Historical Versimilitude for Fun and Profit

Some time ago, I wrote a post explaining the phenomenon of Flintstonism - the idea of ostensibly setting a story in historical era (or something resembling a historical era), but with the conceptions of modern times. As I stated there, there's nothing wrong with that - it can make topics more relatable and more relevant for modern-day readers, or in this case, players. However, if you would like your ancient or medieval fantasy game worlds to feel more authentically historical - or just add some color to your setting - here's a few simple examples of things you can play with. For each, I've included a couple of adventure seeds to show how you can exploit these differences for interesting gaming sessions (and introduce them to players in the process), but of course, the possibilities are limitless.

A note before we begin: these are obviously complex subjects, and there was immense variation between different eras and regions. This isn't meant to be an educational piece, more of just some examples of historical details and practices that can create fun opportunities in an RPG and allow for worldbuilding. Those more interested in the subject are encouraged to research further. 

Inns

On my last post, the esteemed Solomon VK of World Building and Woolgathering (a blog worthy of a look!) described how he forced his PCs to share a room at the inn in order to shake up their expectations of what inns were like. That's a good example of using historical versimilitude to provide new challenges in gameplay.

The inn is a staple of medieval fantasy, and it's particularly close to the heart of many a gaming group - "you all meet at an inn" is such an oft-used start to a campaign that many DMs have gone out of their way to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, the inns most D&D players think of have more in common with a modern-day hotel than anything from the Middle Ages. Most often, every patron will have a private room with their own bed, or perhaps two beds to a room, enough for everyone to comfortably split up. It's the sort of convenience we're used to - but your average medieval peasant would likely find it an incredible luxury.

Some inns might have private rooms, particularly larger ones in larger cities or well-traveled roads. But it'd be more common for patrons to retire to a common room with multiple beds, and often, they'd pack as many people into each of those beds as possible. Sharing a bed with a complete stranger seems unthinkable now, but when space and money was scarce it was simply the most practical thing to do. Even then, sometimes travelers wouldn't even have that - after the bar on the ground floor closed, the tables would be turned into sleeping spaces for the patrons. With the idea of the quaint, rustic, comfortable inn so ingrained in the popular imagination, forcing a party to cram onto the same mattress as a couple of strangers is sure to shake up expectations, and would likely provide for a memorable experience - certainly more so than the everpresent inn cliches would.

For that matter, the concept of inns as a discrete business was far less common than those raised on RPGs would be likely to believe. Many times, an inn was simply the house of one of the townspeople who opened their doors for travelers, who shared the same living space and accommodations. Other times, travelers would have to settle for sleeping in a barn. This might seem risky, but it was generally agreed to be a serious crime to betray hospitality, and many cultures respected this; for an excellent exploration of the concept of the guest-right in a fantasy setting, check out this post from Rosalind Chapman. Another interesting detail is that the conversations between travelers and their hosts were often how news spread in times before mass media and widespread literacy - which means it would be a great opportunity to sprinkle in rumors and adventure hooks, or even have the exploits of the PCs grow into tall tales. Perhaps their stories of recovering treasure from a sleeping dragon's hoard pass from their host to others, drawing the attention of curious villagers who end up drawing that dragon's ire!

For more information, Annwn Magazine published a quite extensive review on the subject, available here.

Adventure Seeds

• At an inn, the PCs must share a communal bed with a few other patrons - one of whom is an old enemy of theirs from the past. Are they plotting something, or will they respect the guest-right? Can they be trusted?
• When their travels take them to a remote village far from any major roads, the PCs find that there hasn't been enough traffic to justify the construction of an inn - and the townsfolk are slow to trust outsiders. How will the party win their good graces?

Feudalism

If there's any concept ubiquitous in studies of the Middle Ages, it's the role of the feudal system. The topic is too broad for me to cover here; I'm just a DM who runs a gaming blog as a hobby, and you shouldn't expect an in-depth exploration of a concept that displayed great variation from time to time and from place to place. Instead, I'm just going to focus on the broader concepts of the feudal system, and how they can be used for gaming.

