Ages of Life: Medieval and Modern Perspectives

 

To pick up where I left off in the last update, I'd like to add a few more thoughts about what different periods of life mean in our campaign world, and how the differ from the world in which most of us live.

 

Researchers at the American Psychological Association coined the acronym WEIRD to describe the bias in psychological research almost entirely done on ‘Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic’ demographics. The typical cohort for study, they observe, is represented by only 12% of the world’s population. Most of what we tend to think is socially and culturally typical was quite the reverse for most of human history, and is still alien to much of the world. We just don’t pay attention, because that’s way out there, and all of us are over here.

 

That changes when we have to put ourselves in a medieval setting. Not so when the setting is a fantasy world as I described last week, but one rooted in the historical exigencies, quirks, and foibles of the actual Middle Ages.

 

We’ve had a reworking of society since then, through the Renaissance, Enlightenment and subsequent reworkings of cultural norms, with perhaps the 1960s marking the last big change in the West. For those of us who grew up after that period, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive of anything different in all but the most deploring and condemnatory terms. Along the way, men became feminine, women became masculine, and no one seemed any happier.

 

Discussions of gender aside for the moment, our modern society has extended childhood to a degree that I’m persuaded is unsustainable. A typical criticism of the sorry state of contemporary education, for example, is the observation that most university graduates today would have a hard time passing an 1895 exam for adolescents in Salinas, Kansas. While standards for what sort of knowledge and expertise is necessary in a given society is subject to such change that comparisons are sometimes disingenuous, as the above link explains in detail, it is nonetheless sobering to consider research indicating that the average Victorian was 14 IQ points smarter than the average Westerner today, in spite of the Flynn Effect, which ostensibly raises average IQ scores over time. It turns out that the gains attributable to the Flynn Effect are in those areas not correlated with general intelligence. In other words, we’ve become better at taking tests. We’ve had to, because we’ve spent so much time taking them and practicing for them. Aside from that, our education now means so little that prospective employers view a high school diploma merely as proof that an applicant warmed a seat for twelve years. In the process he will likely have learnt little in the way of problem solving, discipline, etiquette, or self-reliance.

 

The word 'university', like so much else in our language, has become so debased that it seems it can refer to almost anything. I myself teach a few classes at a place that calls itself a ‘university’ but is in actuality a holding tank for the mildly retarded. In essence, my role is that of a glorified babysitter paid to keep overgrown children out of the job market for a few more years. Their ambitions, when they have any, are generally confined to getting a job with the (ever-expanding) government, because there is little of tangible productivity left for them to do.

 

This is because the intelligent members of our society have successfully innovated to the point where survival is no longer an issue. Survival of mother and child during the ordeal of birth is almost a foregone conclusion, and few children die before the age of five, as would have been the fate of the majority in the medieval period. We live longer, and have less to do, than ever before. As time goes on, prospective employers require more and higher degrees as qualifications, and thus the competing institutions continually lower their standards to accommodate the masses who have neither the interest nor curiosity, nor ability, for higher learning.

 

In the time period in which our D&D campaign is set, universities were for the elite few, and learning was the only goal. There are two in England at the time, Oxford and Cambridge, and both are within reasonable distance on horseback from the party's current location. At some point it's inevitable that they will have to visit one of these places, and thus will be revealed just how different they are to the modern concept of what a tertiary institution is.

 

In a pre-industrial society, of course, there was plenty to do. Simply surviving took so much effort that there wasn't much room to coddle children or to permit that fabricated modern interim period called 'adolescence'. At the age of twelve, every male member of the community went through a public rite in which he swore his allegiance to that community and promised to uphold its laws and those of the king. He was, in effect, a man. He might be called a 'young man', but by seventeen he would be simply a 'man'. A woman was in her prime by seventeen, and 'over the hill' by her early twenties.

 

I recently read a book by an author I admire greatly. I am obliged to make that preface, and withhold details of this work, out of respect for all that this author has done. My complaint about this particular book is that, although the setting is ostensibly medieval, the man character, a 'boy' of seventeen, is naive and irresponsible to an anachronistic degree. He lives alone most of the time, but does little in the way of work and is treated like a child by every other character. In short, it would have been more appropriate in context if his age were made to be about ten.

 

Now, even in some modern societies, such as Turkey (not ‘WEIRD’), boys as young as six are doing fairly responsible work--bussing tables at restaurants, porting luggage, and so on--and by ten are often holding desk jobs. This isn't because they have a lower life expectancy, though, but simply because the Turks haven't caught on to the idea that people should be babied and enstupidated until well after their physical bodies have begun their slow decline.

