Historically Accurate
This one goes out to all the amateur historians. If you’ve ever felt your Legend of the Five Rings experience threatened by inaccurate tax codes or your Viking game cheapened by horny helmets, you know how hard it can be balancing fantasy against the inspiration that birthed it.
Note the word “balance” though, because that’s the real trick. It may be easy to rip on anime, but at some point I understand the aesthetic. Why do we have to make sure that ever little detail hangs together? Can’t we just let awesome fantasy things be fun and awesome?
Speaking as a layman, I find it helps to think of history books as a source of inspiration rather than constraints. For example, I recently discovered that my beloved Night Watch has little to do with medieval policing. Apparently it was all about communal action, with local amateurs dealing with minor disturbances. That doesn’t mean Sir Samuel Vimes is a phony, or that including a organized constabulary in your ye olde setting is automatically dumb and wrong. Instead, it means that words like “tithingman” and “church court” are suddenly in your vocabulary. The possibility space of your setting widens rather than narrows as you plunder Earth’s timeline for all its finest knowledge nuggets. And to me, that additive framing feels a lot more satisfying than, “Um, actually, you can’t do that because it’s based on a common misconception.”
So for today’s discussion, let’s talk historical inspiration. What’s a weird tidbit from the IRL past that you’ve adapted for the table? Did it bring awesome fantasy tropes back down to reality, or did it do the opposite, transforming history into over-the-top fantasy goodness? Tell us all about your most (and least) favorite historical precedents down in the comments!
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Violence is the mark of an amateur, I believe is the saying.
Violence as a concept is fine, violence that can be traced back to you is what’s amateurish.
If you need to kill the guard to get into the building, you’re an amateur.
I’ll grant that even professionals kill people they’re required to kill, but being able to recognize who those people are and aren’t is a necessary skill for the professional.
To quote Master Splinter; “The first rule of being a ninja is “do no harm.” Unless you need to do harm, then do lots of harm!”
It has been too many years, lol. I’m thinking of getting back into TMNT. Just met one of Laurel’s old college buddies at Dragon Con, and they’ve had some of their stuff featured as covers for TMNT comics. Now I’m out here like, “Wait, was six year old me onto something?”
Violence for violence sake is amateurish, perfectly aplied and at right time violence solves your problem. Not all problems can be solved by talkiing, that’s why you carry a set of tools for the continuation of politics.
Maxim #6: “If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.” – The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
That can’t be the saying! When I Googled it in quotes I only got one obscure forum post. 😛
I haven’t done anything with it yet, but I was reading about real-life alchemy a few days ago.
I’m used to the kind of alchemy in Skyrim and the like, with the herbalism and body parts used to make magic potions/poisons, but apparently real-life alchemists were serious scientists. They tended to have fantastical goals like cure-alls and elixirs of longevity and turning lead to gold, but along the way they invented all kinds of experimental tools and techniques, and made all kinds of metallurgical and chemical discoveries.
I’m thinking about an alchemist character of sorts, now; a highly intelligent researcher adventuring to gather materials for their experiments into physical/spiritual perfection and the secrets of the universe. Sort of a mix that’s somewhere between cleric (healing) and wizard (intelligence) and monk (self-perfection) and blacksmith (metallurgy).
Side note; look up copper and cassiterite (the primary natural form of tin). Can you imagine what it must have been like for an ancient metalworker to combine copper ore and that crystal in a furnace, and create (what was at the time) perhaps the strongest metal in existence?
I’m a big fan of real alchemy as well. What fascinates me though is the non-scientific parts – how the physical and chemical processes of fermentation, heating, distillation, etc. were viewed metaphorically for the process of purifying the soul of the alchemist, and depending on who you asked they might be literally trying to turn lead into gold, or only figuratively turning their dull, common self into something precious and incorruptible. And how this abstract religious pursuit was happening right alongside the development of scientific rigor, often by the same people, who saw no distinction between them at all.
That’s because the things you see as metaphors, the alchemists thought were literal.
That’s something that can sometimes be hard for people in the modern scientific world to grasp. When vikings said that Thor created thunder, they didn’t mean “I don’t know what creates thunder, but Thor’s a good guess”; they meant thunder comes from Thor.
