Numbers

Please excuse me, dear reader; I'm going to use this blog as a diary for a moment.

I'm going to talk about politics ... but then, no, I'm not going to talk about politics.  Rather, I'm going to talk about why politics don't really matter.  I expect no one to listen.  But just now, I finally obtained a copy of one of my favourite all time speeches from a movie, a very, very obscure Quebecois language film from 1986 called Le Déclin de l'empire américain.

A little preparation before providing the speech.  These last six or eight years, there has been a sentiment growing that because this or that political group does a thing, it "destroys" or "takes down" or "ends" some part of government, or a political belief system, or the course of history or gawd knows what else.  And this has motivated a great many people to feel frightened, or livid, or the need to lash out, or otherwise suspend all faith in the world.  But see, in reality, all this sound and fury is just nonsense peddled by the media in order to peddle the media.  It doesn't mean anything.  And there is evidence for this.

Here is the quote, said out the outset of the film in Quebecois French.  I'm going to provide the original French first, because I have readers on this blog who speak French as their first language; and yes, some in Quebec:

"L'histoire n'est pas une science exacte. C'est une enquête continue sur la relation entre le passé et le présent. Il s'agit de comprendre comment les événements passés façonnent les réalités actuelles et les possibilités futures. Mais soyons honnêtes, l'histoire est souvent écrite par les vainqueurs. Ce sont les puissants qui dictent ce qui est retenu et ce qui est oublié. Et qu'est-ce qui détermine le pouvoir? Les chiffres.

"Prenez les Basques, par exemple. Un petit groupe, jamais très nombreux, vivant dans une région montagneuse éloignée avec peu de ressources. Malgré leur indépendance farouche et leur forte identité culturelle, ils étaient toujours à la merci de voisins plus grands et plus puissants. Dans l'histoire, les chiffres comptent. Si vous n'avez pas les chiffres, vous n'avez pas le pouvoir. C'est aussi simple que cela.

"Les chiffres nous disent qui gagne et qui perd. Ils déterminent la montée et la chute des populations, des économies et des empires. Les populations plus importantes peuvent soutenir des armées plus grandes, générer plus de richesse et exercer plus d'influence. Les économies qui peuvent produire plus de biens et de services peuvent commercer plus efficacement et prospérer. C'est pourquoi l'étude des chiffres est cruciale pour comprendre l'histoire.

"L'interprétation de l'histoire, donc, est un dialogue sans fin entre le présent et le passé, une recherche de sens dans un monde en perpétuel changement. Mais ce n'est pas seulement une question de dates et de faits; il s'agit d'analyser ces faits, de les comparer et de découvrir des motifs et des tendances. Les chiffres fournissent la précision et la rigueur dont nous avons besoin pour comprendre véritablement la dynamique du changement social, les flux et reflux des économies, la montée et la chute des empires.

"Sans les chiffres, l'histoire ne serait qu'une collection d'anecdotes, dépourvue de la profondeur analytique nécessaire pour une véritable compréhension. Ainsi, en tant qu'historiens, nous devons prêter attention aux chiffres, car ils nous disent beaucoup sur qui nous sommes et comment nous en sommes arrivés là."

And now, translated by chatGPT:

"History is not an exact science. It's a continuous investigation into the relationship between the past and the present. It’s about understanding how past events shape current realities and future possibilities. But let's face it, history is often written by the victors. The powerful ones dictate what gets remembered and what gets forgotten. And what determines power? Numbers.

"Take the Basques, for example. A small group, never very numerous, living in a remote, mountainous region with few resources. Despite their fierce independence and strong cultural identity, they were always at the mercy of larger, more powerful neighbors. In history, numbers matter. If you don’t have the numbers, you don’t have the power. It’s as simple as that.

"Numbers tell us who wins and who loses. They determine the rise and fall of populations, economies, and empires. Larger populations can sustain larger armies, generate more wealth, and exert more influence. Economies that can produce more goods and services can trade more effectively and prosper. This is why the study of numbers is crucial in understanding history.

"The interpretation of history, therefore, is an endless dialogue between the present and the past, a search for meaning in a constantly changing world. But it's not just about dates and facts; it's about analyzing those facts, comparing them, and discovering patterns and trends. Numbers provide the precision and rigor we need to truly understand the dynamics of social change, the ebb and flow of economies, the rise and fall of empires.

"Without numbers, history would be a mere collection of anecdotes, lacking the analytical depth required for true understanding. So, as historians, we must pay attention to the numbers, because they tell us a great deal about who we are and how we got here."

The question we have to ask ourselves is simply this: do we really think they're more numerous than we are?  Never mind who votes, or who seems to be in power, or what bafflegab the media sells, or all the shit that's designed to obfuscate the simple facts.  Of the numbers, which are dying out, and which are thriving?  Which, 40 years from now, when all the adult population older than 50 now either dies or becomes physically or mentally obsolete, is going to make the decisions?  When the seas roll in, and the forests blaze, and the people we're afraid of become more and more certainly wrong to the largest number of people, regardless of who votes, or who's "in charge," because no one's really in charge just because they sit in a desk and have people who tell them so ... who is going to be here?

How important are these folks, really, when they represent just 20% of the population, and the least significant part at that, the part that's going to be dead, along with me, by 2050.

Have a little perspective.  Pay attention to your people and your knowledge.  Do good.  Pass it along.  And ignore the show.  It's just going to go away and be replaced with another one, which won't matter either.  Nearly every person whose ever been alive is totally unknown to us; yet they did all the living and the working and the dying here.  Everyone else, everyone whose names we know, they were just passengers with time.

Cultural Shock

See here.

Felt the above was worth having a look at, since it's core to my personal ideology of game setting.  I was going to say something more slavery.  As yet, it's not even incorporated into the description of the setting's identity, though it's implied.  Slavery has been a part of human culture since the bronze age (that we have any evidence for, at least) ... but somehow the institution failed to possess the stigma that began to appear in the minds of Europeans just prior to my game's chronological date (1650).  For the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, for the Chinese, for the Greeks and Romans, even throughout the middle ages, slavery was a class ... one from which an individual could rise and obtain respect, with society acknowledging that the individual's past had no relevance with regards to the individual's present.  But that ceased to be so with the American experiment (and here, I refer to both continents of America, not the country of the United States alone).

So, in D&D, it's tricky.  Players exist with the stigma version in their heads.  It would therefore be sensible to abolish the whole practice, vine and roots together, arguing that it had never taken place in history at all.  Or maybe that it happened only long, long ago, and had been abolished around the Dark Ages or some such.

This strains reality quite a lot, however.  It's easy enough to pretend that witches were never burned, that only applies to some tens of thousands of victims, spread over many centuries.  But at any time in human history there were millions of slaves; and their collective labour built the world.

Additionally, it's hard to vouchsafe that orcs, ogres, hobgoblins and such wouldn't enslave their enemies.  Or that there isn't a tremendous benefit in the gamespace of player characters working diligently to free slaves, or destroy slavery-based institutions.

Still, no doubt, most DMs would prefer it this way.  No slavery.  Clap hands, problem solved.

I am not one of them.

Reasons for this can be assigned to the usual things: I'm a white male, I was born nearly 59 years ago, I can't possibly understand what it was really like, or what the repercussions were.  But for those who take me for standing on the wrong side of the tracks in the real world, let me stress that this is not how I feel.  How I really feel about slavery, CRT and the 1619 project, and the insidious proliferation of racism that continues to be expressed from parent to child, I can't say it better than Tim Wise.  Watch all of it, and keep in mind that I agree with all of it, before you rise to condemn me for something I do in a D&D game.  Where no actual person gets hurt.

My best argument is the one that's made on the wiki page.  The 17th century was a very different world.  Very.  And better than the exploration of fantasy, better than pretending to be something we're not, better than waving make-believe wands to make magic, I feel the strongest experience players can have is to visit a real place that's very different from the place we are now.  Because a real place is a thousand times more effective at conveying to the player that he or she is doing something that other human beings used to do, and without condemnation, because once upon a time it was acceptable to do those things.

The cultural shock of this when the player realises what it means in the larger picture of their lives, as they comprehend the horrible past of human folk, having spent a little time wallowing in it ... is, I feel, instructive.  It sends a message that those people were not us.  Those people lacked awareness.  Those people were uncivilised.  Those people, our forebears, were monsters.  Not people to be put on pedestals.  Not people to be respected and worshipped.  Not good people doing the best they could in their time.  But people who were ignorant because the things they should have known hadn't been conceived of yet.

