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. 

Specific Injuries

I wiped out on my bicycle yesterday morning and suffered an abrasion somewhat mitigated by formerly sturdy trousers sacrificing their right knee in my defence. Since this happened midway between home and campus, I thought it would make more sense to continue onward and stop into the campus dispensary as soon as I arrived, rather than return home and probably not find a bandage big enough. Besides, I reasoned, the campus nurse worked at a primary school before; she'd probably dealt with hundreds of skinned knees.

 

So I ambled in, a bit worse for wear, only to find a sign on the nurse's door saying she was off for the day. 

 

Sometimes it's quite easy to use the minor inconveniences of real life as inspiration for the game. Simply by amplifying the severity of the wound and removing the recourse to modern antiseptic methods, the treatment of hit points lost in battle can become an adventure in itself.

 

I once heard, incidentally, that once that a man in New York City skinned his knee on the sidewalk and contracted something resembling ebola, but I prefer to think that this is a literal urban legend. On the other hand, I've also heard that Henry V took an arrow to the face during battle and his surgeons successfully removed it. Just to one side of his nose, if I remember correctly.

 

Here in the comfort of my office all I had to do was splash some peroxide on my knee and beg a bandage from a colleague's first-aid kit. Today I'm almost normal.

 

We tend to gloss over a lot of the combat injuries because they're a logistical bother, but the spreadsheets used in our campaign do have spaces to record scarring and maiming. This doesn't quite match the spirit of the original rules. The 2e Dungeon Master's Guide spells out its comic-book style approach to deadly combat in a wee section entitled 'Specific Injuries (Optional Rule)':

 

The AD&D combat system does not call for specific wounds--scars, broken bones, missing limbs, and the like. And in most cases they shouldn't be applied. Remember that this is a game of heroic fantasy. If characters were to suffer real-life effects from all their battles and combats, they would quickly be some of the sorriest and most depressing characters in the campaign world. It's hard to get excited when your character is recovering from a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder suffered in a fall off a 15-foot wall. It is not recommended that characters suffer specific injuries. In general, stick with the basic pool of hit points.

 

Right, because the game is so much more convincing and engrossing when we put ourselves in the place of Gumby superheroes who bounce back from all sorts of damage, rathern than real men who value their blood and limbs enough to try their damnedest not to lose them. 

 

In particular, the assertion that seasoned fighters would be 'the sorriest and most depressing characters in our campaign world' seems to assume that even if we allow specific injuries to PCs, we have to keep all of our NPCs Gumbies. I can't speak for anyone else, but I might find it difficult to repress snide remarks if I played in what was supposed to be a medieval world and didn't see people missing eyes, ears, hands, and legs with some frequency. It's the same school of thought that removes characters' needs to eat and excrete, or even makes death less than permanent. Are none of the people in our fantasy world supposed to wrinkle and grey as they age, either?

 

At the start of our game plenty of the characters have rolled the loss of fingers and other appendages from accidents before the game even started. (One of the most heroic characters we've had in the campaign, in fact, began the game having lost half of his right hand in his father's shop, and in at least one combat, this turned out to be a blessing: Having been forced to learn to use his sword left-handed, he had the literal upper hand when storming a castle and fighting its defenders up a spiral stairway.)

 

It should make perfect sense that if characters have lived through enough combat to have attained a considerable level, they should be scarred and limping from previous injuries. Unfortunately, we haven't yet had a character live past his early twenties. When they've been hit hard enough to receive a permanent scar or broken bone, they're usually dead. Surviving long enough to evince serious battle wounds, then, should be something all players should aspire for their characters to achieve.

Dealing with the Inevitable Data Loss

Our last session was the first one in half a year, and I was rather pleased with the relatively low number of mistakes I made. There were certain things that I should have played up more. The paladin's search for ailing people to heal, for example, should in retrospect been much more fruitful; any medium-sized town should have a visible marginalised leper population as well as a goodly portion of its citizens maimed, infested, or scrofulous. Aside from that, though, the party ended up pursuing some information that I was just making up as I went along, but that could lead to an actual quest I had hoped to eventually use at some point. It was something that I imagined would take place at the opposite end of the shire, but could conceivably take place, in some form, closer to where the party now find themselves.