 

This is the way it was throughout most of human history. People learnt what they needed to live and work through their parents, mentors, and masters if apprenticed. If they were particularly gifted--and only then--they were allowed to study at increasingly higher levels. (This was easier if they were from the upper classes, but there were also programs in place for poor boys of particular talent, like Christopher Marlowe, to be educated at an elite level.)

 

It might help, when playing our campaign world, to think of all PC and NPC ages as the cultural equivalent of several years older than their number. Doing so will make the experience more familiar, at least, generating a sympathetic barometer of relative emotional maturity and wisdom of the sort gained by a life of hardship—and yet the arithmetic conversion must with great caution, for it is all too easy to forget that the younger a society is, the more naïve, the more accepting of superstition, the more prone to sudden change, and the more violent.

Behind the Swordplay

Europe in 1370, from Wikimedia Commons

That it has been more than a month since I last updated, and currently have no idea when we’re going to play after having abandoned the last session right in the middle of combat, gives me some space to pause and examine the game from afar in the interim. I haven’t done any preparation or study directly relating to D&D, much less read anyone else’s blog in the past few moons. My reading habits and musical inclinations, however, still lean heavily toward the Middle Ages, and in this connection I can contrast what I know (or think I know) of actual history with the expectations and preconceptions with which I’m frequently confronted in running the game.

The earliest campaign setting in which I can remember playing was either Europe or someplace like it. When I first tried my hand at DMing in the late 1980s it was almost certainly parts of England and Ireland. Bereft of the benefits of Google or even a decent library in the neighbourhood, I picked up what I could glean from the books my child’s mind could comprehend. Much of what into my early world building was filtered through my father’s interpretation of history. My knowledge was necessarily incomplete, to say the least; and I oversimplified things and got more wrong than right. Nonetheless, it was always the attempt at getting close to the way things really were—or, more precisely, could have been if everything people at the time believed to exist really did exist—that made building worlds and running in them so much fun.

It’s been established that what I seek from D&D isn’t always what players seek. That’s fine, because they don’t have to read all the books I read, or play out all the scenarios that following hooks might lead them to; and yet I still enjoy all the digestive and creative efforts. The thing is, any world I offer my friends as a playing field is going to be informed by the world, with all its attendant customs, rules, laws, by-laws, taboos, economics, and quirks of culture, including the way people work, eat, dress, greet each other, and even speak, although I don’t actually mandate speaking like Chaucer at the gaming table. That would be silly.

But it runs counter to what most fantasy role-players seem to be seeking. Without attempting to create a straw man, I would say that, based on what I have read online and heard from actual players, is not so much a game based on the Middle Ages but a fantasy game: In other words, one in a setting with medieval weapons and technology plus magic and witchcraft plus completely modern attitudes and sensibilities. (I’m tempted to add an additional plus of anachronisms like plate armour and kerosene lanterns, but I think this is not so much an expectation as simply a lack of awareness of precisely when certain things were invented.) It’s this last part, the modern attitudes and sensibilities, that tend to cause the most problems.

There is, for example, the tendency to treat teenage NPCs as children. In England in the 14^th century, the setting in which our game takes place, a male was considered a man at the age of 12, but players have never been able to conceive of him as such, much less behave toward him the way people would have at the time. Likewise, players react with horror at the suggestion that their 20-year-old PC might bed down with a woman of 14, but their counterparts in the actual world would have found it completely natural.

There is also the expectation that anyone can buy and sell anything he chooses—a kind of medieval free market. I’ve played Runescape, so I know what it looks like, and medieval England wasn’t it. There is a very rigid class and mercantile system, and trade is closely regulated by the guilds. People still cheat, and are sometimes punished, but strangers in any locale—which the PCs are whenever they venture past the walls of Ludeforde—will find it much harder to cheat, and easier to be cheated, than the locals. I often have to remind players that they risk execution of they try to bring down big game in most woods, and that if they try to resist arrest when the king’s men come for them, the results will not be pretty. Yet even for this I have run sessions where PCs tried to attack the medieval equivalent of cops—and the players don’t get to claim their character was killed just because he was black.

