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You Want to Make a Fantasy World: Part I - Magick

The first thing you need to decide when making a fantasy world is how magick works.

That might seem heady, but let's go over what you have to decide:

Who can use magick.

How do they use magick.

And how powerful can magick get.

Do you want 9th level magick, that can rip a giant hole in the world and summon unkillable monsters?

Because, honestly, you don't need it.

Can 9th level magick only be used by decrepid old wizards with one foot in their grave? Only it be used by chosen heroes? Only be by inhuman things, like Dragons and Daemons and Liches?

Low level but common magick can have a huge effect on the setting. Being able to light a fire can allow you to save the time and effort it takes to start a fire. Heating a rock can be used to heat a home, or even a bath, giving the equivalent of modern sanitation. Hand washing, bathing, and toilets have done the most for Human longevity. Can you go to a priest, give him a penny, and have him cure your cancer?

Sure, curing cancer isn't as cool as curing sword wounds, but the medical effects it can have on longevity are staggering.

Maybe magic is something that can only be done by a minority of the population, that dedicate themselves to the study.

None of them are wrong answers, so long as they are CONSISTENT.

If magickal ability depends on your bloodline, then someone, somewhere is going to think it's a good idea to selectively breed mages to keep the magics strong. The mages might become the noble classes, they might form their own class, which they breed endogenously, like Hindus.

If only inhuman things can cast upper level magick, and you see a seemingly ordinary Human cast that kind of magick, then guess what? He's not actually an ordinary Human.

Does magick need a physical catalyst? Does it consume reagents? How rare are these reagents? Do they come in one of a few types, or is every twig of berries a reagent for a different spell? Maybe upper level spells require expensive reagents, and that's the limiting factor? Maybe these spells use too much mana, and therefore can only be done by places of power?

Does teleportation require Line of Sight? Can you open long-range portals only if you have local knowledge? Can you target places of power from a distance?

We start with the simple, coarse questions, and get to the finer ones later on. When? When you come up with a good idea for how it works? Or, honestly, when you need to use it. It's perfectly fine to wait until the characters need/want to teleport to decide how it functions.

Another way to limit spells if by giving the heroes a rare magickal item. Why can they use portals?, because they have the Staff of the Herald. Why do they have the staff of the herald?

Given by someone important.

Monster loot.

They found it in an old, abandoned building.

They earned it by accomplishing some feat, or level of training.

Again, all you have to decide is how rare the item is, and maybe if you need some sort of innate/trained ability to use it.

weatherman667

Part II - Choose Your Middle Ages

This is actually harder than you think, because most fantasy fiction is actually closer to the Early Modern Period. And there is nothing wrong with that. This is because this was when all the really nice stuff started appearing.

This is because most of the Middle Ages was dirt.

Rome was the first city in the world to reach 1M people, and did so in the Classical era.

London was the second during the Victorian era.

About 4-5% of the population lived in cities, which typically maxed out at around 10,000 people. By contrast, my city is considered small town by Vancouver, and has ~200,000 people.

Taverns in Rome had a roof, and that was it, while in Northern Europe they might serve you outside.

The more sparse the population, the more freedom the characters have to maneuver. They can escape enemies, and instead contend with Fey and the wilds. A more built up area would have them going from town/city to town/city, having to deal primary with the Greater Races, (sentients).

And the best part is you can, yes, pick and choose. A lot of people think you need to pick one exact area at one exact time, but, this is your world. If you wanted to do a historical drama, then you don't really need to create a world. If you are doing an alternative history, then you just need to decide how it deviated, and what rules would logically follow.

All you need to do is have your world make sense. It's like CGI, when it works, the audience won't notice it. When it does, it damages the Voluntary Suspension of Disbelief, which is how stories get the audience emotionally involved. And when you are making a fantasy world, you can add fantasy elements to explain why it works that way.

Want a Dark Ages Britain, with a magickal sword that can cut through stone?

Well, maybe the Elves forged it. Maybe the Dwarves forged it and the Elves enchanted it.

Maybe they have to rely more on larger walled cities because of monsters. Watch Goblin Slayer if you doubt the impact even the diminutive monsters can make to a world. Like, who in Goblin Slayer wouldn't have a fence and watchmen in the town? Okay, yes, you maybe had adventurers, but maybe there aren't enough, maybe there are more important things to worry about, maybe the quests don't pay well enough to through away their noble silks because of Goblin grime.

You can also have differing technological levels. Hell, the area I live in had the British show up to build a trading post and coal mine, while the locals didn't have metal. Their clothing was made from dog fur, and the enforcers for the local hegemony were cannibals that wove the heads of their defeated enemies into their ceremonial dress.

In fact, the further two cultures are apart, the more likely they will have wildly differing technology and culture. And further the cultures are depends on trade, not on physical distance. A number of countries in South America do not have good roads connecting them to their neighbours. If the only people that traveled long distance were merchants, like most of the history of Mankind, then there would be nothing more than a slow trickle of culture and cultural effects being exchanged.

Which is why the Dragon Prince fucked up so royally. Every village in A:tLA had a different culture and dress, and you could literally tell who was from wear by their clothes. Dragon Prince has no culture for any of the Mannish kingdoms. And I don't just mean different cultures, but any culture at all.

So, not only can you have wildly differing cultures with wildly differing technologies, but you SHOULD. This makes the world a lot more interesting. This is why Skeleton Knight can have more adventure spending a few minutes waiting outside the gates to an Elven city than most stories have in their entirety. This is why Overlord will spend entire arcs focusing on other cultures, because they, too, are important to the story. Humans also tend to attack monsters on site, while Dwarves would rather trade with you.

So, when I say decide your middle ages, pick you viewpoint culture. If it's not an Isekai, this will likely be the culture the protagonist grew up in. Decide how disperse they are, decide what kind of metallurgy they have, and decide how individualistic they are. Is your society tribal, feudal, monarchistic, or Imperial. And stick with it. If they have Bronze by not Iron, than they are less technologically developed. Bronze is sharper, but more brittle than Iron. Iron is a lot more prevalent, but takes ridiculous temperatures to smelt or forge.

weatherman667

Part III - Races

The most important thing about adding races is that every race has to be distinct. You want distinct cultures, and I do mean cultures, as different parts of that race need differing cultures, again.

And this is why anime usually has the same 5 races:

Humans

Elves

Dwarves

Catgirls

Demons/Devils (Akujin)

Could they add more? Yes. Should they add more?

The more races you add, the more detail you need to create for all of the individual races.

If we take D&D/Pathfinder by contrast, they have a million races, which have the entire effect of a few stat bonuses and a couple of traits that only apply once in a while. LOTR has one Dwarf, and we know more about Dwarven culture from that one Dwarf than we do from all of the literature and rules from either D&D and Pathfinder.

And this is why a number of stories will have lots of races, and they just disappear into the woodwork, being generic and forgettable.

You don't need all of the races, and if you do have the race in your world, you don't need to interact directly with them.

Because travel for the vast majority of Human history was extremely difficult. Most people didn't go more than a few villages over.

weatherman667

Part IV - Monsters

Does your setting have monsters, and if so, what are monsters?

This isn't an existentialist question about the nature of evil.

In D&D, Monsters are enemies to fight, and Adventurers kill monsters. And that was it.

If we take Wild Arms - spoilers.

The monsters turn out to be robots. But, all of the monsters are from D&D, and so had little to nothing binding them together as a group. It was the big thing that made the reveal less than impactful.

Goblin Slayer is a great example of how even the weakest monster would make even the tiniest village fortified.

So, what are monsters?

Option 1 - Wild Animals

Bears are so dangerous that most cultures didn't ever say their name, because speak of the Devil and he shall appear.

Wolves are the stuff of nightmares.

Big cats will move silently in the darkness and snap your neck.

It's really not that had to make them big, more powerful, and combined from various different animals. A lioness is bad enough, but imagine if it had wings an could land on your ass. Dragon's Dogma did a FANTASTIC job of making a lone gryphon the bane of your existence. This one needs little to no justification, and no real adaptation on the world's part, or of it's societies. You'd end up with more storied hunters / pre-classical Hellenic heroes, but otherwise, no change.

Option 2 - Magic Beasts

This one takes some explanation, but that's about it. If you have magic, then it makes sense for some animals to learn to do things with it. Areas with magickal power might have more magic beasts, and therefore only the most skilled adventurer would deign to venture there. Better for Higher Fantasy settings, with more abundant magic, or for an epic boss for your hero/party to have to deal with.

Option 3 - Evil Races

Sentient races. Even if they are stupid, and chaotic evil, are still races, and can be dealt with as such. They need territory, they can be talked to, they have culture, even if extremely primitive culture.

Now, Goblin Slayer breaks all of these rules, but does it because

Of how horrifying it is.

And the next option.

Option 4 - They Have a Creator

RWBY V1-5 is a fantastic example of this, as all of the Creatures of Grimm feel like they came from the same root and trunk stock, even if they looked entirely different. They were creatures of enmity, shadows, and death.

Goblin Slayer has a pair of gods playing dice with fate, and regularly spawn monsters to challenge Humans.

Reincarnated as a Sword has the most intact leveling system of any tv show. Monsters have crystals, which grant them power, and are created by gods as challenges for heroes.

Or you can have a necromancer raise an undead army.

The monsters have a source. While this is very simple an fantastically functional, it does run the risk of your heroes

winning

and ruining the adventure of your adventurous world.

But, remember, the world has to work. If no one can leave their walled village without risk of being attacked by a monster, then no communication would happen, unless they have some viable alternative. No trade would happen, except under heavy guard.

If you want a world you can move about freely, then monsters have to be rare, or restricted to certain fonts of power.

weatherman667

Part V - Fantasy Counterpart Culture

So, you want to make a fantasy world.

But creating an entire language, culture, history, and technology sounds like a lot of work. I just want to write, man!

Well, good news. You don't have to create a new culture from whole cloth, you can literally just pick one and copy it.

Okay, you want England, because Freedom and Knights and Arthur.

Sure, go for it.

But you want high French aristocracy?

Go for it.

German-style cities?

Go for it.

Russian depression?

Go for it.

The most important rule is that your world be internally consistent.

When the Europeans arrived in America, most of the cultures didn't have metal, while the Europeans had cannons. Very few had writing. The one culture with a pack animal did not have the wheel.

It's really easy to take a work, and graft different technologies onto them, and spin the wheel of civilization.

But, there is one tricky part, you have to make it well integrated.

A little work to integrate it, but honestly, that just sounds really lazy, doesn't it?

Well, good news, even Tolkien did this. And he literally worked out cultural and linguistic drift for thousands of years, and still copy-pasted a lot of his work.

If it's good enough for Tolkien, a literal doctor of Anglo-Saxon, and the father of all modern fantasy fiction, it's good enough for you.

Here's an example. You want a race with super natural strength, with cultural elements of both Northern Europe, and Japan.

Because?

Maybe you're a weeb. Who knows, who cares.

This describes the Klingons from Star Trek, the Night Elves from Warcraft, and the Eldar from 40K. I'm sure there are others, but that's more than enough diversity for the time being.

Everyone thinks that true art is something that has never been seen before.

Bullshit. We've been telling the same stories for thousands of years. And that's because it works.

The ultimate test of a story is:

Is the story good.

Are the characters good?

Does the setting feel real?

Did you have fun and/or catharsis upon finishing it?

weatherman667

Part VI - Internal Consistency

This is a phrase I keep using.

One way to describe it is like CGI, when it works well, you don't notice it. When it doesn't work, you notice it, and it's glaring.

In writing, this is referred to as the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

The short version of it is that this is a gift your audiences are giving you, and one you should not squander. You have to respect your audience.

Let's say you want to add a black person to your European Fantasy world. This has be done so often so poorly that most people bristle at the mere mention of it, but all you have to do is establish a kingdom with an ethnicity and culture for them. Basically, a fantasy Africa. If you don't want to create a culture for them, you don't actually want diversity. You want to check a box.

But, if it's that far away, how did the black guy get here?

This is the Middle Ages. You have four main choices for travel:

They walked.

A cart pulled by draft animals.

They are rich enough to own a horse.

A ship.

In the early Bronze Age, one of the main sources of Bronze was England. Which means they had naval routes with ships that took them.

But, the short version of it, is that if you have a black person in the Middle Ages, he's either a merchant, the son of someone rich, or was a slave who passed through several masters to the point he walked across the entire continent.

This is honestly not that hard, as the Legionnaires in London got there by walking across Europe first. They will just have a lot of stories from the journey.

A great example of this is the 13th Warrior. The main character, Ibn Fadlan was a real life Muslim who wrote about the Northmen, because he visited them. The reason he was able to visit them is there are naval trade routes through Eastern European rivers from the North to Constantinople, and then from there, you have access to the entire civilized world.

If you want to have cities, you need comparable farmland with good agriculture. Maybe there is some plant magic to help you, maybe they just have late medieval farming practices, maybe they stumbled upon modern farming practices.

If you want monsters, you need either walled cities, or have them so rare that towns can survive for half-a-century without getting attacked by one.

If you have magic that can cure cancer, then there is no need for a modern medical system.

Or maybe the healing magics are organized by early modern colleges. It could be done in another country, like how people in Europe travelled to Italy, because that's where the good universities were.

If you want book stores, you need enough of the population to be literate to justify it. Otherwise most of the books will be held by dedicated scholars, monasteries that do the actual copying, and held in the lord's manor because he's the one with the local archives.

Everything in your story should feel like part of the story. The best way to deal with this is to wait after writing a story, and read through several chapters at once. You will have forgotten your thoughts when writing, and will often come across "what did I mean?" "Where did that come from?"

Your readers will have the same question. The best thing to do is either to answer them, or rewrite the story to not need it.

weatherman667

Part VII - Optimism, Pessimism, and Slavery

Something near and dear to my heart, not because I like slavery, but because of how it is to worldbuilding.

Pretty much every society in Human history had slaves, until England stepped up and said no.

So, you say, I need slavery, right?

No, you don't. It's your fantasy world. And you have to decide if it's an optimistic fantasy world, pessimistic fantasy world, or realistic one.

Optimistic: The young hero defeats the demon king and saves the world.

Pessimistic: Life sucks, and the ones that died might be the luckier ones.

Realistic: The evil empire invading you treats their slaves better than you treat yours.

If order to understand the history of slavery, you need to throw away the post-Feminist lens, that individual people are the buildings blocks of society.

Historically, it was family, usually your extended family. Exile was treated like an almost death sentence. As in, you'll probably die, but we can't let you back in here. If you weren't part of a landed tribe, then your chances of survival likely depended on becoming their servant. You were either part of a landed tribe, a merchant, a priest, or a wanderer.

And who the fuck is going to trust a wanderer?

This is why the Bible doesn't condemn slavery, it actually provides rules protecting servants. Historically, there was also a much higher female:male ratio, as men die of every cause more than women. Imagine what it was like before we had antibiotics? When the main form of surgery in militaries was amputation. So, the Bible says that female servants shall not be denied conjugal rights.

Of course, most slaves were captured in warfare. More developed societies, ones with debt, will have debt slavery. Or just sell yourself into slavery to be guaranteed food and shelter. Some places developed slave farms, where slaves were bred.

Now onto sex slaves. Yes, you can have sex with slaves, any slaves. No, most people did not have sex slaves. Dedicated sex slaves were only owned by the obnoxiously wealthy, or brothels.

But, as I said, you don't have to. You don't have to include slaves at all. You can have the evil empire be the only one that keeps slaves.

You can make slavery entirely positive. Even if you do this in a historically accurate way, it will be controversial. People find pessimistic slavery to be more believable, because of modern motivational speakers.

Seriously, most of Human history was about survival. The idea of choosing your profession is startlingly new. Your profession was what your father's profession was. If you don't have a father, or he doesn't have a profession, then your only real hope is apprenticeship.

Which is a seven year indentured servitude.

There's also another option, the Spice and Wolf. One of the reasons that Europeans traded for slaves in Africa is that Europe had become too peaceful. Largely because states became powerful enough to protect their borders. Slavery had become a distant, but real prospect. The only reason the average European had to worry about slavery was debt.

In addition to slavery, there was also Serfdom. Serf are unfree, but attached to their land, and legally could not be removed from their land. They owed so many days a week of labour to their lord, which was especially intense during planting and harvest. They could not leave their lord's land without permission, but permission was given all of the time. There are legal cases about whether a man is a serf or yeoman, and some of them had freemen become serfs to get access to more fertile land.

