Today we can watch tournaments staged by skilled stuntmen, but the heart of the sport is missing, the intense competition for personal glory: They can never recapture the real enthusiasm of the medieval original, the excitement of spectacle in a world where colour and pageantry were a rarity, the genuine danger of the fighting. The joust and its ideals belong to the glories of the past, to the pages of medieval manuscripts, and above all to the imagination, which alone can recreate these extraordinary festivals.

– Richard Barber, Tournaments

To understand the tournament, you must first understand the medieval world which gave it birth: It was a place of brown, gray, and limited colors. It was a life of eternal toil and struggle. Music beyond folk performance was a rare and precious entertainment. Rich colors and large musical performances were luxuries enjoyed by the elite few.

So it is of little surprise that tournaments – and the festivals which accompanied them – were the most popular of affairs: Events which were anticipated by every level of society, and which drew their audiences from miles away. In contrast to the reality around them, tournaments presented a self-contained world of excitement: A dangerous and skillful sport. Bright colors. Pomp and pageantry.

But tournaments were more than mere crowd-pleasers: They were central events in the lives of the aristocracy. The ideals of the tournament were the ideals of chivalry, and the skills of the tournament were the same skills demanded of the knighthood which stood at the center of the feudal order. Tournaments were political and social events of great importance – and, at times, their stakes were literally matters of life and death.

Considering that tournaments now stand in the public consciousness as one of the most vivid images of medieval life – immortalized in tales from King Arthur to Ivanhoe to A Knight’s Tale – it should come as no surprise that they can play a role in your D&D campaigns. As backdrops for adventure – or as an adventure in themselves – you can bring all the excitement of the tournament to your gaming table.

HISTORY OF THE TOURNAMENT

A number semi-legendary accounts exist of the first tournament: Some say that it was held in the fabled Coliseum before the Emperors of Rome. German chroniclers claimed that it was Henry the Fowler, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 918 to 936 AD, who was the first sponsor of the tournament. Still another tale leads us to King Arthur’s court. Perhaps the most believable account ascribes the first tournament to Geoffroi de Purelli (who did, in fact, author the earliest surviving set of tournament guidelines).

Most of these accounts are the result of medieval scholars attempting to fill in a history they did not know. The truth, however, is that pointing to the “first tournament” probably has more to do with drawing a line than finding an innovator.

In short, the tournament evolved out of a variety of primitive arms-training exercises and exhibitions. Perhaps the most important line that can be drawn between the older forms and what would later become known as a tournament was the development of the couched lance as a weapon of war: Mounted knights charging down upon their foes with this braced weapon could wreak havoc previously unimaginable to the medieval mind… but only if they could execute and recover from charges as a coordinated group. As a result, the couched lance led to the rise of new mounted formation tactics. These tactics, in turn, led to the need for group training. Group training led to group practices. And these practices would eventually become the tournament as we recognize it today.

The oldest occurrence of the word “tournament”, however, was not applied to the formal affair of jousting we associate with the term today. Instead, it was applied to the melee: A rough and tumble affair, scarcely removed from actual combat except that its goal was to capture instead of kill. (Captured prisoners would typically be subject to ransom, just as they would be during times of war.) Later, “safe areas” would be introduced as a place for recuperation and socialization during the competition.

In this form, as scarcely more than unregulated brawls, the tournament was often banned by church and king alike – in no small part due to the tendency for any tournament to result in injury and death. Despite these perpetual secular and religious bans, the tournaments continued to be extremely popular, and knights would often travel to other kingdoms in order to escape the bans and compete.

This explosive popularity can be explained, in part, by the symbiotic relationship which arose between the tournaments and the emerging genre of courtly romance fiction. Courtly romance fiction idealized the chivalric virtues, particularly as they were demonstrated at tournaments. As the romances met with success, the popularity of the tournaments grew. And the popularity of the tournaments, in turn, caused the popularity of the romances to grow.

