Most detailed non-D&D RPG settings?

[TristramEvans]

Ouch. Possibly try some different historians?!

It's more simply that the books are being written with very different purposes in mind. As you mention, there are hundreds of academics churning out stuff, but they aren't doing it to cater to the layman or with the goal in mind of providing comprehensive overviews of the subject. So you've got this wide gulf that exists between simplistic, bowdlerized overviews aimed at elementary schoolchildren at tier one and then the majority of books published at tier III -dry, academic treatise illustrating one particular archeo-sociological finding and its ramifications on scholarship, and then this vast gulf of Tier II which is where practical (for gaming purposes) comprehensive info on a subject as a whole is presented is widely neglected.

I study the occult a lot as well, and it has mostly the same issue. Flippant, "basic bitch who wants to light candles and call themselves a witch because new agy stuff seems cool" introductory books flooding the market on one hand, and then impenetrable shit like Cornelius Agrippa, Crowley's 777, or Jung's Mysterium Conjunctivium, but very very little in between the two extremes.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

All books count as what? Useful? As someone who reads hundreds of history books a year, I'm going to call complete bullshit on that premise. A vast majority of them are hyperfocused on specific elements of historical interpretation that have zero relevance to a gameable setting, and even the useful stuff tends to just be repeated ad nauseum between books or cherrypicked to support the author's latest hypothesis.

I think you just touched on two of the biggest problems with modern historical research in the academy (as opposed to popular history) - since the mid 20th Century almost all serious historical research tends to be extremely hyperfocused as you say, on very narrow slivers of life. I knew a guy who wrote a PhD thesis on the role of bad breath in late Republican Roman politics.. quite often it's a good bit narrower than that. The other major problem is the over-emphasis on theory over the data, leading as you note to cherry picking of data to try to match a theory. I don't think we are really at the point, in general, where we should be pushing theories so hard.

 

[Fenris-77]

Ouch. Possibly try some different historians?! Mind you, there are limits. There are 3,000 professional academic historians in the UK covering everything post AD 285.

I'm with TristramEvans on this one. I also read rather a lot of history, and my area of focus/training is actually the Medieval period. Most of the texts and journal articles I read are not really useful to gamers as they are quite often, as Tristram described, hyper-focused on the author's specific interest of specialty. Even broader texts are still quite often focused on specific enough topics that they aren't all that useful. Topics like Cavalry Warfare in Britain the 9th and 10th Century, which I just made up but is pretty in line with what I'd expect, don't hold a lot of juice for gamers, as interesting as they might be.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

It is hard for a fantasy creation to compete with the real thing in terms of detail and surprising contents. I've been running a lot of modern games using google maps for example, and there is just so much more detail than I could ever come up with as a GM because I couldn't map out every location on planet earth even if I had a whole life time to do it. I think where fantasy and GM designed cities will have an advantage is you can strip things down to what you need for play purposes (i.e. everything will be gameable if you want it to be) and you have a lot more freedom to improvise and create than you might in a historical setting (though that could come down to style, you certainly could give yourself that freedom in a historical setting)

I think you described a phenomenon pretty well - but I interpret it almost the opposite way. If you base your adventure on a real place, a real town or historical region, it will as you say have a lot more detail and 'surprising contents'. So long as you have done enough prep on basic understanding of the setting, the 'surprising contents' make for a far more interesting game / novel / screenplay (for me).

And you can fairly easily adjust, adapt or edit these things to suit your needs so long as you have sufficient background to make sense of it.

Conversely, improvised fantasy settings is far more likely to be generic, predictable, boring, and tied to tropes I find exhausting. See for example 90% of fantasy or pseudo historical / quasi historical films.

 

[SJB]

I'm with TristramEvans on this one. I also read rather a lot of history, and my area of focus/training is actually the Medieval period. Most of the texts and journal articles I read are not really useful to gamers as they are quite often, as Tristram described, hyper-focused on the author's specific interest of specialty. Even broader texts are still quite often focused on specific enough topics that they aren't all that useful. Topics like Cavalry Warfare in Britain the 9th and 10th Century, which I just made up but is pretty in line with what I'd expect, don't hold a lot of juice for gamers, as interesting as they might be.

Guy Halsall, who has indeed written that book, is a gamer!

What tends to happen is that very successful historians write commercial books that are well worth searching out. For instance, Chris Wickham on pre-feudal Europe or the late Lisa Jardine on the Renaissance.

But it’s obviously true that professional academic historians do not write books for gamers (thank God in both directions).

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

When I was a student I was bowled over by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essays on Paracelsus and his network. Pace the mistake he made about the Hitler Diaries at the end of his life he was a brilliant man who wrote beautifully.

Paracelsus definitely makes for a very interesting figure to look at, his "world" / context even more so

The kind of integrated intellectual history you seek is usually regarded as the preserve of Quentin Skinner. His mantra that social context is everything in the study of ideas revolutionised the field. Despite his brilliance as a conversationalist I must admit I find Skinner rather hard going on the page - but it’s not my bailiwick.

So in Britain, at least, the previous generation that reached the apex of the profession (Trevor-Roper was Regius chair at Oxford; Skinner was Regius chair at Cambridge) shared your interests.

The problem I find in Britain, and I have a bunch of friends who are academics there, is that they tend to focus on English history and things directly affecting the British Isles, especially England itself. They are very interested in their own realm in other words, just like most European countries only more so because they are an island. By contrast a Swiss historian, like say, Jacob Burckhardt, not only needs to know about Paracelsus, he more or less has to understand Germany, France, Italy, Austria, because they are all around and encroaching. So you end up with a more 'syncretic' understanding.

There are definitely some exceptions to the rule though for the UK and I do follow several UK historians. It's helpful because I am still mostly confined to the Anlgophone world!