If you want your world to be realistic, or historically authentic, then you need nuanced slavery.

But you are under no obligation to do so. At all. Or you can have it in the background, and not have anything important happen about them.

weatherman667

Part VIII - Pre-Modern Morality

Something that a lot of people have trouble with, looking back at history and make modern assumptions about their deportment.

Christianity

Christianity brought the knowledge of good and evil to Europe. A universal morality. Before Christianity, the concept of good and evil did not exist. Instead, every tribe viewed morality as Helps Me and Hurts Me. Universal morality includes the welfare of others, and provides certain moral prohibitions.

Such as murder. Before Christianity, every culture practiced routine infanticide. It was considered moral to inspect a newborn, and if it was deformed, you smashed it against rocks or left it to die of exposure, or wild animals.

Christianity banned Human sacrifice, and Christian morality is what banned slavery.

Everyone loves deconstructing Christianity right now, with the corrupt church of evil, but it was Christianity that created these concepts.

In a world, this means it is perfectly valid to have evil, selfish cultures. You can make the protagonist from a culture like this, and either be a paragon or a heretic.

You can also make the other culture evil and selfish and have the protagonist come from a good culture.

Feminism

Feminism has convinced us that the individual is the building block of society, but before this it was the family.

And Feminism didn't even occur to people until the 1800's, when upper class women could actually envision themselves as free. For most of Human history, if you were alone, you were were probably dead. Exile was considered tantamount to a death sentence.

Our modern world also hides the physical labour required to keep it going, often by having separate companies do the heavy lifting. But, before the modern world, no woman would even pretend to be able to do as much labour as a man.

While Christian morality is warm and comfortable, the historic girlboss just comes off and ludicrous. You see women that have the Feminist ideal of "I can do everything a man can do!" The attitude of most women was to find a place that was safe and warm, and one that had reliable food.

As historically, these things were far from assured.

You could walk outside, and be killed by wolves. You get get poked with a stick, and get an infection that will kill you unless you cut the limb off. The Royal Navy from Britannia Rules the Waves was finally working out consistent solutions to stop scurvy. The primary killer in wars was dysentery.

Anglo-Saxon England was so safe, that women could walk the entire length of the island in safety, but most places could not make this claim. Modern people think a woman might be robbed or raped, but they might be sold as a sex slave, chained to a bed in a brothel where they get raped several times a day. The Anglo-Saxons had a wereguild. The price of someone's life. You had to pay for how much they would bring for their family. For men it was based off social status. For a woman of child bearing years, it was equivalent to a thane.

Northern Europe had shield maidens and dames, but most cultures did not. Other than the Amazons. But that's a different story.

Old School Punishment

A slap on the wrist used to literally mean a slap on the wrist, with a switch or cane.

For most of Human history, the standard punishment for everything was a good beating. A beating can mean anything from a single slap to be beaten within an inch of your life.

Everyone likes to point out how this other/older culture used to beat their women, and therefore were bad, whereas the main difference between beating a man and a woman is that there are limits on how much you can beat a woman. The reason why the laws saying you can beat your wife is that it was limiting it. Just like how moral/ethical defences of slavery only appear when it is being challenged.

Prisons are a completely new concept. They had dungeons, but the dungeons was to:

Hold you for trial.

Administer a physical punishment.

Hold you because you are politically inconvenient.

Prisons, as a place to hold your as a form of punishment is not only new, but only a product of a modern, prosperous society. Locking someone up and feeding them every day is expensive. Guards are expensive. Investigating when prisoners commit crimes against each other is expensive.

It was quicker and easier to just hit you a few times, (or few dozen, or few hundred), and then send you back to work.

Legally, a person is someone whom is responsible before the law. A woman not being a person means she cannot be punished for most crimes. One of the tactics used by suffragettes was to not pay their taxes, because their husbands would get sent to jail for it. It took the suffragettes to try terrorist bombings before they were even put in jail.

Myth of the Full World

One thing people often do when they think of the past is that they imagine it with as many people as we have now.

Ancient Rome was the first city in the world to reach 1M people.

Victorian London was the second.

Until the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the people in any part of the world had a primary job of making food in some form.

The densest parts of the world were typically a town or village surrounded by farmland, surrounded by wilderness.

I remember some idiotic critiques about Snow White, (20 years ago), that "Why were the Seven Dwarves living in the woods? Why didn't they live in the city like everyone else?" This lead to a Snow White in the 90's that had the Dwarves been bandits living in the woods.

The average town was a few blocks big, and people mostly went there for the market. And then walked home. Because walking was the only form of transportation available to most people. As a place grew stable and prosperous, cities did grow, but the majority of people were farmers, fishermen, drovers, foragers, hunters, etc.

So, cities are unrealistic? No, cities have existed for 5,000 years. But the larger the city the more complex the society it needs, and the wider the influence it needs. Most fantasy fiction is set in the late medieval / early modern period, and that's perfectly fine. You have cool full plate armour, optional firearms, cities big enough to be both cozy AND adventurous, sewers because you don't want to shit in a corner.

Pre-Roman contact, the Celts had soap, and taught the Romans to work iron and make mail.

But, if you want to have a largely empty world, where individual heroes can rise to power by fighting monsters, you can do that.

Or you can go full RWBY and have evil monsters, epic heroes, modern firearms, and cool mechas, with just enough magick to give it a kick. The cities are dense, and broad agricultural regions with modern technology, but still have to hide behind walls to avoid the monsters.

Conclusion

People might think that this means that women being treated as sex-slaves is realistic, and all fiction should have it. Except I pointed out situations that did NOT do this, that are just as realistic.

You can make the world as optimistic or pessimistic as you want. You can have the hero come from the good culture, while the bad people come from a bad culture. You can have slavery, where the master can kill his slaves. You have have slavery where the master has to treat his slaves better than a free person would be treated. You can have slavery where you cannot reduce the conjugal rights of a female servant because you found one you like better. These are all realistic.

Or you can have no slavery.

weatherman667

Part IX - Gender Ratio

In the modern age, Humans are born 51% male, while the overall population is 51% female.

Why?

Because men die more and sooner of every cause.

The only causes that women die more of are childbirth, which is rare nowadays, and breast cancer.

And men have prostate cancer, which kills the same number a year.

Go back to any era before the modern one, and men died of every cause, more. The short answer is that men are stronger, more resilient, and more disposable.

If a woman dies, all of her potential children die with her. If a man dies, another man can father any missing children. No society gets rid of a woman except under extreme circumstances. Men, however, might be cast out because they cannot pass a manhood rite.

If you add to this the tendency of cultures to conquer each other. And then whence conquered, you kill all of the men, and enslave the women and children, and you get an extremely skewed gender ratio.

So, if we have a skewed gender ratio, who gets the extra women?

Well-to-do, men, obviously.

And what this means is that if you protagonist is/becomes a well-to-do man, he is going to have multiple women. And it's not a "probably", because there will be society expectations. Your wife might nag you to get a mistress, because a man with a wife AND a mistress has higher status. It might be a simple manner of hiring a maid. She's isolated in your household. She literally washes your bed linens. She literally sleeps on a pallet in the same room as you, as you do your husbandly duties with your wife. I should maybe do a section of privacy, and how it did not exist. Anyway, isolated maid is watching you fuck your wife, every night, and let's face it, she's horny. She could get married to a man-servant, but they are expensive. Okay, you might be an OP isekai protagonist, but you're not THAT rich. Until you get to the higher level dungeons.

Isn't that cheating? Adultery is a sin?

Adultery only applies when a man sleeps with another man's woman. And this doesn't mean that rape is legal.

Rome created monogamy, not for any moral reasons, but because it reduced the amount of intrigue between potential heirs. This meant that only the children of one woman could be the heirs, and then when you get to primogeniture, you get to one. In theory. Henry VIII proved this doesn't necessarily apply in practice. You still have an excess of women. They might be kept mistresses or concubine or hand maidens or even just unattached maid servants.

Or sex slaves, which didn't really exist. I don't mean having sex with your slaves, as every culture allows that, I mean having dedicated sex slaves. That was something reserved for brothels or the obnoxiously wealthy.

A lot of people assume that women don't necessarily want to have children, but in my experience, the more time women spend around babies, the more they want one of their own. The Jews even wrote into the Torah that an unattached maid servant cannot be denied conjugal rights. I.e. you have to fuck her if she wants you to.

The Bible also prevents you from freeing a slave against their will. Because free men are free to starve.

The vast majority of women were not going to be Feminist girl bosses, doing all of the dangerous things. They would much rather be well fed someplace that is safe and warm. Yes, there were some women that wanted to adventure, but that's a story for another time, i.e. Shield Maidens.

weatherman667

Part X - Archery

One of the most significant military inventions in Human history.

Up there with the spear, spear thrower, horse, bayonet, modern firearm, artillery, and tank.

People think early firearms were a game changer. They were, but not because they were better than the longbow.

The English Longbow is the best form of the bow in Human history.

People have a tendency to think the best is the shiniest. Something unique, made by rare ingredients, by the best craftsman in the world.

7,000 longbowmen at Agincourt killed so many French nobles, that the French nobility NEVER recovered.

The English Longbow was made from a single piece of yew. Yew is the perfect wood to use for bows, as the heartwood is perfect for a compression spring while the sapwood is perfect for a tension spring. Because that is what a bow, a spring with a string attached. For those who don't know, the bow bows in archery. The string largely stays the same.

Other cultures, to create something LIKE the English Longbow, required 25 ingredients, and were weapons passed down as heirlooms.

WWII is where the rifle finally matched the English Longbow in terms of power, range, accuracy, and fire rate. But, we later learned that was too much. Most battles happen within 200m. We dropped to 5.56mm, because it was good enough.

If the English Longbow as such an ungodly powerful weapon, why did the British Empire use firearms?

Because to create a good longbowman, you have to start with his grand father. Firearms can make someone decent within a few hours, and at the extreme, a few months. When facing a line of enemy infantry, accuracy only matters in terms of hitting the line.

The reason why it takes so long to train a longbowman is:

Physical strength: The English would give a boy a bow. When he got good at it, they would give him a more powerful bow. Until they get over 200lbs. Their bone structure actually changed.

Arc: A tiny difference in the distance drawn can dramatically affect the power, and you can shoot a bow from level to almost 90˚. A good longbow can pick off individual targets at 200m, or rain arrows down upon enemy formations, which also ignores cover.

This applies to most bows and slings, historically. This is why getting a unit of famous archers/slingers was especially momentous, because of how rare they were. Now, usually, the expert army is no match for the plot armour of the heroes, but large armies are also poor at hunting a small, ragtag group of adventurers.

Crossbows were completely different. A crossbow is a bow with a cross attached. The cross holds the bow drawn. This effectively makes a bow work like a firearm. It does not require the same extreme strength, and only requires a short time to learn. The downside is that the bow's draw length is limited to a single point, and so you lose the versatility. Crossbows are also slower to fire than bows. A crossbow with a cranequin could punch through a knight's armour, but would take even longer to ready, as the point of the cranequin is the same as a gearbox, it turns distance into power.

So, in order to have an archer, you need lifelong training, and a bow. It could be a single piece of yew, or the rarest ingredients from the rarest parts of the world.

A good archer with a good bow could pick off targets at over 200 yards away.

But if you get 1,000 decent ones, they can rain arrows on an enemy formation. In open warfare, archer units would typically have 1/3 of their number as pikemen, or some other polearm, (the English preferred Billmen, Halberts were expensive luxuries, so halberters were more for bling of war). This is why the Bayonet was such an incredible invention, as it allows 100% of your unit to be archers, and 100% of them to be pikemen.

Ranks of archers, (which includes bows, crossbows, slings, and firearms), were best if shot in cohesive volleys.

The British Empire with the Martini-Henry breachloaders mastered the art of having three ranks that would fire in turn. This allows a rank to always be shooting.

In the high middle ages, battles were typically between feudal lords, and so much smaller in scale. Mercenary crossbowmen would work in teams, typically shooter, loader, paviser, and maybe a close-quarters combatant.

At the end of the day, when not being used, you have to unstring the bow and put it a weatherproof pouch, (typically wax or oiled cloth). And then use tallow on the bow strings to keep them supple.

You do NOT put yourself inside the bow, as you now have a 200lbs spring crushing you. Maybe if you are going to quickly climb something. A better option would probably be better to have it over one shoulder, but again, that would be extremely short term. Which means if you get ambushed, you are not going to have a bow.

Unless you have an Elf, which can use Elf-magic to keep their bows intact.

This means that everyone is going to need a secondary weapon, and every man carried either a knife or a dagger.

weatherman667

Part XI - Non-Inclusive Fantasy

Everyone is trying to make fantasy inclusive, and that is just a recipe to make it boring.

What we think of as the standard fantasy setting is Northern European Fantasy. For better or worse, almost every modern fantasy is dick riding either Tolkien or Gygax.

The Paladins are from the Knights-Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire, i.e. the Peers of Charlemagne. They were the second knightly works, after King Arthur himself. The difference is that King Arthur ruled a kingdom that was becoming Christian, whereas Charlemagne ruled and Empire that was explicitly Christian.

Druids aren't just nature mages, they were a specific class in the Celtic cultures. This is why a lot of fantasy settings will add Shaman as a more brutish alternative to Druids.

People in the US will ask, why don't we have Asian Elves?

Because Elves are Northern European, either Alfar or Fey. Not even East Asian companies will make Asian Elves. They might add something new and unique, or just add something traditionally Asian, like cat/fox girls.

It's pretty bad when East Asian countries have more respect for our own culture than we do.

But there is a great example of this, as they were done by largely the same creatives:

Avatar: the Last Airbender

Dragon Prince, The

In A:tLA, every - single - village has a distinct culture.

In The Dragon Prince, they have massive continental empires that have no culture, other than people with brown skin having dreadlocks.

Celtic Warriors would sometimes have dreadlocks. Because this is a way of managing your hair without washing it. The entire world of Dragon Prince feels hollow and boring, as it spends it's entire time pandering to inclusivity.

Cultures are exclusive, and that's what makes them cultures.

If you are creating a Northern European Fantasy story, then if you want black Men, you need a distant Africa equivalent. And you might say, but what if I want the main characters to be African.

Then the answer is to ask yourself why you are writing Northern European Fantasy? Why aren't you writing African fantasy. Why aren't you writing American fantasy?

Is it because that Northern European Fantasy is established?

You can create your own fantasy world. You can incorporate whatever culture and history you want into it.

BUT

You have to incorporate history and culture into it. You can use real-world cultures, or you can make your own, but it has to make internal sense.

I loved Netflix's Marco Polo. In it, there was one main white guy. Two more white guys were in the intro, but were quickly exiled. Season 2 implied Season 3 would deal with crusaders in conflict with the Mongols, which would make sense, and they would literally be the enemies.

Wukong is famous right now, but there was a Hercules-esk tv show about it. I could not get into it, because it was filmed in Australia, and all of the characters were white. It did not fit.

I don't want white guys in a Samurai story, unless they are one of the 14 Dutchmen allowed in the country, (one in, one out).

Or it's Tom Cruise playing a western soldier in Japan training the army, and used as a viewpoint character. This is very realistic.

Well, what about a black samurai? There was one black guy in Japan. He was a slave. So, if you are going to make a black samurai, make it Afro Samurai. Which, shockingly, did not purport to be historically accurate, and so did not get the Japanese Diet cracking down on it. Just like how Samurai Champloo had hip-hop and break dancing, but it still felt natural.

weatherman667

Part XII - Food

Something near and dear to myself as a fat guy.

And something pretty much every historian gets wrong.

Well, how do I know history better than historians?

Historians only care about what was written down.

Archeology is a better source of food. Especially since archeologists will drink the bog mead and eat the tomb cheese.

People ate - everything - they could get their hands on. This limits the food to:

What is produced locally in the area.

What is either in season, preserved, or shelf stable.

What is not too expensive.

The too expensive is pretty easy, it's whatever was written down.

Here's a great example, 1950's.

People will often talk how terrible the food was. What was their source? Cook books. But, the reason it was in a cook book was that it wasn't a common recipe. People were more likely to eat meat + veggies + starch. How do you cook the meat? 350˚ oven, 1/2hr per pound.