 

In the interim, though, I've had two USB teeth go bad on me in the space of a week. With the help of recovery software, I was able to get back most, but not all, of my D&D material. I had foolishly saved it all to the same place, which I carried in my pocket to work on here and there whenever I had a free moment. Apparently USBs aren't meant for repeated rewriting. On the other hand, most of the really important information was already printed and filed in a series of doorstop-sized binders: Adventures, Goods and Prices in Shropshire, House Rules, and the largest of all being an overview of the world with geographic and demographic information as well as the most useful charts and a collection of NPCs that might appear. Since some of this now only exists in hard copy, it should eventually force me to rework some of it from scratch.

 

I'm more chagrined about having lost my latest research paper, an analysis of the treatment of dialect in Japanese translations of The Canterbury Tales, but I've got several pages of poorly-written notes from which to reconstruct that, too.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh told a story of the Buddha and some of his monks meditating in the forest, when a man came frantically toward them asking if they'd seen his cows. All of his cows had run away, and he said he was going to die if he didn't find them. They said they hadn't seen any sign of them, and suggested the man look in another part of the forest. After the man had gone, the Buddha turned to his monks and said, 'You all are very lucky--you don't have any cows'.

 

I still think it's a good idea to have multiple backup copies, but I've realised that I have enough in my head to run a fairly decent session without much of anything. The world in which we play is very much alive to me; I have a clear picture of the layout of the land, the cultural zeitgeist, the way people talk and act, what they are likely to do or beleive, and what they are capable of. I can see the forest landscape before the advent of most modern species of evergreen trees, when the only squirrels were red and livestock were much smaller than now; I can smell the linen-encased bodies at a time when only monks and the rich bathed more than a few times a year, the interior of inns and alehouses where body odour mingles with manure and mud tracked in from the street and stale beer and dog piss mixed into the old rushes strewn about the floor; I hear the strains of lively tunes, the shouting, bickering and laughing of voices in the market, and the overwhelming quiet of a countryside before electricity. I know what the food tastes like because I prepare it in my own kitchen. And I can almost feel the wonder, credulity, and desperation of a people who knew almost nothing about how nature or the human body functioned, for whom alchemists could certainly turn lead into gold, sorcery was real, foreign lands were peopled with antipodes and cynocephali, and all manner of beasts and demons lurked around the corner.

 

That's enough for a capital game, I'd say.

The Soundtrack

The tune that I taught myself to play on the flute this morning is the one that Loreena McKenitt is scatting wordlessly in the above video. I first heard the song when I was a teenager and found it enchanting. What I didn’t know at the time was that the melody was lifted directly from a medieval Spanish song, the title ’Santiago’ being a reference to the original lyrics, which tell the story of a man’s pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The story is that the man spends the night with a prostitute before his journey, and along the way he meets the Devil who, disguised as St James, persuades him to hack off his penis. The man obliges, and swiftly bleeds to death. His traveling companions then discover the body, and make a swift escape to avoid being accused of murdering him. The Devil and his minions return to claim body and soul, but Mary intercepts them and commands them to return it, on the grounds that they won it unfairly, and they have to let it go. The man is restored to life, but his penis is never returned. 

The title of the song is ‘Non e’ gran cousa se sabe’ and there are several versions available online with the original lyrics. 

Now, it’s really quite impossible for me to convey, in the context of a D&D game, what a profound effect medieval music has always had on me. The best I can really do is to describe the physical and cultural landscape, from the gritty to the sublime, and provide a sense of the world that inspired the music. Simply playing it in the background during games didn't work. 