When an auger or astrologer tried to divine the future, divination wasn’t a shallow justification for their knowledge; it was a genuine attempt to ask the gods what was going on (and the gods could lie if they were pissed at you for some reason).
When an alchemist talks about purifying base metals into gold, that’s because they believe the only difference between lead and gold is that lead is an impure base metal, that can be purified as surely as God can purify the sinful soul.
Those aren’t metaphors or fanciful language or anything. Those are straightforward descriptions of how those people think the world works, from what limited data they had available.
Now that gives me a strange thought; if Chinese alchemists believed that imbibing synthesized ‘gold’ would grant them longevity…humans augmented via metal, would that make them the first cyborgs?
Heh. I just did a few days in Prague back in July. If you ever get the chance, you might enjoy this silliness:
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g274707-d4194102-Reviews-Speculum_Alchemiae_Museum-Prague_Bohemia.html
Faust, John Dee, and pseudo-historical mythologizing combined with over-the-top set design. 😀
One thing I have been toying with but have yet to have a proper occasion to actually play around with is the medieval (and older) concept of oaths.
Now oaths do show up a lot in fantasy, people swear to do this or that or loyalty to someone and so on.
But these are generally the modern conception of swearing an oath, where it’s a matter of the swearers personal integrity/sense of honour and duty/reputation that they are putting on the line, essentially a way of saying “I am being very serious about this promise”.
That’s not how people in olden days thought of oaths however. To them an oath was something which came with it’s own enforcement, you swore by someone or something (generally a god or a holy relic) and if you broke your oath, they would punish you for it.
It’s much more like a modern contract in that way, sign the contract and if you break it the government will come and make you follow it/punish you (usually they require the other party to go too the civil court who will then do it instead of the government doing it on their own initiative but that’s a minor detail).
I have been toying with the idea of a setting with some active (but not omniscient) gods of variant powers putting forth oaths you can swear (or make other swear, I think this could pull double duty as a way to allow players to take prisoners and then let them go without being screwed over instead of needing to drag them around or kill them all).
I’d think something like getting disfavor points building up for breaking the rules with more if someone calls you on it with punishment happening at some break points for PCs.
NPC’s would just get punishment directly if the players call them on it to make up for not being in focus as much as the PCs (and generally not break them, I’d want it to be mostly safe for the players to rely on oaths).
Such “empowered” oaths are a common theme when dealing with the supernatural… faeries, demons, etc. Sometimes such beings are literally unable to break an oath… where humans may suffer consequences in doing so, a devil may be simply unable to violate a bargain, though can usually seek to distort it.
Such themes show up regularly in the Exalted RPG, where negotiating with various spirits is a common part of the game, and where sanctifying oaths is a routine power of one of the major character types. Mechanically, violating such an oath results in some number of automatic failures at dramatically-appropriate times…
I feel like “empowered” oaths are something slightly different than what I’m trying to get at. There it’s a case of magic/curses for breaking them, and generally presented as something unusual and special about said oaths (or at least those that swear them).
What I’m looking at is more along the lines of “enforced” oaths, where someone specific, who you invoked for that job, will punish you for breaking the oath, and where this is more normal being what an oath was in the old conception of them.
I think this might lead to some interesting gameable moments since with specific enforcers rather than vague cosmic magical powers you could have shenanigans around trying to hide oathbreaking, or revealing foes hidden oathbreaking to the enforcers, or attempting to appeal the punishment/otherwise dodge it.
Ancient oaths usually specified the exact punishment that would be incurred by breaking the oath, as did some medieval oaths (even though there was a “standard” penalty of damning your soul). For instance, the oath sworn by Athenian jurors specified a penalty of “destruction for me and my family if I forswear”—a ruinous punishment for potentially ruining another’s life. Specifying the exact penalty for violating an oath would be historically-accurate and allow new story possibilities!
Also new opportunities for players to roleplay their characters…or mess around. “So let me get this straight—the penalty for this nonviolence oath that you want me to swear is to cluck like a chicken?”
(For more information, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry—a blog about history run by a historian—has a great post about premodern oaths and vows.)
