Larceny and Building a Quasi-Medieval TTRPG World
I am grateful to Thog’s Table on Substack for drawing this to my attention a few weeks ago. It is a list of 20 ‘world-building’ questions originally devised by Jeff’s Gameblog. When I saw it I was immediately struck by an impulse to answer these questions, not because I have a campaign world but, as Thog pointed out in their post, as an exercise in responding to prompts. What follows are a hodge-podge of ideas thrown together on the fly and taken mostly from late medieval English and European history, but with the serial numbers sort-of filed off (but not very thoroughly - just think of me as a very, very poor man’s George R.R. Martin).
The answers reflect my preference to build a ‘realm’ that sits within an implied world, rather than an attempt to build a world in its entirety. This is for two reasons. First, pre-modern men did not usually think in terms of ‘a world’, limited as they were in terms of communication and travel and to talk about ‘a world’ in the context of a quasi-medieval setting is to set up a mis-match between content and form. Second, by shrinking the scale of the focus, one can include more granular descriptions that allow for the establishment of cultural difference and contrast - a subject I am much more interested in at the table than the creation of epic fantasy.
After each answer, I will provide a few words about the influences that underpin it and how these fit with my preferences and prejudices when it comes to realm-building and play. It shouldn’t need to be said but, for the avoidance of doubt, these are my own subjective, sometimes hazily thought out, opinions, not a prescription for how anyone else should run their games or an objective criticism of any other approach.
What is the deal with my cleric's religion?
There is only one god, one church and one true religion. While infidels that dwell around the Middle Sea to the south proclaim theirs is the only faith, this is false. Only through our god can men hope for justice, mercy and salvation by obeying the Word as set out in The Codex. Terrible to say, but there are men and women who would pollute the true word and seek to interpret The Codex for themselves. That way lies dissension, strife, chaos and rebellion, and only through the teaching (and, when necessary, stern correction) of duly sanctioned priests can these heretics be suppressed. Only priests are entitled to preach and read The Codex and, while any man has hope that his devout prayers will be answered, it is known that the intercession of a priest is more efficacious.
The exemplar here is, of course, the monotheism of the medieval Catholic church with a mention of Islam and its presence around the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Codex is just a straight swap for the bible. Personally, I find the idea of competing monotheisms more interesting than the frankly rather weak-sauce polytheism of a lot of quasi-medieval fantasy RPG settings. Once one allows that a religion claims a monopoly over matters spritual and soteriological, then stories around heresy and apostasy become possible in ways that are simply not achievable in mushy polytheistic worlds with their paint-by-numbers ‘gods’. From European history we have the examples of the Cathars and Waldensians and, locally to England, the Wycliffites and the Lollards. Using these instances one can tell interesting stories about how different opinions about ‘the truth’ can produce terrible consequences. And this without even touching the question of witchcraft and the worship of demons.
Where can we go to buy standard equipment?
Standard for whom? Since almost everyone leads the life of poor but respectable rustics, their needs are simple and can commonly be met without leaving most villages. Plain homespun clothes, basic wooden clogs or leather shoes and belts, simple wooden furniture and iron tools can all be made by local artisans and cottage labourers. Beyond that, finer and more extravagant goods must be acquired in the many market towns that dot the land, usually no more than a day’s cart ride from most rural settlements. But truly exotic wares - for those permitted to acquire them - can only be sourced in the four great cities of the realm, all of which are ports through which the luxurious silks and spices, jewellery and tapestries from the Southern Isthmus City States and the lands bordering the Middle Sea enter the kingdom.
Nothing special about this; it’s just a very top-line descriptor of late medieval England as a largely agrarian society with market towns and a small number of large cities and a throwaway line that refers to the interesting notion of sumptuary laws. But it is a good example of why it’s a lot quicker to steal wholesale. Yes, one could read lots of abstract texts about human geography and pre-modern economics and construct from that raw information a wholly novel world but, if one applies those lessons faithfully (taken as they inevitably are from actual historical events and processes), one will end up with something that looks very like a real-world example. So why not skip the middle bit and just lift the whole thing from history to begin with?
