Tékumel Shock Syndrome Turned Up to 11

I’ve moved to the ubersuburbs of Seattle recently, so far out you’ll probably need a boat to find me. (You could take a bridge, but that would probably be the long way around.) Thankfully, with the burgeoning popularity of D&D, it didn’t take me long to find a group. The first two people we talked to wanted to learn 5e, so 5e it is. (For now…)

I prefer bespoke campaigns and one of the players said he wanted to play a character with some Aztec-ish cultural aspects. Fine by me; they’ll be fantasy-Aztecs, naturally, probably with tamed dinosaurs and bronze if not iron tools, but I’ll also vet this stuff with the player since I don’t want him thinking I’m making fun of his ancestry.

While I was rolling this stuff around in my head, I came across this interesting article about setting your game shortly after some sort of systemic cultural and geo-political collapse. Neat stuff, and the author makes some good points. After all, that Common tongue had to come from somewhere, right?

More on that stuff later; in a post on G+, Kasimir “RPG Pundit” Urbanski chimed in about his true-to-history (but with the magic folks believed in at the time) setting, Lion & Dragon. Now, first off, Urbanski’s absolutely correct; a true-to-history medieval Europe is incredibly alien to modern suburbanites. If you’re looking for a truly different setting, you can’t go wrong with history. But the reason most folks play in pseudo-medieval RenFest fantasy is because everyone knows the lay of the land. The more alien you get, the harder it is for players to act and invest in the setting. I call this (unfairly to Empire of the Petal Throne, but it’s the first place I encountered this sort of thing) Tékumel Shock Syndrome. And while I’m sure Lion & Dragon is pretty cool, it’s something that’s going to show up in spades if you play there.

If I say we're playing a campaign inspired by the Arabian Nights and Orientalist paintings, that's pretty easy for players to wrap their heads around. I show some pictures, explain how camels differ from horses, everyone gives their character an exotic-sounding name, and we're off to the races.

If I say we're playing in a historically accurate Fatimid Caliphate, well, that's a bit tougher, but most folks in a Western suburban environment feels confident in their ignorance of what that means. So they’ll lean on the DM to help them flesh out the details. With some work and dedication, we could get a game rolling, and I imagine such a campaign would be a rewarding experience.

When you start talking about historical England during, for instance, the reign of Richard the Lionhearted, there’s no lack of cool adventuring opportunities, but it’s what people don’t know that they don’t know that’s going to cause trouble. They’re going to be a bit freaked out when told they have to witness their friend deflower his bride and possibly testify to the consummation in an ecclesiastic court, for instance. If they find an inn (which most towns won’t have; even a “tavern” was often a home where the missus had brewed a large pot beer that would look more like stew to modern eyes), they’ll almost certainly be sharing not only a room with strangers, but a bed. Most people live in literal one-room huts. In Scandinavia you might still have folks living in long houses, which are just multi-family one-room huts. (Yes, just one room. No interior doors or walls, so no privacy, no separate bed room, and in the winter you’ll have the animals in the house with you.) They’ll have read something about Magna Charta enshrining the whole “jury by peers” thing, but that’s during John’s reign, and even after that many medieval trials seem as nonsensical to modern eyes as Zak’s “trial by pie” thing.

In short, if you want to do historical correctly, it’s going to take time and effort and a lot of open-mindedness on everyone’s part to pull it off. But if you do, you’ll certainly have a campaign to brag about.

As for me, I’m thinking my Aztec-esque dinotopia is ruled by dragon demi-gods. ;)

The Right Tool for the Job

So lots of comments about shields and armour and weapons.

The thing about Western Europe was, they were constantly evolving their weapons and armour to outdo their neighbors, or last year’s models. The corollary to that is, every weapon was specifically built to handle a particular job. Sure, some were modified farm implements, but they kept being used because they proved to be useful.

Those polearms with all the hooks on them? Great for dragging enemies off their horses.

Polearms with hammers and axeblades on them, as well as maces, are great for mauling armour and concussing the folks inside with their heavy blows.

Single-handed swords suck at penetrating heavy armour, but are great against lightly armoured (or, even better, unarmoured) targets, where those long, sharp edges can leave really nasty gashes.

The axe, favored weapon of Richard the Lionhearted and Robert the Bruce, was a compromise between the two. The bearded axe could be hooked around the edge of a shield so you could pull it out of someone’s hands, or just jerk them around with it.

The flail could get around the shield entirely.

And so on. Different tools for different jobs. How do we model this in D&D? Not well, I’m afraid. Gygax’s weapon-vs.-armour-class table was one stab at it, but as I understand it, even he didn’t use it. The other options I can think of require rewriting the combat rules entirely, and end up looking something like the table-crazy Arms Law from Rolemaster.

