The Face Underneath a Monarchy

The hardest struggle surrounding the tech/development structure I'm designing is with my imagination; it literally feels like I am squeezing my brain to separate the juice from the pulp, to produce as much detail and content as I'm able.

It's a good thing that I'm well-read, otherwise this task would be insurmountable.  I'll propose a question, one for which the answer was posted on the blog about two years ago.  How is it that the presence of animal husbandry changed the shape and status of house building?

If you're a long-time reader, you'll hit on that immediately.  But three years ago I'd have had no idea myself; I'd have needed someone to explain it to me.  But I read and continue to watch documentaries, which steadily expand my perceptions about things past the usual associations we make.

If you want the answer, and some kind soul doesn't rush to put it in the comments, write me an email at alexiss1@telus.net.

Let's take another example.  What associations do you make with the development of Monarchy?  Right off, the reader should connect the presence of a monarch with a more united kingdom, the rise of an aristocracy, the presence of a court, the inevitability of joint foreign policy and quite probably the creation of some kind of elite military, "the king's guard."

To put it another way, an organized government, which a less developed region would not possess.  We should be able to think of lots of examples of inward-looking social organizations, without a system of government, where the rules of law came down to what your neighbors believed or what people accepted as tradition.  Homesteaders in 19th century America, well ahead of the government, or large parts of Africa or the steppes of Eurasia, where tribes and clans vied with each other for resources but had little relationship with the outside world.  The whole history of Australia, before the arrival of Europeans. 

The arrival of a monarchy on the scene sets up a conflict with tradition; a government is there to arrest, manage or instigate change, depending on what is needed ~ whereas a traditional framework opposes change categorically.  Once a "state" has begun thinking for itself, those beliefs previously held by the population are now under siege.  The monarch has ideas of his or her own; and those ideas are not "traditional" much of the time.  Largely because the problems a monarch faces are not traditional, but the necessity of event: disaster, increases in population, decreases in food supply, the incursion of foreign powers and so on.

These things, however, are very general ~ and they don't affect a party of player characters much.  The point of the structure is to give effect to the actual campaign, not propose a history lesson on how the development of monarchies changed social structure.

It is easy to become enamored with the big picture and lose sight of that point.  If the players don't feel a difference, there isn't one; it doesn't matter if the region has a monarch or not if there are no visible signs that compel the players to view the environment differently.  So let's back up and ask, how does the monarchy affect ordinary people, here on the streets, who would probably never meet the local king or queen, nor attend court a single time in all their lives?

Well, the presence of the monarch does tend to bind together people: when the king is crowned, everyone parties; when the king dies, everyone mourns.  When the king is unwell, everyone worries; and when the king is married or has a child, again, there is a huge celebration. The various aspects of the monarch take on the aspect that we sometimes identify with celebrity culture; it seems to matter that an acting couple has split up or a famous comedian dies ... this is a small taste of the sort of intensity people once had for the reigning family when there was little else outside of their worlds to seize their imaginations.

A second element to consider is the law.  There are a series of effects now to consider associated with the way the local constabulary deal with crime.  When the law is managed by locals, according to tradition, there is room for patience and mercy that are obliterated when the people in charge owe fealty to a power that is distant and removed.  Now, the constable can't just "let you go," because there would be questions to be answered and responsibility to higher authorities.  This makes the overall visitation of the law upon individuals a colder prospect.  You're not dealing with a "man," you're dealing with the power of the state ~ and that power doesn't care that you're stealing bread to feed your family.  You're stealing.

In many different ways, matters of culture are now cut that fine.  Whereas the elders of the village or the town council might make room for you to pay your taxes when business improves, now there's an official, and outsider, who is there to ensure that everyone is paid up and in full.  Taxes are no longer a matter of give what you can; it's been decided that all persons of a certain rank and capacity will give such-and-such, no matter who they are.  The law has become faceless ... and frightening.

But players are far more familiar with a faceless law than the reverse, so that's not much of an adjustment for them.  It is harder to make a group of players understand a law system that isn't faceless than one that is. That is a part of why films like The Wicker Man hold a fascination ~ because we find it difficult to relate to sweet, kind people apparently being able to live together and peace and harmony, yet able to burn outsiders to death because it's a necessity. We, living in the world we do, automatically identify cruelty with institutions, not individuals.

We need more, then.  How else does the monarchy affect daily life apart from a drunken bash now and then and a tax collector that needs side-stepping?

It only came to me a couple days ago:  the answer is fashion.  The monarchy creates fashion the same way it creates the law.  Whereas in a previous time, people wore what they would, the presence of that celebrity cult, the same way it does for us, induces people to grow interested in new clothes, new ideas, new habits ... and the most evident of those habits, the one that the players would most likely notice, is the presence of etiquette.

We normally associate etiquette with the 19th century (we do if we're westerners), but it goes back much further than that.  Confucius, 2,500 years ago, is all about etiquette: right speaking, right acting, correctness of social relationships, correctness of justice and sincerity and so on.

I've often found myself in a position as a DM where an NPC is conversing with the player and the player is acting like a complete boor.  In my mind, it's clear from the first sentence out of the player's mouth that they have just insulted everything that the NPC ought to hold dear ... and I've let it pass because I don't want to hold the player responsible for a clumsy attempt at role-playing.  After all, the player isn't there; the player can't see the NPC as clearly as I can, and for that matter doesn't identify clearly the whole scene.  If that same player were to find themselves transported to the Palace of Versailles in the 16th century, the player would rightly shut their mouth in terror of saying something wrong, particularly if they understood the consequence might be the experience of being whipped like a dog down a long hall full of mirrors, until falling into the hands of four or five guards, who would then drag the beaten victim into a cold stone cell for a few years of unreasonable punishment.

Players don't understand consequences like that.  Why should they?  They have no experience with the sort of non-egalitarian thinking that would condemn an individual to death for speaking rudely.  Players retain their modern sensibilities with these things ... they just don't get that the local townspeople would demand a polite speaking voice and a careful choice of words because that's what the king does, and we all like the king very much and want to be like him.

As D&Dites, we're still dealing with players who answer resistance on the NPC's part with sword blows in broad daylight, followed by the sort of swaggering pride in their action like we would expect from Mad Dog Biff Tanner:  "Look at me, I'm a bad ass."  A moment like that in D&D needs someone stepping up behind the character and hitting them blind with a shovel.

We might try explaining to the players that living in a monarchy means there are now consequences for failing to speak politely, even to goodwives, even to beggars ... and everyone in the town is ready to step up and quietly see that those consequences are delivered.  Save the rudeness for a democracy.  We do not put up with that shit around here.

Chariot

Please take note.  Much of the following content derives from two works: New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare [Garrett G. Fagan & Matthew Trundle] and Chariot: From Chariot to Tank, the Astounding Rise and Fall of the World's First War Machine [Arthur Cotterell].  I'm afraid that I couldn't get hold of the whole text for the second work; I could find just enough to demonstrate that the authors do not agree with one another.  There's no reason they should.  Almost everything we know about the use of chariots, their development and decline, is a matter for speculation.  I remember L. Sprague de Camp's book, The Ancient Engineers, was specific to what can be learned from the archeological evidence - that they were typically a two-wheeled contrivance pulled by typically two to four horses, that they were used as a taxi to enter combat and leave it, that they worked as a higher platform from which to shoot missiles and that later on they were used more for prestige than for combat.  A hunt around the internet will lead to other interesting details.

I know it isn't typical for me to open a post like this with sources, but this is one of those subjects into which everyone likes to weigh in as though the matter were decided and settled absolutely for all time - with the current speaker specifically knowing all the precise details while of course everyone else is deluded.  I am not going to write that post.  We know almost nothing about the use of chariots.  What we thought we knew from Homer and other sources has lately been demonstrated to be improbable, so that at the moment no one is making any definite statements.  Therefore let me emphasize that this post is NOT an academic work.  This post is largely speculation based on other speculation, written expressly for the role-playing crowd.  Please feel free to interject on the subject and provide details of your own, so long as you're aware that you're as full of shit as I am, and so is whatever source you feel justified in quoting.  There's a lot of bullshit scholarship out there on the subject - don't think because you have a book written by Billy-Bob that you've got the definitive work.

Since I'm mostly interested in why or how chariots could figure in D&D or other role-play, I want to talk about why chariots ceased to be relevant in warfare.  First and foremost, we need to understand when chariots were employed, and when they ceased to be relevant.  For that, we need a basis in history.

The most artwork of a chariot created by an ancient artist, the one best known to me, is the depiction of Alexander the Great fighting Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Issus, 301 BC.  Darius, incidentally, is the one aboard the chariot - the figure of Alexander is the one that is furthest to the left.

