I’ve run an awful lot of history-themed RPGs and written a few. It’s an area I love gaming in, both taken straight, and mixed with a dose of fantastic elements. Yet I would be doing the topic an injustice if I did not admit there are difficulties, both in subject matter and attitudes. So what are they, and how can you overcome them?
The focus here is Medieval Europe and the Ancient World, as that’s where I have the most experience. But much of what I say you can apply to other times and places.
Sexism
Big periods of history in many different places are undeniably patriarchal and grotesquely sexist. In Medieval Europe women were socially subordinate to their fathers and husbands. In much of Classical Greece they weren’t even regarded as citizens, even if well-off; even the words of the marriage ceremony were objectifying, and amounted to a father giving his daughter to her new husband in order to bear his children.
So does this restrict or exclude women from such a game as characters, or even players? Being forced to play a socially subordinate role seems far too restrictive. Yet even in the most restrictive periods of history there were remarkable and powerful women. Medieval England alone had Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Empress Matilda, and Julian of Norwich. In the Anarchy of Norman England, women on both sides led armies.
Ancient Greece included poets and philosophers who were women, and even war heroes, such as Hydna of Scione, a noted swimmer who swam beneath Persian ships to cut their moorings, and Queens Artemisia I and II of Caria, who both commanded Caria’s navy. Artemisia II was a noted strategist. According to Pliny the Elder, admittedly not the most reliable source, Artemisia II was also a noted botanist and medical scholar.
Even in the most restrictive times and places, women could be prominent, noted in their chosen field, and not restricted to “feminine” occupations. This applies in both social and action-adventure oriented games And not all periods restricted women nearly as much as Ancient Greece and Norman England.
In more chaotic periods of history where less is known, for example post-Roman western north Africa and Europe, and the period following the late bronze age collapse of societies in the eastern Mediterranean, it’s easy then to make sure women with agency are part of the game, as both player characters and supporting characters, and a deliberate decision not to do so. In times when the social order collapses, or when there is rebellion against an unfair social order, women play as prominent a role as men do, as suggested by people ranging from Boudicca to Rosa Parks.
If there are fantastic elements, things are also easier. Such things as magical gifts are just as likely to favour women as men, for example. Why would a woman with great magical power submit to being a second class citizen? Women’s education is a key ingredient in women’s emancipation – educated people are more aware of their oppression, and education and suffrage movements went hand in hand.
So everything’s rosy, right? There’s room for player characters with agency, and sexism isn’t a big deal for player characters. Certainly the player characters don’t have to exhibit sexism. But part of the fun might be confronting the sexism of society, for example in Good Society, a game inspired by Regency romance, or in Sagas of the Icelanders, which explores social roles in Iceland’s early history. This is something all players should actively agree they want before play.
The best way of course is to talk to players. Don’t confront those playing women with in-game sexist content unless they say they want to confront it. Without explicit consent, assume that it doesn’t come up. Use safety tools. And don’t assume women only want to play women, and men only want to play men. I’ve seen that done at conventions, although not recently, and it’s at best awkward, at worst grossly offensive.
One final point here, which should be obvious, but evidently isn’t: pregnancy and childbirth shouldn’t usually be a concern. Rape should absolutely not feature in any way, and it’s hard to say this strongly enough. For some reason both elements seem to come up all the time in RPGs with a prehistoric setting such as Würm and even more so in Land of Ice and Stone.
Ethnicity, Culture and Prejudice
Ethnic nationalism and modern notions of race are relatively late historical developments, which went hand in hand with colonialism and the 19th century European notion of the nation-state. For big periods of history they simply didn’t exist. Let us consider the Romans for example. They’re in many ways uncharming, forming an empire by conquest, and essentially industrialising the institution of slavery which was already endemic in the ancient world.
But the Roman Empire was multicultural, and in later history all constituent parts were equally Roman. Soldiers from across the Empire served far from home. Hence we have dynasties of Roman Emperors coming from parts of the Empire far from Rome itself – the Severan and Gordian dynasties from North Africa, and others from the Middle East. Being Roman wasn’t by then a race or ethnicity.
Soldiers were also stationed far from home. In the late Empire other groups moved and invaded from all directions. The Alani from Iran settled in Gaul and served later as Roman heavy cavalry. There are records of Syrian merchants and soldiers in Britain. Saint Maurice was a soldier from Egypt, and was a patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire and shown in Medieval iconography as dark skinned.
In post-Roman and by extension Arthurian Britain, not everyone would have been white. Assuming lack of diversity is itself at best ignorant and at worst racist.