And what, we need to ask ourselves, would they have been like if they'd known what we know?  If they carried some of the empathy and morality we carry?  If they had not been monsters in a monster's world?

That, my dear readers, is what's answered by a player participating in that world.  That is where much of my fascination as a DM lies, as I want players puzzle out and resolve what they're willing to do, and what they're not willing to do, when faced with the power to do anything.  Not because I'm shaming them, and not because the general community behind dungeons and dragons would shame them ... but because, being free to act, they choose to decide for themselves.

Laudable?  I don't care.  I do care that in a society that praises free-will and personal experimentation, there's still a game where this is possible with human culture and history.  Even if it gets dirty and unpresentable.

At least, while I'm still running games.

Bronzing the Game

There's no question that paraphrasing history is something of a drug for me.   Since my post on the 18th, I've worked on the chalcolithic period and started the early bronze age, with supportive work on separate Egyptian and Mesopotamian pages.  There's no need to go look at those unless you have some knowledge of history and are interested in how I might have described it all.  Rest assured it's a lot of work ... but of course, it's nothing compared to what a complete history before 1650, the time of my game world, would require.

'Course, I could just stop with the early bronze age and chuck my present world, building a whole new one that took place in, say, the year 1224 BC.  Ramses II has just died, the Kassite Babylonian empire and the Hittites are on the skids, the Mitanni kingdom's in ruins, and the Hebrews are but scattered hill peoples.  It's a great time for a campaign, as bloodshed and chaos are reigning all over, while there's just enough government left to allow trade and some order in places.  It's not nearly as bad as history gets a hundred years later, after Egypt's completely collapsed.

Let's see, what would I need to consider?  Starting with character classes ... there'd still be the fighter of course.  Some kind of "priest class" is possible, as the gods have made their presence known by then (remembering, the gods are real).  The concept of "holiness" hasn't been invented, so the paladin's out; we might replace the ranger with a "hunter" class, stripping out any druidic elements, especially the ranger's perceived identification with animals.  That ditches the druid class too, obviously.

All the introspective religions haven't come into being yet so there goes the monk too.  We can keep thieves (I said "thieves," not rogues).  The assassin's arguable either way.  I'm absolutely not considering any of the nonsense junk classes introduced with the UA or anything after.  That leaves the mage and the illusionist.

I've argued the magic is a technology, something that has to have been developed over time, with various researchers building up the spell list one item at a time, just as player characters are encouraged by the books to invent their own spells.  Given that the early bronze age already lacks quite a lot of those classical scholarship traditions that haven't been invented yet, magic has to be awfully crude and limited.  It think it'd have to be an entirely rebuilt system, perhaps focused on making large-scale things happen at precise moments in time, according to astrological star charts or some such.  An "astrologer" class, if you will.  Imagine the astrologer and the rest of the party organising materials and acquiring a specific space for an astronomical event about to take place 7 months from now ... but if everything is set up just so, and the astronomer is able to "cast," then the effect is causing some sort of environmental change (a disaster, the transformation of desert into a land of milk and honey, whatever) or acquiring unnatural creatures as minions or some such.  Day to day, however, the astrologer's "magical" powers would be for the most part rather, um, weak.  So that most of the time, the astrologer is some kind of intellectual thief, stealing "intelligence" about the world from other people's minds.

How about weapons?  These are bronze, naturally.  The specific gravity of iron is 7.85, while for ancient bronze it's 8.76 ... so about 11% heavier for everything (obviously, I'll still be using encumbrance).  Bronze weapons ought to break or bend out of shape more frequently, so that a fair part of the game for fighters involves reforging or acquiring new weapons a lot of the time.  I'll make the heavier swords do slightly increased damage, adding a +1 to each hit (instead of 1-6, 1-8 and 2-8, it'll be 2-7, 2-9 and 3-9).  That's in addition to strength bonuses, which don't need adjustment.  A spear will cause the same damage and last about the same amount of time as the medieval game, so players will keep spears as back-up for those periods when they're looking for a good bronze blade.

Shields are heavier but they give the same effect.  Armour is a combination of leather and bronze metal components at best, with "scale bronze" being the best possible armour (AC 5), the heaviest and the most durable.  Leather & bronze might give the same AC, but it would tend to more readily fall apart in battle.

Still plenty of opportunity for  mythical beasts and such; in fact, the whole lexicon can still be present, except that any non-human races would have to be really, really remote, so until the players actually explored into distant realms (and it's a long, long way to Scandinavia, Russia or Central Asia), I'd insist on human player characters only.  Later, if they actually went to a place with gnomes, elves, dwarves and such (and those races are in my world in 1224 BC) for anyone to actually start as one of those races.

That's how I'd play it, anyhow.

I think that as an imaginative DM, I'd be able to produce a very different experience for persons in Egypt versus Mesopotamia.  The former would be a patient, structured setting, filled with criminal activities but generally intellectual and problem solving.  Adventuring emphasis would be on exploring surrounding areas, encountering what was out there, trying to secure some valuable from them and establish a sharing of technology and trade.  Dungeons, I think, would be very few and far between, and highly driven by the discovery of some creature the players might let loose on the world for the very first time.  Say, for example, there's no such thing as a ghoul anywhere in Africa ... until the players unearth a bunch and fail to kill them all.  Imagine being responsible for unleashing ghouls on the world.

Mesopotamia would be a much looser campaign, with any sort of travel being fraught with danger from other human groups, from other city-states.  Brutality against the lower classes would be much more common, along with the presence of slaves, with the players being constantly threatened of this fate if they don't win this battle or convince this group of "true believers" that they're believers too.  Strong parties would organise gangs of supporters and set out to dominate others, in a world where being smart means very little if one isn't also pretty strong and untouchable.  It's great if you can get this small area under your heel; it helps keep you from being under the heel of other slightly larger areas.

I think, however, that players would feel compelled to leave all civilisation behind ... at least at first.  There's a vast wilderness in 1224 BC ... not so much full of treasure but certainly with food and equipment hard enough to come by that seizing both could be transformed into an experience-giving benefit.  Apart from killing Polyphemus with a spear in the eye, there's all his sheep to take as booty, which is enough meat to feed a whole tribe ... who, grateful, might grant the characters special status and therefore a small army of tribesfolk to play with.

Bits of artwork, too, like bead necklaces, figurines, pieces of blown glass, decorated pottery and such could also count as experience-giving treasure.  Remember, this is the bronze age; there are no coins, no yet, anywhere.  They haven't been invented yet.

I think that by balancing a certain historical accuracy, along with the players still maintaining their agency in deciding what to do and where to go, the bronze age could yet be a very captivating game experience.

If that's the way I wanted to go.

The First 196,000 Years

Now and then I feel a compulsion to write a "world history" of my game world, that of course is based on actual world history.  This makes the project dubious, to say the least.  Yet I enjoy dabbling in history.  And there are fantastical elements to be incorporated in the story of time that focus on elements like the invention and pursuit of magic, the influence of religion in a world where gods actually exist, the movement of non-human peoples who must have come from somewhere, and must have something that explains the nuts and bolts of their present-day, game world existent culture, the one that players bump into.

And so, from time to time, I go at it.  Much of it ends up being repeat work, as organising historical events is an enormous headache, no less so when the events are described briefly.  There's so much of it, and what there is overlaps and remains geographically tied together, that making sense of sweeping time periods for people who know nothing about history is a trial.

My latest impetus is that I've been addressing the neverending work of moving the old wiki's material to the new wiki ... which as I do it, requires editing in process.  When I first launched the Authentic wiki, I had the help of a number of well-meaning people who, unfortunately, simply moved the material as is from old to new.  That created a headache of hundreds of pages without proper links, and which were as page entries only half written and not well-written at that.  Which pages need attention are mixed hopelessly into the great pile ... and I'm not always interested in correcting the content found in them, even when I stumble across one that needs honest work.

Nonetheless, I've reshaped three pages on the old wiki that I'm glad were not simply copied, since it gave me an opportunity to purposefully rebuild them.  I think the content is clearer, more interesting to read and most important of all, easy to build upon.

These three pages cover the palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic periods of my game world's history.  Their value for the reader, and for my players, is the explanation of how non-human races came to find their way into a human world, what happened in broad strokes after they came here, and where geographically they came to settle by about 4,500 BC.  In the format given, it should be a quick, elementary read.

