Best historical settings?

[Tulpa Girl]

I think this debate should be settled with halberds. Whoever dies of gangrene loses the argument

Depends on their position on the topic. They might *win* the debate by being the first to die of disease.

 

[lategamer]

I definitely wasn't referring to the 18th Century - I am talking about 13th-16th Century, depending on the specific town and other things that were going on.

<snip>
The truth is we have reams of very ordinary, mundane and yes fairly boring data from most of the towns and a lot of the countryside in high to late medieval Europe, and that's a very nice thing. We haven't done a complete analysis of this data, in fact probably most of it hasn't even been looked at in centuries. But from what we have seen, patterns are starting to emerge. New data could appear tomorrow that changes it all, but at this point, the data makes it look like fully recovering from battle wounds was not unusual, and so perhaps my 'cinematic' table is maybe a little more accurate than your 'realistic' one.

A different period is possibly the reason. I've fought for hours with blunted weapons (though metal blades) with only a fencing mask, metal/leather gloves and a leather gilet. And though there was the ever present danger of a blade snapping and impaling someone, we were young and stupid enough to do it anyway. Worst injury we got after literally doing this for three years every weekend was bruises (mostly from being punched with the gloves) and it was a great laugh. (We called it Elizabethan Fencing....but it was just lads larking about while the womenfolk sewed and cooked).

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about someone literally trying to kill you. With a blade. The pant-shitting realisation that you should have practiced more and it's you or them. Not the Hollywood hack-in-turn or the dogged manufacture of that forced on us by D&D.

I think your mini-table was a little "cinematic" but that's cool. We can't have exact figures and good dice rolls make up for a lot. We all play games that sometimes make death a reality (Twilight 2000 4th ed, I'm looking at you) and sometimes make it a mere hindrance (D&D, step forward). There's room For everyone.

I've really enjoyed your inputs and I am listening. The points I respond to are the ones I want to see more debate with. I save the references for later enjoyment.

 

[AsenRG]

I have grave doubts on the veracity of "mandatory weekly reports" in the 18th century or before.

There's survivor bias in the data. As you mention, hundreds of soldiers. The people who didn't write letters or file reports because they died can hardly bear witness.

Hundreds, out of millions. Survivor bias. And unreliable testimony

Yeah, sorry, but that sure seems like "what doesn't support my ideas is unreliable or fake" spiel that is getting more and more popular these days.

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realise I was not allowed to disagree.

...you're disagreeing?
The temerity some people have!

I definitely wasn't referring to the 18th Century - I am talking about 13th-16th Century, depending on the specific town and other things that were going on.


There is a survivor bias in some data like personal memoirs and personal letters, but not so much in the far more common but mundane data such as town government records, tax records, records of fines and other punishments, craft regulation, militia inspections, invoices, contracts, bills of lading and so on. If you are talking about an Italian City-State in the 13th Century or a German Free City in the 15th, these are very well documented places. There were a lot of records. It's not like half the population just died of paper cuts and were never mentioned in the government archives again. Even in small villages, there were people recording major life events like births and deaths, and typically, violent incidents.



Again, see above. And again, I wasn't referring to the entire length and breadth of history, but to the late medieval period. I can't really speak about the 18th Century except to say that I know conditions got pretty bad in a lot of Europe from around 1620, very generally speaking.



You certainly are allowed in my book.

I think maybe his frustration may have been based on the sense that you were only responding to some of the counter-arguments and not others. But I don't expect you to take my word for it, and I wouldn't try to claim that there aren't many ways to interpret pretty much any data set. What I have posted in this thread about the nature of wounds, the law, and what you might call "pre-industrial emergency medicine" is fairly well known (or believed) among a lot of medieval historians and military historians today. But interpretations do change, and any general perception is often at least partly wrong.

We do however have a bias that was inherited from the 18th-19th Century, and goes along with some of the Romantic interest in the medieval period. It is perceived as a time when life was "nasty, brutish, and short" to paraphrase Hobbes, when people were superstitious, illiterate and filthy, and prone to random violence.

But we now know that a lot of the Enlightenment to Victorian tropes about the medieval world just aren't accurate. Nobody was winching knights into a saddle with a crane because their armor was too heavy, that originates with a 19th Century joke by Mark Twain (based on a misunderstood anecdote about Henry VIII). We know that the persecution of witches was something that mainly happened after the medieval period. We know that in places like towns in Lombardy or Tuscany, literacy was quite high. We know that people in the middle ages bathed regularly and didn't go about in filthy rags, we know in fact that the average person had some disposable income, that they had time off, and that at least in some parts of Europe, there was a fairly large middle class both in the cities and in the countryside.