I will add that this question does raise an interesting point; the sheer paucity of material culture in pre-modern societies and the extent to which this is (or, more commonly, is not) addressed in quasi-medieval fantasy settings. A couple of years ago, when I was working on a highly realistic mid-17th century setting, what struck me about it was the amount of time I had to spend researching and thinking about the most basic question of what stuff do people own? It tends to be easy enough for the upper classes as we have written and visual records and surviving examples. But if you are aiming for a gritty low-fantasy feel it is not so simple. Yet, at the same time, having a sense of what a yeoman farmer’s cottage contains in terms of furniture, fixtures and fittings and tools can be important to establishing that world. Having a sense of these sorts of thing will make for a more interesting location than the usual, potentially immersion breaking, guesswork of “er… a bed… umm… a table… some benches?”
Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?
Plate is hugely expensive and relatively new in the land. The king himself has had to recruit armourers from the great City States of the Southern Isthmus to staff his royal armoury in the capital’s Great Tower. A few of the wealthiest nobles of the realm seek to emulate this activitity, but almost none of them can afford to match the sums offered by the crown for the service of these highly skilled craftsmen whose workshops, apprentices and materials are as costly to maintain as their labour. It seems improbable in the extreme that the king or any duke or earl will allow some wild and untamed beast to be fitted for such expensive armour, or that an armourer would consent to make it.
Here is an instance of the deliberate insertion of an anachronism. The notion of having to import foreign armourers is actually lifted from Tudor England, when Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII both sent to the continent (the City States of the Southern Isthmus are just synonyms for late medieval and renaissance Italy) for highly skilled artisans. This is an example of the difference between ‘world-building’ and ‘realm-building’; only at the latter, smaller, scale can you introduce notions of cultural difference that are likely to matter to the characters. It’s all very well knowing that, in such-and-such a world, on a mountain on the far side of a distant continent there lives an undead king in a non-euclidean palace. But how does that rather remote fact impact on the characters in the least? Much more relevant (and therefore flavourful) is the conceit that the best swords come from the bladesmiths of Yspan (a re-skin of the historical fact of the reputed skill and quality of the smiths of Toledo) or that the monks of Deira (Northumberland, Lindisfarne) are renowned as the best illuminators of manuscripts in the land.
I will have more to say on ‘monsters’ below.
Who is the mightiest wizard in the land?
The greatest magician of all time is hundreds of years old, but he sleeps beneath a great grassy tor waiting for the day that the realm will be in its greatest peril, when he will awake to save it. Unfortunately, scholars cannot agree which of the many overgrown barrows and man-made hills that are scattered across the land he rests beneath. The most notorious magician of these days is the Duchess of Gower, who is now walled up alive in her castle after being convicted of trying to assassinate the king with the aid of a poppet doll into which she stuck iron pins. She is condemend to live out her remaining days in a windowless cell on a diet of bread and water (but is to be allowed fish on holy feast days). Her life was only spared because she is married to the king’s uncle, the late king’s younger brother. The common witch who aided her was, of course, burned for treason.
The sleeping wizard is just Merlin, but it allowed me an opportunity to insert the point that there are things about the realm that should be unknown or disputed. Of course, when world-building, part of the GM’s job is to have their own sense of what is actually true. But that doesn’t mean that the people who inhabit that world are equally omniscient. The presentation of a land in which players know that they and their characters know the truth inhibits and smothers the importance of discovery. Mystery, ambiguity and disagreement about what is actual should be endemic in any setting with aspirations to verisimilitude. The same reasoning applies to the brief mention of the ruins that dot the landscape. While it is probably the case that one need not (should not?) construct an entire chronology for a world or a realm, it is equally important that there be a sense of the presence of the past, regardless of whether or not the people of that world can explain the ruins and monuments and things dug up from beneath the fields with any degree of objective accuracy.
The tale of the Duchess of Gower is just the re-telling of the account of the conviction in 1441 of Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, for using magic and astrology to seek the death of Henry VI.
Who is the greatest warrior in the land?