Let me pick your brain on a thing. One of my players had to swear allegiance to a BBEG named Metterak…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/unique-monsters/cr-24/metterak-the-dragon-prince/
…So the party could advance deeper into the megadungeon. A stipulation of the oath chamber’s magic was that it had to be a sincere oath, otherwise the passage downward wouldn’t open. The player confirmed that she intended to stick by her word, and so far she has.
However, the player hasn’t been called into service yet, and she’s trying to get out of the non-magical oath somehow before the big bad asks her to do something nasty. The leading option is “get the local king to absolve you,” but I’m still noodling with consequences.
Any thoughts on ways to play it, O Oathmeister? What should consequences be for breaking a non-magical oath? Is it possible to break it? And does the medieval perspective offer any help?
To make sure we are on the same page, when you say “break the oath” I get the impression you mean a) “no longer being bound by it such that you can do whatever you want without that being a violation”
rather than b) “not doing what you swore to do in violation of the oath”.
If I’m getting this right then: Getting out of one would to my mind more be a difficult matter and one that would be highly dependant on the specific oath (and its cultural/spiritual context).
For some oaths you might just be stuck with it, perhaps ultimately even in an impossible situations where it cannot be obeyed at all.
Others could be more forgiving for impossible situations, or have escape clauses and luckily oaths of allegiance would generally be the latter sort. (through not universally).
Normally such oaths of service wouldn’t be *completely* one sided, even if only implicitly so. You had to obey like you swore to do, but the master would normally have to maintain at least some level of good master behavior, or at least not terrible master behavior. Say if the master started betraying or attacking you first, then you might be allowed to defend yourself, or if the master violated the responsibilities and duties of their position you might be allowed to try to set them right.
If the oath is one that’d accept such circumstances then perhaps it might be possible to maneuver/manipulate Metterak into moving against the player in some way? say by getting her a position he has already ordered some minions against and then sending him word of her new position, so that it is no mere misunderstanding, but without giving him time to call off the attack (I notice he doesn’t have sending magic).
For a less manipulative and more good faith alternative one might play on any paranoia and pride Metterak might have. The player could then gather power and place themselves in a position that’d both be good for betraying or serving Metterak, but crucially without intending to do the former. The idea/hope being that he’d then attack her because of a unjustified lack of trust, thus freeing her.
In both of these cases I don’t think any consequences would be necessary beyond the hassle and the fact that Metterak got to move against her first (personally or through minions depending on where the campaign is).
In the medieval perspective there’d be an enforcer of the oath (the one you swore the oath by/on, often a deity of some sort). You could try appealing to them, or to a higher authority in their hierarchy if they have one. They might be willing to let her out of it if the cause is good enough in their eye, possibly in exchange for going through some penitence (for instance performing difficult task with any rewards going to someone else for, perhaps even to Metterak as compensation, or giving charity significant for you to the needy).
If the power isn’t personally available they might have agents empowered to negotiate for them. Kings could be a classic for that role, Heracles had to go to his brother the king to get his labors for instance.
Depriving oneself or suffering could be another classic form of penitence, in a pathfinder context perhaps willingly taking on the consequences of breaking a magical oath for a time might be accepted as clearing the karmic debt.
Musing it over I think that needing to do something exceptional, but non-morally-nasty, for Metterak to clear the debt, might be more interesting than just suffering penalties.
For instance questing for some magical item that’d be of great use to him/a great weapon against him and then giving it to him or destroying it as appropriate instead of using it themselves.
Coroner’s juries. They’re a quirk of the medieval English legal system, which worked a lot like raising the hue and cry, or getting rustled up into a posse. One of the coroner’s duties was to determine the cause and manner of death, and if they needed help, they could press bystanders into service to perform an impromptu murder investigation. I’ve used it once (in my very first time DMing, so it naturally didn’t go great), but I’d like to try it again, especially to start a campaign: it’s a really direct hook that gets players together, and in a position where they can’t easily avoid the adventure; it sounds weird and old-fashioned and says something quirky about the setting; and an investigation is a gentler, lower-stakes introduction for squishy first-level characters than a dungeon crawl or combat.
My favorite thing about it: like the posse, it actually survives to this day in some jurisdictions in the US; Illinois, I think, requires them for any coroner’s investigation. So citizens get randomly selected like any other jury, and they spend all day listening to a medical professional describe the ways people have died, and vote on whether or not it sounds suspicious.
