History vs. Fantasy: The Plight of the Gaming Medievalist

Readers, there is something that has been weighing heavily on my conscience for a long while now, and I think it's time I finally came clean:

*ahem*

Chainmail is just called mail!  Studded leather armor doesn't exist!  Longswords and greatswords are the same thing; what you call a longsword is actually an arming sword!

Whew, glad to get that off my chest.  Now let me explain...

As an avid tabletop fantasy RPG player and a bona fide medievalist, I often find myself torn between two worlds.  On the one hand, I know that the magical and imaginative world(s) of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are not - and should never be - accurate simulations of the medieval world that they imitate, if only for the fact that magic and dragons and orcs never existed.  On the other hand, I know that the key to good worldbuilding is to ground your world to some extent in reality, and for me the best way to do that is to use what I know of medieval history as a foundation to build upon.  Since I literally know more about medieval history than 99% of the population (even if I am toward the bottom of that 1%), I sometimes come across pieces of the game - be they rules, items, lore, or what-have-you - that strike me as, for lack of a better term, innacurate.  I sometimes find it difficult to take off my historian hat and put on my fantasy hat.  Can't I just mash them together into some sort of awesome new hat?

by DucttapeNinja at Instructables

This baby would have really helped me study for my Latin final

History is not fantasy, and fantasy is not history.  But that doesn't mean that the two are mutually exclusive.*  No one thinks the events of Game of Thrones are actual historical events (at least I hope they don't), yet it frequently becomes a point on which medievalists and the general public engage with each other about actual medieval history.  No spoilers, but toward the end of Season 5 of the show, an event happened which ignited much debate across the internet, including much discussion about whether the event in question was historically accurate.  This - again - despite the fact that Game of Thrones is a fictional story set in a fantasy world that no one believes is real.  Why?  Because actual medieval history informs Game of Thrones and - to a much greater extent - A Song of Ice and Fire, and that worldbuilding foundation makes George "Reading Rainbow" Martin's fictional world so much more compelling than, say, Generic Fantasy World 27B1X.  A Song of Ice and Fire is, at some level, a meditation on the nature of power, so it makes sense to set it in a world of feudal obligation where a ruler's ability to garner support is dependent on his personal relationships and his attempts to please his barons.  This sort of 'realistic' fantasy, set in a world that owes more to the Middle Ages than to Middle Earth, has really struck a chord with people, and as a fan of both fantasy and medieval history, I couldn't be happier.


A few weeks ago, in my piece on alignments, I talked about the importance of legacy to D&D. Essentially, I said that one of the reasons I support the sometimes-cumbersome (but, I argue, incredibly versatile) alignment system is because it has been a core part of D&D through the editions, to the point that it is one of the more recognizable parts of the game even to those who have never played it.  In my many efforts to combine my love of history with my love of fantasy roleplaying, I have been mindful of this idea of 'legacy'.   Sometimes the topic I am covering doesn't really touch on this legacy (as in my articles on tournaments and naval combat), so I can feel free to do whatever I see fit to incorporate historical accuracy into the rules.  My ongoing Fixing the Weapons Table series gets a little more complicated.  When I dealt with early gunpowder weapons, I knew that guns had been incorporated into D&D in a number of ways throughout the years, but these were always tertiary, optional rules.  There was nothing about them that screamed 'D&D legacy', so I felt no qualms about completely gutting and re-working them.  However, when I wrote that two-parter on polearms, I felt compelled to make some compromises.  My design guideline going into the project was to strike a balance between historical accuracy and D&D legacy.  That meant including types of polearms that existed in 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D even though many of them are considered by modern historical scholarship to be 19th century flights of fancy.  I mean, let's face it, a voulge-guisarme is just another name for a halberd.  When I posted those articles on polearms, my friend Jason (who is doing his PhD on polearms) told me, "Some of it was good."  Which, I guess, is the best I could have hoped for, given that I was intentionally perpetuating historical inaccuracies for the sake of D&D legacy.

For the most part, I am happy to spend my free time attempting to reconcile the game rules with my historical knowledge, but sometimes it starts to chafe.  I want that Game of Thrones-esque medieval grounding for my worldbuilding activities, and that legacy stuff can sometimes stand in my way.  "Why shouldn't I just throw it out and rebuild?" I ask myself, sipping from my dwarven beer-helmet.

