Friday, April 27, 2012

What Rough Men Tell Us About AD&D's Implied World


One thing I am digging about writing the AD&D Domain Game series (now collected here under this label), is how fun and liberating playing the “D&D is Always Right” game can be. For those unfamiliar with the term that is instead of getting bent out of shape about how broken the seemingly wonky bits of classic D&D are that you embrace the notion that there may really be something there there.

Half the fun is in exploring the backward implications of those premises, so you'll forgive me as I digress a bit from the series focus.

Yesterday, we steered into some highly pregnant territory for that kind of exploration talking about the “monster” write-ups for normal humans in the Monster Manual. A number of readers riffed on what was up with all the bandit bands captained by name-level characters. 

(Before we go too far down this rabbit hole I will point that this extrapolation game can often stretch analogies too far, often simpler explanations exist for the real design motivators like “we should keep historical feudalism out of this so people can imaginatively own their campaigns more”.)

UWS kicked off that round stating that “you can look at bandits and brigands as mercenary armies without a liege lord, or between services.” Bomasticus follows it up by hypothesizing about why mercenaries are so scarce: “Strikes me now that most of the armed men out there are already "working" as the various Monster Manual vagrant tribes. Maybe the mercenaries who show up are survivors of tribal or civilized armies that have lost their name level leader.”

John Bell followed that up with some astute historical comparisons: “Early D&D has an implicit near post-apocalyptic setting. I always think of the two closest historical representations of the milieu it's trying to create as post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe (late 7th, early 8th century) and Northwestern Europe shortly after 1348.”

This exchange resonated strongly with my read of the domain-play pieces and what it says about the somewhat-anarchic, implied world of the AD&D hardbacks. Many others have explored the notion that most iterations—even the newer ones (“points of light” anyone?)--of D&D have some implied cataclysmic breakdown, but what interests me is the specific bit John ends on because that period marks the series of cataclysms that brought down the established routines of medieval feudalism.
The Funerary Monument of John Hawkwood
Taking one of the best and most accessible accounts of the upheaval of the 14th century, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, you start to see a world with some eerie parallels. You could spend hours talking through chapters of that book, but let's focus back on the mercenary/bandit question.

Take this section from mid-book, note how it all feels so easily translatable back into the AD&D domain game context:
“Outside Paris the breakdown of authority was reaching catastrophe. Its catalyst was the brigandage of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years. There were the Free Companies who write “sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after [the Battle of] Poitiers, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment...
Along with German mercenaries and Hainault adventurers, they gathered in groups of 20-50 around a captain...In the year after the truce they swelled, merged, organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. Seizing a castle, they would use it as a stronghold from which to exact tribute from every traveler and raid the countryside.
They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants' barns...As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.”
Throughout the rest of the book you find descriptions of Free Company leaders who almost to a man sound like the rootless name-level fighters rooting around the fringe of power we were discussing yesterday. Take the archetype, the marvelously named John Hawkwood, Captain of the infamous White Company, who rose from second son of a tanner to the man rich enough to immortalize himself in the art above.

Or Fra Monreale, a renegade Knight of St. John who “maintained a council, secretaries, accountants, camp judges and gallows” in his rough mercenary camp and who—undoubtedly emboldened by his massive accumulation of hit points—cockily waltzed into Rome alone only to be seized and tried. According to Tuchman, “he went to the block magnificently dressed in brown velvet embroidered in gold and had his own surgeon direct the ax of the executioner. Unrepentant he declared himself justified 'in carving his way with a sword through a false and miserable world.'”

Again it's highly doubtful that Gygax sat down and said “how can I subtly code in these great historical themes of the 14th century into the game?” But those themes, tropes and parallels did have their own distant mirrors in the pulp fantasy and historical wargaming influences that inspired the game.

Personally I like it because then it starts to weave it all into post (or pre) apocalyptic themes that can be stretched into any number of customizable campaign elements.

I had originally sat down to write this post with the tongue-in-cheek title “WTF Berserkers?” mostly because my MM reread had me scratching my head again about why the hell you had strange bands of anti-social Norse stand-ins tooling around the wilderness and first level of dungeons with such relative frequency. It still takes some creative spinning but in the above context you start to see it more. Maybe these are some of the former warriors who have succumbed into that pure blood frenzy, that terrible addiction of Tuchman's that truly have become “monsters”? See, wasn't that fun?

Now back to finishing that series, while I let you take a turn at the game.

