Ebrauc Fleshed Out

Living as I do in Tottori, particularly this time of year, it's difficult to imagine a more dreary, damp, grey and bleak place, but I'm trying.

I'm trying to envision myself into a society in which most people bathed perhaps once in a lifetime, owned but one set of clothes, and had barely any seasoning for a diet consisting primarily of potage and what's technically referred to as 'offal'. They at weevily bread that gave them the runs, and had no toilet paper. No tobacco. No tomatoes. No potatoes. Lots of violence.

Reenactment society Regia Anglorum giving us a taste of Anglo-Saxon life

No inns. If you have connections, or if you're the son of a thegn and can play the lute to keep the eorl of a village entertained, you might be offered some gruel and a patch of straw on which to sleep among the dogs in the eorl's mead hall. The rushes on the floor would be full of discarded food, dog piss, and vermin. Characters would itch. They should suffer combat penalties because of it.

Settlement Information Complete

Overview of all settlements in Ebrauc

This chart provides an adequate summary of each settlement's foundation and products, so that we can see how they relate to each other and, by extension, to other kingdoms. This informs the location of what passed for roads--simply areas of land showing signs of recent hoof, cart, or foot traffic--in addition to the extant Roman roads we can glean from history texts. These would be made of increasingly rough-hewn slabs of stone with grass growing in the cracks, but would make for somewhat easier traveling than the alternative thoroughfares of mud and dung pressed into the earth just because people happened to cross the landscape there.

The screenshot does not show the settlements in Deira or the other surrounding kingdoms, partly because my players read this blog and wouldn't be privy to that information just yet, just in case we do play this setting again. Suffice it to say that in general, the settlements in Deira are fewer in number but more populous, so that military forces are approximately evenly matched. Political tensions are mounting, but even the DM doesn't yet know if or when they will erupt into full-scale conflict.

Dark Ages Economy

In this society people are considered rather well-off if they possess any coin money at all. The players didn't see it because I pre-rolled the characters, but starting wealth is in the form of animals that can be used to trade for goods or coin. The number and type of animals a character possesses at creation depends on the family's status and father's occupation. I haven't made tables for determining precisely how this will function, but when I do it will provide another dimension to the world that the players can find interesting or irritating.

Most settlements govern and protect themselves to the best of their ability. They are usually 'governed' by an eorl chosen by the cyning, and each eorl is a thegn, by which is meant he possesses good weapons and fighting ability, and a little surplus wealth. He lives in a mead hall with his family and livestock. If he's particularly wealthy he might have a two-floor structure, with his family and retainers living upstairs, and the animals, weapons, and farm implements kept below. There is no concept of castles, and creature comforts are minimal. Most people provide for their own necessities, with certain goods traded between villages. There are no stores as such, but with a settlement one might find a few skilled craftsmen willing to sell or barter their wares.

Because we had so few players for this setting, each player controlled two characters at a time. Some had tents, others had blankets, some had swords that break on a 1 in 6 because that's all they could afford. Our richest character, a paladin, had well-crafted weapons, a lute with a few extra strings, and a fine woolen mantle. He was slain by an aurochs in the second session. A moment of silence, please.

The Fallen

Thrydwulf, Son of Caedwulf Son of Wulfnod. Three generations of thegns. The player tried unsuccessfully to finagle his father's suit of chainmail for the adventure, but it actually wouldn't have helped much in the end. First a witch in the forest got the best of him, but merely put him to sleep because she thought he was alone and had other purposes in mind for him. She only tried to kill the others when they came to the rescue. He went hunting with a certain eorl and followed the eorl's injunction to go after an aurochs with his sword. A horn right through the gut and he was gored to -9 HP; he bled to death before anyone could get to him.

Raegenhere the Cleric. I liked having a sword-bearing cleric in the party. This being several centuries before the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 would forbid it, priests can draw all the blood they want. I always found it amusing that D&D rules preclude clerics from drawing blood but allow them to bludgeon people to death with clubs and quarterstaves. A fishhook hit this bloke between the eyes as a child, and he had all kinds of personality. He met his end falling into one of the witch's traps, where he was immobilised while she slowly knifed him to death.

The Reactions

This was another small-group session and thus I still don't have a quorum of votes on this world from the party, but it really is time to move on. One comment was that it seemed the world consists basically of more villages, thegns and mead halls, and primeval wilderness. For the immediate area, this is true; but the entities one could potentially encounter would become more fantastic the further the party moved from home base. The same is true for the Minoan Campaign; in the Medieval Campaign that will be the third of three worlds, it would likely be a matter of increasingly powerful human adversaries, unless the party traveled to very remote locations.