The romances also resulted in the first “superstars” of the tournament world. Tourneyers such as William Marshal (a knight of low birth whose prowess at tournament led him to become Henry III’s Protector of England) were made famous by the tales of their deeds in tournament. At the same time, tourneys became a means by which an unlanded knight could gain wealth without the stigma of trade.

This combination of wealth and prestige soon led to tournaments being given their first degree of respectability: In 1194, England’s Richard I issued a decree which specified five authorized tournament sites in England. The decree also required knights to seek charters in order to start an compete in a tourney. In short, the decree (a) formalized tournaments, (b) imposed a set of reasonable regulations on procedures, and (c) earned the king a new source of income on the fees charged for the charters.

Although not imitated in form (which, coincidentally, meant that England’s tourneys assumed an independent existence from those on the continent at the same time that England’s kings were earning a special renown for their willingness to compete in tourney), the substance of the decree was quickly adopted elsewhere: The continent soon gained a similar measure of respectability and control as a result of the example set by England, and the expectations of the growing romantic and chivalric traditions.

This respectability and regulation, in turn, led to an abandonment of the bans which had dogged the tournament’s history to this point: Most kings had already embraced the sport, while the Church (somewhat pacified by the reduction in fatalities and maimings) knew better than to fight its popularity. By the end of the 13^th century, the tournament was a fully integrated part of European life – and its practitioners were not only famous, but powerful. Indeed, when Richard I’s heir – King John – died, he left a minor as king… and William Marshal as regent.

Over the next three centuries, the tournament enjoyed the height of its popularity and success. Its popularity drew larger and larger crowds, and what had once been an informal brawl grew into a formalized and regulated sport – the pastime of nobles and the entertainment of the masses.

Eventually, however, its own success signaled the tournament’s demise. The need to entertain spectators led to greater and greater attendant pageantry, elaborate settings, and heavily developed themes. In time, the tournament was reduced to little more than a staged event or equestrian ballet.

Already in decline, the tournament was finally finished off as the changing nature of warfare rendered it completely obsolete.

HOLDING A TOURNAMENT

Historically, tournaments were held either by nobles or (more rarely) by the governments of the free cities. This was a matter of simple practicality: These were the only people who could afford the great costs associated with the staging of a tournament. In a fantasy setting, of course, these limitations do not apply: Imagine the tournament which could be staged by a dragon with his horde. Or a celestial might sponsor a competition to find a true hero. A band of famous adventurers might establish a tournament to mark their retirement, funded by years of treasure hunting.

Tournaments were usually held during the afternoon, with the morning spent on ceremony on preparation. Exceptions, of course, were known: Nocturnal jousts, example, were magical affairs of torchlight and shadow. And most tournaments ran more than one day.

The size of a tournament could vary greatly, and the largest were surprisingly massive affairs. When the Black Prince celebrated the birth of his eldest child, for example, the record shows that 154 lords, 706 knights, and more than 18,000 horses participated in the accompanying tournament.

The arrangements for some of the larger tournaments could be a matter of years: Invitations were, literally, sent across the continent. Lists needed to be constructed. Proclamations containing the tournament’s rules needed to be issued and posted. Travel arrangements and lodgings needed to be arranged.

As Celebration: In many ways, a tournament was nothing more than a very large party. And, like a party, it was used as a means of celebration. Tournaments were frequently held to celebrate births, betrothals, marriages, funerals, birthdays, coronations, holidays, victories in war, executions, knightings, and any other occasion meriting note. Tournaments were also frequently held as a way of welcoming important guests. In particular, royal entries (when a king entered a town in his domain) were frequently marked with a tournament. In some cases, the tournament became a celebration of itself. For example, a tounament was often held in honor of the “first joust” of a nobleman’s son.

As Challenge: Tournaments, both formal and informal, naturally lent themselves as a means of challenge. Often these challenges were friendly affairs (although played up with mock drama), simply providing an excuse for the tournament to take place in the first place. In other cases, however, a challenge could be of deadly import. Tournaments were used to judge feuds. “Jousts of War”, using unbated weapons, were sometimes held between hostile countries. Indeed, even during certain sieges, the historical record shows that knights would ride out of the besieged castle, engage in jousts with the attacking forces, and then be allowed to return to the castle.