This directly relates to the approach many players have to in-game social and mercantile interactions in general. Perhaps it’s not so much a consequence of modern sensibilities as it is a perception of what was acceptable in the Middle Ages corrupted by Hollywood and video games. ‘We’re never coming back to this town,’ they might say, ‘Why don’t we just kill this guy and take everything in the shop?’ Putting aside for a moment that, barring any house rules permitting telepathy, any verbal exchanges taken in the presence of the DM are clearly audible to any NPCs in the vicinity, their mere presence as strangers in any locale has already marked them with intense suspicion, and they’re unlikely to get away with much when quite a few eyes are on them and many more mouths are murmuring about their comings and goings all over town. Everyone knew each other in medieval towns. This is difficult for modern civilians to grasp, when we are so often isolated in our private cells with our little interactive devices, and our neighbourhood is not so much a community as a juxtaposition of persons. But without the benefit of alienating social trends and technology, everyone belonged, and had a keen sense of his position in the community. People paid attention more. When they heard a dog bark in the distance, they could guess whose dog it was.

The last point I’m going to mention before I bring this to a close for today, is that in almost every way, life in the Middle Ages was less healthy than our own. Part of the reason for the earlier maturity mentioned above is the shorter average lifespan. People in all pre-industrial societies suffered considerably, both from disease and scarcity, the two often going together. Like the hunting proficiency, the fishing proficiency gets abused: It’s sometimes taken for granted that every river and stream is so teeming with fish that a proficient PC can cast his line for half an hour and expect to waltz home with dinner. I usually just overlook this for the sake of moving the game along, but the reality is that climate and land formation make fish rare where settlements haven’t already been built nearby to exploit them—and the presence of any settlement, with septic refuse and offal from butchers dumped copiously into the waterways, makes them possibly toxic.

Much noise is made about the toxicity of the environment these days, with less awareness of how much more toxic it was in the distant past. We like to talk about how horrible the Industrial Revolution was, but we don’t think much about how much worse, in many ways, life was before it. This is the world in which we’re playing. It was, at the same time, an incredible world filled with beauty and enchanting discoveries—including, of course, magic and witchcraft, along with the host of other phenomena medieval people believed were real—but it’s not a place anyone from the modern world would be likely to enjoy experiencing, and most of us have a very meagre and nebulous concept of what the experience would have been like.

A Fungus Among Us

I'd been putting off writing for some time, because I couldn't think of anything to say that hadn't been said better already. Having received an unpleasant but prolific gift for my 41st birthday, however, I can comment on something relevant to D&D. 

A few weeks ago, a friend discovered a kitten under some industrial debris and texted me to ask if I wanted it. I didn't, particularly, but I promised to talk to my wife; when I did, she became giddy with excitement, and so the cat entered my house and I had to be nice to it. We did take it (or, I should say, her, the cat being female) to the animal hospital for a diagnostic, and she was pronounced free of parasites other than fleas, with which she was absolutely rife. The treatment for fleas was effective immediately; they dropped off overnight while she was confined to a cage. I had described the whole process in real time on a forum in which I sometimes participate, and one of the posters insisted, adamantly, that she be 'backlighted' (or 'blacklighted', I can't recall) for ringworm which, if present, would require a quarantine of two weeks. Although at this point I didn't quite know what ringworm was and put it in the same mental category as roundworm, tapeworm, and heart worm, I still put my trust in the veterinarian. I think I assumed, naively, that this was because the condition wasn't common in Japan; and for the past few weeks we have, stupidly, let her crawl all over us and sleep with us. 

I noticed my first spot a week ago while being swarmed with mosquitoes during a neighborhood shrine-beautifying event. Although mosquito bites normally disappear from my skin within a few hours, one spot seemed particularly tenacious. I thought it was strange, but didn't pay much attention until it became larger, more pronounced, swollen, and perniciously itchy. By the end of the week it had expanded into a bright red, puffy ring in the middle of my wrist. Then while showering I noticed an identical ring on my knee. Then another on my forearm, and on the opposite one. With the new one that appeared on my back this morning, I now have five total. 

Now, it is is my impression than in the West, skin conditions are generally perceived as ghastly. I've been careful to impress on the players in our campaign, for example, the extent of the terror fourteenth-century people feel toward leprosy, for example, quite often ostracising members of the community who might only have eczema, on the grounds that it just might be leprosy, which would mean the end of an individual's existence in society. Even now, at least among teenagers, there is a degree of ostracism associated with most skin conditions. In Japan, however, it's taken as quite normal; eczema and atopic dermatitis are omnipresent and death with by what amounts to a shrug of the shoulders. 