Baron Ferborg, illegitimate cousin of Edmund, Earl of Welney, known universally (though never to his face) as ‘The Bastard of Ferborg’ after the castle in which he was born and from which he takes his formal baronial title. Unusually among the nobilty, he travelled the southern and eastern shores of the Middle Sea in his youth, leading some to suspect he secretly converted to the false religion practiced in those parts. He certainly acquired a superlative knowledge of land and naval tactics and has won several victories in the perpetual border skirmishes in the north. His fierce reputation is only added to by his habit of impaling captives alive, another practice he brought back from the east.
This is an example of concealing the proceeds of theft by eliding more than one historical figure into a composite game-world personality. The Bastard of Ferborg is an amalgam of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester and Thomas Neville ‘The Bastard of Fauconberg’. Tiptoft did, in fact, travel widely in Europe and the Mediterranean before returning to England to serve as Constable of England under Edward IV. He was hated by the Lancastrians and was indeed said to have mooted the idea of impaling alive traitors convicted in the Court of Chivalry over which he presided - a punishment he almost certainly learned of on his travels. Neville was a bastard cousin of Richard, earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’) who was a vigorous commander on land at at sea during the Wars of the Roses.
Who is the richest person in the land?
The Duke of Eborac, earl of Mire, Roncey and Diara is the wealthiest private lord. Through accidents of marriage, birth and death, the young duke finds himself the sole inheritor of four of the great old families of the realm, all now extinguished by disease, war and treason - their rights, titles and estates now vested solely in him. The duke is also cousin to the king, and his vast estates now almost match the resources of the crown itself. Some among the royal court - particularly the queen - fear that an alliance between the duke and the equally young (and almost as rich) Earl of Welney could foreshadow strife.
This is, of course, modelled on the figure of Richard, duke of York, who rebelled against Henry VI and tipped England in to the Wars of the Roses. This answer also introduces a series of statements that allow inferences to be drawn about the realm. It implies a more or less feudal society with a hierarchy of nobility, membership of which is defined by birth and lineage. We begin to gather that the monarchy and the aristocracy are bound together by ties of blood but that some tension or rivalry exists between them.
Where can we go to get some magical healing?
Although there are many cunning men and women who can be found in villages and small towns who purport to offer magical healing, their methods are suspect both for religious and medical reasons. The local companies of Chirurgeons have usually managed to have these folk exlcuded from practicing in the larger towns and cities. More reliable is the divine healing that can be hoped for when visiting the cathedrals and shrines throughout the land. There, in exchange for heartfelt imprecation and generous offerings, prayers at the tombs of saints and other great relics may be rewarded with spontaneous recovery from wounds, illness and disease. Sometimes, if the victim is of sufficient piety or is the recipient of the intercession of the truly godly, prayer alone might suffice.
This answer serves to reinforce the analogy with medieval Europe and the claims of the Catholic church about miracles and the power of prayers. So far, so obvious.
But it is also, I think, the first time that I began (without, at the time, consciously realizing it) to adopt a voice. I know there will be people who mislike the use of the ‘unreliable narrator’ in the context of setting descriptions because what GMs want is often some clear and objective truth about the world. Personally, I think the technique can be very effective in that it can reveal both facts about the world and attitudes. In this answer we are told that towns and cities are the location of the company of Chirurgeons, which implies both the existence of a guild structure and of medicine as an ostensibly non-supernatural discipline - both of which allow for the drawing of much wider inferences. It also alerts us to the fact that there are different healing traditions among the rustic poor, but that our narrator distrusts them, preferring the conventional piety of miracle cures.
Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?
God and the saints are the only true providers of cures for such ailments, no matter what witches and sorcerers might claim. However, it is also true that god, in his wisdom, has imbued certain plants, animals and stones with curative properties that are known to the wise. In cases where some person claims that any powers they possess have any source other than the divine or nature as decreed by the divine order, they are deceived or are deceiving others. One would do well to be wary of these folk, for it is well known that demons sometimes arrange what appear to be miraculous recoveries but which are, in truth, only snares to trap the weak and the desperate.
