This week we’re going to have a bit of fun looking at some of the interesting armor choices for the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In a way, this is an extension of the post on “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor,” because I think Veilguard provides a pretty exceptional example of visual character-design armor borrowing from other character designs – rather than from historical armors or armoring principles – resulting in some odd outcomes and unusual patterns.
That said, before we get in, I want to clarify this isn’t a review of DA:VG. For what it is worth, I liked the game, though I found the move away from what I’d term ‘sociological storytelling’ – the emphasis on culture, politics and institutions in previous titles – really disappointing as that had been a major strength of the Dragon Age titles and Veilguard gives it much less attention, a real shame because we were at last in Tevinter! That said, the combat is good, the companions are mostly agreeable and the Big Lore Reveals are mostly fairly well handled and also appropriately Big. The writing is uneven and one can feel the scars of executive meddling, but the end result isn’t bad. It’s a shame it may be the end of the franchise, given the way Bioware is going – cursed by a decade of catastrophic mismanagement by EA – but at least DA:VG, if it is the last entry, closes the circle on a lot of the Big Questions raised in the first three games in a satisfying way.
But that’s not what we’re here to focus on, we’re here to focus on the armor design. And it should be noted at the outside that the Dragon Age games have always had something of a ‘house style’ in armor design (particularly the first two). Interestingly, while I’m going to be fairly critical of a lot of designs here, DA:VG makes some notable alterations to that ‘house style’ towards better, more function designs: there are now choices without comically oversized pauldrons, and the breastplates are all properly shaped now (as opposed to the flat-and-too-long designs from the early Dragon Age titles). As we’ll see, they still struggle with tassets and faulds, but the old bad solution of ‘skirt of something with tassets on the sides where they don’t cover anything’ is out and that’s at least some improvement.
Veilguard‘s other deviation from the ‘house style’ is that it takes a ‘shotgun’ approach to armor designs, from some pieces that seem almost historical in their design to other outfits that are pure absurd fantasy. Part of that comes out of Veilguard’s effort to express several different cultures (Rivain, Tevinter, Daelish, Nevarra and the Grey Warden’s Orlesian-anchored style) with very different outfit designs. The raw variety means that there are both a lot of very silly designs, of course, but also some interesting designs as well. It’s a little messy and all over the place, much like the game itself, but in the end I quite enjoyed it.
But first, as always, if you want to help me afford my own suit of historically accurate armor,1, you can support me and this project on Patreon. Equipment, as I always stress, isn’t cheap! If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I am in the process of shifting over more fully to Bluesky than Twitter, given that the former has, of late, become a better place for historical discussion than the latter.
Bags and Pouches
I want to start with the bags and pouches, because they were the first things I saw that made me think I ought to write this up. DA:VG really loves bags and pouches; a notable slice of its outfits have not just one or two pouches but a host of them, strung along belts and bandoliers all over the place. I’ve pulled a few examples; for the sake of keeping them straight as I talk about them, I’ve lettered them on the image below:
Now, I suspect for a lot of players, these pouch-heavy designs (note, specifically, box pouches) look practical and ready, the sort of thing for a character who isn’t some pampered knight, but a work-a-day adventurer who has to carry their own kit. And I can see the appeal for designs that indicate that sort of practical mindset, as compared to some of the flashier, more posh-looking armor.
You can see the same sort of thinking going into something like Skyrim’s Thieves Guild armor. Clearly folks like the design a lot because a mod that repurposed assets to allow players with other armor to equip bandoliers and pouches in the same style has also been very popular in the Skyrim modding scene. So clearly this isn’t just a Veilguard thing.
That said, if you go looking at pre-1500 armor, you will not find a lot of box-pouches. Indeed, given the prevalence of bandoliers, pouches, satchels and so on in the depiction of fantasy ‘adventuring kit,’ the modern reader may be surprised to find functionally no pouches on medieval or ancient armor or campaign wear. A soldier’s gear was instead carried in a pack, sometimes (as with the Roman sarcina) at the end of a stick to make it easier to carry, or sometimes in a satchel or hunting bag. If you had a horse, of course, saddle bags might equally store supplies and other necessities.
And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn’t need them because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist…and that’s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that’s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist.2 This is just a design feature one does not find in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.