As Sport: Whether as general competition or martial practice, the tournament was – above all – a form of sport: With spectators, scoring, and prizes. Tournaments associated with festivals were almost always of this type.

Whatever the primary reason for holding a tournament may have been, there were also ancillary benefits to be gained: Nobles who sponsored tournaments gained favor with the crowd, and cities reaped the profits which those crowds brought in attendant trade.

TOURNAMENT EVENTS

Today the terms “tournament” and “joust” are used almost interchangeably, but the reality is that a tournament was actually made up of a wide variety of martial events. In fact, as noted above, the earliest tournaments were held before the sport of jousting was invented.

Melee: The melee was a mass combat. Knights either fought individually or were grouped into two or more teams, depending on the form of the tournament. (Whether or not forming alliances as part of an individual melee was acceptable also depended on the tournament’s form.) In some cases, knights fought with partners. The goal of the melee was to capture other knights, who would be ransomed.

In its earliest form, the melee was essentially a war game. It was fought with a variety of weapons, over a field that could extend for several miles. The boundaries of the field were seldom marked, instead being defined vaguely, usually by a reference to two or more towns – for example, “the tourney to be held between the towns of Teugan and Seinoe”. The only formal limits were the fenced-in areas which served as refuges in which knights could rest or rearm in safety.

In time, the damage and injury wrought by these early melees (crops trampled, roads torn up, knights accidentally killed, etc.), combined with the growing desire to have the proceedings more easily observed by a gathered crowd of spectators, began to curtail the expanse of the event: The field became of a more limited size, whose boundaries were usually marked clearly be a fence. This, in turn, led to a reduction in the number of participating knights, and this usually led to a further refinement in which only a single type of weapon would be used.

In later years, as the size of the field and the number of participants continued to shrink, the melee would evolve into individual competitions such as the duel and jousting.

Jousting: Jousting is the classical tournament event, and eventually became the centerpiece (and sole event) of most tournaments. In its most basic and earliest form, the joust simply involved two mounted knights with couched lances: The knights would charge towards each other in an attempt to knock their opponent off their horse. Each charge was known as a “pass”.

In this early form of the joust, the goal remained the capture of the opposing knight: A dismounted knight would typically draw his sword, and would seek to similarly dismount his opponent. The competition did not end until one of the knights had either yielded or been rendered unconscious.

Over time, refinements were added: The idea of capturing an opponent was quickly abandoned, and the goal became the dismounting itself. Typically a set number of passes would be run, and points scored for various accomplishments (see sidebar, below). This allowed the introduction of the tilt – a wooden bar which ran the length of the field and provided a guide for more successful passes. Eventually counter-barriers were added to either side of the tilt, which helped to prevent horses from veering away from the tilt.

Archery: Archery competitions were typically run by elimination. In the early rounds, the competitors would fire from a set distance, and the least accurate archers would be eliminated from the next round. In the later rounds, as the field narrowed, the distance would be increased. Typically, when the field had been reduced to two or three archers, the competition essentially became a duel, with the distances from the target slowly increasing, and the archers forced to match the accuracy of the other or face elimination.

Duel: Unlike the fencing duels into which it would evolve, tournament dueling was conducted in full armor with combat weaponry (although the swords were sometimes wooden). In some cases the goal was literal subdual – with one knight battering the other to unconsciousness or to yield. More typically, however, the duel was fought to a certain number of “hits”.

Endurance Test: A variety of endurance tests (swimming, climbing, running, etc.) were also common at tournaments before the joust became preeminent. These tests were always run as individual events.

Ponte: In the event of ponte the participants were armed with club and shield, and formed into companies. This was a city-based sport, not a knightly one, and the companies were frequently based on the various districts of the city holding the event. A general combat would then be held, with various means of elimination for the participants. Eventually, two additional forms also evolved: In the mazzascudo the club and shield evolved into a single kite-shaped, pointed shield (also known as a mazzascudo) which was used to both thrust and parry. The battaglia de’sassi added the lanciatori, who threw stones.

