Why are all Medieval stories fantasy?

Because the Dark Ages are despressive as crap and would not be fun to play. And that’s coming from someone who used to be obsessed with everything medieval. (Not knowledgable, maybe, but obsessed.)
Without fantastical elements, the Dark Ages are really just about stinky people pooping in the streets and dying in the most horrific ways. As romantic as many people make it sound (cough cheap historical romance cough), that is a world I would not want to enter - as a player or otherwise.

2 Likes

I think presenting the Dark Ages as about “stinky people pooping in the streets and dying in the most horrific ways” as if everything was a form of pain and suffering until somehow humans magically (word chosen intentionally) evolved out of being something somewhere beneath apes is about as realistic as depicting a game set in the present day where most people are kind, smart, friendly, competent, and otherwise completely the opposite.

Yes, the Middle Ages sucked. But presenting it as if this: http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Sheriff_of_Nottingham
is less bad than normal is no more realistic - and certainly no more interesting, as relates to why we don’t have a lot of nonfantasy medieval games - than presenting it as a lost utopia.

Frankly, I’d love to play something set in a realistic version of the Middle Ages, but if that’s just going to be an excuse for playing up the nastiness because we can’t possibly have anything prior to the 20th century - or maybe the 18th for the really, really open minded - be presented in any shades other than vileness and despair - then I would hope it fails to occur.

There’s a lot of good that can come from exploring things outside the box, do we have to settle for games playing up how awful things can be to the point that dolphins (picked because dolphins aren’t very nice) would weep? Do we really have to confuse “darker” and “more realistic” to tell a story set in a historical period and not a fantasy world?

3 Likes

It’s inaccurate to say that people who think the Dark Ages were horrific must be present supremacists. I would argue that there were many better times and places to be alive, including ones earlier than that. And probably a few worse ones, though it’s hard to think of any off the top of my head.

@Sashira I would be very pleased to discover a single element in the life of an ordinary Russian under Peter the Great that would be an improvement upon the conditions under Vladimir the Great seven centuries earlier.

I would be extremely surprised - and just as pleasantly - to be wrong in stating that Philip II of Macedon or Augustus of Rome had no more scruples about abusing power than Philip II of France.

I would certainly not be able to pick between Castlegard and somewhere in an equivalent situation in the Thirty Years War instead of the Hundred Years War for “places I’d rather just be shot than live in”. If that’s a reflection of my ignorance I will bless the person who corrects me on how landsknechts were less likely to kill, rape, and steal.

The founder of Aelia Capitolina hardly deserves to be considered to have the moral high ground over Edward I just because the latter was a medieval king.

I can go on - and I will gladly cede I’m not enough of an expert on antiquity or the early modern period to be as through as I’d like, so most examples will be more modern - but I think this is enough to justify being fair to the Middle Ages instead of presenting them as a time so horrible that it’s “hard to think of any worse ones”.

Edit: Do we count the obvious 20th century examples of horror as out as too far from the century’s mores? That’s my reason for not naming them above.

I’m well aware that there are time periods worse than the Medieval ages, but that’s like saying a broken leg isn’t as bad as two broken legs. They both suck, one is just less sucky than the other.
Anyway, this topic isn’t about which time period was the worse or best to live in, it’s about why Medieval without Fantasy is so neglected on this website

@Interestedparty It’s like saying that having a sprained wrist is less sucky than having two broken legs.

But to address this in terms of making interesting games, here’s a dead WIP of a particularly nondull part of the era:

I’m fairly sure if it had actually been finished it wouldn’t have been worse received than the fantasy games here (which do seem to predominate the list). Why the author didn’t finish this I don’t know any more than any more magical/fantastical game that is a dead WIP - those have died too.

So if we’re going to talk “Yes, why don’t we have games like that?” a game where my choices on encountering a peasant maiden involve deciding whether I want to kill her before or after raping her is not “medieval nonfantasy”, it’s just a different sense of the word “fantasy” than dragons and wizards. It’s the kind of fantasy that brought us Custer’s Revenge in different trappings.