The Alexander Mosaic, circa 100 BC, believed to be a copy of a 3rd century Hellenistic
painting [possibly by Philoxenos of Eretria].  On display at the
Naples National Archeological Museum

It's a fascinating image all around.  For those unfamiliar with a mosaic, the above is made with little tiny stones - thus the picture's dimensions being 8 ft, 11 in high and 16 ft, 9 in wide.  This thing is immense.  If you find yourself in Naples, be sure to get a look.

The symbolism of Darius, the loser in the fight, directing the battle from the chariot, while Alexander, the winner, fights from horseback like a soldier, shouldn't be lost.  We don't know, of course, that Darius did fight this battle from a chariot - except perhaps that the original artist had spoken to Greeks who claimed as much, after the fact.  Still, we know that people make shit up, that stories go around and that any important looking guy riding around on a chariot could have been mistaken for Darius. We just don't know.

From archeological evidence, we know that the chariot was huge and very successful a thousand years before the above depicted image.  We know that the Hyksos, a violent horse-riding people from west Asia, used the chariot, the battle axe and the composite bow to overrun Egypt in the 17th century BC and establish the 15th Dynasty.  We have plenty of evidence for the invasion, the appearance of those weapons and tactics and the time period the dynasty thrived - for about 100 years between 1650 and 1550 BC.  Thereafter, the chariot became the crux of Egypt's power over the eastern Mediterranean during the next four centuries - most notably under Ramses the II.

The chariot was also in wide use as early as 2000 BC on the steppelands of Turkestan, between the Tien Shan and Altai mountains on the east and the Caspian Sea and Ural Mountains on the west.  This was a bronze age culture known as the Sintashta that dominated the vast region for 300 years - from 2100 to 1800 BC. They were probably instrumental in the Hyksos adoption of the chariot; they were certainly instrumental in the development of the modern horse.  The 'horse' as we know it originated in this area, circa 4000 BC.

It is hard to fathom how long ago any of this was happening - just as it is hard to grasp that while the chariot was around in the time of the Romans, Britons and even the Byzantines, as an instrument of war it had ceased to be effective sometime about a thousand years before Christ.  There are a number of reasons for this given by the sources above . . . which I shall try to recount.

I know that many readers will not be aware of the 'dark age' that occurred in Europe and the Middle East between 1200 and 850 BC.  This would be after the rise of the Phoenicians and Minoans, after the Mycenaeans, after the mythological/historical events at Troy and after virtually everything the reader knows about the court and lifestyle of Egypt.  The Assyrians and Romans came after this dark age, while the Sumerians and Akkadians were very definitely before.  More importantly, widespread use of the chariot happened before that dark period.

Called the 'Late Bronze Age collapse,' there are a number of theories for its occurrence and exactly what happened that caused a wide range of cultures to fall into decline.  My favorite personal theory has to do with core samples in Greenland, where the years of ice can be separated like paper and examined for all sorts of things - including dust and pollen contained in the atmosphere - going back thousands of years.  Conclusions have been drawn that a shift in air currents similar to the Little Ice Age produced a 'drying out' of the Mediterranean, so that plant life went into a decline first before human culture very quickly followed.  This was NOT a theory popular with my Classics professors in university, but as with most humanities instructors, science is a myth and does not really exist.  But I digress.

With the eradication of culture in the late 13th century BC came the demise of the chariot.  The chariot calvary never recovered as a military force.  It is probably that the cost of putting a chariot together afterwards became prohibitive.  Consider - two horses must be trained to work together in tandem, whereas with the rise of ancient Greece in the 9th century BC the possession of one horse was enough to consider a man to be wealthy.  Then a rider must be trained to operate the two horses; the carriage must be built, which is no mean cost, particularly when compared with the cost of only a saddle.  To put together a whole force of fifty to a hundred chariots would have been a monumental task - an impossible one in a democracy like Greece or a republic like Rome.  Even the Kingdom of Persia - where there was some use of chariots post 900 BC - would have found the effort arduous (particularly when one considers that the Persian 'Empire' was really a bunch of semi-independent satrapies who paid tribute to a central authority.

As the coffers emptied and personal freedom developed, the cavalries of the 2nd millenium BCE became impractical.  But this isn't the only reason for the chariot's decline.

Consider where it was used during that ancient period.  India, for example, where the chariot was certainly in use during the writing of the Bhagavad Gita and the Rigveda, is FLAT.  Very, very flat. The same is true of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the lowlands of Anatolia (where the 2nd millennia Hittite culture flourished) and the steppes of Turkestan.  Flat, all of them.

Curiously, we have evidence that shows Egypt did not commonly use chariots in its own valley - where fighting units were more often supported by boats.  The reason for that is clear, once the extent of the nile's flood is fully understood.  See this video, starting about 7:20.

Compare, then, the terrain of Greece, Italy, Spain and Sicily ('Greater Greece') where the Greeks and Romans fought their battles.  Very much not flat.  In some parts of Greece, even the horse fails to be of much use.  The Carthaginians were blessed with flat country (northern Tunisia), but horses were in short supply, the land is fairly dry for horses and elephants were available (there were problems with elephants, but we can address those on another post).

Result: no chariot fighting.  Why go to the expense and effort of having one if the instrument can't be used because the enemy has decided to defend from a hill?

By the 1st millennia, the chariot had become a taxi for sure - this is how the Britons surely used them. The Assyrians built really large chariots, but these were mostly VIP carriers.  The most valued use of the chariot in Rome was as a sport - which it continued to be until the 7th century AD.

Think about the incorporation of chariots in your campaign.  How are they an improvement over horses?  By the time of Alexander the Great, firing a bow from horseback had become widespread - what benefits, then, does the chariot serve?

It is certainly a fascinating device.  On that I agree.  But the disappearance of the chariot was surely that it was improved upon - by the very animal that enabled the chariot in the first place.  I feel that what really happened was that we learned much, much more about the horse, making the chariot an unnecessary affectation.  It was a good idea, but in the long run, a disposable one.

Worker

Haven't written one of these Civilization for awhile.  Some gentle readers, I know, felt I would never write one again.  Yet here we are.  Know that I like writing these posts also.  It is only that my creativity was sucked dry by other things.

The 'Worker' is the last unit that would come automatically at the start of the old Civ IV game.  I have been writing a lot about working of late - it is a central theme to the Guide, as I believe firmly that work gives us purpose and therefore happiness.  I've never met anyone completely comfortable with not working - even the least motivated people I've known worked diligently at something - becoming a better snowboarder or a better musician comes to mind.  Whereas I have known hundreds of people who worked obsessively and were certainly happy - even those who worked right up until their first heart attack.

This civilization, this culture, exists because at some point in pre-history it became evident that work was a practical alternative to hope.  By this I refer to an old Chinese parable - literally thousands of years old.  One day, a hunter is walking through the woods, looking for his dinner, when he sees a rabbit suddenly dash from the nearby wood.  Before the hunter can take a breath, the rabbit fails to see the stump of a tree in front of it and hits the stump full on, knocking itself senseless.  The hunter need only walk up, seize the unconscious rabbit and make it dinner.

Forever afterwards, having gotten his dinner so easily that day, the hunter returns to the same stump - where he sits and waits for another rabbit to appear and knock itself out.

It is part of our make-up that we do this.  Having had fortune smile upon us, we sit and wait and waste our lives away waiting for fortune to smile again, knowing that it's better if we return to hunting. Fundamentally, the decision of stone age cultures to give up on chance and embrace effort was the defining moment in establishing every complex structure we see around us now.

Consider - once the tribe transforms itself from random hoping into a unit that diligently manufactures tools and procedures in order to ensure food, a reorganization of that tribe must take place.

A herd of animals forage - every gazelle in a herd, for instance, is responsible for its own food and its own survival.  Instinct draws the herd together because a herd helps protect the individual - only one gazelle need sense danger in order for every gazelle to be aware of it.  Running together increases the likelihood that you won't be pulled down so long as someone else is slower and more vulnerable.

You and I stumble across a grizzly and it turns on us.  We both break into a run, whereupon you shout, "This is impossible, the bear runs faster than we do!  We'll never outrun it."

And I answer, "I don't need to outrun the bear - I only need to outrun you!"

Work reorganizes that principle.  As the tribe develops tools and procedures, it becomes plain early on who is best at finding game; who is best at throwing a spear; who is best at drawing out game; who is best at cutting the meat off the bone and so on.  When it comes time to decide who will stand where in order to kill the game to get us meat, or who will forage today as opposed to hunting, every individual within the tribe has a superior skill that we want to exploit.  Now, if the slower fellow is killed by the bear, the whole tribe misses out because that guy used to make the best spears.  Personal achievement begins to define our importance as individuals.