Seems like a strong hook. The problem is that it’s obscure to our modern sensibilities, so players may feel like it’s a “heavy handed” plot hook, even though it makes perfect sense for their characters.
Introducing this biz is the hard part. I don’t know if a brief write-up on “historical coroner’s juries” would help, or if an authoritative NPC explaining the premise in-character (“You have all been summoned here today…”) would be better. But overcoming players’ kneejerk reaction of, “This is a weird form of justice my GM made up to facilitate an adventure hook,” seems to be Task #1.
That’s pretty much exactly how it played out.
Not European historical, but Chinese historical. The seal of the Emperor was almost equivalent with the Emperor himself. So when people saw the seal they were expected to kow-tow before it. My wife, as GM, set an adventure in Imperial China. And gave us, the PC’s, a mandate with the seal of the Emperor. So we were able to penetrate the lair of the cult that was doing all the dastardly things, and entered the large room in which they were almost all present. So my wife was thinking: massive fight scene! And we, the players were thinking: O f*ck. Until I remembered the Emperors Seal. So we unrolled the scroll, and, almost without announcing it, the whole room sank to their knees, and Kow-Towed the Emperors Seal. Except for the big bad, who was then forced to confront us alone, and we dispatched him quite handily.
Forgot to add that my wife, the GM,was mightly miffed that we cheated her out of a fight scene. We, on the other hand, were very happy that we survived the whole thing
This is why you don’t give your player explosives:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
…Metaphorically speaking. 😛
Still, it’s nice when a player can invoke this kind of high-impact McGuffin and feel like a genius for remembering it.
“This is why you don’t give your player explosives”
Well, you know the saying: It seemed like a good idea at the time…..
My son’s low-level mage had a barely furnished tower (outcome of “deed to a small property” and “map to a ruined tower” starting trinkets). He was busy trying to balance his low cash returns from adventuring with his alchemy-crafting needs, the cost of acquiring new spells, and having any money left for things like food and candles.
Then he learned where he lived.
The area, I (as DM) told him, was named for the many ancient cemeteries in the area. Originally marked as “GRAVESITE,” it became Graveside, then Gravesy, then just plain Gravy. As it was unincorporated, it was technically a hamlet and not a true village. Thus, on the maps, it was labelled “Ham.Gravy.”
“What does it need to be a village?” he asked.
“Technically, a church and/or a marketplace,” I told him, “according to wikipedia and my books.”
Determined to NOT become “The Wizard of Ham Gravy,” he began devoting all of his resources to a) building a church and hiring a vicar, b) constructing a marketplace, and c) petitioning to the local authority (a Duke) to have the area declared the Village of Graveside.
Oh my gosh, I love it. I want to hear more about the Wizard of
Ham GravyGraveside Village.HAM GRAVY
HAM GRAVY
Shit like this is why so many people are disappointed by the 5E Assassin Rogue: Their perception of an “Assassin” is painted more by MMOs than anything and assume it’s going to stand behind the boss for the entire combat stabbing them in the back for insane damge. The fantasy it’s going for is an actual Assassin: Someone who enters the party with a forged invitation to poison the target’s drink and walk out, or sit in a book-depository with a crossbow while they wait for the target’s carriage to ride by. The 5E Assassin Rogue exists for playing Hitman, not Warcraft. (The Warcraft stuff comes from the base Rogue chassis)
Most people who I’ve seen bitch about the Assassin Rogue are aware of what it’s good at, and annoyed that it’s specialized in something that doesn’t actually come up much in D&D games.
Point 1: While Infiltration Expertise and Impostor are great for infiltrating a high-society PTA meeting to spy on the leader of a pro-war political faction, in most D&D contexts that leader is going to be planning a violent insurrection that’s defeated by beating up all of the leader’s guards and elite forces before stabbing the leader a bunch.
Point 2: Death Strike and Assassinate are slightly more useful; if you can get your party to cooperate, you’ll get a whole single round of combat where it applies. Unless you botch your Stealth check. Or the fighter needs to get in position and he botches his, because of his plate armor. Or you miss.
If you need to kill/KO enemies in one sneak attack, which are slightly stronger than a normal rogue can kill/KO in one sneak attack, Assassinate is handy. Death Strike can be, too, if your target is a bit tougher than that and doesn’t have a good Con save. But if you’re not playing Metal Gear Solid while the rest of the party surfs the web on their phones, you’re not going to attack with surprise that often.