My challenge is to continue forward in time in the same straightforward manner.

Scholarship

I've seen other examples of this, but none quite so lazy.

Starting with this webpage from "Medieval Britain," no date (though I'd guess in the last 5 years):

"Inn-keeping was formalized around the 14th and 15th centuries, when traveling was much more common than we normally imagine. The roads were bad, sometimes even impassable for loaded wagons (and not to mention, frequently visited by outlaws and robbers).  Between the villages, there were long stretches of forest."

Then this from The Laws of Innkeepers, by John E.H. Sherry, 1972, 1981, 1993 (published by Cornell University):

"There was a surprising amount of travel in England in the Middle Ages.  The roads, to be sure, were very bad and in general were impassable for loaded wagons, and the transportation of goods from place to place was therefore almost impossible ... the roads were not only bad, but they were infested with outlaws and robbers of all sorts.  Between the villages there were long stretches of forest, and these forests were the refuge of the outlaws who formed a considerable proportion of the population of the country.

Here's a little bit from Cases and Materials on the Laws of Innkeepers, by John Harold Sherry in 1956 (a snippet is all that's available online):

"... apparently peculiar doctrine of the law regulating the rights and liabilities of innkeepers, in order that we may learn the extent of their responsibilities and understand their limitations, we must examine briefly, the early history of innkeeping in England; the character and nature of inns, and the functions which they performed in the social life of the English people at the time when the law of innkeepers was forming, that is, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."

And now, The Medieval Innkeeper and His Responsibility, by Joseph H. Beale, Jr., in 1906:

"... apparently peculiar doctrine of the law regulating the rights and liabilities of innkeepers, in order that we may learn the extent of their responsibilities and understand their limitations, we must examine briefly, as has just been said, the early history of innkeeping in England; the character and nature of inns, and the functions which they performed in the social life of the English people at the time when the law of innkeepers was forming, that is, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."

Now, lest you think the above is merely a quote of the below (and what a strange quote it would be, since it's an introduction to the topic, and not fact-based), Beale's account also includes this:

 "There was a surprising amount of travelling in England in the Middle Ages.  The roads, to be sure, were very bad, and in general were impassable for loaded wagons, and the transportation of goods from place to place was therefore almost impossible ... The roads were not only bad, but they were infested with outlaws and robbers of all sorts.  Between the villages there were long stretches of forest, and these forests were the refuge of the outlaws who formed a considerable portion of the population of the country."

The Copyright Act passed by Theodore Roosevelt was signed into law in 1909; the law only granted protection  if the published work gave proper notice.  Likely, as Beale was writing for a magazine in 1906 called The Green Bag, the effort to follow up and make sure the material was properly protected was likely never done.  As such, Sherry was most likely legally free to copy Beale word-for-word, but consider:

Is this "scholarship"?  Beale is writing for a law magazine; there's no corraborating evidence for any of his statements; and he's talking about a time many centuries before his own.  What are Beale's credentials for writing history?

From my own readings and history education, there are multiple points in which Beale's wrong.  Yes, there were bandits, but they weren't hanging from the trees.  They had no reason to attack people without money, while numerous peoples travelled in multi-family groups and were therefore largely safe.  Bandits were much more interested in charging for passage than causing harm ... but then Beale is writing post 19th-century, a very different time, when bandits were much more dangerous and desperate, and more numerous, despite there being less long stretches of forest.  Imagine being a bandit sitting around waiting for an absence of travellers, week after week ... wouldn't they, you know, haul their ass to where the people were, like on the fringes of the rural districts, and sometimes within them?  As, we know, they did?

 And while places were impassable for wagons, they weren't for carts and mules, which is how most material was delivered at the time.  Donkeys deliver munitions throughout Afghanistan, a country ten times a mountainous as Europe, with no roads at all.  Yet not "impossible."  Beale is making it up as he goes along ... and who cares anyway, it's a law review.

Cornell University is, on the other hand, an ivy league school, considered one of the eight best in America ... and yet here they are printing work from a scholar cribbing sentences like a junior-high school student putting one over on the gym instructor teaching social studies.  Including the introduction, for heaven sake, which is non-fact writing we do to preface the subject material.  It's ...

Exactly what I'd expect from a university professor.

Bronzing History

This is now the longest page on my wiki, with 35,847 characters thus far, or about 5,500 words.  So, not as long as some of the posts on this blog.  On the other hand, it isn't done yet; the below only includes human history; I'm working on determining the general feel for accepted history before inserting historical inventions into my game world.

Okay, but ... why?  What's it all for?  It's not as though my players are going to have any direct connection with ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Hittites.  All of this takes place 3000 years before my campaign.

In general, I'm against DMs building up lengthy, invented historical records for their game worlds.  This content, when read, tends to be a collection of unfamiliar persons and events stacked against dates that don't mean anything, so there is no sense of connection with the campaign.  I don't believe that is the case here.  We, the players, are familiar with actual ancient history, so unfamiliarity isn't the case here.  Nor are the dates a meaningless list for us, as those with historical backgrounds are able to piece together the signposts that dates represent.  Unlike an invented history, we know that -- in general, at least -- the events described above really happened.

Well, sort of.  This is not a history account written for a textbook, this is a description of my game world.  As such, I can cheat enormously when writing out the content.  For example, most of the dates listed above are fluid, in that they reflect a "best guess" by historians of the event in question.  We don't know for certain that the Hittites sacked Babylon in 1595 b.c.  Various books will give different dates, with some sources being wildly out of synch, and in history this is an accepted principle because all this happened a long time ago without reliable records.  As a dungeon master, however, I can say absolutely whatever I want.  I can say it happened on June 7th and that it was a Tuesday -- though, obviously, our present-day calendar didn't exist at the time.  Or did it?  This is, after all, my campaign.

Still, I try to adopt the most probable or agreed-upon dates and events, because this is fun for me.  Though this doesn't explain what use it is.

In my game, I make a lot of references to things, particularly the past.  And my players, bless them, tend to possess a minimal degree of familiarity with history.  If they wish, however, the above overview -- distilled from the endless quibbles and counterfactual arguments that confuse history for the lay person -- can be read over in not very much time, if there's some reason why a player should wish to be familiar with it.  Many of the campaign stories or adventure structures I tend to build include elements of something that happened a long time ago ... and because the source material shapes how I present those elements, knowing the source material helps a player understand my motives and viewpoint.  And while in many cases the history written above isn't exactly accurate, it isn't purposefully inaccurate either.  It contains material from sources that have been "debunked," if we can believe the debunking source, which often has more credibility due to the political faction of a university supporting it than any real "proof" -- but that doesn't matter much.  Just as it is good enough for most people to believe that electrons and protons are little spheres, just like the diagrams taught us in grade school, it doesn't cause harm for people to have, at best, a generalized understanding of the Egyptians or the Sumerians.

Having the time to work on this material, and considering it worth working on, also goes back to recent posts where I've said I have the time because I'm not rebuilding game systems that already work.

The overall task is monumental and probably impossible to finish, given my limitations, but who knows.  I may live to be 90, and still be able to write.

Bad Historians

 For some fighters, this is the promised land -- though I don't know why.

This is essentially the entire page, though naturally the links are useful to have.  The actual power of this sage ability is minimal at best.  We're merely offering some players, those who choose to specialize in pure combat, the chance to use a second weapon and not forgo the +1 armour class the shield offers.  I found some embittered fights on the stackhouse message boards about how you can't use the shield as a weapon, and that you definitely can't use it as a weapon AND a defense.  So I expect these arguments to bleed over into here, because as I always say, it is impossible on the internet to write anything about armour and weapons without starting a flame war.

That said ...

There is a trope that exists in internet-land that, "If we test something, and we can't make it happen, then it is a myth."  Regarding the use of shields as weapons, I turn now to this page from stackexchange, quote:

"During a reenactment exercise, I was hit with a shield using the flat of it, the sharp edge and the point at the bottom. The shield was accurate in size and weight. It hurt, but not as much as a blow from an axe or sword would, with its leverage and momentum (thankfully, these were less authentic).

"I've also had the privilege of being able to talk to a stunt man who specialises in horse and sword fighting (one of the Devils Horsemen team). He said, "I might push someone back so I can swing with the sword. If they are on top of my shield they deserve it. Swinging out with the shield... I wouldn't, especially if there are a lot of people around." It would create an opportunity for an enemy."

