Roleplaying and Medieval Authenticity
There’s a lot of pitfalls with medieval fantasy books and movies that people are quick to critique – the peasants were not all actually that dirty, the clothes were not all actually that bland, the castles were not all actually that drab, the nobles were not all actually that corrupt. Hollywood and Random House together thrive on the myth of the Dark Ages, presenting periods like the Carolingian Renaissance – a high-water mark of European culture - as a time of general misery and squalor that snuffed out the creative spark of the individual under a blanket of religious manipulation and state terrorism. Yet it takes only a trivial interrogation of this image to discover how incorrect it is. There are, however, other misunderstood aspects of the medieval world lying behind the dirt hovels and cackling bishops that are more rarely called out. Chief among these, especially in RPGs, is the difference in the medieval mindset. The reason we buy so fully into the “Dark Age” mythology is tha