Thus the joke is redefined if I am a slacker and you're a doctor.  I may, at that moment, realize that your life is more precious than mine - because you've spent your life wisely and I have not - and stop running.  I may let the bear get me.  I may let you be the faster runner, even if you're not.

We spend so much time in role-playing concerning ourselves with who is playing the tank and who is playing the healer and so on, we forget that we're individuals, too, with individual skills having nothing to do with what class we play.  We do that because on some level we think, "Well, if Jeremy's fighter dies, it doesn't matter because we'll still have all of Jeremy's gaming skills when he rolls up a druid or an assassin or whatever."

We don't care if the bear gets Jeremy's character - because for all the role-playing rhetoric, Jeremy's character isn't real . . . except to Jeremy, who perhaps doesn't want to lose this particular incarnation. But that is another post.

The role-playing format establishes a set of specialties for the player that we're expected to adhere to - but those are just conveniences.  Of greater importance is the work the player wishes to invest into the game in order to provide the party with a greater chance of survival and success.  This work does not rely upon what class the player is or what the player's character skill sets are - because innovation does not result from pre-ordained skill sets.  Innovation results from a willingness to look at the game from every angle, see the exploitable facets in that structure and increase the probability for achievement.

The invented spear exploited the strengths of the human arm; it exploited the comparative weakness in the skin of animals that could be penetrated by a hurled, sharp point.  It exploited the natural material of wood and bone.  It exploited the comparative availability of time that allowed for the spear to be made far in advance of the time when the spear would be needed.

It meant that the maker of the spear had to suspend their immediate gratification while being conscious that, once the spear was made, it would be used later to great effect.  The maker had to work now, sweating and diligently fashioning the spear in a manner that the spear wouldn't break when it was used.  As simple as the culture was that invented the spear, that culture had to understand the importance of quality control.  It wasn't enough to make a spear-shape.  The spear had to be tough, it had to last, it had to be reuseable and it had to be reproduceable if the time ever came when the spear broke.  The amount of value the spear produced in taking down game had to be greater than the amount of time it took to make the spear - else a better spear had to be designed and then made. Young people had to be given tasks that enabled them to understand how the spear was made so that one day they'd be able to do it without help.

All this meant that some people in the tribe had to be left alone and exempt from other tasks for the time it took to make the spear. The spear-maker could not do it alone; he needed a support team that would gather wood to keep the work space warm, to bring him food, to knead out his sore muscles, to give him emotional support to keep working, to forage and obtain food from other sources, and perhaps to find perfect samples from the wild from which other spears could be made. The whole spear-making process - the process of all the work that needed to be done by the tribe - was complicated and deeply involved.  To enable all that needed to be done, a 'cultural' framework had to be made, to describe who did what, when, for how long, in what capacity and to what purpose, as well as a punishment system for those who would not fit into the culture.

We make the mistake of thinking this modern world created this culture of work that we experience, but that's a very limited perception.  All cultures come into existence because of the manner in which work in that culture is required.  Even the most violent of orc cultures would be structured according to the work they did when parties were not actually breaking into their lair. 'Evil' is not a work ethic.  It does not define what a culture is or how a culture manifests.

If you want your world to express itself in terms your players will understand - or if you want to know what your place is in the party - you must begin to redefine the motivations of your world and its habitants by the work they do, rather than the beliefs they hold.  Work comes first; beliefs are a means of motivating a culture towards doing a specific kind of work.  Decide, before giving your inhabitants an alignment, a reason FOR that alignment.

Things will begin to make greater sense thereafter.

Warrior

Continuing on with units from the game of Civilization, we come to the warrior. This, some might say, is more akin to representing the adventure party than the scout ... and yes, they serve more or less the same function. The scout enters a village and learns from it; the villagers offer the scout coin or technology of their own free will. The warrior, on the other hand, marches in and seizes it, while possibly destroying the inhabitants.

I find myself often considering elements of the game which seem to interest no one else ... in the historical sense, for instance, how did the classes derive? Obviously, there were not always paladins or illusionists; these things required advancements in technology both religious and educational (I've already written about how religion was a technology). Even the fighter has skills that obviously didn't exist prior to the existence of fashioned tools.

But then, I run the real world, and thus my world is fitted with a time of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon man, these things not deriving from a magical impulse but rather magic itself being fashioned after effort and invention. Many fantasy worlds simply get around such issues by having the world - and the creatures in it - poofed into existence by magic and the gods, as neatly as the Bible does it. No need to worry about whether or not there were ever cavemen ... there clearly weren't, since man was conceived from the forehead of the DM.

This does bring up a case in point that some may not have grasped, that IF my world did derive from evolution (which I claim it has) and IF gods exist, which is necessary for clerics to have spells, then how does one reconcile the Biblical account of creation with word-of-God statement that I just made about evolution? How indeed?

I don't know, I suppose no one cares but me. I keep mysteries like that close to the chest, in the hopes that someday a party player might have a philosophical bent and might point out these little discrepancies ... and therein lies a most unusual adventure.

The warrior, then, is the result of a technological development. The difference between a proficiency and a non-proficiency results from a methodology of training. How is it the fighter has a d10 for hit points as opposed to a d8 or a d6? Training. Evaluation by a teacher followed by practice to harden, quicken and elasticize the body to make it swing the club so as to cause greater damage. Who improved the training so that four weapons could be learned, and no more than four lessons in the beginning, recognizing the efficiency of that number? How was the groundwork laid so that a level could be gained, and with levels multiple attacks? A steady, slow development of methodology.

In effect, then, the invention of the fighter class (surely the first class) was in turn the invention of the level itself. In my world, it is the ideal that hit points are a buffer between the combatant and the actual damage done by the weapon - that the hit points are the exhaustion experienced by the participant as the fight continues and as the combatant parries the enemy. My sword blocks your blow, so that you in effect 'miss' ... but the next time my sword blocks your blow, I feel the energy of your blow sweep down my arm and through my body. Even though your weapon doesn't touch my skin, I suffer 'damage' because the blow has helped exhaust me.

I recognize many people do not see hit points in this fashion.

Thus, I perceive your training as a fighter affects you this way. You begin with a certain number of hit points that result from your mass - a d8, say, if you weigh 160 lbs.  As you train your way to first level, you begin to gain additional hit points that result from your fighter training.  This takes years, but as you train, the instruction takes hold and you increase in hit points.  Some, the instruction doesn't do very well, and you gain but 1 hit point beyond your mass (but you're still a 1st level fighter); others do better, gaining 4, 6 or 8.  It depends on the individual.   The player character is considered unusual, and starts with 10, the maximum.  Constitution is added to this, and that is the result of training too.

Then, as you march your way through the wilderness, destroying monsters and villages (or whatever you're doing), you gain practical experience.  As you do, there is a nagging in the back of your head, where things your instructors taught you just didn't, or couldn't, sink in until you got into the real world.  You fight for awhile, and then one day you realize that you're dropping your sword every time you try to do this ... you realize how stupid that is, and you change your behavior.  Suddenly, you're able to stop things from getting a handle on you, and overall you feel less exhausted with each combat.  Congratulations, you've just gone up a level.

It begs the question, if the fighter comes into existence with the advancement of warrior training (circa 6-10 thousand years ago), when do the other classes emerge? The cleric seems obvious - with the discovery of meditation, of course. But where does the mage emerge. How early is the development of the thief (surely, very early). What technology produces the assassin, or the monk? Wouldn't the monk also be meditation?

The trick is to recognize that while the ability of the individual to swing a sword does not automatically equal the invention of the training necessary to swing the sword better, the presence of wealth that can be stolen does not automatically produce the thief. Nor does the process of killing in itself produce the assassin. It was necessary for an imaginative development to be made, that encouraged groups of people to do more than steal or praise or hit with the open hand - there had to be a motivation to STANDARDIZE the manner in which those things were done. Standardization resulted from hit-and-miss exploration, which in turn resulted in individuals discarding some techniques in favor of better techniques.

This is how development happens - when there's a joint recognition that a particular manner is obviously inefficient or impractical. This occurs even with D&D editions. A final 'right' answer will always emerge.

Sometimes, this takes a very, very long time.

Scout

If we may continue.

Ignoring rules about what attacks what in Civ IV, or the relative strengths of either, I would argue that the player party more substantially reflects the Scout unit than that of the Warrior. In effect, it sets out from the Keep on the Borderlands, striking out for the distant hills on the horizon, getting first glance of the sea or the desert, encountering 'monsters,' and so on. The Scout moves quickly and it sees much.

Naturally, within D&D, the player party has one principal goal - to find a monster hoarde belonging to monsters who aren't too dangerous, and plunder it. It is a simple-minded goal, and it utterly ignores the reality that if there were monsters just a day and a half away sitting on two or three thousand gold pieces, why has it waited there so conveniently for the player party to arrive?