This reminds me of a mythbusters episode, discussing the practicality of a gunman using two pistols, one in each hand, shooting at different targets.  Whereupon the boys try it, mess around with it for their shooting schedule, at most about a week, and decide that "It's useless."

Okay.  This is an immense crock of horseshit.

Let's take an ordinary, every day magic trick.  You want to make a card that is in your hand disappear.  Take note that the linked video here tells you how it is done, but I want you to imagine that there is no teacher in this scenario.  There's no one anywhere that you can call, bring down to your studio or your practice yard, to show you how to make a card disappear.  That knowledge simply isn't available to you.

If you've never seen it done, and you haven't anyone to teach you, can you make a card disappear?  Yes.  Yes you can.  But here's a couple of things you'll want to keep in mind.  1st, you will have to really, really want to perform this illusion, and I mean on levels where you're willing to go without eating or sleeping or doing anything else, and especially not thinking of anything else, because you are going to have to be laser focused on figuring out how the hell you are going to make this happen.

And two, you're going to be at it for a long, long, looooooooooong time.  We are not talking about a week of filming.  We are not talking about messing around for an afternoon.  Even if you watch the video, and see how it is done, you will be at this process for months as you try to strengthen your fingers and your reflexes sufficiently to do a bad job of hiding that card.

So.  I'm curious as to whether or not you can use a shield against me in a fight as a weapon, so I tell you, "Go ahead, give it a try."  We'll call it a "reenactment exercise."  We're not actually reenacting anything, at best we're mocking television and movies, but okay, good enough.  Let me stress, it is a real shield.  And it didn't hurt as much as an axe or a sword.  Let's unpack that a minute.  Is the fellow hitting you with the shield actually trying to kill you?  No.  Has he trained with using an axe and a sword for the last upteen years of his life, because he is really into this stuff?  Yes.  Has he spent that many hours training with a shield?  No.  We know he hasn't, because the narrator here clearly indicates he hasn't ever tried this before.  Does it matter a whit that the sword is "real"?  Would it matter if I said, "I couldn't make this playing card disappear, and mind you, it's a real playing card."

Like the mythbusters, we have proved exactly jack shit.  We have proved that the shield cannot be used as a weapon by people who are not trained, and who are tremendously inexperienced with using the shield as a weapon.  We have proved that people who don't know how to use two guns against two targets are utterly useless in using two guns this way.  Wow.  Bully for us.

You know what?  I can prove, right now, without any trouble at all, that building a bridge is impossible, because I can't do it.

What I really like is when the answer comes back, "Hey, I've been training with weapons for a really long time!"  Or, "I've been shooting guns since I was a child!"  Uh huh.  I've been playing games with cards since I was a child.  Never made one disappear.  The skill here isn't how well you use the weapon.  It is, can you use it in this particular way, which will probably take you about two or three hundred hours of dedicated practice to master?  And that is, if someone shows you how.  If there's no one to show you how, just exactly how would you know what techniques are required?

To which the answer comes back, "Well, maybe, but we know that people didn't actually shoot with two guns in the Old West.  They kept two guns in case one jammed, but they didn't actually shoot with them at the same time."  Or, "If people had used shields as weapons in Olden Times, there'd have been a lot more discussion about it.  The fact that no one ever talked about it proves that it wasn't practical."

These arguments are desperate straw-grabbing, at best.  We don't actually "know" these things.  Bad historians like to pretend that we know this or that about the past, but good historians never forget that it just takes one unearthed book written in the 12th century to blow "what we know" to complete smithereens.  Point in fact, the printing press and the movement from hand weapons to powder weapons happened at just about the same time.  The proliferation of the printing press took about 50 years, to go from "never had one before" to "wow, they're everywhere."  Over those same 50 years, powder weapons went from "gee, that's new," to "what's a mace?"  The period of humans using hand-held weapons and shields in combat coincides with a rather long historical period when most people who knew how to read and write in the West were members of a quiet group of boys who used to mumble verses six times a day while shut away in stone sheds deliberately built far from the rattling mayhem of everyday life.  These boys didn't write hundreds of books about weapons because these boys didn't use weapons ... and most of those who did came from disturbingly broken homes and possessed poor social habits.  Arguing that mercenaries and bandits would have taken time to sit down and write long books with tons of useful pictures describing how to brain an opponent with a shield is a little myopic in polite circles and downright dead-fuck pig-ignorant when speaking accurately.

On the other hand, shooting with two pistols would have happened in the 19th century, when a lot more people could read and write, and there were reporters and such, so if anyone had used two weapons in gunfights, we would have definitely known about that.  People would have written tons of stuff about how amazing it was that ...

Wait a minute.  Hm.  Didn't all those reporters and eye-witnesses in the 19th century go on and on about the prowess that shootists like Wild Bill and Wyatt Earp had?  Gee, I think they did.  Oh but of course, none of that means anything, because when someone writes something that goes against what we can personally prove in the year 2006 or 2014 or 2021, then it's plainly just a load of bullshit.  Things are only true when they're not written about, because then we know that no one's lying.

These arguments that are premised on all this shaky ground are awfully hard to refute, especially as we arbitrarily decide which contemporary sources we're going to accept and which we're not.  Am I saying that Wild Bill Hickok definitely shot six or seven men in a bar fight in the Nebraska territory in 1867?  Hell no.  I wasn't there, or anywhere in 1867, not in Nebraska nor in any of the other places where Hickok purportedly shot multiple folks at the same time, and did so with more than one revolver in his hands.  And neither was anyone else who lived, either then or now, to write absolutely true accounts of such a thing, one way or the other.  Some historian in the present, who says it didn't happen, is making that judgement are exactly the same amount of hearsay that some historian is using that says it did happen.  The difference between bad historians and good historians isn't that good historians use better sources, it's that good historians know that we can't trust any sources.  Not really.  We just do our best, figure out what we can, and wait for somebody to finally reveal that for the past five generations, this one family in Arkansas has been keeping this old leather-covered book, not knowing what it was.  Even then, we'll never really be sure it was written by Hickok.

So when anyone tells you something is true, because we know it from history, you should treat that person like a fellow trying to sell you land in Florida.  That someone, even if they have a television show, is just one big flop-pie of old cow grass.

Same Old, Same Old

"Steam made an almost incredible difference.  In 1800, one factory installed a 100-horsepower engine.  It did the work of 880 men, ran 50,000 threadwinding spindles, created jobs for 750 people, and turned out 226 times more product than they had before steam.

"People from villages who had never looked at a clock were worked like machines themselves, in unspeakable conditions.  For regular wages.

"And there was a new kind of customer, too, living in the new suburbs.  The up-and-coming middle classes had an appetite for possessions that couldn't be satisfied, thanks to a fellow who practically invented the idea of 'keeping up with the Joneses.'  He was Josiah Wedgewood, potter to the Royal Family.  You knew that, because it was on his bills, letterhead, catalogues, ads and anywhere else he could get it.  Whatever he made ~ vases, medallions, ornamental work ~ he made people want it for 'snob' reasons.  Even tableware.  That's why the biggest seller was called 'Queensware.'  You and the Queen, eating off the same plates.  Get it?

"By the end of the [18th] century, Wedgewood had exhibitions in London, invitation only, gentry only, ads in all the posh papers, travelling salesmen with free delivery and money-back guarantees, clients everywhere from China to the U.S.A., and the first steam-powered factory going night and day to keep up with demand.  By the time he'd finished, if you didn't have Wedgewood, you were nobody.  And for the first time, that kind of middle class thing started to matter, because consumerism had arrived."

James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 6 

I was reminded of this sequence by Charles A's late comment on the last post, in which he explains that human behavior in the medieval era was different from now, because there was no mass production and people had "few possessions" and were "very thrifty."  I'm often amused by such things, since we have plenty of evidence to show that wealthy medieval people were anything but thrifty, what with shooting thousands of released pheasants in an afternoon or the King of France and party slaughtering hundreds of penned up wild beasts.  And, of course, the "thriftiness" hardly describes the regimes of the Rajahs in India, or the nobility in China or Japan, or the excess of the Ottomans or the Egyptians, etc.  Likewise, we have to ignore all the other rich cultures, with their own peculiar habits, when food was plentiful and materialism too.  It is so easy to cherry pick one select perspective of human history at a given point in time ~ say, the 14th century ~ and remind ourselves of England or northern Germany ... and utterly ignoring what it was like at that same time in Rome and Moorish Andalucia.