What happened in the 1950's was a sudden influx of new ingredients, the creation of new technology, and things that were formerly only available to the rich suddenly became cheap enough to try. This is why they had all of the outlandish recipes, as the middle classes could now try these weird, rich things.

My mother, when she was growing up, learned to cook on a wood-fired oven.

The most common form for cooking in history as the hearth. The hearth consists of a flat rock that you build a fire on. You would normally surround it by stone or masonry to keep the fire contained. You either have a smoke hole in the roof, or just let it filter through the thatch. If the hearthstone is big enough, you build the house - around - it.

The reason why a pot for cooking shares the same root as pottery is that pots were originally ceramic. Ceramic is both a good insulator, and has a high heat capacity to hold in the heat. This makes it almost perfect for cooking on an open fire, keeping the temperature even. Metal pots and dutch ovens were a sign of wealth.

So, the choices for most people were in a pot over an open fire, or on a stick over and open fire, or suspended high above the open fire so it's mostly smoke and not heat.

Proper ovens were expensive, and so only found in cities, or among wealthy individuals, like bakers.

Corn when properly processed last forever, (as long as they are kept dry). Corn is the edible seeds from grasses, like wheat, barley, and oats in England. Rice and Maize also qualify.

Roots and tubers can last a year if kept it a cold, dry, dark place.

Vegetables are a different story, and often only last a single season, (or even much shorter time), if not pickled.

Meat has an extremely short shelf-life, unless cured, (salt) and smoked, in which case it lasts for almost ever.

And worst, fire. Without modern mechanisms, creating fire was extremely difficult. It was time consuming and taxing, and even if you do have modern lighters, it can still be time consuming and taxing. So, a lot of ancient civilizations would have someone who's job is firekeeper, (Dark Souls is about the primeval fear that the fire - might - go out). So, the fire was just kept going, forever. The Vestal Virgins of Rome were literally tasked with maintained the symbolic hearth of Rome.

All of those movies where they walk in and there's a fire in the background cooking a pot is... very accurate. Pots were often left on the stove for days, if not forever. And by forever, I mean

A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation.

--Wikipedia

And by foodsafe, as long as it is kept at 60˚F, which is barely simmering, it's perfectly safe to do this, forever.

As for bread, wheat was the goal of all civilization, and even then, the gluten in bread was dramatically increased in the US. So, while bread was common, but nowhere near as fluffy without the gluten. If they didn't have wheat, they would make something similar to pancake, which it seems like almost every single society has something similar.

Every family would have a grain ark. You would often have a larder, where meat was covered in fat for protection, (it effectively creates an air-proof barrier). Every family had a pig, as you could feed it food scraps, which it turns into pork. Some towns would have a municipal swineherd, who's job was to gather up the pigs and take them to the woods for foraging. The Roman standard, meaning the European standard when considering woodlands for tax purposes was how many pigs they could forage. Having a milk animals was the goal of most families. A calf can be bought for a few hundred, and it takes $20-ish dollars per day to feed. And they produced like 18L of milk per day. Chickens were typically not eaten, but kept for eggs. Or you can get a rope and a bucket and climb up/down a cliff to steal them from the birds that fish there. Wild game was freely available, until lords restricted it's use. You just had to hunt it and kill it, or pay a hunter to do it for you. Everyone with a square food of land had an herb/vegetable garden.

Most rent was paid in either work or grain, and the work was often to harvest the lord's own grain. If we take Grain as a general category, then it is the most common currency in Human history. Which is why it makes so much sense for Cybertronians to use Energon.

weatherman667

Part XIII - Armour

Most people think of armour as light, medium, and heavy, but heavy did not exist until the late medieval / early modern.

But, as I said, most fantasy settings are set in the late medieval / early modern period. Because that's when all of the cool shit appeared, heavy armour, firearms, cities, etc.

Light armour is also often thought of as leather. While leather played an important part in armour, it was not really used as standalone armour. Leather armour did exist, and studded leather was used, but for the most part, light armour was gambesons. The point of light armour is to give enough space for sharp weapons to not penetrate. And cloth does a better job of this. Which is one of the reasons Witcher III was so good. The gambeson was also worn as padding under mail.

Chainmail is a modern word. Celts had it before the Romans, and called it Maille. Romans adopted it from the Celts for their Lorica Hamata, which has the same root as Hauberk. Mail was the primary armour of knights up to the 15th century. A Hauberk goes from the shoulders, down the arms, and down to the knees, and with padding can block most attacks. They could then add a helm, a coif or aventail, along with greaves and bracers, and basically be completely covered. They would often add reinforcing pieces to it, on top, or beneath.

Full plate / heavy plate is called a panoply, and is made up a LOT of little pieces. They would often wear either mail underneath, or at least to fill in the gaps.

A Hauberk can be thrown on over a gambeson, and then you add a belt, and you're done. Full Plate takes a significant amount of time to don. And it worked so well that shields started to disappear.

The sword is the romantic weapon. Because they were so expensive, they had to be inherited. Axes and spears were cheaper, and also tools.

The shield was the symbol of the warrior. All the way from prehistory to around the 15th century. And the coat of arms for a knight is literally a shield that is painted.

Let's take the battle of Thermopylae. People look at 300 and think it's exaggerated, and it is, as they wouldn't have worn a leather speedo. When Spartans knew they were going to die, they wore nothing but their helm, shield, and crimson cape. The shield bore the lambda, and along with the crimson cape was the symbols of the Spartaoi. They took off their cuirasses, and greaves, and bracers, and clothing. Because when you are in a tight formation, the three best forms of protection is your shield, along with that of the warrior to the left and right of you.

The phrase exists, "come back with your shield or on it". Dead soldiers were carried on their shields, whereas cowards would throw it away to run away faster.

Most armies did not suffer major casualties until they rout. Discipline is everything. To the point that soldiers from highly disciplined modern armies are taught to ignore incoming fire if it's ineffective.

The downside of armour is that physical force can still hurt you through even the heaviest armour that can be freely worn, (i.e. not powered). Tournament armour was often too heavy to even walk in. And still vulnerable to the lance of a charging knight, or maces and hammers.

Heavy plate would often have an arrêt (stop), on their armour, which would transfer the force from the lance to their armour, allowing them to charge even harder.

Other forms of armour:

Breastplate: Solid armour has the disadvantage that it cannot bend, which is why full plate came in a hundred tiny pieces. Or, you could just throw a Breastplate on, and it provides the most protection for the cheapest price.

Scalemail: Armour that is made from tiny pieces of metal, like scales, that are fitted to a backing, often leather. This has the advantage in fantasy that you can use Dragonscales.

Brigandine is basically a reversed scalemail, that is made up of cloth or leather, LINED with metal plates. This was often cruder, and so cheaper.

Coat of Plates: Exactly as it sounds, it is a coat, with internal plates. It provides good protection while being relatively cheap and easy to don.

Splintmail: Made of small strips of something hard. This can be metal, but it can also be horn or leather, or anything else you have on hand. This allows a full chest armour to be made out of tiny pieces.

Silk: This was worn by steppe horse people, as it would stop arrow barbs from biting. Which is incredibly important.

Flak Vest: Modern armour typically uses Kevlar, heavily compressed. This could, in theory, be done in a fantasy setting, using whatever magically tough fabric you can get your hands on. Probably by Dwarves.

Ceramic: Ceramics seem like a poor choice for armour, except that breaking apart is a good thing. Maybe. The fracturing of the armour absorbs the energy of the impact. If you have something else underneath, and then the ceramic will reduce the force of impact to the point that underlying armour can stop it. Space Marines use Ceramite. Ceramic would also work on heat-based attacks, like say, Dragonbreath.

weatherman667

Part XIV - Mansion != Manor, and Dungeons are Places

A) Mansion != Manor

When looking into the history, people will see a manor, and think it's a big shiny house.

A lord was the mayor, colonel of the local regiment, police chief, sheriff, judge, and master of the archives. The land lord literally owned all of the land, everyone involved in managing the land was hired - directly - by him. As such, his house wasn't just a big house, but had to hold all of the facilities needed to run his land.

If they have a town on the land, the buildings might be spread about the town, but in many cases, it was all contained in his manor.

As the lords got richer, the manor could be expanded to include more rooms for private usage, but many if not most of the rooms were entirely functional. He would likely have an audience chambre to speak with any locals, because he literally IS the local government. The term Courtyard literally refers to the fact that courts were often held there. He would have a library, a portion of which was hold the local archives and archivist. They would have stables and grooms to maintain their horses, and armoury for your retainers, and for the peasants when called to arms.

B) Dungeons are Places

Something that D&D explicitly states is that Dungeons don't just randomly have monsters, but were created for some reason.

The word Dungeon itself is from Donjon, which just means good tower. It was the central keep of a castle. Prisons as punishment did not exist. It might be used to hold someone awaiting trial and punishment, or it might be used to hold someone inconvenient or for ransom.

But, let's face it, if the dungeon wasn't a place, just a place that randomly has monsters, they wouldn't have any loot. Okay, maybe you were attacking a lair of lesser dragonkin because you want dragon scales, but D&D is absolutely terrible on acquiring materials like this.

Some ideas:

Old mines taken over by monsters or criminals.

A school for magic, where something went horribly wrong, (or horribly right).

Camp/base for sentient monsters, like Orcs or Mindflayers.

Place of power, with the monsters attracted to the mana coming out of the ground.

Ancient Temple.

Dwarven hold where they dug too greedily and too deep.

Just remember, why are they there? what challenges are natural to the site? what challenges moved into the site after it's initial abandonment. what kind of loot can they expect? can they make a quick escape?

weatherman667

Part XV - Horse of a Different Colour

Throughout all of Human history, there is one animal we ride because it is faster - the horse.

There are plenty of beasts of burden and draught animals. Donkeys are cheap, mules are hardy and a bit smarter, camels are great in deserts, ox and elephants have incredible power, llamas are great in the mountains.

But of them all, only the horse is actually faster.

But, you are creating a fantasy world. Should you have something else?

Maybe.

LOTR is the most epic fantasy series, where the fastest mounts are basically horses. Yes, there are more exotic animals, but they are treated as truly exotic. The Golden Eagles were divine massagers, and the Nazgül had Fell Beasts, but they are empowered and corrupted straight from Sauron himself. Other than that it's horses.

And this is because horses are designed almost perfectly for running, are docile enough to be tamed, and are perfectly capable of carrying a knight in full armour.

In a visual story, you can include exotic animals without having to provide concrete details about them. But, when written, are you going to spend a few pages explaining why their not-horses are used like horses? If the reader going to care? Sure, you could provide a basic description and then move on. Like how Heinlein would say "the door dilated" or "he used a laser knife to cut through a wall", and then never provide a single word more on how it works.

Think of it like Ye Olde English. You want some more archaic dialogue, but you still want the audience to feel at home. People know what horses are. They are very well defined. Every historic story has horses.

If you want to create something new, it will become exotic and adventurous. If you want a grounded character story, use horses. If you want something more exotic and adventurous, create something new.

And a cool mount is also a great way to make your hero feel special, both in the world, and in themselves.

But, also in fantasy settings, there are a much wider variety of flying animals.

Let's take the Pegasus. Originally there was one, and the only reason he worked with the heroes, (Bellerophon and Perseus), is that the gods ASKED him to.

This lead to multiple settings that have pegasus knights of various orders.

On one hand, compared with pretty much every other flying animals, Pegasi would actually be good at carrying Humans. On the other hand, they would be absolutely terrible at flying. But, if that's the only flying mount you have, you would still have the advantage.

How about Gryphons! Gryphons are a combination of the lion, the king of the beasts, and the golden eagle, the king of the birds. Gryphons are also only female in the mythology, (there is a male, the keythong, but has wing spikes, which would be fucking epic if anyone actually included it). The wingspan of a female golden eagle caps at about 8 feet. The weight of a female lioness caps at around 320 lbs. According to AI, the equivalent wingspan would be 100ft.

Let's take the MLP solution, and make them fly through magic, with the wings being more about control, stability, and magic control.

A lioness needs 10lbs of meat a day, but can eat as much as 50, in which case they will be fine for a few days. Let's double it for our Gryphon, so 20lbs of meat per day. So, a pig would last a few days.

And this is where Warcraft actually handles it better, (pre-WoW).

Gryphons struggle to carry an mage, but can carry a Dwarf with full kit.

Gryphons are more befriended than domesticated. They are only ridden by the appropriately-named Wildhammer Dwarfs, whom are... wilders. So, this means that Gryphons take care of their own food, for the most part, and you have to take a couple hours of every day on campaign to let you Gryphon hunt.

A Pegasus, on the other hand, needs grass. Probably twice as much grass as a horse, and so would need a wider range, which, luckily, they can fly. They would probably cost several times what a regular horse would have, which means you could have Pegasus cavalry. They would be extremely expensive, elite troops. But, since no one else has Pegasi, you would have unchallenged airpower. Unless there's a hungry dragon nearby.

Let's take some other examples of exotic creatures:

Chocobos!: The ever favourite mount of the Final Fantasy franchise. In all honesty, they simply treat them as horses, including eating grass. Grass is a terrible source of nutrition. Horses eat grass, but don't get much nutrition from it, like how pandas eat bamboo. Ruminants, however, have multiple stomachs. They eat, it goes into stomach A. It comes back to the mouth to chew, and gets swallowed to stomach B, and so on. The more stomachs they have, the more nutrition they can get out of the grass. Birds, instead evolved a gizzard. They swallow small rocks and keep them into gizzard. They can then grind. What is this useful for? Seeds. Birds will honestly eat anything they can swallow, but are designed to eat seeds, which most animals cannot process. This is highly impractical for large birds, as there is a maximum size on seeds. Unless you create archtrees, or something. So, the answer is archtrees. Or make them carnivorous, in which case you have to feed them. Chocobos can't normally fly, (unless you get a rare, hero breed), but can flush, allowing them incredible mobility.

A:tLA: Avatar: the Last Airbender has a wide variety of mix-and-match critters. To the point that a non-hybrid bear confuses them.

And this leads to a wide variety of exotic mounts. From komodo-rhinos, to giant (non-mythical) basilisks, to six-legged flying bison, dragons, and... the only truly unique one, the eel-hound.

The reason it's unique is that it has incredible mobility on land, and in the water. The other animals are cool. The flying bison fills the usual balloon-like flying animal role. But, at the end of the day, the average person uses an Ostrich Horse, because they are really easy to use, and really useful.

The mundane solution is often the most powerful for a society, as it can be used by the most people.

But giving the heroes a rare animal is always good. The key thing that Appa does is give the heroes a way to fly, together. Which doesn't exist until Sokka invents the war balloon. Appa fulfills the same role as the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Which is also cool and unique, who's power is incredible speed and ignominy.

Pokemon: Pokemon has a wide variety of exotic... animals? There honestly has not been a consistent answer. And they all eat berries, and curry, and whatever else the game lets you make. SwSh has the best one, where Pokemon are energy beings. Anyways, you have a wide variety of animals you can... Most of the time you just use a bike. Because bikes are like horses, but cheap enough for a 10 year old to afford. Despite the wide variety of animals you should be able to ride, you actually cannot. You can Surf with some of them, and Fly (fast travel), with others, but rarely can you actually just ride them. I'd honestly rather ride a Doduo than Miraidon, but Pokemon is horrible for keeping the exact same combat system they started with (literal) decades ago. But SwSh had a great idea, have Pokemon actually work. For the first time in world Pokemon history, Pokemon were useful for something other than pit fights. And one of the things they use is use the cool new bird to carry around a basket. And as a serious competitor, you get a free pass to use the service.

Summary:

Do you need exotic mounts? No. Are they cool? Yes. Do you have to explain how exotic mounts work? Also yes.

weatherman667

Part XVI - But Human's Can't Magic

Something that absolutely infuriates me.

Most people think they do it because Tolkien did it. The reason Tolkien did it is that he wanted a low fantasy setting. None of the main races can use magic, and most of the magic in the world is leftover from the time of it's creation, or in the realm of literal angels, or damn-near close.

But, if it wasn't Tolkien who said Humans can't use magic, where did we get it from, the Bible?

