Klibbix!
Depraved Necromancer
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I'd love to play in either of these campaigns.
I wish they had gone somewhere!
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I'd love to play in either of these campaigns.
I'm re-skinning a game to be set following the 5th Dragoon Guards in the Iberian Peninsula. Basically, "On the Road to Salamanca." My focus is to have players get into the trials & tribulations of the soldiers between the battle phases of the game. Based loosely on the Richard Sharpe series, but with the British Cavalry.
Thanks, I'll take a look. Salamanca is about as far I plan on going with this project, but reading about a light dragoon would help.Allan Mallinson has written a Sharpe-like series of historical novels following the career of British cavalry officer Matthew Hervey of the (fictional) 6th Light Dragoons. Most of them are set later than the period you're interested in, but the sixth and seventh books (Rumours of War and An Act of Courage) contain a lot of flashbacks to Hervey's time as a young cornet during the Peninsular War.
If I recall correctly, the sixth book's flashbacks take place during the retreat to Corunna in 1809, while the seventh covers the Battle of Talavera in 1809 and the Siege of Badajoz in 1812.
Well then, glad to have been an inspiration!
One thing I could definitely use for that campaign, and I suspect might be useful to Klibbix! , would be maps. I can sort of get by on maps with rough political borders and google maps, but it's difficult to know how accurate the road network is to old roads (in Italy sometimes remarkably close) as well as to remember to eyeball in the extent of say the Pontine marshes, now drained. Plus the cities were smaller and some settlements didn't even exist back then. Does anyone know of any good resources, either online or in books, with good, gamable maps of renaissance/early modern Italy?
It was intended for use not by the central political power of the state but by the landed nobility and bourgeois who liked to hunt in the coastal areas of Lazio. The map appears to have been the result of detailed on-site inspections and partial measurements, which allowed Volpaia to give a detailed picture of the landscape and man-made features of the territory. It pays particular attention to towers, inns, farmhouses and other rural buildings, ancient ruins, springs, roads, and wild woodland areas, which are clearly distinguished from cultivated land. It covers an area that runs from Arrone and Ariccia to well past Rome and is further enhanced by bucolic scenes of rural life involving hunters, fishermen, peasants, shepherds, and travelers. For a long time this was the unchallenged model for the image of the region.
Osprey's really showing up a lot on my radar recently!
It does seem up my alley, I’ll have a look at it!Osprey has a Man-at-Arms title, The Venetian Empire, 1200-1670, written by David Nicolle with plates by Christopher Rothero, if you're interested.
I found this overview map (can't link to the site I got it from, it's suddenly giving me a trojan warning) of Italy in the 16th-18th century, which shows political divisions post Italian wars but with the bigger cities marked, as well as rivers. Unfortunately, no roads, marshes or mountains. Not great quality, but there is a pdf that is much more zoomable.Most of the resources I know are for city plans. One place to start would be the Map History/History of Cartography website, section 12a: Images of early maps on the web 12a. Continental Europe. This lists a number of websites for Italy, though clicking on some of them led me to some broken links or statements that the page had been retired.
According to Leonardo Rombai, "Cartography in the Central Italian States from 1480 to 1680," in the online History of Cartography published by the University of Chicago (volume 3, part 1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, link here), one place to start would be the printed map Il paese di Roma (1547) by Eufrosino della Volpaia. According to Rombai:
The map was republished, with a lengthy introduction by Thomas Ashby (unfortunately in Italian), in 1914. The University of Heidelberg has digitized the book and you can view it or download it; the link for the first page is https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/piante_roma_app2/0001/image . The actual maps appear in the appendix at the end of the book. This is what part of the map looks like, though I've shrunk the image a good deal--it was 3.1 MB in the original:
View attachment 33714
I found this overview map (can't link to the site I got it from, it's suddenly giving me a trojan warning) of Italy in the 16th-18th century, which shows political divisions post Italian wars but with the bigger cities marked, as well as rivers. Unfortunately, no roads, marshes or mountains. Not great quality, but there is a pdf that is much more zoomable.
I found this overview map (can't link to the site I got it from, it's suddenly giving me a trojan warning) of Italy in the 16th-18th century, which shows political divisions post Italian wars but with the bigger cities marked, as well as rivers. Unfortunately, no roads, marshes or mountains. Not great quality, but there is a pdf that is much more zoomable.