Point 2b: Part of the problem is that D&D doesn’t make a great stealth game. The bigger problem, which I feel should be emphasized separately, is that D&D is a multiplayer game, and not everybody is going to be stealthy. You can sneak into the dungeon along and poison the Big Bad, but that’s not going to be fun for anyone else. The social contract of the gaming table prevents you from using your abilities effectively.
Point 3: Putting that aside, I think Assassinate and Death Strike are well-designed. They make attacks on surprised enemies a lot more effective, but they don’t just let you win automatically. Impostor and especially Infiltration Expertise, not so much. They just work.
Part of that ties into the broader issues non-combat challenges face in the D&Derivatives. The mechanical structures aren’t in place to make any activity except combat engaging; you roll a d20, or for complex tasks multiple d20’s, and that’s that. But by the same token, the fact that the Assassin specializes so hard in a form of play not well supported by the rest of the rules is, perhaps, an indication that it needed to go through another draft.
I find that people are disappointed by Assassin Rogue because
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EIcCI0LX0AEwmWz.jpg
Just replace “advantage” with “auto-crit.”
Got excited when I saw some ninja up there, as someone who’s starting a game with the new ‘Adventures in Rokugan’ splatbook for 5e. The Shinobi class’ access to neat ninja tools like smoke bombs and such are exciting to me as a player, and as a GM I’m hoping to see what the players do with the new classes.
As for the prompt, I steal a lot of historical and mythological inspiration for my games. A lot of it is taken from the not-quite-historical Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Lots of heroic stuff in there, from saving your favored NPC from a burning castle, to the party holding off an army from a bridge-flavored chokepoint.
Most recently, the villain of the mini-campaign I ran was just… a thin fantasy version Marcus Brutus. Spent half of the campaign getting the players in good with the fantasy Julius Ceasar, and the party returned after an adventure to learn that their Emperor buddy got assassinated, and spent the rest of the campaign dealing with the aftermath of that. The public unrest, the power grabs, the opportunistic militaries from other nations. Turned out alright.
Any special requests or weird rules interactions I should know about in Rokugan? I’ve been looking for an excuse to do more with Ninja, and his relationship with Draguto and Assassin are currently top-of-mind.
One of the bits I loved about the ‘Shinobi’ class of Rokugan is that they’re a sort of combination of Wizard and Rogue, but not in the matter that they do magic – instead, Shinobi prepare tools ahead of time much like wizards prepare spells. Smoke bombs, bags of caltrops, kunai and the like. They’ve also got an archetype that allows them to set up contingency plans ahead of time, such as weapon caches or prepared hiding spots.
They also lack Sneak Attack, instead getting an ability called ‘Merciless Strikes’, which adds damage on anything afflicted with status ailments, which their tools set them up to use. In a fight, they’re all about isolating, crippling, and removing opponents individually, buuuut they’re sort of encouraged to try and avoid fights to begin with – one of their first abilities gives them advantage on Stealth when they’re at least 10ft above or below a target. Much like what they’re doing in today’s comic! 😀
I suppose the best lesson that Assassin might have for Draguto there is… they’re not a “solo” guy. All their tools and tactics work best as part of a group, whether it be with a squad of other ninjas… or your buddy with the big sword and the plate armor who’s waiting around the corner for a bunch of mooks with caltrop holes in their feet and itching powder in their eyes.
I love thinking of rogues, assassins, investigators, and shinobi as “support” classes and putting them in the same field as clerics and druids. It brings me joy.
Just got my security license. Draguto there reminds me of some of the other people who were doing the course.
A hint: If it sounds like something that would happen in an action movie, it’s never the thing you’re supposed to do.
…As for history: I’ve got to admit, that a lot of how I play nobility and knights and whatnot is more informed by Fire Emblem than by any research into real historical stuff.
Alright, time to bust out my my powerful ability: Contemporaneous-note-taking-no-jutsu!
I can picture the speed lines. I can hear the anime power-up scream. GJ.
Once upon a time I was trying to research the French Revolution for a setting. I was scrolling through titles at my local library when I stumbled across the perfect one:
“The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That [Something Something I stopped reading]”.