No. The Catholic put a lot of effort into rent-seeking your salvation, and so says magic is not real. Protestants were the ones running Witch Hunts. The Bible itself says magic is real. The reason Genies are slaves kept in lamps is that King Solomon had such great magic power, (derived from his great wisdom), that he was able to make the incredible feat of enslaving them. He's the reason why the Seal of Solomon is often used in the iconography of magic circles.

The reason why using magic is bad is that the best way to learn it is by summoning and detaining demons. According to occultism. The summoning of demons is the bad part, not the magic part.

So, why do we think Humans can't use magic?

D&D. They honestly had no idea what they were doing, but they had no idea what they were doing because no one had ever done anything like it before. My problem with D&D is that they have never - bothered - to fix the problems.

The big problem they had is what while they use Northern European-inspired classes, they wanted to decouple them from any mythology to make them more extensible. And this is why the world building of anything D&D/Pathfinder is so absolutely terrible.

In pretty much every - other - fantasy setting, magic is something anyone with the aptitude can use. Why? BECAUSE IT'S FUN! BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK AM I IN A FANTASY SETTING IF I CAN'T USE MAGIC?

Okay, yes, you can have one person in the party do all of the magic things, sure, that works. But, if you can't use magic, and your enemies can't use magic, then why are we in a fantasy setting?

And this is a serious question you have to ask yourself. You have to decide how low or high fantasy your fantasy setting is, but if you strip out all of the magic, except one magic MacGuffin, then why are you even bothering making it a fantasy setting. Even Beowulf has multiple magic swords, and they were created by Humans, (swords EARNED their names, they were not given them).

Case in point: Spice & Wolf. Is Spice & Wolf a fantasy setting, or simply a medieval story? The original anime had like 2 magic beings, and everything else was entirely mundane. And while Spice & Wolf doesn't use real-world locations, it reads like some piece of folklore some medieval monk wrote down, and took the effort to research economics before he did.

But, you don't have to think too deeply about it. The reason might be because you want to fight a skeleton army.

This isn't to insult Spice & Wolf, as it's a great anime. But, if Magic is so hard to use it never actually appears in the setting, then why are you even making a fantasy story? If you want to write a Human / Werewolf / (other) love triangle, then just put a shirtless werewolf on the front cover and write the story you want to write.

Okay, but D&D makes magic something that heroes can use, because they are heroes?

And that just creates false expectancy. Your character didn't became an epic hero because of epic training, devious guile, challenging challenges, or even a skillful mentor, but because they are the protagonist. This might sound like the average Isekai, but Isekai actually justifies the Protagonist having his powers because a god - quite literally - blessed him. Just like in Grecian Heroic Myth, most of the Grecian heroes were either demigods, or blessed by the gods.

D&D gives the heroes power because they can use the PC rules instead of the NPC rules.

weatherman667

Part XVII - Vampire Werewolf Love Triangle

Now, in my last post, I mentioned a Vampire Werewolf Love Triangle, and but it came off as unnecessarily harsh.

Not because Twilight is not deserving, but:

You can enjoy terrible things.

There is nothing inherently bad about a vampire werewolf love triangle.

Twilight

Twilight is legitimately that terrible. It's so terrible that it destroyed romance in the West, (okay, it had help). But, the problem with Twilight is not that it's terrible, it's that the current zeitgeist is that women are always right and men are always wrong.

You see, 300 plays. Men want to go see it. Girlfriends see a bunch of shirtless men in the trailers and wants to come along, ignoring the fact the titular 300 on the posters was literally a blood splatter. So, women regret their decisions, but you see, women are always right. Unable to admit they were being fucking dumbasses, they dragged their men out of the theatre. Because, in the eyes of social conformism, women's feelings outrank facts. The facts are that the woman didn't need to tag along, and that the man already paid for his fucking ticket. But, women's morals are superior, and if the man did not leave the theatre, the woman acts like this is an egregious sin that might end the relationship if the man doesn't do the typical romcom thing of spending 90% of the movie begging his girlfriend to come back to him and proving how wrong he was.

So, Twilight comes out, and what happens? Oh, well, obviously demanding their boyfriends join them in the theatres. Rather than just admitting the shirtless vampire/werewolf made her horny, she INSISTED it was a good movie. And if any man refused to believe this, even after seeing any of the absolutely horrible movies, then it was as if he had committed a romcom sin, that requires the entire movie supplicating himself to make up for it.

Twilight hit the market at just the right time to become a cultural icon, rather than just being a shitty knockoff of harlequin romances. So, instead of just being a stupid book that makes her horny, Twilight being the bedrock of our culture. Which, of course, is why you don't build your house in a quagmire.

Let's take Sin City. Frank Miller has explicitly stated that Sin City was 100% self-indulgent tripe. But it sold. Because it's fun. It had the benefit that no one thought that Sin City was meant to teach them how to live their life.

Hell, Gor/Counterearth literally, LITERALLY LITERALLY, became a BDSM manual for a community, and despite it's incredible artistic merit, (first few books), it never had anywhere near the effect on the culture. 50 Shades, however...

Every Story is a Character Story

Pixar (classic Pixar), was the very icon of taking an absolutely dogshit idea and making quite simply, the best stories mankind has ever created.

What are toys doing when you aren't watching? What if super heroes were defeated by frivolous lawsuits? What if a man tied a bunch of balloons to his house? What if an garbage compactor fell in love with an iPad?

Let's say you want to have a vampire, werewolf, human love triangle. This could be done pretty much every way.

Typical high school romance.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean, Buffy never actually did this, but got pretty close, to the point it wouldn't feel out of place. Okay, Angel had a Vampire / Vampire / Vampire Slayer / Vampire Slayer / Werewolf love pentangle.

Hallmark movie.

MMF porn.

MFF porn.

Star-crossed lovers, (everyone loves a forbidden romance).

A group of scientists studying weird anomalies in blood.

Blood-soaked horror movie.

Sexy, blood-drinking torture porn.

Detective story. Man is a detective, vampire is the doll who turns out to be a vamp. Werewolf is the suspect, but is a lot better than you originally thought.

Man adopts an orphan girl that grows to love him. Vampire girl was planning to make him her next mark. Adopted girl that turns out to be a werewolf secretly fights her off without revealing her secret.

Murder Mystery (like in Witcher III).

The plot is different from the genre which is different from the theme which is different from the style. Hell, Devil May Cry has a Devil, Half-Devil, Human love triangle. High School DxD has a Nekomata in place of the werewolf, a Devil as the vampire, and then throws an vampire trap in for good measure, (along with a miko, valkyrie, phoenix, nun, et al). Metal Gear Solid had a bisexual vampire dating both a colonel and his daughter.

The most important thing is the story telling and authentic characters. If you have that, you can make a beloved movie about rat who becomes a 5-star chef in Paris.

weatherman667

Part XVIII - g/s/c - L/s/d

Most fantasy worlds have gold, silver, and copper coins, but this has almost never happened.

If you introduce multiple units of currency, then you come across arbitrage.

Arbitrage is when someone takes advanced of changing market value based off arbitrary changes. Basically, the larger the land-coverage of the commodity, the higher the chance that minor issues can create regional differences in price.

Basically, if you have gold and silver coins, then someone will realize that the gold is more valuable somewhere else, and go there and change it to silver/goods. And this removes the value of the gold from your economy.

While I can, (and will), go further into depth with this, the most important thing is pick one of gold/silver/copper, and vary the size of the coin.

Gold, silver, and copper are malleable and noble, i.e. they either don't corrode, or they do so slowly. Gold is almost impossible to corrode. If you see something in the ancient world, at one point they will likely discuss payment in talents. Talent is simply a unit of weight, basically like a gold bar. Gold bars are of a standard weight, and used for either holding onto weight, or for large purchases, (like a king's ransom).

The British had the most trusted currency in the world. What they did was have a standard weight for a penny, 1/240 of a pound. We'll get to that number later. Every once in a while, they travelled around the country and weighed locally produced pennies, and if they were underweight, they would cut off the hand of the minter and nail it to the counting house. They also kept their value, because the British refused to debase it.

Debasing is when you add other, cheaper metals.

Everything else was defined it terms of either a Penny or a Pound Sterling.

Farthing: Literally 1/4 (of a Penny)

Haypenny: Literally Half a Penny

Penny

Groat/Threepenny: 3 Pennies

Sixpence: 6 Pennies

Shilling: 12 Pennies

Florin: 2 Shillings = 24 Pennies

Half Crown: 2/6 (2 shillings and six pence) = 30 pennies.

Crown: 5/- (5 shillings and zero pence) = 60 pennies

Half-Mark: 6/8 (6 shillings and 8 pence) = 80 pennies

The next are units of account, i.e. not coins, but used when counting big numbers.

Half Mark: 6/8 (6 shillings and 8 pence) = 80 pennies. This is 1/3 of a pound.

Mark: 13/4 (13 shillings and 4 pence) = 160. This is 2/3 of a pound.

The reason why 240 is used is because they are smart. 240 is a highly composite number.

240 can be divided by:

240 Pound

120 Half Pound

80 Half Mark

60 Crown

30 Half Crown

24 Florin

12 Shilling

6 Sixpence

3 Threepence (great penny = groat)

1 Penny

England did have a gold coin called the Sovereign, that had a nominal value of 1 pound of sterling silver, but as I said, was vulnerable to speculation and arbitrage.

The reason why Britain used L/s/d is that it stood for Libram, Sistercy, Denarius. These were ancient Roman coins that were resurrected by Charlemagne.

Sterling Silver is the purity, 92.5%.

As I said, this was the MOST TRUSTED currency in the world, but your world doesn't have to be that good at economics. Economics still plays a factor, but they might not have figured out the best way to organize it. The important thing is the varying weights.

Your world needs a purity. You don't actually need to know it, but just pick a name for it.

Pick a metal, Gold, Electrum, Silver, Copper. Electrum is a natural alloy of gold and silver, (with a bit of copper).

Have a base weight.

Make everything else a multiple of that weight.

Boom, you have a currency. Add bars of other metals for high value usage, but they could not have a fixed weight.

Fantasy often adds Mythril coins. While Mythril doesn't tarnish, ever, ever-ever, it's almost impossible to actually work, and would not work well as coinage. Unless made by a race that can work Mythril.

Platinum does work as a step better than gold, if you have a world with a platinum industry.

One of the most important things for currency, however, is "can I buy things". If the person does not live in a society where the currency is considered valuable, they cannot use it. Traders could trade it for something else of value, but for most people, it would mean nothing.

Several cultures even used sea shells as currency.

The currency has to be accessible, but in a limited way. If it's common, people will not value it.

weatherman667

Part XIX - Bathing

In Northern Europe, if you swim in a lake at any time other than the heat of the summer, which around here last 30 days, you have to spend hours around a fire warming up, or you will be hypothermic. In fact, for most of the North, if you got too cold, there wasn't really a good way of getting warm again.

Unless you had a sauna, which was Uralic. I.e. Siberian, rather than Indo-European.

in order to have a bath, you need a bathtub. And even the tiny medieval bathtubs were considered a luxury. Now, you have to collect enough water to fill it. Then you to heat the water by building a fire, which means you need the wood/coal/faggots to build a fire with. Which you are not cooking with, which is also a luxury.

And now you went through all of that effort, you get one bath. And then the rest of the family, in order.

And this is why Northern Europeans didn't bathe that often.

But, Celts had soap before the Romans arrived, so they probably gave themselves sponge baths, which provide the same level of cleanliness, but not the relaxation or warming aspects.

I remember a documentary about hot springs, and it came to the most logical and boring conclusion: cultures with natural hot springs tend to have much better developed bathing cultures. Because hot springs provide all of the benefits of bathing, without all of that hard work.

So, if you want your fantasy world to have baths, they are either a luxury, from hot springs, or from a well developed civilization. You know, the well developed civilization that has the inn with a giant hall and individual rooms, and silk lingerie, and full plate armour, and big, poofy dresses at big, poofy galas.

As I've said before, most fantasy stories are actually set in the early modern period, because

that has all of the things you want. Including cities that have bath houses.

Or you can get a magic rock that heats water when you turn it on, and priest come by every once in a while to purify the water.

The Lion of Cynn features as a subplot with the protagonist introducing Dwarven bathing culture to Mannish cities.

weatherman667

Part XX - Off the Grid Lifestyle

We now couch this as resisting modern society, when most of them focus on keeping as many modern luxuries.

The reason why Patriarchy/Feudalism was so prevalent around the world, is that it is the most sustainable society Humans have ever created. During WWII, modern, European super powers discovered tiny villages where life had not changed for centuries.

Modern Progressive values take Christian values, and run amok with them. They don't care if it actually works, or if it runs headlong into extinction.

Hell, a lot of Progressives are cheering for Human extinction, because we are the disease.

There is a tendency for modern writers to add modern values to historic situations. And this is a choice the author has to make. You want your world to be realistic, but you also want your world to feel at home for the modern audience.

But, as I said, modern values are Christian values - run amok.

The Bible tells you to love your neighbour, but also tells you to socially isolate from outlanders and sell the cloak off of your back to buy a sword if you don't have one.

The Greeks held hospitality to be sacrosanct. The stories of the gods showing up in disguise to see if you will offer hospitality comes from ancient Greece. It was so sacrosanct that the Iliad, the sum total of every Greek Heroic myth, was caused by an extreme violation of sacred hospitality.

In Greek, Roman, Gaulish, Brythonic, Germanic, and Scandinavians all had the tradition of In Vino Veritas.

You offer them hospitality, get them drunk, build trust, and use that to find out why the outlander is really here.

And this is why warriors focus so much on boasts, so their reputation would precede them.

Knights had heraldry that showed who they were and where they came from. This means that if anything happens, you can go to his lands and ravage them, and his wife, and hold his kids hostage, and steal his falcons, (the English had such great animal husbandry that two English falcons was enough to pay a prince's ransom).

And this is why people are immediately distrustful of a Black Knight, i.e. a Knight not displaying his heraldry.

TL;DR It's entirely likely that there are untouched medieval villages in the most modern countries, nevermind in your fantasy setting. So long as they are socially cohesive and source their food, (and other resources), as locally as they can.

weatherman667

Part XXI - Crazytech

I've talked about not only does have completely different tech level societies make sense, it's far more likely than the alternative.

But, just as importantly, the technology we have is

completely accidental.

The reason our cars use an internal combustion engine is Henry Ford. Before this, electric and steam technology were more useful.

The only reason we don't use the Kraut Space Magic G11 is that ordinary firearms technology progressed while it was in development, and it simply wasn't worth the cost of further development, along with rearmament.

The only reason we don't use the Boltgun is minifacturing had not fully developed, and as such it took too much time to make the ammunition, (and it was a warcrime while we're pretending the Rules and Customs of Warfare have any current validity).

What this means is that Dwarves riding giant steam-powered monowheels is perfectly valid. Elves spinning around double-bladed swords and using them like boomerangs is perfectly valid.

The War of the Worlds had Land Ironclads that used pedrail wheels.

The Ratte was not developed because it took too much fuel and was vulnerable to aircraft.

The Tsar Tank was cancelled because it was underpowered. The rear wheel didn't work, but could be replaced with larger ones like the front. These problems could have been fixed, if the Russian Revolution didn't happen.

Why does Venus Wars use unicycles? Who cares, they are fucking awesome.

Reincarnated as a Sword decided that merchant wagons should have three wheels, and be pulled by this guy.

Why? Who cares. It's cool.

Shadiversity looked at LOTR swords, and most of them are perfectly valid, if from far different blacksmithing traditions than what exists today.

The Orc swords would have terrible edge alignment, however.

If you want to make something new, go ahead. So long as either the technology could work, or it could work if you add magick to it.

weatherman667

Part XXII - Magitech

The war between magick and technology was created by D&D to explain their ridiculously limited magic system.

And example in Pathfinder is the Stone Call: A rain of dirt, gravel, and small pebbles fills the area, dealing 2d6 points of bludgeoning damage to every creature in the area. This damage only occurs once, when the spell is cast. For the remaining duration of the spell, this debris covers the ground, making the entire area difficult terrain. At the end of the duration, the rocks disappear, leaving no aftereffects (other than the damage dealt).

In order to maintain the absolutely limited nature of spells, they have to make the rocks disappear.

In every case not contaminated by D&D, magic is instead treated as pervasive but invisible energy. We already know about a lot of invisible but pervasive energy fields: gravity, electromagnetism, non-visible light, alpha and beta radiation, etc. And by every case, I mean most historical writings about magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, in pretty much every culture.