But of course that made me wonder where all of these pouches, as a visual design language, were coming from. Because there is a kind of soldier who has a use for a whole bunch of pouches and pockets all over the front of their equipment so they can quickly grab at things: gunpowder infantry.
Of course the way that gunpowder infantry store their ammunition varies based on the sort of weapons they use; it is technologically sensitive. Above, you can see how an early musketeer might carry his ammunition. The cartidge hasn’t been invented yet, so his ammunition load comes in three distinct parts: measured powder charges for the main charge (loaded down the muzzle) carried in small wooden vials attached to his bandolier, a powder horn (the canister over his leg) for priming the pan before firing and of course the actual bullets, in the pouch at the base of bandolier. Note he also carries a lit matchcord (in his left hand, just over the butt of the musket, lit at both ends, so if one end went out, it could be used to reignite the other) but has a spare matchcord, unlit, also dangling from his bandolier. This fellow is pre-flintlock, so he is relying on that lit matchcord to ignite the powder in the pan of his musket which in turn sets off the main charge which sends the bullet down range.
By contrast, for the soldier using a paper cartridge, carrying his ammunition was made a lot simpler: cartridges could be carried in a cartridge box, typically a single, square leather box with rigid sides, carried on a shoulder-belt and suspended at the waist for easy access. The paper cartridge might contain enough powder to both prime the pan and load the musket, removing the need for a separate powder horn or powder flask, which of course was useful both to speed loading as well as reducing the amount of loose black powder in a combat situation, which reduced the chance of your musketeer exploding at an inopportune time. Consequently, where your early musketeer has a bandolier with a whole bunch of wooden powder flasks hanging off of it, with the paper cartridge, all of that fits into a single cartridge box. There’s generally not a need to carry multiple boxes, because these weapons fire so slowly.
But that’s not what we see here; what we see here is a chest rig with at least half a dozen large pouches, generally rectangular in shape. And it was actually in looking at Armor C, with its huge chest-mounted squared off box-pouches that I realized what was driving this tend, which I will note I’ve also seen everywhere in fantasy adventurer concept and character art. It is, of course, this:
Modern combat load equipment generally includes a whole mess of pouches – or in more sophisticated versions, a modular pouch attachment system, as with NATO’s MOLLE – for carrying all sorts of things. Now some of this is what we might term general equipment: communications equipment, water, first aid kits, and so on. But most of it is for magazines. Because a modern soldier has to carry a staggering amount of ammunition. While a soldier using paper cartridges and firing a muzzle-loading musket or rifle might have carried ammunition for just a few dozen shots, the standard U.S. Army combat load, I believe, includes something like 210 rounds of ammunition, which is seven 30-round magazines. Those magazines need to be carried in combat and they need to be carried somewhere they can be retrieved quickly and without looking, thus they end up carried (and indeed have been since the World Wars) on waist- or chest-mounted rigging in the front where they can be easily reached. Because magazines are generally rectangular(ish), the pouches that carry them also tend to be rectangular.
And, just so this doesn’t remain unsaid: you are only going to keep on your person in these sorts of pouches things you need in a fight. Marching equipment, supplies, those neat crafting ingredients you picked up, those are all going to go in a marching pack, either carried or worn, which can be dropped if you get into a fight. In short, what I think is happening with the proliferation of pouch-heavy fantasy armor designs – especially with lots of on-the-front square or rectangular pouches – is that that artists, riffing off of later gunpowder equipment, have imported elements of that equipment into a context where they don’t actually make a great deal of sense.
As an aside, the usual counter-argument here is that these pouches are either for potions or reagents. But as we’ve already seen, even just ammunition pouches change in form substantially depending on how the ammunition is carried, so I have to imagine the carrying system for ‘magical ammunitions’ like potions or reagents would equally be different. For one thing, cartridges are uniform, but reagents and potions might be particularized; you need a way to make sure you aren’t grabbing the wrong one! Of course in the case of DA:VG it doesn’t really matter: the only in-setting reagent is lyrium (carried in glass bottles) which is no longer represented in the game mechanics and in this game potions have been streamlined into a single resource of which you only carry three.
