Fridge / The Dark Eye

Fridge Logic

• The biggest metropolis in the game, the imperial capital of Gareth, is located in a place that would never be able to support a city of this size (later, the authors freely admitted that they screwed up here).
• The setting consists night-exclusively of every popular Fantasy Counterpart Culture imaginable (apart from Asia), with technology levels that range from the stone age to the renaissance - yet despite those differences, you still have uncivilized jungle dwellers next to a far more populous and far more advanced slave-holding empire that has been around for thousands of years, and Viking expies using dragon boats who against all odds can still hold their own against the navy of most technologically advanced power in the setting.
• Language logic oftentimes doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.
  • The ancient version (Bosparano) of the current common speech of the setting (Garethi) is presented as Latin, while the modern version is the standard language of the version you're playing, which means it only makes sense if you're playing the French or Italian version. However, this has been handwaved away by saying that these languages are just localized standins and that the actual languages are as closely related to one another as, say, Italian and Latin.
  • Naming customs are rather... volatile. For example, in the first overview of of Aventuria's history from 1984, the bosparanian Emperors had unusal but unspectacular fantasy names (Fran, Olruk, Dalida, Seneb, Belen etc.). Later, when the Meadows Duchy got its own regional module, the early rulers (who were Bosparanian settlers) had decidedly Old High German-inspired names (Isegrein, Waldrada, Falgund, Fredegard etc.). However, when the Old Empire of Bosparan became a playable setting in 2012 (with an antiquity campaign setting that took place around 1500 years prior to the regular setting), all new NPCs got generic Roman names (with the Old Empire being Aventuria's Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Ancient Rome), and most of the settlements were renamed to be Roman-sounding as well (which was quite plausibly explained with those names being the original denominations) - but the existing historical NPCs didn't get the same treatment, which makes the names of these rulers stick out like a sore thumb.
• The Hjaldingians, forefathers of the Thorwalians (Viking expies), crossed the sea separating Aventuria and the Gyldenland in their flight from the Imperial Cantherians (ancestors of the Bosparanians and later the Garethians). 1000 years later, their descendants ran into each other in Aventuria; and the Thorwalians immediately recognized them as the guys their ancestors had been fleeing from. Given the sheer time difference and how quickly such knowledge gets lost, this is so unlikely it basically qualifies as impossible. For comparison: this is as if Medieval Lebanese had run into Medieval Italians/Greeks in some totally unrelated place and immediately recognized them as the descendants of the dudes who sacked Carthage.
• The system's Noob Cave, the Nostria/Andergast region, has been both independent from all surrounding powers and locked in a permanent feud for 2000 years. Which in itself already doesn't make any sense whatsoever; but as if that wasn't enough, the culture in the region qualifies as very "Middenrealmian", which is extremely unlikely (even if one disregards the fact that it has never been a part of the Middenrealm in the first place). In Real Life terms: Luxembourg has been independent from the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation for 200 years, and the Netherlands for over 400 years, and both nations have culturally differentiated themselves from Germany to a far greater extent than this region has done in comparison to the Middenrealm.