And we know that they didn't just die like flies every time they received a cut. There was a combat sport in almost all the Central European towns in which people fought with blunt swords 'to the highest bleeding wound', for fun, with no masks or other major safety gear except maybe a pair of gloves. Do you think they would have done that if minor wounds were routinely fatal? (people did occasionally die or get maimed in these events but it was not routine).

The truth is we have reams of very ordinary, mundane and yes fairly boring data from most of the towns and a lot of the countryside in high to late medieval Europe, and that's a very nice thing. We haven't done a complete analysis of this data, in fact probably most of it hasn't even been looked at in centuries. But from what we have seen, patterns are starting to emerge. New data could appear tomorrow that changes it all, but at this point, the data makes it look like fully recovering from battle wounds was not unusual, and so perhaps my 'cinematic' table is maybe a little more accurate than your 'realistic' one.

Thank you for answering that!

Depends on their position on the topic. They might *win* the debate by being the first to die of disease.

Don't worry. I would find the recipe I mentioned and use it to prevent the gangrene from setting in...
Even if that would make it survivor bias.

A different period is possibly the reason. I've fought for hours with blunted weapons (though metal blades) with only a fencing mask, metal/leather gloves and a leather gilet. And though there was the ever present danger of a blade snapping and impaling someone, we were young and stupid enough to do it anyway. Worst injury we got after literally doing this for three years every weekend was bruises (mostly from being punched with the gloves) and it was a great laugh. (We called it Elizabethan Fencing....but it was just lads larking about while the womenfolk sewed and cooked).

Amusingly enough, so have I. We just called it "historical fencing", though, and nobody was sewing and cooking, the womenfolk were participating...

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about someone literally trying to kill you. With a blade. The pant-shitting realisation that you should have practiced more and it's you or them. Not the Hollywood hack-in-turn or the dogged manufacture of that forced on us by D&D.

Yeah, I've had that happen as well, much to my chagrin at the time.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

A different period is possibly the reason. I've fought for hours with blunted weapons (though metal blades) with only a fencing mask, metal/leather gloves and a leather gilet. And though there was the ever present danger of a blade snapping and impaling someone, we were young and stupid enough to do it anyway. Worst injury we got after literally doing this for three years every weekend was bruises (mostly from being punched with the gloves) and it was a great laugh. (We called it Elizabethan Fencing....but it was just lads larking about while the womenfolk sewed and cooked).

I did historical fencing for 25 years, so trust me, I'm hip. Not just in backyard fencing but large tournaments too, and with longswords, military sabers etc. not just the lighter sport type weapons. I had my share of knocks, and a few broken bones, but like you mostly just bruises.

But fencing with longswords without a mask, in matches scored to 'the highest bleeding wound', is on another level. The likelihood of at least am inor injury is much higher, almost by definition. And my point is that if the standards of medicine were as poor as we tend to assume ala Monty Python or the "medieval caveman trope" of pretty much every historical or fantasy film, I doubt they would have risked it, or risked the dozens of other violent, rowdy martial sports and warlike games they routinely indulged in, from water jousting to bareback horseracing, grappling and all the rest.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about someone literally trying to kill you. With a blade. The pant-shitting realisation that you should have practiced more and it's you or them. Not the Hollywood hack-in-turn or the dogged manufacture of that forced on us by D&D.

Right. I've had some experience of a few real scuffles myself. It definitely feels different when someone is out to hurt you. As you note though, the plural of anecdotes isn't necessarily statistic, so sometimes it's good to look at those, which I did when I was designing my game many years ago, and have done a few times since then during conversations like this. One thing that seems to hold consistent over the years, from the 1990s era FBI statistics I got from the Library back in the 'oughts to much more current studies done within the last couple of years, is that knife and machete wounds, as recorded by the boring bureaucracies of our own day, tell us that the ratio of death from blade wounds is surprisingly low.

For example this very detailed study of 73 patients in Iceland with "knife and machete wounds" gives us a mortality rate of about 4% and rated the median "ISS" score for their injuries at 9, whereas a score of 15 is sufficient to require admission to the Hospital. Only 20% of the wounds were serious enough for admission to the hospital.