Similarly, in Medieval Europe there were other cultures and people of colour; the blog People of Colour in Medieval Art History examines representations. There were trade connections, wars, and migrations of people looking for new opportunities. People travelled because of curiosity and intellectual interest; not every explorer in history came out of Europe; consider for example Ibn Battuta and Hasekura Tsunenaga.
In fiction, it’s popular to include a Saracen as one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. And there have always been vast multicultural melting pots, such as Alexandria and Byzantium. In such places, diversity is even more universal.
Now I’m not saying different ethnicities let alone cultures were common throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Nor am I saying there was no prejudice, some of which was ethnic in nature – consider for example at the absolutely diabolic attitudes towards and treatment of Jewish people in Medieval Europe, including massacres in London and York in the 12th century, and eventual expulsion from England, the 14th century Erfurt massacre, and an attitude of prejudice and blame in the time of the Black Death. There’s a tragically sizeable list.
But I am saying people of colour existed. There’s no reason to exclude people of colour as characters from historical games, or by extension fantasy games based on Medieval Europe.
On the same note as for sexism, of course you shouldn’t assume that a player character who does not look like those of the dominant culture wants to play a victim of prejudice. In many cases ethnic bigotry would itself by unhistorical. Prejudices will be towards cultures rather than ethnicities in the pre-Modern era.
By the time we’re in the age of European colonisation, this changes, but that’s a whole different topic.
Details, Details
There’s a story from UK convention circles involving someone facilitating Montsegur 1244. The opening line was essentially, “Do you know anything about that part of history? Great, now keep it to yourself.”
Nerdy pedants can be problem players and facilitators at historical games at conventions and other open spaces. They’re often nerdy over specific details I don’t personally care about – guns are typical.
Dealing with pedantry is one reason I sometimes like fantasy and mildly alternate history approaches. A historical RPG doesn’t have to be exact in all details. And yes, player characters can influence and alter “established” historical events. Personally though, I still want some feeling of authenticity. This means getting a few points across on the big picture, and a few specific details relevant to what’s going on.
For instance, I’m the coauthor of the upcoming Mythic Babylon, which is set in Babylon in the time of Hammurabi. There’s culturally appropriate magic and monsters. The big picture elements are a Bronze Age level of technology, city-states near the rivers raised on mounds with a few “great kingdoms” ruling a whole bunch of city-states each and vying for control, relatively barren land that’s difficult to traverse between the rivers, and a hierarchy with the king and temple at the top.
Details can be introduced in play as and when they are relevant to the game’s themes. These include irrigation canals watering the fields by the river, with floods and river course changes being problems or disasters, literacy being the preserve of specialist scholars and needed in law, clothes being a typical gift for guests before a royal feast, a new king cancelling all debts, and each city-state having a patron god with an exalted temple, with power matching or exceeding that of the palace.
There’s no need to introduce historic details all at once. Bring them in when they present interesting ideas or flavour, and don’t overdo it. And there’s no need to worry about getting everything right.
Matters are slightly different when it comes to more familiar settings, such as a game set in the Second World War. Then there might be questions from the player on fine points of detail. My method there is to turn the question back on the player. If they’re asking about what’s in their rations or what precise gun they carry, they can answer that themselves, so let them.
Then there are less technical questions that appear tougher. For example, I have had players ask about playing gay characters in 1920s and Victorian settings. I’ll happily say yes. The question then is whether they want their character’s sexuaility to be accepted by those they interact with, whatever “society” says in the historical era, or whether they want to face in-game prejudice. The only way to find this out is to ask! Prejudice shouldn’t feature in the fiction of the game without explicit consent in this or other matters. Again, safety tools are useful here.
So Why Bother?
With all these potential hurdles, the important question is: why run historically-themed games? The glib answer is because I find history interesting. For me there’s an added resonance and connection to something set in real world history that doesn’t exist in most purely fantastic settings. There’s an immediate level of involvement for me when a game is set in ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, or 19th century London that I don’t automatically feel in most invented fantasy worlds. I can picture it, and there’s a depth there.
There’s also an incredible amount of cultural detail, events, and personalities to use as GM or facilitator. I find the research fun, and the play fulfilling. I get something more as a player in a well-researched and thoughtfully-presented historical game. It feels more real.
Also it’s part of our background and culture. History belongs to all of us, and is too important to leave to pedants and those who want a playground for their prejudices.