Shields and Turtles

Oddysey is continuing her hate-on for the shield! Ok, seriously, she brings up some good points:

My understanding of older styles is that shields were mainly used when the sword was a heavier weapon that didn't allow for much finesse, and in large, well-trained units where each individual soldier's use of the shield contributed to the defense of the unit as a whole.

The "heavier" comment generally isn't true (most were actually lighter than the bastard swords she discusses in the previous paragraph) but the large unit stuff is. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to speak about medieval European swordsmanship because they kept changing things all the time. Vikings used shields in large part because most Joe-vikings didn't have body armour (and they did shield walls). Most mounted knights wanted shields because being on horseback made it hard to protect their left side. That lasted until the armour got good enough that the shield became redundant. The Spanish sword-and-buckler dude used his shield to get past the wall of sharp pointies surrounding a formation of pikemen so he could get to the soft, stab-able center. The story of medieval European arms and armour is one of constant flux and innovation, as warriors adapted their kit to the foes they expected to fight.

I think Oddysey nails it here, from a gaming perspective:

The main reason I think D&D doesn't favor shields remains that split between offensive and defensive strategies, and honestly it's a pretty good one -- more offense means shorter combats, and shorter combats means more time for the parts of the game that I find actually interesting.

A game with valuable defensive strategies is a game of interminably long combats. Low-level fights against weak armour tend to be pretty snappy; but pit your 2nd level fighters against guys in plate and be prepared for a whole lot of dice rolling: miss-miss-miss-miss... And that's in a fight where the only real defensive choice is which armour you put on before the fight starts. Imagine how ugly it could get if the goblins could form a shield wall or a turtle? I've often considered building a combat system around the rock-paper-scissors of thrust-parry-feint, but again, that sort of focus just makes combats take longer, and that's not at all what I want in my gaming these days.

Art by Albrecht Durer.

Naked Warrior

I’m going to pick on Brad over at Skull Crushing for Great Justice a little bit. Yeah, I know, he’s mostly complaining about cheesecake pin-up babes, but he also brings up bare midriffs, halter tops, and generally scantily-clad warriors.

Who’d go into a fight without even, at bare minimum, a shirt and pants?

Oh, I dunno… maybe these guys. Or these guys. Or maybe even these guys (NSFW).

Seriously, we in the west have an equipment fetish. We can’t imagine going into a fight without 40+ lbs of gear. The average US GI goes into combat today carrying more weight than the medieval knights did, and those guys expected horses to do most of the heavy-lifting.

On the other hand, nothing looks dumber than two warriors who are supposed to be from the same culture, but one is so heavily armoured that not an inch of flesh and showing, and the other is wearing a bikini. (Which is my pet peeve with Red Sonja of the comics. Wearing a chainmail bikini in a fight only makes sense if everyone else is dressed similarly. If you’re the only one doing it, it looks as insane as tights in bright, primary colors. Xp ) Frankly, I think this says more about male body issues than female ones, but that’s a post for another day. What turns on thee may not turn on me. So let’s focus on scantily clad warriors in RPGs, shall we?

Ohio Metal Militia is poking at this question for his Antediluvian Witchery setting. Fact is, your players probably share in the common equipment fetish, and it drives them to outfit their characters with the most effective equipment they can get, and to the Abyss with looking cool. That’s only reasonable, which means if you want the PCs to dress “appropriately “ (and to not pwn everyone who does), you have to make these sartorial decisions make sense in your mechanics. How to do that?

1) Class Limits: this is the classic from the earliest days of the hobby. Magic-users can’t wear armour of any sort and still cast spells. Druids can’t wear metallic armours. Quick, easy, and to-the-point, though it can feel a bit “game-y” if you don’t work to justify it somehow.

2) Encumbrance: not only does the LotFP Weird Fantasy RPG include an easy way to track encumbrance, it makes it important, especially to thief characters. Most of the thiefy skills can’t be used if much encumbered, meaning your thief is either not going to be doing much other than searching for traps, or they’re not going to be wearing much armour.

3) Humidity: the panoply of the ancient Greek hoplite shrank a lot. By the time of Alexander’s march into Persia, the helmet had shrunk to expose the face, the shield was smaller, and the heavy bronze breastplate had been replaced with lighter Kevlar-like linen armour. Why? Because they were fighting on the shores of the freakin’ Mediterranean and didn’t want to get heat stroke. To simulate this in your RPG, say that folks in chain mail or heavier armour can fight for a number of rounds equal to their CON hit-point bonus without ill effect. After that, they suffer a -2 to all dice rolls. If the fight continues another equal number of rounds, they lose a hit point, and another for every additional equal number of rounds. Keep in mind that in most old school games, a round is a full minute. That’s a long time to be fighting in heavy armour in 80%+ humidity.