Last week I talked about the early history of religion in D&D, and how this discordant mélange of influences eventually led to a weirdly incoherent metaphysics in which:

• Gods are arranged into pantheons, a word literally derived from the Greek name for a temple which worshipped all gods, and yet…
• People (including the clergy) almost universally choose just ONE god to worship because…
• Every civilized god gets slotted into a church based on monotheistic Christian rites, architecture, and organization. (With “evil” gods being slightly more likely to get primitive fanes and the like.)

As we look across the vast landscape of roleplaying games in the modern world, of course, we can see that any number of efforts have been made, many based on real world mythologies, to break fantasy religions out of this box. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can also see that D&D’s religions, by default, remain heavily influenced by contemporary Christianity (probably because that’s most of the audience’s only practical exposure to religion): Monotheistic religious practices awkwardly grafted onto a pantheistic mythology.

And this tends to bleed over into other fantasy religions and our own worldbuilding.

FAITH & BELIEF

Here’s a common, yet also complicated, example of this: In a world where gods obviously and observably exist, why do we talk about people believing or having faith in their god? If you have proof that your god exists, you don’t need to believe in them!

In large part, this paradox exists because it’s how we think about God in contemporary Christian society: We think of the divine as something you have to “believe” in, and that way of thinking just kind of elides naturally into the fantasy world. (Often without any close examination.)

But this is also why I keep talking about contemporary Christian society. Because it turns out that this is not inherently how people think about gods in the real world; the idea that the existence of God is something you need to have irrational belief in is a way of thinking that developed over time. In fact, our very understanding of the words “belief” and “faith” have been shaped by that evolution of thought.

If you look at the etymology of “belief” (from Old French) and “faith” (from Old English), you’ll discover both words originally meant basically the exact same thing: To trust someone; to have confidence in them; to be loyal to them. (The last could perhaps better be understood as a mutual exchange: You trust them, they trust you, neither of you would betray that mutual trust, and therefore you are loyal to each other; i.e., you share or keep faith with each other — a phrase which survives into modern usage while maintaining the older sense of the word.)

The meaning of the word first bled from people into ideas: To have faith or belief in a particular idea meant that you trusted it; you believed it to be true. But just writing the word “believed” is misleading to a modern sensibility, because the meaning was still fundamentally rational: You believed something was true because you had evidence for it.

What caused the meanings of the words to glide into the irrational was, in fact, their application to God. People had faith in God the same way they might have faith in their feudal lord. And obviously the Church wanted them to believe in the ideas that the Church taught them. And so “faith” and “belief” became deeply tied to the worship of God.

(“Worship” itself was a word which originally meant one who was worthy of honor, glory, renown, respect, etc. The noun was turned into a verb – i.e., to worship was to give honor, glory, renown, respect, etc. to the worshipped – and then applied to God, who was obviously worthy of those things. You can see the remnant of the original sense of “worship” in honorifics like Your Worship.)

As time passed, however, European thought became more rational – in fact, the words “rational” and “irrational” were invented, along with concordant understanding that something could only be rationally thought of as true if you had evidence that it was true.

The trick, of course, was that there was no rational evidence for the existence of God.

It took centuries, but eventually this idea became so strongly enmeshed in European thought that it was actually reflected back into the Church and inverted: Sure, there was no rational evidence for God’s existence. But you still needed to believe in God; you still needed to have faith that God’s word and his love for you were true.

At that point, through religion, “faith” and “belief” were deeply connected to something which could only be irrationally accepted as truth. Give it another century or so and these words come shooting out the other side; they’re now applied to other irrational truths that must be believed without evidence and their modern sense. In the case of “belief” the meaning remains mixed (it can apply to both rational and irrational conclusions), but when it comes to “faith” the transformation is more or less complete.

FAITH IN A WORLD OF FANTASY

So one way of understanding how the relationship between worshipers and their gods would work in a world where gods actually exist is to basically turn back the clock on our understanding of the word “faith.”

