Swords & Dorkery

D&D’s medievalism inspired a lot of players to try to develop something more verisimilar to the real world medieval period. In the early days, games like Chivalry & Sorcery made a nice effort but couldn’t give up the Tolkienisms (elves, dwarves, hobbits, etc.). Similarly Harn imagines a very realistic world, but stocks it with kingdoms of orcs and similar. Fantasy Wargaming laid out an impressive sourcebook and innovative rules but never achieved any kind of following because it didn’t look or read like a rule book. A lot of games took inspiration from myth and legend and focused on some limited aspects of history, like Pendragon and Ars Magica. More recently three games have appeared with explicit or implicit claims to “medieval authenticity” (only one actually uses that awkward term). They are: Lion & Dragon, Wolves of God, and Aquelarre. How do they stack up?

I previously reviewed Lion & Dragon, and was very impressed with the magic rules, less so with the rest. Its failures helped me identify what a game really needs to create a sense of authenticity in its medievalism. In medieval Europe, the most important relationships every person had were to their lord and to their God. Which is to say, social standing and religious standing. How well a game incorporates that into play seems, to me, to be the critical piece. I always thought Fantasy Wargaming set the benchmark for this with its system for social class and piety. (It added a third all-present relation to the supernatural via the magic system, which in some ways subsumed the religious rules and extended them to include one’s relation to the macrocosm with detailed astrological correspondences, but I’m not convinced many people outside of medieval universities really thought much about that.)

So really my minimal standard for medieval authenticity would be having an adequate system for social hierarchy and having the Church accurately represented. Lion & Dragon failed pretty badly in those departments, with a very underdeveloped and barely used Social Class attribute and generic sun-god church that barely imposed any kind of restrictions on people’s daily lives, being egalitarian and even benevolent in a way that brushes aside all the conflict between Church and state that drove the Middle Ages.

Wolves of God on the other hand does a fantastic job of setting D&D (by way of the OGL) in later Anglo-Saxon England. My only complaints would be that, given the very specific time and place, it is set a good deal earlier than what most folks think of as the Middle Ages (the High Middle Ages really), and it is written in a style and tone meant to suggest it is contemporary to the Anglo-Saxon age. High Gygaxian replaced with the Venerable Bede. The art and style make this a fantastic artifact, though I wonder a little if the quirkiness of the rulebook will make it a little tedious. It’s absolutely perfect for Dark Ages adventures, though, and seems to have a workable system for domain management and full scale battles. Everything about this game feels authentic. The focus on a narrowed period and setting is both its strength and weakness, though, since you the game offers just four character classes (a warrior, a holy man, and a wizard, and a fourth which can choose some abilities from any two of the the three other classes, which adds some versatility, to be fair) and the rules will probably be stretched if the party leaves England — which you certainly would want to have happen if you think about the possibilities for interactions with Vikings and the wider world. Still, it is easily my favorite attempt at medieval authenticity so far. It really deserves a full review, which I might do later.

Aqualerre takes the opposite end of the medieval period from Wolves of God and is set in the late High Middle Ages, the 14th and 15th centuries. This is a great choice. It uses the Iberian peninsula as its setting, which is natural (the authors are Spanish) and  provides all the expected Church-state conflict and adds the clash with Islamic Moors, since the Reconquista has not been completed. But the focus of the game is more horror than adventure, from what I can tell. The main threat is not the Moors, or the Inquisition, but witches and demons. Reviews  indicate that it emphasizes the gritty, dirty grimdark view of the Middle Ages, which is not necessarily inaccurate. It’s also very adult, and the sales page even describes the artwork as “disturbing” and not for kids. So, it’s probably not exactly what I was hoping for either. If/when I get a copy I’ll post a full review.

I kind of cant’s stop with those recent games though. Broadening out to source books for specific games or even rules-agnostic supplements, there seem to be a lot of options.

Cumberland Games & Diversions offer two sourcebooks: Fief and Town, which attempt to provide the GM everything they need to know about feudalism in rural and urban settings, respectively. They are not available in print, so I have not actually read more than the samples of the PDFs offered at their web site. (Actually, I broke down and bought Fief just now, as it is available in a bundle that supports a good cause.) It covers a lot of the same ground as you’ll find elsewhere but it is gathered neatly in one place. I could do without the “price lists,” though, which take up a lot of space without really being useful. Nice work though on the timeline and bibliography, and the index (Monsters, see Children, Beasts”)! I should mention that the tables of contents of Town and Fief might make you think there is a lot of repeated material, but from the full Fief text I just got and the sample of Town, they are covering the same topics from different angles and would probably be complimentary. I’m still disappointed there is not a print version available, given how easy print-on-demand is, but that might be a publisher’s decision. I can hardly talk since my own book is now out of print and available only as a PDF. I’ll need to post a full review of Fief, anyway, it seems really well done.

A Magical Medieval Society is in its third edition. I’ve only seen the first edition. It  tries to help a GM generate a fantasy kingdom with calculations for populations, demographics, and even the income generated at the level of a manor! I found it kind of exhausting, but I’m sure it has has its own audience. The most interesting thing for me is the effort to work out how magic would affect a medieval society. It falls more on the side of high fantasy than gritty realism, though, and doggedly imagines the typical D&D pantheons of deities and multiple religions rather than including the Church. For me, that’s definitely a bug. The economics are probably solid though. (I have no idea, that’s not my forte.) In some ways it reminds of the very old series on creating medieval towns and villages in the early issues of White Dwarf. The author there (which I’m drawing a blank on) recommended using existing prices for items and hirelings in AD&D to work out the annual wages of various professions, and I like the simplicity of that approach. It might be giving those price lists too much credit (Gygax after all admits they inflate everything associated with adventuring, much as tools and such were inflated during the gold rush) but I agree in principle with changing as little as necessary.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the GURPS sourcebook Middle Ages I. It’s meant as a historical setting, rather than something to use for FRPGs, but it does have some notes about incorporating magic, horror, or science fiction, being GURPS. I found it mostly interesting for the details on England’s kings and queens (the number I indicating they hoped for follow ups covering other parts of the Europe). The GURPS fantasy setting, Oerth, is actually a fairly good imagining of high fantasy mixed with medievalism, as actual regions of medieval Earth were transplanted by a cataclysmic event onto a fantasy world, so a relatively authentic if idealized set of European and Saracen kingdoms exist alongside elves, dwarves, and the rest.

At this point, I realize how impossible it would be to cover all the RPG sourcebooks that try to add authentic medievalism to FPRGs. RPG publishing has reached a level of democratization and independence that there are probably hundreds of games, sources, and so on I haven’t even heard of. I should mention my own publications in the first two Burgs & Bailiffs booklets, and my follow-up solo book B&B Trinity, are only semi-serious and indulge in some sensationalism. I plan on playing it a bit more “straight” in the revised & expanded second edition of Trinity, which is what occasioned the thoughts leading to this post to begin with. Looking at some of these other efforts has helped me firm up my own vision  of what I’d like to see and of what to keep, what to remove, and what to change in D&D to make it so.