How many pits are in a pair?*

There’s a project I’m working on where it is very easy to get lost in the weeds. For example: I’d like to be able to say: the typical feudal baron holds between x manors.

Not being an historian, but being pretty good at finding answers, I’ve found the details of feudalism to be very difficult to nail down. This is partly because “feudalism” is a nebulous term and conditions were different in various places and times within the Middle Ages, and partly because records are vague, incomplete, and often absent. Being fluent only in English, I realized from the outset that I should focus on England just to have easier access to scholarship and reference works, but from what I can tell population and property are only really well-documented by the Domesday Book (after the Norman conquest, in 1086) and a poll-tax lists from 1377-1381. Obviously this leaves a big gap in enumeration because 12th-13th century were absolute boom years in terms of population, due to advances in agriculture and trade, and the 14th century saw a precipitous collapse due to pestilences of crops, murrains of livestock, and of course the Black Death, not to mention the probable beginnings of the “Little Ice Age.” Moreover these sources don’t count paupers — beggars in both cases and mendicant friars in the case the poll taxes– nor women & children under 16 or so. So the total population can only be estimated. But it turns out the exact number of manors is also unknown.

What I have seen repeatedly is an estimate that medieval England had 5000-6000 knight’s fees: units of land considered sufficient to support a knight and his retinue, and generally each manor would be a knight’s fee. That should make it pretty simple. Estimate 5500.

But: each manor would have its own church, representing a parish. But I’m usually finding estimates of 10,000 to 13,000 parishes in Medieval England. This is almost certainly based on the number of modern Anglican parishes, which have the number variously reported as 13,000 and 10,480. A vital piece of missing information I found was that about 1/3 of the modern parishes in England were created after after the middle ages, so depending on which number we trust, there would have been 8,666 (13,000 x 2/3) or 6987 (10,480 x 2/3) parishes in Medieval England. I’m going to guess that 13,000 is the total Anglican parishes including Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and 10,480 is just England. This is admittedly a guess, since I haven’t seen any specific sources on how those numbers were generated.

The second number fits a lot better with the number of knight’s fee’s. Let’s call it 7000. Supposing about 10% of the population lived in cities, we could pretty readily justify 1/10 of the parishes being urban: that is parishes not on manors but in parts of cities.  This gets me to roughly:

about 5,500 parishes on manors

about 700 parishes in cities (including parishes centered on cathedrals rather than smaller churches)

about 1300 parishes still unaccounted for

But there were also at least 600 monastic communities and 150 friaries in early 13th century England. Each of these has a chapel or church, possibly representing a parish (all those lay brother serfs need somewhere to pray too!). So now we’re down to 550 “extra parishes.”

This is a difference I can tolerate. Maybe I should have used the largest guess, 6000 knight’s fees, so another 500 parishes are accounted for. Or maybe some 10% of the 5500 manors are large enough to have two churches and thus two parishes. (Or: the “service chapels”  that existed on larger manors to serve the more isolated peasants at their extremities should count as second parishes?) These two-parish manors are presumably bigger than a knight’s fee. That’s fine. We know some estates were on lands considerably smaller — one in Oxford, I read, was just 5 acres, which really wouldn’t support any serfs.

BUT, you say, weren’t those abbeys and friaries built on land that used to be enfoeffed or granted to the Church out of those 5000-6000 knight’s fees we counted earlier? Well, I think so. But I looked a little more for the source of the 5000-6000 estimate, and seems to stem from the Domesday Book, which remember was an assessment of England in 1086. England was gradually clearing forests and otherwise reclaiming “waste” land for agriculture, so I think entirely plausible that new estates were created from cleared land and given to knights/barons/earls or the Church.

All this just leads back to saying: Medieval England can plausibly be said to have had around 5500 secular (not Church-held) manors. The Church held an estimated 1/4 to 1/3 of the land, and held many manors. But the Church was likely to send money (scutage) rather than armed men in times of war. I’ll assume that the crown would not want to reduce it’s military potential and maintained the same approximately 5500 knights fees in the hands of knights and barons. Any additional arable land is consumed by freeholders, the Church, and the royal demesne (manors held by the crown), and won’t be held by any baron.