If magic is just energy, and energy conversion, then you can make it work with technology. You can have clockwork mechanisms that use magic as the energy source, instead of springs. You have have things that look and act like firearms, but are basically blasters.

Basically, FFX. This allows the world to be non-industrialized and rely on magic to have airships, cannons, and robots.

Of course, this requires specialized knowledge, engineering, and magic, and so can likely only be done by one or two cultures in the setting.

weatherman667

Part XXIII - Mysterious Chest

This is part of the fantasy meta that bothers me the second most, after the idiotic idea that Female Dwarves have beards.

Chests - are not - mysterious.

Chests are the standard way to keep things you don't want to moulder. It's probably the only part of the household that is not as moist as the surrounding environment.

Chests are how you keep things. The nicer the things, the nicer the chest. Coffers are small chests to carry money, because money has traditionally be metal coins and people did not have pockets. Arks are chests with slightly different shape for storing grain.

Barrels and amphoras are used to carry liquid.

The only reason chests are mysterious in fantasy settings is because the GM typically didn't create a reasonable timescale for how long it's been sitting there without care.

weatherman667

Part XXIV - Classical and Pre-Classical Fiction

The Bronze Age was from the transition from the Stone Age.

In order to make Bronze, you need Copper and Tin, (et al). There were two main sources of the tin for the Bronze Age, and one of them was in Britain.

The main Bronze Age cultures were Greece, Egypt, Anatolia/Ionia, and Mesopotamia. China had something similar, but did not have as close connections. In order to have a Bronze Age, they had to trade all of the way to Britain. The Bronze Age was the creator of civilization. It required social organization, hierarchy, writing, bureaucracy. It tends to revolve around large, (for the day), cities.

But most of these cities died. Most civilizations are one drought away from collapse. The ones we know about:

lasted

had writing

Most empires don't last the death of the emperor. The ones that do will typically die with the emperor's grandson.

These eras had effectively zero civil rights, unless you were upper class. Rome was special because they actually wrote the rules down.

So, these cities appeared out of nowhere, and often did not last, and the plebs had little to no rights. So, why did people live there?

Because the entire rest of Humanity were barbarians. Semi or fully nomadic tribes, low social organizations. Nomadic cultures cannot keep possessions. They cannot carve a stele with all of the rules of the city. Possessions are passed down by hand, not fiat, and everything is preserved by word of mouth. And these barbarians thought that living in a city was worth it.

This was an era where a single skilled combatant could keep a city safe, and he was typically made king. Gilgamesh apparently actually instituted Primus Noctis, and people STILL felt the walls of the city were worth everything. Their solution was to find the wild man Enkidu, to keep Gilgamesh busy. To redirect his incredible masculine energies away from the city.

Iron, by contrast, is much more prevalent, effectively everywhere. It is soft, so not as sharp as Bronze, and rusts. It also requires much higher temperatures to work. Iron requires unique knowledge and skill, but does NOT require a well developed civilizations.

When Rome was conquering Europe, the celts used Iron. They had soap, butter, and mail, that the Romans copied. During these days, you don't really need tactics. And empire could show up with a few thousand men, and vastly outnumber every tribe they came across.

weatherman667

Part XXV - Out with the Ye Olde and in with the Early Modern

You are writing a pseudo-Medieval English fantasy world, because let's face it, everyone is copying Tolkien. So, you want the language the FEEL like it was from the time.

You're not an expert. This isn't an insult, because not even Tolkien was an expert on all English. Tolkien was a Doctor of Anglo-Saxon.

English is a language that's been forming for at least 2,000 years. It's normally divided into Old, Middle, and Modern. Old is the language of the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Middle was caused by the Norman invasion, bringing lots of French, and Modern is where they decided to try and make some goddamn sense of it.

But, it includes Celtic influence. Of all of the languages that fed Modern English, Latin has the most living roots. Greek not only heavily influenced Latin, but Celt. Anglo-Saxon is a German language. The Danes conquered part of England for a while.

On top of this, every village has their own accent. To the point that when making Kingdom, Stephen Fry created his own accent, to make sure that they could not be mistaken for any of the milliennia-old towns in the area.

Even if you did get a doctorate in the language used at a specific time in a specific place, your audience will definitely not.

Alright, so what do you do, just use modern language? Well, current language is VERY dated, and does not make sense outside the tiny 5/10 year band it's written in.

But, English is a quite a varied and beautiful language, that we only use a tiny part of in the modern day. If you try to use a more varied diction, people will often get mad at you.

So, no only have we lost most of the English language out of reverse snobbery, we've also given up on formality. In the Middle Ages, if you were not respectful enough of a knight or peer, they could kill you. And in the past 70 years, we have completely destroyed every respectful part of English.

In the Lion of Cynn, the main character is a squire with Elves that have taken a shine to him. The kingdom of Cynn knows perfectly well that this means he's a destined hero, and promote him to knight and give him an epic quest. And for the first books, he has two voices, formal and informal. Formal is used when he has to, informal is when he's only talking to his party.

So, how do you expand your vocabulary?

The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet's go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of Eng

If that fails, try here.

The world's leading online dictionary: English definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more. A trusted autho

Every time you see or hear a word you don't understand, look it up.

weatherman667

Part XXVI - In the Grim Darkness of the far past/future/present/if-world, there is only WAR

AKA: Your fantasy story has a big battle.

weatherman667

Part XXVII - Standard Hero Reward

So, the hero, either a young, callow youth, or an OP isekaied Hikkiomori, has defeated the evil ancient horror foreigner.

So, what happens?

Well, the king offers his daughter's hand in marriage. It's so old, it's cliché, right?

Except it's not just a really great idea, it's what happens.

You see, contrary to popular and French belief, the entirety of the nobility, from squire to king to emperor, were part of the martial class. The reason why a king was crowned in the first place is usually that he fought off an invasion, and the most important job of a king is protection of his realm. This is to the point that King Richard was considered a good king, despite rarely spending time there. This is because he was fighting our enemies away from home, which greatly benefits the economy through the war and trade, but also prevents your kingdom from being razed in conflict. War is inevitable, and it's better if it happens far from home.

If you have someone with this kind of ability, you want him working for you. The easiest way is to tempt him with a princess, or some border real estate.

William "the Marshal" Marshal was the third son of a minor noble that had no lands or future. As a kid, he was ransomed, and his father left him to die. He survived by proving how great he was to his captors. He started winning tournaments, and got marriage proposals from across Europe.

Now, don't think the girls objected. Girls, because most women got married 16-18. Seriously, the giga-chad chevalier riding up on an expensive horse wearing fine clothes and more educated than anyone other than monks, (who can't get married).

Now, the real question, does the hero want to marry the princess? Or the Dwarven valkyrie/amazon he met along the way. Or the priestess that healed him. Or, have you seen the Elf? I mean, you don't have to be a straight man to appreciate that. Straight men, gay men, gay women, straight women all want to bang the Elf babe.

weatherman667

Part XXVIII - What was Aragorn's Tax Policy

An attempted gotcha from Grr Martin to J.R.R Tolkien. This ignores the extreme detail Tolkien put into his writing, but also the extreme detail we have about medieval England. After the Norman invasion, the first thing William the bastard/conquerer/first did was write a colossal tax document called the Domesday Book, (literally Doomsday book). Since most lords were Anglo-Saxon, with about thousand Normans in charge, he needed a judiciary that was responsible to the crown, and not local lords.

First off, most people did NOT pay taxes. They paid rent. Rent was paid to the lord. Tax was paid by the lord to the crown. One of the things Magna Carta did was give Parliament control of taxes, and the people that paid taxes was Parliament. This is why the English Parliament was so much more effective than equivalents from other countries, most of which in theory had something similar. Parliament voted to tax themselves and what this tax money was used for.

Lords paid the king with taxes and military service, and exchange got control of their land. Lords required payment or service from those underneath them.

If you were a serf, you had required man-days of work per week, but if you had sons or brothers, you could share the work. The number of days depended entirely upon the place, time, and season. There is obviously more work to do around planting and harvest, but the average is 3 man-days.

In exchange you got your own strip of land, one chain, (22yrds), by one furlong (220yrds) = one acre, military protection from the lord, and guaranteed minimal food supply.

When it comes to the work, it depends on the season. During planting and harvest, you would be planting and harvesting the lord's fields. Other times out of year, whatever work the lord wants. If the lord was building something, he would hire a few skilled stonemasons, and all of the brute labour would be provided by the serfs. Your job is to carry rocks from point a to point b, work stone under the auspices of an artisan, putty and place stone under the auspices of an artisan, etc.

Your job was also to show up for military service when the lord wants. He'll give you a pointy stick, show you which banner to follow, and off to battle you go.

Later in England, they came up with the idea that you could give more land to the better farmers, and instead of getting work from them you can just take more grain. Farmers might get rich enough to have money, and just pay their tax with money.

England actually has cases of freemen becoming serfs in exchange for better farmland, along with plenty of legal challenges of peasants arguing they should be free.

If you weren't a serf, but survived off the land, you were probably a yeoman, whom was basically freeborn land-owners. They still had to pay rent, but were exempt from all of the requirements, even military service. This doesn't mean they didn't fight, just that they had to be paid. Filling a role similar to regular military, long before the New Model Army. To this day, the guards in the Tower of London are known as the Yeoman Warders of the Tower, (AKA the Beefeaters; why Beefeaters? Because fuck the French. Not joking.). Yeomen were free, and could therefore go wherever they wanted, and were normally trained a lot better than serfs, and as such could command a better wage.

If you were the son of an artisan, you would probably become an artisan yourself. Or if you can get an apprenticeship.

Now, if you were a serf, but did well when attached to an artisan, the artisan might want to take you as an apprentice. Now, the people who teach history teach that the lords were all evil villains hellbent on oppressing the people. Instead, a lord that managed his land well would benefit, and well rested and well fed workers are more productive. A lord could look at this, and just agree to it for no other treason than you need artisans. Artisans also pay rent with money, and were typically more lucrative than serfs.

Or you could escape to a city, (Ville). After 2 years of living in a city, you would be free. Now, if you don't have gainful employment, and you are living in a city... how are you earning a living? Perhaps by being a Villain? Anyways, cities would normally require you to pay to enter, and so were incredibly lucrative to lords. If you have more merchants, you might attract more artisans, which might even cause someone to found an academy. It's not just prestigious, but everyone in the city has to pay rent to the lord. For most buildings it was based off frontage. This lead to long, narrow lots, to minimize frontage. But, if you are in a city, you are walking everywhere, and short frontages mean less walking. Of course, cities required more infrastructure and management, so a good portion of these rents would have to go towards it.

All of a lord's lands were evaluated. You have this many serfs working this much land. Your woods can forage this many swine. You have this many artisans, all of which would present taxable income. Parliament would then vote on what percentage of their taxable income lords would have to pay.

But, depending one what kind of political system, areas might pay taxes based off what they produce. In fact, cities would require a fee for a merchant to enter, but a percent of their merchandize was a perfectly good alternative.

The Roman Empire had the cursus honorum, which was a series of positions that Romans nobles would go through. Every time they do well, they make themselves available for the next one. So, in this system, every noble represents themselves, their family, tribe, and all of Rome, at the same time. The nobles would select the best of themselves for positions. This was vulnerable to intrigue, corruption, and the nobles were not dependant upon their own lands, but it was also flexible enough, as every noble with a position of honour started out in the military.

The Chinese Empire had a meritocratic bureaucrat class. The class was meritocratic, but also not at all tied to the consequences of their own actions. Bureaucracies are also vulnerable to capture, as there is no way to remove the bureaucracy once it's created. But, the other side is that entry into the class was dependent entirely upon passing a test.

The big advantage the feudal system provided, however, was resilience. It didn't matter what happened at the higher levels, because every individual fief was economically and politically independent.

So, Aragorn's tax policy was to not take too much, to allow the people to prosper, but not take too little to maintain the stability of his kingdom.

weatherman667

Part XXIX - When in doubt, add a Tarakian

In 1981, they released a movie that was part of a forgotten genre. The only other one who even attempted to make movies like it was Ralph Bakshi.

The genre was sexy fantasy, and the movie was Heavy Metal. The movie is a series of vignettes, centred around the Loc-Nar, a green orb that was essentially the incarnation of ultimate evil. All of the scenes are great, from art to framing, to voice acting.

The final one has Taarna. Taarna discovers she's a Tarakian.

What's a Tarakian? We've never told, nor do we especially care. They were a race of warriors, maybe female warriors, with special powers that are never elaborated on, other than resisting the Loc-Nar. She enters a forgotten temple, strips down, puts on stripperific armour, (it does actually have armoured pieces), and kills evil mutants while riding something like a cross between birds and pterosaurs. The segment is so iconic, people are still making art of it, and all it was was a good protagonist killing evil mutants. There's blood and nudity, interesting environments, interesting characters... and minimal dialogue, no character development, and no attempt at world building.

But, this breaks all of the rules, doesn't it?

Ask Pixar. Pixar is the master of taking idiotic premises and turning them into fantastic stories. You don't need a good background or history. You don't need a devious plot, full of twists. You don't need pages of exposition. And you don't need Current Year. All you need is visceral storytelling. And if you do that, you can make your audience love a movie about a trash compactor falling in love with an iPod.

You see, before Star Wars, or Star Trek, or Dune, or the Big Three Science Fiction Authors, or even LOTR, we had John Carter. Everything from Superman to Green Orcs to Gor are derived, heavily, from John Carter of Mars.

On Barsoom, no one wears clothes. During the day, they walked around nude, ornamented with straps and jewelry. At night they wore furs and silks as blankets. As a book, they don't have to be riské, as very little detail is given to describe their nudity, other than the colour of their skin, and whether or not they had tusks.

Nowadays there has been a major process of de-sexifying speculative fiction. Why? Because winging Feminists.

There are plenty of times when nudity is called for in a story, especially a story not set in the modern and full world. We have not evolved passed the need for visceral combat, soldiers still wield bayonets, which are still effective in disciplined armies, we are still sexually attracted to each other.

For Barsoom, they are an average of 1.5 AU, i.e. they are 50% further away from the sun. Assuming they had an ozone layer, they would not need clothing to protect them from the sun, and when in the sun, it would be hot enough that clothing would only hamper them. Edgar Rice Burrows did an exceptional amount of research when writing Barsoom. Of course, at the time, they didn't know how bad dust would be on Mars.

Do your characters need to be fully dressed?

Is it practical? Meaning that Elves and Dwarves might not need to dress as heavily to survive.

Is it social? Because a lot of cultures did not have a nudity taboo until Europeans showed up.

But what about armour?

Can your character get armour? Armour is expensive, and requires skilled artisans and intact supply chains.

Does armour exist? We go through periods where armour is good enough to deflect weapons, but then weapons are improved to penetrate armour, making armour useless again. And if you are telling a historic story, the culture might not have had any armour other than a shield, and maybe not even that.

Is the armour practical. A full panoply takes a lot of time, and assistance to don. Tournament armour got so heavy that knights had trouble walking if they were unhorsed. Armour can be heavy enough to cause overheating.

In the modern day, most soldiers don't wear that much armour, if any. They wear clothing to protect them from the elements, and IR radiation, but if the enemy doesn't have modern day night vision, that last part of kind of pointless.

Historically, most people had to work. Maybe the upper/warrior class had the option of getting fat, but that was usually solved with fat shaming. People were fit, ergo sexy. The Greeks added sexiness as a sign of being chosen by the gods.

As for blood and guts, if you actually slash someone with a sword, you are going to cut out chunks of flesh, rupture organs, or maybe expose them. If the sword is heavy enough, or hits in the right spots, it will lead to dismemberment.

I had a coworker that loved horror. I hate horror, because it focuses on the inability of the main characters, but he - could not - understand that I had no problem with meaningful gore. I don't want to watch people being tortured, but if they are fighting, then yes, there should be violence and bloodshed.

Despite Current Year, none of these elements have lost relevance.

weatherman667

Part XX - Easily Conquered Planet

This one is more about Science Fiction than Fantasy, but the only difference between the two is the justification for why you can go between worlds. This is how we get 40k be one of the hardest science fiction setting not despite having space magic, but BECAUSE it has space magic.