This is consistent with several other studies, because as Wikipedia notes: "85% of injuries sustained from stab wounds only affect subcutaneous tissue”

Now it's true that today knives tend to be smaller than those carried in the medieval period, and though people still sometimes have machetes, longswords or halberds are rare in the brawls on our city streets. But this modern ratio is similar to the statistics aggregated by Professor Anne Tlusty from her study of records from 16th Century Augsburg, and published in her 2011 monograph, The Martial Ethic of Early Modern Germany. According to this book, in Augsburg there were 208 documented incidents of attacks with swords and knives from 1450-1750, 107 (51%) resulted in either no injuries or minor injuries. 50 resulted in serious wounds and 50 resulted in deaths, which is 24% of the incidents. In most cases these however are for multiple wounds - in incidents she covers in detail in her book on average 3-4 wounds were suffered by the loser of the fight and 1-2 by the winner. On the other hand, these fights mostly took place within the walls of a fairly sophisticated town and both physicians and apothecaries were available, as well as the usual barber-surgeons. So we can assume the higher standards of medical care (by the standards of the day) were used to treat these injuries. Almost all of these incidents involved swords, and in all but one case death resulted from an injury to the head, neck or torso. One of the deaths was from an accident during a fechtschüle in the 16th Century, which was the subject of a prolonged (and darkly amusing) interrogation by the town council.

We know from test cutting of media like tatami mats that a sword, a saber, or a big knife like a messer or bauernwher, can certainly cause devastating wounds. It is possible for example to decapitate someone or amputate a limb in a single cut. We can also see this from forensic evidence in exhumed battlefields like at Towton in the UK or at Visby on Gotland in what is now Sweden. But we also know from test-cutting that if you botch the cut, (which is easy to do) you can fail to do much of anything - your blade might not even go through a basic textile covering like a piece of denim, or it might only cut 2-3 centimeters deep. Bureaucratic records from late medieval sources tell us that minor wounds were often the result of violent encounters, (though each wound suffered brings a chance of a catastrophic injury). The same forensic data that shows us spectacular injuries such as split skulls and amputated limbs also shows us many bones with cut marks from older wounds that had healed. And so on.

So that's what I'm basing my version of the table on.

I think your mini-table was a little "cinematic" but that's cool. We can't have exact figures and good dice rolls make up for a lot. We all play games that sometimes make death a reality (Twilight 2000 4th ed, I'm looking at you) and sometimes make it a mere hindrance (D&D, step forward). There's room For everyone.

I've really enjoyed your inputs and I am listening. The points I respond to are the ones I want to see more debate with. I save the references for later enjoyment.

Cheers I certainly don't mind discussing all this. And there is always room for different interpretations.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Depends on their position on the topic. They might *win* the debate by being the first to die of disease.

Good point!

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

I found that for many 20th (and now 21st) century players, their reaction to following through on this is that it is arbitrary and unfair. By the early 1990s, I ran a couple of "slice of life" campaigns using GURPS where players played characters that were part of some aspect of my Majestic Wilderland setting that was not normally known for adventuring. One of the took place with the playing low point/low level character who were members of the city guard charged with keeping order in the City State of the Invincible Overlord. Another was one where everybody played low point/low level characters who were ordinary resident of a City-State neighborhood.

The results were instructive and by the end of it the players figured out a variety of plausible (given the resources they had) ways of dealing with "adventurers" and traditional fantasy and medieval challenges. As a result of me doing what I always do, they were incorporated into the next campaign I ran that had a more traditional adventuring setup. Suddenly the players treated the city guard and ordinary folks with a tad more respect.

Even years later, with a completely different groups of players, this still holds true.

That's an excellent example of what I mean, though in this case your data was acquired empirically / via experiment rather than through (historical) research.

When you start with a workable system, it helps you find the right balance between various delicate matters, in this case too much force to calm down rowdy adventurers (people die, maybe you cause riots), vs. too little (the town gets burned down).

In real medieval towns in Central Europe they didn't trust professionals to guard the walls or the city streets at night so they made ordinary citizens do town watch duty, which they absolutely hated. But of course, it does give you that perspective, and it makes it that much more embarrassing to be arrested for being drunk and disorderly when it's your neighbor or co-worker putting the manacles on your hands.

Generally, I try to start out with as accurate a map of the realities as I can, partly because this usually gives you functional systems. Oh armor works, ok, well now this suddenly gives me a reason to bother with all these armor-piercing weapons. But then after starting with a functional, plausible system you can hack it as you please, reduce the granularity to whatever level your players are comfortable with, and so on.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Peter Von Danzig

Are you planning to write adventures and campaigns for the Baltic region?