It looks like there were around 2000 barons in Medieval England. So the average baron held 5500/200 = 27.5 knight’s fees. This actually looks like a reasonable number. Some will have much fewer, and some more.

So, there’s my best guess, having scanned a few books and articles. And Googled a lot more than I’d like to admit. And thrown around numbers in an effort to convince myself. I’ll leave to an actual historian or economist to figure out the correct numbers, but this should be verisimiltudinous enough for my purposes.

*You know damn well there’s more than two.

 

AD&D Monks as desert ascetics

Since my recent revisit of Fantasy Wargaming I’ve been thinking about a medieval setting for D&D some more. My Burgs & Bailiffs projects were kind of aimed in that direction too, though I may have been swept along with the “grimdark”/jokey attitude of the rest of the B&B writers. Having seen several attempts at “medieval authentic” RPGs from the past 10 years I still think there’s room for something interesting, and the next campaign I run will definitely try it out.

One thing I’ve been wrestling with a little is the idea of fitting AD&D (mostly) as it is into a more authentically medieval setting. I’ll have more to say about that later but one thing I enjoyed looking at was whether AD&D classes could be fit into something approximating the High Middle Ages. One of the toughest would obviously be the Monk.

The Monk class seems exceptionally improbable in a medieval European context, but consider that by the 13th century there were contacts between Venetian merchants and China, and it is possible that emissaries or even proselytizers from the East could turn up in Europe. So that might by itself give some rationale for foreigner Monks.

Alternatively, the Monk class could be reskinned as Christian desert ascetics — stylites or hermits whose tremendous piety and discipline have given them miraculous powers. As such, they are really a subclass of the Cleric. Their ability to dodge and catch missiles would be divine intervention intercepting or reversing the missiles; their open hand damage is a supernatural rebuke. Other special powers could similarly be reimagined. Speaking with animals would be similar to St Francis’ sermons to the birds. Their ability to mask the mind from ESP would simply be their intense concentration from meditating in the desert. Immunity to disease, and haste and slow spells would come from purification. The “quivering palm” would be a delayed curse laid upon the impious. Their thief abilities would become uncanny stealth and luck.

St Simeon the Stylite. Source: Wikimedia

 

The 1e Monk doesn’t have anything too exotic listed as weapons either — only the “bo stick” and “jo stick,” which could be long or short walking sticks pressed into service as weapons.

If the Monk is reimagined as a Western ascetic, the biggest hurdle IMO would be  the limitation on characters above 7th level and requirement to fight them to advance in level.

The best idea have so far is: instead, at 8th level and each level thereafter the Monk will be tempted by demons or devils. The character must retreat to a desert, forest, or waste and fast, awaiting the arrival of one or more demons or devils they must defeat — in combat or in some other kind of trial or contest. The tempters will typically be one demon or devil accompanied by manes, lemures, larvae, or similar sub-demons and lesser devils. Their total HD probably should not exceed the Monk’s.

The temptation of St Anthony. Source: Wikimedia

Straight combat could be a problem for a Monk, given that many demons and devils can only be hit by magic weapons, and 1e doesn’t give monks the ability to hit such beings in the PHB, though I think OA or some Dragon articles introduced ideas along those lines. Of course by that level a Monk could have a magic weapon or two.

A series of illusions and temptations would be better, though AD&D doesn’t have much in the way of mechanics for that kind of thing and it would be more of a roleplaying challenge.

I don’t think I have had a monk in any AD&D party I’ve played in, so I doubt it would necessarily be something I will playtest, but I think it’s an interesting idea.