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered what the book was actually about:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56912.The_Judgment_of_Paris
Still the only art history book I’ve read cover-to-cover, so I’ve got that going for me. Really interesting stuff. Didn’t help my setting too much though.
Point is that historical research is hard. No wonder so many of our kind default to YouTube videos for their research. :/
So far, my incorporation of historical elements into D&D games has been limited to character backgrounds that nobody reads. But there’s a lot of potential.
Just yesterday, I came across a couple of blog posts arguing that D&D games (especially in the AD&D days when PCs were expected to found a barony) have more in common with Western narratives than medieval Europe. But as fun as the fantasy of wiping out the savage Capital-E Evil and bringing/returning civilization to the world can be, there’s also plenty of fun to be had in adventures inspired by how actual medieval societies worked.
One big example: All armies, aside from the odd necromantic horde, need to eat. Pre-railroad armies on the move almost universally needed to pillage the countryside just to avoid starving. (I say almost because some areas allow naval supply, steppe nomads have different logistical challenges and resources, and there’s a lot of armed groups that might or might not count as armies who function differently than the definitely-armies of agrarian states. But the kinds of army you’d find in medieval Europe basically all needed to “forage” for food.)
So one way to play with D&D conventions could be to cast the PCs as local villagers in the borderlands between two warring groups. Possibly something pointless and Game-of-Thrones-ey, possibly something more epic and Dragonlance-ey; Solostaran Kanan’s soldiers need to eat as much as Tywin Lannister’s. The players need to defend their village against both enemy soldiers and nominally-allied ones.
There would be combat, of course, but with the enemies are coming to the PCs. They’d have the village as a home base, and would be able to build up the village’s defenses over time (especially if they pick up spells like expeditious excavation or wall of stone). You could break out the kingdom-building rules if the players were into it, or just treat it as something like a big tower defense game.
The campaign would start with just small foraging parties from vanguard forces, composed of relatively low-level soldiers. Then larger armies pass through, with larger foraging parties and the occasional high-level officer/champion/demonic beast. Eventually, the armies hear about the powerful defenders of this random village and assume there must be something valuable there. First they hire adventurers to defend the foraging parties and see what’s going on there; when those get driven back, they send groups of adventurers to raid specifically for whatever great treasure the PCs are defending…
…never realizing that the only treasure there was a safe community.
Or you could have the PCs be part of the foraging/scouting parties, but considering that “foraging” is a euphemism for stealing food and stuff from peasants…even if you’re foraging in goblin villages or draconian camps or whatever, your players are probably still gonna feel like the bad guys.
Feel like the bad guys…
Problem is that we want our modern values to be visible and ignore the implications. Once we tap on history all the not so nice things come up, looting as soldiers pay, selling captured enemies as slaves if they couldn’t pay a ransom, stuff that we are now horrified but used to be the norm. I don’t get it, it was then now is now, stop whining and accept that some places are not as civil as we are, and during war times, well just look at Ukraine. We haven’t really goten any better as a species since the acient times.
So, let me get this straight. I spent four paragraphs describing how you could incorporate a historical truth into your game, then half a sentence pointing out that playing the other side of that same historical truth would feel shitty.
You get pissed at me for some reason, something about wanting to project modern values onto the past, humans still suck, blah blah, even though I was just saying that it would probably be more enjoyable to play a game where you defend the victims of historical shittiness rather than one where you actively perform the shittiness.
Hell, I’ll perform Godwin’s Ritual to summon this argument’s final form: Would you make this same argument if someone suggested it would be more fun to play people protecting Jews/Romani/LGBTQ/etc in Nazi Germany than it would be to play the Nazis?
Based on previous conversations, I’m guessing that Jaeger is referencing Viking thralls:
https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/denmark/prehistoric-period-until-1050-ad/the-viking-age/power-and-aristocracy/slaves-and-thralls/
I personally wouldn’t want to deal with that mess in a game. But it depends on how grimdark the party wants to go, and whether or not you’ve talked it out ahead of time.
I suspect that the “stop whining” line was apostrophe directed at Jaeger’s Viking abolitionist partymates rather than you personally.
