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 that we don’t try to appreciate how the people at the time experienced life – we reflect instead on how we, moderns who were raised in an environment of political liberalism, positivist philosophy, and breakneck technological progress, would have felt living under Cnute the Great or Emperor Otto I.

In RPGs, this automatic assumption that the modern liberal westerner represents the default state of all humanity past and present tends to sabotage the concept of authentic medieval roleplaying. Instead of getting into the character of a Knight born and bred in a feudal society, we imagine ourselves transported to King Arthur’s court like some Connecticut Yankee in a Halloween costume.

“Not at all true,” you might protest, “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist biologist, but my Level 12 Paladin is a crusading fanatic.” Sure, there are some parts of an authentic medieval worldview that are easier to simulate, bigotry and fanaticism being (worryingly) high on the list. But has your character ever expected to see a map of the world, or even the region? Has he ever thought about his State in terms of borders and territory? When he looks up at the night sky, does he see the infinite dark of the vast ocean of space, or does he see the Gods’ well-ordered spheres turning above him in perfect harmony? There is a much deeper gulf separating us from our ancestors than simply our views on the King and the Pope; there is an entire psychological disposition towards a world understood on such fundamentally different terms that it often seems even more fantastical than Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms could hope for.

“It’s just a fantasy world, not a real simulation of a medieval society.” And fair enough – part of the reason for fantasy worlds is precisely to avoid the need to have a society that is truly medieval-authentic. Nor am I saying that playing a modern mindset in shining armor is wrong. I am saying, however, that roleplaying can really be enhanced if there is either an attempt to take seriously a mindset foreign to our Cartesian world, or a conscious decision to play a character more influenced by that world. There can be so much more to roleplaying when our vision of what humanity is and how people have lived, thought, and experienced their lives and themselves, is expanded to account for the incredible diversity of our history.

So, how can you play a more authentic role in a world of kings and alchemists and swords and sorcery? Running out to get Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image is probably unnecessary (though if you really want to delve into the medieval mindset, I strongly recommend both). Instead, a few simple guidelines can quickly get your Knight to seeing the world as a Knight would:

1.    Take the implications of your religion seriously – Modern man compartmentalizes religion as a personal choice based on feelings or experiences, which is neither how any religion understands itself nor how anyone ever practiced it before the Enlightenment. Because of this compartmentalization and subjectivism we tend to see the implications of religion as being, at most, moral. If your Cleric treats his religion as an embellished list of rules, then he’s not treating it the way his real-life counterpart probably would. Religion should instead be treated as providing the basic assumptions on which an entire understanding of the world is built. My earlier comment on what your character sees when he looks into the night sky is an example – if your character believes in a “Prime Mover” deity, he likely treats the universe as an ordered, cohesive plan, laid out by God and operating according to his will. This isn’t (just) an ethical point – it’s an understanding that will inform every fortune and misfortune he comes across. If he or she believes in Gods of fate, how does he propitiate them before battle? Does he believe he can? Does he see himself as having any free will at all? How does that impact his feelings towards the villains he comes across?

2.      Politics is Personal – Our modern world conceives of politics in terms of ideology and nation-state, both of which are unique products of post-Westphalian Europe. We organize into communities of belief that seek power in a bounded territory. In the medieval world, politics was relational. A King would have his royal demesne, but it would constitute only a small portion of the realm he ruled through a network of oaths, vassals, retainers, vassals of vassals, their retainers – the network of loyalties and relationships that constituted politics could become so tangled in medieval Europe that a given noble might well be a subject of both the King of England and the King of France while they go to war. So who is your character loyal to? What drives that loyalty? What would your wizard do if his King declared war on the Sorcerer who taught him?

3.      Consequences are Communal – The modern individual is a bounded, discrete object whose actions and consequences are localized to himself, at least in theory (consider the debate over masking for an illustration of this theory becoming a contentious flashpoint when it is compromised). Medieval man did not consider himself segmented like this; his being was bound to the community as much as the community was a part of his self. This is why religious minorities were so often reviled – damnation on one heretic in the community is damnation on the entire community if there are not walls of discrete individuality to separate our fates. This shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to play a simple bigot but instead as a framework for understanding how your fighter might see his home village, or how your wizard might see his guild. How would this perspective change their outlook on threats to their communities? How would it change their community’s response to their adventures?

I should probably quality these suggestions with the recognition that medieval people lived in thousands of societies across hundreds of years, and that this model of humanity was no more universal then than the modern individualist is universal today. I’ve definitely over-generalized and painted with a very, very broad brush. The point of these suggestions is not to help simulate a Burgundian cutpurse circa 900 AD with perfect accuracy – it is, instead, to encourage deepening the role playing experience by drawing inspiration from how a character born into a similar time and place would have experienced the world. Chances are, they’re a lot less like you than you thought!