But even in a Dungeons and Dragons setting with lots of reagents and potions, I think we might well imagine them carried differently than modern warfare-inspired box-pouch webbings. Personally, I actually think the early gunpowder bandoliers might represent an easier way to carry such things: premeasured amounts stored in wood bottles (more durable and much cheaper than glass). For that purpose, modern magazine pouches or mid-19th century cartridge boxes (Armor A appears to have one on the right leg) probably aren’t ideal. Everyone so often I see one of these where the bandolier is a potion bandolier, with slots for each standardized potion vial to fit in and that actually makes a lot more sense to me in a fantasy setting.
But what I find most interesting here is the way in which the self-referential nature of fantasy armor design has taken a design element – lots and lots of pouches – which is almost entirely out of place in this context and made it somewhat standard as a way to signal that a design is ‘practical.’3
That said, we also have some oddities with armor, and we can start with my perennial complaint:
No One Knows How Faulds Work
This, of course, picks up directly where our pieces on The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor left off. There we noted that using rigid materials to armor a human body without inhibiting movement is an extremely solved problem – that is, humans have already come up with a wide range of solutions on how to do this effectively. One of the key problem areas for armorers is the waist. To fight effectively in close combat, humans need to be able to bend and turn at the waist, so any armor there needs to allow a wide range of motion. Consequently, the breastplate – the rigid plate covering the upper-torso – can’t extend much further than the natural waist (the thinnest point on your torso, which is generally a couple inches above the belt-line) without unacceptable inhibiting movement.
There are a few ways to solve this problem. Some beastplates flair outward at the base in a ‘bell’ shape allowing them to extend a little below the waist (but not very far) without inhibiting movement. That might be paired with a flexible protection of leather, textile or mail extending below, like Greek pteryges, or it might be hanging flaps of lamellar armor as with Japanese kusazuri upper-leg protections. You can also try to cover part of the area with a broad metal ‘belt,’ basically continuing the protection of the chest-plate with a disconnected (so it can articular) piece of armor that can at least cover some of the hips, which we see, for instance, in central Italic armors from the fifth to the third century BC. But in the medieval armoring tradition that most Dragon Age armors draw from, the solution arrived at was probably the most comprehensive: tassets and faulds.
And I know someone at Bioware knows this because they did it right, once, on Armor E above. You can see the breastplate which effectively terminates at the natural waist (where they have a high belt, but not how high that belt is – up at the waist not down at the hips – flaring out just a bit below that belt (the ‘bell’ shape noted above). Then below that are attached a set of thin, curved metal plates (faulds), three in total, which run parallel to the ground and are going to be connected to each other by leather straps on the inside which allow those faulds to telescope in. That lets the wearer bend at the waist and rise the legs and even sit down: the faulds just telescope in. Finally, beneath the faulds, to protect the upper legs are two solid, hanging metal plates; these are called tassets. Note how those tassets are ‘cheated forward’ – they cover the front not the side of the upper legs. In a lot of historical armors, they’d be even more to the center, making that center gap between the thighs smaller (particularly as this character does not require an open space to permit a large mostly cosmetic armored codpiece).
So they do know how it works! Or perhaps more accurately, one of what was probably a team of artists noticed and incorporated this feature into this armor but not any of the others. Which creates the problem: Thedas has invented faulds and then just…decided to almost never use them.
It’s not hard to see the problems with the comparison armors D, F, and G. Armor D lacks faulds, so the tassets have to begin really high up and they’re tiny leaving an enormous gap in protect over the upper legs. That’s quite bad because the upper legs are filled with big arteries moving lots of blood, meaning that a wound there can quickly cause disabling or fatal blood loss. By the time you are going in for dedicated knee plates and huge, oversized decorative pauldrons, you probably want to have tried to do what you can do to protect those upper legs.
Meanwhile, Armor G has a host of problems, but among them are its absurdly massive tassets. Once again, there appears to be no fauld and instead they use a sash combined with what appears to be at least three belts to conceal the fact that the breastplate extends too far down the torso to connect to these gigantic single-piece tassets. To understand why you don’t see that very often, just imagine running in that setup and how the tassets are going to react as you bring your knees up, flapping upwards in your way.