When it comes to the medieval period, England and France which are our two biggest influences tend to be the least interesting for me because they were basically consumed by dynastic and civil wars until the post-medieval period. In England there was the fairly brilliant late Tudor (i.e. Elizabethan) era, which was their (quite late) Renaissance and then civil wars and absolute monarchies, expanding maritime power, colonial exploration and wars. France was similar - their heyday being largely the reign of Louis XIV, but that's not the kind of setting i find interesting, compared to say, Italian City-States or the Holy Roman Empire. Or say, the early Portuguese exploration of the Indian Ocean...

 

[Telok]

Guy Halsall, who has indeed written that book, is a gamer!

What tends to happen is that very successful historians write commercial books that are well worth searching out. For instance, Chris Wickham on pre-feudal Europe or the late Lisa Jardine on the Renaissance.

But it’s obviously true that professional academic historians do not write books for gamers (thank God in both directions).

Plug for acoup.blog, a historian who likes gaming (computer mostly, but still very applicable) and advocates for more general public history stuff between the extremely simplistic and the excessively academic.

Resources for World-Builders

Since the WordPress archives are far from the easiest thing to navigate and it can be difficult to find what you are looking for even though it is, I am putting together a couple of ‘index&#8…

acoup.blog

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

I'm with TristramEvans on this one. I also read rather a lot of history, and my area of focus/training is actually the Medieval period. Most of the texts and journal articles I read are not really useful to gamers as they are quite often, as Tristram described, hyper-focused on the author's specific interest of specialty. Even broader texts are still quite often focused on specific enough topics that they aren't all that useful. Topics like Cavalry Warfare in Britain the 9th and 10th Century, which I just made up but is pretty in line with what I'd expect, don't hold a lot of juice for gamers, as interesting as they might be.

There are primary sources (and closely linked secondary sources) which are very difficult to contextualize, and those which are hard to understand or read, and then there are those which are easy to understand and provide a great deal of data I'd say is entirely appropriate for gamers. You may not find this for England in the medieval period though - you'll want to focus on those places and during periods where literacy is fairly widespread. In central Europe or Italy, and parts of what is now Spain, you'll find most of the towns had pretty detailed chronicles which can be cross-referenced with town council records and the like. Quite often noble families also had their own histories, as did multiple competing elements of the Church and all the universities. Major figures of interest, such as those I mentioned above and many others - often wrote dozens or hundreds of personal letters and sometimes even memoirs which often have surprisingly contemporary language.

The broad based type academic or near-academic histories kind of peaked in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and they stopped doing those for basically ideological / political reasons in the mid-20th. Some of the 100 year old history resources are quite dated now, but others turn out to be surprisingly prescient, anticipating later discoveries, or, like say Hans Delbrück, their theories and interpretations may have aged but their translations and data are still very useful. You can also sort of 'stitch-together' those very narrow micro-histories once you have found a time and place you like. That takes some work but it can pay dividends.

In general, there are several of these which are still quite useful depending on the time and place you are interested in.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Plug for acoup.blog, a historian who likes gaming (computer mostly, but still very applicable) and advocates for more general public history stuff between the extremely simplistic and the excessively academic.

Resources for World-Builders

Since the WordPress archives are far from the easiest thing to navigate and it can be difficult to find what you are looking for even though it is, I am putting together a couple of ‘index&#8…

acoup.blog

That's a great one.

I also really appreciate sites like this one, which gives you floor plans and maps of hundreds of castles and town fortifications, plus a lot of background and history. These are all basically adventure hooks

Ancient and medieval architecture

Website dedicated to all kinds of medieval and ancient architectural monuments: from castles, fortified towers and churches through monasteries, synagogues, city walls, bridges, urban and rural buildings to chapels, barrows and ancient ruins.

medievalheritage.eu

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Guy Halsall, who has indeed written that book, is a gamer!

What tends to happen is that very successful historians write commercial books that are well worth searching out. For instance, Chris Wickham on pre-feudal Europe or the late Lisa Jardine on the Renaissance.

But it’s obviously true that professional academic historians do not write books for gamers (thank God in both directions).

You would be surprised how many professional academic historians are gamers...

 

[Fenris-77]

Guy Halsall, who has indeed written that book, is a gamer!

What tends to happen is that very successful historians write commercial books that are well worth searching out. For instance, Chris Wickham on pre-feudal Europe or the late Lisa Jardine on the Renaissance.

But it’s obviously true that professional academic historians do not write books for gamers (thank God in both directions).

Sure. You can assume that I know that, and also that those books aren't precisely what we were discussing. I believe the quote we started with, or at least the one TristramEvans replied to, said something like 'all history books'. To repeat my basic point, no, all history books are not necessarily useful for gaming applications. There are books that are useful for gamers, of course.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

These are not generic fantasy cities and represent pretty accurate take on medieval life. In addition, they take a lot less effort to get going than trying to shift through various primary sources to get something useful for the table.

If you want to see this out in more detail then these are some fan made works of comparable quality to the main Harnline.

Various Tashal Articles

Search Results for “Tashal” – Lýthia.com

www.lythia.com

A complete block in the Tashal's Upper Eastside fleshed out with floorplans.

Tashal: Upper East Side

Upper eastside city block in Tashal.

www.lythia.com

A townhouse for a noble (there are several others)

Bastune House

This large townhouse in Tashal (H3) is a fitting home for the appetites and ambitions of its chief resident, Lady Peresta Bastune.

www.lythia.com

All written by people who are passionate about Harn's medieval feel.

Ok - before I plunge in, could you give me a rough idea which medieval cities these are supposed to be similar to?

 

[Telok]

That's a great one.

