Best historical settings?

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People die from minor injuries in the modern day - but I wasn't talking about a splinter in their finger. I meant adventurer type injuries. A sword strike on an arm might heal but it also might need to lose the arm. A sword strike on the torso was either an impressive scar or a suppurating wound and eventual death. Again I go back to germ theory.

Right. And I'm telling you that this is something generally misunderstood about the period. Your typical knight, soldier, even town citizen (due to militia duty) was wounded in battle multiple times in their lives, sometimes dozens of times. Relatively few died of suppurating wounds or infections as a result, depending on the specific type and severity of injury and precisely where and when it happened. So neither do player characters necessarily.

They did not have germ theory in the middle ages, but they did have surprisingly effective medical techniques which not only kill germs, they kill super germs, and they knew how to treat mild to moderate battle wounds, again depending on the specific type and the specific time and place, with a pretty high likelihood of success. Even really brutal injuries such as an arrow stuck six inches into a man's face, a severed arm, or an evisceration could successfully be treated with the medicine of the day.

One of the reasons I really love the "Master and Commander" movie over the Hornblower series is the detail on injuries and the lack of fear regarding character death. I would have mentioned the "Dying room" episode of Sharpe but bloody Sharpe himself was effectively immortal.

But Master and Commander is set in a different era, and not necessarily a better one in terms of medicine or the types of wounds often faced in battle.
 
I'm sorry, I'm having a dumb. I'm not sure what you mean.
(zero snark)
You can do it the Flashman/Quantum Leap way of inserting the PCs into historical events such that they were the reason why the events happened the way they did, and/or the The Last Kingdom way of letting PCs be movers and shakers, but they get written out of history because they pissed off the person who decided what would be written.
 
I have to admit, I have trouble running a straight historical game. Normally I sneak in some kind of "secret paranormal". It can be best thought of as Urban Fantasy (secret hiding paranormals) in the historical settings. So 98% historical, with 2% oddness hiding in the shadows.

The closest to a straight historical game I had was a painfully short Flashing Blades, Musketeer-era France.
I did another one. It lasted a bit longer and had some shadowy monsters in the background.

I have done a number of western games with some monsters in the shadows ("Bullets don't kill'm, but it does slow them down a might"), or a time riff/ portal valley, or The Phantom Empire.

I did Spies (that had UF elements) and Daredevils (which was as close to historical as a pulp game can get).

They were "mostly historical", but only the painfully short Flashing Blades was true historical.
 
You can do it the Flashman/Quantum Leap way of inserting the PCs into historical events such that they were the reason why the events happened the way they did, and/or the The Last Kingdom way of letting PCs be movers and shakers, but they get written out of history because they pissed off the person who decided what would be written.
I find both of these are hard to do unless the players both know what happened historically and are happy to play along and ensure that history happens.
 
I have to admit, I have trouble running a straight historical game. Normally I sneak in some kind of "secret paranormal". It can be best thought of as Urban Fantasy (secret hiding paranormals) in the historical settings. So 98% historical, with 2% oddness hiding in the shadows.

The closest to a straight historical game I had was a painfully short Flashing Blades, Musketeer-era France.
I did another one. It lasted a bit longer and had some shadowy monsters in the background.

I have done a number of western games with some monsters in the shadows ("Bullets don't kill'm, but it does slow them down a might"), or a time riff/ portal valley, or The Phantom Empire.

I did Spies (that had UF elements) and Daredevils (which was as close to historical as a pulp game can get).

They were "mostly historical", but only the painfully short Flashing Blades was true historical.
As an exercise, what's your favourite system. I'll think on one for you :smile:
 
Right. And I'm telling you that this is something generally misunderstood about the period.

We will have to agree to disagree on the efficacy of medicine. Some people might have been run through and survived, but I guess it works for PCs to be those extraordinary people.

But Master and Commander is set in a different era, and not necessarily a better one in terms of medicine or the types of wounds often faced in battle.

Master and Commander and Hornblower are both set during the Napoleons Wars.
 
I'm thinking about this. Most people did not recover from injuries. The human population was kept small by infections (most of them in their teeth). If I was modelling it in a game there would be the following states of health. On any hit, you roll 1d6.

Uninjured.
1-2 Just a Scratch.
3. Debilitated for two months.
5-6. Lying in the dying room, moaning.
6. Dead.

We have a very sanitised view of the past though movies and literature that focused on the people that survived and actually managed to do things.
No, we don't have a sanitized view. You have a Warhammerized/Gameofthronized "dung and infections" view of the past...possibly influenced by areas where people had lost knowledge of the actual medicine.
Like, yes, the US circa the Civil War, sorry to say...