In a fantasy world, to have faith in a god doesn’t mean that you believe the god exists: It means that you are keeping faith with them. (And I think, furthermore, that it’s worth the effort to truly grok the way in which “faith” described a two-sided relationship: Not just to trust someone, but for them to also trust you. For you to be able to count on each other.)

Once you’ve made this fundamental realignment, it’s interesting to see the impact it can have on other aspects of religious thought.

For example, consider the divine right of kings. In the real world, without any actual evidence of God’s existence, a king’s position as king was essentially “evidence” that God must want them to be king. (Otherwise, of course, they wouldn’t be king.) But the whole thing gets turned on its head if gods exist and are literally endorsing temporal rulers.

• Why would a god do that? It more or less turns “god” into just another tier on the feudal hierarchy: Counts swear to dukes; dukes to kings; kings to gods. And what are the feudal duties of a god to their kings?
• How can this be compatible with multiple gods being worshipped in a kingdom? Perhaps this is the function of a pantheon? It’s more or less a committee of gods who collectively agree who’s going to be king?
• What does this do to the concept of succession? Feels like the god(s) might endorse anybody to be the next king, not just the last king’s eldest son. Does this concept “trickle down,” so that you don’t really have any inherited nobility?
• What does this mean for the hierarchy of the church? In the real world there could be a struggle between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes because both could argue that they were the one with divine right, but if you can literally just dial up your god and ask him that sort of thing falls apart (and, assuming your gods are, in fact, endorsing kings, the division between temporal and religious power structures seems likely to collapse or never exist in the first place).

And so forth.

On the other hand, the concept of keeping faith with someone doesn’t necessarily require a one-true-way. You can be friends with Susan in a way that’s different from being friends with Debbie, and it might be the same way with gods. (Particularly if your gods are sufficiently ineffable.) Thus, for example, in my D&D campaign world both the Imperial Church and the Reformists worship the same Nine Gods in different ways… and the Nine Gods grant spells to all of them.

CODA: ATHEISTS

On thing I rather dislike is when “atheists” show up in a fantasy world where gods verifiably exist. An atheist is someone who rejects the existence of gods because there’s no rational evidence that gods exist: If you live in a world where there IS rational evidence that gods exist and you refuse to believe that they do, that doesn’t make you an atheist. It makes you a crazy person.

In some cases, the mythology of the world is that it’s not that “atheists” don’t believe that the gods physically exist; it’s just that they don’t believe that the gods are anything other than really powerful people and/or they simply don’t pledge themselves to any god (they refuse to keep faith with any of them). But even this is a perversion of what the word “atheist” actually means and what atheists actually believe. If you want characters who reject the idea that gods are worthy of worship or faith in your fantasy world with verifiable gods, I’d recommend using a term like “heretic” or perhaps inventing a new term like “godless.”

There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle PC wealth in an RPG:

• Don’t track it or worry about it in any way
• Use an abstract wealth system
• Manage it in character (most typically by counting every coin)

All of these can work well, depending on what the game is focusing on and what effect you’re looking for. For example, when I’m running Feng Shui 2 the individual wealth of each PC is, at best, window-dressing to the pulse-pounding action.

A properly designed abstract wealth system, on the other hand, can be a valuable channel for communicating setting information. In Infinity, for example, I designed a system in which a character’s Earnings (an abstract value indicating how much income they have) can be used to provide a similarly abstract Lifestyle, with the Lifestyle you live determining your Social Status (which feeds back into the Psywar system for resolving social conflicts).

The cool bit is that instead of just one Lifestyle, there are four: Clothing & Fashion, Entertainment, Food & Drink, and Housing & Property. I could then provide short descriptions for each Lifestyle at each rating. For example:

Entertainment for the Elite and richer includes custom-designed experiences, niche happenings, and expensive participatory events: AR experiences mapped onto orbital insertions; pop-up nightclubs inside hollowed-out asteroids; recreation masques using morphing flesh-masks of historical figures; and other similarly unique opportunities.

This very light layer of structure let me really dig into what the panoply of day-to-day life was really like in this strange, almost alien setting existing on the transhuman cusp in a way that could still be easily accessed by the GM (what is this hyper-elite NPC wearing? where is the demogrant NPC living?) and also provide simple hooks for players looking to come to grip with their characters without needing to absorb the totality of every social class and circumstance.