View attachment 33745
Klibbix! When researching for my Mythic Constantinople games I lapped up almost everything Osprey published on Byzantium and some of the stuff about the relevant Italian city states (Genoa, Venice and some of the more general books covering the peninsula) just in case my players headed west. However they picked up n the vampire threat and show no signs of leaving the city. However I can recommend the Osprey stuff as providing enough background in a general way to cover most of what a player might be interested in and which would give sufficient background to provide a sense of being there.
I can recommend this Medieval Baltic book, although I haven't used it for a game.
And I see there is now a second volume.
If anyone knows of a good book about hanseatic cities, especially with a focus on daily life I'd love to know.
Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law: Trading Routes and the Development of Commercial Law, Brill (2020)
As far as resources on Renaissance Venice go, it occurs to me that I'm not sure what period precisely Klibbix! is interested in. It used to be common in English-language writing on Renaissance Italy to see the French invasion of 1494 as marking the end of the era, with maybe a generation or so after that included, but lately more books on the Italian Renaissance extend the label until 1559, or even 1599. So I'll assume anything from the later 1300s through the 1500s is fair game.
There is a huge volume of stuff written about the occult in this period, though not as much as one might expect specifically about Italy and in English. Here are a few titles that occur to me:
- Wayne Schumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 1972). This is an older book, and in some ways quite dated. Schumaker felt that he had to provide arguments against at least some of the ideas or practices he described, like astrology, and the chapter on witchcraft is far behind current scholarship. But the provides a decent introduction to basic elements of astrology, alchemy, and Hermeticism. The chapter on 'White Magic' is basically a summary of the texts of Giambattista Della Porta on natural Magic, Marsilio Ficino on astral magic, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa on ceremonial magic. These are less valuable now than they were back in the 1970s, because translations of those works are easily available in English, but I remember leaning pretty heavily on Schumaker when I first ran a game based in the Renaissance.
- Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008). Most of Clarke's scholarship dealt with 19th and 20th-century occulta, but this is a nice overview of the whole field with chapters on "Italian Renaissance Magic and Cabala," and "Planetary and Angel Magic in the Renaissance." It also provides an introduction to Paracelsus, if you want to include his ideas, and to Rosicrucianism. The latter is a 17th-century development, of course, but if the Rosicrucian origin myth were true, the group would have existed in the 1400s and 1500s as well.
- D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Warburg Institute, 1958). Quite old, but one of the classics for 'high' magic in the Renaissance and much of it focuses on Italian thinkers. It's fairly tough reading, IIRC. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964) is another classic, though Yates' overall thesis on the relationship between Hermeticism and the scientific revolution hasn't held up that well. Ingrid Rowland published a very readable biography, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (University of Chicago Press, 2008), though it doesn't spend all that much time on his ideas about magic. A recent book that deals with Ficino and Hermeticism at length is Brian Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Despite its sweeping title, most of the book is dedicated to Ficino's magical ideas, their sources, and their reception. Copenhaver is one of the top scholars of this material, and of Renaissance philosophy in general, and the book assumes you know a good deal; it's also quite discursive.
- For astrology in this society, there is Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life (Routledge, 1983), though I think (particularly for gaming purposes) you'd be better served by Anthony Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Harvard University Press, 1999). Grafton gives a fair introduction to the underlying ideas behind astrology, but also depicts the various things a practicing astrologer might do.
- Witchcraft has an enormous, and constantly growing, bibliography, but there is less than one might think about witchcraft in Italy written in English, maybe because witch-trials were actually fairly rare in the peninsula. One reasonable place to start might be Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Not all of this deals with Italy, to be sure, but a fair number of the chapters do, including one on "The Struggle of the Inquisition with Venice" that might be particularly helpful. Matteo Duni, Under the Devil's Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy (Syracuse University at Florence, 2007) deals with popular magical traditions as well as witchcraft, and concludes with some primary sources. Another source which is well worth a read is Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Penguin, 1983), which deals with the odd type of popular magician known as the benandanti. In practical terms, they were magical healers, but they had an elaborate myth to justify their powers, which involved them going in spirit form four times yearly to fight battles against witches; if the benandanti won, then good weather and fertility were ensured for that quarter of the year. They were found in the Udine, not far from Venice, and so might be good fodder for your game. Ginzburg likened them to shamans found elsewhere and argued that they were a survival of ancient fertility cults, but I don't think his argument has won over that many people. Guy Gavriel Kay used the benandanti in Tigana, with the serial numbers filed off, of course.