I also really appreciate sites like this one, which gives you floor plans and maps of hundreds of castles and town fortifications, plus a lot of background and history. These are all basically adventure hooks

Ancient and medieval architecture

Website dedicated to all kinds of medieval and ancient architectural monuments: from castles, fortified towers and churches through monasteries, synagogues, city walls, bridges, urban and rural buildings to chapels, barrows and ancient ruins.

medievalheritage.eu

Oh yummy!, that'll be useful.

 

[Fenris-77]

There are primary sources (and closely linked secondary sources) which are very difficult to contextualize, and those which are hard to understand or read, and then there are those which are easy to understand and provide a great deal of data I'd say is entirely appropriate for gamers. You may not find this for England in the medieval period though - you'll want to focus on those places and during periods where literacy is fairly widespread. In central Europe or Italy, and parts of what is now Spain, you'll find most of the towns had pretty detailed chronicles which can be cross-referenced with town council records and the like. Quite often noble families also had their own histories. Major figures of interest, such as those I mentioned above and many others - often wrote dozens or hundreds of personal letters and sometimes even memoirs which often have surprisingly contemporary language.

The broad based type academic or near-academic histories kind of peaked in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and they stopped doing those for basically ideological / political reasons in the mid-20th. Some of the 100 year old history resources are quite dated now, but others turn out to be surprisingly prescient, anticipating later discoveries, or, like say Hans Delbrück, their theories and interpretations may have aged but their translations and data are still very useful. You can also sort of 'stitch-together' those very narrow micro-histories once you have found a time and place you like. That takes some work but it can pay dividends.

In general, there are several of these which are still quite useful depending on the time and place you are interested in.

Good lord no. I wasn't suggesting that primary medieval sources (from any country) are useful for gamers. Even 17th and 18th century primary sources can be slog even if you have training and some familiarity, never mind without. The language barrier is enough to make that true, never mind the issues you point out about context and analysis. I would never tell someone not to study primary sources of course, but for TTRPG purposes it is probably not the easiest point of access. Super cool though, so there's that.

I do agree that there lots of older historical books that are still quite useful. One needs to be on the lookout for certain sorts of period bias, but there's great stuff out there. Personally, I quite enjoy reading Victorian and Early 20th century works on topics that interest me. The notion of stitching together micro-histories, which I applaud, is probably more research than your average gamer wants to do however.

 

[SJB]

Plug for acoup.blog, a historian who likes gaming (computer mostly, but still very applicable) and advocates for more general public history stuff between the extremely simplistic and the excessively academic.

Resources for World-Builders

Since the WordPress archives are far from the easiest thing to navigate and it can be difficult to find what you are looking for even though it is, I am putting together a couple of ‘index&#8…

acoup.blog

Sadly, he seems rather depressed about his career prospects in the profession.

 

[ffilz]

That's a great one.

I also really appreciate sites like this one, which gives you floor plans and maps of hundreds of castles and town fortifications, plus a lot of background and history. These are all basically adventure hooks

Ancient and medieval architecture

Website dedicated to all kinds of medieval and ancient architectural monuments: from castles, fortified towers and churches through monasteries, synagogues, city walls, bridges, urban and rural buildings to chapels, barrows and ancient ruins.

medievalheritage.eu

So how do I use that to make something game ready? I don't have tons of time to do a deep dive.

Certainly it's hard for a game setting to have the depth of the real world, but do we actually need that?

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Good lord no. I wasn't suggesting that primary medieval sources (from any country) are useful for gamers. Even 17th and 18th century primary sources can be slog even if you have training and some familiarity, never mind without. The language barrier is enough to make that true, never mind the issues you point out about context and analysis. I would never tell someone not to study primary sources of course, but for TTRPG purposes it is probably not the easiest point of access. Super cool though, so there's that.

I disagree - there are English translations of several primary sources which I think are solid gold for RPGs, novels, screenplays, computer games etc. For example, for the late medieval world I would cite the town chronicles of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg (available in a slightly abridged English translation from the early 20th Century) which give you an almost endless series of dramatic events (skirmishes, uprisings, pirate raids, wars, alliances, etc.), the Nuremberg Chronicle (which is really more of a 'world' atlas, complete with maps and panoramas of dozens of towns) which has the sort of thing that chronicles have plus a lot of witty, droll commentary by the well educated authors, Aeneaus Piccolomini's Europe, and the Annales of Jan Dlugosz which cover 700 years of Polish and neighboring states (Holy Roman Empire, Teutonic Order, Bohemia) histories in a very contemporary voice with tons of fascinating detail. Finally I highly recommend the travels of Leo of Rozmital, which you can find in a rare 1950s translation, a fascinating real life travelogue of some Czech knights and burghers voyaging all over mid 15th Century Europe - which is actually two parallel accounts written by two different people (a German burgher from Nuremberg and a Czech knight). Totally wild and unexpected stuff, often very amusing.

At a slightly more challenging level in terms of the dialect / style, but even more engaging, I'd also recommend the memoir of Götz von Berlichingen for a look at the life of a very colorful 'robber knight'. He was only kind of semi-educated so it's not quite as easy of a read but it's very entertaining as you might expect and gets you right into the (very bloody) weeds. Also, at a similar level of challenge, reading the late medieval and early modern fencing manuals can offer a lot of insight into the era, and how people fought - they are almost all available for free perusal on the Wiktenauer.

All of these translations (with the partial exception of Götz' memoir) are written in language that is pretty contemporary and easy to follow. it's not like reading Chaucer or something, and all are just dripping with adventure hooks, wonderful characters and great setting ideas. I think these translations are much more useful, in general, than most of the modern overviews will tend to be.

In my opinion, these 15th-16th Century sources are a lot more accessible than most 17th or 18th Century sources, which actually (counter-intuitively) read as much more archaic, tend to be much more stridently religious in their language and so on. I have a dozen or so memoirs from that period and I couldn't get through any of them.