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the prospect of finding a few ounces of gold per day drove people to risk life and limb and travel thousands of miles to live in the worst conditions imaginable (Klondike, Australian Desert, etc.) ... yet in D&D a local lord won't walk a day and a half to kill off a few dozen goblins and collect up enough gold to pay the mortgage for a month. Apparently, he won't order his steward to either, or be able to count on his fully grown sons. No, that gold will sit out there and rot until the RIGHT party has luckily stumbled across the right hole after a few days of walking along beaten trails. The gentle reader or I should have such luck.

I'm not suggesting it should be any different - that's the game, after all, and without it there wouldn't be much of a game. I've played in and tried my hand at choking off the 'gold supply' (in my woefully mis-spent youth) and come to realize that reality isn't really much recompense for spending Saturday nights at a kitchen table. So yes, gold will be plundered.

But its part of the overall problem that presents, when gold is metaphorically hanging off like ripe fruit in comparison to the clinically difficult work of drawing out plans and sorting out the business of running an efficient settlement. Why struggle and calculate for that gold when its right there for a party to take (clearly, since no NPC wants it).

So the Scout format becomes the default format. There is always another hill, and always the next treasure to be hauled to the next settlement that is someone else's problem to run. So long as it is a great wide world and there's no end to the treasure, there ought to be no end to the player's freebooting lifestyle.

Of course, DMs recognize this freebooting shit begins to get tiresome and dull if there are no consequences imposed along the way. So towns become difficult things to enter and extricate one from, the business of buying and trading and getting your money's worth for goods gets fucked with, followed by endless annoying taxes and picky guardsmen harrassing parties who dare to use public roads as the DM attempts the easiest and most obvious means of making the whole grab-and-take lifestyle have some sort of meaning. "Maybe, perhaps, they'll appreciate their money if the cost of living keeps them at least off-balance."

But of course it all seems very petty and contrived to party players. I wrote a post just recently how I wouldn't put a convenient price tag on treasure, and predictably received some whining responses about how such things are inhibitory towards the game and general good will towards the players. I guess I see the point (though it was whining). Not knowing things sucks.

It's true that applying the fog of war to the cost of gems is a somewhat petty restriction on a player's knowledge base. It's seems less descriminatory, however, if that same fog of war is applied to virtually everything - and in my world it is. I try, to the best of my ability, to keep players terrifyingly in the dark, to make them feel as best I can that moving through my world is something like walking naked in Soho after dark after having paid a stranger to randomly attack you when your guard is down. If that's your goal as a DM, then a party not knowing things is key.

A lot of people would rather not play D&D under those conditions. I understand completely. The door is right over there.

If the party is going to be at all encouraged not to see the world consistently as their personal apple orchard, fabricated by the gods to be stuffed with wooden cliches and frontages without bite, something has to be done about this day and a half shit it takes to find the treasure that must be out there. More importantly, the highest level characters have to find themselves starved a bit to find something worthy of their magnificent level-achieving requirements.

See, the logic is to presume that IF the party has gone up ten levels, then the universe has ALSO gone up ten levels. Suddenly the hill tops are full of chimera and manticores, frost giants blow in with every snow storm and the once-quiet forests and now chock full of killable treants. In short, if it takes 200,000 experience to get the fighter to 10th level, then stuff those forests with slaughter-foes aplenty and stack that gold high. Nevermind that the party used to walk all week to find a dozen orcs with 300 gold ... those are the far-gone days when forests were safe for 1st levels. Today (2 game years later) the hit dice are far thicker on the ground. How else to keep the game healthy and exciting?

What I'm proposing is that where once the party found killing three ogres difficult, and where once they found the treasure from three ogres an abundance, now that the party is 10th level, when they march out to see what adventure they can find I suggest you have them find ... three ogres. With the treasure of three ogres. And after that they should find a dozen orcs, then a few dozen goblins, and so on and so forth.

Why? Because I'm a tremendous asshole, isn't that obvious? Because they should be starved. Because D&D shouldn't be a catering service, or a hotel where room service in the form of monster-served platters should be made available. Oh certainly the really horrific monsters should exist, no question ... but they should be a) a lot farther away than 30 hours walk, and b) unpleasantly hard to find.

Again, why? Won't your players just quit the game?

They would, I suppose, if you weren't very careful to throw them a biscuit once in awhile between slowly weening them from their mother's milk to solid food. Players have to be encouraged to recognize - by demonstration, by finding it out for themselves - that your world is not an endless smorgasbord. Of course it can be if you want it to be, but then it isn't your players who are responsible for seeking nothing but spoils. You're spoiling them. You can keep doing that forever, but you're bound to end up with squalling, grown-up infants. The kind who can't understand why there's no '100gp' etched into the agate gem they've found.

If you're enormously clever, it won't happen overnight. It doesn't take overnight to ascend from first to tenth level ... so why should the realization that the treasures just aren't as meaningful as they used to be? And oh look, here's the other readily acceptable option that offers reward that is more immediately accessible than another four month hike to the middle of nowhere.

Step by step, my brothers. First the scouts go out and search what's beyond the dark. Then there's no more dark, and the scouts just wander around aimlessly, and you stop wasting your time building them. It seems so natural, so right, so ... clear as to why this change happens. You've done this part. It's time to move on to the next.

Settler

Now that the gloves are off I feel free to run wild.

There's something up with blogger. I can't seem to compose in "compose" mode, and the sidebar on this blog is screwed up - its been moved to the bottom of the page, presumably because blogger is rebooting. Been off and on like this all week. But still, I know enough HTML to get by.

I don't know how many gentle readers have played Civilization IV. It isn't that I think the game is the greatest ever made, but the fellows did their homework and it is a great template to talk about a wide variety of things ... not just the things themselves, but even the way those things play out inside the game. For example, the Settler unit. At the beginning of the game, you do not start with a village, you start with a Settler, allowing the freedom to choose what exact spot on the map pleases you for your main city. It's the sort of flexibility that is largely missing from most games.

Settlers and the process of settling have been a central element of storytelling for thousands of years (its the main theme of the Bible's first five books). Regions with vast hinterlands, such as Russia or America, were defined by the process of loading up animals and wagons and 'conquering' the wilderness, and that's how we tend to see settlers now - mostly in terms of the Old World settles the New World formula. Wikipedia makes a distinction between 'settlers' and 'indigineous peoples,' since in most every historical case this has been the central conflict. Joshua and the other Judges and Kings must clear Canaan, the Australians must push off the Aborigines, the Europeans seize lands from the Amerindians and so on.

But of course, in reality the indiginous peoples were settlers too, going back a long, long time ... and they did not set out to conquer new lands for fame and wealth, but because the old lands were full of people and not enough game. At some point, a given clan is too successful, gains too many offspring, and a change in the environment causes the local game to drop substantially in number ... and so part of the clan acknowledges that things must be better elsewhere, they pick up everything they'll need and try their luck with the next valley over. Or the next valley beyond that, until they find a valley that's empty and has enough meat and vegetable matter to support them. Thus it is that all mankind springs forth from Australia until they occupy nearly everywhere.

The question is, why is the settler ideal not more central to D&D? Wagon trains certainly made good stories in their day, and we still like that motif for ships heading out to other planets. Has it occurred to anyone that very rarely does someone make an adventure - or initiate one, in a sandbox - that involves getting a load of settlers out of this place and into one far away?

One thing about the wagon train ... we are a lot more interested in the 'getting there' part of the story than in the actual settling. Getting there sounds interesting - fight off some natives, some animals, lose a person or two to disease, lose a wagon over a cliff, have sex with a girl and so on. The actual settling part sounds boring and doesn't hold our attention, so the movie always ends with the expected shot of the new village, colony, what have you, and everyone happy and holding hands while they look out at the camera from their pile of supplies and their hastily established temporary shelter. We don't care what happens next. There's probably a lot of work to be done, but we're satisfied the drama is over.

In Civ IV, when your old village creates a new settler, the first thing you want to do is get that Settler established in a new location so that it can start building and so you can pop a military unit on top of it. Though the Settler climbs over hill and dale, across rivers, through jungles, striving towards the oasis in a desert or the uninhabited coastline - you get NO feeling whatsoever in that game that your Settler is on an 'adventure.' The game gives you the big picture, that Settlers are there to seize and expand territory, to build cities, to enrich the state, etc. About the only drama you feel in the actual travelling is that the Settler is vulnerable and very easily made dead ... so you don't waste time about it and you don't send the Settler off alone.

Seems to me there's a lot of ground there for player characters in a sandbox wandering about trying to think of something meaningful to do. But it must be understood that in a medieval society settlers don't just sprout from the roads. Travel WAS dangerous, and most people - even if they did want to move on - would be loathe to do so.