4) Buffs in the Buff: it’s been written that the Gaul warriors fought in the nude because they believed their sun god would give them strength and courage through the beams of the sun. These solar-powered scrappers exposed every inch of flesh to the invigorating sun beams to take full advantage of this gift. Unfortunately, in the real world, naked gaulish virility was no match for the Roman gladius. Fortunately, in your fantasy worlds, it actually can be. Combine a naked +2 to-hit and damage bonus with the humidity penalty above and folks will be shedding armour like they’re adventuring at Club Med.

5) Defensive Bonuses: you saw this first in the 1e monk, and later in 3e. In one version of WotC’s Star Wars RPG, things got “screwy” when high level characters were better protected by being nude than they were when wearing armour. Yeah, that makes no sense, but it does model what we see in the movies. Not my favorite option, but it works.

6) There is no Armour: your setting doesn’t have it. You’ll have to explain why, or your players or going to try to invent it.

7) Guns: the big plus with guns was that they punched holes through armour pretty handily. When I use firearms in my games, they do modest amounts of damage (1d6 to 2d8, more than enough to kill the average human in a single shot) but give big bonuses to hit or ignore armour. If there are enough of these in your setting, and you use any sort of encumbrance rule, people will ditch the armour as too much fuss and bother, just as they did in the real world. Again, not my favorite way to go, but perfectly fitting for a Sword-and-Planet world. Though now you might have to justify why anyone bothers with a sword.

UPDATE: Bree Yark! suggests:

Here are a couple of options in addition to what you've listed:

#1. Limit the kinds of armor available based upon the law of the land. For example, it could be the case that only members of the nobility are allowed to wear plate armor. Anyone else found wearing or even in possession of plate armor will face the wrath of the king.

#2. Change armor to damage reduction. D&D uses AC as an abstract composite of how hard you are to hit, and how hard it is to inflict damage on a successful blow. You could separate these two things.

The less you are encumbered & the better your DEX score, the better your AC is (making you harder to hit). On the other hand, armor increases your encumbrance, making you easier to hit (weakens your AC), but you subtract a certain number of points from each hit, meaning weaker hits do no damage.

For example: Leather could provide 1 point of damage reduction, chain mail 2 pts, and plate 3 pts.

Yeah, sumptuary laws should have been on my list. Thanks for the reminder! As for option 2, that's a lot more involved than I think I want to get on this, but I'm considering it. Just how far do I want to stray from B/X/Labyrinth Lord? Well, I'm not going to be running a game like this anytime soon myself, so that's probably a question for another day.

And be sure to treat yourself to Bree Yark's treading in the artistic footsteps of a master (arguably the master) on his own blog.

Art by John Singer Sargent and Hendrick Goltzius.

When is D&D?

Over at the Hill Cantons blog, ckutalik wants to know:

…what really is the historically-analogous period implied in the garden variety D&D?

It's an interesting question. The clues lead us all sorts of contradictory directions.

For instance, the argument for a late Renaissance to Early Modern dating is largely based on equipment. Plate armor, halberds, and two-handed swords primarily date from this time period. Ditto for such things as the widespread use of coins, glass for windows, lanterns, and spyglasses, carriages, theaters, harpsichords and pipe organs, standing armies and navies, clockworks, and even potatoes and tomatoes and pasta. Likewise, Mr. Gygax himself is quoted as setting his games in a Renaissance analog.

Which is all well and good, until you start talking about druids, large and unexplored frontiers within walking distance of the civilized world, feudalism, and the absence of gunpowder. These aren't even the trappings of the high Middle Ages of the 12th century. Most of these belong to the dark ages between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne.

It gets even worse when you start poking at all sorts of assumptions that the players have. Private rooms at the inn? Even as late as the American Revolution you're more likely to end up with up to eight people, mostly strangers, in a single room and in a single bed! Homes with glass windows, wooden floors, fireplaces, and separate, private bedrooms are also completely modern. The attitudes of most, especially in "good" lands, directly adhere to what we expect to find in suburbia, except with less football and a greater reverence for monarchy.

So what's going on here, and when is bog-standard D&D set? The answer is: neverwhen. It is a crazy stew of common assumptions, misunderstandings, and outright laziness of the sort that gives us Sir Lancelot in gleaming plate armor and allows Xena Warrior Princess to both rescue the Ark of the Covenant from Babylonians and meet Julius Caesar.

And why the heck not? Rigorous historical play can be fun, but that's usually not what we're about in these games. Letting our cleric of Bast and her kung-fu monk best friend go mano-y-mano with a high priest of Cthulhu for the broken shards of Excalibur in a back alley of Sanctuary while the city is under siege by an army of Barsoomian apes under the sorcerous command of Yyrkoon of Melnibone is just fun! Sometimes, what you really want is the no-time that is every time implied by the old Deities & Demigods book. If D&D truly has a default setting this is most assuredly it.

Art by Vittore Carpaccio and Frank Dicksee.