For other periods though one can still find quite good sources. On the late Roman Empire, as just one example Procopius military histories combined with his "Secret Histories" is excellent source material for the early Byzantine / late Roman world, full of bizarre and entertaining anecdotes (such as for example, the time when the Roman Empire went to war with a whale in the Black Sea....). For something earlier, Julius Caesars memoirs are very readable and quite exciting, full of fascinating details about Roman military campaigns in this period. For further back into the Hellenic period, it's hard to beat Xenophon for sheer eye-popping entertainment value (and plenty of story hooks).

I do agree that there lots of older historical books that are still quite useful. One needs to be on the lookout for certain sorts of period bias, but there's great stuff out there. Personally, I quite enjoy reading Victorian and Early 20th century works on topics that interest me. The notion of stitching together micro-histories, which I applaud, is probably more research than your average gamer wants to do however.

I agree on both points - you have to be quite careful with the Victorians and early 20th Century historians as many of them have a great deal of bias or downright prejudice and other abhorrent ideas, and some really don't care about fidelity to truth or accuracy. Quite a few are sheer propaganda. But there are some significant exceptions without any doubt. Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy holds up very well for example, there are few that surpass it I would say.

The stitching together is i agree a challenge, however there are two remedies - one is collaboration with others, such as we have done in the HEMA / historical fencing world, and the other is to focus yourself on a specific time and place - in an RPG you are not necessarily likely to travel thousands of miles let alone time travel, so you can focus on a particular region and a 20-30 year span of time. You can get something like one of those Osprey books and a handful of free articles from Academia.Edu and get something you can really sink your teeth into.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Sadly, he seems rather depressed about his career prospects in the profession.

Life can be really brutal for adjunct professors right now, especially in the US where student debt is such an issue. Professors I know seem to either be lucked into a very cherry position or they are really struggling and bleak like you see here.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

So how do I use that to make something game ready? I don't have tons of time to do a deep dive.

Certainly it's hard for a game setting to have the depth of the real world, but do we actually need that?

I mean, is there a castle or a town in your game? Read two or three of those entries and I think it almost writes itself as a story. I made an adventure partly written around one of those castles. If you want - give me a few guidelines and I'll find you a good one in 5 minutes.

I'd say the same for many of the other sources I just listed. First kind of narrow down what you are looking for a little bit. A city? a castle? An abandoned abbey? Pirates? Heretics? Necromancy? Robber knights? Bandits? You can probably find a bunch of examples in a half an hour. Pick one and make a few notes, you are already on your way.

It's also not too hard to change a robber knight to an ogre or bandits into hobgoblins if you want to. Historical nNecromancers can make pretty good vampires, heretical cults can be remade into Cthulhu cults fairly readily.

 

[Fenris-77]

I disagree - there are English translations of several primary sources which I think are solid gold for RPGs, novels, screenplays, computer games etc. For example, for the late medieval world I would cite the town chronicles of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg (available in a slightly abridged English translation from the early 20th Century) which give you an almost endless series of dramatic events (skirmishes, uprisings, pirate raids, wars, alliances, etc.), the Nuremberg Chronicle (which is really more of a 'world' atlas, complete with maps and panoramas of dozens of towns) which has the sort of thing that chronicles have plus a lot of witty, droll commentary by the well educated authors, Aeneaus Piccolomini's Europe, and the Annales of Jan Dlugosz which cover 700 years of Polish and neighboring states (Holy Roman Empire, Teutonic Order, Bohemia) histories in a very contemporary voice with tons of fascinating detail. Finally I highly recommend the travels of Leo of Rozmital, which you can find in a rare 1950s translation, a fascinating real life travelogue of some Czech knights and burghers voyaging all over mid 15th Century Europe - which is actually two parallel accounts written by two different people (a German burgher from Nuremberg and a Czech knight). Totally wild and unexpected stuff, often very amusing.

At a slightly more challenging level in terms of the dialect / style, but even more engaging, I'd also recommend the memoir of Götz von Berlichingen for a look at the life of a very colorful 'robber knight'. He was only kind of semi-educated so it's not quite as easy of a read but it's very entertaining as you might expect and gets you right into the (very bloody) weeds. Also, at a similar level of challenge, reading the late medieval and early modern fencing manuals can offer a lot of insight into the era, and how people fought - they are almost all available for free perusal on the Wiktenauer.

All of these translations (with the partial exception of Götz' memoir) are written in language that is pretty contemporary and easy to follow. it's not like reading Chaucer or something, and all are just dripping with adventure hooks, wonderful characters and great setting ideas. I think these translations are much more useful, in general, than most of the modern overviews will tend to be.

In my opinion, these 15th-16th Century sources are a lot more accessible than most 17th or 18th Century sources, which actually (counter-intuitively) read as much more archaic, tend to be much more stridently religious in their language and so on. I have a dozen or so memoirs from that period and I couldn't get through any of them.

For other periods though one can still find quite good sources. On the late Roman Empire, as just one example Procopius military histories combined with his "Secret Histories" is excellent source material for the early Byzantine / late Roman world, full of bizarre and entertaining anecdotes (such as for example, the time when the Roman Empire went to war with a whale in the Black Sea....). For something earlier, Julius Caesars memoirs are very readable and quite exciting, full of fascinating details about Roman military campaigns in this period. For further back into the Hellenic period, it's hard to beat Xenophon for sheer eye-popping entertainment value (and plenty of story hooks).



I agree on both points - you have to be quite careful with the Victorians and early 20th Century historians as many of them have a great deal of bias or downright prejudice and other abhorrent ideas, and some really don't care about fidelity to truth or accuracy. Quite a few are sheer propaganda. But there are some significant exceptions without any doubt. Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy holds up very well for example, there are few that surpass it I would say.