As far as excess goes, Wedgewood's genius would not have worked if the human fascination with materialism was not baked into the human model.  Burke's words, "made people want it," are unfortunate.  He put it in front of them, spoke the words that they wanted to hear and the hormonal response that had been there since Oldevai Gorge came pouring out.  We love, adore, are endlessly fascinated by new things.  The fact that certain groups and cultures throughout history, including hundreds of millions of people right now whose lives consist of picking over garbage heaps, were forced to take what they could get, and couldn't afford to buy new, or that new things simply didn't exist in their worlds, is irrelevant.

The whole new-thing-bragging-rights is purely hormonal serotonin.  My distant ancestor who noticed a bee on a log, turned over the log and found a mass of honey, did not only enjoy the honey ~ he likewise enjoyed the momentary social status of being able to demonstrate to others that HE found it, and not them; that HE was the one providing it, and not them; and that HE was a very important person because of it.  The simple translation of that moment, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years later, into iPhones and being first in line for StarWars, only marks the relative delivery process that produces the serotonin result.  Instead of marching a seven miles across the landscape and coming back with two fist-fulls of honeycomb, I'm standing in line in front of a store.

Charles may, or may not, come rushing back at me with ten arguments about what I'm misunderstanding or what I don't get about this.  It is an old, old argument, one that kept coming up during my Classical History university days, as some profs would cling to arguments that the Romans and Greeks were nothing like us, while other profs would scoff and laugh at the ignorance of their tenured peers to be so insipidly ignorant.  If 19 Classics Profs stuffed together in tiny offices on a single floor of a building built in the 1960s can't agree, I see no reason why people would agree about this on the internet.

I am strictly in the camp that believes that we haven't changed a whit since we began wrapping up our privates.  And if I'm ever in doubt of that, I need only turn to my Juvenal's Satires.  These are, at this moment, located merely 8 feet from my left hand, right here on my bookshelf; and it only takes me a moment to find an example from the 2nd Century A.D., supporting my position.  This is from Satire III:

"All lower class citizens should have marched out of town [Rome], in a body, years ago.  Nobody finds it easy to get to the top if meagre resources cripple his talent.  But in Rome the problem's worse than anywhere else.  Inflation hits the rental of your miserable apartment, inflation distends the ravenous maws of your slaves; your humble dinner suffers inflation too.  You feel ashamed to eat off earthenware dishes ~ yet if you were transported to some rural village, you'd be content enough and happily wear a cloak of course blue broadcloth complete with hood.  Throughout most of Italy ~ we might as well admit it ~ no one is seen in a toga till the day he dies.

"Even on public holidays, when the same old shows as last year are cheerfully staged in the grassgrown theatre, where peasant children, sitting on their mothers' laps, shrink back in terror at the sight of those gaping, whitened masks, you will still find the whole audience ~ top row or bottom ~ dressed exactly alike.  Even the magistrates need no better badge of status than a plain white tunic.

"But here in Rome, we must toe the line of fashion, living beyond our means, and often borrowed credit: every man jack of us is keeping up with his neighbours.  To cut a long story short, nothing's for free in Rome."

So it goes.

Bronze Age Europe

A little more history, with surprises thrown in, particularly towards the end.  I've been enjoying exploring a historical rendering of my game world.  Most of this has been in my head for decades, but it's never been thoroughly written out.

By the late Neolithic period in Europe, six dominant cultural regions had formed: a) Danubian cultures, from the Rhine to the Black Sea; b) Mediterranean cultures, from the Adriatic to eastern Iberia, including large portions of the Alps; c) Thessaly and Macedonia; d) the Dneiper and Don valleys; e) a mosaic of local cultures, including halflings, from Iberia to Sweden; and f) the pre-Vepsian culture extending across northern Europe from the Volga to the Greenland Sea.

The construction of megaliths took place mainly in the Neolithic period, continuing into the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age. Prominent examples include the sites of Brú na Bóinne and Carrowmore in Ireland, Maes Howe in Orkney, and Gavrinis in France, Carnac in Brittany, Stonehenge, Avebury, Ring of Brodgar and Beltany.

The smelting of copper begins along the Danube from 3500 BCE. After 2800 BCE, various peoples, displaced by the Vepsian gnomes, move south and occupy all the lands between the Dneiper and the north shore of the Caspian Sea. The polished battle axe proliferates in these steppe cultures after 2500, possibly due to influence by gnomish metallurgy. Beaker pottery spreads throughout Europe from 2200 to 1900, influencing the manufacture of kilns and ultimately of metallurgy.

The Vepsian Bronze Age begins around 1950 BCE, marking the beginning of that culture’s consolidation into the Vepsian civilization. The arrival of seafaring elves (sometimes called the seafaring peoples) results in settlement along the north shore of Ulthua (circa 1800). These bring a crude Bronze Age culture with them and an advance technology in woodworking.

By 1600, other Bronze Age cultures have taken hold in south-western Iberia, central Europe and initiating the start of Mycenaean Greece.

The Cretan Neolithic culture advances in many ways after 2700 BCE, forming the complex Minoan Civilization. Yet despite many technological feats, the Minoans do not develop arsenical bronze until after 1450; this allows them to be overrun by the Mycenaeans by the next century.

By this time, after 1500 BCE, numerous central European cultures have developed Bronze Age societies. The Celts, Italics and Illyrians expand into Italy, the Rhone, Seine and Rhine Valleys, Iberia, the Balkans and Asia Minor, where they destroy the Hittite Empire, which by this time had developed the secret of founding iron. This knowledge would afterwards spread through Europe, initiating the region’s Iron Age.

The use of bronze tools and weapons greatly empowered the cultures able to use the technology. Bronze Age swords appeared in the 17th century BCE. These, along with spears, shields and maces, supported by slings and javelins, allowed these cultures to claim lands inhabited since time immemorial by monsters and immense creatures of dreadful form. The Bronze Age initiated an age of heroes, in which warriors who were godlike in stature were able to slaughter these beasts and make the lands clear for settlement. Hydra, Stygian beasts, enormous lions, lesser and greater cyclops, chimera and minotaurs were eradicated or driven back. The Nuragic civilization of Sardinia was built upon the bodies of giants and still has monumental Giant’s graves. The effect of this was to give humanoids untold accumulations of experience that had never been available, providing them with prowess and knowledge that was hitherto unheard of in Earth’s history. These heroes became so powerful that some became demi-gods, possessing names that are instantly familiar to this day.

This led to an expansion of the fighter class, in which training in certain kinds of weapons produced a newer, different breed of combatant, with greater hit points and a greater potential in battle. Not merely limited to three or four experience levels, fighters could accumulate as many as 15 to 20 levels, making certain of their number powerful beyond the comprehension of the time.

Priests of the Bronze Age were able, in certain parts of the world, to communicate and interact directly with Gods, who had grown interested in Earth through tales told to them by Odin. God settled upon Olympus for a time, showing an interest in the Mycenaeans and Minoans, and in Elphyne, sometimes called “Fairyland.”

[take note, the humanoid “elf, elven” is distinct from the faerie “elfin,” which does not refer to a single race but to the collection of all fae-folk].

This association led to the earliest use of clerical magic, expressed as crude spells much reduced in power from the present period. These spells were largely portentous in nature ~ augury, for example, possessed an earlier form than the more familiar spell. Other early spells include create water, purify food & drink, chant and enthrall.

Rumblings of other classes that gave some promise of appearance after the Bronze Age include the druid, ranger and thief. But these would not flower until the Iron Age that followed.

See Also,
Campaign
European History
World History

Tommy's Son

From the net, I recently learned that Kiefer Sutherland is in some awful television show in which he is the President of the United States.  From the look of the trailer, it looks like Jack Bauer of 24 got elected; I wonder if he's going to be shoving any towels down the opposition leader's throat.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Sutherland, though I would never watch any of the awful shows he does.  It has some to do with his dad, Donald Sutherland, who is undeniably one of the great actors of the past five decades.  But in a much bigger way, it has to do with Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather.

Donald Sutherland married an actress, Shirley Douglas, who is immediately recognizable to any Canadian born before 1970.  And as it happens, every time I cut something open and get stitches, every time I need a broken bone set, every time I need anything from a hospital, which I will certainly get for FREE, because I am a Canadian citizen, I have Shirley Douglas' father to thank.