One really good resource for maps of early modern Europe in general are the atlas published by Braun and Hogenberg ('civitates orbis terrarum'). You can buy a facsimile pretty cheap - it's small so the images are not big but it's really cool. In particular they provide maps of hundreds of cities. Many of these are also online, for example, this is their map of Rome:Another good place to look for online maps is the edmaps.com site. Their page Historical Maps of Italy gives a lot of links to other sites and just to maps. For the region around Rome, they provide a link to the very neat Cartographia storica di Roma e provincia page, which includes reproductions of a lot of old maps of the region. You might be interested in Forlani (1563), Mercator (1589), Widman (1666), or some of the others. It might be possible to find higher-resolution images of these maps elsewhere, too.
For all of Italy, some good links seem to be:
- Italy after the Peace of Lodi (1454), from Reginald Lane-Poole's Historical Atlas of Modern Europe (1900); this is very zoomable.
- Italy, c. 1490, from the Cambridge Modern History's atlas volume (1912).
- Italy in the 16th and first half of the 17th Century, in Italian.
- Italy at the end of the 16th Century, again from the Cambridge Modern History (1912).
Just to clarify, are those scholarly works, or RPG-related ones? I recently purchased two RPG books on the Medieval Baltic!Hi, I am a historical researcher out of the HEMA community, I've written two books on the Medieval Baltic
Welcome to the Pub, Peter Von Danzig ...as a (somewhat lapsed) HEMAist as well, I thought your screen name sounded familiar!
Just to clarify, are those scholarly works, or RPG-related ones? I recently purchased two RPG books on the Medieval Baltic!
I have those two books. Very cool! Definitely plenty there to set up a rpg campaign.They are history books for HEMA practitioners, They are not academic books, though they could be. I'd just have to add about 50 more pages of citations. But RPG gamers and other people use them as well, so we may be speaking of the same books. I sell them through historical fencing distributors, and also via DriveThruRpg. But there are no game rules or anything like that in these books, just history, a lot of primary sources. Basically a two volume encyclopedia of Central -Northern Europe . So hopefully if you did buy them, you won't be disappointed by that, we tried to make it clear!
I also publish historical TTRPG books, (also on DriveThru) but that is a separate thing.
One really good resource for maps of early modern Europe in general are the atlas published by Braun and Hogenberg ('civitates orbis terrarum'). You can buy a facsimile pretty cheap - it's small so the images are not big but it's really cool. In particular they provide maps of hundreds of cities. Many of these are also online, for example, this is their map of Rome:
... and there is a very high-res scan of it on Wikimedia Commons here
This is their map of Venice
Some of their 'maps' (like many in this era) are more of a side view like this map of Trier. But these can be quite evocative for gaming IMO.
Thank youI have those two books. Very cool! Definitely plenty there to set up a rpg campaign.
Thank you so much for all you’ve posted in this thread! I’ve got some reading to do…
Well, these are the two I've got. And I haven't found any others on this topic on Drivethru, so I guess it's them that you mean...They are history books for HEMA practitioners, They are not academic books, though they could be. I'd just have to add about 50 more pages of citations. But RPG gamers and other people use them as well, so we may be speaking of the same books. I sell them through historical fencing distributors, and also via DriveThruRpg. But there are no game rules or anything like that in these books, just history, a lot of primary sources. Basically a two volume encyclopedia of Central -Northern Europe . So hopefully if you did buy them, you won't be disappointed by that, we tried to make it clear!
I also publish historical TTRPG books, (also on DriveThru) but that is a separate thing.
Welcome.One really good resource for maps of early modern Europe in general are the atlas published by Braun and Hogenberg ('civitates orbis terrarum'). You can buy a facsimile pretty cheap - it's small so the images are not big but it's really cool. In particular they provide maps of hundreds of cities.