20/30 years ago, legitimate science fiction authors started using Speculative Fiction. The main reason most people don't know the term, and instead use Science Fantasy is that the writing industry completely destroyed legitimate speculative fiction. It was on purpose, part of the "long march through the institutions".

The legitimate authors, before they were unpersoned, started using "sci-fi" as short for Scum-Frum, as in Scum From Hollywood.

So, you are watching a Sci-Fi (Scum-Frum Hollywood movie), and there is a battle. And I do mean, literally, one battle. One short battle, and all of a sudden the planet changes hands. It's fun when it happens, but you go to your fridge afterwards, and it seems hollow. How does that make sense? This isn't bad because the premise is bad, but because Hollywood is.

In pretty much every way. But let's focus on writing and storytelling.

BattleTech is the most obvious example. The main characters all have 40ft killing machines, and if you don't have one, there is not much you can really do about it. Even further, the ones with 40ft killing machines fighting over your planet only really care about the capital, space elevator, and hyperspace transceiver. The rest of the planet they really don't care that much about.

That's all pretty fantastical, but what about if you DON'T have Battle Mechs?

During the Middle Ages, there was a tradition of riding the colours in front of the troops, so the troops know what flag they were fighting for. Because most of them were peasant levies given a pointy stick, and taught how to point it in roughly the same direction as everyone else. Note: This is quite effective.

This is all about morale. If soldiers do not have a common cause, an esprit de corps, they really don't care. If you don't have Churchill, "We will fight them on the beaches", you'll have Neville Chamberlain.

For the record, Neville Chamberlain:

10: Germany invades a country.

20: Neville Chamberlain: I'm sure this is the last one.

30: Goto 10

And this one of the big problems with the potential civil war in the US. The Blues control a lot of big cities, and assume that they would obviously win. The Reds control wilderness and rednecks.

Army bases are often put where land is cheap, (red areas), and soldiers are typically from low-density areas, (red areas). You also need supply lines, (red), farmland (red), mining (red), land to maneuver (red), etc.

All the Red side would have to do to win is park a bunch of 18 wheelers on the highways into and out of major cities, and the cities would starve. For the Blues to win they would have to conquer every Appalachian Holler, nevermind Alaskaman or Floridaman territory.

To misquote General Tojo, the reason Japan did not attack the Continental US was because "There would be a gun behind every blade of grass."

And 99% of those blades of grass are in red areas. Blue areas make self-defence a crime.

This is what I referred to in a previous post as a Martial Tradition. You have civilians that willing maintain the training and capabilities of a warrior, so when the call comes, they are already trained. If you don't have that, and the government gets taken over, then most people just wait to see how the tax policies would change.

By the time of Henry VII, there was a tradition whereby the king would pick a region of the country every year to visit. Because if he didn't, he would probably never see the region, and the people there would never see him. Magna Carta stipulates the the king call Parliament at least once every 10 years. Because some kings thought that it wasn't needed that often.

With the modern world, everyone has a cellphone that they are addicted to, and everyone films everything. If people had proper cellphone discipline, and weren't posting every facet of their life online for clicks, we would have to rely on news. And this was what it was like 30 years ago. 40 or 50 you had the daily news paper. Before that you had the Royal Mail, and before the 1940's you had to visit the post office and ask them if they had any letters for you.

The reason why the British Empire conquered the Zulus was that the British Crown was against it. The local governor wrote a letter telling the crown what he intended to do, knowing it would be 6 months before he got a response. That's how the British got South Africa.

They conquered the Dutch because of legitimate issues between brothers. You might love your brother, but every once in a while you might have to go out back and have a go.

So, in a fantasy world, let's assume the OP isekai protagonist used the lost spell Gate to get into the capital, and beat up the guards. He has his sword pointed at the king's neck and demands... an apology.

For anyone that thinks this is silly, this is 75% accurate for Shield Hero.

The king not understanding modern context would abdicate the throne, and the isekai hero is now king.

If this world does not have long distance magic communication, then it might be MONTHS before individual lords find out what happened. It depends on how organized the massager relay system is, how much infighting there is between local lords or governors, how safe the roads are, etc.

The reason feudalism works so well is that most parts of the country can survive in almost complete isolation for centuries without easy access.

Let's take a modern example. Aliens arrive, and invade Germany. Germany has a good military for it's size, but the aliens have space-based death rays. Germany gets conquered. The US has a long tradition of shouting FREEDOM with a bullhorn, but Germany is very rules following. The government signs a surrender agreement. As long as the aliens seem as rules-following as the Germans, you're probably not going to get a giant civilian uprising. Right away. Until they find out about To Serve Man.

The American love of freedom is, historically, the barest of exceptions. The 0.0000001% of history. It is the product of moral philosophy and debates going back 5,000 years, and massive technology progress, to the point that the idea of independence is even plausible.

TL;DR: For most of history, banishment was considered slightly less than execution. You live a society, and you really don't have much of a choice in which society you get to live in. And even in a modern or futuristic society, if the king gets toppled, it doesn't mean most civilians are going to become revolutionaries to stop you. Instability is a different story.

weatherman667

Part XXI - Hobbitposting

Hobbits are known for two main things:

Eatings a lot.

Living underground.

Eating Like a Hobbit

Hobbit Meals:

Breakfast

2nd Breakfast

Elevensies

Luncheon

Tea

Dinner

Supper

And none of them are invented, though most people didn't have all of them. Most are not full meals. Truthfully, only Dinner was a true, full meal.

Until the industrial age, we did not have an easy source of calories. Calories being the biggest requirement during a day, with Victorian journeyman bakers requiring and estimated 5,000 Calories / day. Most of these came from two sources, the easiest grain to get access to, and the easiest fat to get access to. In Northern Europe, the fat was butter, while around the Mediterranean, it was olive oil. For grain, pretty much every culture that encountered wheat tried to make that their goal, but barley, rye, and oats grow much more easily in Northern Europe.

I am not exaggerating when I say whole societies try to rebuild themselves upon the introduction of wheat. From India and Far East, rice was the most common grain. And for the most part, grain was served whole. More refined grains were more expensive, and therefore the purview of the upper classes.

For rye bread, the estimate is you would need 45-46 slices to produce 2,500 Calories, which was half of the needed energy for heavy labourers. For butter, that would be about 3/4 of a lbs.

A DAY.

Obviously, you can get calories from other sources, like meat and fruit, but both were sporadic in the pre-modern diet. Fruit is entirely seasonal, and meat depends on the availability in the culture.

So, if you were a heavy labourer, sitting down to eat bread and butter every hour or two would be absolutely necessary. And yes, this could come in the form of pastries, which is basically bread mixed with fat and/or milk and/or eggs.

And reminder that most of the food did not have the same calorie density of modern foods. So, even if you were not a heavy labourer, you would still need to eat more than we do in the modern day.

Unless you were a noble or merchant, that took pride in NOT having to eat breakfast, and had more access to fruits and meat.

Hobbithole

Contrary to popular portrayal in fantasy media, food doesn't grow underground. And before any of the BUTs and Whataboutery, on Terra, 99.999999% of life use energy from the sun. This is either directly through photosynthesis, or indirectly by eating something that does, or eating something that eats something that does. Even bats, moles, mushrooms, insects, etc. All of the energy comes from the sun. There has to be a vehicle that brings the energy into.

I.e. insects eat plant matter, bats eat the insects, bats hide in a cave overnight, and their shit is food for mushrooms.

There is extremely rare cases that grow from radiation or chemicals. So, it is possible to have an ecosystem based off magic.

Or have a species that can create / maintain a persistent daylight spell. Or have sentient fungi living off radiation. Or have some evil, occult energy permeating from the abyss. But, you need an energy source, and you need something that can live off of this energy to provide food for everything else. But, we also have the colossal squid. It's the heaviest squid, but requires an estimated 1 ounce of food per day. And it does so by having a ridiculously low metabolism. This is probably how the Sarlaac survives for thousands of years while barely eating.

The reason to live underground, however, is that underground has a stable temperature, year round. I think it's like 8 feet down. Once you get below it, the temperature stays pretty constant, until you get deep enough to find magma. This means you don't have to worry about inclement weather, like storms and blizzards and snowfall, etc.

The downside is that you can't produce food, and so will need to go to the surface to do that. As such, the game is a good shelter, and that's about it.

I.e. Hobbithole.

Or what I did with Dwarves in the Lion of Cynn, have them dig a mine into the side of a mountain, and have them turn a cliff face into something that looks like highrise, while maintain farms and grazing land outside the hold.

If they live more than an hour walk from the outside, they will need to find some sort of underground food supply.

weatherman667

Part XXII - Symbol of a Warrior

When you think of a warrior, what weapon do you see him carrying?

A sword? Sword were storied, ancestral weapons passed down from generation to generation. In Northern Europe, weapons had to earn their name, and most of the weapons that earned a name were swords.

So, the sword? The reason that swords were passed down as heirlooms is because of how expensive they are. Only a few countries issued swords to every soldier, and the bible tells you to sell the cloak off of your back to buy one.

How about the other common weapons? Axes? Spears? Maces?

The spear is a weapon you can spend a lifetime mastering, but also a weapon that you can train peasants to point in a single direction while standing close together really easily, and have a relatively effective force. They were also used for hunting, back to our earliest prehistoric days. We arguably had spears before we became Homo sapiens.

There was also an expansive list of weapons that are basically tying a sharp tool to a stick, to make a crude halberd. They were common, but not exactly celebrated.

While war axes did exist, they were by far the exception. Most axes were meant for wood. Still, hitting a human with a weapon designed to chop down a tree is bound to have a profound, life-altering affect. And shields were normally made out of wood.

There were a number of pseudo-axes, that were treated like cheap replacements for swords, but in all honesty, most soldiers would rather have swords.

Maces really weren't that common. Clubs and staves were, but would often not be classified with weapons, allowing everyone and everyone to carry them. Maces were quite specialized for one purpose, and if you could afford something so specialized most people would rather have a sword.

What are we left with, bows? English Longbows and Crossbows could penetrate late medieval heavy plate armour. Other cultures had equivalents of the English Longbow, and they were also ancestral heirlooms because of how complex they were to make. But in any case, archers were normally a separate category, as they are used completely different on the battlefield. And it was a specialized skill, even if not necessarily a noble one.

The answer is actually pretty simple and all too often forgotten.

The furtive pigmy shield.

Humans are basically glass cannons. To put this in context, NATO uses a 5.56mm round. So, a pebble 5 1/2 milimetres across and weighing about 4 grams is enough to kill you. A lot of it is energy, and a lot of it is that anything that penetrates our larger arteries could kill is in about 30 seconds. Holding out a plank of wood will stop the vast majority of sharp and pointy things from penetrating our more vulnerable areas. It was also only really useful for warfare. It also wasn't normally regulated, meaning most people could have one.

This is one of the things that HTTYD actually got right. TL;DR, the book was better. Anyways, one of the things that happens almost immediately in the first movie was the young heroes training, and being explicitly told that if you have to choose between your weapon and your shield, pick your shield. There was a wide variety of weapons you can use, and quite frankly, when fighting something with literal dragon scales, maces suddenly a lot more justified. But no shield, and you are dead.

Medieval knights literally started painting their shields with unique colours, and ironically, the painted shields lasted longer than knights using shields, as late medieval full plate made anything short of an English Longbow worthless.

The sword is the symbol of the knight, even if it more of a backup weapons, as only knights could really afford swords, and even when out of armour, would carry some sort of sword.

The knife / dagger is the symbol of the soldier, as it doesn't matter what else they were carrying, they had a knife or dagger.

For warriors, their symbol was the shield. For a warrior without his shield is either dead on the battle, or a coward that cast it aside to flee. Which, ironically, turning your back on an enemy trying to kill you is not as good of an idea as cowards might imagine.

weatherman667

Part XXIII - Fantasy High School

In truth, this is one of my most hated fantasy tropes, not because it's bad. It's like Isekai. Isekai is an easy way to setup a viewpoint character in a fantasy world, and a way to justify their strength. Unfortunately, it's SO easy that it's easy for people to create an extremely lazy story.

Fantasy High School is the exact same. As none of the core elements require a fantasy world. I didn't want the fantasy show to deal with usual high school bullshit. I didn't even like that when I was in high school.

But, this said, we have had high schools for 1,500 years.

Before high schools, in any shape, they had academies. Academies were normally created by a founding scholar, and focused on whatever the scholar is particularly known for.

Some were made by a king or a city, and had official sanction, in which case they would try to attract as many scholars as they could reasonably support.

A college is a group of collegiates on a single subject. So, if you wanted to study astronomy - you would talk to an astronomer astrologer.

But, England was different from every other country, in that it has largely been contiguous for millennia. For most of Europe, they would be conquered, and now belong to the guy to the east instead of the west. What this meant is that they could have official institutions that last for that entire time. The earliest schools were cathedral schools, because the Church was the centre of learning for Europe, but royal patronage meant that the school in Canterbury developed a curriculum for the children of the king. This is the exact same thing that most nobles would want their children to learn. And ten it became common, and then EXPECTED for the children of nobles to attend school.

When did this happen?

...

The Early Modern Period. Which is when most medieval fantasy worlds are set. Seriously, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But, there is a way to have a fantasy school for the high school age without having such dedication to scholarship at a monarch level.

MAGIC

I mean, it is a fantasy world. Having a school to teach magic is not just useful at every level of a feudal or imperial system, but it's also important to teach your potential mages how not to fuck up fireball. This is pretty important. And this is why Mushoku Tensei did the fantastic thing of combining Grammar + Magic schools. In a specific kingdom that especially valued it. Every other kingdom sent their kids there, just like how European kingdoms would send their kids to Italy, to do the academy circuit there.

weatherman667

Part XXIV - Castles

Something that is misunderstood by everyone, even people that claim to be experts on castles.

Castles come from Roman Marching Castra. Every night, the legions would dig in. This was initially just a ditch, i.e. a moat. You move the spoil inwards and you get ramparts. This was enough to get a military advantage. When in a new area, the locals immediately have the advantage, and even so much as having a ditch and berm was enough to shift that in your favour. They had scouts that would find a good site BEFORE the legion marches, and the longer a legion stays in the same location, the more fortified it would become. This is because one of the main advantages the Roman Legions had was engineering.

Castles came later, but their designs started as Castra.

The basic layout of a castle is a curtain wall, moat, at least one bailey, preferably more. There would usually be a main tower, the keep, and the whole thing was designed to be defence in depth.

Castle are military staging bases, but when you have a lord in the area, they are probably going to have their family live in the most fortified part of the territory. Inside the castle you will have enough room to not only take in all of he surrounding peasants, but enough supplies to feed them, and enough weapons and soldiers to protect them.

Castles were as big as you have space to build, and money to build, and normally sited in defensible locations.

Now, this description is pretty vague, because it really depends on the site and how much money and other resources you are going to build it. You decide how many entrances you want, (the entrances are the most difficult to defend), build the wall, build the tower, and then fill in the rest. The most important parts of a castle:

Site

Moat

Walls

Keep

Well

Food Stores

Defence in Depth

Defenders

Everything is dependant upon the knowledge and resources available at the time. Which means that there were plenty of castles built out of wood. By the time Europeans got really good at castle design, they invented the cannon, and then we had to switch to the Star Fort. And this is something that really bothers me, how everyone judges a castle based off the absolute best castles ever designed. Or, in the case of Rohan, they used horses to protect themselves, and not castles.

weatherman667

Part XXV - Henry VIII is Early Modern

I keep saying that most fantasy fiction is Early Modern rather Medieval.

Trade had improved, cities had grown, cannons existed but did not yet dominate the battlefield. Tunics shorted, requiring cod pieces to fill in the gap, (literally). Universities existed, at least in a nascent form, with people travelling across the known world Europe to attend them. Tunics were the most colourful they had ever been.

But, the primary political system was still Feudal Monarchies. Armies were still growing larger, but knights still dominated the battlefield.

Well, except England, but England is Spiders Georg.

Henry is most well known for executing his wives, but:

He did not kill any of his wives.

They were tried in open court.

The two that were executed were found guilty of treason.

Sleeping around on the king is treason.

*modern shocked gasps*

But that's not good!

Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, was the winner of the Wars of the Roses, (think Game of Throne, except more dragons). Henry VIII saw attempted revolutions when he was a child, and it became abundantly clear that a lack of a clear heir would mean civil war, or England becoming an appendage of a foreign power. Which is exactly what happened.