Many settings seem to assume a modern understanding of how geopolitics work - the law of the land is absolute, and directly centralized from the capital. But that's something that often requires complex infrastructure in order to work; you need to make sure people can get from the capital to any point in the kingdom in a reasonable time, and without important details of an order being lost along the way, to ensure communications stay consistent. Even the ancient empires of Rome, Persia, and China had to overcome this obstacle. And in medieval Europe (along with other areas, most famously Japan), local rulers had a lot more sway. As long as they were paying their tithes, they were essentially left to their own devices.

For that matter, the term "capital" would more accurately describe wherever the king was at the time rather than a permanent residence, but that's another matter entirely.

Essentially, at the very bottom of the ladder, you had your serfs and peasants. They were subject to a lord (typically a noble, but sometimes a clergyman), who they supplied with a tithe, or tax, in wealth or goods in exchange for protection. That lord would then be subject to other lords higher up the pyramid - counts, dukes, and the like - and ultimately everyone was subject to the king. Again, this is a gross oversimplification, but it does the job for my purposes.

Many settings assume some sort of feudalism in the background, but it rarely actively comes into play beyond a few NPCs having noble titles. The fun part of feudalism is that it lets you have both sweeping courtly intrigue that could impact the fate of entire kingdoms and independent points-of-light-in-a-sea-of-darkness, depending on which strata of society you focus on. The Lunar Lands might look like a number of large unified countries on the map, but when you zoom in, each nobles' holding is its own autonymous statelet. This expands the range of stories you can explore. If you want to tell stories of ambitious nobles plotting within the courts, you simply focus on what the king is doing. If you want to make your villain an oppressive petty noble who subjects his people to brutal taxation in order to serve his own corruption, you make him a feudal lord under that same king, who may not necessarily approve of what he's doing, but then the king doesn't have reason to care as long as the wealth eventually gets to him.

In some places, it wasn't uncommon for feudal subjects to squabble among each other, even those under the same liege. Perhaps a lord wants to extend his reach by taking over some territory from a neighbor, either by sending men-at-arms or trying to persuade the subjects to swear alliegance to him instead. If you wanted to incorporate political shakeups into your setting, you can do so while still keeping the status quo more or less the same if they happen on the lower levels of the feudal ladder. If you use domain-level play, feudalism can also lead to a sense of progression as PCs build more and more favor with their betters, and may be granted greater and greater power as their domains expand, going from competing against frontier barons to exerting influence on the higher courts. The same lords they once worked for could even become their vassals, and may need to be called upon in times of need.

Adventure Seeds

• An ally of the PCs can't pay tithes to their lord, and now they risk being cut off from their protection - and with threats afoot, that's too great a risk to afford. Will the PCs solve the problem keeping them from their duties? Will they appeal to the lord instead?
• Two minor nobles covet each others' land, but they're both vassals to a count who would like things to stay peaceful. When one of them has his men disguise themselves as bandits to wage war under their masters' nose, will the PCs discover there's something bigger at play?

Law and Justice

Now this is a fun one. Not always fun for the people accused, of course, but the topic of justice in the ancient and medieval world is ripe for exploration. There were, of course, codified systems of law dating back even before Hammurabi, but their importance has often been overstated by historians and the general public alike (the Magna Carta, for instance, was specifically about royal authority over nobles, and several kings ignored it anyway). Often, laws were whatever the greatest authority decided upon. This ties into feudalism - if one of the duties of a lord was to provide safety and stability for his vassals, then dispensing the law was part of that.

Early in the Middle Ages, courts were typically held at a lord's...well, court. The accused and any relevant parties would be brought before him, or a magistrate appointed by him, and their sentence was determined accordingly, which would then be carried out by a reeve or baliff. This, of course, meant that lords were free to decide the law as they pleased. You could be fined for wearing clothes that were too fancy, or taxed for having a beard. There were some treaties that limited this to some degree at various times and places, but overall, it's a far cry from the consistent and agreed-upon laws modern people are used to. Strictly speaking, a corrupt lord who always ruled in the favor of his allies wasn't doing anything illegal, even if it was frowned upon. And, of course, this makes them very useful as villains, as anyone familiar with the Robin Hood mythos can tell you.