I think that’s important if we’re going to try to get anyone to write or play something set in this thousand odd years of history.

This was getting off-topic pretty fast, so I’ll follow your lead and go back to the facts as relevant to making games.

Custer’s Revenge is not a thing that should ever be recreated in any form. :disappointed_relieved: You make a good point there. I didn’t mean to suggest that a plot set in the middle ages would have to be grim or horrific, or a character has to act this way, but the setting cannot be romanticized if the designer is attempting realistic fiction.

Ways to get around the dilemma you raise, of awful behavior being expected from the MC by their society:

  • Use the Timeline cheat, and send back a character with modern ideas and values, while keeping the rest of the setting realistic. Not everyone they meet will be awful, and some residents of the past may appreciate their radical opinions; how many challenges the MC runs into might depend on where exactly the game is set, whether they’re male or female, etc. If you never meet Sir Tristen the Terrible Person, there’s no need to write that interaction.

  • Don’t give the MC that much social power. If they’re 98% of females, a commoner, or anything but “nobles and knights”, they’re not going to have the option to abuse people without repercussions. You can then give that character valuable skills, brilliant ideas, or the ability to break social norms to their benefit (e.g. making them a criminal) to give them a fighting chance at affecting their situation.

  • Set your game in that era somewhere other than Europe. There were various interesting things going on in the world during that 600 years or so (I think we must be dividing eras differently, if your definition is 400 years broader.)

I don’t know most of the societies you mentioned in your counterpoint, so I’ll take your word that they were awful. I’m better with pre-history/antiquity.

They’re not going to have the option as “nobles and knights” either. If you want to be a power wielder who can say “talk to the death spewing firepower” to any questions on what they do with their power, you expressly need a 20th century authoritarian state.

Sure, being a medieval peasant was subject to the will of his lord far more than I’m subject to the will of Samuel Farr - but droit du seigneur appears to be a myth, and easily the classic example of “the Middle Ages were
even worse than they actually were”-ism.

Otherwise I like those ideas - I’d say the best situation in a game always puts the PC in a situation where they’re powerful enough to make choices and not so powerful as to make too many people make choices. If you make this about kings and emperors they need to deal with the problems of the throne, not the fact even without absolute power over their subjects they still don’t have to pay attention to 90% of the rights we moderns take for granted.

It’s going to be a disturbing place even at its best. Medieval life was not for sissies even under kings that put “for the good of my kingdom” as something distinct from “me”. I’d look at how Sabres of Infinity and following treat that situation for its equivalent-to-18th-century - admittedly its technically fantasy, but it does give an illustration of how “I’m a noble.” puts you above any commoner, by definition, in ways that simply don’t exist anymore.

And I’d definitely welcome a good game set outside Europe. I know Europe best and care most (because I know and understand it - compared to other areas), but there’s no reason a game set in “the Crusades” has to be from the POV of a crusader to pick one of the most recognized, if not necessarily understood, elements.

And finally:
I’m defining the Middle Ages from the last Roman Emperor in the West to the last Roman Emperor in the East (476 to 1453), the Dark Ages as an era within that end somewhere between Charlemagne and AD 1000.

You? I’ve heard other definitions, but I grew up on that one and am slow to adjust to the idea of starting with 632 or something (based on ideas of “Late Antiquity”), though I’m not concerned as long as I can follow it. .

1 Like

Just looked it up, and yours is the usual definition (476-1453.) I hadn’t thought of the Middle Ages as being defined as far apart as the two emperors; it looks like I wasn’t counting the Low Middle Ages. We’re on the same page as far as which centuries of that were the Dark Ages.

My forte starts about 3000 years ago (the trifecta of Antiquity being everything before and Modern being everything after that millennium is something I’d completely forgotten), so I can be hazy about centuries. Thanks for correcting my definitions there.

As for the whole droit de seigneur thing… I think I only ever heard about it in the context of Braveheart, so that makes sense. To throw out a similar myth, the iron maiden was invented by museum owners.

@Sashira No worries. Just glad we’re understanding the dates the other gave.