So let me use myself as an example. If a man from the past had pus in his knee due to an infected wound, what would you think would happen? Lacking access to (or desire to use) modern medicine, would he be choosing between amputation and death:shade:?

I mean, that was my exact situation. And I used stuff I literally had in my drawer to make a folk recipe which removed the pus completely (based on honey, I forget what the other part was...my wife remembered it, not me).

If you're wondering why I did that instead of going to a doctor...well it was late at night. Besides, a modern doctor would have prescribed antibiotics as part of the treatment. I didn't fancy taking those if it could be avoided:thumbsup:.

We will have to agree to disagree on the efficacy of medicine. Some people might have been run through and survived, but I guess it works for PCs to be those extraordinary people.
Do you really think I'm "one of those extraordinary people which are PC-material":grin:?
Because no, my immune system isn't really all that good. It was the medicine, pure and simple.
Total time of treatment: less than 3 days, during which I was mostly active and walking.
 
Although Master Vincentio Saviolo said in his fencing treatise "any thrust deeper than a finger's length to the torso is invariably fatal".
 
I find both of these are hard to do unless the players both know what happened historically and are happy to play along and ensure that history happens.
The less information we have of the period, the easier it is. :wink:
The Last Kingdom is a great example (IMO) of how this can be done. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles are remarkably succinct in their accounts of what happened, so it is very easy to imagine how the PCs helped Alfred escape from Chippenham, or uncover Odda's/Wulfhere's treachery, or thwart an attack that therefore never happened and was therefore never chronicled.
 
Although Master Vincentio Saviolo said in his fencing treatise "any thrust deeper than a finger's length to the torso is invariably fatal".
Yeah, been stabbed and a LOT deeper than that. Here I am (no chirurgy required)
 
One other adjustment I make in gameplay style is that fights tend to be both a bit rarer and more dramatic. The analogy I use, which is a bit dated now, is the "John Wayne style" cowboy movie vs. the "Clint Eastwood style" cowboy movie. In the former, there is a lot of gunplay, the cowboys shoot lots of people, but you can be fairly sure that the good guys aren't going to buy it, aside from one or two designated 'red shirts'. In the Spaghetti Western type, violence and the number of gunshots are a bit rarer, but there is more dramatic buildup beforehand and more consequences after. You can't be sure who is going to live or die. You can take that a bit further into Peckinpah or Cormac McCarthy territory where it's very violent and the chances of everyone dying are elevated.

Generally speaking in my games and my system, a fight is a bit more serious and the consequences potentially more dire, so the players usually prepare more carefully and try to maximize all their advantages. If you do a historical system right, you can kind of harness the normal player instincts to min-max in such a way that it will just take them deeper into the setting and their historical options, rather than fighting it as you have to do in most fantasy settings. The players don't have super powers but there are still a lot of things they can do if they are crafty and resourceful. I.e. instead of a super powerful spell, magic power, or magic item, a really deviously planned and well executed ambush can make all the difference in outcomes.
...have we ever played in each other's games, or did we evolve that in parallel:grin:?

I focus on Late medieval Central Europe - Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Bohemia, Flanders, Scandinavia, Hungary, Livonia, Prussia etc., and in these zones the social control was a lot less, there was a lot more variegated political landscape, more lawless or quasi-lawless areas, and many more centers of control than you would find in England which is a little bit unique at that time, though has a bit more in common with the other Western Kingdoms like France or Castille.

In Central Europe there is enough flexibility and variability and far less concentration of power, that the PCs can kind of wander around in something a bit more like a sandbox. There are moments of concentrated social tension, but one can almost always just move on to another neighboring area if things get too hot -or even another polity within the same area, like moving into a Free City if you got yourself in trouble with the local Duke, or just befriending the Duke's brother in law and bitter rival, the local count or bishop who lives two days ride away. Which is one of the reasons I like this setting a lot.



There are certainly parallels. It's conceivable that a PC could play a role in the Hussite rebellion for example, but probably not to the extent that it would change outcomes. The uprisings and wars were less dependent on specific individuals and more on groups and coalitions.