Fantasy Wargaming news…it’s kind of a big deal

It’s hard to believe that it was over a decade ago that I decided to revisit Fantasy Wargaming. It all began with a search of a bibliographic database (WorldCat) to see if the authors had written anything else: Bruce Quarrie was a familiar name from his books on historical wargaming, but the rest of the authors were more mysterious. The name “Bruce Galloway” turned up on an intriguing array of titles: some histories, some political tracts, even some guidebooks for hikers. I decided to find out if any of the authors were the same as the FW author, and the journey began.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the authors and the larger circle of people who were involved with developing the book in various ways, most of whom were very generous with their time and memories, helping me put together a picture of how the book was written. The blog posts became quite numerous as new bits emerged, and I gave the rules a cover-to-cover read. I concatenated the posts into one page, which has seen a regular flow of visits and even been cited in an academic paper on gaming. Someone even asked if I could edit the posts into a short book, and during the COVID shutdown I took up the task in earnest.

I soon discovered that there was more interest in FW than I realized, with many blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts posting their own revisits and reviews. I also began to find more reviews from the period when it was published, and several other people passed along their finds. The one coauthor of the book who is still with us even found a cache of documents that adds a lot more more information and fills in gaps I thought unrecoverable — letters to and from the main author, notes for a sequel, and more.  The new information I’ve gathered since posting the page has revealed a lot of new information and confirmed or refuted many of the guesses and conjectures I made.

And now the book is here, with a lot of updates, corrections, and additions to what I originally wrote. It might be a book no one reads about a game no one played, but I can honestly and with pride say it will be a contribution to gaming history, covering what I still believe to be a fascinating and singular work in roleplaying game history.

Preparing the book has been a trip. Initially, I was pretty sure that a small academic press would be publishing it, but that press became a casualty of COVID. Nevertheless Heather Ford from that the press went ahead and did an amazing and flattering job of making my manuscript into a gorgeous illustrated book — providing many original illustrations no less. And we found a new home for the book at Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press, a publisher of academic and trade books on entertainment technologies.

The price for the full color hardcover will be commensurate with the markup you see on academic books, partly due to the costs of distribution but also due to the higher quality paper needed for the images to come out clearly. ETC Press is an open access publisher, though, so you can also download the full PDF for free. I’m also looking at options for making another edition that will be more accessible for those using assistive technologies, or for those preferring a traditional e-book. Watch this space.

You’ve read my blog, so why should you buy or at least read the the book?

• I added a full and as-comprehensive-as-possible literature review with all the reviews, notices and discussions of FW I could find, annotated.
• I was given access to Bruce Galloway’s personal file of clippings and manuscripts, which answer some questions about the rules and outline the sequel to FW which would have covered the ancient/classical world. Some of that material is reproduced in appendices.
• Heather Ford’s cool art and graphic design made this into a gorgeous artifact for your RPG research collection. I mean it really looks amazing and could be a coffee table book.
• Lawrence Heath, who illustrated FW, has allowed me to include some of his artwork from the period, and it’s pretty dang awesome too.

Click here to download the *free* PDF of the book (or buy a hard copy) from ETC Press!

Click here to buy the full color, hardcover book from Lulu.com!

Click here to buy the full cover, hardcover book from Amazon.com 

coming soonish(?): an ebook edition for purchase

 

The relics of Notre Dame

As you will have heard, the fire at Notre Dame cathedral did not destroy two of its most famous relics: a, I mean the, Crown of Thorns sported by JC at his last public appearance, and the tunic of St Louis, supposedly worn by the king turned saint when he brought the crown back to France. It was given as a bribe to Louis IX in exchange for his support of king Baldwin, who had pawned the crown as security against a loan for 13,000 gold pieces from the Venetians.

The crown itself has no thorns, as these were distributed to other sites as important relics. But happily by the power of sympathetic magic, I mean Divine Grace, many more thorns were transformed into  relics (third class) by being touched to thcrown.

It’s kind of cool that human chains of the faithful rescued and other valuables from the fire this week. But technically they needn’t have bothered: any medieval theologian could have told them that real relics can’t be burned. But if you read Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity  you knew that.

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory (now with leaked material!)

Forget leprechauns and banshees … here’s your St. Patrick’s Day adventure!