The stitching together is i agree a challenge, however there are two remedies - one is collaboration with others, such as we have done in the HEMA / historical fencing world, and the other is to focus yourself on a specific time and place - in an RPG you are not necessarily likely to travel thousands of miles let alone time travel, so you can focus on a particular region and a 20-30 year span of time. You can get something like one of those Osprey books and a handful of free articles from Academia.Edu and get something you can really sink your teeth into.

I would have thought it obvious from my post that I wasn't talking about translations of primary sources. Those are certainly a different beast though, I agree, when you can find them.

 

[robertsconley]

Ok - before I plunge in, could you give me a rough idea which medieval cities these are supposed to be similar to?

None in particular. Why would that matter? N. Robin Crossby and the Harn creative team use their knowledge of medieval life and history to flesh out Tashal across the social spectrum. I am sure much is based on particular bits of actual history but since NRC is dead and that it was developed over decades by many different folks who knows? But being well-versed in medieval history it is by far one of the best presentation for gaming.

If you want a complete town of 4,000 to look at look at the town in Harn Pottage 4.

Hârn Pottage IV

The fourth outing for Harn Pottage, this is the biggest yet. It features 2 mini-adventures and a number of generic locations useable in any role playing game system.

www.lythia.com

It is 14 page and describe a town dominated by a Cathedral.

 

[SJB]

None in particular. Why would that matter? N. Robin Crossby and the Harn creative team use their knowledge of medieval life and history to flesh out Tashal across the social spectrum. I am sure much is based on particular bits of actual history but since NRC is dead and that it was developed over decades by many different folks who knows? But being well-versed in medieval history it is by far one of the best presentation for gaming.

If you want a complete town of 4,000 to look at look at the town in Harn Pottage 4.

Hârn Pottage IV

The fourth outing for Harn Pottage, this is the biggest yet. It features 2 mini-adventures and a number of generic locations useable in any role playing game system.

www.lythia.com

It is 14 page and describe a town dominated by a Cathedral.

View attachment 57412

I asked this up the way, but got diverted into the discussion on history; do you find the individual building plans useful/well done?

 

[Fenris-77]

I asked this up the way, but got diverted into the discussion on history; do you find the individual building plans useful/well done?

The larger scale maps are excellent and the closeups are also great. An example:

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

None in particular. Why would that matter? N. Robin Crossby and the Harn creative team use their knowledge of medieval life and history to flesh out Tashal across the social spectrum. I am sure much is based on particular bits of actual history but since NRC is dead and that it was developed over decades by many different folks who knows? But being well-versed in medieval history it is by far one of the best presentation for gaming.

If you want a complete town of 4,000 to look at look at the town in Harn Pottage 4.

Hârn Pottage IV

The fourth outing for Harn Pottage, this is the biggest yet. It features 2 mini-adventures and a number of generic locations useable in any role playing game system.

www.lythia.com

It is 14 page and describe a town dominated by a Cathedral.

View attachment 57412

Thanks I will check it out. It's a very nice map.

 

[robertsconley]

As for the general case of "How the fuck I use historical sources" You read as much as you want to get your hands on both primary and secondary sources and develop a sense of the possibilities for a given time period. Then just make it up. Folks in any time period lived lives that were varied and rich as our own so how things actually worked in Upper Danford versus Little Farnworth can vary.

Trying to go beyond that is a fools errand because of the nature of the sources. Do it because you enjoy reading about history but for gaming, you will find the details always fall short and thus you have to make stuff up to use what you know at the table.

For example, my map for the village of Kenla in my Scourge of the Demon Wolf adventure isn't based on any particular medieval village or manor but rather on my general impression of the range of traits that medieval village/manors share.

The same for the adventure itself while it is a D&D adventure with a supernatural threat. The various elements that make up the situation are all grounded in how people lived and acted throughout the medieval era and for that matter throughout all of human history. What makes it grounded in the medieval are the specifics.

That a group of peasants refuses to bring in the harvest after the baron's bailiff in charge of the manor was brutally killed. After the Baron's own huntsman said that the local wolves were hunted out. The local parish priest has his own ideas about the cause of the killing. This will cause complications for the PCs who are sent by the baron with authority to clean up the mess (if that particular plot hook is used). I deliberately setup the situation to play on medieval ideas about power and authority and thus creating a challenge for the players who just want to find and kill the demon wolf and possibly loot it. There are some elements of fantasy like a conclave of mages. A religion that is not the Catholic Church but echoes it. But I found it works quite well as a Harn adventure or a Ars Magica adventure. Or it could even be played straight and the mages are a local monastery and the demon wolf is just particularly cunning and possibly rabid.

 

[robertsconley]

I asked this up the way, but got diverted into the discussion on history; do you find the individual building plans useful/well done?

what ffilz said. For an example of how it worked out in actual play, I refer you to this series of blog posts by one of my players.

Look Squirrel! We shot the Sheriff
Reflections on a Majestic Beat Down
Do you hear the people sing.
The Seige Ends

The rest of his posts on the campaign including the use of more maps from Harn adapted for my Majestic Wilderlands

 

[robertsconley]

For those who are interested, this is a map I did as an experiment. Each small hex is .5 miles. I generated the acreage each manor and village had. Divided them up using the three field crop rotation system (for the most part there are some deliberately placed oddities. And plotted it out. I haven't done this since as this is way overkill.


Yes I repurposed Phandalin from the Lost Mine of Phandelver. This was created for the first 5e campaign I ran. I opted not use Forgotten Realms and instead re-arranged all the stuff in the adventure around an area of my Majestic Wilderlands.

This the general region at 12.5 miles per hex. As I planned to publish before ending my Judges Guild license I renamed Phandalin to Phandar.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

As for the general case of "How the fuck I use historical sources" You read as much as you want to get your hands on both primary and secondary sources and develop a sense of the possibilities for a given time period. Then just make it up. Folks in any time period lived lives that were varied and rich as our own so how things actually worked in Upper Danford versus Little Farnworth can vary.