My first experience with D&D was as a kid playing outside, with books and dice spread over the sidewalk. This was in the days before portable devices and iTunes made music ubiquitous, so the issue never came up--and besides, my only exposure to medieval music was an anthology my father had on vinyl, and perhaps the flute section in the intro to 'Stairway to Heaven'. When I started playing again as an adult, and was somewhat awkwardly shoved into the role of DM, I fancied myself punctuating my exposition with a few bars on the flute here and there. For the sake of convenience I settled on letting things like this flow throughout the game:

My idea was that it would enhance the setting. In practice at least one player found it inappropriate and distracting. I was told, eventually, by a member of our campaign who offered to take a turn DMing so that I could play for a change, that he could use music more effectively than I was doing. What that turned out to mean was that he played certain video game soundtrack loops as he deemed appropriate for the setting of the current scene of the game. This struck me, though, as cheesy and contrived, and not merely because of the cheapness and inauthenticity of the music itself, although that was certainly a factor. The impression I got was of a ham-fisted attempt to dictate the mood we were supposed to be feeling. 

Certainly I'm guilty of susceptibility to mood. I'm moved everytime I hear Anwnn's rendition of 'Douce Dame Jolie', for instance. It's breathtakingly evocative, and my frame of mind completely alters toward it, no matter the situation. Especially when preceded by the instrumental virelai in the clip below, I'm sucked right into the pathos. 

I don't suppose it does much for the spirit of combat, though, if that happens to be the emotional orientation of the campaign at the moment. 

Eventually, after some discussion with the players last year, I settled into the habit of using sound effects more than music. After all, in the actual fourteenth century, that's mostly what the characters would have heard. I organised a plethora of clips in YouTube and iTunes to fit different situations, and most of them are related to the weather and environment. (Sadly, the only place 'Douce Dame Jolie' might be appropriate is at a noble's private party, and our party isn't at that level socially.) There's bawdy and off-key a cappella mingled with rough chatter for the alehouses and low-end taverns, pipers and drums mixed with conversation for the better establishments and certain parts of town, lots of premodern street noise for the cities, and a variety of nature-based noise for the countryside. A ton of different rain sounds, for example.

One obvious benefit of this is that it frees me up to focus on other aspects of narration. We've certainly had players who were less than snappy in the past, and who, five minutes after my detailed description of how the icy rain is soaking everyone to the bone and painfully numbing their extremities, ask, 'What's the weather like?'

I doubt many players are going to feel the way I do, and perhaps the far more common preference is for so-called 'epic' cinematic music with the subdued string section and bass drums that so often go along with warriors racing into battle on horseback in period films, but the musicians who try to bring the arrangement and instrumentation as close to authentic as possible are the ones that get me going in the morning. 

Safety vs. Adventure

I came across an article in the newspaper yesterday about an Australian man who runs an 'adventure company' in Hokkaido. In the article he explains his approach to marketing the 'adventure lifestyle' to Japanese consumers, who as a demographic have a very different set of values from Australians or most other Westerners. I've lost the link now, but when I checked out his web site I noticed that the company's 'about' section emphasised that 'your safety is our primary concern'.

This got me thinking about the nature of 'adventure' although not primarily because we play D&D in Japan and the prevailing psychology must necessarily have influenced the way we play the game, but because I think all of us as Westerners are well aware of the 'safety first' mindset of the culture into which we immigrated. This is in stark contrast to, say the 'bir şey olmaz' attitude of the Turks which my wife and I found so striking.

On our last day in Cappadocia we hired horses for a tour of the local desert. The ranch's promotional materials explained that these were 'wild' horses, which gave them the advantage of being surer on their feet and tougher in the arid climate than those bred in captivity. I explained to our guide that my wife had never been on a horse before, and that it would be better if she had the most docile one available. They obliged my request, but made us sign a waiver stating that no matter what injuries or fatalities we suffer on the trek, we wouldn't sue them. It meant we were admitting the possibility that things certainly could go horribly wrong--and we're not even professional adventurers.