Well again, I don't know about England - but in Central Europe I'd say everyone was prepared for trouble. That doesn't mean that authorities didn't measure their responses, to the contrary I think, prior to the reformation at least, they were far more hesitant to engage in wholesale massacres to crack down on social disturbances than they were in England, where executions seem to have been shockingly common. Definitely in the towns, if say the butchers and bakers were in an uproar, the town council or bürgomeister would tread lightly and try to figure out what they wanted rather than try to kill them all, for fear of a rebellion. More likely they might exile a couple of people and try to give some concessions to the others. Each faction is ready to pull the knives out, they all know it, and more often than not before things spiral into chaos, everyone will back down and make some kind of political compromise. The Germans called this a Rezeß. This was in part because there was always another more dangerous enemy next door who would take advantage of local strife. If the town is in a civil war, the bishop may attack. If the bishop and the town are at war, the Mongols or the Ottomans might send a raiding party.

But if one person or small group starts to act crazy within a given community, people are ready for trouble all over the place and will react quickly and decisively. Princes, prelates, pirates, mercenary captains, heretic fanatics, inquisitors and others routinely did try to start trouble and occasionally successfully disrupted communities, but success was pretty rare. Much more often they would be swiftly ejected or killed. I've done a couple of academic lectures on some specific cases of this exact scenario in history.

So my point is really just that if the players wanted to try something like that, they would need to prepare very well, because the community is structured in such a way as to swiftly mobilize and deal with trouble on a hair trigger, whether it was a fire, a raid, an attempted coup, an unexpected invasion, or just random violence.
And I'm just saving this post to show it to any future players:thumbsup:.
Right. And I'm telling you that this is something generally misunderstood about the period. Your typical knight, soldier, even town citizen (due to militia duty) was wounded in battle multiple times in their lives, sometimes dozens of times. Relatively few died of suppurating wounds or infections as a result, depending on the specific type and severity of injury and precisely where and when it happened. So neither do player characters necessarily.

They did not have germ theory in the middle ages, but they did have surprisingly effective medical techniques which not only kill germs, they kill super germs, and they knew how to treat mild to moderate battle wounds, again depending on the specific type and the specific time and place, with a pretty high likelihood of success. Even really brutal injuries such as an arrow stuck six inches into a man's face, a severed arm, or an evisceration could successfully be treated with the medicine of the day.
Keep preaching it!

But Master and Commander is set in a different era, and not necessarily a better one in terms of medicine or the types of wounds often faced in battle.
Indeed. It is actually surprising how much the medicine of the era sucked compared to what was relatively common earlier... I attribute it, semi-jokingly (if a player asks), to the scientific method just starting to evolve and discarding earlier, "unproven" methods while not being to cover adequately - and as we all know "a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing".


Although Master Vincentio Saviolo said in his fencing treatise "any thrust deeper than a finger's length to the torso is invariably fatal".
Yes, but IMO, he did so for two reasons (my conjecture):
1) Marketing, his method had a slight preference for the thrust, so he wanted to show how deadly his method is. Ever heard people who claim that one punch can KO or kill you? Well, same thing...:tongue:
2) To make students conscious of the need to avoid wounds, but especially thrusts. Because those are definitely harder to treat, even today. So hopefully, any smart student would know not to neglect defense:shade:!
Please note, those two don't exclude each other!

Maybe he had really big hands...
Alas, neither his wife, not his mistress, left any memoirs that we're aware of, so this is unverifiable. Not that I'm sure what it has to do with the matter of killing people...

Oh, you mean like "long fingers"? Maybe, but I feel my theory explains it better:gunslinger:!
 
Yeah, been stabbed and a LOT deeper than that. Here I am (no chirurgy required)
Was your doctor using 16th century techniques and medicines? That's terrible healthcare! :grin:

I've read of a 15th century Spanish knight that had a suppurating shin wound from an arrow¹ that troubled him all his life but didn't kill him.

obligatory arrow-knee references please)
 
As an exercise, what's your favourite system. I'll think on one for you :smile:

Hero System is the one readily available. Let us stick to 4th ED (maybe 5th) if we can. (I am in the camp that 6 is an abomination.) Bushido and Tri-Tac would be in that top running, but I would not inflict Tri-Tac's engine (3T) on anyone and Bushido is designed for a movie/ Chambara play (thus hard to do straight historical). Convergence Point is there at one, well it almost there for re-release.
 
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You can do it the Flashman/Quantum Leap way of inserting the PCs into historical events such that they were the reason why the events happened the way they did, and/or the The Last Kingdom way of letting PCs be movers and shakers, but they get written out of history because they pissed off the person who decided what would be written.

Has anyone ever done a Flashman RPG? That seems like it has potential to be hilarious, though it could stray into territories that would offend some folks...
 
