As a novelist of the fantasy genre, as well as a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master, I often want to create a medieval European fantasy world. I seek to delve into its details and bring it to life. Not just as a backdrop for an adventure, but to create a fully realized simulation of reality. This book helps me do that, both in a novel and in a campaign setting for a tabletop roleplaying game.
This book lays out how to generate
manors, medieval towns, and keeps. It provides rules for creating settings at
the scale of kingdoms, villages, and everything in between; both generalized methods and more detailed methods. With a little bit of time and math, a novelist
or game master can work out how many people are in a given area, how many of them
are spellcasters, how much food they raise, how much land is under cultivation,
etc. That is useful, but this book is more than just a collection of generators.
It lays out, in general terms, how the
medieval system commonly known as "feudalism" works, both
historically and how things like D&D-style magic fit into such a system. It
gives a brief description of concepts like vassalage, land=power, the medieval
idea of "justice", and how non-modern systems of commodity exchange
function. Again, this is in general terms. The author mentions that there are many
variations of these customs and things changed over time, because the concept of "Medieval
Europe" encompasses over a dozen nations over a thousand or so
year period (the medieval idea of "nationhood" is also touched on).
When the author says this is a book for creating a medieval society that is not restricted to real life medieval history, that is a true statement. At no point does real life history influence a section, nor does a real life country stand as a substitute. What is present here are common structures, practices, customs etc. that can create the flavor of a generalized medieval European culture without adapting any particular country's history. The author even mentions which parts of medieval society would be influenced by modern ideas, such as gender equality, and advises the novelist/GM in question to consider the implications of such for their fictional country's history.
The book also has sections for building organizations.
Guilds, manor staff and armies are laid out in detail. There are tables for
generating them, such as how much to pay for a particular kind of soldier, and
how much food a given soldier of a given race needs to consume. There are
explanations of how guilds function, and certain rules used by historical
guilds to govern themselves. From the baker's guild to the royal court, this book provides novelists and game masters a template to work from, thus reducing their research and prep time.
Finally, spread throughout the chapters, are considerations about how magic as presented in D&D would influence a medieval world. For the most part, not much. Magic can be one more resource a lord can tax to add to their wealth or prepare for war. Wizards can be one more trade guild among many. Clerics possessing divine magic isn't going to stop them from getting into theological disputes with each other, nor from insisting to non-clerics that their god is the only one deserving of worship. Admittedly, that is kind-of depressing.
However, this is only for a low-magic setting. The author assumes a low magic setting, where even low-level spell casters are few in number, and the secrets of both Arcane magic and Divine magic are closely guarded and regulated secrets. The author admits this is to keep the scale of the societal alterations manageable.
In the book, the author states that a moderate or high-level magic setting would cause so many changes to the medieval European world that the scale of it becomes mind-boggling. Thus, it would be difficult to state in brief. Indeed, many of the considerations of the influence D&D style magic has on historical medieval Europe are short. They are limited to small scale instances like, "most building teams probably have at least one person who knows the Feather-Fall spell", or something like "any king who can manage it likely has an abjuration wizard in his bodyguard".
This is understandable. A full
consideration of the effects of D&D style magic on a historical medieval
Europe would be very long, like one volume per aspect of the society. Then
there's the possibility that the GM/novelist using this book doesn't use D&D-style
magic, which would then limit the book's usability. So, the author's desire to be small scale and general in the interest of staying concise is totally understandable.
Trickster Eric Novels gives an A+
Click here for my next book review: The Isolator - Realization of Absolute Solitude. manga volume 1
Click here for my previous book review: So I'm a Spider So What - light novel volume 5
Brian Wilkerson is a independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).
His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback.
No comments:
Post a Comment