The environment is humid, particularly in summer, and fungal infections thrive. It's simply that they're not accorded any particular gravity. This cultural difference from the West is one to which my eyes have only now been opened. The best comparison that comes to mind is with the flu, which is no big deal in the US. It's similar in symptoms to the common cold, except that it's accompanied by fever and joint pain, and the treatment is basically the same: Rest, Vitamin C, hot tea, stay home if you can but work if you have to. In Japan, however, the flu is always called by its full name, influenza, and always pronounced in ominous tones. People are expected to wear surgical masks when going outdoors and are almost shunned in horror. This, I'm told, is because somewhere, at some point in history, someone died from the flu. Odd, I think, because gastroenteritis, of which I myself nearly died in my early 30s, has a much higher mortality rate, and yet is included in same sociolinguistic category as the common cold: kaze, which normally describes light ailments that are not life-threatening. 

I remember working on a translation of publicity materials for local hot springs with a Japanese translator; one bath was supposed to be good for what he directly rendered as 'skin diseases'. I pushed to have the phrase softened to 'skin conditions' on the grounds that Westerners wouldn't want to get into the water with people infected with contagious diseases. 

Knowing what I know now, I'd have left it as diseases and left it to tourists' judgment whether they wanted to get into the hot spring. 

In my aggressive search for information, I did see some sites that suggested ringworm can be spread in swimming pools and even house dust. I cannot vouch for the reputability of those sites, but I feel it is my moral duty to give as much information to the players in my campaign as possible, so that they can make informed decisions about whether or not they want to visit my house. 

We took the cat to the veterinarian again yesterday, and he fearlessly touched her with his bare hands and let her rub all over him. It seems to be okay if you wash your hands afterwards. He even said it's fine to let her sleep with us. In the meantime, I'm rubbing anti fungal cream on my five spots three times a day after washing them thoroughly. There is a treatment for fabric that includes spraying it with two different chemicals and wiping it down with a third just to make sure, and this is what we're going to do with all the dining room chairs, for example. The cat was given both oral and topical treatments--we have to massage her with cream and make her swallow half a pill every morning--and she's expected to recover in a week. Diagnosis is similar for humans, although because we don't have fur our spots will still be visible for a month or so. I can't go to the beach party looking like a leper. 

All this really impresses me with how inefficient are our standards of hygiene even in the 21st century. In the 14th century, living in close proximity to livestock and companion animals as so many people did, ringworm and other fungal infections, as well as myriad parasites, would have been ubiquitous. I live in a country and culture that prides itself on its cleanliness, and yet we succumb to infections like this, which make me afraid of my entire house and itch to an extent that my capacity to enjoy life is significantly reduced. Of course, the average medieval peasant would have been so covered with lice and fungus all the time that he wouldn't notice much difference. 

Which brings us to the paladin. 

The 2nd Edition Player's Handbook states that the paladin is 'immune to all forms of disease'. It says nothing about fungus, and as I've mentioned before, if she spends too much time in a wet saddle she'll end up with an itchy snatch. (This would amount to what, as children, used to call 'cooties'.) We'll also assume, for the sake of argument, that's she's usually got some lice. Perhaps not as much as the average Tom, Dick, and Beavis, but a few. Bear in mind that the medieval ritual of combing the hair was always done near a window, often with help so that the lice could be picked out one by one. 

In other words, the average person on the muddy, feces-and-offal covered street would be used to a fair amount of itching on a daily basis. Therefore the symptoms of fungal infections or parasites would have to be pretty severe in order for penalties to THAC0 and AC to apply. Anal fistula would certainly do the trick, though athlete's foot and cooties probably wouldn't unless they reached a certain severity. This could give our campaigning party weeks to treat the problem, or at least air the skin out enough to keep it from getting too much worse too quickly. 

These are all things the party should bear in mind, particularly now as the cold spell has ended and the humid summer will be soon upon them. A degree of circumspection should be applied when considering to walk about fully clothed in the rain, go for weeks without bathing, ride or wear armour for hours on end, and forego the price of a stay at an inn in favour of a straw bed where animals sleep, or an oily mattress in a roadside hospital. 

In the real world, we have a session scheduled for the 18th of this month. This morning we gave the cat a double shampoo before rubbing her down with the cream as usual, and we've done our best to decontaminate the house, but as I said, you use your own judgment. 

How I Use Modules

It's been difficult to build the motivation to post to the blog, but as we've got a session coming this weekend, I'm doing my best to cough up something.