Because Tommy Douglas was the Father of Medicare in this country.  Beginning in the 1940s, Douglas led a long-standing charge to make legalized, paid-for medical care the standard in a part of the world little remembered on the world stage: a province named Saskatchewan.  Saskatchewan is as big as Texas; in the 1940s, it barely had 0.8 million people; today, 70 years later, it has 1.1 million people.  In Saskatchewan, that's progress.

In Alberta, we have a joke about Saskatchewan that any Albertan will understand immediately.  "What is the first thing you see after you cross the Saskatchewan border?  Manitoba."

Yet Tommy Douglas was a powerful speaker.  He was a socialist speaker.  A brilliant speaker.  By sheer force of will, he would ~ through those people he influenced ~ bring this entire country around to his way of thinking.  

"Saskatchewan was told that it would never get hospital insurance. Yet Saskatchewan people were the first in Canada to establish this kind of insurance, and were followed by the rest of Canada. We didn’t have Medicare in those days. They said you couldn’t have Medicare – it would interfere with the ‘doctor-patient relationship’. But you people in this province demonstrated to Canada that it was possible to have Medicare. Now every province in Canada either has it or is in the process of setting it up.

"And you people went on to demonstrate other things with your community health clinics. You paved the road, blazing a trail for another form of health service, to give people better care at lower cost. You did these things. You have demonstrated what people can do if they work together, rather than work against; if you build a cooperative society rather than a jungle society."

That's Tommy.  And while I've been careful to use the last names of his descendants through this piece, I remember growing up when the man needed no other name to define him.  If my grandfather, who was born, who lived and who died in Saskatchewan, started talking about what Tommy said, he meant Tommy Douglas.

And now his grandson, a Canadian, is the President of the United States.

I'm so proud.

Say It

In the context of a proposed history podcast (because life continues), I have communicated some with a regular reader here who responded to the linked post.  We have been talking and this is something we're interested in doing.  It wouldn't be role-playing driven, though we might mention RPGs ... it would be the more difficult pretext of spitballing historical events, patterns and geography: either a particular moment, or a process that covers a lot of periods and cultures, or a specific cultural region.

We've been talking about an overview of the history of Korea, most likely from the late 1800s, in light of recent events ~ considering most people have little to no idea why or even when the peninsula was subdivided.

This reminded me of a Sam Kinison cameo in the 1986 film, Back to School, which was a fairly intellectual romp featuring Rodney Dangerfield.  Still a lot of fun.



No doubt about it.  I hold History sacred also.

Podcasting, WPIIA and Other Things

Yesterday, I finished my guest appearance on a Point of Insanity Podcast, specifically Whose Podcast is it Anyway, which will turn up on Friday, August 18.  It was a lot of fun and I got to talk about some of the things I've lately posted about, along with slamming the company behind D&D, adding some talk about Sasquatches and about Russian history.

Listening to Chad, the Podcast presenter, talking about his relationship to the Reagan era (he turned 13 when the Wall came down), I was astounded by the knowledgeable distance between what he knew and something that was happening while I was a conscious and politically active, self-aware individual.  I had turned 16 before Reagan was elected; I watched that campaign, my first (politically interested Canadians watch both the American and British festivals, as we are affected by both), and I remember very clearly what sort of things were being said about Reagan.

None of those things are being said now.  Reagan is the go-to president when people want to talk about a Republican who did bad things but was basically of good character.  Pundits will often say, "Reagan did this or that thing, but at least he was aware of the consequences of what he was doing." Like being aware makes it all better.

Reagan was awful.  Worse than that, he was a joke.  But the Iran-Contra thing had been going on all that summer and making Carter look like a worse joke.  Reagan "got the hostages out," which he totally did not do, as anyone conscious was aware of at the time, but all that has disappeared into dry history books no one reads.  I have lived long enough as a political animal to watch history being rewritten by the winners.  Totally rewritten.

However, as you will hear, Chad seemed to find my few comments about the Afghani war and the coming down of the wall as interesting ... and that makes me wonder about how much raw history is being lost on a daily basis as people who remember first-hand what was going on in the 60s, 70s and 80s are passing away.  History seems a mystery to most people anyway, since the education system (in Canada too, as much as anywhere) is shoving it aside in favor of social culture and social responsibility.

I can't say that the world "needs" me to settle in and write a ton of history, giving my take on things like the Reagan years or what it was like to listen to stories about Carter's brother or Gerald Ford's falling down stairs, both of which were so important a week couldn't go by without either being parodied or discussed.  There are hundreds of thousands of history students who are already doing this, not to mention a major cultural effort of writing the history of everything via Wikipedia.

It reminds me, however, that people don't read history.  If it happened before we were born, it seems to bear little interest for us; why care, everything that matters must have happened after 1964, the year I was born.

(I know, you think that everything that mattered happened after 1976 or 1983, but you're wrong)

Of course, we're willing to make some exceptions for things like Kennedy's assassination, that McCarthy thing and Nazis, but we don't want to get crazy, right?  Not that anyone understands the fifty reasons why people would want to shoot Kennedy, or who McCarthy was or what started that witchhunt, or that Nazis were not just bad guys in Indiana Jones' movies, but hey, we're just interested in the important stuff, right?

I think it is a little sad.  I could do a podcast every week where I did nothing but talk about history, potentially with time to look up small details on the net just to be sure I got the details right ~ and what's odd is that I'm sure that some people would really like it.

But my experience with Chad reminded me what I really need to make a podcast work: someone to ask me questions.  I'm great at answering questions off the cuff.  I enjoyed doing the bits with my daughter, but the issue there was that she steadfastly refused to be a set-up person for me (something about not wanting to be in the shadow of her father or some silly thing).  I've played around with just talking, but it feels ... weird.  If I'm just going to chatter, I'd rather write.  I write better than I chatter.

I'd love to do more podcasts.  I've looked, and I've had some others who have looked, but we haven't found any podcasts who are willing to step up.  If anyone has any ideas ~ or connections, which is better ~ I can write the introductory email.

And if someone wants to dig in and go head to head with me, I have the means to record us and I have the guy to edit us (if he's still willing).  So let me know.  Could be fun.

A Separate Mindset

"The first prehistoric farmers of central Europe, the so-called Linearbandkeramik culture that arose slightly before 5000 B.C., were initially confined to soils light enough to be tilled by means of hand-held digging sticks.  Only over a thousand years later, with the introduction of the ox-drawn plow, were those farmers able to extend their cultivation to a much wider range of heavy soils and tough sods.  Similarly, Native American farmers of the North American Great Plains grew crops in the river valleys, but farming of the tough sods on the extensive uplands had to await 19th century Europeans and their animal-drawn plows."

- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies

If the reader has spent any time reading material regarding the rise of civilization and the development of human technology and culture, the above quote will not stick out.  The sentiments expressed by Diamond are those that can be read in hundreds upon hundreds of other sources.  They are not wrong.  That is precisely the change that increased the food supplies of both Europe and North America, as well as many other familiar cultures that can be found around the world.

The paragraph jumped out at me last week, however, in light of the continuing controversy I seem to be having about the explanation of my tech level proposal.  If I may express the argument some have made, it would seem obvious that, once the technique could be intellectually shared, the food supply of every region would be increased as the ox-drawn plough was introduced.  Why would anyone continue to plough with hand-digging sticks once the ox had been domesticated?

Diamond is making an assumption in the above; he knows he's making the assumption and it is no problem for him, because the argument he makes is not challenged by the assumption.  That assumption is that heavy soils and tough sods exist in the area where ox-drawn ploughs are introduced.

That is by no means a guarantee.  There are many places around the world where such soils don't exist, where hand-digging sticks are sufficient.  It is true that oxen will till much more soil than hand-digging sticks, but many places in the world do not have enough tillable soil to make the introduction of oxen an efficient addition.  Oxen eat.  Some parts of the world can't produce enough food for both the humans in the region and oxen, so if cows exist at all they are not the sort that are made into working animals.  A working cow gives less milk and far less meat, and because it must be fed in and around the place where it works, it must be fed with food that is produced on the local soils.  On the other hand, cows that are not used as working animals can be taken far afield, to eat natural grass on lands that cannot be tilled at all, since they are composed of too much stone.