On the other hand, consider Trail of Cthulhu: Here the emphasis of the game is on solving Mythos mysteries in the 1930’s. The game uses a single Credit Rating score which (a) has a very brief description to orient the reader to the historical epoch and (b) can be mechanically used to glean clues. Because that’s what the game is about.

COUNTING COINS

Which brings us to counting coins.

This is, of course, how D&D handles wealth. Which means that, like a lot of things D&D does, it has become an often unexamined default. Recently I’ve seen a number of designers and GMs decide that they don’t like tracking every copper piece, and their solution has been to count only a single, universal currency (i.e., only Gold or Credits or Cash).

Here’s my two bits (pun intended): If you’re tracking currency at all, then it’s worth tracking at least 3-4 types to give roleplaying flavor and logistical variation. If you’re NOT interested in currency-based flavor or logistics, then you shouldn’t be counting coins at all (and should instead use one of the other two methods I talked about above).

Flavor is ineffable, but there’s a difference between silver pocket change and coffers filled with gold; between the dive bar where people are sliding copper pieces across scarred bars and the high-class joint where people pay in gold. The noble who recompenses you with a small stack of platinum in a black velvet bag just feels different from the drug lord who pays you off with a coffer full of silver.

Note from My Player: I still remember that payment. My character kept that bag. It’s good stuff.

Logistics can include the encumbrance difficulties of lugging 10,000 cp out of a dungeon vs. 100 gp (prompting tough choices and ingenuity in problem solving). But it’s also stuff like currency conversions.

Such conversions can be nation-to-nation stuff that makes long distance travel visceral in its details, but it can also be the barmaid who bites the gold coin you tossed her, looks at your suspiciously, and says, “I can’t make change for this.”

Speaking of currency conversions: Many world-builders are drawn to the idea of having different currencies for different nations, but often these aspirational goals are abandoned due to the metagame logistics of tracking all that extra data: The players need to track all the different types of coins they receive, while the GM needs to both (a) stock the dungeon hordes with them and (b) figure out what each local market/merchant’s relationship with each type of currency is.

If this is an idea that appeals to you, however, you might try achieving the same effect WITHOUT increasing the number of coinage types being tracked by having each nation use a different metal standard of coinage.

For example, the Trade Federation uses silver coins; the Young Kingdoms prefer gold; and the Old Empire uses electrum. Copper is the common coin, used interchangeably by everybody. Platinum coins are mostly a currency of account (they don’t physically exist), but the ancient Draconic Empire used them and the richest cities/neighborhoods of the Old Empire use them occasionally.

HOW MANY COINS?

So why track three or four currencies instead of two or ten or forty?

In my experience, that’s generally the sweet spot where you get the benefits of flavor and logistics before hitting diminishing returns.

What you’re generally looking for is:

• A poor currency
• One or two currencies in the range of what the PCs typically use
• A rich currency denoting unusual wealth or power

With those relative values, you’ve gained the bulk of the semantic/narrative meaning to be milked from currency.

In D&D that’s copper, silver, gold, and platinum.

In a campaign where the PCs are drug dealers, it’s the scale from garbage bags full of dirty $1 bills that need to be laundered to flashing Benjamins at the club.

In Firefly it’s bulky trade goods that need to be fenced, credits, and immunization ration bars.

Of course, if you’ve got player buy-in and you think it’ll be useful to break Firefly credits into platinum, ivoprovalyn, propoxin, and hydrozapam… great! Go for it! Complicated exchange rates between credits and Browncoat scrip used on the black market? Hard coin exchange rates based on the planet? Sure! I can see cool scenarios coming out of that!

But if it’s just one scenario, you can probably go one level up in the abstraction. If the players are just tracking silver pieces, you can still dip in at any time and say that these specific silver pieces – the ones they found on the would-be assassin – are Turcan chits, and that’s really weird because you’re in the Lasartian Dominion where they typically use Stantian roundels. I mean, you might occasionally see a Garsian slat, but a chit? No way.