When I look at the current page of this blog, which comprises perhaps the most recent ten posts, under each of them is emblazoned the discouraging words 'No Comments'. Oddly, when I look at the stats, I can see that people are clicking onto these pages from North America, a few countries in Europe, and even India on occasion. Although I do get feedback from the players in my campaign once in a while, most of the time I feel like I'm talking to myself. Perhaps the readers are largely just clicking here by accident and immediately leaving when they see there's nothing here that they want. Or they might actually be staying to read, even regularly, but without any feedback I have no idea whether they're thinking, 'Hmm, interesting, good stuff' or, 'Man, this guy's a yutz. Why does he waste his time?'

At any rate, here it goes. The topic on which I'm going to pontificate today is the use of modules. Not long ago my DMing hero decided to market a module on his blog, and there was mention that it was possible to interpret this decision as 'selling out', or in contradiction to his philosophy and approach to the game. Since our campaign just finished making an excursion into a module--rather waltzed over the tip of its dramatic iceberg and, after some bloodshed, dropped the whole adventure like a bad habit--I thought it would be a good place to look at how I personally use those dandy packets lazy DMs adore so.

 

The module we recently bastardised is called The Village with No Name, and it's available for free download at http://www.dragonsfoot.org/fe/ along with a boatload of other modules. I'm going to go into a bit of detail about what I did with it, while mocking it just a tad.

 

I have never opened a module with the intention of running it the way its writers direct it to be run. I might have done when I was a young teenager first playing the game, if I had been aware of the existence of modules back then. As a jaded greybeard, I look at what the module is supposed to accomplish and think about whether the party is likely to find that their while. I then consider what minimal adjustments would be necessary to have the module make sense in the geographical and temporal context of my world. Lastly, I rummage through it to isolate any bits that are particularly interesting, at least as window dressing. Because most modules are a hodgepodge of tropes and cliches, this search is almost always fruitless, and I have to rely on actual history and  my own imagination to jazz it up.

 

Now, if I happen to find a module that I think has something to offer my party, I cut it up andmake paper dolls with it so that it can fit where the party is and what they're doing without appearing absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes this takes so much tweaking that the adventure bears scarce resemblance to the module.

 

The most annoying aspects of any module are immediately discarded. That includes the gaudy prose in which the descriptions are normally ensconced; treasure and weapons that couldn't possibly exist where the party is; the NPCs personalities and back-stories, which are invariably two-dimensional and derivative; and, usually, their names. (In the case of The Village with No Name, I kept most of the original names and just toned down the hyperbolic elements and gave the personages a bit of depth.)

 

The module's title itself is pretty ridiculous. The idea that 'the villagers never bothered to name it' is improbable though not, I suppose, impossible. Naturally enough, my party asked one of the villagers the name, and he replied that it didn't really have one. It's a bit of a stretch, but we could say that before the poll tax of 1377 not every locale had to be categorised and recorded. In this case, since the village straddles the border of Shropshire and Staffordshire, it might be recorded as Straddling East if finally determined to belong to the former, or Straddling West if the latter. This is of no great consequence, because they were able to find it easily enough with the help of the king's foresters, and at any rate they wouldn't have been likely to be particularly awed by mention of 'the village with no name'.

 

Map possessed by the party's paladin. The village would be in the Morfe Forest.

 

The characters, introduced on the second page of the .pdf, are: Galyn, the leader of the band of outlaws the party are supposed to face; Pilanor, a green-cloaked assassin who hangs out in the church; Feldryk, the parish priest; Vilnin, whom I couldn't help picture as a drunken and belligerent Rebeus Hagrid; and Burl, a fat, ugly, subhuman monster with a 'massive mace'. The module mentions about a score of outlaws without names; I gave them names on my record sheet as a means of keeping track of them and inspiring myself to run them sort of like people, which is surpisingly hard to do during the confusion of melee.

 So far, the best way I've found to keep track of that mess.

The outlaws are all carrying or wearing weapons and other items of value or power that could be found if the party had time to search the bodies after combat. Sometimes, they just have to run for their lives, and don't get the chance.

The idea of the module is that a band of outlaws, led by Galyn, have captured a village and are using it as their base of operations, to the horror of the people living in it. The subplot is that some of Galyn's gang are going to betray and assassinate him, and there's a bit about a special ring he's wearing, and the 'thinking' party are ostensibly expected to focus on that. Whether my party would been interested in doing or not, I cannot tell; they never made it that far. It doesn't matter whether I would have had Galyn killed by his own men nor whether Feldryk was actually a priest. The more powerful members of the gang were unreachable during the bellicose forays the party made into the village proper, and now they are long gone, having vacated the premises when they saw that a band of adventurers was making their stay in the village rather unfun.