And I’m somehow not surprised by that on the iron maiden. It looks like something someone would do if they had too much time on their hands - a Count Rugen from The Princess Bride sort of device, if less inspired.

Medieval interrogation involving torture as a matter of course does not seem to be as mythical, sadly.

Yeah, iron maiden was a stupid idea from romantic imagination. Our inquisition had tons of better and more cruel methods to obtain confessions. Iron maiden is too lethal and not enough pain to served . The droid of seigneur is just a french term and more modern that the primitive ius malacandi and other medieval concepts. In Spanish culture many of the typical droights of laid with the peasant bride and free right to punch your peasants always don’t include break of hands or limps never was active. Anyway, medieval right sucks badly, but has interesting premises. Guilds rights are awesome so if any of you want made a realistic medieval cog, probably the guilds and or monasteries are the places. Their privileges and structure allows enough space to make a not only grim story.

@interestedparty
1a) I think it’s because it’s easier to write a fantasy story since the author doesn’t need so much reasearch and can write things as they like without having to care about accuracy.
b) In a choice game, magic and non-human races offer more choices. Note that many games set in present days feature magic, super powers or supernatural

2)Actually, It is not neglected on this website. There is Lords of Aswick on Hosted Games, there are some WIPs, the most recent of them being Life, Tyranny, Revolution & Medieval England, Choice of Games announced that they’ll make a Choice of the Viking game and @jeantown wants to make a Robin Hood game after she has finished Guenevere.
Many other settings have not a single WIP, I would call that neglected.

  1. I like your ideas. Why don’t you make a game based on one or two of these concepts?

@Elfwine
I guess you haven’t played Samurai of Hyuga?

Someone asked me this before. I suck at writing stories; I’m a great idea guy, but when it come to putting things to paper my plans fall apart

@WulfyK Played a little of and lost interest - long story short, I didn’t like being the kind of ronin the story was writing.

But I hope it finishes.

@Interestedparty I suck at writing too. Let’s hope someone else get inspired by your proposals.

I feel a blog post coming on, and I apologize in advance. :slight_smile:

Apart from the fact that all Arthurian lit is inherently fantasy from its first appearance, one of my main reasons for writing pseudo-medieval fantasy rather than realistic historical fiction is that I get exhausted dealing with the Historical Accuracy Police. Some people’s favorite pastime seems to be tearing apart medieval-setting historical fiction because the author failed to represent what the Middle Ages were “really” like.

We will never know what the Middle Ages were “really” like. Yes, there are some things we can know for sure. Charlemagne probably did not have a cell phone and Eleanor of Aquitaine probably was not a ninja. But there are a lot of things we’ll never know, and never understand. History, especially medieval European history, is just a lot of guesswork based on sources that don’t – can’t – make a ton of sense to us now.

Medieval European people lived prior to our current idea of science, which deeply informs our understanding of reality. Medieval writers and artists were generally more interested in symbolic meaning than what we would think of as literal or empirical truth. I’ll never forget reading Roger Ray’s article on medieval historiography (in the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages; sadly not available online) where he talks about how medieval chroniclers would sometimes write “Nothing true happened this year.” It’s not that no events happened, it’s that events didn’t seem to reflect a higher reality, and were therefore not meaningful. Medieval writers and artists also had no problem changing the literal truth to reflect what they thought was the greater truth.

It’s also worth pointing out that nothing written in the Middle Ages was written in the languages we speak now. All of the information we have – whether it’s written, drawn, or archaeological – comes to us through many, many interpretive filters of present-day culture. One of the things any good academic program in medieval history teaches on Day 1 is that it’s impossible to be objective about history, so the best thing you can do is examine your subjectivities and be as self-aware as possible.

It’s my experience that the Historical Accuracy Police have not usually examined their subjectivities very well, nor have most of them read many, or any, actual medieval texts in the original languages. I get really tired of dealing with people who think they know everything about the Middle Ages on the basis of museum exhibits, college survey courses, and pop history books from Barnes and Noble. (I’m not knocking museum exhibits, college survey courses, or pop history books! I love all of those things. I just think there’s a lot of stuff we can’t know for sure.)