A queen sleeping around on the king made all of their children potentially illegitimate. This - literally - caused the 100 years war. Which was only a hundred years ago from Henry's reign.

People treat Henry wanting a legitimate heir as evil patriarchy sexism misogyny, when he didn't want to restart the Wars of the Roses, or the Hundred Years War.

Henry VIII also developed blast furnaces. Blast furnaces allow you to cast iron. Iron cannons are 1/3 the cost of bronze, and now ships of the line could carry as many cannons as their buoyancy could support. In short, he created battleships, and bought cannons for his army. He had 12 45-pounders named after the 12 Apostles.

As a second son, he was raised to be ready to join the church. His older brother, Arthur, predeceased him. Arthur was married to Katherine of Aragon. Under Christianity at the time, this was considered incestuous. Rather than being a Levirate Marriage, which is explicitly supported and expected in the Bible. He needed special dispensation from the Pope, which arguably should not have been granted.

Henry VIII, the Oak Among Reeds in the Protestant Reformation, earned the title Defender of the Faith because of his treatise In Defence of the Seven Sacraments.

And pretty much any of these elements would be cool to see in an anime.

weatherman667

Part XXVVI - Witch Hunts

Almost didn't happen.

First of all, what are witches?

Witches believe you channel energy: Positive to help people, and Negative to hurt people. And witch culture focuses heavily on tolerating "a diversity of tactics".

The official Catholic view of witchcraft is that it's made up hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo. But, most witch trials were local.

The Spanish Inquisition came to the conclusion that witchcraft wasn't real, and put an end to witch trials.

There weren't actually laws against witchcraft, but there are laws against hurting people. The means witches used to hurt people was witchcraft.

Witches not only tried to curse Trump, they had it published in papers that they tried to curse Trump, and then complained in news papers that their attempts to curse Trump didn't work.

Most witch trials had the subject explicitly state they were a witch. The question is did the witch curse the person, which they would often openly admit to, and did the curse actually work?

Were witches tortured during witch trials? Yes, but so was everyone. The response to criminal accusations was often to torture the accused to see if he confesses.

What happened later was the Malleus Maleficarum. This was a treatise that recommended treating sorcery as heresy. It also called out the inquisition for using illegal means.

Heresy did result in being burned at the stake, but not burned alive. The convict was strangled first. The fire was just to make sure they was really dead. The Middle Ages had terrible medicine, and their primary means of telling if someone is dead was "fog a mirror".

This let to the fun practices of burying someone with a bell on a string. The only true ways they had to know if someone was dead was decapitation, burning the body, and leaving the body in your parlour for 2 weeks until it starts rotting.

Heresy was also voluntary, as in they always gave you a chance to renounce. The renunciation was what they actually wanted.

Did witch trials happens? Yes. Over about 400 years, across all of Europe, 40,000 - 60,000 people were executed.

The United Kingdom has 6,000 villages. Most people probably heard of a witch trial in their region in their lifetime.

But, what about the Salem witch trials?

This happened once, in Christian history, and most of the accusers were adolescent females.

There was also the "Witchfinder General". He was a man that self-declared himself the Witchfinder General, which was not an official position. Over 2 years he killed 300 women. He died, of presumed natural causes, while Parliament was talking about treating him like a mass murder. He was basically Spiders Georg for the witch burning statics in England.

The main reason why witch hunts are given so much emphasis is honestly anti-Christian propaganda, and for the sake of drama.

This allows the Sisters of Battle to gleefully take flamethrowers to heretics, because burning witches, am I right? 40k is also Spiders Georg, as they made the universe as horrifying as they possibly could. Giant space jellyfish used to eat suns, until they discovered that eternally torturing humans provides more energy. The Dark Eldar literally survive off of torture. A Psyker might accidentally open a portal to hell.

For the most part, Witch Hunter referred to men that hunted down magical monsters. Which was apparently more believable than actual curses. This is how we got Witchers, and in the case of RWBY, Huntsmen.

And again, Christianity was the one that brought universal morality. It brought the idea that all human lives have value.

Most societies had morality of "helps us" and "hurts us". So, their view of witches is "helps up" or "hurts us." They also didn't hold any specific value on human life, as such, there was no moral question about murdering someone you thought had cursed you. Who cares if you were wrong, because their life does not hold any intrinsic value.

And this is why the focus is more on Christianity, as they were morally conflicted about it. They tried to set reasonable guidelines, perform investigations. Not just randomly killing someone because of the accusation.

How you use it in the setting really depends on how common magic is, and the moral character of your society.

weatherman667

Part XXVII - Firekeepers + Soup

Firekeepers

Not something Dark Souls made up.

If you have flint, and metal, and know how to use it to make sparks, starting a fire is almost impossible.

If you don't have flint, it is impossible.

To make a fire you have to strike the flint so that the sparks land on tinder. This is Kindling the Flame. This flame is so weak that a light breeze can snuff it out, but you need wind to make it grow. Once the tinder is fully alight, you can use it to light dry wood. Once the dry wood is burning, you have a fire, and largely just need to add a log periodically to keep it going.

With the flint, tinder, and dry wood, it can take a couple of hours for a fire to really be going, and is highly dependant upon environmental conditions.

If you have a proper fireplace it's easier, but fireplaces are (early) modern. What most people had historically was a hearth. Which is basically a brick or stone platform that you build a fire upon. Usually with a lip, but a big rock works quite well. This holds some of the heat in it, making it good for cooking, and to relight a flame.

So, what did most cultures do? Spend a couple of hours relighting a flame every day, and hope nothing goes wrong? Absolutely not. The primary solution was to never let the fire go out. And for that job, you need a firekeeper.

Do they have to be women?

Historically, there was a much larger gender imbalance. You didn't have that many men, and so you would only use them for work that needs a man. Women are also better a low-level persistent work while men are better at higher level intermittent work.

TL;DR if it's not dangerous or requires great labour, you are not going to waste a man's labour on it. If you waste the labour of your men, you are going to die.

Firekeepers were so venerated that Rome's Vestal Virgins were simply firekeepers. They kept the fires in the hearth of Rome.

You can also have her be the cook, which brings me to my next topic.

Soup

The super food.

Most of the time it's used, super food just means some weird modern fad. Modern food is overly laden with cheap calories and salt, and if you don't have that, it's basically super food.

You need both micro nutrients, (vitamins and minerals), and macro nutrients, (protein and calories). Soup typically does not have the calories, which is why you pair it with bread and butter, but it has everything else.

To make soup, and when I say soup, I mean wife soup, you start with bones and/or a carcass. A carcass is just the body of an animal after you remove everything you can use off of it, (large meat sections, fat for tallow, skin, organs, blood, etc). You then put it in a pot.

And by pot, I mean pottery. Unless you're like really rich.

You then cover it with water, put a lid mostly on it, and leave it on the stove. Forever.

As long as you keep food over 60˚C, (140˚ Pagan), it will last, forever. We also didn't have good ovens. The temperature did not get that hot, and could vary, considerably. So, basically, everything was slow-cooked. This takes hours. As long as your firekeeper is not sleeping on the job, your fire will keep going. I'll usually do it over night.

Boil your bones into stock. Remove the bones. Add things.

Anything that is edible.

Even things that are not digestible, but are non-toxic can be used, as long as you plan to remove them later. The easier way to use them is during the stock phase.

Bone broth can have the same protein content as meat, and contrary to what vegantarians, (and food packages), tell you, there is no, (single), plant that you can build protein from. Humans need essential amino acids, and there is no plant that has all of them You can build everything else from the basic ingredients, but the essential amino acids are required to build protein. There are combinations of plants that provide all of them, but then you are getting a fraction of a fraction of the usable protein.

And all of the micronutrients are included in the vegetables you add to the broth.

Mushrooms are also a good source of protein, depending on how good your foraging is.

The difference between soup and stew is... thickness. It depends on how much water you add, and how much you thicken it with starch.

The reason why witches are also shown with cauldrons over the fire is because... they are single women. Of course they are going to have soup over the fire at all time. If they didn't, they would be dead.

......

I love Skeleton Knight, but they had a scene with a mother making breakfast for her kids, and then smothering the fire. Yes, that would put out the fire, which would be disastrous on it's own, but wood ash is where you get lye from, which was the primary detergent for most of Humans history, and is honestly better than anything else we've made since. Lye even has the same root as washing, (in Froggish).

weatherman667

Part XXVIII - RPG Stats and Women

None of the standard RPG stats give women parity with men, nevermind a bonus. The one exception is a rote Magic stat, but many RPG's try to redefine magic in terms of mundane stats, all of which favour men. This is because almost everything in an RPG focuses around the male sphere rather than the female sphere.

This is because of sexual dimorphism. Both of our sexes evolved to excel in different spheres. Men are biologically disposable, whereas a woman's fertility it universally required. Women will not be kicked out a society, except in EXTREME circumstances, whereas a man's ability to reproduce is very easily replaced.

Men evolved to take on the more physically dangerous and demanding roles, while women evolved to take on the more social, collective, local upkeep roles. "But, that's unfair." Well, yeah, because women were never meant to compete with men. If a woman encounters danger, her best chance or survival is to summon a man to protect her. As such, women have the superpower of summoning men to their aid.

They have Neoteny, the evolutionary trait of retaining childlike features through adulthood. They literally evolved to be cute, to make men want to protect them.

Strength

How had you can hit, along with your ability to physically lift, push, pull, climb, etc.

Women have, on average 50% of a man's upper body strength, and 75% of a man's lower body strength.

So, when you see a woman using a fighting style that focuses heavily on kicking, it's her using techniques that mitigate her deficiencies in strength and reach. Women's olympic weightlifting records are half of those of the men. The strongest woman is roughly on par with the average man.

Constitution

HP, stamina, shock resistance, trauma resistance. Men have higher stamina in every regard, from the sprinting Lactic Acid tolerance to the longer VO2 to higher muscle rebuilding to recover the next day.

Male bones are both more dense, and larger in diameter. Men have large and denser muscles. Male ligaments are large. Trauma that might cause a compound fracture in a woman might cause a hairline fracture in a man. As long as fracture are in position, the body will naturally repair. But fractures don't necessarily occur ACROSS the bone, and if it goes at an angle, you now have a spear in your body. So, even if a bone breaks, there's a much greater chance it can be easily set and allow the man recover.

When it comes to diseases, men are not just more resistance to every pathogen, women when pregnant naturally compromise their own immune system to prevent rejection of the fetus. Men can lose more blood while still functioning, while 1 week our of every 4, women need twice the iron of a man. If your apothecaries cannot correct this, then the women will be anemic, and her body will take much longer to recover, from everything.

Dexterity

This is an interesting stat, but Dexterity in RPG's is actually Agility. Power = ForceXVelocity, which means your ability to accelerate every part of your body is increased with power, which men excel at. For mobility, men have longer stride lengths, and more power. They are better able to resist the stress of crossing obstacles, and have the power and reach to overcome them. Reaction time and rapid threat assessment are also male traits.

What's annoying about this is that Dexterity is the one of the only traits women have an advantage over men in, but not in RPG terms. Dexterity is you ability to move your fingers and limbs in a nimble fashion. This includes spinning, sewing, and manipulating tiny humans without hurting them.

"But that's women's work".

Yes. Every piece of cloth, from rags to cloths to clothes to the sails of tallships were spun by women.

Can dexterity help women in combat.

Yes?

The advantages it could grant women would only apply at extremely high levels of skill, and a male that is equally skillful could use his own, more numerous advantages, like strength, reach, and bodymass.

There is one area where dexterity could really help in combat, Critical Strike. You hit a human in a critical artery, (heart, heart, heart, heart, neck, neck, neck, neck, crotch, crotch), with a half-decently sharp knife, and they will bleed out in 30secs. Humans are actually ridiculously easy to kill, if you know how to do it right, and/or have the appropriate tools.

What about bows? Women and bows are tropes right?

There are two sides to this.

On one hand, in every - single - regard, men are better with bows.

It doesn't matter how good you are with a bow, it matters if you hit hard enough to kill them.

While a woman with a bow would be weaker than a man with a bow, have lower range, less armour penetration, and lower ability to resist trauma, it does not take very many arrows to kill a human. As long as you can consistently hit the target at the appropriate range, and their targets aren't wearing arrow-proof armour, (this depends on the draw weight of the bow and the distance you are shooting), as long as you hit, even a single arrow can be debilitating. A single barbed arrow can completely take a soldier off the battlefield, and kill them if they don't get good medical treatment pretty quickly.

But that said, stronger bows means stronger stopping power. A man hitting you with a bow will cause more physical trauma than a woman. This will, as the name suggests, stop the target, and cause more damage from trauma.

So, a man with a 250lb Longbow will probably kill a woman in a single shot, but if they are at 25 yards, and she's quicker on the draw, she will hit him before he can let loose an aimed arrow.

A bow can nearly equalize a women's combat abilities, under certain conditions.

How about throwing, also a ranged weapon? Except for the male Human body is ridiculous good at throwing weapons, both in spacial awareness, and the ability to move their bodies in ways woman cannot to dramatically improve their power and precision.

If a woman has a spear thrower, which is a stick you can use for leverage when throwing, she can easily kill most men with a thrown spear.

Intelligence

Intelligence in an RPG is typically IQ. This is the kind of intelligence we can measure, and the kind that men also excel at. Rote mathematics, spacial orientation, and applied book learning. That said, the women that excel at this are much better than baseline men. But, if you make magic power and MP based off of intelligence, then women would not have the advantage.

Charisma

This depends on your definitions.

Women are naturally more likeable, to the point a women with below average initial reaction would have the same likability as the average man. Women also have the super power of entreating upon men, and everyone is willing to believe a woman is in danger.

But, if we take leadership and the ability to have a clear and powerful voice, then men take the advantage. And the ability to speak powerfully and clearly is how Charisma-based spellcasting works, and leadership is what often determines party size.

Wisdom

Lore, which depends upon societies, as various societies have had wise MEN and wise WOMEN.

Survival.

Foraging is female.

But hunting and surviving the elements is male. They are much better, in every way, at long distance navigation.

Cunning. Women have social cunning. Men have combat/hunting/survival cunning.

Conclusion

So, why am I talking about this? Pretty simple, these are natural traits that Humans instinctively understand, and if you ignore them, then you break the willing suspension of disbelief.

Now, the willing suspension of disbelief is, shockingly, willing. But the more deviations that you do, then the harder it is for the willingness to remain. And people will look at it and start laughing. It's basically a pain threshold, that when someone passes, they will go from love to disdain.

Am I saying not having women be core elements of your story? Absolutely not. Every story I've written has been a harem story, with most of them being battle harems.

The first way is the traditional way, make them the heart of the story. If you combine the male story of struggle and overcoming conflict, with the female story of I'm-good-enough, you get a male lead that does the actions in the story, and a female lead that is the emotional heart of the story. The best example of this is Princess Leia. There are three main characters in Star Wars: Luke, the young hero that goes on a hero's journey, Han, the loveable rogue that goes through the rebel with a heart of gold journey, and Leia, who's a diplomat. And the prequels quadrupled down on the importance of diplomacy, to the point that diplomats do more than space wizardry.

From the 1980's to the early oughts, this was THE standard for every - single - mainstream movie.

Another solution is to make magic a female thing. Again, if you don't use standard RPG stats, and make Magic it's own category, then women can excel at magic. So, make all of the women in the party spellcasters, boom, done. Or make some of them hybrids, like spellswords, so they can use their magic in the combat. It makes perfect sense that your fighter, barbarian, and ranger, to have a healer, mage, and spellsword with them. This is basically every Final Fantasy, ever. Give or take a monk or thief.

Add a divine blessing. RWBY does this with Aura. Many of the RPG-mechanics-verses do this with experience level mechanics. And by doing this, you provide a simple way for the audience to just accept it. Because she has levels in holy knight, and standard RPG stat growth is logarithmic.

Fourth, add a higher level female. Like, young hero, and skilled swordswoman. She would be his lancer, help train and guide him, but maybe doesn't have the charisma or destiny or explosive stat growth to be the hero.

For those that don't know what the lancer trope is, just think Han Solo. He's not the hero. He doesn't have the pedigree, or destiny, or prophesy, or space wizardry, but his experience and skill are invaluable throughout everything they do.