The Hows and Whys of City States

At his blog, In Deep Places, Evan has been wondering about the demographics of city states. My reply is bit too long for a comment, so I'm resorting to another blog post.

I'm going to be pretty flexible in my definition of city states here. Traditionally, the city state is a city that is also an entire nation. Today, both Singapore and Vatican City are considered modern versions of the city state. However, many of what we call city states from the past violated that definition little bit. Classical Athens, for instance, made itself the capital of an expanding empire, the acquisition of which led to the Peloponnesian Wars. In this case, I'm going to call a city state any nation dominated by a central city whose borders extend only to the extent of a few days march.

Heck, even that is problematic, because what exactly is a city? These days, any respectable city probably has a handful hundred thousand citizens. The walled city of Jericho at around 8000 BC probably boasted a population as large as 2000. Here's another fact about Jericho to twist your noodle: cities started forming before agriculture. It appears that the walls of Jericho may have been built to protect rich hunting and gathering territories. Settled living probably later led to the development of agriculture, rather than the other way around as we were taught when I was in elementary school.

So exactly what we're talking about when you say city states entirely depends on what you want in your game. I'm assuming that Evan’s thinkgin along the lines of the classical city state like we see in ancient Mesopotamia or Greece. Where you find city states like these is pretty simple; human communities form near water. It's vital for drinking, it's vital for agriculture, it's vital for sanitation, and helpful for both defense and trade. So, if you have a map of your world, your rivers are going to run from the mountains to the sea, and population centers are going to be placed along those rivers. You can also put small cities in desolate places where there are oases, and, if you don't mind being completely fantastical, you can have magically supplied cities.

The why of city states might not be nearly as important, especially if you don't really want to get into the mechanics of demographics. Many city states seem to be primarily about defense, like ancient Jericho. People gather together, build walls and other defenses, and protect their rich territory from those who would invade. Others are more about geography. Rough terrain, like you find in Scandinavian countries and in Greece, tend to support the creation of small, isolated communities. The terrain was fertile enough to support the creation of city states in Greece. In Scandinavia, communities tended to be much smaller and there seem to have been a much stronger emphasis on going elsewhere (going “a-viking”) whenever possible.

So, the question of supporting themselves is fairly simple. For the most part, these city states are going to be self-supporting. Local agriculture will be producing enough food to support both the farmers and non-farming citizens of the community. Keep in mind, most everyone was a farmer in ancient Greece. They may have had their home within the walls of the city, but they usually had a plot of land outside as well. The Spartans got away with not having everyone be a farmer by invading and enslaving the local population, the Helots. The indigenous slaves did all the farming, freeing up the Spartan men to concentrate almost exclusively on warfare.

With agricultural surpluses, the city state doesn't necessarily need to trade with anybody. Trade frequently happens where communities intersect, but it's not a given. In fact, the closer communities are to each other, more likely there is to be acrimony, especially if their territories are close enough they could possibly overlap on each other. In this case, it's not unusual at all for one city state to utterly dominate its neighbors, and now we’re back to empire building.

So for Evan’s underworld campaign, I’d suggest city states be placed fairly far from one another, with at least 50 miles between each. The intervening land might be peppered with small freehold farms and farming communities which help support the city state. I'd clustered these in river valleys, arable plains, or at oases. Local culture and character can be heavily influenced by local resources. A city state on the edge of the jungle, for instance. is going to sport a lot of wooden structures, while one in the hills or at the foot of a mountain chain may use more stone. You can break this pattern to create mystery, a sense of unease, or say something about the local cultures. Maybe the city state at the edge of the jungle uses stone because the forests of the jungle are too dangerous to harvest. Local customs, holidays, clothing, and diet will be heavily influenced by what is available in the area. Salted fish, fried locusts, and beer were favorite foods in ancient Ur, while in Athens you're more likely to find wine, bread and olive oil as the staples of the diet.

So yeah, I'd create a scattering of city states with maybe 75,000 total souls in each larger metropolitan area, in states of either uneasy truce or frequent war with one another, and each largely self-supporting. That should create all sorts of fun political tensions, reinforce local character, and provide frequent opportunities for adventure.

For Taichara: Historical Settings

Taichara's asked for some input on what people want from an historic setting for RPGs, in her case specifically Red Box D&D. Again, I find myself pressed for time, so instead of writing something pithy and quick for her comments, y'all get a whole blog post. ;p

My chief interest is in how this setting can shake up my game. Whether I'm going to use it as a brief jaunt for a change-of-pace in an existing campaign, or the setting for an entire campaign in itself, I want to know pretty early on how this will be noticeably different (and, hopefully, better) than your bog-standard Middle Earth clone.

Culture
This really is the bedrock, from whence all the rest should flow. Who are the folks that live here? What's important to them? Where do their assumptions differ from ours?