So when you conceive of your "Borderland" adventure, the very simple one where the party stumbles out into the wilderness to kill things the law doesn't protect, to bring them back in order to buy more stuff to kill more things to buy even more stuff to kill even more things, consider a venture into the heart of empire, the steady gathering of people to make good settlers. The selection process to find a willing blacksmith, armorer, assayer or competant sage; the purchase and allocation of goods and transport; the clearing of the road throught the kingdom, as its necessary to pass by towns with your charged populace without rousing the panic and anger of the locals; and finally the arrival at the borderland, the establishment of a piece of land, the struggle to feed all these people and their necessary defense from what used to be bags of water that were killed for treasure (humanoids like orcs and so on). Of course, for all that, you'll need a DM who can see beyond split-open-bag = experience ... and you'll need to realize that the art of settlement is more complicated than just cutting down trees and planting.

Part of the real crime perpetrated against D&D is the idea that it must be a linear arrangement of events, like the course from the beginning to the end of a story. Or even that it is a host of scattered cameos, isolated onto themselves and without much import beyond the fact that they were interesting for a time. D&D has the potential to look into the big picture, too, the art of development and creating a personal footprint on the world, to change the world, not just be a passenger in it. How would it be if you could get out of your seat in a movie, walk onto the screen, slap the stupid actor carrying the idiot ball, point a pistol at the people you prefer and MAKE them apply themselves to something more substantial? "No, no, we're not going this way with what we know here, we're going that way - you, get some guns up here, put that girl on a goddamned train and someone get me a sandwich! We have work to do."

D&D is hands on. The work is the drama, not just getting there. You'll never realize the full potential of this game until you, the player, learn that you ARE the Settler.

'Course, you're the warrior too, but that's another post.

Work Boat

I have come to a reconciliation.

To date, I have written 75 individual Civ IV technology posts. This is far more than I think anyone expected, and they have taken me much longer that I would have (I wrote the first one, Fishing in July of '09.

The next post scheduled is, and has been for some time now, 'Combustion' ... and I have four times (including a couple of days ago) sat down intending to write it, only to lose all interest almost immediately. The difficulty is that I am pressed into writing post after post now that mostly talks about, "What is a D&D world like if this technology doesn't exist." That was interesting for awhile, but now that I've wrote something like a dozen such posts, I'm rather tired of it.

So, I may not write any more along that vein. I don't know. I tend to get things like that stuck in my craw, and eventually return to them. For the time being, I'm prepared to let it go ... so that I can pick up writing the kind of posts I want to write.

It is not my intention to stop posting in this category. I just mean to do what I had always meant to do when finally writing the 'Future Tech' post - I intend to go back to the beginning and talk about other elements that are highlighted in that game. For example, units.

Above is the lowly workboat.  A purist might insist that I ought to begin with either the worker, the settler or the warrior, since those units do not technically require any technology ... and I do need to write posts for each. However, I'm nostalgic, and way back four years ago I started with fishing. It feels right to start with fishing again.

A few notes first, however, about my intentions. Later on I'll be writing posts about spearmen, swordsmen and a host of other military units, and I know I'm going to get hounded for what I don't know about the use of those weapons or what people used them or how they used them, etc. It wouldn't matter how great an expert I was, the hounding would occur nonetheless, because those are the sorts of things - like most knee-jerk memes on the net - that get people with a little bit of knowledge stirred up.

So while I will try to be accurate, and while I will listen and consider criticism - I have to learn too, after all - my goal is not to provide a scholarly thesis on the various units in question. If you want to know more about work boats, fishing boats, etc., I suggest you spend as much time as you like reading scholarly theses on rafts, coracles and canoes, which are available to you. My mandate is D&D ... and any background material I write on the subject is aimed towards that mandate.

The earliest archeological evidence we have for fishing boats extends back to 7000-8000 BCE, but obviously rafts and the like would have existed tens of thousands of years earlier. A log, after all, straddled by a well-balanced angler, whose descendants learned in time to dig out and make sturdier, is the easiest sort of boat and will get you across a fair-sized lake if you're committed to it. Hands make good paddles. Reasonably, we can probably guess that using a log as a boat to cross water predates cro-magnon humans, probably going back to the beginnings of neanderthals a half a million years ago. So 'early' applications don't really mean much.

The reasons for applying a boat to water seem obvious, but there's things to learn from the obvious, so let's look at two such reasons. The first, to travel, and the second, to free oneself of the reeds and tangles that make the shoreline a poor place to fish. No doubt it soon became evident to those cultures able to experiment with fishing offshore was to learn that this is where the fish were and where the weeds weren't. The discovery would do more than simply increase the daily take of one fisherman - it meant more fish for the whole village, which meant more villagers, and ultimately more villages all together, pressed upon any lake big enough to supply more than a single clan.

Consider a lake a dozen miles in area, able to supply enough food for ten or twenty permanent clans, all in the space where ordinarily only one clan would be moving constantly, trusting to luck to find food. This would mean different clans competing over the same smaller area, jostling against one another, watching one another's technique and learning from a far wider source of experimentation than might normally occur in an open savanna or highland. Socially, too, there would be a greater emphasis on setting boundaries, trading potential sexual partners from clan to clan, deputations to other clans for power support, a demn for sophisticated diplomacy and the first efforts to avoid immediate and brutal conflict upon clan meetings. Think of what this means 40 to 60 thousand years ago, 2,500 generations before the rise of traditional farming - because fish are, by far, the most reliable natural game in existence - a much more reliable and dependent a resource, which in turn encourages greater interdependence among isolated tribal clans, or bands.

Long, long before civilizations rose on the Nile, the Indus or the Yangtze, very small clusters of human culture intensified in places we hardly consider central, upon lakes in Africa first, and later in all the parts of Europe, particularly France, Austria and Sweden. In regions where the sea was shallow and islands pressed together, such as Denmark, the coasts of India, Indonesia and ultimately Polynesia, fishing cultures flourished and became 'cultural' ... that is, identified by independent, consistent traditions that marked those areas despite the lack of things we would usually consider technologically necessary for the development of a 'nation.' These cultures did not have kings in the sophisticated sense and the residents did not develop distinct personal status ... but the cultures themselves existed nonetheless.

The application of that is to recognize that a lake or a seashore in your world is more than merely a bunch of people fishing, or participating in an industrial process. The cohesion that forced primitive tribesmen to resolve differences by talking rather than war some sixty thousand years ago (because after the first hundred wars, where everyone wants to go on staying put instead of moving to the next valley, it gets tiresome) still exists in any traditional fishing culture you care to stumble upon today - even in places like Brittany or Newfoundland. The motivation is to fish, and to encourage all else not to impede upon the fishing, and to stand together - against no matter what - because we think alike, we act alike and we want the same things.

It is a sort of cavalier attitude that says, if you're in trouble, we're prepared to give you a hand because that's our way; but if you're here merely on your own volition, then please go immediately. At once, contributary and generous, AND violently xenophobic against outsiders, depending on the circumstances. Blow ashore on a wrecked boat and deserted, and you'll be invited in as a brother. Land in a perfectly good vessel and find the doors slammed in your face.

It isn't just the work boat that matters in context here, it is the sort of influence the boat has upon the culture that grows around its use ... and how that culture eventually expanded best along rivers, where not just food, but travel was encouraged also. The means to move a hundred miles up and downstream meant all of the above, with even greater emphasis on the practicalities of trade and the expansion of knowledge from one cluster of fishing villages to the next. The reason Egypt and other rivers advanced to the fore was not merely because of the abundance of food, or the intensification of agriculture (that would come later), but because thousands of humans were bound together geographically and, more importantly, nutritionally, encouraging a creative/inventive pool that knocked transhumerance and other hunter-based cultures into a cocked hat (which was a long way from being invented) 40,000 years before the first farm was ingeniously planted. This is the crux of human development, that is constantly overlooked but represents the critical mass of progress - the more people working on a problem, the more likely one particular well-meaning individual will hit upon a single clever moment of creation ... then emulated by hundreds, then thousands of other individuals.

The work boat, the simple process of getting to the fish, and thus having more to eat, begins a train of events that precedes everything we know about history ... and so subtly that now, as you read this, you realize you've never clearly thought of it before.

Medicine

In my youth I had been raised a Lutheran.  I remember having a conversation with a minister, where I brought up concerns I had about heaven.  Wouldn't I miss all the people that were left on earth, I wondered; and since I had been told that in heaven "all would be made clear," I asked, what if I wasn't happy with the truth?  The minister, as all good ministers will, also explained that in heaven, this perfect knowledge of everything would also make me feel good about the truth, whatever it was, and that I would not be sad for those I left behind, because I would 'understand' the reason.