This answer builds upon the previous one by hinting at the existence of ‘natural’ cures. It also introduces the smallest glimpse into something like a wider cosmology in which the world is divinely created, ordered and capable of mortal interpretation and exploitation. It touches upon the notion that evil spirits exist, have some degree of supernatural power and employ deception, preying upon mortal fears to tempt and trap them. This is conventional medieval demonology.
Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?
No. While magic is not unlawful it is regarded as having the potential to lead men into perdition. Even though magicians are careful to say that their wonders are the result of the power of god and his angels, enough of them have been confirmed as dabbling in the worship of demons that their practices are regarded with deep suspicion by most decent folk. Nevertheless, a thriving, secretive, trade exists in books of magic, with devotees creating informal networks of practitioners who exchange tomes and techniques between them. Because true magic is a literary art, it is shameful to relate that, often, these cabals are formed among learned men of the church and students at the great university of Isford. This is to be distingushed from the sorcery practiced among the simple, which relies not on complex rituals written down but crude charms and talismans the knowledge of which is passed from one generation to the next.
As can probably be inferred by now, I am by preference and taste a low-fantasy, low-magic sort of GM. There are perennial debates about how one would model a quasi-medieval world of high magic which always circle around the same problem: What is left of a world modelled on the Middle Ages when everything from food to light to clothing to animals can be conjured into existence or when illness and disease can be ‘magicked’ away? My answer is ‘nothing’ - such a world is conceptually broken. You can have a setting that has some verisimilitude to the medieval world, or you can have magicians and miracle-working priests wandering the land breaking the laws of nature with wild abandon. You cannot have both.
However, since we are attempting to create a fantasy realm, not a rigidly historical one, my solution is to make magic real but socially and mechanically burdensome. Here the narrator’s voice does a lot of heavy lifting by making the attitudes of the populace to sorcery clear. But within that, we gather quite a lot of information about some forms of magic as ‘mechanical’ disciplines; they are complex, time-consuming, secret and claim to rely on the same monotheistic power that governs all (licit) supernatural events. However, wondrous powers can also be derived from traffik with demons and, frighteningly, even some magicians may not know what they are dealing with. Note that, here too, there is reference to a ‘rustic’ school of hedge magic that is very different in kind from the literary and learned tradition. This historical division - between scholarly magic and its simpler rural practices - is an aspect that is often underdeveloped in quasi-medieval fantasy settings.
Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?
Most every market town of any size will be home to someone who claims to be an alchemist or at least an apothacery. How many of these people actually have any skill is highly debatable. Of even more dubious quality are the cunning men and wise women that can be located in almost every settlement larger than a hamlet and which the simple rely on as healers, brewers of potions and providers of occult advice and counsel. If any true alchemist is to be found, it is probably among the scholars of the University of Isford, but the subject is not part of the official curriculum and, if any of them have made any great discovery, they are keeping it well hidden. The king, who is said to be much interested in the secrets of true alchemy, recently issued letters under his seal empowering an obscure baron - Henry Perpont - to conduct research on this subject at royal expense.
Here we have once more a distinction being drawn between different approaches and attitudes to (super)natural processes. The inclusion of a second reference to the University of Isford makes it clear that there is some formal higher educational institution but, since alchemy is not on the curriculum, we may gather that it is in no sense a ‘college of magic’. Universities (not counting tiresome re-imaginings of bleedin’ Hogwarts) are another important area of medieval life and culture that is all but ignored in RPG settings. Edward IV really did write to Baron Pierpoint, a minor midlands noble, in the 1460s giving him licence to practice alchemy.
Where can I hire mercenaries?
By god’s grace, there has been no civil war in the land since the present king’s grandfather overthrew the tyrant that was then. As a result, the realm is not troubled by bands of sell-swords and bandits. Any man who brings a private army into the land must expect to be accused of waging war against the crown and the realm and be treated as a self-confessed traitor. Of course, the lands of the Grand Duke of Marle across the Small Sea are not so fortunate and warfare is constant there. If any man were foolish enough to trust in those who sell themselves to commit violence, he will find many such there, though their quality and loyalty is nototiously bad. More reliable and professional are the Great Companies who ply their trade on the more distant Southern Isthmus, where the constant wars between the rival City States give them great opportunities for plunder and draws men from every land to try their luck. But these men do not work cheaply and one would have to have deep pockets indeed to tempt them away from the service of the likes of the Tyrant of Firenze.