It seems you've shared all the setting material but are writing adventures for central Europe.

And to go back to your point about the usefulness of historical setting information for a wider range of people, I count myself as one of them.

I've been playing a bit of Shadow of the Demon Lord, which is a dark fantasy game, in your setting and it maps really well in terms of the tech level, religious and political landscape. The thing to dial up or down is the magic, fantasy species and monsters. I'm sticking to the Clerical magic, no fantasy species just yet ( I may include changelings) and the monsters are there, but not ubiquitous. It works really well for me and feels more immersive than the setting that comes with the game.

Ah that's really interesting. I'll have to add "Shadow of the Demon Lord" to the list of games people have adapted Codex source material to. Did you base this on the Codex guide to the medieval Baltic or the Player's Guide?

I haven't done any adventures set in the Baltic zone proper yet, the closest I've gotten so far is Silesia. The main reason is that in our period, the Baltic being caught up in war makes it a bit more complicated. I've tried to use settings in Franconia (Germany) and Silesia as kind of 'gateways' into the setting more broadly. As you know if you read the Baltic books, there was a lot going on in Prussia circa 1456. It's a bit of a challenge to figure out how to make an adventure set in all that craziness without doing 150 pages of background setting and explanation.

However, I have started working on a new small one ("The Blockhouse") set in the Baltic zone. And I ran a whole campaign a few years ago set in Prussia, Lesser Poland and Lithuania right in the middle of the 13 Years War. My notes were not detailed enough to make a book out of it though. A couple of the guys who designed Burning Wheel also did a Prussian campaign in the same period using their system, based on my Baltic book.

I'd love to see more about your "Shadow of the Demon Lord" game, you should post about it here or on our Discord.

Oh and speaking of changelings, I do have a Doppelganger in "Road to Monsterberg 1" and there is a spell to summon them, or afflict them on someone, in the magic book (the spell "Der Weinstock des Wechsels")

​

 

[chuckdee]

Good point!

No pun intended?

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

No pun intended?

Right through the face!

 

[AsenRG]

No pun intended?

Why would you assume it was unintended?


P.S.: I actually wrote this before Peter Von Danzig had posted, above. I just wanted to read the whole thread, and got distracted!

 

[MoonHunter]

Just to throw in an interesting aside. When I was 9 or 10 my brother and I were fencing with our mother's knitting needles. A lucky thrust put one right into my bicep. Don't remember beng taken to A&E but I might have been but I stiil have a small scar 60 years later. Never had any infection so those needles must have been pretty clean.

Knitters keep needles clean as to not solid or put oils into the fibers. If she was serious about knitting, she never ate before or during knitting and always washed hands (to minimize oil). That said.

Pre-Germ theory, nobody sanitized anything. Including wounds. (Though the habit of dousing wounds with wine or some strong drink (to numb the pain supposedly) had that effect.) So even cleaned weapons just had dirt and viscera removed. So infection was a serious thing.

Now limb hits were technically survivable. Hit one to the abdomen or chest, usually internally bleed. That plus infection. Yah.

 

[Adam Csipke]

I'm talking about someone literally trying to kill you. With a blade. The pant-shitting realisation that you should have practiced more and it's you or them. Not the Hollywood hack-in-turn or the dogged manufacture of that forced on us by D&D.

In my experience (Kuwait*, Bosnia) that happens after. You're full of adrenaline and your training comes to the fore. It's afterwards I had the "HOLY FUCK I COULD HAVE DIED!!!" feelings.

Others experience it differently though.

*Kuwait was the stabbing. Didn't get shot until Bosnia. Turns out I'm crap at being an army man.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

yeah adrenaline has a way of clarifying the mind. I found tournament fencing matches more nervewracking than the onset of a real fight, just due to the anticipation and the whole artificial setting, and the long build up. It's a bad feeling. Usually goes away after the first bout.

However, there is that moment in a real life situation when you realize somebody wants to hurt you, especially if you see a knife, a gun or some other serious weapon, or realize you are outnumbered etc., where you get that flash of adrenaline and the clarity comes in pretty hard. You tune everything else out. I can still remember a few moments like that clear as a bell.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Knitters keep needles clean as to not solid or put oils into the fibers. If she was serious about knitting, she never ate before or during knitting and always washed hands (to minimize oil). That said.

interesting!