Which would mean, I suggested, that I wouldn't be 'me' anymore.  I'd be so changed, that I'd lose everything that I believed now and that would be like being brainwashed, completely and utterly.  The minister, naturally, did not understand.  He perceived it as a 'healing.'  I was not comforted.  If being healed meant having my mind wiped and a new program installed, I'd rather be sick.

And I say this, writing now, sitting in a robe and suffering from some kind of cold.  Serendipity, that I would be writing about medicine today.

What I could not explain to the minister, because I was quite young and didn't know it yet, is that I am the product of my trauma - and trauma is damage.  If something happens to me that distresses my body or my psyche, it leaves a 'scar' that does not simply evaporate.  I'm thinking of the five inch scar I have on the top of my knee, which I obtained from five years ago when I snapped my quadriceps tendon while on a diving board.  That's the tendon shown in the image.  I succeeded in breaking it completely by running along the diving board, leaping, and landing on the end of the board with the intention of getting height to do a jackknife - a dive I'd done hundreds of times.  Only on this occasion, my right foot slipped on the board, and rather than bounding off the end, my body continued in a straight-down direction, doubling up my left leg under my left hip.  The knee overextended and the tendon snapped, and I fell into the pool with my left leg effectively 'hanging' off my femur.

The next day I was in surgery, and two days later I was released.  The knee, five years later, is pretty much 100% ... or perhaps 99%.  I'm no spring chicken, and both my knees tend to ache anyway.

Am I over it?  Oh, sure.  At least in the sense that I'm willing to dive again, or run or take part in physical activity.  But am I completely untouched by the event?  No.  No, that would be impossible.  I am not immune to the psychological effects of suddenly finding myself helpless and sinking in deep water ... nor to the conception of instantaneous terrible pain.  No one is.  If you've ever been in a car accident, then you know how fast they happen.  Bang!  And its over.

Your characters, however ... being fictional and not real, are little affected by trauma.  YOU, the player, may feel a bit of trauma at having lost something that was precious to you - a character, a +3 mace falling from your hand and lost in a gorge, that sort of thing - but it isn't going to compare with a real car accident or a spontaneously required knee operation.  Hit points are lost, hit points are gained, and there's no psychological loss.  If anyone out there really wants to simulate combat - if they really want to LARP - then they should pay a massive bruiser to sit at the table whose job it is to rise, walk over to someone who's just been hit for 10 damage and clock them across the jaw, or perhaps just thump them hard in the chest.  Bruiser cracks his knuckles ... player experiences trauma.

Somehow, I don't think it would catch on.  It would, however, really cause players to reassess the nature of combat and its place in the game.

It's foolish to think that we simply 'get over' the terrible traumatic events of our lives.  What we do is adjust.  We fix our patterns of behavior to compensate for the mistakes we've made, to ensure as far as possible that we don't make those mistakes again.  Sometimes, we adjust by increasing our aggressiveness.  Sometimes, we adjust without being conscious of it, fearing a particular highway, or choice of venue ... and we can get very surly and defensive if that fear is either identified or discussed.

We'd rather not be afraid ... but we are and that's the fact of it.  It took forever for the psychological community to finally accept that post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, largely because so many people respond to it in ways that socially we identify as 'chosen.'  Anger, resentment, avoidance - even the so-called pussification of the male sex - are things we don't associate with illness, they are things we presume are character flaws.  More often than not, however, fury is a response, not a decision.  On that, we're still trying to educate the masses.

Staying with the characters, however ... there are a great many psychological features that don't play out in their design, simply because they don't suffer from traumatic feedback.  They can afford to be 'heroes' because at heart they are wooden, two-dimensional false fronts, like the buildings that feature in old films (particularly westerns, satirized in Blazing Saddles).

Consider, if the gentle reader can, the effects of a stranger in a dungeon stepping up, catching your fighter by surprise with a military pick and breaking your shoulder blade.  In D&D, naturally, you respond by making a few ticks on your page, snatching up your 20-sided and swinging back.  In life, you may yet do that - but psychologically you're never going to forget that moment.  You will be traumatized ... and you'll never be able to walk down a dungeon hall in the same way.  You would resist suggestions to go down some corridors; you may even act irrationally and violently against other party-members suggesting that a dungeon adventure may be a good idea.  It doesn't matter that you're healed ... the after effect remains despite your present condition.  That is the very definition of PTSD.

Imagine, then, the effects of some spells!  If a military pick is a frightening object to be struck with, what would it be like to find yourself suddenly immolated by a fireball?  Only to then look around you and see three or four of your friends or associates dead and gently smoldering?  Fear?  Potentially ... but potentially also a rabid, insensate hatred of magic in every conceivable form.  Look at the effects of the hatred that arose surrounding drunk drivers ... and the social stigma attached to same.  How would it be with magic users?  Would you be able to even tolerate the magic user in your own party?  Knowing, always, every day, what he or she might do at any given second.  Talk about bouts of anxiety, distrust or aggression.  How long would it be before the fighter was being held down by the cleric and the monk, as he screamed, "I'm going to kill it, I'm going to kill the mage before he kills us all!"

Someone, I'm sure, will suggest that a cure light wounds spell would cure the spirit as well as the body ... and to that I say, we are back to the heaven example at the outset of this post.  Curing the spirit is a convenient gaming explanation for enabling a hardcore adventuring crew to go on fighting without any lasting emotional effects - but it is a terrible, awful form of brainwashing.  Perhaps, just for the sake of deepening the characters in the game, it might be better to consider that 'depth' of character begins with comprehension of what these characters have gone through.  Not just as stick figures, but as breathing, living beings.  Beings that understand that for some things, medicines don't really exist ... and that their lack defines us as who we are.  Not sticks.  Not heroes.  But flesh-and-blood beings possessed of doubt.

I don't expect anyone to embrace that.  Still, give it some thought.  And please accept my apologies for not writing the expected, long dissertation of the practice of applying herbalistic techniques in a D&D campaign.  Strictly speaking, that didn't sound very interesting.  Because, technologically speaking, the development of medicine in human history has almost wholly been about healing us physically; there still lacks any desirable means of healing us emotionally ... except, perhaps, the tremendous healing quality of sitting around on a fine evening playing a game with friends.  Preferably without the trauma ... er, drama.

Electricity

This may not be the post you're looking for.

I might write a post about the opportunities offered by electricity in a fantasy world; I might essay to explain how and where there are differences between traditional electricity and magical-generated electricity; I might pinpoint the development of electricity over the last five hundred years, or talk about ways to modify Volta's Pistol with magic to make it a death weapon extraordinaire.  I might ... but I haven't the motivation.

As these posts deepen into the realms of higher technology, it becomes more valuable to discuss what the lack of a particular technology has upon the D&D world, rather than what's added.  As we dwell in a world where electricity is as pervasive as air and water, we should give some time and contemplation to a world where none exists.  After all, none did, and very recently.

The first comprehension is always the modern presence, and therefore the medieval absence, of light.  After all, as the gentle reader looks around, you're surrounded by 'artificial' light, quite probably all of it electrically based (for all I know you're burning a candle right now).  You're reading a computer that throws light, and whether you're sitting in the glow of little vampire lights on your tower, your mouse or your phone, or in a room flooded with flourescents, you can't help but think that if there were no electricity, it would be a lot darker right now.  If you're outside, then you have to consider that its going to be much darker soon.

The absence of all that light is going to mean a lot more than you can't see what you're doing ... its also going to mean you're doing a lot less.  Most definitely, either entertaining or educating yourself, the two mainstays of human activity when not actually working to keep yourself alive - which of course, you're going to do almost exclusively in daylight.  In the 19th century, there was widespread working at night prior to electricity, mostly due to the increased availability of burnable fuel - coal-tar gas, petroleum gas, and even whale oil, the production of which leapt once steam manufacturing increased the rates at which ships could be built in order to hunt for whales to find the oil that would keep the lamps lit while making more things.

But this is all Industrial Revolution stuff, and we don't play D&D during the Industrial Revolution.  We don't even play it during the enlightenment, when newpapers became widely available, which became the primary way in which people educated themselves in the late 17th century.  Newpapers, one will take note, don't throw light, and therefore were expensive to read outside of daylight hours.  That's a difficult thing to consider ... that if you wanted to do something at night, you had to worry about more than your ability to do so - you had to worry about how much it would cost you.  Burning a candle, which you must replace when it gutters out, is more tactile than a bill you receive online; you didn't burn them unless it was important.  We love to tell stories about Abraham Lincoln reading books in his cabin by candlelight, as though he were poor ... when in fact, his family was doing awful well to be able to keep a kid of theirs in burnable fuel.