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Part 1 of ? In the Cultivating A Storytelling Mindset series
Last month, guest writer Paul Mitchener talked about how to use history in fruitful, productive and most importantly non-harmful ways in your roleplaying. One thing that jumped out at me from that piece is that I’m definitely more interested in exploring interesting, difficult tension in my games. History is a great source of inspiration for interesting tension because humans are messy and capable of twisting ourselves into moral pretzels. It also clarified for me that without the context leading to that interesting tension, we’re left with aesthetics and mood boards.
Interesting Tension
It’s true tho. One of the reasons many storygames fixate on negative emotions!
What I mean by interesting tension is a set of contexts that complicate otherwise easy decisions. Off the top of my head, here are some examples of what I think of interesting tensions:
The overlapping demands and constraints of class and gender that conspire to keep lovers apart in Regency era games like Good Society. Rich and poor alike face an uphill battle when they love outside their classes. Men are expected to be the instigator in romance, and resort to violence (perhaps physical but maybe also social) in competition for a woman’s hand; women are expected to seek financial security for their extended family, but are also – in the rules of the genre – prone to pursuing true love and happiness. Internal tensions, external tensions, it’s great stuff. I love, love Regency romance fiction. I love it because it’s so fraught.
Another example:
Your nation is competing with other states to colonize and exploit lands they’ve recently discovered. Back home, those nations are in varying states of internal unrest or outright war, so the colonization is a proxy for all that. It’s one kind of game if you’re just going to play out a string of battles against, dunno, the primitive hordes that threaten all the colonists. It’s another game entirely when you stop treating them like faceless obstacles and start treating them like conflicted, complex communities. Now you’re facing an insurgency, working out delicate temporary alliances, recruiting collaborators, falling in love with your alleged enemies, questioning conflicting and contradictory orders from remote masters. That one where you go beat on the primitives, ehhh and yikes. That second one is full of interesting tension with tons of context. I love decolonized frontier games because they’re so fraught. The fraught-ness is the point.
Hint: it wasn’t awesome because of the giant gun and crazy cars.
What tensions do you find interesting? Look at the fiction you like to consume: I’ll bet it’s not a string of interesting fight scenes, right? I know I get bored out of my tears when a movie or show features contextless violence (off the top of my head: Into the Badlands did this to me — it might’ve gotten more interesting later but the first episodes chased me off). But raise the stakes and now the story is so much more interesting.
Identify Internal and External Contexts
While the specific tension points are where we want to end up, let’s start by thinking through the context that causes that tension. This is good to do if you’re starting with an established setting, premise or historical context.
Internal context is limited to the character’s makeup. That might be deeply held religious values, internalized cultural constraints, needs, wants, vows, loyalty, past history.
External context arises from setting materials. That might be class, race, culture, externally enforced religious or cultural values, or external time pressures (impending natural disasters, ecological collapse, arrival of an enemy force). Personally? I prefer making the external context internal. Don’t let the characters just be cutouts for larger sociopolitical factors.
Once you’ve thought through your internal and external contexts, you can start poking at pairings and see where you say “Oh, that’d be interesting to explore.” So from the short lists above, we could poke at:
Principled faith values, versus a classes that treats faith as frivolous or dumb.
Indoctrination into a warrior caste that simply cannot ignore insults, versus a tradition of tribes that exchange insults as a way of testing one another’s mettle.
Two races that believe the other is an implacable enemy, versus your character’s love for a member of the other race.
The coming meteor that’s going to cause unspeakable destruction, versus a character’s vow to his family to carry a parent’s ashes to a distant traditional burial site.
My membership in a wizard’s covenant, versus your membership in the church that’s committed to snuffing out wizardry. And we’re siblings.
Some folks may read these as no-win situations, but that’s thinking about play with a win/lose mindset. In a storytelling mindset, this is the good stuff. This is where everyone gets to make a statement about their character’s values. The point isn’t to win, it’s to ask interesting questions and produce interesting answers.
The goal here is exploration. You absolutely, positively cannot answer these questions for the players! And players cannot ask the GM what the “right answer” is. Whatever answer they provide, it has to mean something. It has to change the game in an irrevocable way.
Another red flag: If you find the players trying to Batman their way through situations (i.e. both save the bus full of civilians about the plunge off the bridge and keep the bank from exploding, whatever), they’re trying to win the situation. Totally coming from the wrong place. I can’t even say “make it literally impossible,” because that won’t address the player’s understanding of the point of play at this particular table. Batmanning might be totally suitable in some games, and it’s a creative tactical challenge. I’ve had this happen at tables and the only way I’ve ever been able to address it is to the player: make an assertive, irrevocable statement, and I promise I’ll honor your statement and show how it’s changed the world.
Reverse Engineering
You can reverse-engineer this process as well: think about the interesting questions, then take it a step back and ask why a question is interesting.