Well, these are the two I've got. And I haven't found any others on this topic on Drivethru, so I guess it's them that you mean...
DriveThruRPG
www.drivethrurpg.com
DriveThruRPG
www.drivethrurpg.com
For the record, I'm not disappointed in them regardless of whether they're the ones you wrote.
Welcome.
I've used a few of these maps for my campaign set in Terrinoth in lieu of "proper" maps to give my players a sense of the layout of the cities their characters visit. I would just say that the part with the buildings with the pointy roofs are where the wizards live, the fort in the background is where the city's guards are headquartered, and the shorter buildings on this side of the river are where the poorer people lived, while that district with the wide plazas is the merchant district, etc.
Then allow me to compliment you on the quality of your work. Though the 50 pages of sources might have been useful, too!yes those are the ones. Also available through our website and (printed copies) via Purpleheart armory. They will be POD on DriveThru in a few weeks.
Browsing through the Nuremberg Chronicla now, but the first thing I noted was the title of the last chapter...which is going to make some people I know laugh and cry!yes they are quite good for atmosphere, they make for lovely fairy tale or fantasy settings. And you aren't too far off the mark with how you broke down who lives where in terms of the historical towns.
Aside from Braun and Hogenberg, who have ~ 200 maps (in two different editions of their Atlas, so sometimes there are two or more images of each town) there are several other good period maps and portraits of towns and castles. Some are very similar to B & H, for example this lovely map of Amsterdam by Cornelis Anthonisz from 1538 (note how similar to the map of Venice above with the canals)
Another earlier (15th Century) source with a ton of maps, albeit more crudely drawn as they are woodcuts used in an early printed book, is the Nuremberg Chronicle. They also give you kind of a side view.
Here is their depiction of Venice
This is their depiction of Nuremberg itself
Also the entire Nuremberg Chronicle itself is available in English translation in a searchable format, incredibly. Most of the writing is in a very contemporary voice, so to speak, and sometimes quite amusing, with a slight note of sarcasm. Very useful resource for Late Medieval Europe. and another that you can mine almost endlessly for fantasy content with a little blurring around the edges.
Then allow me to compliment you on the quality of your work. Though the 50 pages of sources might have been useful, too!
Browsing through the Nuremberg Chronicla now, but the first thing I noted was the title of the last chapter...which is going to make some people I know laugh and cry!
I was referring to your statement from before: "They are not academic books, though they could be. I'd just have to add about 50 more pages of citations."There is a quite extensive bibliography in there, especially for primary sources. We actually had about 10 more pages of footnotes that we lost due a computer crash and subsequent document recovery. Sad story....
Yes, and especially the fact that it's called "Sarmatian lands".You mean the chapter on Poland?
yes, I agree, and well, it basically is. Certainly it's been the basis of four peer reviewed academic articles and about 15 academic lectures at various universities and museums.I was referring to your statement from before: "They are not academic books, though they could be. I'd just have to add about 50 more pages of citations."
And my first thought was that it a) would make them quotable in other works and b) that it would be very fun to run a game and tell people that your setting book is an "academic work".
Yes, and especially the fact that it's called "Sarmatian lands".
Well...I use PDFs, the additional weight wouldn't even register!yes, I agree, and well, it basically is. Certainly it's been the basis of four peer reviewed academic articles and about 15 academic lectures at various universities and museums.
As I mentioned, we had a lot more citations, and lost almost ten pages of them, I've started to put them back in but it's a tedious and time consuming process. If we had all 50 pages of those it would also add about 25% to the printing cost and make the already fairly large and heavy printed version a bit too thick, we might have to reconfigure it into three volumes instead of two.
Amusingly, I thought about Osprey, but decided not to mention it, since your book actually seems aimed at a different market. But then Osprey are publishing RPGs these days....But the distinction I was making is, the bibliography is still in there, and the book itself quotes extensively from the sources in direct translations, it's just we only have a bout 10% of the citations we'd need to call it an academic work. So in this sense it's a bit like an encyclopedia sized Osprey book.