Fortunatus, we are told, had heard in his travels of how two days’ journey from the town, Valdric, in Ireland, was a town, Vernic, where was the entrance to the Purgatory; so thither he went with many servants. He found a great abbey, and behind the altar of the church a door, which led into the dark cave which is called the Purgatory of S. Patrick.  In order to enter it, leave had to be obtained from the abbot; consequently, Leopold, servant to Fortunatus, betook himself to that worthy, and made known to him that a nobleman from Cyprus desired to enter the mysterious cavern. The abbot at once requested Leopold to bring his master to supper with him.  Fortunatus bought a large jar of wine, and sent it as a present to the monastery, and followed at the meal time.

“Venerable sir!” said Fortunatus, “I understand the Purgatory of S. Patrick is here; is it so?” 

The abbot replied, ” It is so indeed. Many hundred years ago, this place, where stand the abbey and the town, was a howling wilderness. Not far off, however, lived a venerable hermit, Patrick by name, who often sought the desert for the purpose of therein exercising his austerities. One day he lighted on this cave, which is of vast extent.  He entered it, and wandering on in the dark, lost his way, so that he could no more find how to return to the light of day.  After long ramblings through the gloomy passages, he fell on his knees, and besought Almighty God, if it were His will, to deliver him from the great peril wherein he lay. Whilst Patrick thus prayed, he was ware of piteous cries issuing from the depths of the cave, just such as would be the wailings of souls in purgatory. The hermit rose from his orison, and by God’s mercy found his way back to the surface, and from that day exercised greater austerities, and after his death he was numbered with the saints.  Pious people, who had heard the story of Patrick’s adventure in the cave, built this cloister on the site.”

Then Fortunatus asked whether all who ventured into the place heard likewise the howls of the tormented souls. The abbot replied, ” Some have affirmed that they have heard a bitter crying and piping therein whilst others have heard and seen nothing.  None, however, has penetrated, as yet, to the furthest limits of the cavern.”

(From Sabine Baring-Gould’s Curious myths of the Middle Ages)

Via Wikipedia, here is a map of Station Island. Click to Embiggen. “Caverna Purgatory,” noted between the two large buildings, denotes the site of the cave.

St. Patrick features rather prominently in my book, Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity: The poor pilgrim’s almanack (or in print here). Some excerpts follow below in italics. He was a very important saint, and had several hagiographies written on his life and miracles. Unsurprisingly many different places claimed to house his remains or other relics important to him. The disputes began right after he died:

In cases of disputes about the proper home of a relic, ordeals might be held to settle them. After the death of St. Patrick, the churches of Saul and Armagh both claimed his body. To settle the dispute, two untamed bulls were yoked to the cart which bore his body and left to go where they would. They stopped at the spot where the church of Downpatrick was built and Patrick buried.

(From the chapter “Furta sacra” (holy theft))

…

Here are three pilgrimage sites in Ireland from the chapter “Whither Pilgrim”?

 

St. Patrick’s tomb
Location: Downpatrick, Ireland
Miracles: Sticks to Snakes, Snake Charm, Speak with the Dead, Dispel Magic
Downpatrick is the most likely of the several claimants to St. Patrick’s tomb; he is also said to be buried with St. Briget and St. Columba. When Downpatrick wasn’t being looted and burned by Vikings (as happened at least seven times), it was one of Ireland’s most popular pilgrimage spots. But since most of Ireland was usually being looted and burned by invaders anyway, it was still a top attraction even in the “off season”.

Croagh Patrick (Mount Patrick, also called The Reek)
Location: County Mayo, Ireland
Miracles: Dispel Magic, Silence 15’ Radius
This was a pagan pilgrimage site for the summer solstice for thousands of years. But as a Christian site, it is said to be where the Saint fasted for 40 days. The best time to visit was the last Sunday in July (Reek Sunday), when the pious celebrated the time Patrick killed a witch by repelling her spell back onto her. Pilgrims, usually barefoot, circle the mount clockwise seven times saying seven prayers.

St. Patrick’s Purgatory
Location: Lough Derg (a lake island, also called Station Island)
Miracles: Detect Magic, True Seeing, Plane Shift, Speak with Monsters, Resist Fire
Restrictions: Visitors must convince the shrine keepers to unlock the door over the cave, and then spend a night inside. They will face various demons and devils inside.
Supposedly the cave was created when Patrick asked for a visual aid to convince sinners of the reality of Hell.