Trying to go beyond that is a fools errand because of the nature of the sources. Do it because you enjoy reading about history but for gaming, you will find the details always fall short and thus you have to make stuff up to use what you know at the table.

Ok sure, but let me give you a counterpoint here specifically to do with communities like a village or a town.

In England, a village inevitably follows this feudal model, it's going to be ruled by some kind of nearby feudal lord like the baron in your example, and administered by a bailiff and some kind of cleric like your parish priest. This is fine, but it's a very familiar and to me, a little bit boring model. It feels a little bit constrained. If you further 'uncomplicate' it by making it a bit more Ren Faire and a bit less 'War of the Roses', it's becoming ... Harn.

In most of Continental Europe East of the Rhine, in terms of proximity to England, starting at Flanders and spreading east, northeast, and south from there, quite often you'll find that the communities, any town large enough to have a stone wall for example, probably runs itself to at least some extent. Many are fully autonomous and have their own armies, foreign policy and diplomacy. This makes for quite fraught internal politics too in communities as small as a couple of thousand citizens. They are embedded in alliances with other towns and sometimes nobles or factions of the Church. Universities are laws unto themselves. They routinely go to war against princes such as kings or bishops.

The rural landscape is also divided. Instead of a clear hierarchy from the King down to the lowest reeve or bailiff, in much of the rest of Europe it's far more open. In Italy, by the time you have things like plate armor and stone castles, there basically is no king. It's just a bunch of competing city-states and the Pope. In the Holy Roman Empire, there is a king of sorts, the Emperor (who usually also holds the title of 'king of the Germans') but this person is often out of the picture. Instead there are princely families, mighty town leagues like the Hanseatic League (which, though powerful enough to face down England and Denmark on their own, still struggles with organized pirate groups in the Baltic) or the Rhennish League which is organized by towns to fight cruel robber knights on the Rhine river.

The Kingdom of Bohemia is loosely controlled often by a foreign king and is dominated by radical heretics. In Poland, there is a King, but he's from a pagan Lithuanian family and 20% of the population are nobles who can veto almost any policy. The cities like Krakow and Danzig are self governing and dominated by German speaking populations. Further north in Livonia towns like Riga are openly allying with pagan Lithuanians against the Crusading Orders. In Flanders, the Duke of Burgundy holds sway, in theory, but in a tense rivalry with the very large, wealthy, and culturally sophisticated cities of Flanders and Holland. The Swiss Confederacy has evicted all nobles of princely rank and is ruled by a coalition of walled cities and peasant clans. Towns like Venice and Genoa in Italy have naval empires encompassing half the Mediterranean, and routinely clash with such daunting foes as the mighty Slave Empire of the Ottomans.

This is much more engaging than the usual lord and his manor kind of setup, and it invites a host of engaging and fresh stories.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

So down to the level of a village - they might be embroiled in the politics of a nearby town, in the rivalry between neighboring princess, caught up in some kind of controversy over heresies, in the midst of a feud against a nearby robber knight. They would likely be highly prepared for trouble and probably fortified with a militia etc. if they were anywhere near say, the border with the Mongols or the Ottomans, or a rival Latin state ... little towns on the Rhine had to worry not only about raubritter but also invasions across the French-German border or from Burgundy.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

I think you described a phenomenon pretty well - but I interpret it almost the opposite way. If you base your adventure on a real place, a real town or historical region, it will as you say have a lot more detail and 'surprising contents'. So long as you have done enough prep on basic understanding of the setting, the 'surprising contents' make for a far more interesting game / novel / screenplay (for me).

And you can fairly easily adjust, adapt or edit these things to suit your needs so long as you have sufficient background to make sense of it.

Conversely, improvised fantasy settings is far more likely to be generic, predictable, boring, and tied to tropes I find exhausting. See for example 90% of fantasy or pseudo historical / quasi historical films.

It is possible I am misreading, but I think we aren't that much on opposite ends of the spectrum here. I think a very well researched prep on historical locations definitely can lead to more interesting content (that is why I like history in a lot of my games). It is just important to understand the hurdles and the downsides of each approach I think. And different campaigns call for different things.

The benefit of going the fantasy direction is you can improvise and be creative more freely (obviously you can be creative in a historical setting but there are expectations that history will constrain some of your choices). The fantasy direction is also faster. I recall one reason Howard set Conan in a kind of mythic prehistory is because it unburdened him from having to research all the details, he could throw in pirates, vikings or whatever, wherever he needed, without worrying about precise historical facts or having to stop and research. Granted a lot of that was probably already informed by material he had encountered reading history. But it isn't a historical setting like the Roma Sub Rosa series or the Cadfael Mysteries, or the Name of the Rose. Still the Conan stories are my favorite fantasy and they provide a rich and exciting setting that taps into the same nerve for me as when I read history books (even though it is definitely not historical). I think avoiding the historical research approach benefited Conan (but wouldn't have benefited The Name of the Rose).

But if you can take the time to do the research, the rewards for a historically based setting are immense. That time investment though is definitely something people have to weigh. I studied history in college, and I prefer to read history books to novels. But even for me, there are times I just don't want to invest that kind of commitment to a campaign or there are times where it just isn't what I am looking for (I may want something not as tethered to history for whatever reason). I see this sort of thing more as one approach, among many, to running RPG campaigns. And this applies to fantasy settings that are heavily inspired by and draw from history as well, as much as concrete historical settings.