They did encounter Vilnin, though his name never came up. The module instructs the DM to have this lone ruffian 'demand' the outrageous sum of '100gp' or attack the party. I did have him berate and attempt to intimidate the party, but he had to be drunk off his arse to do, and the party at that point was seven strong and fronted by a seasoned Danish mariner not likely to be intimidated by a loudmouth drunk. It did eventually escalate into a fight, but Vilnin wasn't difficult to take down in his condition. Having all the treasure the module gave him would have been a joke. Why would Galyn have even allowed him to keep it in a barn, the first building on the road into the village, instead of in a locked chest in deep in the gang's hideout? One of the party's henchmen greedily snatched up the earrings to sell to a local jeweler; whether I had endowed them with the magical properties suggested, the players will never know.

 

The monster Burl is described as 'the size of a house, standing 7' tall with shoulders nearly as wide', and one suspects, or at any rate I do, that that description wasn't proofread before publishing. As wide as he is tall? What is he, a gelatinous cube?

 

The module has the ruffians playing cards, but as this is unlikely in 14th-century England ours were playing dice, and not gambling nearly as much money. Their weapons and armour are all of local and unspectacular origin. With particular attention to Burl, the module reads:

Burl sits and watches the melee with passing interest for a full round before draining his drink, rising to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, grabbing his mace and attacking the nearest PC with a roar of battle lust.

Not something PCs are going to notice. They'd be too focused on the enemy directly in front of them. I might say instead, 'It occurs to you that the gelatinous cube with the mace the size of a tree is headed toward you. If you have to roll a new character, I'm sorry'. Even converting this Burl's stats into 2e terms, they're still unreasonable: STR 19, 24 hit points. Considering the attack bonus for strength and brawn as well as the mere weight of a 'massive mace' crashing down with the force of gravity behind it, our paladin, bard, and mariner would be three mushy piles of guts and brains. Planning for gratuitous treasure in the unlikely event the party survived wouldn't have been much compensation.

But after doing away with Vilnin, my party weren't stupid enough to traipse into a public house and start a fisticuffs, and I didn't expect them to be. As a 'thinking party' of a quite different sort, they played the situation much better: They had some henchmen find out who the village chandler was and buy up all the pitch they could, then set the pub on fire and knocked off the outlaws as they staggered outside. They may not have plundered the booty the gang left on the tables, but they captured the five panicking horses tied up outside, which were probably worth more.

There was no solving of any mystery. My party weren't going to care about backstabbing within the outlaw gang, much less attempt to put a stop to it. There was a bit of intrigue at first, but after that it was just hack and slash: The paladin read the priest's aura and decided he was corrupt and she wanted nothing to do with him. (It should go without saying that I had no itention of decorating Feldryk's office with a shelf of books with titles like The Beginner's Guide to Pious Practices listed on page 10 of the module. The 1980s North American self-help craze hasn't come to medieval Shropshire, and  besides, books in the Middle Ages were kept in locked chests, not on shelves; and this DM would be a tad less blatant in dropping hints about a priest's authenticity. Whether he was a real priest or not isn't actually something that would have been relevant; even if the party had defeated the gang, if they hadn't killed Feldryk, I would have had him do everything in his power to get away from the party, not continue to plague them in future adventures.)

The thing is, there were three PCs, plus a handful of jakeys from the Quattforde alehouse who happened to be taken in by the paladin's charismatic recruitment speech--the survivors became her henchmen later, but in the first foray into the village they were merely roustabouts--against more than a score of professional scallwags. Before burning down the pub, they had already got into a skirmish outside the church, and the peasants (whose existence is noted nowhere in the module, but they would have had to be there for the village to function) helped them get away before the gang could call for reinforcements. In retaliation, the outlaws went on a murderous spree, trampling the crops, burning down the cottages and orchards, carving up the men and doing to the women what one would imagine them doing to women. When the party came back after hiding in the woods for a day, they couldn't very well ask the torched corpses for help.

Once the PCs and their henchmen--two of whom had been slain at this point--destroyed the public house and stole the horses, they had what they thought was the best they could hope for, and they headed for the hills. At the end of our last session, the party found themselves well west of the Clee Forest, ready to do something completely different. Galyn's (or Feldryk's) gang would have abandoned the village, its most important resources used up or destroyed, and gone to evade the law in some other land, leaving the remaining buildings to be shrugged off and marked down as a ghost town by the 1377 tax collectors.

So if you're in this party, go ahead and spend the money on the Tao Jumpstart Proposal. When the module you get hits you in our campaign, it won't look anything like you imagine.