We so casually conceive of a party sitting around a fire in the evening, after a long day's march, eating haunch of roast beast, whittling stakes or whetting a sword, that we tend to forget that once the sun's gone down, there really wouldn't be much else a party could do.  The popularity of story telling wasn't a motif of the period because stories are really cool and gosh darn, the people just loved them, it was because your primary source of entertainment during those hours when you weren't doing the things that needed light could only be done with your ears.

How quaint and soulful it is to imagine people sitting around a fire, listening to the elders tell tales of the past, the family gathered together in the glowing light, so much cheaper than candles.  And how easy is it to forget that most of those stories were out and out lies, and that they included things like that the Jews murdered Christ, or that people who didn't suck up to the Church daily were going to hell, or that children who did not obey their parents would grow sick and die because God wanted it that way.  Far more of the tales were socially-motivated lies and propaganda, intended to encourage people to obey and act in accordance with social norms, than cute stories about fluffy bunnies and princesses in love.  The reader will get a far better idea of what sort of 'stories' were told by sitting in a bar in Bowling Green, Kentucky, than meeting with the Beatrix Potter fan club in Rye, New York.  The world was a nasty, dismissive, oppressive place, and you can be damn sure the elders made their younger clanspeople well aware of it.

Education - of the sort where you learn something that's true and you can compare notes about it - was everlastingly rare.  It was available only to those people who did not have to spend every hour of daylight supporting themselves ... because they had others supporting them.  The reason why so much science and social thought developed among the English clergy for hundreds of years was because, beyond having to produce a sermon once a week, there was plenty of time for those people during daylight hours ... when it cost nothing to read, write, experiment, produce artistic works, etc.  And if you didn't happen to have the will yourself to do this sort of thing, but you did have a lot of time during the day, you amused yourself by patronizing some other creative soul with your wealth; this meaning, naturally, that you could go around and bug him once or twice a week, getting the feel for creativity without the need for discipline or talent.

The ignorant stayed ignorant for century after century not because the various powers kept the knowledge from them, but because there weren't enough daylight hours to indulge in things that didn't stop you from being killed by starvation or the weather.

Not that candles produced in the 1300s very bright, either.  If you think you're getting a feel for the medieval atmosphere by turning off the lights for your game and lighting a few candles, think again.  Candles for most people weren't made from the same stuff as your candles, and beeswax was wildly expensive.  Candles were largely made from tallow - pig tallow, if you were lucky and doing fairly well.  Otherwise, you got by on vegetable tallow, which burned quickly and did not exactly light up a room.  Additionally, it took a lot of work, and so it was reserved for particularly important times of the day - ten minutes a day, perhaps, for eating.  Certainly not for reading.

So consider that the Bible doesn't offer much solace during the long hours of night ... so logically, if the devil was going to get you, it would be when you couldn't scan a few tracts in his face.  Of course, the common people didn't read, and didn't own Bibles, which weren't written in the vernacular anyway ... what would be the point?  If Gutenberg had run around making bibles for the poor in the 1450s, even in German, French, Italian and English, there was no light to read from them.  We like to think that once the Bible was finally translated, everyone ran out and got a copy ... but of course, that really only happened when reading around the table became an option two hundred years later.

Let's go back to your ears, now, and consider the influence of electricity on those.  What are you hearing right now?  Energy, going on all around you.  And it is always there.  If we get rid of the blower in your office, or the furnace, there would still be the soft whine of your computer.  There's always some noise in your life, because something is always humming or whining, somewhere nearby.  You may not be able to hear it now ... but if we mask out the louder things you don't pay attention to, there would still be the quieter things you would learn to hear also.

In fact, unless you've taken deliberate steps to leave every kind of device behind, you've probably not been without them your whole life.  Even in the country, you can hear the lamps you're carrying around your campsite; the distant cars on the highway.  When I used to spend some of my teenage nights with a telescope in a farmer's field outside a cabin development near Sylvan Lake in the early 80s ... I could yet hear the cars on the secondary highway three miles away, even though it was midnight.  It's very hard now to find somewhere truly remote - and truly quiet - and we can't begin to imagine it.

James Fenimore Cooper's inevitable twig snapping would have been like a gunshot to ears that were not assailed day and night by decibal levels in the triple digits.  Even a double digit sound would be rare off the guild streets of a town, or where people weren't gathered.  There would have been little need for a town crier to cry quite so loud, since there would be less to cry over than you standing up to shout politics at your university's Speaker's Corner.

So ask yourself - are night watches really necessary?  Parties are so used to setting them up, assuming that creeping up on a sleeping person is as easy in the 15th century as it is today ... despite the fact that six hundred years ago, it really was freaking quiet.  The lack of electricity, which runs everything with a little bit of noise, would attune a party to recognizing every imaginable sound within a hundred yards just as if it were a light shining in their faces.  A thief would have to be a lot better at moving silently then than he or she is now.  There's no ambient noise to cover it up.

Which is why, I think, I've never liked the thieves' hear noise ability.  Honest, this ought to be someone who automatically does it ... or at least, there would have to be considerable mitigating circumstances that denied the success.  10%?  You might as well argue that I only have a 10% chance of seeing a light when its turned on.

This has been going on for awhile, and I have to cut it off.  I'll just put in the reader's mind a few thoughts about how much of a day's fare was eaten raw because building a fire and cooking isn't as practical as running a stove, even in the house.  Or how much more comfortable a party member would be building a fire, having built them every day of their lives since infancy (which I admit, I hadn't considered).  Or that the ends of your fingers were probably burnt a hundred times from handling metal pots buried in coals.  Sex would be almost a completely tactile experience - you could go decades without ever seeing your wife or husband naked, not because they denied it ... but because except for dangerous forays into the isolated woods, nakedness only happened in the dark.  There are other reasons the 18th century invented porn, as light because more available to all.

Just general food for thought.  I'm sure others could come up with more.  Remove electricity from the field of human comfort and habit, and its truly hard to envision what the world really would have been like.  You almost certainly cannot, not in the environment where you live.

Fascism

There are times when I must admit that I grew up in a very different world from the one that exists now.  In the spring and summer of 1978, when I was coming out of Grade 8, I read the book Mein Kampf.  There was a copy in my junior high school library, and when the end of year came and I still hadn't finished the book, I purchased a copy at a local bookstore.  It wasn't hard to find.

Of course, I did not understand much of it.  I comprehended the geographical references just fine, I had a strong working knowledge of both the 1st and 2nd World Wars (because I was a boy and I was fascinated with those things from even a much younger age) and I knew what hatred was.  What I did not understand was the context ... why anyone would write these things, believe them, pursue them.  Like anyone today, I knew about Hitler, I knew about his rise to power and I knew about his demise ... they were making movies about it all the time, and there was practically a Hitler section at the W.H. Smith's at the mall.

Still, most of the events and circumstances - the Weimar Republic, the inflation, the psychological effect of losing the war, even the history of the Jewish people in Europe - were things unknown to me.  I knew the war; I did not know the people.

I was very affected by the book.  Mostly, I was concerned about how appealing it was, particularly since at the time I was a mostly abused, brighter-than-my-classmates nerd who had already learned how easy it was to lie and get away with it.  Frighteningly easy.  Mein Kampf did not encourage me to rush into the arms of a fascist ideology; it scared me right away from it.  I think probably, had I not run across the book, I could have conceived of some of its contents on my own ... which may have had more frightening consequences, as I might have embraced those ideas from a place of anger and ignorance.

If you have not seen the 2008 German movie The Wave I would strongly recommend it.  It is a better film than the original 1981 movie, which was based on the 1981 novel by Todd Strasser, which in turn was based upon the actual experiment performed by Ron Jones, a teacher in Palo Alto California, in 1973.  According to Wikipedia's page on The Third Wave,

"Jones started a movement called "The Third Wave" and told his students that the movement aimed to eliminate democracy.  The idea that democracy emphasizes individuality was considered as a drawback of democracy, and Jones emphasized this main point of the movement in its motto: 'Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride.' "

The effects ... as the gentle reader can obtain from the last page linked above ... were educational.  The German movie goes past the reality, but the presentation was excellent.

It is the speed with which the movement took effect that is the most terrifying element of the experiment, which cannot help but demonstrate for anyone willing to look hard and thoughtfully at the results how deep is the craving for unification.  It helps one to get a sense of the preparedness people have in assigning legitimacy to something which, on the surface, seems honest and positive.

Models upon which armies were built throughout the 19th century took advantage of the psychological acceptance of human beings in this regard to compile the forces that massed themselves together and marched to their deaths in World War 1.  While it may seem impossible to comprehend how so many hundreds of thousands could willingly take part in the kind of mass butchery that was that war (quite different from the technological struggle of WW2), the fact was that the armies themselves were convinced they were behaving rightly and that they were spending their lives for a good and noble cause.  That nothing good came out of it was unimportant; veterans continue - have continued - to believe that something DID come out of it, something that must have been for the good because it was believed to be for the good.  It is as fine an example of cognitive dissonance as ever was, celebrated annually every November 11th by people who did not even fight in it.