One of my favorite resources for my wuxia campaign is a book on commerce in Song China. It is very dry, dealing mainly with trade goods in order (how they were sourced, shipped, the kinds of operations that were in place to facilitate shipping, legal matters around selling) and with markets (there is a whole section on the types of markets that existed). I don't always rely on that information for games (I am pretty loose on the market side of things, even though I find the historical details very interesting), but I do like building off that kind of secondary source when I am putting together an adventure.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

Yeah, I mean, it's funny to say, but as far as RPGs are concerned, children's books tend to be more generally useful to a roleplayer than your average history book, in that they are one of the few types of books dedicated to providing an overview of a historical period in easily digestible nuggets of info that give a (relatively) complete picture of the lives of people in that period, much like what the GURPs 3rd ed sourcebooks excelled at.

Stuff like the DK Discovery Eyewitness books...

View attachment 57399

The DK World Atlas of History is one of my favorite books

 

[Alai]

The benefit of going the fantasy direction is you can improvise and be creative more freely

Hrm. And yet, this is roleplayers we're speaking of. And especially, RPG players, an infamously cowardly and superstitious lot.

The phrase "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" very much springs to mind.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

It is possible I am misreading, but I think we aren't that much on opposite ends of the spectrum here.

We aren't too far apart, I think just a slightly different approach.

I think a very well researched prep on historical locations definitely can lead to more interesting content (that is why I like history in a lot of my games). It is just important to understand the hurdles and the downsides of each approach I think. And different campaigns call for different things.

The benefit of going the fantasy direction is you can improvise and be creative more freely (obviously you can be creative in a historical setting but there are expectations that history will constrain some of your choices). The fantasy direction is also faster. I recall one reason Howard set Conan in a kind of mythic prehistory is because it unburdened him from having to research all the details, he could throw in pirates, vikings or whatever, wherever he needed, without worrying about precise historical facts or having to stop and research. Granted a lot of that was probably already informed by material he had encountered reading history. But it isn't a historical setting like the Roma Sub Rosa series or the Cadfael Mysteries, or the Name of the Rose. Still the Conan stories are my favorite fantasy and they provide a rich and exciting setting that taps into the same nerve for me as when I read history books (even though it is definitely not historical). I think avoiding the historical research approach benefited Conan (but wouldn't have benefited The Name of the Rose).

See, I'd site Robert E Howard and his Conan stories as a good example of a 'once removed' fantasy setting which was heavily reliant on history and mythology. Howard did not make his world or characters up out of thin air. He actually did a lot of research. He and HP Lovecraft actually met when HP read a detailed letter to the editor that Howard had written, to do with some obscure detail of Celtic history. Howard could mix and match his Vikings, pirates etc. and do so in a convincing way, because he knew the history of these folks pretty well.

I call fantasy / horror / weird fiction authors like Tolkein, Lovecraft, Ashton Smith, Howard, Jack Vance, Leiber, Stoker, Hope Hodgson, Moorcock - and more current ones like Sapkowski and George R.R. Martin 'primary' writers. These people all really knew history and mythology very well, and they were capable of convincingly and plausibly mixing and matching to create fantasy

To do a novel at the pristine level of detail of Name of the Rose (or several of Eco's other works) is beyond most fantasy authors and certainly too much work for a game setting. But I'd refer to my anatomy analogy upthread - if you know what bones connect to what others, you can move things around. If you know the grammer you can write poetry that breaks the rules and it still works.

On the flipside, I think what happened to a lot of later 20th C novels, most RPG settings, almost all fantasy computer games and the vast majority of TV shows and films is that they are derivations of an author who is derivative of another who copied yet another... in a chain leading back to one of the people who really knew their historical and mythological sources. But by then they have often lost the plot.



This also happens when maybe a pretty good book is adapted to film or show by somebody who is relying heavily on the derivative or generic fantasy tropes and pseudo medieval gibberish. It may be easier, but IMO it quickly breaks down because it just doesn't hold together.

But if you can take the time to do the research, the rewards for a historically based setting are immense. That time investment though is definitely something people have to weigh. I studied history in college, and I prefer to read history books to novels. But even for me, there are times I just don't want to invest that kind of commitment to a campaign or there are times where it just isn't what I am looking for (I may want something not as tethered to history for whatever reason). I see this sort of thing more as one approach, among many, to running RPG campaigns. And this applies to fantasy settings that are heavily inspired by and draw from history as well, as much as concrete historical settings.

What I think works is figure out more or less what you want to do, and take a page from Robert E Howard and his peers by looking at a few historical sources, which will inspire you with new concepts and help keep your ideas somewhat in the ballpark of internally consistent.

One of my favorite resources for my wuxia campaign is a book on commerce in Song China. It is very dry, dealing mainly with trade goods in order (how they were sourced, shipped, the kinds of operations that were in place to facilitate shipping, legal matters around selling) and with markets (there is a whole section on the types of markets that existed). I don't always rely on that information for games (I am pretty loose on the market side of things, even though I find the historical details very interesting), but I do like building off that kind of secondary source when I am putting together an adventure.

That makes me think of the Prattica della Mercatura - a series of 14th and 15th Century Italian guide books for trading down the Silk Road, potentially all the way to China. They have a lot of dry data on things like merchandise, but also really interesting (and plot-hookish) tidbits like where you are likely to get mugged, who you need to bribe, and what riddles you might be asked by roaming Mongol warriors... all kinds of useful data you can borrow from (like a big box of crayons) without needing to become an expert in.

Pratica della mercatura - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Generally speaking, I go back to my previous comment - it's not too hard to adapt a Robber Knight into an Ogre, a historical necromancer into a Vampire or a Wizard, a group of bandits into Hobgoblins, or a medieval serial killer into a werewolf. Etc.

 

[Fenris-77]

Generally speaking, I go back to my previous comment - it's not too hard to adapt a Robber Knight into an Ogre, a historical necromancer into a Vampire or a Wizard, a group of bandits into Hobgoblins, or a medieval serial killer into a werewolf. Etc.