And then there is Armor F, which fits a pattern I see more and more of in concept fantasy art and such: the “I give up” solution in which the groin and belly are just left entirely unprotected because it is really hard to figure out what to do there. I should note that while I picked ‘F’ (the starter warrior armor) because it was really clear, there are several outfits in the game that follow this pattern. The problem here is that there’s a lot of blood vessels and vital organs in the groin and belly – a strike in either is extremely likely to prove both immediately disabling and eventually lethal. What needs to happen ehre is the chest plate needs to extend down to the natural waist (it terminates too high here) and then something, even if it is just thick leather straps (note that Armor D actually has something like pteryges, though they ought to be more substantial) to cover the groin. Meanwhile, it preserves the ‘sides only’ school of tassets that has been part of the Dragon Age ‘house style’ since Origins (also common in MMORPG armors) but hasn’t started making sense at any point in all of that.
Now I rather assume some of this aversion to tassets is that they might be hard to animate, though unless the player is looking close, the traditional expedient in video game armor animation of ‘making the rigid thing bend’ will work just fine to give the impression that they’re telescoping. But with the amount of resources on display here – all of these intricate armors, with lots of moving parts and cloth physics – I have to imagine tassets and faulds could be made to function properly or at least ‘faked’ convincing.
More broadly, I think a big part of the issue here is precisely that fantasy armor design has become really disconnected from historical originals, to the point that folks drawing and designing these armors are unaware of the common solutions to their common problems, in a way that comes out pretty clearly with Armor F’s, “I didn’t know what to do” solution to the center torso or some of the awkward ‘just cover it with belts’ solutions from games like Baldur’s Gate III. It’s that sort of thing which suggests to me this isn’t that artists have made a conscious choice to avoid a specific historical solution, so much as that they do not know it exists and so are at a loss as to what to actually do about that region of they body: they know they can’t just extend the breastplate down because it looks wrong, but they don’t seem to know how to fix it.
The irony is I think faulds and tassets can do a lot for the other problem these artists seem to struggle with which is maximizing visual interest. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but western audiences kind of expect armor to come in an ‘alwyte‘ style, which is to say with lots of uncovered, polished visible steel, as opposed to facing armor with colored textile or putting things like surcoats and tabbards over it and so on (which was, in earlier periods, very common!). But there’s an aversion to just having a lot of solid steel surfaces which don’t have a lot of bits and bobs of visual interest. You can see that really clearly on Armors D and E; the former uses a LOT of fluting, kind of like Maximilian plate armor, while the latter presents a breastplate riveted together unnecessarily from a bunch of smaller plates mostly just to break up its lines and curves.
But while breastplates weren’t usually composites of half a dozen plates (they were sometimes composites of two plates), protections like tassets and faulds give a lot of opportunity to add layers and movement, as well as decorative surfaces to make visually interesting armor that doesn’t end up feeling quite so overwrought as most fantasy armor does. After all, while tassets and faulds look neat, they’re also clearly practical, quite obvious in the way they protect part of the body.
And that brings us to problems with…
Pauldrons
Now I should note at the beginning that the Dragon Age ‘house style’ started in 2009 when the World of Warcraft-inspired vogue for gigantic pauldrons was still very much in effect and so if you look at the armor of the Dragon Age games, particularly Origins and II, you’ll see nearly all of the heavy armor has really big ‘bubble’ pauldrons, much larger than what we’d generally see historically.
Veilguard moves away from this: some of the pauldrons are still jumbo-sized, but the classic oversized ‘bubble’ shape, already relatively rare in Inquisition is now basically gone. What is unfortunate is that the designers don’t seem to have quite known where to go from there: Veilguard features a lot of pauldron designs and almost none of them are quite right.
The easy problems to point out here are poor Davrin’s armors, G and I (G is also available for Rook), with just use pauldrons. Armor G in general is just kind of a trainwreck. The in-game description makes a point that Armor G is basically the heaviest of all heavy armor and everything about it is a bit over the top. We’ve already mentioned the gigantic tassets (but alas, no faulds!) and the massive pointed pauldrons are likewise just silly. As an aside, sharp or spiked armor is very rare, historically, for the obvious reason that you are going to spend more time wearing and marching in any kind of armor than fighting in it and so lots of sharp edges.
But equally awkward is this armor’s deeply silly enormous bevor. A bevor (or bevor plate) is a metal plate which extends up from the breastplate to protect the neck, often intended to be used with a type of helmet called a sallet, which could interlock with the bevor to provide pretty darn complete protection. Now this bevor that Davrin has with Armor G is too far from his face to work with a sallet, but more to the point when you look closely you realize that entire plate, which runs down almost to Davrin’s naval, is the bevor: there’s an entire second metal plate (the actual breastplate) behind it.