The Drain

This is just my experience as an over-thinking introvert and not every single DM will be able to relate, but I'm sure that not a few find the task absolutely exhausting.

 

After every session, my voice and nerves are shot. I've just spoken nonstop for five hours, which is more than speaking than I do all week in total. I try to be concise, of course, for the benefit of the players, but I often end up giving long answers to questions and anyway must provide quite a lot of description and information just to move the game along. This isn't difficult if I psyche myself up to it with lots of espresso and the music of Arany Zoltan, but when it's all over I feel like a sponge that's been wrung out.

 

It precludes doing much else on weekends, and especially anything having to do with human contact. Even speaking to my wife doesn't come easily, but she understands and tolerates my monosyllabic responses at times like this. Socialising is out of the question.

 

For example, I have a neighbourhood obligation on Sunday nights which I'm inclined to cancel on the days we play, even though it's several hours after the session has ended.

 

I bought a house in a village in Japan, where neighbours are closely knit and expected to all do their part in the community. The man who lives across the creek could hear me practising the flute in the morning and decided that, for the upcoming lion dance that takes place around the district next month, I could apply my efforts to the traditional Japanese transverse flute. All the non-elderly men in the village participate. It would have been bad form to refuse, so each Sunday evening I faithfully show up to practise from the hours of six to nine, which in actuality amounts more to drinking beer and engaging in that sort of crude banter normally known as 'guy talk'. This past weekend we prepared the straw sandals we have to wear, and practised for a total of five minutes the entire night. Such is human relations.

 

Doing this after D&D, however, would amount to an overdose of humanity. Normally, it takes at least as many hours to recover from playing as I've spent playing.

 

The thing is, the event is coming soon and the men want to get in as much practise as possible. I'm going to attempt doing both this coming Sunday. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to D&D more than to practice.

 

It's worth it, of course. Introverts are capable of being as jovial and boisterous as extraverts; we just need a long time to recover afterwards. I'm not sure I'll get that this time. It will be interesting to see what condition I'm in by Monday.

The Party's Current Predicament

This is a continuation of last week's post about the legal system, primarily to give the party some additional background information that would come in the course of conversation with those 'agents of the law' in whose care the party now find themselves.

 

It was asked, when one of the party interrogated certain villagers about the foresters and received the answer that they hadn't had anything to do with the foresters hoped they never would, why this was. It may be helpful to remember that in the modern world, poor people in any urban ghetto would answer the same about the police.

 

The king's foresters are there to catch and punish commoners with the temerity to poach. The king owns the forests and decides who can hunt there. He might hunt with his own party, or grant limited hunting rights to those he favours, or grant a local lord 'full warren', which is tantamount to giving that lord his own private forest. Other than that, no one is legally allowed to hunt there. Catching smaller game, such as birds and coneys, would likely result in a mere fine, but killing anything large, such as a deer, is punishable by hanging.

 

All of this is not merely because the king is greedy and cruel. (He is, but that's rather beside the point.) This is an integral part of the medieval English legal system, and is in place because the scarcity of food in general makes it a status symbol, with big game at the top. The bulk of commoners' sustainance comes from what they can produce themselves, which is mostly grain, with a three- to six-fold yield on seed the best they can hope. Civilisation is surviving by a very slender margin.

 

Currently, the foresters have sheltered the party in the cylindrical keep where they take their meals and watch over the woods from a high place when they're not out patroling. The foresters are sympathetic to adventurers because adventurers can perform a public service that legal and resource constraints preclude the foresters doing themselves: Hunting down and getting rid of outlaws. The foresters would certainly appreciate this, and offer the party a place to recover spend the night.

 

They would not, however, be likely to spare any food if the party happen to run short of rations at this point. The continuous cold snap that still delays the onset of spring weather has meant that the fields have barely thawed, preventing farmers from plowing them, and preventing what few seeds they have planted from growing. People are living on their grain stores, with crafty merchants hording supplies and illegally speculating on the prices. The town authorities are insisting on the prices set by the Assize of Bread and Ale, which means many bakers cannot afford enough wheat for their product. Tension has been mounting in town as the bakers threaten to go on strike, which would bring activity to a halt across the countryside.

 

When we left the party, they had just found their way through the wilderness and back toward the foresters' tower--they had got lost during the night, but in daylight the paladin's trained bird was able to spot the tower from above and guide the party to it--after a sleepless vigil huddled around a fire without shelter. The party sagely concluded that the outlaws wouldn't venture into the woods to track them in temperatures that cold, and were able to keep a fire blazing and not actually freeze to death, but they will have frostbite. They will have lost some HP because of it. (And get XP for the loss. Perhaps they'll consider purchasing gloves, overcoats, blankets, bedrolls and a tent--or perhaps they won't, considering how much the encumbrance would slow their travel; at any rate, they will have learnt something from it.)