Granted, this is the area most likely to be ignored in the heat of a game. Players often bring their cultural baggage to the table, and that's fine. But there's a good chance I'll want to let them play strangers in this strange land. So show me how these folks are different from the people I know. At the very least, let me know what they eat, what they wear, what they love, and what they fear. I'd like to know how they celebrate the stages of life, and if their ideas are different from ours on that score.

Politics would be useful as well. Who wields supreme executive power and upon what mandate? Who is likely to hire the PCs, and what are they likely to want done? Who might try to thwart the PCs? Who's in charge of maintaining law and order, and what are their methods and tools?

Calendar
If you give me nothing else on their culture, I do want this. How do they measure time? What days are special to them, and how do they celebrate them?

Gods
What do the people of this setting worship and how? This is where you can really shine and be useful to the DM, since D&D generally gives you next-to-nothing on playing and adjudicating clerics. Let us know how clerics interact with the temples and the gods. What worldly and organizational resources does the cleric have to draw on? What sort of behavior is likely to get a god's nose out of joint? Does the religion of this setting necessitate changes to the clerical class, or the creation of entirely new classes?

Equipment
The D&D equipment lists tend to be a bit anemic as it is. Feel free to flesh them out with all sorts of setting-specific goodies.

I'd not go on too long about weapons. Yeah, they can be cool, but D&D's combat is so vague it really can't tell the difference between a viking's broadsword and the pharaoh's khopesh. If it's important, go into metals and materials and how they make a difference, but most things can be mentioned briefly (“they make their shields from woven wicker” or “their helms are fashioned from the tusks of boars fixed to leather caps”) and then you can move on.

You'll probably find it's more interesting, especially for folks who enjoy hex-crawling, to talk about mounts and beasts of burden. Ancient India has elephants, and ancient Egypt will have the camel. Such beasts can make a big difference in combat, logistics, and wilderness exploration.

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of additional magical goodies, but they can be evocative and this is Taichara we're talking about here. ;) If you are going to give us new magical items, make sure they are both new and evocative. A bag of holding with feathers stitched to it is still a bag of holding.

Architecture and Maps
Most historical time-periods have evocative architecture that immediately brings them to mind. The Egyptians, of course, have the pyramids and their great, giant columns in post-and-lintel architecture erected on a grand scale. The Romans had their arches and the Colosseum. The Japanese have their sliding paper walls and nightingale floors. Show us how these things work and give us some context for them.

Give us maps of the homes and shops of the average folk, and at least one tavern, inn or similar place where adventurers are likely to congregate. Maps of temples would be useful, especially if there are competing faiths in this setting. A map of a village or a city where adventures can start or take place wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

Think also about common locations for adventures. Tombs, forts, jails, palaces, temples, houses-of-ill-repute, seedy taverns, and inns are all places where adventurers might practice their trade. Maps are something we don't often see enough of in books like this.

Magic
You can do a lot to make a setting feel special by changing the rules for how magic works or creating new magic. One place D&D is historically lacking is in daily-use spells, the sorts of magic people used in their homes or in their work, and yet it's the what we have the most examples of from real history.

Monsters
Again, normally I'd say don't go crazy here, but we're talking about Taichara, and such things don't apply to her. :D Some creatures just scream to be made over (the mummy, for instance) while some are missing all together. Keep it flavorful and remember that this is D&D, so we don't need giant stat-blocks or great whopping lists of powers.

I'd rather not see amazing re-imaginings of the traditional monsters. The scarab-swarm lamia of 4e, for instance, does nothing for me. I'm quite happy with the traditional monsters as we see them in folklore.

Sample Adventures
Please include at least one which highlights how adventures in this setting can be different. I'm just as capable as the next guy of replacing the King's daughter with the Pharoah's daughter. Give me something that really highlights, for me and my players, the possibilities of the setting. Give me something that only this setting and no other can deliver.

And heck, if you want to give me a book of adventure locations that, over its pages, reveals a setting to me, that'd be great. It doesn't necessarily have to be a tightly-linked adventure path, but maybe five “locations” that include an introductory adventure, some tomb-like areas to plunder, a city or town that can supply both a base-of-operations as well as adventures in its own right, the headquarters of a powerful antagonist, and maybe a wilderness area suitable for exploring and building a stronghold on.

Player Handouts
Finally, steal a page from Monte Cook and do a player's PDF. This should help explain the setting, lay out the basics of the culture and any rules changes the players will need to know to make a character in it. If you're going to spend money on art, it should show up here. Art is a great way to make a setting come alive, and to communicate the style, themes, and feel quickly. If at all possible, it should help the DM sell the setting to the players.

Playing with Culture: Noble Titles Among the Efreet

One of the things I love about DMing and world building is inventing and playing with cultures. The races of D&D each offer opportunities to play amateur para-anthropologist, creating imaginary ceremonies and customs to dazzle and intrigue my players. I like to take something about the races, combine it with something from the real world, and twist. That's why my gnolls tend to be matriarchal. How do you say thank you to myconids for vital information and 'shroomy snacks? How about defecating in their garden?