More broadly, I think one of the things that a lot of fantasy armor designs struggle with is that they want to communicate “huge and heavy,” and so want armor that is thick and broad. The problem is that armor shapes are dictated by human biomechanics and the need for have blows glance off, which means they don’t tend to be that sort of enormous and indeed cannot be. Instead, even the heaviest armor almost looks thin to modern eyes, because of course it is armoring the body of a relatively fit person and aims to fit as closely as possible. Just about the ‘chunkiest’ armor I think I know of is Henry VIII’s Italian-made field armor – which ends up looking ‘dumpy’ as much as threatening – and that was mostly because Henry VIII was himself very big both vertically and horizontally by the end of his reign.
Armor I also has fairly oversized pauldrons, by the thing I actually want to note about these pauldrons isn’t that they’re big but the contrast in how they appear to attack. Armor I’s left pauldron appears to attach at the shoulder and hang down, whereas the right shoulder – the really oversized decorative one – attaches on the upper-arm and is supported upward.
This style of pauldron attachment is rapidly becoming a trend in the fantasy armor concept art space I’ve been noticing, another example of ‘DeviantArt Disease’ where by new fantasy concepts are based in old fantasy concepts rather than historical armors. Pauldrons (and their less elaborate cousins, spaulders) are the part of the armor that protects the shoulders and parts of the upper arms. The trend I have been seeing is to feature pauldrons and spaulders which, instead of hanging down from the shoulders, with articulated lames (thin bands of metal), projecting down to cover the arms, these fantasy ‘pauldrons’ (really technically bizarre and oversized rerebraces) attach to the arms and project upwards alongside but not overtop of the shoulder.
And you can see that problem in both right and left pauldrons in E and A, along with the left pauldrons on H and I. I don’t know enough about the technical details of video game animation to be sure, but I think the issue here is actually that the pauldrons are being rigged as a single solid object which moves based on the position of the shoulder and the animator doesn’t want it to clip into the character’s face, so they’ve moved the edge of the pauldron way out away from the neck. You can see that really clearly on Armor A, where the upper lame of the spaulders, which ought to over the entire shoulder are instead absolutely tiny and barely cover anything (and are, for some reason, mounted on a continuous leather backing, rather than articulated using sliding rivets or leather straps).
The coverage problem here is significant. Biomechanically, all strikes in close combat originate from the shoulders and one of the easiest and most instinctive strikes to make with almost any cutting or bludgeoning weapon is the falling diagonal strike (in longsword fencing, this is the classic zornhau, “wrath strike,” but the basic physics of the falling diagonal strike show up basically everywhere). That strike, aided by gravity and using a lot of the body’s muscles is really powerful and extremely dangerous (to the person being struck) and also basically instinctive. And it is going to fall, if aimed correctly, basically at where the neck meets the shoulders, give or take. So armoring that area is really quite important and historical armors very often reinforce that region: early Roman mail armor (the lorica hamata) was doubled over that space, the thick ‘yoke’ of the Greek tube-and-yoke cuirass protected the same area, and in the high Middle Ages that area would been protected both by the mail of the hauberk (the coat) but also by the hanging mail of the aventail (extending down from the helmet). And once plate protections are back on the table, you protect that region with the upper component of pauldrons or spaulders.
By moving the pauldrons out to the upper arm, that region is left almost entirely unprotected, or protected only by the top of the cuirass. Instead, a lot of these designs create what is basically a ‘shot trap’ where a descending diagonal blow is going to hit the shoulder (in a less armored place) and then catch on the pauldron, preventing the weapon from sliding off. That may matter less for armor penetration, but it matters a lot for hooking and pulling, which are important elements of a lot of close-combat.
Finally, can we just note that Armor H is just generally terrible? I’m not sure what NPCs wear this design, but it is available to the player and is just a mess. We’ve got some sort of padded puffy textile under the armor that both doesn’t look like a non-synthetic fabric and also doesn’t look like actual padded armor. And then we have a metal cuirass which inexplicably leaves little openings on the side to allow an enemy’s sword or arrow easy access to your lungs. Meanwhile, the lower legs (less important) have enormous greaves while the upper legs (more important) are entirely unarmored. Meanwhile for all of that lack of coverage, there is still a sharp, angled solid downward projection, secured by rivets, over the groin to make sure that sitting or riding a horse is as uncomfortable as humanly possible. I am honestly a bit baffled by it.