If the habit of using a cow to till isn't pursued, then the region will possess no residents who know how to employ a cow as a working animal.  Do you know? You don't, because you don't need to know.  An impoverished, agriculturally-stunted environment doesn't have that knowledge either, not because it doesn't exist, or because it isn't known about, but because it isn't needed.  There are no parents to teach the technology to their children, so for all intents and purposes, the region continues to exist in a technologically backward state.  It is irrelevant what technology exists elsewhere.

Far too often, we presume that different parts of the world advanced at different rates because the knowledge was lacking.  To some degree, this works for parts of the New World prior to the 16th century . . . but how does it explain the continued backward cultures of Persia, North Africa, even Lapland and Pictish Scotland up until the 1400s?  People elsewhere in the world knew how to read ~ why didn't a typical Icelandic herdsman?

Well, what good would it have done him?  It required all of his daily labor, in those hours when light was available, to accomplish the tasks that would keep him and his community alive.  When he was done, it was dark.  He could not afford candles ~ what a waste that would have been.  It requires a tremendously intricate commercial and civilized culture to enable a very small number of persons to possess the capital to waste on candles for no other purpose than to read or otherwise occupy themselves at night.  The typical resident of Iceland did not have access to that culture until the early 20th century.  No resident of Iceland possessed it in the 15th.  That is why Iceland had an oral storytelling tradition.

This notion that knowledge overwrites everything about an existing culture's technology and status is a 20th century one.  We cannot free ourselves consciously from it because it represents so much of our personal identity and cognitive experience.  We see something new and we have adapted to immediately embrace it ~ because everything that we see can be embraced, implemented into our lives and made useful.  This has not been true through the majority of human history; something demonstrably true from the accounts written by hundreds of travellers into foreign places: Conti, Przhevalsky, Leo Africanus, Marco Polo, even Lewis & Clark, if an American example is needed.  In a world without mass communication or easy travel, a distance of a hundred miles must be, for most people, as far as a trip to the moon.  Most people did not possess enough food at any given time in their lives that would enable them to walk that far and back again.

That is hard to get our heads around, when we get on a flight in the morning to attend a funeral 500 miles away, then to get on another flight afterwards to be home in time for dinner.  To us, every farmer's field is the same, every collection of livestock is the same, every weapon is the same ~ and if there isn't iron to be mined in the area where swords might be made, obviously it would be imported, right?

But am I right?  What would Ooredoo, my most recent tech-6 contribution, do with a lot of swords?  To be used against who?  Invaders who would come to seize . . . what, exactly?  And if the invaders took over, and demanded taxes from the residents, how would that actually change anything?  They pay taxes already.  If they spend their hard-earned food on swords, the swords would just be sitting in rooms, where they could not be eaten.  What good would that be?

We simply can't imagine a world without nationalism, without identifying ourselves according to our traditional belief systems, without getting angry because an outside country has done something inside our country.  But no one from before the 15th century would have cared about that. Nationalism is a very late cultural development.

I urge the reader to try to think as a medieval or renaissance individual would have felt, when faced with technologies that did not substantially improve their lives, or were impractical for reasons such as available resources or social interest.  Things were not always the way they are today.

Depth of Story

Of late, I keep encountering this meme that writers seem to like, that most soldiers in the various wars of the last century intentionally fired their weapons over the heads of the enemy, because they did not wish to kill their fellow man.

This is usually based upon a statistical argument, one that says a truly impressive number of bullets were fired without causing injuries; and this is in turn supported by anecdotal evidence of soldiers who have said that they refused to fire at an enemy.  All in all, it makes a nice argument for the humanity of humans, that even in war they'd rather not kill.

I don't know how this explains events in human history where soldiers have plainly proven their willingness to kill perfectly innocent civilians.  Custer's men certainly did not hesitate to massacre women and children at the Cheyenne camp on the Washita River in 1868.  Where was the humanity of humans when British Colonel Dyer's troops killed 379 unarmed men, women and children at Amritsar on April 13, 1919, wounding 1,200 others.  Dyer reported that his men fired 1,650 rounds.  Plainly his men did not fire over the heads of the crowd.  And when U.S. troops murdered, tortured and assaulted more than 347 unarmed South Vietnamese citizens at My Lai, I'm fairly certain that shots were not fired over the heads of the "enemy" by soldiers who were secretly unwilling to fight.

These are difficult memories to bring up.  Most would rather they were never recalled - and if recalled, only to be sure we promise never to do that again.  I don't bring up these events to indict the participants; history has already tried them and found them guilty.  But I wish to encourage the reader NOT to engage in false hopes that soldiers with guns are secretly not willing to kill.  That is a wishful thought, encouraged by those who need the crutch of wishful thinking to conceal the actual bloody carnage that results from there being weapons present.

I just finished watching the film Ghandi.  I consider the movie to be a masterpiece.  Most others, I find, consider the movie to be long, dull, somewhat preachy and in some instances, unforgivable in its inaccuracy.  Yet as I watch it, I am moved by moments such as the depicted massacre I've just spoken about and by the various other scenes of self-sacrifice, belief, virtue and endurance the movie depicts.  I believe that most find the movie difficult to watch because it demands something more of the viewer than most films.  It does not appease the viewer.  It does not say, "Here are some people just like you, so you can feel valuable as you watch and pretend you're as good as they are."

That's not possible with this film.  None of us are Ghandi.  Very few of us would be willing to endure the sacrifices that Ghandi's compatriots were willing to endure, much less what Ghandi took upon himself. There is nothing in the film that hides this.  The film says, "You don't rate.  If you're not measuring up to this, nothing you have done in your life has any value."

We don't make films like this.  Moreover, we don't encourage others to make films like this, not any more.  Youtube is filled with channels created by would-be filmmakers who have chosen to dissect the works of other people and say what makes them great.  But though there are many of this sort of film interpreter around, there are very few films that these interpreters seem to like.  The list is a very short one.  They all like Kurosawa and Edgar Wright.  And of course Martin Scorsese.  Most gush over Tarentino, ascribing all sorts of genius to the man that simply isn't there on the screen.  It is the same films, the same arguments about editing, the same repeated complaints about shot-reverse-shot, the same painstaking descriptions of composition and detail, soundtracks and the art of silence.

But what the filmmakers do not talk about is story.  They discuss story in passing, they talk about the importance of characters that the audience can identify with, but they don't talk about the nature of story and the cold brutality of stories that don't fit with the comfort level of an audience that wants to be wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket rather than face the harsh reality of the every day world and be changed by it.

The story that filmmakers want to tell now are stories about how soldiers shot over the heads of the enemy and not at the enemy.  Because that's what you and I would do, right?  We wouldn't intentionally kill others, right?  And if we did, we would feel bad about it.  We wouldn't enjoy it.  Because we're not made that way.

And if there is a mountain of evidence that argues that we are made exactly that way, because a billion others just like us have killed and enjoyed it, because the soldiers at My Lai were laughing as the children died, not because they were horrible but because they were just like us, because they were living in an insane world that did not include the possibility of any reaction except the kind an insane person would have - well, if that evidence is there, we ought to just ignore it.  We ought to pretend it isn't like that.  That the chemical weapons recently used in Syria aren't used all the time, by every side, because that would be more horrifying than a few children killed in a single attack.  It would be more horrifying because it would mean that children and others are actually being killed all the time.

But not in our movie.  Not in our story.  Not here.  Not on this earth that we think we know.  Because what really matters is how long the camera lingers on the face of the man who has just discovered his wife is cheating on him.  This is the universe we understand.  Small.  Bite-size.  A catharsis we can bear up against.  Nothing that is going to spoil our dinner.

And I wouldn't mind, because I'm just like every other person in the theater.  I was raised in this soft, silly environment too.  I ate a good, fat dinner too.  But I wish the filmmakers would try for something more than just feeding us emotion.  There's not much story in just emotion.  It doesn't measure up to what I would call filling.  Kurosawa and Scorsese are fair camera-pointers, but on the whole it is just cotton candy.  Not belly-filling.  Not mind-expanding.  Just candy.

And candy, you know, is for kids.

Change

A boy is wandering over a battlefield and from among the dead, finds a gnarled tree limb that was being used by one of the invaders as a club.  The boy drags it home, thinking it a prize, though no one else has any use for it.  The boy scrubs it with sand and makes it smooth, he cuts away parts of the staff and carves his name into it, Gryg.  As he grows into a young man, he uses the staff as a walking stick and later, as a weapon.  The shape and feel grows so familiar to him that he prefers it to other weapons, though he learns how to use a knife and a sword.