In my other game, efreet may turn out to be major players. (The players from my college game are probably snickering already.) It's fairly traditional to pepper the efreet with lots of Arabian trappings. In the recent Paizo adventure, “The Impossible Eye
,” the palace of an efreeti pasha comes complete with a mosque, including prayer rugs, shelves for footwear, minbar (no, this kind, not this kind), and minaret where “the imam of the palace would in times past recite the adhan to call the citizens to salah (prayer).”

I can certainly understand the impulse, since if you're going to have an adventure with genies and the like, people just naturally assume you're going to be including that Arabian Nights feel. Myself, if I wanted to give the efreet the trappings of a real-world religion, I'd probably have chosen Zoroastrianism.

As it is, in my Doom and Tea Parties campaign, the efreet revere the Eldest, and pretty much leave it at that. They are, mostly, pirates and reavers whose plundering ways have earned them the ancient enmity of the djinn, and the mistrust of nearly all the other genie races. They are also rather vain, and nearly all efreet consider themselves part of a natural nobility. That being the case, matters of title and station will be rather important to them, even if their social rankings can change suddenly and chaotically. But what titles to use?

Here, I'm going to use the traditional titles. The old 1e MM says this about the efreet: “A powerful Sultan rules the Efreet. He is served by many different sorts of nobles and officials (pashas, deys, amirs, valis, and maliks).”

There's a good start. The hierarchy of Middle Eastern titles listed in the 1e DMG is a bit of a mess, so I decided to do a bit of research to get things a bit closer to right. Not having mountains of time to work on this, I settled for using Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, “sultan” is Arabic, which works, and refers generally to a rule who claims absolute political authority over an area without claiming to rule the entire caliphate, but who generally doesn't have any temporal authority over them.

Pasha is from “bashaw” (which I could not use in a game without my players snickering) and is apparently an Ottoman title. The Ottomans also used the title sultan, though, so mixing them is ok. Apparently, the use of horsehair tails or peacock tails were used to designate just which level of pasha you were, from one to three. (Only the sultan was allowed to use four.) There are no horses in this campaign, and I'd prefer to reserve peacock imagery for the shaitan of Earth, so instead I'm going to use blue flames instead. The blue should stand out brightly against the black, gold/brass, and red that I see dominating the efreet palette.

Things get a bit odd when we get to dey, however:

Dey (Arabic: داي, from Turkish Dayı [1][2]) was the title given to the rulers of the Regency of Algiers (Algeria) and Tunis (Tunisia) under the Ottoman Empire from 1671 onwards. Twenty-nine deys held office from the establishment of the deylicate in Algeria until the French conquest in 1830.
The dey was chosen by local civilian, military, and religious leaders to govern for life and ruled with a high degree of autonomy from the Ottoman sultan. The main sources of his revenues were taxes on the agricultural population, religious tributes, and protection payments rendered by Corsairs, regarded as pirates who preyed on Mediterranean shipping.
The dey was assisted in governing by a divan (ديوان) made up of the Chiefs of the Army and Navy, the Director of Shipping, the Treasurer-General and the Collector of Tributes.

Obviously, my efreet don't rule Algiers or Tunis. But there's at least one city-state of some importance other than Brass. This is called Petal, a city-state famed for its Babylonian-style hanging gardens, where the bounty of the Plane of Water is harnessed to feed an agricultural and herbal industry famed throughout the Elemental Planes. Are there other such cities? I haven't dreamed any up yet, but it certainly stands to reason that there might be.

So our deys will be the rulers of such cities. While they owe fealty to the Sultan in Brass, they typically rule their realms with little oversight from that distant potentate.

Emir gives me some problems. It's typically used as a generic “leader” title, but more often means “prince” and ruler of a principality. My efreet don't really have principalities, but pretty much city-states and small holdings and citadels, scattered across fire. Emir may get the boot.

Wikipedia does give me “kaymakam,” which means a person who speaks or rules in the place of the sultan. I'm thinking that might make a good name for a conquering leader who claims new territory. Not sure there are any kaymakam at present, but something to keep in mind.

When I ask about “vali” Wikipedia turns me to “wali,” which means “trusted one” and “should not be confused with the word Wāli (Arabic: والي) which is an administrative title that was used in the Muslim Caliphate”.

Well, maybe I shouldn't, but I kinda like confusing them. Words shifting meaning and merging with other, similar words is something that happens in language. So I'm making a wali a pasha who has been entrusted with an especially important duty. Most of the major city-states will have a Wali of the Wall, who is in charge of maintaining both the architectural integrity of the city's wall as well as its military preparedness. They'd also be tasked with manning fortresses that protect important planar gateways.