But let’s close out with something positive to say.
The Uses of Textiles
One thing about Veilguard‘s armor choices is that they’re so varied that you get some really interesting designs that I do think have interesting ideas that I want to see percolate into the broader thinking about fantasy designs, although I kind of hope we might anchor them in their original historical exemplars, rather than their fantasy presentations. As noted above, one of the big challenges these artists face is the demand to create a lot of visual interest in their equipment, which can be tricky with alwyte armor that is mostly just shiny steel.
The thing is, this was a historical problem too. Soldiers and warriors in expensive armor wanted to look impressive. They also wanted to be individually recognizable in a lot of cases. And so there were a lot of solutions to try to add color and interest to their battlefield kit in a way that would render them recognizable and impressive looking.
One of the standard ways of doing this, historically, was to alter the shape and color of the textile elements of the panoply, rather than the metal ones. In medieval Europe, the fashion for alwyte armor comes relatively late, in fact: for much of the Middle Ages, it was instead common to cover the metal elements of your armor with textile. You might, for instance, wear a tabard, jupon or a surcoat – a textile garment, often elaborately decorated, with the colors or arms of your family – over a mail hauberk or coat of plates. That textile could then, of course, be dyed or embroidered or decorated in any number of ways. Indeed, early plate cuirasses were often faced on the outside with brightly colored textiles rather than left ‘white’ (with the metal showing).4
One option for visual interest that I am shocked more games do not imitate is the Japanese jinbaori, a sleeveless vest or coat sometimes worn (as an optional element) over a samurai’s armor. I think that is the direction Armor M is going as well: you can see the plate cuirass underneath, but then it is covered by a sleeveless coat. Jinbaori, as far as I know were generally shorter, more vestlike, but I have seen longer examples that look like they ran down to the knees, so the length of the coat on M isn’t a problem (though it has a lot of layers and gets visually confusing a bit. Likewise, it looks like, rather than do cut outs from the breastplate, instead the big shadowdragon crest in the center of the breastplate is framed by an out, decorative textile layer to the armor, which would work and was done. It’s not perfect (the breastplate has that odd groin-remover sharp projection at its base because we still haven’t figured out tassets and faulds), but Armor M was one of my favorites.
Meanwhile, Armor K shows another option. I suspect this was an effort to bring forward some of the style of many of Inquisition‘s player armors, which featured long coats over relatively modest breastplates. K is far from perfect here – the breastplate has an odd cut down the center (but is clearly metal and shiny) and you can see the “we don’t know what to do at the waist so we added eight belts instead” solution being used here too. Now in practice, textile garments over armor – like a surcoat – tended to close at the front; I can understand why developers don’t want to go that way, because it hides the armor and introduces a lack of clarity as to if a given outfit is or is not armor. So I am a bit forgiving of the open-coat approach; again, I think working from historical jinbaori is probably the right idea here.
Finally Lucanis there in the center with Armor L shows another option, wearing both a scarf for a spot of lighter color, but wearing his coat underneath his plate cuirass. This particular configuration, of a plate cuirass worn over a thick leather coat was a common early modern setup, as armor – being made thicker and thicker to resist bullets – started to drop everything but the most important components. Normally in Europe that coat would have been made of buff leather, which tends to come out a very distinctive orange-brown as a result of the treatment process and tended to be left that color, but there’s no reason your fantasy environment can’t have other colors to work with and in this case, they wanted to keep Lucanis’ theme colors which are blues.
But the point I want to make is that while none of these outfits is perfect (though L is actually pretty damn good), they all show options for adding lots of visual interest through decorative textile armor elements – a very common historical solution! – without necessarily damaging the functionality of the actual metal armor.
Conclusions
Overall, Veilguard takes a ‘shotgun’ approach to armor and outfits, with a lot of different styles and approaches, a sharp break with the previous Dragon Age games, which tended to hew to just a handful of styles, be it the ‘house style’ of the first two games or the ‘breastplate under leather jacket’ motif of Inquisition. Naturally that shotgun approach produced some absurd armors, but also a few good ones.