Pre-Germ theory, nobody sanitized anything. Including wounds. (Though the habit of dousing wounds with wine or some strong drink (to numb the pain supposedly) had that effect.) So even cleaned weapons just had dirt and viscera removed. So infection was a serious thing.

I would debate that. Galen, Avicenna etc. advised to clean wounds thoroughly, even to carefully debride them, and to clean and even boil surgical instruments. They had special tinctures and concoctions like "Four Thieves Vinegar" and Thyme oil which they used for this purpose. They also had pain relievers such as opium and (by the 16th C) Laudanum, but that was a separate issue.

Some of this advice seems to have gradually fallen out of favor in the Early Modern period and been part of a whole slew of things that were thrown out in the 18th-19th Centuries, but in medieval period they did have this idea that anything rotten, dirty or bad smelling spread disease. So it worked out similarly to germ theory (in matters like public sanitation as well).

Now limb hits were technically survivable. Hit one to the abdomen or chest, usually internally bleed. That plus infection. Yah.

 

[TimWest]

Ah that's really interesting. I'll have to add "Shadow of the Demon Lord" to the list of games people have adapted Codex source material to. Did you base this on the Codex guide to the medieval Baltic or the Player's Guide?

I haven't done any adventures set in the Baltic zone proper yet, the closest I've gotten so far is Silesia. The main reason is that in our period, the Baltic being caught up in war makes it a bit more complicated. I've tried to use settings in Franconia (Germany) and Silesia as kind of 'gateways' into the setting more broadly. As you know if you read the Baltic books, there was a lot going on in Prussia circa 1456. It's a bit of a challenge to figure out how to make an adventure set in all that craziness without doing 150 pages of background setting and explanation.

However, I have started working on a new small one ("The Blockhouse") set in the Baltic zone. And I ran a whole campaign a few years ago set in Prussia, Lesser Poland and Lithuania right in the middle of the 13 Years War. My notes were not detailed enough to make a book out of it though. A couple of the guys who designed Burning Wheel also did a Prussian campaign in the same period using their system, based on my Baltic book.

I'd love to see more about your "Shadow of the Demon Lord" game, you should post about it here or on our Discord.

Oh and speaking of changelings, I do have a Doppelganger in "Road to Monsterberg 1" and there is a spell to summon them, or afflict them on someone, in the magic book (the spell "Der Weinstock des Wechsels")

​

I use the two Baltic setting books.

To be honest there's not much to say about how I use the setting. For those that don't know Shadow of the Demon Lord has a sketch of an official setting in the core rule book (there are splat books going into more detail). It's a dark fantasy / horror / grimdark setting (depending on how you dial it), reminiscent of the Diablo games. It's easy to make it as light or dark to your taste.

I'm just playing the rules as written but leave out the strongest magic, only allowing the Cleric / Priest schools. I'm using the various monsters and demons but not as every day occurrences. There are two main religions in the game Cult of the New God, which I map as Christianity and the Old Faith which I map as Paganism.

I find the Baltic in1456 appealing because it's such a patchwork of societies right next to each other, Christians, Pagans, Teutonic Knights, Polish, Germans, Livonians, Lithuanians, Mongols, Russians all in close proximity. So all kinds of encounters are plausible. And there's room for roaming bands of adventurers, mercenaries, traders and ambassadors. It doesn't feel wrong to just make up a small town as a base of operations within a few days ride from all these different factions.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

That's great, yeah it's precisely what I intended for people to do with those. Glad it's working out.

 

[SJB]

I came across this and thought of our discussion about the “holes” in the knowledge of well-known periods of history.

Scenario brief: Dark Hall, well-defended manor house, somewhere in England, AD 1200 to AD 1399. Err … that’s it; everything else is up to you and the players.

 

[AsenRG]

In my experience (Kuwait*, Bosnia) that happens after. You're full of adrenaline and your training comes to the fore. It's afterwards I had the "HOLY FUCK I COULD HAVE DIED!!!" feelings.

Others experience it differently though.

*Kuwait was the stabbing. Didn't get shot until Bosnia. Turns out I'm crap at being an army man.

Well, that was my experience as well, FWIW. Vlad Taltos actually describes it pretty well...

Together with "tournament fights are often more nerve-wracking due to the anticipation" that PvD mentioned.

 

[dragoner]

Stephen the Great's 15th Century Moldavia would also be pretty awesome for an adventure background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_the_Great
Cool map included:

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

An 8 meter long section of wooden stairs found within the Halstadt salt mine in Austria. This is Bronze Age technology, a little worse for the wear after more than 3,000 years. But it gives us some insight into what was going on in that very strange, very mysterious world.