It has come up from time to time before now, but this is perhaps the most extensive example so far of what I take to be a requirement for any ‘realm-building’ - a sense of where the land sits with respect to its neighbours in broad strokes. The duke of Marle is just a straight swap for the fantastically wealthy duke of Burgundy who had the most cultured court in almost all of 15th century north-western Europe and with which England had a complicated and shiftng diplomatic and commercial relationship. As previously mentioned, the Southern Isthmus and the City States are just Italy, with the detail of mercenary companies here lifted from the actual history of the condottieri and men like John Hawkwood. Once more, the emphasis is on variation both in terms of the relative stability of these realms and the quality of mercenaries one might find there. Contrast is essential to the creation of the illusion of depth and solidity.
Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?
Only those of gentle rank and above may carry swords anywhere in the land, under penalty of a fine and confiscation of the weapon for the first offence, a whipping for the second and amputation of the sword hand for a third transgression. The wearing of armour is also prohibited among the masses save in times of strife when royal licenses may be had to go about ‘in harness’. In the disordered Northern Border with the kingdom of Alba and The Pale across the Emerald Sea some leeway is permitted since those regions are so given over to lawlessness. Magic is not illegal, but it is deprecated by all pious and right thinking folk and crimes committed employing sorcery are most severely punished. Apart from the Borders and The Pale, the realm is generally well governed and law-abiding with every man, from the greatest duke to the meanest farmer, under a duty to enforce the law and keep the peace. Every village has a constable and a watch and, with order under a noble or royal seal, these can be summoned to band together in each county to form the Shire Array that can be called upon to deal with serious disorder.
I have written a long series of posts - starting here - about medieval English law enforcement. It is a purely personal preference that I find settings with social constraints and consequences for ignoring them more interesting than lawless worlds. But something in my brain also rebels against the idea that a quasi-medieval fantasy realm can try at once to claim all of the benefits that must flow from a degree of social organization and discipline - cities and guilds, roads and taverns, kings and armies, merchants and money - and yet casually toss all those things aside when it comes time for characters to murder their way across a countryside swarming with bands of demi-humans and ‘monsters’. If one wants to say ‘but this is fantasy!’, then that’s fine. But I do not want to play in a world where the setting bends and twists itself in implausible knots to fit character (player?) preferences at every turn without any regard for consistency.
This is, I think, the inexorable implication when one claims that characters can spend money in a roadside inn one day (with all that those words imply about travel and trade, mints and markets) and occupy themselves the next day slaughtering goblins by the hundred in their hidden lair a few hours’ ride away. This realm would be only one step away from those computer RPGs where consistency and consequence are thrown overboard in order to promote a certain sort of game on ‘easy mode’ - one where you kill the quest-giving NPC, only for them to spring to life after the next re-load.
The historical borrowings are obvious; Alba is Scotland and Hiberni is Ireland, with the Northern Border and the Pale being adapted from the English presence on the Scottish border and on the island of Ireland.
Which way to the nearest tavern?
Almost everyone in the realm is usually within a few hundred yards of an alehouse. In even the smallest village there can often be found a simple building with a name like ‘The Frog’ or ‘The Swan’ where the proprietor buys ale from the private households that make their own (as most rural farms do) and sell it to locals and passers-by. In larger settlements, along major roads and in the cities, inns very often evolved from the private properties of nobles whose retinue could find sustenance and board there when travelling on their masters’ business. Over time these premises started offering their services to the public more generally. This is why so many taverns have names derived from heraldic devices (the Red Lion, the White Hart, the Bear and Staff etc.), taken from the shields depicting the noble’s arms and hung outside to identify the place.