Hitler's Mein Kampf did nothing more than tap into the groundwork of the 19th century's fabrication of mass armies, mixing in the added special ingredient of an imaginary good purpose towards which those armies could be put.  The imagination of that purpose tapped into something that had been there all along as well - the fear of prejudice, the fear that is so easily turned to hatred when all else fails to resolve it.

But why did it take so long to hit upon the formula?  Or technology, if you will, since we are talking about the technologies described in the game Civilization IV.  Why is there no fascism until the early 20th century?  The armies were there.  The social behaviorism of humans was there.  The racism was there.  What was the combining factor?

A better question:  Why does D&D go all the way back to the medieval age, and why does that time hold a romance the 18th century never can?  Why are roleplaying games based upon the French or English or American revolutions not more popular?  Why do we not pretend to play mauling street toughs on the streets of New York in 1810?

It is not merely that the Industrial Revolution made everything squalid and unpleasant, and we want no part of that.  Industrialization made possible the plentiful distribution of weapons and uniforms, the educational apparatus that could encourage everyone in the same country to grow up the same, think the same, have the same aspirations and respect the same peoples.  Industrialization established a rigidity to life that transformed us into ... well, neurotic freaks.  Waking up at the same time, marching to work in the same way, collecting our paycheques together and celebrating in the same establishments ... and all the time with our minds turned towards a reconciliation of the ambition that was installed in us in school and our utter failure to achieve what was expected.

We are neurotic, in a manner that no one pre-Revolution ever was.  Think about the symptoms:  anxiety, moodiness, worry, envy, jealousy ... we are a patchwork of failure and fear of failure, of the resentment of success, the fear of being unloved, the fear that we will be expected to 'love' others we simply never will and so on.  As biological creatures we are a fucking mess - and something that arises that seems to untangle that mess, even for an hour, is manna from heaven.  Why was Ron Jones' experiment embraced so heartily by children almost immediately?  Not because it meant they did not have to think, no; it was because it gave them something to think about that seemed pure and fresh and CLEAR.  Compare that to what your parents and teachers tell you about getting an education and getting a career.

D&D provides that exact same escape.  It offers a universe where the principles are understandable and without equivocation.  I am a fighter.  I fight.  I am an adventurer.  I adventure.  I do not march, I do not follow, I do not take orders from above, not even from the Dungeon Master.  I want freedom and I want an total absence of moral responsibility for my actions.  Kill orcs?  Please, yes, more.  Abscond with heaps of treasure?  That's nice, thank you.  Ignore the beggars, slash the throats of guards, steal and pillage?  Oh my, feels good.

Only I said at the top of this that I am very aware that the world is changing.  You can't buy a copy of Mein Kampf quite so easily now.  And there are many, many more influences in the game telling you that a moral free-for-all isn't acceptable any more.  There is a steady, subtle instigation of social responsibility that is continuously invested into the game, most of it under the disguise of those seeking status and respectability.

Perhaps they're right.  I've just written a post associating our social predilection for fascism with the game of D&D as it was originally played ... and unless you've stopped reading, your head is spinning with the socially-inculcated insistence that the association simply ISN'T possible.  No doubt you're going back through the words, looking for the sleight of hand that I've pulled to make it seem reasonable.

Well, I won't cheat you.  The sleight is simply this.  People frustrated with the pursuit of traditional success - and most people are, since they don't achieve it - are ripe for the influence of fascism.  And people frustrated with the social stratum that dictates they must be rigid round pegs are ripe for the influence of D&D.  Once you accept that the first half of the equation isn't an opinion, it is psychologically reproduceable.  And you are not magically exempt from the dictates of your psychology.  You're the sort of social deviant to which D&D appeals.  You may be vulnerable to other things that have equal appeal.

Now, you may hurrumph and tell me how full of it I am.  You ought to be frightened.  You ought to be re-evaluating your motivations.  But that is only going to contribute to your neuroses, and lets face it:   YOU HATE your neuroses.  You hate them so much, in fact, that you'll do just about anything to get around them.

Yes, that's right.  Anything.

Artillery

To begin, we must first acknowledge the difference between "artillery" and "engines of war."  It is more than just a matter of scale and distance - it must also be taken into account that artillery lobs complex shells that are capable of doing more than merely blunting an enemy fortification.  Artillery creates fire, it creates shrapnel ... and most importantly of all, it creates smoke.  Engines of war are a complex arrangement of mechanical applications; artillery is a much more systematized weapon, applying scientific methods that require physics as well as geometry in order to promote accuracy.

D&D weapons, even magic, rely almost entirely upon line of sight, which with weapons includes a near-flat trajectory (direct fire), and with magic means a perfectly flat trajectory (almost anti-physical in nature).  While long bows employed at Crecy and Agincourt clearly were not fired to produce a flat trajectory, but were mass fired blind at opponents beyond friendly lines, there are no rules for the in D&D that I know of.  Ask your DM - what's your chance of pulling twenty bowmen together and then having an effective attack by firing blind into the goblin's fortification?  Don't expect the DM to assign a 5% chance per bowman.

Artillery is entirely about indirect fire, produced with frightening accuracy.  Airburst artillery, in which the shell explodes above the ground and fires shrapnel into every possible axis, is so deadly in fact that most military situations would prefer not to use it (as it tends to kill defenders and attackers indescriminately).  It is something like a mechanical fireball ... except that someone can load the gun again and produce the same effect about 90 seconds later.

Artillery can also lay groundsmoke so that it covers the battlefield, making the blind indirect method of artillery use more effective by reducing direct fire attacks.  This is why they say, on the battlefield, artillery is king.

The cannon precedes the modern artillery piece, and is the first frustration for a game that wants to include "gunpowder" but not "modern warfare."  See, the trouble is that cannons produce modern warfare by blasting holes in everything and forcing towns to reproduce themselves as large, flat geometric shapes, as early as the 16th century.  Battle ceases to be the sort of thing that you see in ancient Rome, and starts to be a ridiculous free for all in which humans are cut to pieces because they happen to be standing in the wrong spot (there were cannons at Crecy and Agincourt too, though we tend to forget that).  Being slaughtered as twenty cannon balls filled with shot and gunpowder explode randomly next to the party tends to ruin the whole joy of battle, so many campaigns say 'yes' to gunpowder pistols, while casually forgoing their cannon grandfathers.  But many campaigns also avoid mass struggles in general, so it works out.

Funny thing about cannon and direct fire.  They aren't.  Cannonballs do not fly straight (thought it was assumed that they would), and for a time (more than a century) it was tremendously frustrating to aim them.  It was not merely enough to raise or lower the cannon, or shift it left or right ... the balls themselves were made of stone or partial iron or whatever large block could be stuffed into the breech, and as such one cannon "ball" did not fly exactly like another.  Even small imperfections would mean missing at a distance of a hundred yards, as any major leaguer can tell you about a baseball over 90 feet.

This problem launched considerable scientific inquiry into ballistics, air resistance, mass displacement and so on ... but James Burke can catch you up on all that (for the short jump up, watch from 13:00 to 19:00).

Which brings me up to the usual question about magic and history.  One can easily say, well the problems of understanding missiles curving through the air can be solved with magic.  Yes, that's true ... if the magicians are aware that missiles curve through air.  We did not fully understand that they did, or how they did, in history until after 1500 (Tartaglia's date of birth - see link).  So why would mages in the 11th century not automatically assume that objects did as Aristotle said they did?  Would not magic - for a couple of centuries at least - frustrate itself trying to force cannonballs to fly straight, until it became evident that non-magicians were wreaking bloody havoc by simply allowing them to fly in a curved fashion, thus employing artillery far better than the magician's could?

Is this not the sort of thing that would have been happening continuously?  We can't assume that magicians always knew the truth about natural physics going back four or five thousand years.  We MUST assume that they were ignorant of quite a number of physical principles, which had yet to be discovered by Aristotle or Al-hazam or Tartaglia.  Which would mean that for a time, magic was designed to compensate for our inability to do this particular thing, which was then later understood, forcing magic - like any other technology - to adapt itself and change.  Which would mean there were spells that had been created for the purpose of making a two crowns of different metals displace the exact same amount of water, even though they were technically of different volumes.

Perhaps it was Aristotle himself who invented the spell ... and thus blew understanding the physical principal.  By constantly "fixing" inconsistencies in physics, magic might possibly have increased the general ignorance of the upper classes, so that it would really be a fighter type or a monk, and NOT a spellcaster, who solved these things despite magic's insistence to the contrary.

Magic might have made us all dumber.