I'm pretty stoked this came up in my feed today. I was actually one of the players in that campaign! We played in a small, virtual group during Covid. I sent this thread to Garlic~
The coffee shops weren't a big part of the campaign, but it was definitely a recurring theme. He did a great job world-building and there were backstory elements he added in for us. I did miss the Starbucks reference until it came up and I echo the collective groan we had. There were other puns and fun adventures we had in the campaign.
The only issue I have with this jape is the first in the list might should be "moondoe."
Moondoes. Sunfawns.
Yeah, why is only Starbucks pluralized? Joke ruined!
Thank you for your service. I was going to say the same thing.
Hahaha, amazing. Haven't read this before.
What a coup
A coup is a passenger car with a sloping or truncated rear roofline and two doors.
I failed a brain check, I've been googling those names for 30 minutes. I don't get the reference. What's the joke here? I would have just taken it as cleaver naming for the region.
Each one is a combination of 'Celestial Object' and 'synonym for deer'. The first two seem innocuous and fantastic enough, but they establish the pattern - letting the third be 'Starbucks', a real-life coffee shop chain.
Starbucks is a real coffee chain that exists in the real world. Moondeer and sunfawn follow the same naming scheme, but the players didn't realize that was what the DM was building to until the big reveal. It's...pun-adjacent.
My world always has some strange puns and other characteristics. My favorite has been the Young Mariners Cobol Abode which is mostly populated with young sailors. One player was having a real hard time to understand why everyone there was asking if "he is a friend of Dorothy" and why people seemed a little on edge. It took about 30 minutes for him to realize he was in a gay bar and everyone was confused why he was there grilling them if had met a "handsome young well dressed half orc man". They were looking for their rival and they just assumed it was his boyfriend. Everyone else slowly go to the joke and added on. Good times
As someone who's been DMing for 30+ years, it's really interesting to me when people have anachronistic stuff like coffee shops in D&D.
Coffeehouses have been around since the 15th/16th century in the Ottoman Empire.
Coffee shops go back pretty far tbh.
That being said, it's only anachronistic if your setting is this world. No reason why the equivalent of an inn wouldn't be serving a stimulant beverage of some kind.
Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.
Something like that probably wouldn't have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.
Anachronistic like magic in medieval settings?
Depends on the magic. Fireball was used in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, so that's not anachronistic. But if you want to do elemental transmutation, that wasn't discovered until 1896. You could have it in steampunk.
Fair point! I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just interesting to me cause I'm not used to it. I usually run D&D as medieval (like ~1300 AD) European fantasy with magic and a little bit of anachronistic renaissance stuff.
OH DEER GOD
Yeah that's what I meant by clever naming. I guess I was reading too deep. I thought it was referencing more.
I was part of a campaign that was running for a few years that unfortunately ended abruptly before I could ever naturally reveal the several puns and references I packed into my character from the outset. The set up for the ones I remember are my character was a large, friendly paladin whose highest stat was in Charisma, who largely wanted a group of friends and his highest goal was to be called their pal, who wanted to be called by his last name by his friends, who was half angelic/celestial (can't remember the name of the race), who had dark skin, a large muscular frame, bald head, and short facial hair, whose starting gift was his blessed chainmail, and whose name was Cronwier Aderb.
The references that I remember are that he was designed in the image of a meme with Terry Crews photoshopped as a paladin (stats also reflected this meme), his blessed chainmail was his Hole-y Armor, I remember there being something about his name reflecting a crown but I can't remember the pun or reference, and lastly he wanted his friends to say "this is our pal, Aderb." That last one I remember I specifically came up with after the DM asked if my character was going to be "like your dark souls character, another paladerp?"