RWBY again, did this right. They had divine blessings, (Aura), gave the main quartette magic pedigrees and the power of plot. Then they added Jaune, (Ron Weasley), to explain how Aura does NOT work, and Pyrrha, (Hermione Granger), to explain how Aura does. And they made Pyrrha Achilles, who was so skillful that no one could land a hit on him. Funny enough, despite being the protagonist of the Iliad, Achilles was the Lancer to either Menelaus or Agamemnon, (depending upon your perspective).

We also have Valeria from Conan, that no one doubted could fight.

This is because the hero/protagonist is not directly competing with the lancer. The lancer is fighting the evil minions, who might have a much lower level of training. They aren't The Hero, or The Big Guy, but they might be better at crowd control.

Fifth, add different races, or in more mundane worlds, add different nations.

The Prime of His Youth starts with Jack Darby, mundane Human, and Arcee, Femme Cybertronian who's one of the most skilled warriors ever created. Then add Sirenia, a socially awkward non-combatant that pushes the main pair out into the outside world.

Feared Love stars Spike, a Dragon. I tried to do something else, but of course it ended up an epic Sparity romance. While none of the others can directly compete with him in shear power, Earth Ponies, Pegasi, Unicorns, Changelings, Crystal Ponies, Chthonic Ponies, and Winter Deer all offer completely different abilities, and completely contrasting personalities. None of them, other then maybe the Changelings, even have a remotely similar roles.

The Changelings all have different personalities, but they are personalities that support different ponies. Adding an aide is an absolutely incredible to get a character to open up without actually opening up. Think Alfred for Batman, or Mako for Conan:

"He is Simmerian, he don't cry, so I cry or him."

Before that, I had the Lion of Cynn:

Protagonist/Hero / Male Human Sageknight

Male Dwarf Dragoon / Merchant. His "I know someone" is a catch phrase, and the main way the plot of the first book made any sense.

Female Dwarf Nurse / Alchemist: Acts like a housewife. Marries the protagonist becoming his (head) housewife.

Female Gnome: Gnomes are good at connection, making them good at earth magic, communication, maintaining mechanical objects, and gardening.

Male and Female Elf: Elves use body magic. This allows them to heal, transform, and enhance their bodies, to the point they can use longbows far too strong for their scrawny frame.

Female Dwarf Valkyrie: They fight with wind and lightning. Female Dwarves are about as strong as Male Humans. Dwarves also consider swords to be girly. Male Dwarves use the word Mannish to basically mean girly, (from their perspective), and will stop using it on Men when they respect them. Despite the fact they are literally men.

None of them have powers or personalities that overlap. The Female Dwarf is as strong as the Male Man, and it makes perfect sense for her to be a frontline fighter, even without the lightning powers. The Elves use stealth and can annihilate large groups of enemies with their longbows. The Gnome and Dwarven nurse don't need to fight to be useful.

But what if you want to make the protagonist female?

Make her skillful and witty, like Lara Croft? Guns are a great equalizer for women. We love video games that give us bigger and bigger guns, but most modern militaries used bullets that are "good enough", i.e. much weaker than they used to be.

Go the RWBY route, and give Ruby divine protection, a hero's pedigree, thematic powers, plot powers, magic, and OP laser eyes. She's also adorkable, and either braces her rifle by stabbing it into the ground, or just uses it's recoil to help her super hero flight.

Taarna, that has the power of? Something. We are definitely told she has the power of - something.

Samus Aran that is genetically engineered and has powered armoured. if there was a male in her position, he would be even stronger, but, luckily for the universe, there isn't. One Samus blows up more than enough planets as it is.

EVE, 2B, and The Major are super duper super cyborgs.

KOS-MOS is a robot with the power of God.

Shion has the power of Clarke's Third Law. They literally call it ETHER / Especially THEory of Rudimentary. Well, that, and Jujitsu.

Mass Effect has "engineers" throwing fireballs. And despite being a world that actually gives you an appropriate amount ammunition, (1,000 rounds), the battles are never actually long enough that a man's stamina would make much of a difference. And it is light enough to not really affect carriage.

weatherman667

Part XXIIX - Char (everything), Wax (everything), and Firearms

Let's say you want a standard fantasy world, except WITH FIREARMS.

Well, good news:

Most fantasy worlds are early modern, not medieval.

They had firearms in the middle ages.

Now, you might ask, if they had firearms in the middle ages, why didn't they just completely dominate warfare? And the simple answer is that the US had not been invented yet.

This sounds like a joke, but it's not. It sounds like glazing the Yankee-doodles, and I'm not, as I'm trying to use Yankee-Doodle as an insult. The problem is that Americans cannot take an insult.

Anyways, the US had a wide open continent. Not only did their constitution gave everyone the right to bear arms, they had a vast continent that was almost impossible to protect in any way other than giving everyone firearms.

Canada did not have the US constitution to protect us, but until 1970's there was no regulation on firearms, other than concealable ones.

But, the US was the land of dreamers. They had access to the entire world's intellectual capital, and without exaggeration, we can credit them with the creation of modern firearms.

John Browning, Samuel Colt, Hiram Maxim, and Richard Gatling.

Samuel Colt was the first to make interchangeable parts. Before him, every firearm was created bespoke. The parts were only designed to work in the firearm they were made for. This meant that if anything happened to your firearm, you needed a gunsmith to fix it. It also meant mass production was impossible. With interchangeable parts, firearms could be mass produced, which makes them perfect for armies.

John Browning is the father of 95% of pistols in the world, along with pretty much every repeating firearm in the world.

Richard Gatling made the first weapon to fill the machine gun role.

Hiram Maxim made the first machine gun. When the British decommissioned the Maxim gun, they decided to fire it, continuously, for several days. The soldiers worked in shifts, and did normal combat maintenance, barrel changes, water refills, and of course, firing in controlled bursts, (because they aren't American barbarians). And the weapons never failed. the biggest problem with the Maxim gun is that it could not be turned into a light machine gun, (useable by a single soldier).

In the middle ages, hand-held firearms started with the hand gonne. It was a gun designed to be carried. Basically, a small cannon, before cannons were invented. The primary way of firing early firearms was with a torch and maybe wick.

A wick is a piece of string with wax or oil. You light it, and it burns, and when it hits the flash pan, the power starts to burn. This burn moves into the chambre, detonating the powder there and firing the weapon.

They then created the Match Lock. You had a burning match that attached to a spring. When you pull the trigger, it falls into the flashpan. This makes it much easier to aim properly.

The matchlock was replaced with a flintlock. The flint strikes, creating sparks that fall into the flash pan.

Until rifles were invented, accuracy was measured in "can you hit the front line of an enemy army". You had entire regiments firing at a target the size of the barn.

Rifles added rifle grooves. This spins the projectile, and accidentally removes the windage, in this context, the distance between the ball and the muzzle wall. The spin imparts moment of inertia, which makes it travel in a much straighter path. The problem is that it's a lot harder to load and clean. If the weapon isn't clean, it could still have burning embers inside, and when you try to load it, the powder will detonate immediately. A good musketeer can fire 2 rounds a minute, and rifles much less. It took a single American general to completely rewrite the rules of warfare to make them useful.

Firearms were incredibly vulnerable to rain. Archers were also vulnerable, but temporarily, but if black powder gets wet, it's essentially useless. Water is also the antidote to fire, which you need to fire firearms.

So, no accuracy?, Wicked Witch of the West vulnerability to water, low firerate. Why the hell would anyone use them?

Archers take years, if not generations to produce. Crossbows were similar in capabilities, but much larger and more unwieldy.

Peasants could be trained to use firearms in a couple of hours or weeks, nevermind the years usually required to train a soldier. It's up there with the pointy stick in it's ability to be used with little training.

Firearms are also good to mass produce with industrial production. Once Henry VIII created Blast Furnaces, you could cast them.

Firearms didn't get even half-decent, (compared to modern firearms), until the case was created. The case is made from stamped brass. You put a bullet in the open end, and a primer in the base. The primer fires when struck with a hammer. Mass production of brass is incredibly new, but the Romans had it for accents, and it may or may not be Orichalcum.

So, in a fantasy world, you need a culture high in technology, specifically metallurgy and alchemy, (chemistry). They need a strong connect to the stone, fire, and the forge.

Dwarves. You want Dwarves. Which is why most fantasy worlds make Dwarves the firearm users. Does it has to be Dwarves?

It's your fantasy world, it's your choice.

That said, I will judge you for it.

Char/Wax/Oil Everything

I talked about how almost impossible it was to start a fire. I was - slightly - exaggerating.

You see, in the middle ages, the average person didn't have any real schooling, or especially good nutrition, but they weren't stupid. Once someone figured out how to do things, they... did it. This is one of the most important parts of tradition.

To make coal, you take anything organic, and cook it in an airless kiln. Early kilns were often just mounds of dirt. All you need is to separate the fire from the material you are charring. What this does is reduce the material down to base carbon. Back in the day, Charcoal was simply called Coal, until we started digging up Coal in mass quantities. The reason you do this is that it burns easily and consistently. If you are starting a fire, you will probably have char cloth or cord with you.

You still had to kindle the flame, by carefully blowing on it, but instead of starting from a spark or ember, you start from something that is burning consistently.

You can soak pretty much anything organic in oil or wax, and you get... oil cloth or wax cloth.

Most peasants didn't have wax candles, as wax was expensive. Churches wanted to create giant crosses out of light. So, what did peasants use? Rush lights. You take the pith from rushes, and soak it in oil, (like rendered tallow), you stick in something to keep it upright, and you light the top end. It burns like a candle. Peasants would likely have wax cloth to use as saran wrap. It would get bad after a while, and then you just heat it over a flat surface, and it's good as new.

Archers would typically have an oil or wax bag to carry their bows in.

Torches are a stick with one end wrapped in oil cloth.

And, to this very day, wax and/or oil is used to maintain leather. And if you do it properly, your leather products will last for pretty much forever.

weatherman667

Part XXIX - Token Evil Teammate

While any story can have a token evil teammate, speculative fiction creates the option of ontologically evil beings.

A Human can be reformed. They can learn the value of life, the power of friendship, etc. An Orc will still be an Orc.

And before anyone says anything, Orcs are not meant to represent a race. The word itself is Britannic, and Tolkien used it to refer to how Men can fall to depravity in times of warfare. He created them after fighting the Germans, the Germans who had been the very centre of European civilization for over a thousand years.

The Orcs are an anti-civilizational force. They cannot be civilized. At best they can be beaten and repelled. They are the Mongol hordes. They are the Prussians killing their own daughters and raiding good Christian lands to replace them.

But, before we talk about civilizing Orcs, we need to discuss the D&D alignment system.

The vast, unyielding majority of people are neutral-neutral.

They follow the law for fear of consequences, but break it whenever they feel especially justified or spiteful.

A good priest can convince them to give to charity, while an evil priest can convince them that human sacrifice is a good idea.

Most classical heroes are also _______ Neutral. Nowadays, we think that heroes are all about moral character, but historically, it was guy fight well. Because everyone was fighting everyone, and if you lose, you either die, or became a slave, (maybe a castrated one). And beyond that, there was plenty of wild animals. Lions weren't restricted to Africa. Tigers were not restricted to Asia. Big wolves, (other than the iconic Dire Wolf), existed. Everyone had marsupials.

Walking from one city to another was incredibly dangerous, and most places didn't have cities.

If you wanted to survive, you needed to be strong. If you wanted to raise a family, you needed to be stronger. If you wanted to keep your territory so you can feed your family, you need to be even stronger.

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and so Spartans became wolves. Armies had to hang their own soldiers to stop them from looting and raping.

And, let's be honest, there is a lot of dubious if not outright evil morality by TTRPG players.

Good vs. Evil is pretty easy to understand, but Lawful vs. Chaotic is much harder.

Because a lot of people, (including late D&D itself), conflate evil with Chaotic Evil. For those that don't know, D&D 4th turned the Alignment Chart into a straight line, from Lawful Good - Good - Neutral - Evil - Chaotic Evil.

Chaotic Evil is the Orc, the anti-civilizational force.

Law is the civilization, and the rules and norms that hold the civilization together. Lawfulness is the belief that there is a set of rules that we are all bound to, regardless of the potential for punishment.

High trust, cohesive societies often don't need rules, because shame is enough to maintain their Lawful society.

Chaotic is the opposite belief. Either that I make my own rules, or that no one should be able to make rules. Basically, the Libertarian vs. Anarchist, both of which are Chaotic.

So, let's ask why the Chaotic Evil character is in the party being lead by a Lawful Good paladin?

Self-interest: The Orc is putting his own comfort aside, because he is getting something out of it, say revenge or loot, or something.

Token Heroic Orc: While the vast, vast majority of Orcs are anti-civilizational, pretty much every RPG allows the player to be special.

Slavery: The Orc was beaten, and is now a slave. He'd rather be fighting enemies than he would say, mine, or something.

Envionment: While the leader is a Paladin, they are far from home, and spend most of their time living outdoors and fighting. Two things the Orc is perfectly happy with.

Evil Virtues: Just because he's a Chaotic Evil Orc, doesn't mean he doesn't have virtues. Honour, loyalty, beauty, compassion, camaraderie, intelligence, cunning, etc. Okay, maybe the Orc doesn't have most of these, (a Drow might), but maybe the Orc believes that a Life means a Life. You saved/spared his life, and now he'll fight for you. He's still fighting, just not caring about WHO he's fighting, or WHY.

Love: Maybe the Orc doesn't care about anything other than how much they love the protagonist. This could be platonic or romantic.

It could be a wide variety of things, but you do need a reason for the party to not just break apart at the first sign of dispute. You need a common cause, a Commander Shepard, or just an aligned personal interest.

weatherman667

Part XXX - Monarchism

The Middle Ages was AFTER the Roman Imperial period. The start of the Middle Ages is generally considered to be 500 AD-ish. Heavily depending upon region. There had been 500 years since the last republic. The Enlightenment was largely fuelled by the rediscovery of the Classical philosophy. NO ONE knew what democracy was, or especially cared.

What did they care about? Food and safety. Most of the world was beset by rampaging barbarians. Even barbarian civilizations were constantly beset by rampaging barbarians. Basically, for all of Human history, everyone was fighting everyone. Being subservient to a great warrior in exchange for his protection was literally the most you could ask for.

While there's no proof of Prima Nocta in the Middle Ages, Gilgamesh practiced it. Prima Nocta is your lord having sex with your wife on your wedding night, before you do. Apparently, Uruk was safe enough that this was tolerable.

A bunch of Tribal Chief work together to fight off outlanders, and name the leader king.

Boom, Monarchy. The Tribal Chiefs pledge loyalty to the king, and the king works for the common defence. The concept of civil rights didn't really exist.

Rome was notable for it's 12 Tables, which was basically the city actually publishing it's laws, so the public knows what not to do. This was exceptionally rare.

Most people in the modern day see kings, and think it's obviously a bad idea. For the people at the time, it was the best idea they have ever seen. There was law, order, legal protections, food guarantees.

Democracy has proven itself to be, on the balance, slightly better than monarchy. We have teachers castrating your 5 year old, because he doesn't know what men and women are, and the state protects them. Property rights are being eroded, with your existence only continuing so long as it is tolerated by the state. Fertility is below replacement, and we have no desire to rectify the issues causing this. We are only making it worse. A lot worse. You can't even have festivals anymore without vehicle barricades, because of tolerance.

A king would at least TRY to keep the rapacious barbarians at bay.

But what about freedoms?

Canada debanked the Freedom Convoy for PARKING violations, (and honking; LET FREEDOM HONK). The EU is trying to fine Txitter because they allow... free speech. They allow people to have political opinions that are not sanctioned by the fascist eurocracy. After it turns out that the Biden Whitehouse was using it to censor people.

And modern people from Democracies cannot understand how motivating it is to be fighting for a king, to fight for something greater than themselves. The King represents the country, and the unity of the people under him.

Under Feudalism, the lord has duty to your upkeep, along with a direct interest in your survival, because you can't produce if you aren't alive.

Did they have the freedoms of the modern world? No, but no one did.

Did they have the lifestyle of the modern world? No, but no one did. The average barely above minimum wage worker has a lifestyle better than Emperors.

For most people, a good king, or even a slightly positive king, was the best they could hope for.

#how I write #fantasy #monarchy #monarchism

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