 

[gentlemanbear]

A lot of folks don't know that Columbia Games gave the Harn treatment to Richard the Lionheart's England

View attachment 50812

View attachment 50813

I still have a copy of that!

 

[WillPhillips]

Ah, it's going pretty well. We have Monsterbeg Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 available on Print on Demand now (got the second one done about a month ago) and they are selling pretty well. Monsterberg 1 is on sale at the moment and I've left the POD price heavily discounted for now for both of them. Some Mythras players adapted these to their system so we had a little cross-over which is fun, and I got to meet a bunch of Mythras people.

I've been working on Monsterberg 3 but I have a lot of other irons in the fire which have taken up most of my bandwidth. This mainly consists of a big website update we've been working on for several months, based on elements from our offline database that we are slowly moving on to the web. So far this includes a pretty thorough, searchable collection of medieval and pre-industrial weapons (with stats, historical data and images of specific antiques), a searchable database of historic regions in late-Medieval central Europe with coats of arms and all kinds of historical information, a fairly robust automatic adventure seed generator (which we are also making into a book called Iter Tyche), an automatic "loot" / treasure generator, an online historical marketplace, and some other minor things like a historical currency converter, historical name generator, and some elements of the character generation system. Goal is to have full character generation up on there before the end of the year, and a combat simulator some time next year.

The meta-goal is to make our site into a useful general resource for anyone interested in historical (and historical adjacent / historical derived) gaming, regardless of what system you use.

Other irons in the fire include a "monster" book (including both mythological creatures from late medieval Central Europe as well as standardized and individual NPCs), a military themed mini-adventure set in medieval Prussia based on some really cool data that kind of got thrown into our lap, and a possible sequel to our mini-Adventure "The Devil's Pass" which has been unexpectedly popular. We are also coming out with Devil's Pass for POD, we had to make some minor adjustments after the last poof came out but it should be released soon, hopefully by Halloween.

Another thing in the works is that a couple of stunt-men friends of mine are doing a Codex Martialis mini-expansion set in the Classical era Mediterranean, which seems to be moving fast. I'm pretty excited about that, this is something we are licensing. And another HEMA guy is working on a French translation of Devil's Pass.

And speaking of HEMA and Martial Arts friends, we've also been running a series of little battle-tests on Discord with some friends called 'Tales from the Nameless Pub' which is turning out to be a bit of fun. Most of these people are fencers or martial artists who have either never played Codex or never played any RPG before so we are starting off with mostly one on one fights and kind of building up to larger more elaborate (and bloody) scenarios. We recorded audio and we just started putting a couple of these on YouTube, you can listen to one here.

I'm just about done with my side of all the database work for the new web tools, so this will all be in the hands of the web developer soon and I can pivot back to books. The top priority after that is going to be to finish the Adventure Seed book Iter Tyche, (hopefully very soon as a lot of it is already done, it just needs to be formatted and laid out), and then crank out the short Prussian adventure "The Blockhouse", and then I'm going to try to tackle Monsterberg III which I've been collecting data for this whole time (if you have read Monsterberg I and II you know that these projects are a bit more in depth and require an enormous amount of research).


Probably way more than you needed to know but the TL: DR is that I've been up to my neck in alligators with database work for a couple of months, but that is ending and I'm about to start writing books again. Monsterberg I and II are available on POD right now and at a discount. Website stuff gonna be great. Monsteberg III is looking like first quarter 2023, assuming the world isn't blown up by then.

Goodness sakes, Peter. I love all this.

I'm up to my eyeballs in my very ahistorical monster heroes rules project, but it's encouraging and makes me think of returning to my own late Renaissance project in 2023.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Goodness sakes, Peter. I love all this.

I'm up to my eyeballs in my very ahistorical monster heroes rules project, but it's encouraging and makes me think of returning to my own late Renaissance project in 2023.

Thanks, always glad to meet a kindred spirit! You are welcome to join the fun on our Discord. We have a small but lively group from all over the UK, US and Europe (so far). Our goal is to make ourselves useful to anyone doing any kind of historical, historical-adjacent, or historically derived / low fantasy etc. gaming.

 

[WillPhillips]

Thanks, always glad to meet a kindred spirit! You are welcome to join the fun on our Discord. We have a small but lively group from all over the UK, US and Europe (so far). Our goal is to make ourselves useful to anyone doing any kind of historical, historical-adjacent, or historically derived / low fantasy etc. gaming.