He also has a tomb in England:

Glastonbury Tor
Location: Glastonbury, Somerset, England
Miracles: Holy Word, Commune
Restrictions: Must approach with peas in shoes (-2 to Dex for a week afterward); possibly guarded by fairies or knights
This mound was the site of an ancient monastery, but in the 12th century, in legend it grew into “ground-zero” of Christianity on England. So in 63 CE, Joseph of Arimathea arrived with the Grail. The Chalice Well provides healing waters. His staff grew into a hawthorn tree — the Holy Thorn Tree or Glastonbury Thorn. The Thorn blooms every Christmas. Many minor saints, as well as King Arthur, Guinevere, and St. Patrick are said to be buried here, and Christ spent some of his missing years here, building a church.
Pilgrims used to walk the 512-foot-high Glastonbury Tor with peas lining their shoes for penance.
The tor or hill also has pagan associations (as a fairy mound and entrance to the Otherworld, and abode of the king of the fairies) and later with the Arthur legends (the tor is known was the Isle of Avalon to the Britons and the final resting place of King Arthur).

…

“Appendix I: an index of saints, spells, and relics” mentions a few more spots to visit if you need some relics of St. Patrick.

St. Patrick (Snake Charm, Dispel Magic, Speak with Dead, Snakes to Sticks) [crosier, tooth, and bell: Dublin; lower jaw: Derriaghy]

This appendix lists nearly 200 saints and Biblical figures with miracles associated with them. Each entry in Appendix I follows the format: Name (Miracles) [relics: places], so every miracle associated with a given saint is in one place, and any relics of the saint not mentioned in “Whiter Pilgrim?” are also indicated. These matter because the book also gives a couple of systems whereby clerical magic requires either relics for casting, or pilgrimages for learning, spells. Off to fight the snake cult? Better stop by St Patrick’s tomb to learn Snake Charm, or possibly swipe one of his bones to take with you.

The Poor Pilgrim’s Almanack now on Drivethru RPG!

I don’t mind admitting I’m kind of psyched that my book is now available on DriveThru RPG. The Lost Pages store is the place to get the hard copy, shipped from Scotland (I also hear some copies may be showing up at the better conventions too). But obviously Drive Thru RPG is an important distributor, and I’m glad people might be able to stumble upon my book even if they’ve never heard of it.

What is the Poor Pilgrim’s Almanack? (And here I begin just quoting the blurb:)

An historical supplement on pilgrimages, relics and religion in the European Middle Ages.

The Poor Pilgrim’s Almanack is filled with painstakingly researched essays on religious life (and death) in the middle ages. It lets you use relics and pilgrimage as the basis of an alternative conception of clerical magic. Also included are details on travel, burial customs, catacombs, and the business of relic theft. A travelogue of shrines and other pilgrimage sites, detailed rules for relics and reliquaries, and a listing of historical miracles (corresponding to familiar clerical spells) make this 128 page sourcebook a treasure trove of inspiration. Dozens of adventure seeds and tables for generating encounters on the road, graves and grave goods, and randomized catacomb generation and stocking round out the contents. A new class, the Palmer, provides a novel take on religious adventurers. 

But wait! Don’t take my word for it. Here’s something someone said:

An excellent and necessary supplement if you’re wanting your campaign’s religious culture to feel more European Medieval and less the polytheistic/pantheon style used in mainstream D&D

– James Raggi, Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Research mathoms III

I’ve been noting what’s NOT in Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity : The poor pilgrim’s almanack, or, The handbook of pilgrimage and relic theft. But what’s in there? Here’s a screencap of the table of contents. It doesn’t list sidebars, but it does drill down to the section headings within the four main essays: On the road (which covers travel generally); Death, Burial & Grave Goods; Furta Sacra (all about relics and their theft); Into the catacombs (all about catacombs); Whither pilgrim? (a gazetteer of shrines, holy wells, tombs, and other pilgrimage destinations); and Relics & Clerics (which offers a revised clerical spell casting system and a completely different kind of cleric that is dedicated to pilgrimage). Click to embiggen.