That’s significant in the moment, but you don’t have to start tracking chits and slats and roundels forever after just because it was important to this specific situation.

The point, of course, is that even when you’re counting specific coins, you’re usually still looking at those coins through a layer of abstraction. The abstraction to choose (as well as when and how you choose to break that abstraction) is as much a channel for information about the game world as the Lifestyles from Infinity. So think about what information you’re choosing to communicate and to what effect.

In medieval Spain, free cities would erect a gallows because the jurisdiction over the death penalty was one of the essential rights they gained when freed from feudal fealty.

This led to the gallows scaffold itself becoming a sign of freedom and independence. Communities, wanting to celebrate these liberties, would place the gallows in a prominent place where it could be widely viewed. This often meant the top of a hill. Thus the Puig de lees Forques (Hill of the Gallows) or the Tossal del Penjat (Hill of the Hanged Man).

First: This is a cool bit of lore that you can inject into your fantasy worlds. You can also spin off variants, too: Like free elf communities being allowed to plant a cutting of the white-barked True Oak. Or dragonborn displaying the skull of their dead sire to show that they owe fealty to no drake. Or lean into the gallows itself by having necromantic kings send undead gallowsmen to the cities they’ve freed from feudal lords.

Second: These high places where the gallows once stood are now ideal for wind turbines.

These turbines, of course, are sucking up the ghosts of the hanged men and women who died there and are either spewing them out across the local countryside or injecting them into the electrical grid.

MINING THE WORLD

Kenneth Hite often asserts that, “No invented setting is as interesting as the real world.” No setting is better mapped, better documented, or (as we can see above) filled with more weird little bits of lore just waiting to be injected into your game. The real world and its history also instantly resonates with your players in a way which can be very difficult (Hite might say impossible) to achieve with a fictional setting.

(For example, I’ve written whole articles about how to establish the lore of your world and make your players care about it so that you can use it to best effect for awesome pay-offs. Conversely, you don’t have to do anything for “Hitler” or “Great Pyramid of Giza” or “Shanghai” to immediately resonate and have meaning for your players.)

So how can you find cool historical tidbits like this and use them in your worldbuilding/adventure writing?

The example of the gallows above was actually a really clean cut example of how this can work, so I thought it might be instructive to break it down.

FIRST: READ HISTORY BOOKS. Writers talk all the time about how important is for creators of superhero comic to read more than superhero comics; or for writers of fantasy to read stuff that isn’t fantasy. Basically, you can’t cull fresh new ideas from history unless you’re actually reading history.

This isn’t homework. Nor is it targeted, specific research. (That’s a different thing, although all kinds of tangential tidbits are likely to crop up while you’re researching something else.) Ideally this should be pleasure reading; find history books (or science books or whatever) that you enjoy delving into.

In this case, I was reading Will Durant’s Story of Civilization.

SECOND: JOT DOWN THE INTERESTING STUFF. Durant dropped the tidbit about the free cities of Spain displaying gallows as a sign of their free rights and it struck me as a cool, macabre detail I hadn’t heard before. I wrote it down in a file full of similar notes.

THIRD: PULL ON THE THREADS. I thought it would be fun to share the gallows tidbit on Twitter, but before doing so I did a quick Google search to verify it. (Durant’s series is fantastic because of its almost unparalleled breadth, but he also wrote it in the ‘40s, so its not unusual for some of his scholarship to have been superseded by new discoveries.) The search specifically led me to an entire book specifically dedicated to the death penalty in medieval Spain (The Death Penalty in Late-Medieval Catalonia by Flocel Sabaté) with a lot more information about the gallows being displayed by free cities. That gave me both the names of the hills and the factoid about the wind farms.

FOURTH: GIVE IT A FANTASTICAL TWIST. This is more art than science, but generally you can look at your factoid and say, “If this existed, how would magic interact with it?” (This is the sort of thought that gives you “sucking up ghosts and spewing them out.”)