One year, there is a civil war and with his friends he goes to fight in it.  In the midst of a battle, his company is in danger of being wiped out when he rallies them, raising the staff as a guide for others to follow.  The tide of the battle turns and he becomes known.  By the end of the struggle, he is the undisputed leader of his company.

Returning home, he becomes one of the important men of his village; his name and his exploits are mentioned in several yearly festivals.  He continues to carry the staff with him, having hammered bits of iron into it to keep the wood strong.  When Gryg becomes an elder, the staff is well-recognized as a symbol of authority.

Another war comes and Gryg gives the staff to his son, Grygson.  It is too old to be used as a weapon, now, but it serves as a standard for others to rally around.  Grygson carves his name into it as well; when Grygson meets the king, he makes a note of it on the staff.  When his father dies, Grygson decides to carve symbols of the battles his father fought.  Now there are several companies who treat the staff as a symbol of luck and power, swearing their faith in the staff's ability to protect them.

Very late in life, Grygson's village suffers from a serious drought and he, an old man, begins a march towards a new land where his family, and other families of the village, will settle anew.  Along the way, Grygson dies ~ but his daughter, Grygora, promises the staff, which she names Gratifier, will lead the people safely to their destination.  When they do arrive, she blesses the ground with the staff; each member of the new village puts their hand on the staff to swear their gratitude for bringing them to to this new place. She is made the chief elder of the new village and sits, with Gratifier on her knees, at every ceremony and at every meeting.

Grygora dies childless, but she gives the staff Gratifier to the wisest male in the village, Hansyr.  This male is well-chosen; he is educated and clever.  He has much of the staff carefully carved.  The bare wood is lacquered.  The bits of iron are replaced with leaves of hardened steel and the tips of the staff are fixed with silver.  The elder that is chosen to follow Hansyr, whose name is Grey, renames the staff Greymail and has a large carnelian inserted into the gnarled head of the staff.

There are three elders who follow Grey before the staff comes into the hands of Marryn.  By then the village has become a town and the surrounding environs have sworn allegiance.  Marryn raises the staff and begins a successful war of conquest with the creatures at the edge of the frontier, destroying them.  Thousands of would-be settlers and partisans of all kinds begin to settle into the emptied forests, greatly raising the strength and power of the region.  The town is renamed Marryn's Grey and the region, Staveland.

After a dozen generations, these names have become Marengrey and Stavland.  Stavland is an important part of the kingdom now, the leaders of which have been conferred the title of Duke.  By this time, the staff has been much transformed; only its heart remains wood, the outer surface completely covered in metal and various gems.  Most of the time the staff rests in a glass-covered case in the palace of the Duke, moved from this place only three times a year for specific ceremonies.  Here it remains, until it happens one day that the Duke of Stavland is named King by an election of all the nobles, when it happens that the former line has died out.

Now, standing in the Great Palace, we are allowed to view the ornate, magnificent staff, the size and shape of a massive scepter, from a proscribed distance.  Can we hope to imagine a boy finding such an instrument on a battlefield, unwanted, unimportant?  Yet is it not the truth that any spectacular item we might chance to see or find, placed into our hands by adventure, may not have a history that is unfathomed as we see only the magnificent thing it has become?

The Senegalese Slave Trade

Once again, control of the internet, the power to write.  It's been three long days of moving, moving and moving.  So, Senegal.

The Senegal river basin is a fuzzy dividing line between the Sahel and savanna south of the Sahara Desert and the thicker rainforests of Gambia, Guinea and Ghana.  In the 8th century, the Senegal was visited by new traders and religious pundits, those that were carrying the message of Islam.  This was a message that was received well by some groups south of the Sahara, notably the Fulani, who had come from Morocco and the east in the 5th century (not all the Fula peoples, but we'll get to that in a bit).  The encroachment of Islam was slow; took centuries, but it was steadily clear by the 15th century that most of the people north of the jungle were largely Muslim, while most of those south of the savanna had remained animists.

Like every other part of the world, west Africa was in a state of continuous empire building.  It has only been in the last fifty years that we are getting a clearer picture of what the south Sahara was like in the hundreds of years before the Europeans came.  On the savanna, the Ghana Empire was followed by the Sosso, the Kanem, Mali, the Songhai and the Bamana Empires.

In the forests were the Akan Kingdoms, the Yoruba, Dahomey and Benin.  These empires and kingdoms rose and fell, they attacked one another, they battled one another - in short, they did their best to exterminate each other.  Just like humans did everywhere.

Then the Europeans came.

Now, I'm not interested in the modern world here, so I'm only going to talk about the first few centuries of European interest.  In terms of territory, that would amount to very little.  The Europeans did not fare well away from the coast in Africa.  Unlike South America, the biology of Africa is far more diverse and far, far older (remember that most of the American environment is comparatively more recent, not only in terms of humans but in terms of most animal species there).  Africa is thick with little buggies, successfully overcome by countless generations of Africans, just waiting to kill soft white Europeans.  The Europeans in America may have brought smallpox to the natives, but Africa had dysentery, typhoid, blackwater fever and trypanosomiasis, all waiting to destroy would-be adventurers well into the 19th century, if the well-prepared natives didn't kill them first.

As such, the Europeans clung to the coastline.  Portugal, France and England favored the lower Senegal, Gambia and Casamance valleys; the Dutch, Danish and Spanish - along with other French and English - favored the Ivory, Gold and Slave coasts (truth in advertising).  There they did a lively trade, very much in slaves.

While once upon a 1970s a group of Hollywood producers envisioned white people catching Kunte Kinte with nets, chasing black people through the jungles like animals, the bargaining was a much colder affair.  If the Yoruban animists of the forests fought Mande Islamists hundreds of miles to the north and won, they would bring their captured Muslim prizes south and sell them at places like Fort Anthony, Acra or Caran.  And if the Mande won, they'd take their animist prizes west and sell them at places like Goree, Ziguinchor and James Island.  And because the Europeans could sail all around the coast from Nigeria to the Canaries, they were ready to pay for whatever the market could provide.

Note how the Europeans conceive of the long river that easily
shuffles the slaves along the Islamic corridor ("Negroland"), where
the river conveniently splits into the Senegal, Gambia and Casamance
all at the same time.

This is why the slave trade went so well for the Europeans.  As far as gathering slaves, they needed only to build a fort on the coast and wait for other black tribes to bring in their enemies.  It should be remembered that whatever horrors the Europeans committed (and those horrors were far, far greater than the greed of black African traders), it was blacks that made the trade possible in the beginning.

The trade was made illegal among most European nations by the early 1800s (the Portuguese in Brazil and the plantation Americans were long-time holdouts, with the Brazilians finally outlawing slavery the year after the American Civil War ended (1866).

The providing of slaves meant something to pay off the traders, which meant textiles, liquor and manufactured goods (including weapons, of course) flowing south from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas and then sugar, tobacco, cotton and whatever other raw materials the Americas could produce flowing back to Europe.  For two centuries, this triangle made Europe the richest most powerful political force on earth, not to mention the added impetus for overcoming things like disease, navigation, enemy aliens and other 'problem-solving' methods that were employed in order to keep the guns, liquor, slaves, sugar and tobacco flowing.  The pressure to remove obstacles from the paths of the traders - and the competition between mariner states to get a bigger share - built the western pattern of science, medicine, politics and economic drive we have inherited.  Of course, we still have these triangles - but they are interwoven triangles and quadrangles that bind the hands of states beholden to rich assholes, enabling the horror show in Zaire, Colombia and Indonesia to go on and on.

Coming back to D&D, faced with a world like this, in the big scale of our world as it was, there's little the players could do.  They might seize a backwater for a time, even make it civilized, but the overall buying, trading and misery would simply continue unabated.  This is part of the reason why people don't like slavery in their campaigns (though I doubt they've given it this much thought): there's no cure for it, not that a party can bring about.  The only real cure was centuries of time and a steady re-evaluation of racism and human value.  At any one moment in time, however, the party just feels helpless.

Most don't want that helplessness to invade their 'fantasy' game.  I'm different that way.  I don't see fantasy as fuzzy bunnies and roses; I see it as a methodical, institutionalized investigation of the human soul, dark sides included.  Then, when we step out of the game chamber, we can appreciate the light that is the modern world with context, hope, satisfaction and perhaps a greater resolve.