Historical accuracy and Fantasy gaming

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Collective_Restraint

1. I am not very good at history, I want to play games, not start studying how feudal system fully works, etc. I have always been very interested into history but simply was never good at it.

That doesn't affect me. I do research for fun. I've been setting up to run a campaign set in France in 1717, and I've read something like ten nonfiction books for it, including Braudel's three-volume study of economic history. Plus several novels, including The Three Musketeers—and I'm about to reread Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania. The fact that a campaign idea can be researched historically is a plus as far as I'm concerned.

2. How can you really evaluate historical realism when we are talking about realism where dragons roam, magic exists, etc. ? Sure, I don't put television sets in my fantasy games (still, I know I could with magic existing an all) but since I am not very good in history, I'm sure if I had historians in my games they would start pointing me that this event doesn't make sense and etc, etc. How can you realistically evaluate how a realm would function with magic being present and all ?

H. G. Wells defined his approach to writing fantastic stories as "make one impossible assumption, and then work out the implications with rigorous logic." That's the way I like to approach fantasy. Whatever the fantastic element is, it has to interact with the nonfantastic aspects of the world—and if I don't know how those work on their own, I can't so easily guess how the fantastic element will transform them.

Besides that, in my view of fantasy, the fantastic element normally comes from myth, legend, folklore, or fairy tales, or is invented to resemble them—to have not verisimilitude but fabulisimilitude, the likeness of myths. Knowing the actual supernatural beliefs of past societies is a great source of inspiration..

My point is, is historical accuracy very important in your fantasy-themed games ? Is a good story more important than historical realism ? This is probably what turned me down into using Banestorm as my game campaign setting: too historical for my taste. I feel that if I don't understand fully how the medieval ages were, crusades, etc, I wouldn't run a "good" Banestorm game. One other thing that I don't like is that it is too close to what Earth is. I play fantasy games to escape to other worlds. I'm already tired of hearing about religious wars of catholics against muslims in newspapers that it's something I don't even want to start gaming. So I'm asking you, do you prefer games where everything is historically accurate or games where evil mages build lairs and fills them with traps and monsters and laughs maniacally about taking over the world ;) ?

Neither one. The latter is just too damned silly. The former, well, of course it's not historically accurate; it's got magic. But I like the fantastic elements to reflect actual historical data on how the relevant cultures worked.

Let me be more concrete. Here are my fantasy-set-in-a-low-TL-world campaigns:

Jesus Magus (source for Roma Arcana): The Roman Empire ca. 250 AD, in a world where mystery cults and sorcery actually work, and the gods of Rome have withdrawn their favor because they don't get enough worship.

Zimiamvia: Taken from E. R. Eddison. An analog of Renaissance Europe, but with classical paganism still around, Christianity unimagined, and avatars of God and Goddess bestriding the world like colossi.

Under the Shadow: Taken from J. R. R. Tolkien. An alternate Middle-Earth where Sauron snagged the One Ring from Frodo and conquered everybody in sight, and the PCs are in the Resistance.

Manse: A fictitious timeline inspired somewhat by Exalted and somewhat by Ars Magica, where the fall of an ancient empire left one castle, one village, and their hinterlands protected by an ancient spiritual pact, but surrounded in every direction by chaotic Free Magic. Players each made up a culture for one of the aristocratic houses—but I got players who would do serious storytelling stuff.

For me, fantasy is a dialogue between sheer imagination and historical fact. When historical fact falls silent, the resulting monologue is dull. It's kind of like Robert Frost's crack that writing free verse was like playing tennis without the net.

Bill Stoddard

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Plus several novels, including The Three Musketeers—and I'm about to reread Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania.

I haven't read that in years. I've only ever seen the one copy, and it was in the public library of my old home town. Yarbro's works never seemed to get to NZ in any quantity.

Now you've reminded me of their existence I'll have to track 'em down.

[Ed the Coastie]

I seldom if ever run a historically accurate game. I do run a lot of campaigns inspired by historical eras, though, and try my best to maintain a level of pseudo-historical consistency. One of my favorite settings, for example, is set in a Dark Ages Europe analog with magic and other fantasy elements. That is all fine and dandy...but my setting is not Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, and internal logic will only go so far; don't expect to see anachronisms such as full plate armor or Renaissance alchemy in what are effectively shadowy echoes of Arthurian Britain and Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire.

But that's just me, and that is the kind of games that I enjoy.

[Fish]

The heritage of D&D is built largely on the writings of one man, a language professor who had been trying to cobble together the basis of an English myth. Tolkien's world has pockets of internal consistency offset by gaping holes in the fabric of reality. For example, even though that world must be 90% agrarian, the only farmers we meet are in Hobbiton — who feeds the armies in Gondor? Who made the clock on Bilbo's mantlepiece when clockwork is a machinery that requires rigorous and exacting standards and machined tools?

People began nailing things into D&D that made no sense — katanas, rapiers, scimitars, claymores; and chain mail, plate mail, and leather; and all of them were the product of arms races in different parts of the world and never designed to interact. The katana was not designed for foot soldiers to fight against an English knight in plate mail, and in fact changed in design over the course of centuries, and yet in most games there is one purified form — the Platonic Katana, we might say — one style of katana which has been established as representative of a thousand years of swordsmithing.