So let's talk about chainmail, studded leather, and longswords.  Longsword-wielding fighters and studded-leather clad thieves are as much a part of D&D as cowardly kobolds and gelatinous cubes.  Heck, Chainmail was even the name of the medieval fantasy wargame that led directly to the original Dungeons & Dragons.  How dare I consider changing their names, or in some cases even negating their existence?  First of all, the longsword/arming sword thing I can live with.  No matter how many times I've felt compelled to change their names in one of my Fixing the Weapons Table articles, I've managed to resist because it's really just a cosmetic issue.  On the other hand, studded leather armor makes no sense!  Putting little metal studs on leather armor doesn't make it more protective.  If anything, it will just hurt more when you get smacked in the stud.

Today's medieval historians recognize that studded leather armor was just a 19th century misinterpretation of medieval illustrations of brigandine, a type of armor made up of hundreds of overlapping metal plates fastened to the inside of a cloth or leather jerkin by means of a series of rivets or studs.  In fact, as with pole-arms, D&D's ideas about armor drew a lot from those late-19th century 'flights of fancy' (or, to put it more charitably, 'missteps of historical reasoning').  I remember, as a child playing Baldur's Gate, having trouble figuring out how exactly studded leather, banded mail, and splint mail were supposed to work.  As it turns out, my childlike intuition was right!  Banded mail and splint mail, at least as Gary Gygax knew them, were another questionable 19th century contribution to the study of armor.  Well, splint mail (properly 'splint armor', because it isn't mail) did exist, but it was used almost exclusively for arm and leg armor, not full suits of armor.  Banded mail was probably just 19th century historians' way of explaining one of the ways medieval illustrators drew chainmail (*ahem* - 'mail'), and it seems every historian had a different theory about what it was and how it was made.  But younger me and 19th century historians weren't the only ones confused about how splint and banded mail worked - just check out the illustrations of them in the D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook and tell me the poor artists weren't having trouble figuring out what the heck they were supposed to be drawing.

3.5E Player's Handbook - Wizards of the Coast

And they turned out about as practical-looking

 as the attempts I made to draw them in junior high

Note that you won't see a single representation of banded or splint mail in any D&D book outside of the page where they first show them to you.  Of course, that's probably no coincidence, because I can't think of a single character of mine - or a character that I've played alongside or GMed for - who has worn banded or splint mail.  There's something about those armors that the subconscious intuitively knows is BS.  At some level, historical accuracy anchors a fantasy world to reality, making it more accessible.

While knowledge of the Middle Ages has progressed greatly since Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren wrote Chainmail in 1971, all these idiosyncrasies of 19th century scholarship, like banded mail and glaive-guisarmes, have been enshrined in D&D legacy.  I mean, if D&D hadn't popularized the concept of studded leather armor, it would now only be associated with an entirely different kind of dungeon.

Pulp Fiction - Miramax Films

+3 AC

So how do I reconcile my principle of staying true to 'legacy' with my need to make things historically accurate?  When I am designing new items and rules and things for d20 Despot, I will always try to balance legacy with historical accuracy.  But you can bet your ass I will also make optional rules that sacrifice legacy on the altar of historical accuracy.  That means that you, dear readers, can look forward in the near future to seeing the historically accurate armor table that I am designing for my campaign setting (for simplicity's sake, I'll call it Generic Fantasy World 27B1X).

All that legacy stuff is great.  In the context of D&D, I love studded leather armor.  I will never tell someone that they are wrong for using it in their game.  But if legacy ever stands between you and the game you want to run, kick it out the window.

-your historically accurate d20 despot

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*This arming sword cuts both ways.  As fantasy can be full of history, history can also be full of fantasy.  Take, for example, this passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle telling of the first recorded Viking raid in A.D. 793:

In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.

That's a historian (or what passed for a historian in the Middle Ages) talking about fire-breathing dragons.  And he is not alone.  Take a look at this painting, made in 1545, depicting the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold, a tournament held by King Henry XIII and King Francis I in 1520:

via Wikimedia

If you look in the upper left-hand corner, you'll see a dragon.

Why is there a dragon in this painting of an actual historical event?  Because, according to contemporary accounts of the tournament, there was a dragon there.  Was the dragon simply an imagined ill-omen, like the dragons of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?  Was it, as has been speculated, a misinterpreted firework (obviously created by some sort of Gandalf-level pyrotechnician and set off by a fool of a Took)?  I am of the opinion that it was some sort of decoration - just another level of pageantry added to an event already overflowing with pavilions designed to look like castles, actual golden tents, fake trees with silken leaves, and fountains of wine.  Prior to this, tournaments had been rife with fantastical imagery.  In the Late Middle Ages, knights liked to declare a type of tournament called a pas d'armes, where they would dress up like fictional characters from romantic literature and challenge each other to a joust, essentially becoming the first LARPers.

As it turns out, the desire to inject a little fantasy into real life is by no means a new thing.