Yes, but I just sent it to a Polish friend and suggested he should use it to make a fantasy setting with proto-Sarmatian outriders and proto-German knights...This is the Germans kind of mis-understanding the Poles own nascent mythology / creation myth, which had significant political angles, which they called "Sarmatism". I think the idea of Sarmatism was to create a foundation myth for Poland which made them clearly distinct from both German / French Latin Europe and Russian / Ruthenian origins.
Sarmatism - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Well, in Spain of the same period the hidalgos, which were the kinda-analogue of the szlachtichi (technically noble, but lower nobility) were also very numerous. I seem to remember about 10%?Sarmatism had it's own fashion and slang and everything. I also defined the unique nature of the (proportionally very large) lower nobility in Poland, the szlachta. In Poland and parts of Lithuania the (technical) nobility were as much as 1/5 of the population. Compared to most other parts of Europe where it was more like 1% or say, in France, 0.01%
Szlachta - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
yes, it's not something you'd need to worry about, I shouldn't gripe about such things in public, but it's tricky to maintain separate versions of the same book.Well...I use PDFs, the additional weight wouldn't even register!
Originally, an Osprey type book was kind of what I was going for. And initially (before I published) it was a small pamphlet sized book like one of theirs. As the book grew however and we got hold of some nice primary sources (like an English translation of the annales of Jan Długosz) a professor friend convinced me to start putting in heavy layers of citations. Then we had the computer mishap and now I'm back to taking books down off the shelf and looking up page numbers putting a few more in every so often.Amusingly, I thought about Osprey, but decided not to mention it, since your book actually seems aimed at a different market. But then Osprey are publishing RPGs these days....
Some Poles I know still believe in Sarmatism!Yes, but I just sent it to a Polish friend and suggested he should use it to make a fantasy setting with proto-Sarmatian outriders and proto-German knights...
That's a good point about Spain. They are an interesting case in that for example they never really created a burgher estate like they did in Central Europe, but rather made prominent town citizens into a special kind of petty nobility. France did the same thing but much later (reign of Louis XIV). This is one reason why 'bourgeois' has a kind of snooty connotation while 'bürger' has sort of a stodgy connotation.Well, in Spain of the same period the hidalgos, which were the kinda-analogue of the szlachtichi (technically noble, but lower nobility) were also very numerous. I seem to remember about 10%?
Either way, I like this kind of settings. A member of the lower nobility, without a taler in his pocket for a second day in a row, but walking proudly, insisting on his honour being preserved, and not showing the pangs of hunger, is a real figure I like.
Maybe I'm just weird that way, but whatever. This is the right side for us weirdos!
No, I appreciated the explanation. I was just saying why it never occurred to me!yes, it's not something you'd need to worry about, I shouldn't gripe about such things in public, but it's tricky to maintain separate versions of the same book.
...remembering how writing the bibliography for my Master's degree's work was the hardest part of writing the whole thing, I can only empathize!Originally, an Osprey type book was kind of what I was going for. And initially (before I published) it was a small pamphlet sized book like one of theirs. As the book grew however and we got hold of some nice primary sources (like an English translation of the annales of Jan Długosz) a professor friend convinced me to start putting in heavy layers of citations. Then we had the computer mishap and now I'm back to taking books down off the shelf and looking up page numbers putting a few more in every so often.
Yes, it's an approach I appreciate. I admit I haven't followed the bibliography yet (nor finished reading it, for that matter, for various reasons...), but remember, we were discussing your statement. OK, at this point I'm repeating my previous post, so I'm just going to cut this topic short.But the bibliography is there, and the text is full of direct quotes and imagery of the actual "thing" under discussion, or period artwork. I like to let the sources speak for themselves as much as possible.
I know, but he ain't one of them. It's a joke that makes sense in context and for the audience it was intended for...so, like many other jokes, I guess (including some Shakespearean ones).Some Poles I know still believe in Sarmatism!
Yup, it's even the X century, 966. Though I'd note that the "fairly late" part still made me chuckle... that's only a century after my own people (864 AD) and in the same century as some of the earliest attempts to Christianize Scandinavia. 10th century was the time of King Haakon the Good, and he didn't exactly win popularity contests with those attempts...That's a good point about Spain. They are an interesting case in that for example they never really created a burgher estate like they did in Central Europe, but rather made prominent town citizens into a special kind of petty nobility. France did the same thing but much later (reign of Louis XIV). This is one reason why 'bourgeois' has a kind of snooty connotation while 'bürger' has sort of a stodgy connotation.