Not only is it not hard, but it also gives you a lot more of an idea about ecology and motivation than a simple MM entry might.

 

[ffilz]

So the challenge I have is sure, there's all these cool resources for maps out there, and I used to collect all sorts of things. But the reality is I rarely seek out maps. I don't have the time. Or at least I don't seek out maps for this or that. What I do is seek out adventures that seem like they might fit what I'm doing and then use the maps in the adventure. Now in my RQ campaign, I DID use a couple Dyson Logos ruins maps for locations in the Big Rubble and then stocked them. But trying to find a map of the smithy the PCs are in? I'd rather just sketch something out than spend even 10 minutes trying to find something.

Now about looking at history to find situations, again, I really don't know how I would do that in any way that I would remotely have time for compared to browsing my module collection. Maybe I just haven't applied myself to how to do such a search. And these days, I don't read books much. It takes me at least a year to get through a novel. I suppose I could pay a bit more attention to the magazines I read (Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, People, Wired, AARP). I dunno, my brain has almost never turned a conflict from news (even though Smithsonian and National Geographic cover some amount of history, it's still mostly "news" rather than "history") into an RPG conflict.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

Not only is it not hard, but it also gives you a lot more of an idea about ecology and motivation than a simple MM entry might.

Exactly!

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

So the challenge I have is sure, there's all these cool resources for maps out there, and I used to collect all sorts of things. But the reality is I rarely seek out maps. I don't have the time. Or at least I don't seek out maps for this or that. What I do is seek out adventures that seem like they might fit what I'm doing and then use the maps in the adventure. Now in my RQ campaign, I DID use a couple Dyson Logos ruins maps for locations in the Big Rubble and then stocked them. But trying to find a map of the smithy the PCs are in? I'd rather just sketch something out than spend even 10 minutes trying to find something.

Now about looking at history to find situations, again, I really don't know how I would do that in any way that I would remotely have time for compared to browsing my module collection. Maybe I just haven't applied myself to how to do such a search. And these days, I don't read books much. It takes me at least a year to get through a novel. I suppose I could pay a bit more attention to the magazines I read (Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, People, Wired, AARP). I dunno, my brain has almost never turned a conflict from news (even though Smithsonian and National Geographic cover some amount of history, it's still mostly "news" rather than "history") into an RPG conflict.

Well look, I just think it's a useful resource. This thread was about 'detailed settings' - I find a detour into history useful for that. But I don't think it's for everybody or every RPG by any stretch.

 

[robertsconley]

Ok sure, but let me give you a counterpoint here specifically to do with communities like a village or a town.

In England, a village inevitably follows this feudal model, it's going to be ruled by some kind of nearby feudal lord like the baron in your example, and administered by a bailiff and some kind of cleric like your parish priest. This is fine, but it's a very familiar and to me, a little bit boring model. It feels a little bit constrained. If you further 'uncomplicate' it by making it a bit more Ren Faire and a bit less 'War of the Roses', it's becoming ... Harn.

The main issue I have is that you are making assumptions about Harn. The 1st and 2nd Harn wave of products were thin on the details of the folks involved basically the mid 80s and late 80s run of products. The bulk of it is were various lists of names and occupations. Even with the otherwise excellent overview about life in Harn, the details you are interested in could be and were a bit bland.

This is no longer the case. The last two waves started in 2000 and devotes far more to the NPCs involved in the various locales. Why Tashal expanded from 6 pages to 70 pages along with the other locales and cities. Sure there are still barons, baliffs, and parish priests, but now there is a life that surrounds them making what happens with Kiban and its Earl very different than what happens with Gadeiren and its Earl.

n most of Continental Europe East of the Rhine, in terms of proximity to England, starting at Flanders and spreading east, northeast, and south from there, quite often you'll find that the communities, any town large enough to have a stone wall for example, probably runs itself to at least some extent. <snip good summary>

The Kingdom of Bohemia is loosely controlled often by a foreign king and is dominated by radical heretics. <snip good summary>

This is much more engaging than the usual lord and his manor kind of setup, and it invites a host of engaging and fresh stories.

Harn is equally varied in its regions. As well as locales within those regions. As a result of Harn being a product of multiple authors working across decades in close coordination with two good teams of leaderships. While N. Robin Crossby established the overall structure deserves a lot of credit of making the basic elements interesting. The magic happens in the articles which expands the details.

As for my own stuff. I will let Tenfootpole speak for me.
Scourge of the Demon Wolf review.

I will have this out again in a revised version by summer.

I have another medieval adventure in the works as well called deceits of the russet lord. BedrockBrendan and Baulderstone both got to play in one of my playtest in that adventure.

The Deceit of the Russet Lord is an adventure involving star crossed lovers, corrupt monks, rebellious peasants, tyrannical lords, bloodthirsty orcs, and the faerie that orchestrated it all, the Russet Lord.

Yes, it is a rural village that is part of a monastery's estate with a tyrannical knight as the bailiff. A peasant boy runs away with the knight's daughter flames discontent with the fed-up peasants as the bailiff overreacts. The monks are fat and lazy due to the monastery containing a popular pilgrimage site and really can't be bothered. The default hook where the PCs are sent by the bishop means that what looks to be an investigation of corruption turns out to be something completely different.

Both adventures are set in what most would consider bog-standard stereotypical boring medieval local. My trick is that I think about it as if I am there interacting with the locals and hearing their troubles and joys. When you focus on that it turns out things are not so bog-standard after all. Watching the writing style of Harn change over the years helped me with that a lot.

Thrown into that the machinations of a powerful winter faerie lord then you have a medieval adventure with a lot of interesting complications and challenges.

 

[Peter Von Danzig]

It sounds interesting, and it certainly sounds like you made it work.