I have to admit, I have trouble running a straight historical game. Normally I sneak in some kind of "secret paranormal". It can be best thought of as Urban Fantasy (secret hiding paranormals) in the historical settings. So 98% historical, with 2% oddness hiding in the shadows.

The closest to a straight historical game I had was a painfully short Flashing Blades, Musketeer-era France.
I did another one. It lasted a bit longer and had some shadowy monsters in the background.

I have done a number of western games with some monsters in the shadows ("Bullets don't kill'm, but it does slow them down a might"), or a time riff/ portal valley, or The Phantom Empire.

I did Spies (that had UF elements) and Daredevils (which was as close to historical as a pulp game can get).

They were "mostly historical", but only the painfully short Flashing Blades was true historical.

One of the things about historical RPG 'stuff' is that it is the wellspring from which dozens of variations of "historical adjacent" and "historical derived" genre's can grow. You don't have to do a purely historical setting. That can be more demanding on the author of the adventure, throwing in some supernatural elements is an easy way to add drama. As someone said upthread, it's like hot sauce. If you cook the meal perfectly, you really don't need any. But one doesn't always want to cook a gourmet meal on a Wednesday night. That's where the hot sauce comes in handy - sometimes it's fun to just paint it all red. Hell I put it on scrambled eggs sometimes.

My point (to stretch the analogy) is that a historical setting, or the use of well researched historical elements can really help with making the meal good to begin with, even if it's just scrambled eggs, and then you can season it according to your preferences. I'm a firm believer that done right, historical is great all by itself but I think it's also extremely useful as the basis for various other genres you can branch out into.
 
I'm thinking about this. Most people did not recover from injuries. The human population was kept small by infections (most of them in their teeth). If I was modelling it in a game there would be the following states of health. On any hit, you roll 1d6.

Uninjured.
1-2 Just a Scratch.
3. Debilitated for two months.
5-6. Lying in the dying room, moaning.
6. Dead.

We have a very sanitised view of the past though movies and literature that focused on the people that survived and actually managed to do things.

AsenRg covered this pretty well already, but I'd like to chime into it.

Pre-industrial medicine, though limited, was also surprisingly effective, and history (as in literary sources) is not just the stories told by "those who survived". When it comes to periods as relatively recent and as highly literate as say, the 15th-16th Centuries, we have vast quantities of very mundane documents. Like the mandatory weekly reports filed by barber surgeons from towns in Italy, or Coroners rolls from England, or the minutes of town council interrogations in cities in Central Europe, which investigated and recorded every violent incident. And we have memoirs of literally hundreds of soldiers, knights, mercenaries and so on. Reams of personal letters. Tax records, contracts, lawsuits. We have enough, in short, to build a fairly accurate picture of the time, and we can also combine the historical (literary) evidence with archeological, which tells us a lot more.

Mostly all this is known to specialists, however. Most of this data is scattered into a thousand little slivers, so we have not retold this story really yet. The public knowledge which filters down to say, high school and undergrad university level or what you might see on a documentary on BBC or PBS or "History Channel" (if they still did history), would be about 100 years out of date.

But I don't hate your list, and it's not entirely incorrect, in fact I think that would be kind of a cool list for a bloody / grim genre game, but as AsenRG put it, more like a Game of Thrones genre or maybe something set in the 19th Century. I'll make a slightly different one in a second.

As AsenRG said, I think that in general we tend to project our more recent memories of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and for the Anglophone world, in particular the life of the people who ended up in the New World, many of whom were essentially refugees or forced labor, or slaves. We also assume that progress of all types is steady and inevitable. But that isn't always the case.

Just to make a couple of examples related to comments I made in my last post on this -

Medieval Medicine
Bald's Eyesalve, is one of several popular medieval remedies rediscovered in recent years which we know from modern tests were effective anti-microbial treatments. This one came from a Saxon manuscript of around 1,000 AD. Bald's Eyesalve in particular, a deceptively simple formula made of wine, rennet, garlic and onions, turns out to be such an effective treatment against MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria and several dangerous fungi, that it has now been manufactured into a drug since it's (quite recent and almost accidental) rediscovery. Just in the last few years there have been several similar though slightly less dramatic tests done with "four thieves vinegar", and simple soldier's concoctions made with honey and fat+salt which have also turned out to be surprisingly effective.

Another specific example is a rather lowly English surgeon and metalworker in the late 14th-early 15th Century named John Bradmore. Released from jail (where he had been languishing on suspicion of counterfeiting) he was suddenly given the perilous opportunity to try to save prince (future King) Henry V, who had an arrow embedded six inches deep into his face. Bradmore treated the infection with a mix of honey and turpentine and made a special tool to extract the bodkin arrowhead, and it worked. Big deal for Henry, who recovered and for John, who wrote a book about it and became a major courtier as a result.

This is a little video about it

As an indication that this wasn't a fluke, the same surgeon (Bradmore) later saved the life of one of Henry's courtiers (William Wyncelowe) who had disembowled himself and punctured his intestines, though that cure took a bit longer (one of those bedridden for several months - 86 days to be exact). But what makes these two cases really interesting is that they are both the type of injuries which would be rather challenging to treat even today and could easily result in death even in a modern hospital setting.

More prosaic but also more telling, are the historical records and archeology that show us that far more ordinary soldiers, knights, sailors, burgher militia etc. were routinely wounded and recovered. We have literary records of this (for example in the memoirs of guys like Götz von Berlichingen or Bernal Diaz who were both wounded dozens of times, and from aggregating the records of surgeons and coroners and town council interrogations) and we can also see it in forensic data - bodies exhumed from battlefields and cemeteries which show signs of wounds so serious, that for example cuts have left marks on the bone, and yet we can tell that the wounds healed and the people recovered. This is pretty routine going back to the Bronze Age.

So my list would be something more like -

(D10)
1-2 - Just a scratch
3-5 - Moderate wound (needs treatment)
6-7 - Partly maimed (needs treatment)
8 -9 - Seriously wounded, long recovery (needs treatment, + roll d6 - 1-2 partly maimed, 3-4 seriously maimed, 5-6 dead)
10 - dead

This would also depend a lot on the type of weapon and the type of wound though (more on that in a moment). A halberd wound or a cannonball is much more likely to kill whereas a knife cut or shallow stab wound much less so.

The future is here, but it is not evenly distributed
The medicinal standards in this period could get pretty high, but it could also vary enormously from place to place. England, where John Bradmore lived, was generally several generations behind more advanced regions like Flanders, northern Italy, or parts of the Holy Roman Empire. John was a surgeon which in this period was a fairly low ranked artisan, i.e. he likely never went to formal school but learned his craft in a guild-apprenticeship. University trained physicians like the Polish-German astronomer Nikolaus Copernicus could be far more effective, but their services were expensive and it wasn't always easy to tell which physician really cured the sick and who was a quack. (One way which did help was to verify the survival rate of their patients!)

Medicine had known limits, and Laws and military practices followed the medicine
I don't want to overstate the case though - certain wounds were usually fatal. Disembowling where the guts were cut open or out was usually fatal, as was usually being run-through. Same for head injuries where the brains were exposed, a major artery was cut or wind was escaping the wind pipe. Generally speaking, deep stab wounds were harder to treat than cuts. This is why the most common places to protect yourself with armor then as now was the torso and the head. Even where you recovered, and didn't say lose a limb, you could lose partial mobility in a limb such as by a cut tendon which might not be repairable.

Laws were also tailored to the limits of medicine example in the German speaking parts of Central Europe (and overlapping into the Norse, Flemish and West-Slavic zones) while it was permitted to defend yourself in a fight, even to protect your honor, it was frowned upon to stab anyone. Cutting was acceptable, striking with the flat was best, but if you wounded someone with a thrust you might get in serious trouble. This is also mentioned in some of the period fencing manuals.

The Victorians didn't always improve things
One example of how things changed, and not necessarily for the better some time between the late medieval period and the 18th-19th Century, was that in their efforts to be 'more scientific', physicians tossed out some of the age old advice that had been taught to physicians from the Classical era through the dawn of the world's first Universities in the medieval period - the advice of the great 'auctores' such as Galen, Avicenna, and Hippocrates. All three suggested washing hands before surgery or examining wounds, that one should boil instruments before surgery, use silver or brass instruments by preference, and clean wounds with strong vinegar or wine. They did not know germ theory though and explained this according to the proto-science and religious language as in the powers of Hermes, Apollo, some Jinn or Allah.

The logical and materialist thinkers of the Enlightenment and Victorian eras however rejected these practices. There was no known logical reason to boil surgical instruments, use silver, wash your hands etc., and they bloody well didn't believe in Hermes Trismegistus or Allah. So it was considered just a superstitious practice for 'good luck'. So this is one of the reasons why the lethality of injuries seems to have increased in this period. Another reason was the spread of personal firearms like pistols and carbines, particularly in the New Worlds, as bullets caused deep penetrating injuries which often led to fatal infections. And of course exposure to all kinds of exotic diseases in every corner of the earth.
 
People die from minor injuries in the modern day - but I wasn't talking about a splinter in their finger. I meant adventurer type injuries. A sword strike on an arm might heal but it also might need to lose the arm. A sword strike on the torso was either an impressive scar or a suppurating wound and eventual death. Again I go back to germ theory.

One of the reasons I really love the "Master and Commander" movie over the Hornblower series is the detail on injuries and the lack of fear regarding character death. I would have mentioned the "Dying room" episode of Sharpe but bloody Sharpe himself was effectively immortal.

I just saw Master and Commander on cable the other day and this aspect was indeed quite good....
 
The problem with wounds is that survival is highly dependent on where you get one. A stab through the bicep that sticks a foot out the other side is excruciating, debilitating and possibly crippling but nowhere near as dangerous as a full penetration to the viscera that penetrates the kidneys, intestine or liver (assuming heart/lung is fatal). For limbs you are either in immediate danger of blood loss from an artery or infection, things the torso has in abundance as well.

This my friends is why the first thing you see armoured is the head, one good hit there and you're helpless against a follow up. Immediately after that is the torso. Arms and legs are actually quite hard to hit.
 
The problem with wounds is that survival is highly dependent on where you get one. A stab through the bicep that sticks a foot out the other side is excruciating, debilitating and possibly crippling but nowhere near as dangerous as a full penetration to the viscera that penetrates the kidneys, intestine or liver (assuming heart/lung is fatal). For limbs you are either in immediate danger of blood loss from an artery or infection, things the torso has in abundance as well.

This my friends is why the first thing you see armoured is the head, one good hit there and you're helpless against a follow up. Immediately after that is the torso. Arms and legs are actually quite hard to hit.
I'd say "weapon arm" being next*, but legs and shield arm are definitely behind the torso:thumbsup:.

Why is it easier to hit the weapon arm? Well, since the enemy insists of pushing that one close to you at semi-regular intervals, it's really impolite not to use such a politely presented opportunity...:devil:
Not so with the shield arm, and legs require you to crouch to get them (or to have a longer weapon, to offset the reduced reach).

*Case in point: look at gladiatorial armour:grin:!
 
An excellent video just came out, by one of those very rare individuals (Andreas Bichler) who really knows medieval crossbows

Link
The HEMA experts/nerds are having a field day on this on on social media, criticizing it for using samples of mail that are not representative of what someone would really have worn on a battlefield (one is apparently some sort of modern knock off with butted rings or some such nonsense, another is a rusted out late Ottoman shirt that you could poke your finger through, etc.).

Edit: I looked through it and saw the mail shirt he pokes holes in for most of the video is obviously riveted (good) but also ludicrously light and 'open' in its weave - something characteristic of re-enactment mail but very different from the weaves typical of decent quality period mail.
 
Another specific example is a rather lowly English surgeon and metalworker in the late 14th-early 15th Century named John Bradmore. Released from jail (where he had been languishing on suspicion of counterfeiting) he was suddenly given the perilous opportunity to try to save prince (future King) Henry V, who had an arrow embedded six inches deep into his face. Bradmore treated the infection with a mix of honey and turpentine and made a special tool to extract the bodkin arrowhead, and it worked. Big deal for Henry, who recovered and for John, who wrote a book about it and became a major courtier as a result.

The anecdotes, while useful from a gaming perspective, are maybe correlation but is there causation? They weren't record keepers and Bradmore himself seems like a desperate cad. Likely he just got lucky. We don't hear about the poor feckers who didn't. Again, survivor bias.


(D10)
1-2 - Just a scratch
3-5 - Moderate wound (needs treatment)
6-7 - Partly maimed (needs treatment)
8 -9 - Seriously wounded, long recovery (needs treatment, + roll d6 - 1-2 partly maimed, 3-4 seriously maimed, 5-6 dead)
10 - dead

A more cinematic version to be sure.
 
The anecdotes, while useful from a gaming perspective, are maybe correlation but is there causation? They weren't record keepers and Bradmore himself seems like a desperate cad. Likely he just got lucky. We don't hear about the poor feckers who didn't. Again, survivor bias.

A more cinematic version to be sure.
...didn't you read his post:shock:?

I don't usually ask it like this, but let's see...
PVD mentioned "the mandatory weekly reports filed by barber surgeons from towns in Italy, or Coroners rolls from England, or the minutes of town council interrogations in cities in Central Europe, which investigated and recorded every violent incident".

There's no survivor bias in the reports of those who weren't themselves involved in the incidents, but were tasked to describe them and account for them:thumbsup:.
It is on top of them that "we have memoirs of literally hundreds of soldiers, knights, mercenaries and so on" (which might have survivor bias). On top of that he mentioned "[r]eams of personal letters", which might or might not (depending on whom the incident happened to).
And in "[t]ax records, contracts, lawsuits" you don't have any survivor bias, either.

You also seem to be ignoring both his, and mine explanation about medicine at the time. Despite it being backed by both research in the properties of old medicines, personal experience, and archeological data.

Honestly, I think that at this point it becomes well-warranted to ask whether you've read the posts:gunslinger:!
 
...didn't you read his post:shock:?

I don't usually ask it like this, but let's see...
PVD mentioned "the mandatory weekly reports filed by barber surgeons from towns in Italy, or Coroners rolls from England, or the minutes of town council interrogations in cities in Central Europe, which investigated and recorded every violent incident".

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

There's no survivor bias in the reports of those who weren't themselves involved in the incidents, but were tasked to describe them and account for them:thumbsup:.
It is on top of them that "we have memoirs of literally hundreds of soldiers, knights, mercenaries and so on" (which might have survivor bias). On top of that he mentioned "[r]eams of personal letters", which might or might not (depending on whom the incident happened to).
And in "[t]ax records, contracts, lawsuits" you don't have any survivor bias, either.

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.

You also seem to be ignoring both his, and mine explanation about medicine at the time. Despite it being backed by both research in the properties of old medicines, personal experience, and archeological data.

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

Honestly, I think that at this point it becomes well-warranted to ask whether you've read the posts:gunslinger:!

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realise I was not allowed to disagree.
 
Has anyone ever done a Flashman RPG? That seems like it has potential to be hilarious, though it could stray into territories that would offend some folks...
Not that I am aware of, but I ran a wargames campaign based on the same concept many, many years ago...


Back then Victorian Scifi wargaming was all the rage, you see.
 
The HEMA experts/nerds are having a field day on this on on social media, criticizing it for using samples of mail that are not representative of what someone would really have worn on a battlefield (one is apparently some sort of modern knock off with butted rings or some such nonsense, another is a rusted out late Ottoman shirt that you could poke your finger through, etc.).

Edit: I looked through it and saw the mail shirt he pokes holes in for most of the video is obviously riveted (good) but also ludicrously light and 'open' in its weave - something characteristic of re-enactment mail but very different from the weaves typical of decent quality period mail.

Which HEMA experts?

Personally, I'm in general on the 'armor works' side of the endless bows vs. armor debates. Even when it's guns vs. armor as shown on a Nova documentary. And one can always find better or worse armor for these kinds of tests.

That said, I suspect those kinds of crossbows at that kind of (very short) range could pierce mail. Maybe not all mail. And generally I don't think they could pierce plate armor (as this same guy's own tests show).

The guy in the video is Andreas Bichler, he's not an armor guy but he is probably the premier medieval / early modern style "crossbow guy" in the world. He's (I think) the first to successfully fabricate Central European style horn prod crossbows, and consistently have them perform anywhere near what we would expect from period sources. In that video he was getting up to 60 mps with ~50 gram bolts, which is excellent performance compared to most crossbow replicas of that draw weight. In another of his video he gets near 70 mps with an 80 gram bolt with a 1,200 lb draw weapon. Modern hunting crossbows can get an arrow up to 90 mps or more, but these are very light arrows of 10 grams or less.

There is a bit of a mystery about medieval crossbows. The type used in Europe then had a short powerstroke, had very high draw weights often requiring sophisticated mechanical tools to span, and shot heavy bolts. Modern hunting crossbows have a long powerstroke, relatively low draw weights and shoot very light bolts by comparison. We don't really know why they made crossbows the way they did in say 1400, because they certainly knew how to do longer powerstroke. Bichler has gotten us closer to understanding than anyone else.
 
I have grave doubts on the veracity of "mandatory weekly reports" in the 18th century or before.

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'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.
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.

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

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.

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

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.
 
Ironically, the term "Dark Ages" was actually coined by medieval scholars, (specifically the 14th Century Paduan scholar Petrarch) in reference to the time during what we call now the Migration Era, from which the medieval scholars noted that it was very difficult to find records.
 
Wasn't the Dark Ages originally the entire medieval period right up until Petrarch's own time?

I thought it was only later it was restricted to the migration era.
 
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Wasn't the Dark Ages originally the entire medieval period right up until Petrarch's own time?

I thought it was only later it was restricted to the migration era.

Petrarch, I believe, was doing the typical medieval thing and using multiple meanings simultaneously. "Dark Ages" was in part a rejection of the Christians of his day referring to the Classical era as "Dark", and in that sense it was a reflection of his own age, which as a kind of proto-humanist he considered ignorant and lacking in their understanding of Greek and Latin culture. But he was also referring to an (at the time well known) gap in the records - literally a dark age- basically between the reign of Justinian and the Carolingian period. Later 15th Century scholars (also mainly in Italy) built on this idea, as they recognized their own time (for all it's faults) as one of spectacular cultural and technological growth, what we call since Jackob Burckhardt, the Renaissance, which was just beginning in Petrarch's era... and contrasted this with the small, wooden buildings and crude surviving artwork of the Migration Era (as they saw it).

Petrarch, like most of the scholars of his time, was an avid antiquarian and went on long trips north of the Alps where he searched out ancient documents in old monasteries and town archives. The goal was to find literature that was not yet known in Italy, and in fact he did make such finds, in 1333 in Liège Petrarch found two speeches by Cicero which were considered politically and philosophically significant back in Italy.

Part of the reason for the wide and exhaustive searches carried out by many scholars of this era was that many of the great 'auctores' or authorities of the Classical World had already been kind of pre-approved by the Church, due to the work of 13th Century Scholars like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, who had analyzed and carefully 'glossed' the works of Aristotle, Galen, Livy, Pliny and so on. Ancient legal statutes also had some weight in medieval courts. So if you could find something from one of the accepted auctores that nobody had seen before, you could suddenly find yourself wielding significant power.

Late medieval Scholars were able to track down and find multiple copies of many sources for Classical Literature, ranging from remote sources in Ireland, Byzantium, North Africa and the Middle East, to thousands of archives within Latin Europe... but they didn't find much after the reign of Justinian, until you get into the late Merovingian and Carolingian era, and by then the literary output was much smaller. It didn't really start to approach Classical levels until the High Medieval period in the 11th or 12th Century.
 
Well, this forum is a start. And I know there are a few other nooks and crannies like this on FB and Discord and some other online fora. But maybe we should think about creating a space for this particular nexus of interests.

From playing, writing and publishing historical RPGs for about 15 years now, I can say for sure that we are a small minority of gamers. But gaming is so big now that even say, 1 or 2% of the whole is a fairly large number. It's nice to hear from others with some existing enthusiasm for this kind of thing as distinct from say, superhero power gaming and ultra high fantasy and so on. One can be free for a moment from the sense of swimming against the current.

I suspect for designers and people trying create settings or adventures based on historical context, a lot of are also kind of reinventing the wheel. Figuring out even the broad strokes of the realities of a given historical setting, especially anything prior to the Early Modern period, is very challenging. Designing combat rules that 'ring true' and fit into a historical world is also a major challenge. As are esoteric elements which did always exist in pre-industrial societies, but are tricky to add in such a way that doesn't disrupt the setting. We can learn from one another and enjoy exploring different approaches toward handling the same issues.

Historical sources and the authentic mythological literary traditions are not just for us fanatics either. They are also a wellspring which can enhance and renew fantasy genres. In particular Sword and Sorcery, Wierd Fiction and Low Fantasy merges very well with these kinds of settings and sources. So even for the much larger number of people who recoil in nameless Eldritch horror from the slightest hint of an historical name or place, they too can derive enjoyment from the hard work of people with a serious interest in it.

I find it useful to use history as a jumping off point and a constraint. The 'problem' with fantasy is that you everything goes with the end result being that nothing feels fantastical. When everyone can do magic, then it no longer feels magical. Although I appreciate weird / gonzo settings and aesthetics as well.

I've been building a Sword & Sorcery setting based on Sundaland during the last Ice Age and I've always tried to work within what is historical or plausible before I add the fantastical elements.
 
If I'm running historical I'm sanguine about the possibility rhat the PCs might change history. In the words of the sainted robertsconley robertsconley you need to be prepared to let the players trash the setting.
Of course that's a possibility but it depends on whether the players want to have that kind of huge history shifting influence.

I wonder if the people that are attracted to play in a more historically grounded setting are more content with being bit part players in the grand scheme of things? I certainly am.
 
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So my point is really just that if the players wanted to try something like that, they would need to prepare very well, because the community is structured in such a way as to swiftly mobilize and deal with trouble on a hair trigger, whether it was a fire, a raid, an attempted coup, an unexpected invasion, or just random violence.
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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