I’ve never done “the war campaign” for a game, but the concept has always intrigued me. I’d be tempted to pick this one apart for inspiration:
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ironfang_Invasion_(adventure_path)
From innocent bystanders to la resistance to generals of a ragtag coalition seems like a satisfying arc. But even there, the historical reality of “pillage to survive” makes turning the corner and taking up the sword yourself an exercise in feels-bad. No good guys in war and all that.
In that sense, it feels as if “fantasy war” in the style of the new Voltron would be less objectionable.
Well IDK about “Historical Fact” (other than some fun things that happen if you line up timelines, like the wild west, late-stage piracy, samurai, and the Victorian times all happening at almost the same time), but for actual Historical Fiction, well… anyone who says modern DnD/Pathfinder is becoming ‘too anime’ needs to read some authentic Arthurian legend. There’s some real gonzo stuff in Arthurian legend.
One of my favorite Arthurian tales is that time the comic relief knight made fun of Lancelot’s half-giant friend, so Lancelot dressed up as a woman to beat the comic relief knight at jousting, on foot, to humiliate him.
Honestly, Galehaut the Uncrowned King is a super underrated character in general. He’s ten feet tall, conquered thirty kingdoms, and refuses to accept a crown until he conquers Logres (King Arthur’s kingdom)…but changes his mind and surrenders to Arthur when he sees Lancelot’s battlefield prowess, wanting to become Lancelot’s friend. It’s somewhat unclear where on the bromance spectrum Galehaut wanted their relationship to be, but Galehaut’s awesome however you interpret him.
Also worth pointing out that there’s also a half-African knight, Feirefiz, half-brother to grail-hunting knight Parzival/Percival; Feirefiz is notable for his swanky sapphire-studded armor, his conversion from Roman paganism to Christianity so he could see the Grail (after being a knight of the Round Table for some time, mind), and originally being written by someone who didn’t know what biracial people look like. Also Ywain, Knight of the Lion, who is named after his lion pet/friend/mascot. Also worth bringing up Safir and Palamedes, a pair of Saracen knights who apparently entered the Arthurian mythos after the early Crusades.
My point is that the medieval Arthurian legends were more colorful, in every sense of the word, than basically any adaptation thereof in the modern era.
Well now you’ve got me curious. It’s been a while since my “Arthurian Lit” class, and I could do with a refresher. What “gonzo stuff in Arthurian legend” are you thinking?
I’m thinking the “gonzo” also has to include a) the groupie who commissioned a mannikin (painted statue) of her favorite knight –who was then accused of philandering when someone saw “him” standing in her bedchamber, b) Sir Dagonet, King Arthur’s jester (I always envision Danny Kaye at the Round Table), Sir Escanor le Beau (Handsome Stranger, no doubt named for his father) and his villainous half-brother Sir Escanor le Grand (Giant Stranger) –who was Black Adam to Gawain’s Captain Marvel, as both had strength that waxed and waned with the height of the sun in the sky.
Yeah, Escanor’snkind of a badass
https://nanatsu-no-taizai.fandom.com/wiki/Escanor
Let’s see, Arthur himself was stated to have a strike that could knock down walls, cuts a giant in half vertically in a single blow, at one point single-handedly took out 940 foes in a single battle. Even when he dies, to being stabbed quite literally in the brain (the story calls out the brain-pan), he managed to get up, walk (though not without difficulty) to a chapel, where he proceeded to give more orders while his knight took excalibur, left, returned the sword to the water, came back, and had another brief chat before he finally died. Several paragraphs later.
Sir Kay (probably the most Anime knight) could shoot heat rays from his hands, grow to monstrous size, and also survive over a week without breathing.
Sir Bedwyr had a lance said to produce wounds equal to nine normal lance-wounds, and was also said to be three times faster than a normal man.
Oh, and Sir Balin (known as the Knight with the Two Swords) destroyed an entire kingdom with one blow. By accident.
Honestly Lancelot gets a lot of screen-time when Arthurian stuff comes up, but really he was probably one of the more boring knights. Yes he was a very skilled fighter (most stories say “the best”) but that and his tryst with Arthur’s wife are about all he’s really got going for him.
I tried using 8th century europe as a seting piece once. Changed around what races occupied what areas and some borders a bit. Start would have been in Francia.