It was a relief to have had enough of the world created that I could adjust to any decision the players made. During the first session I felt trapped and frustrated by not having enough potentially interesting things available in every direction the party might go. I have little more than a week before the next session and have to complete at least this same amount of work on a 14th-century setting, just in case enough players show up to make it wise to introduce it for the next session.

The Alexis Smolensk Challenge, World 2 of 3

The Kingdom of Ebrauc

Ebrauc and surrounding kingdoms, shown within what is now the North Riding of Yorkshire

This small but cosmopolitan domain is nestled between the North Pennines and the Anglic Kingdom of Deira, with the Bryton kingdoms of Bryneich and Rheged to the north and Elmet to the south. During the Roman occupation Ebrauc, and particularly the fortress settlement of Eboracum (also called Cair Ebrauc) served as the northern capital of Roman rule in Albion. Since then it has been occupied by various surrounding tribes while maintaining a blend of Roman culture; the population is now largely Bryton and Angle, with a significant Roman minority. The common language remains Aenglisc, though Cumbric and Common Brittanic speakers abound, and there is sigificant use of Latin among Romans and Christian clergy of all tribes. 

Most of the people are Pagan, but particularly in Ebrauc there is a mingling of different faiths, including that of the Druids, most of whom are connected to the Picts in the northern regions. Assigning a specific year to the campaign is not necessary, as dates would have been in reference to local events. At any rate, this is several centuries before the emperor Constantine would help popularise the belief that Jesus the Christ had been an actual historical figure and back-counted the years since he must have lived; at this point, he is still seen as a symbol and metaphor, so there is no concept of BC and AD. (Christian holidays are few, and the Pagan traditions later appropriated by the church are extant in something closer to their original forms.)

At the start of the game, border skirmishes with Deira are common, and negotiations have changed the eastern several times in recent history. Ostensibly, the lords of both realms wish to maintain an amicable trading relationship, and have thus far sought to avoid all-out war. Indeed, trading arrangements are of much mutual benefit, as Ebrauc manufactures weapons and jewelry of famous quality, and Deira produces excellent ships as well as salt and other commodities. 

For the initial impetus, the aging cyning of Ebrauc had one of his thegns collect a party of stout-hearted young men to look for a group of tally-keepers that had failed to return from their rounds through the realm. The six young men (I had each player take on two characters each, because most of our players failed to show up that day) walked from Eboracum to Isurium to Beodlamh to Deruentoine, where they were told the tally-keepers should have gone back to Eboracum. The party were waylayed by some locals in trouble, and when we finished the session, the party had just discovered some muddy horse tracks leading into the river, which they were about to cross into the foggy Wolds of Deira in pursuit of the attackers. 

As the weather spreadsheet shows, fog is going to reduce visibility and interfere with combat a goodly portion of the time. This was the first serious fog of the four days of game time that made up this session, but the party spent a lot of the rest of the time getting rained on, trudging through mud, fording rivers in cowhide shoes, and generally having lots of opportunities for foot fungus, to which even a paladin isn't immune. Aside from that, the landscape presented less of an obstacle than in the previous setting, and as the party had a charismatic lyre-playing son of a thegn with them, they were able to secure free lodging and a meal in different villages. (The rest of the characters were either of the ceorl, or propertied 'middle' class, or geburs, owning no land at all.) Perhaps this made things unduly easy for the party, but then, as only their second experience in a world without alchemy, mood-altering substances, armour, crossbows or even longbows, I thought I should mitigate the bleak abject misery just a tad. I explained to everyone at the beginning that the intrinsic violence in the society was such that they should consider every man they meet as a first-level fighter by default; somehow, they judiciously avoided confrontation throughout the session. 

From my perspective as DM, I felt this session was much less successful than the one we played in the ancient Greek world. The general consensus from the players afterwards was that they preferred the other world slightly, but didn't dislike this one. I thought at first I was just depressed by the poor turnout, but I realised that I really hadn't put as much work into this one. I hadn't even decided the locations of most of the settlements, let alone their industries, geographical features, and other things of potential interest; all of which I had done in detail for Minoa. The map above shows just the first pass through. Some of these are represented by settlements still remaining in some form today, which provides some hints as to what they might have been like; the rest have to be improvised out of incomplete accounts, folklore, and my own demented imagination. 

This just shows that I still have a boatload of work to do.

All in all, I was dispirited at my own lack of intimate knowledge of the setting, and it looks like I'll have to put the medieval world on hold and just take another two weeks to completely prepare the Ebrauc environment.

Sources

The History Files: Ebrauc

Historical fiction author Richard Dennings

Good ol' Wikipedia: Archaeological sites in North Yorkshire

David Nash Ford's Early British Kingdoms

Yorkshire topography map