 

Here’s one more mathom.

Beheaded martyrs

If you read much about martyrs, you will quickly notice that a large number of martyrs went through multiple executions before being really, sincerely martyred. They might be broiled, beaten, shot with arrows, crushed, hung, trampled by animals, or have any number of brutal treatments and still survive until they are finally beheaded. While we might be tempted to imagine the persecutors shouting “There can be only one!” scholars speculate that the beheadings are often later additions to the stories, because by the Middle Ages, only beheading was considered an appropriate execution for high-status individuals. For the saints to be killed by lesser — even common — means was incongruous with their status as God’s elect, so the hagiographies were amended to end with a more aesthetically pleasing (to the generally noble or high-ranking patrons of the scribes) death.

More fancifully, the trope of saints being beheaded also spawned another category of saints: celaphores. These were saints who are depicted — visually in icons and statues, or narratively in their hagiographies — as carrying their own severed heads. Celaphores are often said to have carried their severed heads to their burial places, in some cases preaching as they walked; most famously, St. Denis of Paris did this, but folklorists have counted more than a hundred cases. Apart from making memorable miracles and dramatizing the saint’s power over death, this behavior helps legitimize the final resting place of a saint, and discourages further translation.

St. Laurence, a celaphore. From http://www.funjdiaz.net/almanaque/ficha.php?id=704

 

 

 

Research mathoms II

Here are few more sidebars, etc., that didn’t make it into The poor pilgrim’s almanack, or, The handbook of pilgrimage and relic theft. (#shamelesscommerce) The illustrations here and in the other Research Mathoms post were not necessarily meant to be in it though — we used only black & white or greyscale images that were in the public domain or under CC license.

The incorruptibles 

Many saints were found to be “incorruptible” when exhumed. In a few cases this meant that the corpse remained largely untouched by decay for a very long time — perhaps perpetually. The bodies are often displayed under glass. But most incorruptible bodies eventually decay. The designation that a saint’s body was “incorruptible” required only that the corpse look fresh when first exhumed. Decay may set in almost immediately. The relics would be encased in reliquaries, or possibly chased in gold, or covered with wax to represent the appearance of the body when it was exhumed.

St. Cuthbert being exhumed and found incorrupt (image from Wikipedia) — 

Note that “incorrupt” is a relative term. Here’s an incorrupt saint, St. Zita. Not too bad for a 750 year old corpse.

***

Fantastic relics

In addition to the relics of saints and Biblical figures, some collections at shrines included unusual items such as Griffin’s claws, phoenix feathers, unicorn horns, and other parts of monsters — collected by pilgrims in foreign lands, sent as rare and valuable tributes, or even as trophies from the ordeals of saints. One church boasted that it had the tip of Lucifer’s tail, lost in a fight with a Syrian hermit. Some such objects were reputed to have their own occult power to heal, but most were simply exhibited along with the fine clothes, jewelry, and other valuables offered in honor of the saint.

Alicorns — the supposed horns of unicorns, most often in the form of narwhal horns or vessels carved from rhinoceros horns — were a highly valued item both because of their intrinsic worth (princes would pay up to 20 times their weight in gold for them, and a large narwhal horn could weight over 12 pounds) and for their supposed magical properties. St. Denis cathedral near Paris had a 7 foot long, 13 pound alicorn among its treasures; St. Mark’s in Venice had two alicorns, each about a meter long and supposedly looted from Constantinople in 1204, plus another of a later date that was two meters long; other impressive specimens were in cathedrals and churches at Milan, Raskeld, St. Paul’s in London, and Westminster Abbey. Alicorns were thought to cure or prevent poisoning and pestilential disease. Unscrupulous guardians might sell filings from the horns for quick cash, and there are records of alicorns being gilded or chased in silver to prevent this. Griffin claws — the horns of ibex or buffalo — were thought to neutralize poison too.