Crossing some of the roads was a moderate challenge. The natural tendency of the Turks to drive in a way many other places might consider psychotic is exacerbated by the absolute absence of anything resembling law enforcement. Cars tear out from behind the hills like Magyar horsemen, and you had best stay out of their way. Our guide cautioned us to pause at the edge of the asphalt and make sure there was no audible motor sound anywhere before kicking the horses into a quick trot to the other side. My wife's horse turned out to be more stubborn than docile, which made for at least one rather close call.

Eventually, we came to a narrow spit between two hills, with a sheer drop on either side. It certainly seemed to me that one misstep in the crossing would have plummeted horse and rider to certain death, and when my wife's horse saw what was ahead, it simply refused to go forward. Our guide dismounted and, sidestepping precariously over boulders at the edge of the precipice, basically dragged the horse by the reins across to the other side.

This, obviously, would be unimaginable in the country where we live. But it should absolutely be expected in the game we play.

I think we tend to forget that not everywhere is safe. I avoided hitting the party with criminal menaces and the like because I wanted to drive home the point that their home shire is relatively safe--certainly it's not the primeval wolds of the Dark Ages setting, where it could be assumed that everyone wants to kill you. This does not, however, mean that this world holds any less of the bloody, harrowing, or fantastical. It simply means that it's a bit less obvious, that it will not necessarily reveal itself if you stay in the place you know best.

If safety is guaranteed, it's not what I would call an adventure.

Fighting Entropy

With several centimetres of snow carpeting the world outside, I'm disinclined to set foot outdoors today and have finally been able to force myself to sit in front of the screen and type out some things that could bear saying as I work toward getting the campaign started again. 

We've created a character for our new recruit, and I'm working on the spreadsheet presently. In conversation with the other two players last night, it was generally agreed that the campaign 'needs' at least one more player. 

One of the obstacles contributing to the general situation of entropy was the lack of anything going forward when we last played in summer of 2015. This was something I wasn't sure how to overcome as I faced overwhelmingly tepid responses when I rained hooks on the payers. My interpretation was that the hooks just didn't seem novel or compelling enough to inspire them to follow. I've been told in the interim, however, that in fact they don't know whether it's a hint toward something I 'worked on' or just a red herring. 

I'm just a wee bit taken aback that the entire nature of what I'm trying to run has been misunderstood. 

I believe I've said it enough before, but let me defer to my hero who has said it differently. Go to The Tao of D&D and read everything he says about railroading. In fact, read everything else, too. I say this especially to the new players joining our group: If you're going to read just one D&D blog, read his. If you're going to read two, read his and mine. 

The game isn't my narrative; it's yours. I don't know how else to make that understood. As players, I've always expected you to pursue any course you wish without concern for what I've 'prepared'. There's no reason to assume that an adventure as I've conceived it in my mind is going to be in any wise superior to one that unfolds as a result of your decisions. I 'prepare' in response to what you do, and that's a fact, not a promise. I will never give you any deliberate shove toward any particular state of affairs. I don't have to. What D&D lacks in graphics it more than compensates for in possibility. 

So please, paladin and bard, don't just stumble around from town to village sitting in alehouses lapping up the sauce and waiting for something to happen. Follow your noses, get out of your comfort zone, and take charge of your own adventure. 

Auld Lang Syne

This long hiatus was unexpected, but I'm not dead, and I'm fairly sure I'll pick up writing again within the next few months; but as it is, the blog lives in tandem with the campaign, which is still in hibernation.

Mostly it's been the mess of moving, having no proper place to play in the new house, and all my D&D materials packed away along with so much else that's inaccessible in storage.

Ostensibly, the campaign has a promising restart, with the addition of an eager new face whose resume includes DMing with Forgotten Realms. I could stand a bit of a push, though, as once inertia sets in it's difficult to overcome. I haven't been getting it from the campaign itself, I've been neglecting even reading the Dao, and lately my connection to the Middle Ages is limited to music and architecture. I've found myself waxing nostalgic about the Ancient Greek and Dark Ages worlds, and wanting to bring them back at least as much as resume the game in Medieval England.

This post, then, is just to be a placeholder until things get rolling again. I am searching for inspiration.