Alternatively, you can look at the fantastical elements that already exist in your setting and ask how they would accomplish the same thing or achieve the same goal in different ways. (For example, elves planting cuttings of the True Oak instead of putting up gallows.)

AND THAT’S IT. It really does just boil down to being self-aware of stuff that you find cool and interesting, documenting that stuff, and then giving just the tiniest amount of thought to how it can be used or adapted.

When you’re drawing lines on a map, it can be very easy to see them as very neat divisions: You’ve got the elves over here and then the nagas over there. The sun-worshiping samurai are in this bit, with the Daejongist Empire tucked away on this peninsula. And the Goryō Kingdoms take up this big chunk to the north. If you’re in the kingdom of Taiyō, then you’re going to see a bunch of melanin castes. But if you’re over in the Daejongist Empire, you’ll have a bunch of shaman lords running around.

And nary the streams shall cross.

In the real world, of course, cultures blend at the borders and draw together into the melting pots. So the first thing you can do, if you’re near the border in your campaign world, is to reach across it and selectively draw in elements from over there. For example, in In the Shadow of the Spire, the city-state where the campaign takes place is located in Arathia (whose architecture is primarily Greco-Roman in influence), but it’s very near the border with the Vennoc Protectorates. Which is why you’ll see the faintly gothic architecture of the Vennocan style creeping into my descriptions of the city.

You can take this technique to the next level by thinking about how both cultures are shifted as a result of this cultural exchange: It’s not just that there are death shamans near the border of the Goryō Kingdoms, it’s that many of the ghosts in this region have learned to murder the animistic spirits and take their place like spiritual doppelgangers.

But the cultural penumbra of a people or nation is often more significant than that. Consider, for example, the region of Brittany in northern France. It’s called Brittany because in the 4th century people from Britain crossed the channel and created a colony. In the 5th and 6th century, this immigration by the British exploded as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.

Or look at Franconia, a region of Germany so-named because it was conquered by the Franks (the same Franks from whom France takes its name). Although the Frankish dominion of the region has been swept away by countless invasions and regime changes, that historical legacy nevertheless endures.

These vestigial or tributary realms not infrequently outlast their motherland, leaving them as a living tribute to a lost history.

There are a couple of ways that you can build this kind of dynamic cultural legacy into your campaign world.

First, you can meticulously plot out the entire history of your world, tracking invasions and cultural migrations and regime changes in the detail necessary to know that, for example, the Bakunawan serpent clans swept down the seven valleys of the Nauteka river delta, drove the Bathalan people to the west (where they warred with the proto-Daejongist civilization), and claimed the so-called lunar cities for themselves, only for those cities to become isolated when the Shwe Nabayan empresses seized the Celestial Throne and began a purge of the Bakunawans. Six of the seven lunar cities were destroyed during the Shadow Wars, and then all these lands were claimed by the kingdom of Taiyō as the wars came to an end. The province of Bakunawa remains, with the old city of Maiphai as its capital, its rocks riddled with the infamous wyrm-caverns, and its samurai favoring serpent-hilted swords.

But working out your fictional history to that level of detail, while fun, also takes a lot of work and time.

Once you know that this sort of pattern exists in history, though, you can skip the laborious steps and jump straight to the effect.

For example, if you’ve got a big old kingdom full of elves (or maybe a region where there’s lots of ruins from the Old Elven Empire), then you can look across a channel or a river or maybe even just a couple hundred miles away in a semi-arbitrary direction and… Yup, there’s Alvland. Probably filled with an anomalously large population of half-elves. (Most people have at least a hint of a point on the tips of their ears.)

Once you’ve placed one of these vestigial realms, of course, you’ll probably want to fill in some of the details about why it exists. In the case of Alvland, for example, it turns out that about six hundred years ago one of the crystal citadel-cities of the elves abruptly vanished from the sky, reappeared a couple hundred miles away, and crashed. After the initial catastrophe, during which the local populace swarmed to their aid, many of the elves chose to remain in the area and settle down.

(Hmm… I didn’t even know the elves used to have flying cities made out of crystal. I wonder what happened to the rest of them?)