36 comments:

  1. Excellent post Chris. I have always been fascinated by the Human entries in the Monster Manual (so much so that I volunteered to write them up for OSRIC). :)

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    1. I didn't know that you wrote those. I was just reading that this morning, much more succinctly put there in OSRIC.

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  2. The Tuchman book is an excellent inspiration, so is the 1849 era goldrush. Booze, whores, blood and fortunes gained and lost in hours.

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    1. Good point, the American West in general always make for good comparisons and influencing bits for D&D.

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    2. Yep, a medieval sort of "Deadwood" is the way I have seen the 'village' where players rest up between adventures ever since I laid eyes on that show.

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  3. This is pure genius. Now... How do the dervishes fit in?

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    1. "Dervishes WILL be led by a cleric of 10th, 11th or 12th level."

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    2. Bombasticus has the right of it (I think). Remember name-level PC clerics have followers that are such zealots that you don't even have to pay them. Maybe these are just the crazy dancing followers of all the Lawful clerics who couldn't afford (or like sleeping outside in tents) to build a stronghold?

      Or maybe they are the nomadic remnants of a breakdown of a pre-Fall, empire-wide Church? Or better the fanatical followers a la the Arab Conquest spreading the new faith of a prophet by their sword as they "wander"?

      The mind boggles.

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    3. Love it. Dancing manias. Signs and wonders. Sell what you own and follow. The Dore lithos from "History of the Crusades" -- http://www.danshort.com/crusade/

      Although to be fair the dervishes (and their high priest bosses) do have "strongholds." They just spend 95% of their time on crusade. I wonder if this is what name-level PC clerics were meant to be doing.

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    4. Hmm again maybe the strongholds are conquests by these band?

      Just realized that the Muslim-Byzantine wars fit exactly into the era John mention's first(7th-8th century). Neat.

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    5. It's very cool. Much more dynamic than either the endless "medieval" dream or the bombed-out Bakshi readings of our text.

      The lack of rules for a PC becoming a bandit/dervish chief is interesting. Unless you go the ranger lord route, you still need to buy a house to get the guys in the first place. Otherwise you'd have bandit tribes put together from scratch by especially charismatic 5th level fighters -- which BTB doesn't happen. To start a tribe you need to burn or conquer a castle. D&D just doesn't go the other way.

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    6. Isn't it though?

      In general where the rules are the weakest is with the "entry-level" domain game stuff. The ins and outs of owning a ship, running a caravan, leading a band of nomads, etc. I mean of course you can--and should--make your own up for your campaigns but it would be nice to have a wee bit more support for it.

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    7. There's a funny rule-by-right / rule-by-might tension in the rules, now you mention it. We all know hereditary rulers are rarely the toughest guy in the hex (midwestern anti-aristocratic impulse!), but that's presumably because the civilization makes it possible for a 3rd level fighter to command the loyalty of armies.

      But player characters in and of canton dirt have a much harder time of it as you note. You weren't born with the right to rule large units and definitely don't have the might. Your earned "might" becomes indistinguishable from old-world "right" at name level and then people naturally gravitate toward you. Free army! Tax revenue!

      Until then, you can buy a caravel off the equipment list or capture one used, but that doesn't make you a buccaneer prince capable of running 20-200 swashbucklers who muster like the Monster Manual. You can wander around with your friends, but only an 8th level fighter can build up even a 30-nomad band. And even if you clear the Moathouse in Hommlet and run it as your personal mansion, you don't get a free army. Even if that much mercenary talent was available, on that man-to-man level you'd run up against Charisma limits well before that point.

      For what it's worth, that 15- to 30-person warband seems to be the limit at which man-to-man starts bumping up on Chainmail scale anyway. Before name level, you're just a big adventuring party, whether you have a house and uniforms or not.

      But blah blah, BTB. Presumably a player-created variant could support "starter packs" of the various Rough Men types, and that would be an awesome way to do it.

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    8. I was being flippant about the dervishes. :D

      Although I hadn't thought of them as ecstatic pseudo-christians before. I always associate them with the Master of the Desert Nomads. I wonder how Black Arrow, Red Shield (whichever way round they are) would play out?

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  4. Yes Chris, I wrote the Men and all Humanoid monster entries for OSRIC back in the day. :) Even the Tribal Spell casters were mine.

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  5. There were the Free Companies who write “sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after [the Battle of] Poitiers, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment...

    Yeah, that's pretty much the plot of Flesh and Blood, 1985, starring Rutger Hauer. Not for the faint of heart or stomach (the raping and pillaging is explicit) but demonstrative of the scenario. Thinking on it and from memory, there's some similarity of Hauer's role here and in Blade Runner, though in Blade Runner he is much more sympathetic.