The description of rustic taverns is just a truism of medieval English life, when there were relatively few large commercial brewers but almost every household brewed ale or beer for private consumption and sold or bartered any excess to the local tavern-keep. The idea that inns sometimes emerged from noble houses is an interesting example of employing something that I once heard or read somewhere years ago but have never actually bothered to check its veracity. Another instance, then, of truthiness that feels right for the setting.
What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?
One hears a great many tales of monsters in distant and remote places. In the wild forest north of the River Aegir there is said to dwell a great wyrm or serpent that takes deer and boar in great numbers. Another such creature was discovered, seemingly in hibernation underground, when a huge oak tree was uprooted after a storm in the village of Nether Heart in the remote and backward West Country. The monk, Brother Gervase, writes from his distant monastery to the king to say that, in the nearby town of Bram, it is said that a man has risen from the grave and terrifies his former neighbours at night, banging on barred doors and shuttered windows demanding to be fed. From Wolfpit in the prosperous east of the kingdom come rumours of the discovery of a pair of green-skinned chldren who speak no known language and who are terrified by the sound of church bells. On the coast at Orfoot fisherman have capured a ‘wild man’ in their nets far out to sea and taken it to the royal castle in the town, where it has been lodged in the dungeon. The king’s constable of Orfoot writes to the crown to ask what is to be done with the creature. The Northern Borders and the Isle of Hiberni are known to be plagued by the terrible and majestic fae who have their own kings, queens, courts and kingdoms. In the realm as a whole, the fae are more commonly encountered as mischevious spirits of the hearth and home, though it is said that, in the great and ancient earthwork of Wanderbrooke, a fae royal court gathers on certain full moons and waits for mortal knights to challenge their prince to a duel.
All of these examples are re-skinned from actual medieval or early modern English stories of ‘monsters’ and faeries.
There are two related points to be made here. First, there is a distinction to be drawn between ‘the monstrous’ and ‘the fantastic’. In a setting full of monsters, the fantastical runs the very real risk of being diluted to the point of becoming mundane. The extraordinary is necessarily recognized by contrasting it with the ordinary. Without a sense of ‘normal life’ we have no yard-stick by which to measure those events that are outside that common experience.
Second, I return to the point made about magic and law previously - one can have a world that features constraints, consequences and limitations - or not. If one wants to have a setting in which fantastical monsters or bands of intelligent demi-humans roam every corner of the land beacuse - weirdly - all those kings and nobles and cities and towns have (a) managed to thrive in spite of these conditions and (b) haven’t done anything about any of those threats, then have at it. It’s your table; do what you will. But I think ‘monsters’ benefit from being extraordinarily rare. Not just because this is the logical outworking of a world that claims some quasi-medieval verisimilitude, but because characters who fight monsters should be special. In a world where dragons and orcs and the undead are everywehere, what distinguishes the characters as individuals who seek them out and fight them? Not much, I would suggest.
Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?
If one is motivated only by base coin, then the Grand Duke of Marle and the cities of the Southern Isthmus are always looking for mercenaries. If the good of the realm is what is sought, the Northern Border is always in want of stout men to defend the land from raiders who cross over from neighbouring Alba, since the boy king of that land is either too weak to stop them or does not care to. The most likely looming war is that between the realm and the tribes of the Isle of Hiberni beyond the Emerald Sea to the west who are rumoured to be preparing once more to try and conquer the fortified colony known as The Pale. Of course, fighting around the Pale is always brutal, since the tribes do not favour the glory of open trial by battle, preferring tactics of ambush and murder, taking no prisoners and refusing to ransom any hostages of theirs that might be taken.
Further development here of the idea that our realm sits within a broader context of neighbouring states and kingdoms and hints at how those principalities might differ. It reveals something about the different attitudes towards and tactics employed in warfare between ‘the realm’ and the Hiberni - another instance of the creation and highlighting of contrast and, therefore, depth (or the simulacrum thereof).
How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?