Here’s what I mean by reverse-engineering. Let’s say I want to explore loyalty as a theme. I start by asking stuff about loyalty: Who’s worthy of your loyalty? What would it take to become disloyal? What benefits are there to loyalty, even in the face of uncertainty? Lots of places to go.
I’d start by thinking through context that would lead to these questions being asked in an organic way. What’s great about the nation/caste/society/guild/whatever to which a player might pledge or feel loyalty? And then, what’s terrible about them? What other groups might compete for your loyalty? And what’s great and terrible about them? Internally, what values might a character have that were already in conflict with loyalty to an external body? Is there a faith in conflict with a nation’s goals? Are there family ties that can be fruitfully threatened by conflicting needs?
The questions aren’t nearly as interesting as the context in which they’ll be asked. Work on the context, and you’ll also find new questions getting asked you never even thought about.
Avoid Easy Answers (Except When You Need One)
Oscar knew the score.
If your impulse, either as a GM or player, is to look for easy answers, to avoid fraught, interesting tension, my advice is to push back on that to start. Or lean all the way into it, but do it in an intentional way. Tell the GM: “Okay, my commander just blindly hates the orcs. Can’t abide them, won’t negotiate, scorched earth. Let God sort ‘em out.” Now that commander has herself become a new source of interesting tension. How does an implacable personality get along in this world?
My personal aesthetic is to caution against GMs ever letting the game get away with easy answers. There are no unbreakable social rules, there are simply rules that nobody has yet broken. There are no faceless hordes that are just fine to murder off, there are societies with their own interests and internal conflicts. There can even be potentially lethal consequences – that’s the highest stakes, right? The punishment for treason might very well be death. Is it still worth it to question your orders, or your faith?
But also: not every game needs to address every potentially fraught tension. Not all tensions are interesting to everyone, and this is where intentionality on the players’ side is a skill worth cultivating — both for the players to develop, but for the GM to recognize. I may find class, society and gender all super interesting in a Regency game, but I’ve also played Good Society at a hardcore-queer table where the gender stuff was just off the table. Not even a thing. It worked okay, and we leaned harder into social tensions to make up for it: tension between circles of friends, family and religious groups. It wasn’t the ideal experience for me in that moment, but good grief, everything is negotiable.
Each easy answer turns down or off a whole set of potentially interesting tensions. That’s the cost. The cost might very well be worth paying, particularly if a topic is behind a line or veil, or has been X-carded, or is, for whatever reason, just not where folks want to go. Sometimes discomfort is okay too. I’m not smart or arrogant enough to tell you when to push through discomfort in the hopes of finding something interesting on the other side.
Coping Strategies
One neat strategy is to dress up difficult context, to provide some distance from the subject matter. You don’t want to hit the men/women gender line so hard but you still like the idea of conflicting interpersonal constraints. Maybe it’s caste, or age, or profession that separates folks, and keeps the players from seeking easy answers. It’s an interesting critical thinking challenge, isn’t it? What are gender roles? Is it really all just performative tradition? And so on.
Moving an historical game into a fantasy or sci-fi setting is another go-to, but it’s also easy to trip over or edit out the parts that made the history problematic. Moving your Old West game into a space frontier, Firefly style, is great for recontextualizing North/South antebellum tensions, and doing interesting things with culture and community. But if you’ve simply removed the Native American component, well…you’ve just re-colonized your Old West game and given it blasters. Firefly was iffy on this point because the Reavers were a mindless, faceless, implacably violent enemy (yikes), later revealed in Serenity to be victims of science gone wrong (total erasure, double yikes). Is erasure better than othering? That’s a game of racism bingo I really don’t want to play.
Move Past Aesthetic Boards
Having worked in the past on aesthetics-intensive properties (Mutant Chronicles 2nd edition, Deadlands, others), I’m intensely, acutely aware of the costs of reducing setting and character to aesthetic boards. This is also why I squirm when I read the phrase “rule of cool.” Slapping together decontextualized cool shit means asking nothing but easy questions and demanding nothing more than easy answers. Make your setting easy enough, and your game is reduced to high-fives about each other’s coolness. Which, whatever, do what you want at your table, I’m not your dad. And under many circumstances, I like celebrating each other’s aesthetic contributions. Cool moments are awesome.
I guess coolness, for me, is more than cool imagery. It’s discovering surprising, satisfying answers to difficult questions…and seeing what new questions get asked as a result. The point of tension is to release it, to complete the pattern, and create new unresolved tensions waiting to reveal undiscovered patterns.
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