Also: Medieval people themselves had almost no sense of historical accuracy. They were perfectly happy to draw pictures of Moses in 12th-century clothing. The same goes for their storytelling. To them, what “really” happened was what made for a meaningful story about higher truths. So I very much believe that most fantasy lit, while its material differs greatly from actual medieval culture, is very, very true to the spirit of medieval storytelling – truer than “historically accurate” fiction, which is a modern invention.

I do enjoy historical fiction and respect the people who write it; in fact, I’m often overprotective of them when the Historical Accuracy Police step in and try to tell them how wrong they are. I just know that I myself am not up to dealing with that particular headache every day, and that’s a big part of why I write fantasy.

Also because dragons are cool.

9 Likes

You are totally true about history accuracy about Medieval times. But We really had totally accurate account of many aspects of the society, guilds and religious orders economic accounts gives an boring but accurate description of people number, gender ,social class amount they give to church etc… Donations . I live near Santiago of Compostela greath cathedral and we had a lot of books and account info from s XII . Vatican has an amazing archive with treaties etc and letters . We have laws from that time in all europe. In fact historical laws is something laws schools teach all over Europe. There are tons of laws we have original copies. Sadly, that accuracy never was used to write what the hell really happened in battles and live in general people loved put dragons angels and demons all over the place, heck half of Spanish battles victory on the war with muslims is basically "Santiago Matamoros appeared flying in his white horse killing all the Muslims "

1 Like

Also while it’s probably not a big deal for a game whether there were five or six thousand or if the other side had ten or twelve thousand, the numbers given by the writers of the day get so inflated it might as well be just as fantastic if it did have dragons and demons and angels. God help the poor modern writer who has to sort out what happened when both elements are used in full force.

Not impossible to get good enough for a game numbers if you’re willing to spend the time researching, but the so-called histories won’t be very much help.

@poison_mara Sure, we have records of laws, but there are SO many things those records can’t tell us.

To take an example of a 20th-century law: Some states in the US used to have a literacy requirement for people to be allowed to vote. A law like that would basically just say “Citizens have to prove they can read in order to vote.” What it wouldn’t say is that the law was created to prevent African Americans from voting. African Americans were given an outrageously difficult, deliberately misleading “literacy test,” and not allowed to vote if they didn’t pass it. White people weren’t even given the test. Just reading the law itself wouldn’t tell you that it was a means of racial discrimination, or how that discrimination was enacted. Laws get made for all sorts of reasons, and their implementation is highly subjective. Even today, many US states have laws on the books that aren’t enforced at all, laws that are only enforced sometimes, and other laws that are enforced in very strange ways you could never guess just from reading the law.

To take an example from the Middle Ages: Extant confessional manuals for priests specify particular periods of penance for particular sins. So, for example, a person who steals something is supposed to do penance for three years. But that “three years” could be fulfilled in lots of different ways which aren’t specified by the rule. Depending on the people involved and the circumstances, the three years of penance might be paid for with alms (later indulgences) or converted into harsher, shorter penances, or conducted by family members, or just waived by a compassionate priest. Taking the confessional manual at literal face value would be a mistake.

As for economic accounts and treaties, sure, that’s valuable information, but without context, there’s so much we can’t know. Were the treaties observed loosely or meticulously, or at all? What happened to all those donations to Santiago de Compostela after they were given, and why did X or Y person make a donation, and did the donation have the result the donor was hoping for?

I’m not saying we have no records, just that almost everything we think we know about the context of those records is a guess.

5 Likes

I’m not entirely sure it’s entirely a guess. But its certainly more along the lines of a scientific hypothesis (as opposed to undeniable fact or as close as any discipline gets to that) - especially with how much has to be translated.

Not just in the sense Old English is a foreign language, but in the sense that medieval people thought they lived in a world that we would find to be fantasy. Maybe not literally magic everywhere, but “mundane reality” was as compared to Heaven, not as compared to Middle-Earth.

2 Likes