I've been trying to take some steps away from Discord (as I just find it a bit too much to keep up with), but I'd very much love an invite to that!

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

yeah I know what you mean. It's very good for some things but not so much for others, and if i was signed up to more than the handful of servers I'm on, I can see it being much too much of a distraction. Discord seems to be where all the activity is right now though.

Invite sent.

 

[chuckdee]

yeah I know what you mean. It's very good for some things but not so much for others, and if i was signed up to more than the handful of servers I'm on, I can see it being much too much of a distraction. Discord seems to be where all the activity is right now though.

Invite sent.

I end up only following a few- it just moves too fast to do more than that.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

yeah exactly, agreed

 

[Ynas Midgard]

Although I appreciate weird / gonzo settings and aesthetics as well.

I first read it as "anesthetics"...

 

[SJB]

I’ve been enjoying Stara Skoła (= Old School) which is Peter Von Danzig introductory version of Codex Martialis. There’s a gritty short adventure set on the mid-fifteenth century Baltic coast. The use of historic maps is very clever. In fact, the whole presentation of the book is very pleasing.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

I’ve been enjoying Stara Skoła (= Old School) which is Peter Von Danzig introductory version of Codex Martialis. There’s a gritty short adventure set on the mid-fifteenth century Baltic coast. The use of historic maps is very clever. In fact, the whole presentation of the book is very pleasing.

So glad to hear you like it! We are coming out with the first supplement for Stara Szkola in a few days, called 'Streets of the Fencing Master'.

As you know Stara Skola is a very simplified version of our original game Codex Martialis.

We are doing a series of expansion supplements for Stara Szkola (SSk) which give the gamer and GM more options, and go into a little bit more detail on different walks of life or 'estates' to use the proper medieval term. This first one is focused on the burghers, others soon to follow will include minor nobility, courtiers, mercenaries, scholars, vagabonds, sailors etc. Each book will have a couple of new class options, some new 'fighting traits' appropriate for the 'estate', a somewhat detailed mini-setting, and a micro adventure on a similar scale to the one in the SSk core rules.

These are all going to be bundled with SSk on DriveThru so that the expansion is very cheap if you already own SSk. The idea is to allow people to customize their game by focusing on the aspects that interest them. (I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it or not, I was kind of talked into this approach)

Streets of the Fencing Master includes a mid-sized medieval town, with details on life in the town and what you can do and get there etc., and then there is another 'gritty' little micro adventure at the end, based on players being members of the town watch on a particularly rowdy night after a festival. Citizens of these towns had to serve on the watch, more or less as police, every few weeks, kind of like jury duty today. It's difficult and potentially dangerous work, and of course, the Watch has to be careful not to be too heavy handed, but at the same time, they can't let chaos rule the cobblestone streets...

The expansion covers a fair amount of ground but it is succinct like SSk itself, and comes out to about 30 pages. Both the setting and the adventure are fairly system agnostic and rules lite.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Anyway, one of the nicer knock-on effects of having SSk now is that it makes creating adventures, especially smaller ones, much easier, so you will be seeing a lot more little historical adventures from us this year.

 

[Ynas Midgard]

Wait, I thought it was a Polish language production... Off to the digital marketplace we go, then!

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

No the Polish name is just a nod to the Central European setting...

 

[TimWest]

Will you create any adventures for the Baltic setting? It seems like a missed opportunity to put so much effort into those setting books and then not create adventure resources for other areas.

 

[AsenRG]

So glad to hear you like it! We are coming out with the first supplement for Stara Szkola in a few days, called 'Streets of the Fencing Master'.

As you know Stara Skola is a very simplified version of our original game Codex Martialis.

We are doing a series of expansion supplements for Stara Szkola (SSk) which give the gamer and GM more options, and go into a little bit more detail on different walks of life or 'estates' to use the proper medieval term. This first one is focused on the burghers, others soon to follow will include minor nobility, courtiers, mercenaries, scholars, vagabonds, sailors etc. Each book will have a couple of new class options, some new 'fighting traits' appropriate for the 'estate', a somewhat detailed mini-setting, and a micro adventure on a similar scale to the one in the SSk core rules.