Malik is another word for “king” according to Wikipedia. While the idea of a bunch of efreet giving themselves mostly meaningless and aggrandizing titles is amusing, it makes things a bit more chaotic than I think I want for them. Malik gets the boot!

However, if I'm going to use deys I need to have beys. Beys were more local leaders, clan heads, and chieftains. I'm going to make it a title also claimed by raider and pirate captains. A raider or priate with other ships or warbands under his command would be a “bey of beys”.

And then there's the old standby, effendi. It's sorta like “sir” or “master” and works well as a title all efreet would expect to be used at the very least when addressing them.

Unfortunately, these are all masculine terms, and I might want female deys and certainly effendi. I've seen “sultana” used as the feminine of sultan before. I suppose I could slap an “a” at the end of all but pasha, and declare that one to be unisex. Anyone who knows more about such things have any advice?

Image credits: Hans Makart, and Jean-Léon Gérôme

The Warrior's Kit in Medieval Europe: Technological Revolution

Noticing a theme here?

It's not misplaced. Lots of folks will tell you that, during the Middle Ages, weapons were basically bashing tools and little more, with no real innovation or advancement, which is utter hogwash. There was quite a bit, and it's easy to see.

In Europe, anyway. Japan is a great contrast. You're certainly familiar with the kit of the samurai, the layered armour, the katana, the tall bow, etc. This equipment was pretty much standardized in the late 14th century, and wasn't changed. The Japanese felt they'd perfected the arts of arming and armouring the samurai, and felt little need for innovation.

In Europe, this sense of perfection was never achieved. Some have described what happened in Europe as a continuous battle of innovation between the spear-makers and the shield makers. As each side improved their goods, the other was forced to compensate through new designs and techniques.


The armour we'd all recognize as “knightly” was actually a fairly late invention in the middle ages, and probably didn't appear until the 15th century. (I suspect this is one of the reasons Gygax preferred to set his games in worlds with early Renaissance tech.) Before this, knights generally wore full suits of mail, or chain mail for those of you who learned about armour from D&D. ;) Significant plates were not added to the armour until the 14th century, and a breastplate and helm with visor didn't appear until maybe the end of that century.

As these armour plates began to appear, the sword underwent a radical transformation. The broad, hacking blade was replaced with longer, narrower blades, more focused on thrusting and finding weak chinks in armour rather than trying to chop through it. By the end of the 15th century, the shield had been pretty much discarded by the knight, and the sword was now a long, thin weapon, wielded with both hands in a style more reminiscent of a staff, for stabbing and clubbing. The slash had all but vanished from the knight's repertoire.



The key idea I'm trying to get across here is that every weapon and piece of armour had a purpose, a reason for existing, and that the forms these weapons took derived naturally from their function. The heater shield replaced the round shield of the Viking and Anglo-Saxon shieldwall because that triangular shape proved easier to use and more effective on horseback. The axe gave warriors a more powerful blow that might sneak around the shield, and the bearded axe could be used to hook the shield and pull it aside so that another warrior could step in and land a killing blow. (Both Richard the Lionhearted and Robert the Bruce were renowned axe fighters.) The ball-and-chain, flail, or morning star, while wild and unpredictable, were even better for getting around the shield and smacking the foe in the back of the head or shoulders. The Dark Age seax, a single-edge, chisel-tipped cutting tool that doubled as a weapon, morphed over time into the rondel dagger, a long spike on a handle usually wielded like an icepick for jabbing through the gaps in heavy armour.

Our games rarely take this sort of thing into account. They assign fairly arbitrary numbers to weapons, and then we wonder why anyone would bother to carry a dagger into combat, since they're next-to-useless in our games. The truth is, the seax was a great little tool to have around and quite good at gutting a lightly armed foe, while the rondel was perfect when two knights grappled into each other, rolling about in the mud and blood, bashing into each other while attempting to jab through the joints or eye slits. The premier weapon of AD&D, the longsword (a one-handed weapon which isn't the same as the "longswords" the guys in the video were fighting with because terminology is another thing historians like to argue about), was quite popular at the dawn of the Middle Ages, but as armour grew heavier, its utility waned, until knightly duels were more likely to be conducted with poleaxes than swords. Every weapon had its time and its place.

Photo credits: rinpoche, Gidzy.

RELATED: The Godless Paladin rants about the listed weights of weapons in D&D.

The Foundations of Medieval Europe: Technological Revolution

Noisms has mentioned an interest in learning more about the Middle Ages. I’m assuming he means the European Middle Ages, as this follow-up post implies.

My bachelor’s degree from UT Austin is technically in liberal arts, because UT doesn’t award undergraduate degrees in history. But it was the history sequence I completed with a focus on medieval Europe, especially England and France. UT has a great Medieval Studies program, and if you get the chance, I strongly recommend you take any class you can from Janet Meisel and Martha Newman.