D&D was then pulled in a different direction by people who wanted some semblance of real-world simulation: now there was slashing and piercing and bludgeoning damage. If they had taken it a step farther and calculated the relative strengths of armor against various weapon types, and vice-versa, the various weapons would be properly placed against the armors designed to withstand them, and therefore replicated the entire history of warfare on paper.

I like GURPS. It cuts to the chase: this is historically accurate, use it if you want, but if you want to mix and match forms, here's how. :)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fish

The heritage of D&D is built largely on the writings of one man, a language professor who had been trying to cobble together the basis of an English myth.

I don't quite agree, actually. Certainly Tolkien was [i]a[/a] major source. But if you read the monster list in the original Monsters and Treasure volume of the three little tan books, it's clear that there were three major sources of D&D races and creatures: Tolkien, classical mythology, and "creature feature" films (source of the Cleanup Crew monsters and the various giant bugs and such).

Not that Tolkien didn't have occasional creature feature impulses; the big spiders in The Hobbit (and their ancestress Shelob in LOTR) and the tentacular monster outside the gates of Moria in LOTR would do just fine in a fifties horror flick.

Bill Stoddard

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

I don't particlarly care about historical accuracy unless the characters are in an actual historical setting. I'm much more interested in internal consistency and a "simulationist" mindset seems to be the best way to achieve this. Studying historical parallels can help create a plausible and internally consistent world.

I agree with this. I don't want history getting into my fantasy game . . . I want games where I can file the serial numbers off Aztecs, Guptas, Mongols, Norsemen, Romans, etc.; advance the low-tech ones and retard the high-tech ones to get everyone on a technological par; and slam them down on a single continent where magic works and gods intervene. However, I do draw on real, historical cultures, and try to stick to a recognizable technological par. I just don't care much about sociological reasons why these cultures couldn't coexist or operate on an equal footing. "The gods made it that way and magic keeps it that way" works well enough for me. But bows still shoot like bows and iron is still harder than bronze.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't quite agree, actually. Certainly Tolkien was [i]a[/a] major source.

Sure, they padded out the bestiary with off-the-shelf monsters, but the general focus of D&D is largely as Tolkien presented his Middle-Earth stories: adventurers crawling through dungeons and tombs and battlefields, fighting various monsters. Magic was designed for combat; professions for non-combatants were practically non-existent.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't quite agree, actually. Certainly Tolkien was a major source. But if you read the monster list in the original Monsters and Treasure volume of the three little tan books, it's clear that there were three major sources of D&D races and creatures: Tolkien, classical mythology, and "creature feature" films (source of the Cleanup Crew monsters and the various giant bugs and such).

Not to mention Trolls straight out of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (from which AD&D's paladins also owe much of their origins as well).

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fish

Sure, they padded out the bestiary with off-the-shelf monsters, but the general focus of D&D is largely as Tolkien presented his Middle-Earth stories: adventurers crawling through dungeons and tombs and battlefields, fighting various monsters. Magic was designed for combat; professions for non-combatants were practically non-existent.

But there isn't a great deal of combat magic in Tolkien. And this sort of stuff is more from sword & sorcery than Tolkien, as are the level names in the old versions of D&D, the presence of assassins, and thieves that have cool backstabbing abilities. The AD&D1 DMG had a list of sources of inspiration in it, and sword & sorcery figured much more prominently than high fantasy (and ISTR the Gygax didn't particularly like Tolkien's works).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fish

Magic was designed for combat; professions for non-combatants were practically non-existent.

In Tolkien? Well, let's see. Sam Gamgee the gardener, and his uncle the ropemaker. Farmer Maggot, who is, of course, a farmer. Ted Sandyman the miller. Robin Smallburrows (if I remember his name right) the shirriff. Barliman Butterbur, the innkeeper who brews the best beer in the northlands. Thorin and the other dwarves, who have done all sorts of manual labor, even coal mining. The butler in the Elvenking's halls in Mirkwood. The dwarves in the Lonely Mountain workshops, who make the best magical toys for export to the Shire. Galadriel and her elven-maidens, who weave superb rope and bake lembas. Grima Wormtongue, a royal advisor and effectively the keeper of the privy seal of Rohan. Hama the doorkeeper of Theoden's court. Various minstrels in Rohan and Gonder. Iorech and the other old ladies in the Houses of Healing, and the master healer with his elven names for plants. The Mouth of Sauron, who apparently never wielded a sword in his life. The small orc whose job is to track by scent, but who apparently isn't a fighter. Cirdan the Shipwright at the Grey Havens. That seems like quite a few who are neither warriors nor battle wizards.

Of course, the economy of Middle-Earth is somewhat etherealized. Bujold's recent two-volume series The Sharing Knife provides an interesting look at a nomadic "ranger" culture that has an actual economy, with 90% of its members doing stuff other than having adventures; Tolkien handwaves a lot of that. But people who practice the peaceful arts show up all through LotR.

Bill Stoddard