But what I think it revealed most is the degree to which this design process, as with film and TV costume armors, has turned in on itself, endlessly riffing off of other fictional armor. Part of the reason, as an aside, that I think video games often mess up tassets, faulds, pauldrons and spaulders is that these are components that are hard to manufacture in the real world cheaply using pressed plastic and other cheap materials and as a result they tend to be done poorly in live-action film and TV. Of course, animation doesn’t have the same limits, but if the character design team is riffing off of Game of Thrones instead of the arms and armor collections at the MET or the Wallace Collection, they’re going to import those corner-cutting practices all the same, even though they’re unnecessary, looking silly and cheap.
Ironically, as I’ve been writing this, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out and I have just started playing it. I have no review thoughts about it yet (though my sense from others is that it avoids some of the historical missteps of the first game, offering a lot more depth to the wide range of people and lives one might see in medieval Bohemia), but one thing it shares with its predecessors is a steadfast commitment to using historical armor designs. Admittedly, they fudge the chronology a fair bit, with some equipment showing up being either probably a bit too old or a bit too new (e.g. some rounded-visor bascinets showing up a few decades too early), but I don’t think anyone really minds that kind of limited fudging. I certainly don’t.
Instead, what I find striking already about that game’s approach is how actually using historical armor designs rather than fantasy designs solves so many of the problems one might face. The problem of developing visual interest is fixed by decorative surcoats and jupons; many characters are instantly recognizable, even in full armor, because their armor is distinctively colored and decorated.
Another trend in fantasy RPG armor has been the move away from components to having just a single armor slot. TESIII: Morrowind‘s armor came in 10 mix-and-match slots; by TESIV: Oblivion that was just 5 and by TESV: Skyrim just four, with bracers, pauldrons, and the cuirass all being merged together. Veilguard has a single ‘armor’ for appearance which includes everything but the helmet. The usual justification for this is that otherwise it is really hard to get all of the various armor pieces to ‘play nice’ with each other without clipping; by limiting the combinations, the developers can better control how the armor all fits together.
But actual historical armor was designed with a degree of ‘mix and match’ in mind. Indeed, tournament armor often included ‘pieces of exchange’ – alternate components for different events or uses which could be swapped in and out. Anchoring the presentation in historical designs thus allows for a system where the various pieces ‘play nice’ together because they were designed to do so in the real world without overly limiting mobility. KC:D2, for reference, has twelve armor slots, layered over each other, representing fairly well the basic components of c. 1400 heavy armor.
In short then, I want to encourage fantasy artists and designers, for every kind of production – film, video games, or just 2D artwork – to spend less time looking at each other’s fantasy work and more time looking at historical armor. A lot of today’s fantasy armor tropes come out of the 1980s and 1990s early years of Dungeons and Dragons when it was much harder to get good information and especially good pictures of historical armor. But that’s changed! A lot of museum collections are online now with pictures. The best thing is, that also lets you expand beyond Europe: there are fascinating armor designs from all of the world over which almost never show up in these settings. South Asian-style mail with mirror plates, for instance, or Chinese-style lamellar, or the differently constructed and absolutely awesome looking Japanese lamellar. Heck, even in the European tradition there are cool armor types which almost never show up in fantasy fiction, like the oft-overlooked brigandine.
The armor design language developed over the past c. 3,000 years globally is both far richer but also deeper, informed by a wider range of concerns of practicality and decoration, than the last twenty years of fantasy film and online character art. Thanks to online collections and better publications, a lot of that variety is available to you and a lot of knowledge about how and why these armors worked the way they did is also accessible. You’ll get better designs if you use it!
- To be clear, I am not currently collecting armor, but at some point I would like to get an accurate production second century lorica hamata made for myself, at the very least.
- This point has been done to death on YouTube so perhaps does not need noting, but while both back-quivers and waist-quivers were used in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, quivers at the waist seem to have been the more common, practical option. Multiple quivers to carry more arrows – an oddly common solution in some game settings (e.g. Bannerlord) – were not, so far as I can tell, a thing, because no archer would have the strength and endurance to fire off two whole quivers except in a context (like a siege) where arrows might just be delivered from the baggage train.