Apart from the animal fights of distant Yspan on the western edge of the Middle Sea, the arena has not been seen since the fall of ancient, pagan, Arcadia. However, a man of proper birth and status who can afford a train of horses and costly tournament armour can try his luck in the jousts that are held periodically both in this land and abroad. Those hosted by the Grand Duke of Marle and the City States are said to be the most spectacular and offer the largest prize purses for those who triumph in the lists. In this land, tournaments are more modest - even when held (as they usually are) to celebrate a royal betrothal or birth - and the old tradition of allowing commoners to take part in the grand melee has been outlawed after several such events descended into riots. By convention, most tournaments in these times are conducted using lances designed not to inflict grievous injury but, from time to time, it is agreed that the older - and much more lethal - traditions will be revived. Even when such old rules are not invoked, the lists can be perilous; the Grand Duke of Marle’s younger brother was killed when a blunted lance shattered and pierced his throat.
Lots of little setting lore-dumps going on here; the bull-fights of Spain are a simple real-world detail. We also now know that there was an ancient pagan civilization which is known to have permitted combat in the arena. I trust the analogy is obvious, but it serves as just enough flavour to inform us that this fallen empire is known about with some degree of detail, but without having to provide an exhaustive account of its history. It also serves to illustate another advantage of stealing. Most role-players will have some passing familiarity with ancient Rome and its fall. By lifting this concept and history so obviously, one can piggy-back on that player knowledge to provide a very general short-hand sense of facts that it would be tiresome to relate in detail.
The material on jousts happened to be in my brain at the time of writing because I’m doing the reading for an upcoming piece about tournaments in quasi-medieval RPGs and so all of this is just scraps and details that came immediately to mind. The selection of particular details - and the shift from general to specific information - was made to allow inferences to be made about the realm and the lands beyond.
Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?
Despite the victory of the present king’s grandfather over the tyrant and the subsequent defeat of the rebellion of the tyrant’s adherents in the years thereafter, rumours persist that even today, some 50 years after those events, the partisans of the tyrant still whisper and plot. They hope to bring the tyrant’s son out of his exile, where he lives as a gilded ornament to the Grand Duke of Marle’s court, allowing the Duke to maintain some leverage over the realm when he threatens - as he does periodically - to turn the ageing ‘prince’ loose to make trouble for the kingdom. It is said that these traitors still secretly wear the green and white livery of the tyrant and don his silver badge of the hart when among their fellow conspirators.
This is adapted from the real world history of the deposition of Richard II by Henry IV blended with the later history of the political use made by continental rulers of Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII), Perkin Warbeck and other pretenders to the English throne in the later 1400s and early 1500s (and of the deposed Stuart claimants in exile in the later 1600s and 1700s). I could, I suppose, have gone with The Old Man of the Mountain or some other pre-modern ‘secret society’ in the more conventional fantastical sense, but tying the setting to actual history has two advantages. First, it allowed an accumulation of detail that ties current events to the history of the realm, so adding a degree of depth. Second, it allowed my brain to grab hold of very minor details to add colour. Richard II’s partisans - notably his company of royal Cheshire archers - really did wear green and white striped livery and the White Hart was famously the king’s badge.
What is there to eat around here?
What can you afford? The peasants make do with a monotonous diet of rye bread accompanied by a salty porridge of barley and root vegetables, sometimes augmented by flesh and bone broth if they have had reason to slaughter one of their few cattle, pigs, sheep or chickens. For the more affluent artisan, the basic pottage is the same, but more often supplemented with flesh or fowl and perhaps even some dried fish if it is to be had. Gentlemen can afford much better fare; roast meat including game animals (deer and boar) and birds (pheasant, plover, lapwing, larks) that the peasants are forbidden to hunt; dried or fresh fish, savoury custards flavoured with spices from beyond the Middle Sea, fruit and cream and honey. For the nobility, there is no upper limit. They are even permitted by special licence to serve at their table heron, swan, porpoise, turbot, sturgeon and other dishes normally the preserve only of the royal family.