The muslim invasion made for decent big bad for souther adventure and the norse raids for norther one. We got one game under and then one guy got really argumentative about the details of the setting and it kinda soured the whole thing.
A historical version of Cleric, huh? Doesn’t sound too fun.
What bits of history did That Guy argue about?
> What’s a weird tidbit from the IRL past that you’ve adapted for the table? .
My favorite one has been a character backstory based on the history of DuBiers and their stranglehold (at one point) on the diamond trade. Now, their story involved a ton of exploitation, market fixing, and crimes against humanity.
So I tossed the depressing stuff and made my character’s father a man who married into poor nobility and turned them around by fast-talking and making deals to convince people that the previously near-worthless ‘pink diamonds’ in his setting were CLEARLY the jewelry of true love and affection, and everyone needed to have the perfect one for that special someone! Of course, he did this after quietly buying up all 7 known pink diamond mines in the world.
…all as backstory to explain why my character was a smooth talker and relatively well connected to other merchants in the seas he traveled, even if he was trying to make his OWN fortune and always looking for *just* the right kind of BS to sell to the world that it would beg to buy up by the end!
The DM decided when we met Eddie DuBeers, the father, that he was a real Frank Costanza sort, and a great time was had by all!
> The DM decided when we met Eddie DuBeers, the father, that he was a real Frank Costanza sort, and a great time was had by all!
Nice! Grinning like a dummy imagining that reveal.
I might have mentioned this before, but are you familiar with the tale of the industrious rogue?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/TaleOfAnIndustriousRogue
Always struck me as a good example of Moist von Lipwig in action in an RPG.
For my KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) games quite a lot of historical knowledge and facts come around. There was this adventure in which the knights were tasked with guarding the bishop of their liege’s town to a monastery where he would be getting a relic for the new cathedral in said town. They were mightily perturbed that the bishop (being a younger child of their liege) was more interested and active in hunting and falconry and other knightly/noble pursuits, then in spiritual matters concerning the relic.
Do you have a go-to source for your Arthur-meets-history knowledge? It’s been a few years since my “Arthurian Lit” class, and I could do with a refresher.
Yes, No, Maybe? Living in Europe, and growing up less then 5 miles from a genuine medieval castle, and being interested in history tends to infuse you with a lot of random historical knowledge. Also trying to get a hand on as much medieval-esque RPG systems and books and reading them gets you all that “irritatingly trivial” knowledge. For the larger, more well known, parts of the whole Arthurian cycle there is the Great Pendragon Campaign, which is more or less a synthesis of most of what happens in the romances, presented in one big book, in which the players knights have the ability to participate in quite a few key happenings. Although I did read Morte d’Arthur, and Once and Future King, I am more influenced by the TV-series Ivanhoe (with a very young Roger Moore) and Floris (a Dutch series with a very young Rutger Hauer). And the knowledge more or less aggregated form there. One thing that helps is the conceit in KAP that it basically encompasses the whole of the Middle Ages. From the leaving of the Roman Legion just before Dark Age Saxon AEngeland, all the way to the early modern pageant and tourney in which Francis and Henry tried to impress each other, and each others courtiers, on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Calais . So any period specific real-life knowledge can become a player-hook, or the seed of an adventure, in the appropriate KAP Arthurian age. That is basically how I make most of my KAP one-shots. I know some more or less obscure medieval fact, and fit it in the broader weave of the Arthurian saga, by way of KAP. So, yes, there are a few go-to sources, but they are more about the “true” history than about the Arthurian one. And no, I can’t point you to one or two specific ones. So maybe this was somewhat helpful?
One of my go-to books for a quick bit of Arthurian inspiration has been
The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends.
Author: Ronan Coghlan
Publisher: Element Books Ltd (September 30, 1992)
ISBN-10: 1852303735
Amazon lists it as being “from $2” in paperback; it’s nestled on my shelf next to my dog-eared Howard Pyle books.
–But for weird but useful bits of castle living I often crack open
The Medieval Castle
Author: Philip Warner
Publisher: Penguin Books (December 31, 2001)
ISBN-10: 0141390700
Amazon lists it as being “from $3.50” in paperback.
Ah, those look like books I would have (and I think I do have the Life in Castle one). Will have to look, and if not order. Thanks for the suggestions!