There were also an array highly unusual items with supposed supernatural origins in various church collections. A ray from the star of Bethlehem, objects given to saints by angels ranging from clothing to clocks, body parts from angels, the foreskin of Jesus (as well as many other unlikely mementos of his infancy and childhood), feathers (!) from the Holy Spirit, and even fire from the Burning Bush were all inventoried in various collections.

 

Corpse Roads and Lych Gates

The local parish church held funeral rites and everyone who could afford the fees would prefer to be buried in the parish graveyard. However as small villages sprang up further and further away from the central parish church, it became necessary to establish roads leading from the villages to the church. These roads would be used solely for transporting the dead for burial, as the presence of a corpse was unlucky at best and potentially dangerous at worst. Moreover the ghosts of the dead were thought to wander the corpse road for as long as the soul was in purgatory — potentially many years. For these reasons the corpse road was always laid out in unwanted and otherwise untraveled land. The corpse road was also kept as straight as possible, even if it meant cutting through difficult terrain or crossing streams, because it was thought the ghosts traveled only in straight lines, and no-one wanted the ghosts to wander off the road. Corpse roads always led to a Lych Gate, the gate to the burial yard (“lych” meaning body or corpse).

Lych Gate at St. Mary’s, Wendover (image from Wikimedia Commons)

Research mathoms I

Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity comes in at 128 pages. I wrote a fair amount more that did not make it in to the final version, because of space limitations (essays too long to be sidebars or boxed text and too short to be appendices), because they didn’t quite fit in the flow of the work or ramble a bit off topic, and in one case because a table was far too complex to fix in the page layout. Maybe some day an expanded edition will be possible (and I’d probably add some revised bits from Burgs & Bailiffs 1 and 2). But in the meantime I’ll post some research mathoms here on the blog: tidbits too good to leave on the cutting room floor. (The last one I thought made it in, so my apologies if anyone was thrown by the December 6 post. Having looked at the final draft I can confirm that it DOES detail fun stuff like the saint whose miracles include striking down his own family and making a pope crap out his intestines, the “code” used by funeral bells, and more. But here are some mathoms:

Jinn shrines

There are a number of sites in the Moslem world where the jinn are appealed to for intercessions. Illnesses, especially mental illnesses, are often attributed to evil jinn, and supplicants visit sacred places where the jinn congregate. In Baduan, India, for example, the shrines of several sufi mystics are visited for this purpose because the king of the jinn is said to hold court in a nearby banyan tree. Those suffering from mental illness are brought by their relatives, who make offerings to the jinn and hope to elicit their mercy. As unorthodox as this sounds, the jinn are thought to have mostly converted to Islam in Muhammad’s time, so there is nothing heretical about appeal to them.

(See Sadakat Kadri’s Heaven On Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World. Farrar, Strauss, & Giraux, 2013. The introduction describes the author’s visit to such a shrine in Baduan and the place of jinn in shari’a law. Mostly excerpted here)

Animal catacombs

The Egyptians rather famously mummified various animals and placed them in human tombs. However perhaps less well-known are the animal catacombs under certain temples. One temple at Saqqara has a so-called “Sacred Animal Necropolis” with separate catacombs for falcons, cows, ibis, dogs, and baboons. The baboon catacomb has three levels with hundreds of mummies of olive baboons and Barbary macaques. These primates were raised at, and kept in, the temple for their entire lives. Similarly the falcons and cows were kept at cult sites for ritual purposes. The cults eventually abandoned the site some time under Roman occupation. The “Dog catacombs” — sacred to Anubis — include burials of foxes, jackals, cats, and mongooses.

Canine catacombs at Saqqara (from http://www.livescience.com/51228-photos-egyptian-dog-catacombs.html)

Who stole Santa Claus? 