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    1. That movie is totally brutal, the rape scene early in the movie in particular. But some great landsknecht-themed stuff in there (and more than once I have based run-ins with mercenary landsknechts in the HC on characters from the movie.)

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    2. I've been trying to remember the name of that film for 5 years! Thank you!! (I had been mistakenly looking it up under Klaus Kinski)

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  6. When you consider that D&D was written because/for the Greyhawk campaign originally, and Greyhawk certainly suffered from war and lawlessness in full measure, it all fits.

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    1. Right and they even had a whole region given over to the anarchy of the Bandit Kingdoms (at least in the published version).

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  7. A cogent observation. It seems that almost all the historical eras that produced a lot of "adventures" came at times of the breakdown of old social structures (if not necessarily an acocalypse). I've read that the Anglo-Saxon bands that (maybe) invaded Britain arose as populations caused the old class system to fall apart. The musketeers can from largely de-landed nobiility as greater nobility cobbled up the domains of lesser. There were American mercenaries from the South in foreign wars after the Civil War. The ronin of the early Tokugawa Shogunate, etc.

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    1. I'm generally in agreement with this idea, and it's had a strong influence on how I design settings. My current S&W game is set in a fantastical version of the Americas circa the 1520's and focuses on the collapse of the native order and the imposition of a pseudo-European one.

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  8. For berserkers proper, may I recommend "unrealistically severe mass ergotism?"

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    1. In my campaign they're all warriors who are possessed by the Devil.

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    2. Mine are crazed, remnants of the Hyperboreans who haven't realized that the world has moved on in the last 5000 years.

      But I like Evan's too.

      Just reading about 14th cent. flagellants and thinking they could make for a berserker culture.

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    3. Just reading about 14th cent. flagellants and thinking they could make for a berserker culture.

      I might have to make a random table of "why are these berserkers berserk?"

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    4. Evan said, I might have to make a random table of "why are these berserkers berserk?"

      Have one of the reasons be, "Wizards of the Coast just announced another edition change!"

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    5. Berserkers and Dervishes are usually memestorm infected ideocults IMG.

      "Why all the nomadic loonies Chris?"
      "Various strains of nomadic loony disease."

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    6. The Berserkers of history were the followers of Odin who, it is written, were invincible in battle. This is not surprising, with Odin being the god of war and wisdom. It is said that they would fight the enemy and friends alike and even batter aside trees and rocks in their rage. The accounts say that they would leap through fire, swallow hot coals, and even that blades and iron could not hurt them. D&D doesn't really reflect this power, though, it would need to make them about 17+HD to do that (in my opinion).

      They were hugely problematic, history tells us, when the clans were not at war because they would challenge men to fight over property and wagers and even other warriors did not want to face them in battle. Some of them were said to be able to blunt swords merely by looking at them. Imagine the incredible hulk and you've got the mythic inpsiration for his raging power.

      Followers of the devil? That's Christian propaganda rearing its ugly head about our pagan pasts again. Such comments should be treated with the derisen they deserve.

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    7. I hardly think Evan is a Christian propagandist. I think it's important to distinguish between our imaginary worlds and the real one.

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  9. This is a really good setup, and I need to sit down and do a post about how all of these tie into my campaign setting, but I'm not sure yet where to start.

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    1. The funny thing is this all really only kinda-sorta fits with the setting logic of the Hill Cantons.

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  10. To start, two words:

    Robin Hood.

    The Robin Hood stories are certainly an influence on the game.

    And there is another, less obvious source - The Fremen of Dune - were certainly an influence in Blackmoor. And that matters because:

    Bandits, Nomads and Dervishes, are in D&D because they were first in Blackmoor. Read the FFC entries on each. They are the early drafts on which the D&D entries are based. There were of course no name level or Charisma restriction on gathering followers in Blackmoor - anybody with cash could raise an army - so that is why no rules are given for becoming a bandit chief in D&D. Bandit and Nomad "chiefs" - particularly in the Peshwah - were often contolled by players in Blackmoor.

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  11. Nice post. It validates my own encounter tables' rationale - though I went with only small groups of humans at lesser chance. Its a place of fear and chaos, where only adventurers and desperadoes dare to tread.

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  12. You can add Kham Krum (one of the war lords who help create Bulgaria) to that list. Truly an epic level bad ass, he eventually took the skull of a Byzantine Emperor as a drinking vessel.

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