Europe, 718

So I'm running a D&D campaign again.  Despite having (probably literally) dozens of fictional worlds to pull from thanks to twenty years of writing (crappy) fiction, I like running campaigns set on Earth.  Past, future, either works.  So the current one is set in the era of Charles Martel, 718, before the battles definitively keeping the Moors in Spain and not in France.

The twist, of course, is that a dragon wiped out Constantine and his opponent at the battle of Milvian Bridge, so Constantine never became sole emperor of Rome.  The dragon has taken up residence in Rome, the eastern empire has split off as Byzantium, the Franks moved into western Europe, the Celts still have some small footholds, and Christianity didn't become the dominant religion in the region.  Islam is still moving up through North Africa, but the cultures in Europe are still more varied.

There's also magic and elves and classical monsters and all of that, so it's not exactly your vanilla European backdrop.  Teasing out which cities exist, what the plagues of Justinian did to the population, who's in charge where, which languages are extant, what the technological levels are, and things like, has a bridge been built here yet? have all taken some digging, guesstimating, or sometimes sheer fabrication.  It's interesting for me finding textual gaps in the historical record, or areas of sparser research - in a hundred years it's Charlemagne Charlemagne Charlemagne and you can find tons of information on life and culture at the time, but back up to Charles Martel and you're doing a bit more guesswork.

So the party has arrived in Gundelfingen an der Donau, and I'm being reminded that I'm much more comfortable pronouncing German than French.  I think they've decided to continue up the Danube to Regensburg, which means I get to switch encounter tables from what they were facing in the Black Forest.  I think this one includes angry fish!