Ask any historian about pretty much any topic, and they’ll want to cast back a handful hundred years to discuss how things got to be that way. I’m going to do the opposite and discuss the Middle Ages by hopping forward in time to answer the question, what were the Middle Ages?

The term comes from a time when very little was known about medieval Europe. So far as historians were concerned, European history kinda stopped with the fall of Rome, then restarted again with the Renaissance. Documents from the time were few and far between, and peppered with mythology, like King Arthur. (Want to see a medieval historian get all flustered? Ask ‘em about Joan of Arc.)

Modern efforts to restore and catalogue medieval documents have helped us fill in a lot of the gaps, however, and we now know far more about what happened during those days. The period called “the Dark Ages” has been pushed back to the handful of centuries just after the fall of Rome. Written sources are very rare for those years even now, and what we have to work with primarily comes from oral accounts later committed to vellum and the fruits of archeology.

What we do know is that, as the power of Rome declined, western Europe was awash in successive waves of invaders from the east. On the continent, Goths, Huns, and Franks pushed in from the east, conquering as they traveled, settling down, and merging their customs with those of the people they’d subdued. In the north, the invaders were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Vikings.

When the armies of Islam had conquered the length of northern Africa and crossed into Spain, the peoples they fought there were Goths who had invaded a few centuries before. When the Saracens attempted to raid back east across the Pyrenees, they got their hinies handed to them supposedly thanks to a technological marvel that I think shaped what we know as the Middle Ages. The myth (remember what I said about the difficulties of separating fact from fantasy in medieval history) goes that seven men, draped in mail and riding powerful horses, each slew a hundred Saracens and only lost one of their own number at the Battle of Tours. These men would have been the first knights, and their exploits, whatever they might have truly been, were due in large part to the stirrup.

The stirrup had been in use in Asia for hundreds of years before the 8th century battle that saw the Islamic advance into modern France stymied. What the Franks did that was different was to use the stirrup to outfit their cavalry with heavy armour that made them nearly impervious to the standard weapons of the day. The weapon system of the armoured knight, while extremely effective, was also extremely expensive. Each knight needed a handful of mounts to be effective in battle, and these horses required oats to put on the bulk and muscle the knights required, especially as their armour grew heavier over the years. Knights also needed lots of training to get the most out of their mounts and their weapons. In short, a lot of man-hours were eaten up by the care, training, and breeding of horses for use in war.

In order to make sure he had knights when he needed them, a king would grant large tracts of land to his ablest warriors, in exchange for the promise, usually backed by sacred oath, to deliver a certain number of knights and infantry when the king called for them. Each warrior would organize the land and the peasants living on it to feed him and his servants while they went about the business of preparing for the next war. Such a lord might also divvy up his land into smaller parcels that would be given to other knights, so that they could do the same thing, creating a pyramidal organization of land passed down in exchange for oaths of service traveling up the pyramid. It was sort of like Amway, but with swords and battle axes.

And there you have the foundations of medieval Europe’s social structure. The granted land was called a fief, and the knight who ruled it could pretty much do as he pleased with it, so long as he delivered his quota of warriors to his king’s wars. In order to protect his fief, knights built castles on their lands, and divided their larger holdings into smaller fiefs so that they, too, could raise armies when the need arose.

Of course, in practice, things could get a bit messier than this perfect picture. Sometimes a knight might grow stronger than his lord, or even his king. Knights sworn to the same king might disagree about exactly where one fief ended and another began. Most fiefs were passed down to eldest sons when a knight died, but the exact details of such inheritance were sometimes settled by open warfare between knights. (A similar issue served as the pretext for William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066.) Knights who had covered themselves in glory by slaughtering lots of people might attempt to ease their blood-spattered souls’ passage into Heaven by gifting churches and monasteries with their lands, allowing the Church to acquire great wealth and even, at times, raise its own armies.

In spite of all of this, the coming of the mounted knight pretty much ended the successive waves of invaders from the east. Islam was held at the Pyrenees and then slowly pushed back, first to the southern edge of Spain and then, in 1492, out of western Europe all together. In the east, Europe slowly went on the offensive, spreading Roman Catholicism by the sword into eastern Europe and the Middle East. As the Vikings found raiding more difficult and less profitable, they began to settle down. The Vikings who settled on the northern shores of modern France learned the ways of the knight. These Norsemen slowly became Normans and more French than even the French. When they invaded England in 1066, their chivalric heavy cavalry faced a shield wall which was more akin to their ancestors’ ways of making war than their own.

It was on this foundation of landed knights, supported by the serfs who toiled at menial tasks to support and equip them, that medieval Europe was built. Once you’ve got that down, it’s a lot easier to understand what came later, and how Europe slowly transformed into the modern nation-states we know today.

Photo credits: rutlo, frielp, magoexperto.