These are all going to be bundled with SSk on DriveThru so that the expansion is very cheap if you already own SSk. The idea is to allow people to customize their game by focusing on the aspects that interest them. (I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it or not, I was kind of talked into this approach)

Streets of the Fencing Master includes a mid-sized medieval town, with details on life in the town and what you can do and get there etc., and then there is another 'gritty' little micro adventure at the end, based on players being members of the town watch on a particularly rowdy night after a festival. Citizens of these towns had to serve on the watch, more or less as police, every few weeks, kind of like jury duty today. It's difficult and potentially dangerous work, and of course, the Watch has to be careful not to be too heavy handed, but at the same time, they can't let chaos rule the cobblestone streets...

The expansion covers a fair amount of ground but it is succinct like SSk itself, and comes out to about 30 pages. Both the setting and the adventure are fairly system agnostic and rules lite.

Anyway, one of the nicer knock-on effects of having SSk now is that it makes creating adventures, especially smaller ones, much easier, so you will be seeing a lot more little historical adventures from us this year.

Fun fact: I can't find Stara Skola by Google, because the name means "old school" in Bulgarian* as well. So I get a lot of info on old schools, even some dilapidated ones...

*Though it's a strictly conversational, archaic word for "school", so I'm only getting social media posts.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

I guess it wouldn't be a true Codex project without some element of history related self sabotage... here is a link

Codex Martialis: STARA SZKOŁA - Codex Integrum LLC | Codex Martialis | Codex Adventum | Codex Integrum | DriveThruRPG.com

Codex Martialis: STARA SZKOŁA - Stara Szkoła is a game designed for people who enjoy a dynamic, vivid combat experience, where martial choices and dari

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Will you create any adventures for the Baltic setting? It seems like a missed opportunity to put so much effort into those setting books and then not create adventure resources for other areas.

Yes, it is planned. SSk makes everything easier and quicker so the pipeline will move faster. The next thing in the pipe is I am going to finish my series on Monsterberg, set in Silesia, with the third chapter. That will be in the original Codex Integrum rules, and it's a big project but I've already done a lot of the legwork. Then we have planned a series of 'lite' adventures set around Riga for SSk, and a similar series in Prussia set on the Vistula river, probably also for SSk, and a 'sea' series linking Danzig / Gdansk to a place in what is now Norway, that happened to be a major (and wonderfully well documented) pirate haven where German, English, Norwegian, and Scottish pirates and privateers all encountered one another. These last three series will all be of short and relatively simple aventures using the SSk rules, but you could also play them in CI. Being in SSk will also make them easier to convert to various other systems.

Aside from all that, we also have a micro-adventure already in the SSk core rules which is set in Pomerania, right on the Baltic, and also involves pirates. I might expand that into a series as well, the background is a very interesting (and fairly rare) feud between two cities in that area which has a lot of little commando actions etc. that would be great for RPGs.

The Baltic book was a massive research project which I myself routinely use as a resource, and it makes anything set in Central Europe much easier to do and flesh out for me. I like to find extra / local sources for each little adventure but all of these projects are possible in large part because of the Baltic book, because it covers so much for Central / Northern Europe in general...

I also have some new collaborators who are helping a great deal, not in least part because they have language (and other) skills that I lack, and local knowledge I'll never have.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Eventually I want to expand these into all sorts of other genres - Classical World, 16th Century Pacific Rim, even paleolithic...

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Ok Streets of the Fencing Master is out as of tonight. I also made a bundle so it's very cheap if you already have SSk.

It includes a fairly thorough setting for a semi-historical medieval town and a micro adventure set as a member of the town watch.

SSk: Streets of The Fencing Master - Codex Integrum LLC | Codex Martialis | DriveThruRPG.com

SSk: Streets of The Fencing Master - This expansion takes you into the world of the warlike burgher of the Middle Ages. Burghers spent most of their energies

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

So uh, speaking of the medieval world in Central and Northern Europe, here's something I bet you didn't know about. Came up in a discussion somewhere else so I thought I'd share here. People tend to think of the medieval world as very backward and repressed, but it was actually less so than today in many respects, and certainly much less than say, Victorian England or the US in the 19th or early 20thC. In German speaking and Nordic areas in the 15th, they used to have a system wherein young people past their adolescence were allowed overnight visits with one another, in specially modified beds which sometimes had a barrier down the middle. The girl could pick who she wanted to visit her, if anyone. The rule was either there was a barrier and the boy was supposed to stay on one side of it, or one of the two had to stay under the covers. Basically the real rule was that no pregnancy should result, and the two kids were thoroughly briefed on what that meant. This continued right into the early 20th Century in Sweden, which is why we have photos of it. (this is an auto translate from Swedish Wikipedia) https://sv-m-wikipedia-org.translat...l=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp