Best historical settings?

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Just popping over from the “avoid bean counting thread”.

But if you are going to cross the line and bring in actual FACTS into our debate on fantasy wizard games (how dare you ), I have to point out that one of the main reasons RPGs struggle to model armour accurately is that probably the biggest determiner of armour use in history was cost.
If you have a choice of being completely covered in blade proof steel plates or basically a stiff puffer jacket, the only reason you ain't ironed up is you can't afford the purchase, maintenance and repair costs of the full plate armour.

There is certainly a reasonable amount of evidence that cost and armour protection had some relationship. For example:

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However, that evidence is very patchy; snapshots rather than time series, and interpretation is difficult. For example, in this case plate was the cheapest option.

“When labour costs rose after the Black Death, then the price of mail rose accordingly. In an era of rising prices, it ceased to be an economically attractive way of making armour. Indeed, by the 15th century the cost of a mail shirt (4.59 gulden) at Iserlohn [Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia] was notably greater than the cost of plate armour (4.33 gulden).” [Williams, Knight & Blast Furnace].

Going back to the original imperial Roman example, it seems that whole units were supplied with armour. It’s the state rather than the individual making both the cost and tactical choices. The evidence is as clear as mud, however. No-one can really understand what the papyrus and epigraphic evidence means. Tacitus says in the Annals that, “military service was relentless and unprofitable; body and spirit were valued at two and a half sesterces a day, and out of this they had to pay for their clothing, weapons, and tents, and bribe vicious centurions to escape routine drudgery.” The consensus seems to be that he was exaggerating for effect and that soldiers were charged for breakages and losses. It is pretty clear that depreciation changed the system over time.

Roman soldiers made some reckless armour choices:

“Many of our men fell because they were fighting under the emperor’s eye and left off their helmets in the hope of being easily recognised and rewarded by him; this exposed them to the skill of the enemy’s archers.“ [Ammianus Marcellinus, Book 20, Siege of Bezabde, AD 360].
 
One consideration in talking about central European "Free Cities" is that they were often extremely small: 1000 or less. It was a purchased status that bore far less relation to the size and importance of the "city" than to the size of the magnates' purses.
 
Well there were many many small ones, a fair number of 'middling' ones (5-10,00 people) and a few dozen that were fairly large by Central European standards (15-30,000), though these were still a good bit smaller than the largest towns of Italy or Flanders.

And even though that is tiny in today's world, barely qualifying as a village in many parts of the world, in say 1400 or 1500, those places were quite formidable in terms of cultural genesis (look, for example at the inventions which came out of Nuremberg or Augsburg) and in political and military terms. Especially if they were part of a confederation or a town league such as the ones I mentioned upthread.

Bern and Zurich were middling sized towns, but they certainly weren't taking any orders from any princes, even up to the Duke of Burgundy or the Holy Roman Emperor. When the princes tried to test their luck, it usually didn't go so well for them.

Larger towns like Nuremberg, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Cologne, Lübeck, Hamburg, Danzig, Breslau, Prague, Krakow, Frankfurt am Main, Riga etc. were certainly big enough to have their own foreign policies and exert significant, sometimes major influence on regional events. This also goes for even quite small towns which were part of significant leagues. For example the little towns of the Decapole or the Lusiatian League, in both cases, won a series of feuds and small wars which gradually tamed the regional robber knights and warlike minor nobility who had made the roads unsafe. That kind of thing can make for a fun adventure.

Even very small towns, such as for example the tiny community of Rottweil, which I think had roughly 500 citizens circa 1450, sometimes had substantial military 'street cred'. That was the basis of Rottweil being allowed into the Swiss Confederation eventually. Or the small community of Soest which successfully fought a war of independence of their own archbishop in the mid-15th Century. To me these are dramatic stories.

There were of course also hundreds of 'territorial towns' (mediatstadt) which could be of varying size but were usually under the thumb of some princely noble ruler, but even these were often interesting places with all kinds of intrigue, and sometimes had features like universities which made them extra dynamic. And like the Free Cities, they often had trade links to many far off lands, which entailed visiting merchants and nobles from very distant exotic regions.

So I think GMs and players can have a lot of fun with these kinds of settings. The town itself is often relatively free space, which defines it's own rules, and is frequently involved with other regional and international issues of compelling interest. Plus the towns were incubators of all kinds of new disruptive technologies - printing press, portable clock, wheel lock pistol, etc., which could have major consequences for the world.
 
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The Hanseatic towns won wars against the kings of England and Denmark in the 14th-15th Centuries. The Swiss ended the valois Dynasty of Burgundy and crushed several princely Hapsburg armies. The Prussian towns, in addition to helping defeat England in the Anglo-Hanseatic War, joined forces with Poland to overthrow and face down the Teutonic Order. So not trivial in terms of military capabilities.
 
6) But, and this is an important detail, birth rates in the towns were not as high as in the countryside, and did not usually meet replacement rates. It was usually like around 3.8 or something, with infant / child mortality taking out about half before they came of age (birth rates in the rural areas could be double this). So they had to bring in people from the countryside. Town officials also made deals with people in the rural areas. To what extent this happened varied enormously, but over time, a town in Poland became more and more Polish, a town in Hungary became more and more Magyar, at least in terms of genetics.
She does mention this factor, solved either by further immigration or by people from the countryside moving to the city and adopting its culture & language.
In one instance (the “Saxon” areas of Transylvania) the countryside itself became German-speaking.
 
She does mention this factor, solved either by further immigration or by people from the countryside moving to the city and adopting its culture & language.
In one instance (the “Saxon” areas of Transylvania) the countryside itself became German-speaking.
Yeah, those are the cases I've studied about:shade:.
 
She does mention this factor, solved either by further immigration or by people from the countryside moving to the city and adopting its culture & language.
In one instance (the “Saxon” areas of Transylvania) the countryside itself became German-speaking.


That's quite interesting, I always thought Transylvania was one of the more polarized areas with less flow between town and country, but I guess there too, people crossed these thresholds. I know at one point the Saxons were allied with the Székely people (Central Asian nomads who lived in Transylvania- that's who Louis C.K.'s real last name comes from) and kind of against the Wlach who were the poorest folks in that zone.
 
I think this kind of setting would benefit from tables to generate the content as you go rather than having everything pre-created (outside of the broad strokes of the setting and the largest well known cities, Danzig, Prague etc.).

For example, say you wan to generate city or town.

Is it a Free City

1. Yes completely autonomous: 33%
2. Free, but not completely autonomous: 33%
3. No: 33%

Majority Ethnicity / Language

1. German: 60%
2. Estonian: 20%
3. Polish: 20%

Major Source of Income:

1. Trade
2. Artisans and Crafting
3. etc.

Alliances

1. No alliances: 20%
2. Part of the Hanse League: 20%
3. etc.
 
I think this kind of setting would benefit from tables to generate the content as you go rather than having everything pre-created (outside of the broad strokes of the setting and the largest well known cities, Danzig, Prague etc.).

For example, say you wan to generate city or town.

Is it a Free City

1. Yes completely autonomous: 33%
2. Free, but not completely autonomous: 33%
3. No: 33% ….

By odd coincidence, I was looking at Volker Bach’s Philos Basilikos, a short GURPS supplement for the Hellenistic era that suggests a broadly similar approach—choose a location and generate your own version within some general guidelines—though without the random tables. For a lot of towns in that era we know very little anyway.
 
I think this kind of setting would benefit from tables to generate the content as you go rather than having everything pre-created (outside of the broad strokes of the setting and the largest well known cities, Danzig, Prague etc.).

For example, say you wan to generate city or town.

Is it a Free City

1. Yes completely autonomous: 33%
2. Free, but not completely autonomous: 33%
3. No: 33%

Majority Ethnicity / Language

1. German: 60%
2. Estonian: 20%
3. Polish: 20%

Major Source of Income:

1. Trade
2. Artisans and Crafting
3. etc.

Alliances

1. No alliances: 20%
2. Part of the Hanse League: 20%
3. etc.

By odd coincidence, I was looking at Volker Bach’s Philos Basilikos, a short GURPS supplement for the Hellenistic era that suggests a broadly similar approach—choose a location and generate your own version within some general guidelines—though without the random tables. For a lot of towns in that era we know very little anyway.
I just wanted to say that I love that idea:thumbsup:!
 
Peter Von Danzig Peter Von Danzig wondered if I might return to The Road to Monsterberg now that he has completed the trilogy.


This is a version of what will go on my blog.

One of my favourite discoveries of the past eighteen months or so has been a three-part campaign setting called The Road to Monsterberg. The third and final installment dropped at the end of 2023. The author, Jean Chandler, offered to comp me a copy but I'd already bought it - $12.99 - to complete my collection. I can best describe The Road to Monsterberg in this way: imagine The Enemy Within as written by a US Army medic with years of experience as a HEMA fighter and a genuine passion for medieval history rather than a bunch of snotty English university graduates who needed to sell some toy soldiers and had seen Where Eagles Dare a few too many times. (In passing I can recommend the books Broadsword Calling Danny Boy and Achtung Schweinhund to anyone who is interested in that British subculture.)

The Road to Monsterberg is set in Silesia in AD 1456. The PCs are mercenaries who have just served in the successful campaign to save Belgrade from the Ottomans. They are trying to get home to Germany or other western lands. They have traversed Hungary and now find themselves on the southern border of Silesia without horses. The campaign revolves around the PCs trying to cross Silesia, whilst inexorably being drawn into Silesian culture and politics.

I knew exactly nothing about medieval Silesia before reading The Road to Monsterberg. Modern Silesia, now almost entirely in Poland, has a rather ugly reputation for ethnic cleansing, genocide and environmental degradation. Medieval Silesia, on the other hand, was a rich land, rapidly getting richer. It was densely packed with sophisticated urban communities living in well-built walled towns. They needed the walls because many jealous eyes fell on Silesia. Its traditional Polish Piast Dukes had been reduced to squabbling lordlings whose domains were less impressive than their lineage and titles. Most of the dukes paid homage to the crown of Bohemia, across the mountains to the south. The Hohenzollern Margrave of Brandenburg had ambitions to add Silesia to his own growing dominions. There was a very nasty confessional struggle between Hussite heretics and the Catholic Church. Invading Hussite armies from Bohemia had put the cities to fire and sword in the 1430s. The Inquisition were present in strength to staunch the flow of heresy. The Mongol Golden Horde and the Ottoman Turks also cast covetous eyes over Silesia as somewhere they might plunder if not conquer.

The Road to Monsterberg wants to tell you about all the above. It wants you to know each settlement, its history, its peculiarities, how people looked, spoke and felt. It certainly wants you to know how people fought and equipped themselves for war. It's fifteenth-century central Europe so the PCs can kit themselves up with anything from full Gothic plate to steppe lamellar made out of buffalo hide. The Road to Monsterberg tells you how to get and use this stuff in a realistic fashion. If you play by the book you'll being doing that in D&D 3.5, or at least the author's hack of those rules called Codex Martialis. Although I own Codex Martialis I can't tell you if it's a good hack: I've never played D&D 3.5 in my life.

There is a trend in the OSR to favour short descriptions, formatted and bullet-pointed, so that a GM can run adventures with the least prep possible: The Road to Monsterberg does not live in that world. It would prefer you to look at a sixteenth-century map and retcon it into the fifteenth-century. The map will be barely legible, in German and upside down (the 1561 map used in volume one is orientated south-north, but, heh, any self-respecting group can cope with that. The maps in volumes II and III are more traditionally orientated.) You might want placenames on the maps to match with those in the text: weakling. What you get is German, Polish, Czech and Swabian used interchangeably: Danny Boy is going to be f*cking confused. Personally, I see all this as a feature rather than a bug. I despise "lore" in fantasy games: with a few noble exceptions it's written and adored by individuals with no discernible fantasia. Silesia, on the other hand, is a real place and repays delving in those dense blocks of text.

The history leaves the campaign rather oddly positioned. It's quite hard to work out what is meant to be going on. There's a whopping big clue about where the PCs are likely to end up by the end of volume 3 on the map included in volume 1. Tucked away on the top right hand corner, which should be the bottom left hand corner, i.e. south-west Lower Silesia is a little pictogram of Silesia's tutelary spirit, Krakonos. I won't go any further than that since this is a recent publication. There is plainly a supernatural or at least superstitious element to the campaign. I'd describe it as "weird menace". You're not going to be shocked to learn that Codex Superno is the author's supplement on realistic late medieval magic.

For my own use, I've transformed the very flexible options of The Road to Monsterberg into a good old railroad in order to understand it better. I’ll post that guide for GMs as a pdf on my blog. Obviously, if you think someone is going to run The Road to Monsterberg for you, don't read the bloody pdf.

Edit: Codex Martialis has now been delinked from OGL/3.5 (see below).
 
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Thanks for the review! Just one small clarification, Codex Integrum is no longer linked to 3.5 DnD or the OGL, we cut that cord late last year due to the trouble with the whole OGL incident a while back. But the adventure is designed to be system agnostic, with the stat blocks for NPCs in the back of the books as I'm sure you noticed. With a little prep, you can run it with Warhammer fantasy, Mythras, some version of OSR DnD, Burning Wheel, whatever you want.
 
Great. We can add this to “Games I’d never be able to do justice with” thread.
I fear that I’m in the same boat. I have the privilege to play in a long-running historical/weird menace/swashbuckling campaign, albeit one set in early seventeenth-century Europe. I think the guys would look at me gone out if I suggested we should plough years into Monsterberg as well! I know that you are not a big fan of solo gaming but I’m giving thought about how to do something on that score.
 
Great. We can add this to “Games I’d never be able to do justice with” thread.
My hubris would bring me past that, but the location alone puts it in my "won't touch this with *your* ten foot pole" bag. :wink:
 
Thanks for the review! Just one small clarification, Codex Integrum is no longer linked to 3.5 DnD or the OGL, we cut that cord late last year due to the trouble with the whole OGL incident a while back. But the adventure is designed to be system agnostic, with the stat blocks for NPCs in the back of the books as I'm sure you noticed. With a little prep, you can run it with Warhammer fantasy, Mythras, some version of OSR DnD, Burning Wheel, whatever you want.
I hope that I made clear that I view The Road to Monsterberg as a masterwork. Thanks for creating it.
 
My hubris would bring me past that, but the location alone puts it in my "won't touch this with *your* ten foot pole" bag. :wink:

What's so bad about the location?

Road to Monsterberg (Monsterberg is a real town by the way, as is Frankenstein) is meant to work on at least three levels. You can make it into a linear adventure as SJB has done (by the way, I've been enjoying reading through your treatment of it), you can use it as a big sandbox, especially the third chapter of it. And you can mine it for adventure hooks, scenarios, and individual locations (towns, castles, underground rivers, mountain ranges, little wilderness zones, etc.) and characters which you can adapt to your own adventure or one off. Whether in a historical setting or (just change a few names) adapt it to fantasy, like Andrej Sapkowski does for the Witcher with the exact same setting.

The game design model I've used for a while now, I think with some success, is to map out the historical parameters, so to speak, and then scale it to whatever level of abstraction I want to play in. The Monsterberg series is a big, carefully researched atlas of this interesting cultural crossroads (between German, Polish, and Czech cultures, with a lot of West-European and other foreigners around) that you can mine for story ideas, adventure hooks, a little small set pieces, and challenges for your players. Each book includes the real places and people, various little dilemmas, and some of the magical folklore that people believed in at the time. Each of those books is good for probably a half dozen short adventures.
 
I'm German, and as a GM tend to be overly defensive when it comes to locations and time periods. So entirely my personal hangup.

Ah, understood. I have some German friends from the HEMA world who actually helped me with this project. But I can understand. Things in Silesia got really nasty starting from the religious wars in the 17th-century and through the mid 20th Century of course.

And yet, during the Renaisance it's kind of a roadmap to semi-functional / semi-harmony, arguably. With great dividends in culture, art and technological growth. These communities were very interesting mashups, and they managed to (mostly) get along for centuries.

I felt a different vibe last time I was in Germany. After a HEMA event in Dijon, my wife and I did a big road trip through the Rhineland from Switzerland up to the North Sea, about five years ago. People were more open, more confident than when I was stationed over there in the Army in the 80s (in what was then West Germany). Food was great, the beer of course. Festivals all over (it was spring). We had a great time.

I noticed there were also a lot more references to the Holy Roman Empire, the old coats of arms of the free cities were very visible, and many towns in the northern coast had reverted to calling themselves 'Free and Hanseatic City of...' Perhaps HRE and the Hanse are not a bad model looking forward. If the 21st Century gives us all the chance to explore that route.

There is a German concept from back then, now archaic, called the Rezeß, which was key to many of these towns managing to retain their cohesion through extremely difficult challenges. It's one I wish was more widely understood around the world today.
 
I think this kind of setting would benefit from tables to generate the content as you go rather than having everything pre-created (outside of the broad strokes of the setting and the largest well known cities, Danzig, Prague etc.).

For example, say you wan to generate city or town.

Is it a Free City

1. Yes completely autonomous: 33%
2. Free, but not completely autonomous: 33%
3. No: 33%

Majority Ethnicity / Language

1. German: 60%
2. Estonian: 20%
3. Polish: 20%

Major Source of Income:

1. Trade
2. Artisans and Crafting
3. etc.

Alliances

1. No alliances: 20%
2. Part of the Hanse League: 20%
3. etc.

Yeah I like this too, and it's something I've been tinkering with for a while, as part of an idea of a whole book of different random tables like that. I actually made about 40% of it. It keeps getting pushed back for other things though.
 
I haven't worn mail since the 90s, so I asked one of my buddies who does professional re-enactment and film work and routinely wears all different types of armor. This was his comment on mail (this is aside from the whole 'butted mail' thing ala Ren Faires):

"The trick of mail I find is it needs to be tight. If it's baggy it adds a ton of inertia to your movement and that really sucks. Same as having a badly packed ruck or one that shifts on you all the time. Get it tight and you are fine"

I'm going to try to contextualize the whole Ren Faire / SCA / LARP thing. Bear with me I'm going to try to be respectful and fair about this.

When DnD and soon after, Runequest, HARN, GURPs and it's precursors, Rolemaster etc. were created, this coincided with an increase in interest in the US, and UK and continental Europe etc., into living history and the whole array of medieval and Renaissance history, up to and including fighting in costumes and armor. SCA started back in the 60s out of the hippie world, and a lot of the originators were history and Tudor literature professors and grad students. There were still a lot of those types involved in SCA and Ren Faires in the 70s. The enthusiasm these people brought to the subject kickstarted a lot of much later things including HEMA, Bohurt, and the newer types of reenactment.

But there were also problems. This was originally a very American driven thing, and in the US in general, really the whole Anglophone world, we are heavily influenced by the English perspective. England's heyday was not in the medieval period, it was much more the Tudor period and later. We started with their version, which kind of glosses over most of the medieval period and ignores most history on the Continent... and then we lost a lot in translation from what they have. What we ended up with was a mashup of Tolkein, Monty Python, Shakespeare, Arthurian legends, and a lot of Victorian notions which were often quite wide of the mark. It all helped open this whole thing up, of which any fantasy RPG is a part, and gradually we also got Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish and many other cultural influences joining into the mix, along with (mostly English language) fantasy literature from the 1920s-1970s ala Robert E Howard, Tolkein, Lovecraft, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Leguin, C.S. Lewis etc..

All of this created the fantasy genre as we know it, which extends into the Ren Faire and the various types of combat sports that go back to the inception in the 60s and 70s. And also extends into countless films, TV shows, computer games and so on, many of which were a lot of fun. I'm not going to lie, I love the original "Beastmaster" just as much as the next kid. This was very much grounded in fantasy though, and eventually, a lot of SCA people and so on developed a sense of ownership combined with a reluctance to let go of a lot of very familiar, fun and comfortable tropes which deviated enormously from historical realities. I heard so many SCA people tell me to my face that armor was only to protect against 'glancing blows', real medieval swords were "barely sharpened crowbars" that weighed 10 lbs, 99% of everybody in the medieval world were filthy serfs who never took a bath. Martial Arts (and medicine, and science) only existed in Asia. People in medieval Europe drank beer and wine because the water was so dirty, they put spice on food to cover up the taste of rotten meat etc.

This is fine for some people. It is, in fact, the basis for most modern RPGs. But with the advent of the internet, those of us who really wanted to penetrate a bit deeper, began to do so. We found the fightbooks kind of hiding in plain sight and learned that there was in fact real martial arts in Europe. I think for a lot of people who are from Europe or lived in Europe, these cartoon tropes didn't hold up very well. If you have walked the streets of Florence, Strasbourg, Prague etc., you know these people weren't backward filthy idiots.

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If you ever had the opportunity to handle a real antique medieval sword, you immediately know it doesn't weigh ten pounds and isn't a "sharpened crowbar". To the contrary, you can instantly sense that there is a lot more to this technology than we had been led to believe. It doesn't seem backward compared to equivalent modern technology, in fact very much the reverse. It's so much better and more sophisticated that it's really a bit stunning, I can tell you having been in that situation personally.

We have since the late 90s, learned and shared among each other, an enormous amount of data which has become available through the interwebs. Many universities, private collectors, even the Vatican have put thousands of real medieval manuscripts and books online. We have a whole Wiki just for the fightbooks. People have made marvelous videos based on real fencing techniques and this has gotten into the film industry now, helping to revive interest in things like Vikings. Many of us have gotten seriously into the research, have handled antique arms and armor in the basements of museums and universities. There is a whole new genre of re-enactment based on the reality instead of the old fantasy tropes.

1705935490881.png1705935475114.png
Left, fantasy - fun and creative. Right, closer to historical reality. Also fun!

But we are stuck with one problem. Real medieval history has almost nothing in common with the pseudo historical tropes that we all got from the Ren Faire world. Both are a lot of fun, and the Ren Faire stuff is much more familiar, and therefore comfortable. It's the basis of almost all RPGs, fantasy and (allegedly) historical genre films and shows, novels, computer games, and historical / fantasy genre art from the last 50 years. So there is a clash. Any time you try to talk about all the newly discovered stuff, which is really cool, you will run into the older tropes. And it sometimes becomes a "zero sum game" where one must conquer the other. As an adherent and participant in the latter genre, I can tell you that is a challenge. It's also an opportunity as we can see Matt Easton from Schola Gladiatoria (which is the name of his HEMA club) has benefitted from, as have several other YouTube stars of decidedly mixed merits. There is an interest in the real history. Even among people who helped create some of the original tropes. Terry Jones of Monty Python for example did a wonderful series of books and shows which tried to undo some of the tropes that they unintentionally created with their comedy.

I don't think it all has to clash though. Your leather armor and dragon riding and zombies and all the rest, yes even the turkey legs, are perfectly fine and fun to play with. Most RPGs, computer games, films etc. are going to remain firmly in this genre and that is going to be the fun zone for most people. If you want to either play in the strange, sometimes alarming world of the 'new' history, I am one of the people trying to hold the door open for that. If, as I think is generally going to be more often the case, you just want to take an occasional look at it and borrow some ideas from it, such as to fix the problem highlighted in the OP of this thread, I'm here to open that door too. As are many others. What I'm not here to do is throw water on your Ren Faire camp fire. There is no reason for one to overrule the other, and in fact it would be impossible to do so.
 
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Two other thoughts.

1) Even though it may sometimes seem like I do, I actually don't want to overthrow the historical / fantasy genre and try to replace it with history, because to do so would destabilize the basis for all these games and other entertainment that we all enjoy, since they are so deeply tied into it. I definitely don't want to even try to do that.

2) The "new" historical sources are hard. The youtube videos etc. we are now seeing so much are distillations of 15-20 years of research, and they are really in most cases a decade or more behind the current research, which is both overwhelmingly robust in terms of new data, and still painfully small in terms of people doing the work to sort it all out. Making sense of the world we are starting to see is a big challenge, and that is one of the things I try to do for the RPG and HEMA communities, so to speak. It's very challenging I can tell you. But also very rewarding. And there's the rub! If you learn enough, it will become an addiction you'll never overcome. There is no rehab that can fix it. In fact, save money because you may end up going to Florence or Prague.
 
I also don't want to imply that I think I'm the only one delving into the real history and opening it up for RPGs, a lot of people are doing that now and have been for a while. I just wanted to try to articulate the apparent split between the two things that these discussions sometimes break down into.
 
I did a ton of research when developing both of them, including going through small town/settlement census data and other records, but (to be honest) a lot of that was for my own enjoyment, since I love doing research.
A lot of my fascination with historical gaming comes from this: preparing is just so damn much fun.

To answer the original question, pretty much anything from the Early Modern to the present day is my favorite way to roleplay.

Now, back to reading the rest of the thread . . .
 
This is a really fascinating account of a battlefield duel between a German and Italian soldier in 1487. It offers insight into the technical capabilities of weapons and training, as well as the cultural context, and the role of Chivalry on the real battlefield. It's also interesting for example in that it gives us an example of how plate armor was defeated, and how quickly people seemed to be able to recover from wounds. All in all, a fun (and not too long) read of interest to anyone who is curious about medieval warfare, dueling, grappling, or the Renaissance in general.

 
I think this kind of setting would benefit from tables to generate the content as you go rather than having everything pre-created (outside of the broad strokes of the setting and the largest well known cities, Danzig, Prague etc.).

For example, say you wan to generate city or town.

Is it a Free City

1. Yes completely autonomous: 33%
2. Free, but not completely autonomous: 33%
3. No: 33%

Majority Ethnicity / Language

1. German: 60%
2. Estonian: 20%
3. Polish: 20%

Major Source of Income:

1. Trade
2. Artisans and Crafting
3. etc.

Alliances

1. No alliances: 20%
2. Part of the Hanse League: 20%
3. etc.
When you posted this I was casually putting together some tables for Monsterberg “solo”. I’ve put them on my blog.
 
This is a long shot, but I'm trying to remember the name of a book and maybe someone here can help. It's about towns in (at least) late medieval Germany. It has a mostly purple cover and a black on white woodcut picture (of a burgher or something). It was used as a text in one of my undergrad classes, and I really liked it, but I'm blanking on the name (one of the other texts may have been The Cheese and the Worms if that helps). Perhaps someone here knows what I'm talking about...
 
This is a long shot, but I'm trying to remember the name of a book and maybe someone here can help. It's about towns in (at least) late medieval Germany. It has a mostly purple cover and a black on white woodcut picture (of a burgher or something). It was used as a text in one of my undergrad classes, and I really liked it, but I'm blanking on the name (one of the other texts may have been The Cheese and the Worms if that helps). Perhaps someone here knows what I'm talking about...
A few questions: was it a case study or microhistory (like Cheese and the Worms) that focused on a single town or individual, or a more synthetic work? Also, what year was the course? That will give a terminus ad quem for publication.
 
A few questions: was it a case study or microhistory (like Cheese and the Worms) that focused on a single town or individual, or a more synthetic work? Also, what year was the course? That will give a terminus ad quem for publication.
All I remember is that it had some detailed social history type stuff about several (I think) German free towns (guilds maybe, there were weavers I remember) - my fuzzy memory is that it may have used a set of several specific cities to illustrate wider themes. The course would have been in the late 90's so published, say, pre-98 and I'm almost positive (after checking the UofW website) the course was called Medieval Society. Thanks for even considering such a vague call for help. :thumbsup:
 
All I remember is that it had some detailed social history type stuff about several (I think) German free towns (guilds maybe, there were weavers I remember) - my fuzzy memory is that it may have used a set of several specific cities to illustrate wider themes. The course would have been in the late 90's so published, say, pre-98 and I'm almost positive (after checking the UofW website) the course was called Medieval Society. Thanks for even considering such a vague call for help. :thumbsup:
Though it's not limited to towns, or to Germany, your description of the cover puts me in mind of Georges Huppert's After the Black Death. The first edition came out in 1986 and the second in 1998. Here are some cover images:

After the Black Death.jpg After the Black Death 2nd ed.jpg
 
That is exactly the book!! Good gravy, you're a resourceful fellow. Thanks ever so much. :thumbsup:
 
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