In Poland, as I guess you know, what happened was they converted to Christianity fairly late (9th C) and were right away involved in fighting on the frontier with pagans, steppe nomads and others. So the feudalization process was never completed, and rather than being disarmed (as so many were in say, France) many of the old tribal clans had to be recruited directly into the fighting, and were thus able to bargain for rights. hence the Szlachta.
Well, I think it's for much the same reasons as in Poland - and it lead to the other similarity, I'd argue. I mean, the Reconquista was kinda similar to the "fighting with pagans, steppe nomads and others" and probably created a similar dynamic. Too, it was probably better not to tell returning veterans from the Reconquista that they should disarm and stop wearing swords...purely my speculation, of course!But as you note in Spain, and I think Portugal, and in fact in many other smaller regions around Europe, there were many exceptions to the ideal of the feudal world set forth in the French notion of the three estates.
Yes. Feodalism is the system of exceptions, wasn't it?In Central Europe and Italy you had the burghers. In Scandinavia and Switzerland, parts of Germany and Lithuania and so on, in addition to burghers, the bauern or peasants retained so many rights that the wealthier ones were effectively gentry. Even in England you had the yeoman farmers who were the backbone of their longbow archers, and a 'gentleman' mercantile class in the towns.
Well...I have almost no use for "zero to hero" and I have other systems and settings for "fantasy superhero", when I want to play it. But the majority of my characters have been firmly in the "real people" camp - even those that were fantasy to begin with.Yeah, it is more fun for me too. I think most people really prefer the "zero to hero" and "fantasy superhero" type genres.
Yeah, that's me as well. See my examples, above...I prefer those kind of characters.But for me, I like the world of the only slightly better than the ordinary folks. People who still do have to worry about where they are going to eat tomorrow and where they will find shelter to lay their weary head at night... and who can't be certain they can kill any robber who accosts them on the road.
Yup, kinda like Aquelarre - another game I want to run some day (because I know the odds that someone is going to run it for me and I don't like them).This is the basis for the great "low fantasy" fiction which was also important in the genres which influenced RPGs: Jack Vance, the original Robert E Howard Conan novels, Fritz Leiber and so on. These are the kinds of stories I personally find most fun. And these are the kinds which you can really sink your teeth into in an historical setting. We also assume a little big of magic and mystery in our 'historical' setting, but based essentially on what the people of the period believed was true and real: Mysterious angels and celestial spirits, trolls in the forest, necromancy of scholars, the cantrips of hedge witches and cunning folk, the fey, the powers of saintly relics and shrines, and of course, demons and devils, rather than modern high fantasy tropes.
Indeed. Though I don't mind princesses and palaces, my players often prefer having that freedom.You can of course set up a game among princes and royal palaces, but there are a few more constraints you have to deal with in that kind of setting. The Hidalgo without a thaler in his pocket has many worries, but he can pretty much go in any direction he wants!
You're welcome.Thank you for the kind words sir.
I see you know your fencing masters!
Sure, but I'm Bulgarian. And for our part of the world, 9th century was actually pretty early...though we got translations to Bulgarian within the same century, long before most places that were "firmly part of the Roman empire".When i say converted 'fairly late' I mean relative to those places which were firmly part of the Roman Empire. It's perhaps more of an issue in the Anglophone world. The British tend to assume that everyone was a Christian - except the Vikings - as soon as they were, which was comparatively early. American perception of history is inherited from the British, for better and worse.
Never played it yet, but I love Aquelarre, they made an English translation of it, which I bought in PDF, though I haven't read it yet (500+ pages!)
Well yes, my interests aren't actually towards the late medieval period - I much prefer 12-13th century and before. But I entertain diversions in later eras as well...much like the way I also play and run games in Ancient China.I also think that high medieval or even Carolingian period are equally interesting times to the late medieval; the advantage of the latter though is that there is an immense quantity of records and written resources... and art.. which really helps flesh it out. As long as you stay away from Scotland!
People might misunderstand you, though...I want to frame these and put them on my wall