 

Now it remains for the party to determine their next move. For the moment, they are safe, and could probably make use of the foresters' shelter and fire for several days before being asked to leave; but they will be hungry, and supplies are dwindling.

Law Enforcement

In our last session, the party came up against a troupe of outlaws who had seized control of a village and were using it as their headquarters to waylay, rob and murder travelers. The party received information from the king's foresters who, recognising them as adventurers, advised them that they would be within their legal right to apprehend the outlaws, the implication being that there would be no legal repercussions if the party went so far as to slay them and claim their property, even without waiting for the coroner to arrive. In this context the sentence, 'We're not officers of the law' was uttered, and so it seems some background on the way the law is enforced in our campaign world is in order.

 

There aren't 'officers of the law'. The closest thing medieval England has to a police force is the town watch, a handful of men who do their best to stay awake through the night and take appropriate action in emergency situations. There are only a few of them to patrol an entire big town, and they're responsible not only for making rounds to check for burglary and violence, but also to watch for fires and look out over the town walls in case of an invading army. For the rest of the time and for all other purposes, and for every purpose in the case of rural areas, communities are responsible for their own 'policing'.

 

Each free male, on reaching the age of twelve, is required to be sworn into a tithing, a group of ten households headed by a chief tithing man; the tithing reciprocally enforces obedience to the law among its members. If someone in the tithing is accused of a crime, the rest of the tithing is responsible for bringing him to justice (perhaps turning him in to the local bailiff or gaoler, or to the lord's retainers if they live on a manor). If they fail to do, they stand to be fined for more than they can afford to lose.

 

On a manor, disputes and trials are overseen by the manor court, in which the lord is often judge and jury with the power to execute those found guilty. Death by hanging is the most popular punishment--with drowning typically preferred if the accused is female--for all sorts of offenses from theft to murder. The only other common punishments are fines and being placed in the stocks. Incarceration is very rare, and grisly punishments like burning at the stake or being drawn and quartered are reserved mainly for extreme cases of religious heresy and high treason, respectively.

 

In a town, there are usually one or more magistrates, men of good standing selected by the king to act as judges in criminal matters.

 

Fines for such things as starting a fight vary by locality, always with heavier fines for drawing blood. In any case, anyone who witnesses an act of violence or theft is expected to raise the hue and cry, a signal to all in the vicinity to rush to help apprehend the perpetrator. The sound, whether made vocally or with the aid of some instrument, would be known and recognised by all who live in the area. There is a fine for failing to raise the hue and cry, as there is for failing to respond to it. All free men keep some form of arms depending on their status and what they can afford; they are required by law to be able to defend themselves and their country as well as arrest criminals when necessary.

 

In cases where the accused remain at large, they are generally given three chances to appear in court. If they fail to appear, they are declared outlaws the fourth time and can legally be beheaded on sight.
 

A complication that allows many criminals, particularly criminal bands, to remain at large and unpunished, is the practice of maintenance, whereby lords protect their criminal retainers. Our trial session gave the party a taste of this system when a knight hired them to investigate a different group of bandits; the knight was on a quest to make maintenance illegal. As it stands, the law is very selectively enforced, with those who lack political power keenly aware of their position; and corruption is rife.

 

The question was asked why the foresters themselves don't carry out justice, or at least help the party and claim part of the reward. The answer is that the king has appointed them to patrol his forest and hang poachers, not to risk their lives confronting dangerous bands of outlaws. Even if they wanted to join the party, the king would not be pleased if they abandoned their duties to do--and the political consequences would be particularly messy if the outlaws are under a lord's protection.

 

Finally, to expand on the foresters' mention of not needing to wait for the coroner: The coroner (from the Latin corona, 'crown') is an officer of the king who is supposed to be present before justice can be carried out. The coroner's duty is to assess the value of man's assests to determine what portion of his property should go to the king. As common law already allows for the lord or householder to claim the belongings of anyone who dies on his property, and death sentences pronounced on manor courts already ensure that the lord of the manor will receive the man's best beast, the coroner is necessary to make sure the king gets his due. When outlaws are apprehended, citizens are supposed to wait a maximum of forty days for the coroner to arrive, but this is often flouted when the situation is extreme.

 

Thus, the party are currently in that most coveted position of adventurers: They can kill people and take their stuff.