Towns, which would increasingly fall under the influence of guilds and councils of influential citizens, had their own laws - and as such, the law that held in one city might not apply to another. Some towns, for instance, prohibited the bearing of weapons unless they were "peace-bonded" with a leather strap to prevent them from being drawn from their scabbards. The Bergsburg Project, a community-sourced city supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, details one town square containing a stone that was once believed to control peoples' thoughts, so legally anything spoken by anyone touching the stone - no matter how seditious - cannot be punished. I love this. It's the exact sort of specific that seems like it could be a real medieval town law (I wouldn't be surprised if it was directly based on one). It's a concept I've stolen, and one that gets me thinking about what other silly local laws could exist in my setting.

In addition to how laws were decided, the ways in which they were enacted would also be unfamiliar to modern eyes. How many fantasy stories can you think of in which criminals were locked in a dungeon as part of their sentence? This is familiar to us in an era where incarceration is a common punishment for severe crimes, but in the actual Middle Ages, it was more likely that this would be done to keep the criminal from running away before their sentence could be determined. Actual punishments were more likely to involve public humiliation (eg. being put in the stocks to be pelted with rocks and vegetables), corporal punishment (having a hand cut off for theft), or both (being locked in a gibbet on the side of the road to starve). It may seem barbaric to us, but to people of the time, this was simply part of life.

One particularly interesting concept is that of trial by ordeal. In short, the accused would need to perform some sort of task, and based on their response, it would be determined if they were guilty or innocent. The idea was that if they were innocent, God would have intervened on their behalf. For example, if the accused could walk across hot coals without being hurt (or if their wounds healed within three days), they were innocent. And then, of course, you had trial by combat, in which whoever won a duel (either personally or by way of a champion - perhaps the PCs could find themselves filling in) were declared the winner of the dispute. In a fantasy setting, this could be expanded upon with the use of magic to ensure the ordeal works, or perhaps things truly do work by divine intervention!

Furthermore, we must discuss the concept of outlaws. The word originated from the fact that wanted criminals could be declared to legally be outside the law, and thus, anything done to them up to and including murder was legal. However, this did not apply to churches, which were considered to be under the authority of God, not whoever owned the land they were on - and thus, an outlaw would be protected as long as they stayed inside a church (hence the concept of sanctuary). There are a great many quirks to medieval and ancient laws that could translate into some great gaming material, and all of them help make a game world feel more distinct, immersive, and unlike the real modern world.

An Addendum: Since this post was first published, my players managed to exploit the medieval justice system beautifully in a way that used the established context of the setting to their advantage. When one of the PCs was on trial for murder and brought before the lord, the others - having appealed the god of death for a miracle to restore the victim to life - presented said victim alive and well. The lord had absolutely no response to this, as it wasn't a situation he would ever be prepared for...and so he pardoned everyone involved, because if he was unable to weigh in on the situation he had no choice but to concede that he had no authority to act upon it (he is, after all, the lord of the land, and if his word is law, how is the law to handle something he has no words for?). That was some brilliant thinking on their part, and it deserves a mention here to show what players can do with these tools on the table.

Adventure Seeds

• The PCs are in a village where the local cult of the cleric's patron deity practice a form of trial by ordeal - but the cleric finds they (or others they know should be) aren't protected. Has the village fallen out of favor with the god, or is it all a ruse to control the populace?
• An outlaw takes shelter in a temple, insisting that they're wanted for a crime they didn't commit. An angry mob has surrounded the temple waiting for them to emerge, and the priests are growing impatient. Can the PCs clear their name before the oath of sanctuary is broken?

I have many more subjects I would like to discuss, but this is getting to be a long post, so I'm cutting it in half here. Let me know how you've introduced aspects of historical culture into your games, or if there are any other topics I should cover!