In the Middle Ages, Saint Nicholas of Bari (now known more popularly in the English-speaking world as Santa Claus or Father Christmas) was revered by sailors in particular because he once calmed a storm at sea while on a voyage to the Holy Land. The 4th century holy man and bishop lived and was buried in Myra, Lycia (which later would become part of Turkey). His tomb became a popular pilgrimage site. In 1087, after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia, Italian sailors and merchants from Bari rescued one half of his skeleton (despite the resistance of Orthodox monks at his shrine), ostensibly because of fears that the Turks would interfere with pilgrims or desecrate the shrine. During the first crusade, a party of Venetians rescued the other half of his skeleton and set up another, competing shrine in Venice. But the relics at Bari continue to excrete myron as they did at Myra, while those in Venice do not. The faithful would attribute this to St. Nicholas’ desire to be in Bari, while skeptics and Venetians might point out that the myron is actually water, exuding from the marble of the tomb which is, in all fairness, below sea level.

Some of St. Nicholas’ bones in Antayla, Turkey (from Wikimedia Commons)

The poor pilgrim’s almanack

To no fanfare, my first game book — Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity : The poor pilgrim’s almanack, or The handbook of pilgrimage and relic theft —  has become available via The Lost Pages! So you can get it now in print+PDF or PDF only for you skinflints.

Paolo Greco, proprietor of the Lost Pages, did a bang-up job laying out the text, which was sort of complicated because the original manuscript had dozens of footnotes and sidebars, as well as some really big tables. Not everything could make it into the final product, so once I see the final product myself I’ll post some of that material here. I’m thinking of some of it as “research mathoms” — stuff I found or created that’s too good to throw away entirely but which didn’t fit in well enough to keep, either in terms of flow or formatting, like the giant table of carrying and pulling capacities for animals ranging from rats to elephants (if you need to know how much a goat can carry, how heavy different types of camels are, or how much traction a moose can pull with, it was in there!). So watch this space for research mathoms…

I eventually envisioned this as a sort of source book like the ones Steve Jackson has been producing for GURPS — chapters of informative text that is as well-researched as I could manage with gameable material (rules). I tried to keep it as system-neutral as possible, but really it’s meant for the, ahem, World’s Most Popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game, in the B/X or first Advanced edition. Thus the sidebars, dozens of brief “adventure seeds” like the GURPS sourcebooks, and so on. I’m not an historian by training but I do read a lot, and did my research at one of the largest public research libraries in the US, where I was also working.

I’m not sure what else to say about this, and as I’m on my lunch break now I don’t have time to get long-winded anyway, but for what it’s worth here’s an excerpt from my foreword, which really explains the project:

Although I’ve always been a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons, another game has long haunted me: Fantasy Wargaming, by Bruce Galloway (and others). That infamous rule book has haunted me because of its unfulfilled promise — the idea of an historical, logical setting for adventures like those in D&D. In part FW failed to fulfill its promise because it was a haphazardly presented system of rules, and frankly the rules seemed unnecessarily complicated. But the real failure was that the game focused strictly on recreating medieval legends and sagas, which while interesting, were too esoteric for someone used to simple generic fantasy to get a handle on. My forays into running FW were pretty disastrous — I subjected my players to retreads of Viking sagas and Beowulf, which were OK for what they were but did not deliver the exploration and adventure we expected from a fantasy game. What I didn’t know then was that all the elements of dungeoneering could be realized in an historical setting. There really were adventurers who entered subterranean mazes, seeking treasure and braving dangers (real and imagined). They could be rogues, warriors, holy men, or magicians, just like in D&D. They might be seeking gold and gems, but they might just as well be seeking items with supernatural powers: the relics of saints. To find these underground complexes — catacombs — the adventurers would undertake long, perilous journeys: pilgrimages.

While this supplement could be used simply to rationalize dungeoneering in historical or pseudo-historical campaigns, the medieval superstitions and practices detailed here should also inspire new and interesting adventures, over land, at sea, and in town and city. Pilgrimages to shrines and other holy sites, whether for secular or sacred purposes, invite all manner of encounters and obstacles that will create exciting adventures. Lastly, the veneration of shrines and relics suggests a new conception of divine magic and clerics: the pilgrim miracle-worker. Paolo and I are excited by the idea of clerical magic which is grounded in historical beliefs, completely different from the usual wizardry and spell-casting that games use for secular magic-users, and which provides a justification for adventuring holy men and women. We hope that you will find ideas you can adopt in your own games, whether you follow the historical precedents herein or reskin them for your fantasy world.