This is another of those questions - like the one about ‘standard equipment’ above - that I think should be central to any ‘world-building’ exercise if what one is after is a world that feels real. It might be argued that, in ‘high fantasy’ and world-spanning campaigns, no-one in their right mind is going to care in the least what people are eating. Perhaps. But it should be remembered that even Tolkien lowered his sights from the grandest of narratives to talk about the dining habits of Hobbits and Vance’s concern for these details are captured in the extensive ‘food tables’ in the Lyonesse RPG based on his works. I’ve seen sessions played as part of sweeping campaign arcs that lose their way and become clumsy and trite because a banquet scene is stumbled through and hand-waved with scant and awkward mention of ‘roast beef’. Ironically, because the focus is so tightly on the characters when they sit down to dine with kings and princes, not on the world, the lack of these details looms larger, and their absence is more striking and therefore immersion breaking. In grittier low-fantasy settings, the ability of a GM to be able to rattle off the details of the food available at a squalid tavern is instructive detail.
Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?
Many years ago, the pagan king Radwald caused to be made three silver and jewelled crowns. These he had ensorcelled with many powerful enchantments and buried them in three of his forts and palaces along the eastern shore of the realm, facing the Small Sea. For as long as these crowns remained securely buried it was said that the kingdom would never be conquered. But, as is well known, 400 years after the crowns were buried, Radwald’s dynasty fell when the progenitor of the king that is now sailed across the Small Sea and took the realm for his own more than 350 years ago. Two of the crowns are known to have been broken up and melted down in centuries past, but the third is said to lay still in the sandy soil of Radwald’s lost palace by the sea, though watched over by an ancient and malevolent guardian.
I stole this entire story wholesale from M.R. James’ A Warning to the Curious in which the treasure-hunter Paxton digs up the Saxon crown, only to be pursued to his death by its guardian. The detail of Radwald is ahistorical in that it is the evocative name of the man thought to be buried in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial. James’ stories acquire their depth from the blending of the genuine (and sometimes trivial) and the superntural (there really is a dusty stuffed crocodile on the wall of the Cathedral at St Bertrand de Comminges, the setting for his first ghost story - Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book). Here the point is that my act of blatant larceny is made possible (or at least, much simpler) because, with the history of Saxon and medieval England as a common exemplar shared between James and this fantasy realm, I can situate events in the imagined past and map how they impact on current in-game events in a way that make sense and which already contains within it a consistent chronology.
Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?
Dragon? Dragons don’t exist, you fool. Or at least, if they do, they are far away beyond the Middle Sea and are never likely to trouble this realm.
The point is flippantly made, but is valid nevertheless. Fantasy realms can benefit from the presence of the idea that there are some things that are just not true; that exist as ideas or myths but which no-one actually believes. This particular example is a small twist on the medieval bestiary as it came to be transmitted to late medieval England through the works of John Trevisa. There, among the long list of fantastical creatures, he casually inserts that there are legends of a beast called the hydra, but everyone knows that this is a made-up creature. It seems counter-intuitive to bother to write down what no-one believes to be the case about a fantasy realm. But, of course, what people do not believe tells us as much about them as a culture and a society as what they do believe. Additionally, characters who discover that that which is universally believed to be false is actually true (or vice versa) makes for a more interesting story than those same characters wandering around a world of unchanging certainty.
And 20 More Questions…
What is the most renowned or feared indigenous animal?
How are the dead properly disposed of?
What languages or dialects are spoken?
Who uses money and who can get by using only barter?
What is the most popular form of entertainment?
If someone finds a hoard of gold coins, who buried it?
To whom or where do you go to if you are destitute or ill?
When the ruler dies who decides his or her successor?
Do people keep pets?
If a crime is committed, what are the chances of being caught?
At what age are children expected to earn their keep?
Is slavery or serfdom legal?
What traces remain of what has been lost (ruins, earthworks etc.)?
What proportion of the population can read and write?
Who fought in the most famous battle in history?
When someone is executed, how is the sentence carried out?
How do people get their news?
What single custom or tradition is almost universally observed?
How high can a peasant rise in society?
Which disease do all men fear the most?
Great answers! Really enjoy your knowledge. Have you ever played Pendragon? (I think it’s from Chaoasium) If so, did you like it?