My name is Boris, and
this is my blog, Bardiches and Bathhouses.
The main purpose of this blog is to explore synergies between two long-term
interests of mine – role playing games and historical sociology. To me, a great
part of the attraction of role-playing games, especially in the fantasy or
historical genres, has always resided in the exploration of worlds different
from our own, yet ones resonant with our social experience. While I might enjoy
pure tactics, dungeon crawls, and more personal and psychological
investigations of character, I like the thrill of adventuring and interacting
in a rich, sophisticated setting most of all – one that is worthy of suspending
disbelief. Although fantasy literature and related genres do provide useful elements
of such a setting, in most cases, I tend to draw on sociohistorical analyses of
the past, and anthropological or literary studies of the worlds of meaning such
societies constructed, simply because real societies and real-world legends
stood the test of time, and offer the best models to utilize when extrapolating
fantasy worlds and settings.
I sometimes ask why,
when people design settings for campaigns, they tend to start with complete world
maps. After all, most people in premodern societies did not conceive of the
world as a globe, and knew little, if anything, about other continents. If we
are designing a setting where magic and planes of existence are “real”, why not
experiment with a flat world, which has an edge from which one can tumble? Or a
world that rests on three giant elephants atop a giant tortoise? The typical
response is that yes, one can do that in a fantasy world, but it is much easier
to assume that it exists on a planet more or less like ours, for the sake of
simplicity, so that the poor GM does not have to invent the laws of physics
from scratch. It is a good counter: if you want people to take your world
seriously, and if you want characters to be able to make tactical plans in
light of common sense expectations, then it is better and easier to take the
workings of a real planet Earth, which modern physical science has revealed to
us in the last several centuries, as a baseline, instead of trying to reinvent
the wheel. However, when it comes to subject matters that are commonly investigated
by the social sciences, people are
much more willing to throw caution to the wind. Want to have evil races? No
problem! Special ops teams based on a highly technical division of labor
available for hire in every town? Sure, why not? Economies based on extracting
buried hordes from dragon caves? Come on – we’re not playing Papers and
Paychecks here! Magic that just “exists”, without any form of social
regulation? Who cares, if everyone is having fun? But although most people are
unaware of this, the unwillingness to take systems of social organization
seriously at the same time as demanding that worlds should have “normal”
natural laws has nothing natural about it, but is the product of how knowledge
is ordered in our own society. Natural and physical sciences are respected for
telling us what is “real”; the social and historical disciplines –
significantly less so. But if you are playing in a fantasy settings that, at
their best, are created to model medieval societies, this denigration of social
knowledge makes very little sense, and it detracts from worlds that could be
significantly more interesting if questions of their social organization were
taken more seriously. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who plays fantasy
RPGs should be obsessed with these questions. But we continue to return to
Middle Earth because its societies have well-developed philologies and
histories, and we return to Westeros because George Martin designed it to have
a credible economy, and a credible states system. Similarly, GMs know how
societies in their world work are GMs whose worlds provide an immersive
experience. They are also GMs who can make good decisions about what non-player
characters in their world do and say on the fly. Games are not books, but the
best games reach for the level of sophistication that books are expected to
have.
Toward this end, some
examples of issues I would like to explore in this blog are:
·
The social
character of “adventurers”
·
The
political configurations of the “typical” fantasy setting
·
Social
regulation and hierarchies in worlds of “actually existing magic”
·
How
fantasy societies would be impacted by some people having the capacity to bring
others back from the dead
·
The social
and economic impact of trade in magical materials
The name of this blog,
Bardiches and Bathhouses, reflects a
longstanding project to design a fantasy world that extrapolates Northern and
Inner Eurasian (particularly Russian) historical and folkloric elements, rather
than those of Western-Latin Europe, that still serves as fodder for most
fantasy world construction in gaming and literature. Sometimes, the posts will
deal with the specific elements of this world, which I will call “Lukomorye”.
Sometimes, I will post material about other settings I am thinking about or
running games in. I will occasionally write about “systems” or rule variants
concerning combat, interaction, and exploration, as well as reviews of gaming
materials, books, and aspects having to do with my life and interests outside
of RPGs. I hope to contribute something which people in the community (and
beyond) will find interesting, thought-provoking, and at best, stimulating to
their own world-building endeavors.