- For what it is worth, pouches aside, armor ‘A’ was one of my favorites for this game. It’s hardly perfect, but it has nice, relatively simple lines, although I will note that in addition to its pouch problems, it has to ‘too many belts’ problems we now see a lot of, along with what seems to be a misunderstanding of how a saber’s scabbard suspension works.
- You can see a lot of these – period correctly! – in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel (which I have only begun playing).
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“Ironically, as I’ve been writing this, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out and I have just started playing it”
I was 100% expecting a short fireside this week precisely because of that. You have your prioritise wrong; writing long essays for us rather than making sure your Henry has a belly full of wine and pleasant bath house company.
I think one of the big reasons we don’t see accurate faulds in games is that modern fashion, especially men’s fashion, prefers clothing that sits at the hip rather than the natural waist. Accurate bell-style faulds are effective, but to a modern audience runs the danger of looking like a poofy skirt.
Even without lots of faulds, wasp-waisted armour can easily look very feminine to modern eyes. Which is exacerbated by games typically reserving plate armour for the heaviest, tankiest characters/builds, which the designers want to depict as hulking, macho body builders. Of course, RPG archetypes are a whole other can of worms…
Should go well with female characters, then. Certainly more plausible than a chainmail bikini…
This is further complicated because (i) there are a lot more female characters wearing armor in both games and fantasy live action than in actual history and (ii) there are a lot more players or viewers who appreciate exaggerated female figures (on female characters) than there were on historical battlefields. So one goal for fantasy designers, utterly absent in the actual past, is to accentuate gender differences.
Entirely true, but there are paintings of, eg, Joan of Arc done in the Renaissance. Even if they’re not accurate depictions of what she actually looked like, it does show what people in an armour-wearing period thought a woman in armour ought to look like. It’s obviously far less sexy than the metal bikini trope, but she still looks distinctly feminine with a deep accentuation of shoulder-waist-hip ratio that would make any 1950s dress maker proud. Would be nice to have more games using that as a starting point.
Speaking of Joan of Arc, looking at artwork I came across a piece by John Everett Millais depicting her (I can’t attach an image but if you look up “Joan of Arc John Everett Millais” you’ll find it). In this painting she has pauldrons that seem to have the same problems described in this post, where the raised arch seems like it would funnel a downward stroke towards the neck. Is that a historically accurate suit of armor, or a fabrication of the artist?
@DaveM That’s actually a pretty accurate depiction of the Maximilian armor Bret links in the post. The arches are likely less of an issue because you’re not seeing them in their combat position: With the arms raised, they pivot towards the neck, closing the gap.
I believe Joan of Arc did wear armor. And Queen Elizabeth wore a breastplate at Tilbury. There are probably a few other RL instances of women in armor. I wonder if any armor designed or made for a woman survives (and if so, what it looks like).
The rising flanges on the pauldrons of the Millais Joan of Arc harness comes from late 15th- and early 16th-century designs where the priority was to protect against lance blows, since the lance was one of the very few non-gunpowder weapons still capable of penetrating a contemporary breastplate and associated undergarments if wielded on horseback with a proper lance-rest and plenty of room to accelerate. The idea was to stop any lance blows that glanced off the pauldron before it could get to the helmet, and incidentally the feature would also protect the wearer from ricocheting crossbow bolts or spent arquebus balls coming from roughly the same direction. Blows coming from above were no longer such a high priority to defend against since cavalry and infantry roles were growing more distinct, so the wearer of such armour wouldn’t have expected to engage in dismounted fighting without changing the configuration of the harness altogether (quite unlike in Joan of Arc’s era 60-100 years earlier).
Note that Joan is wearing a plate collar/gorget. Doesn’t matter what gets funnelled down there.
(The armour is accurate but of course anachronistic for the subject.
“female figures (on female characters)”
That’s a curious additional qualifier.
Mind, considering how very popular Astarion was in Baldur’s Gate 3, perhaps there’s a lot of untapped appreciation for somewhat effeminate male characters as well.
Astarion is part of a tradition in visual media, going back to Valentino’s characters in the silents, who manage to evoke a strong sexual response from an audience despite the fact that they display almost none of the features that men traditionally recommend to other men when giving advice on how to evoke strong sexual responses from an audience.
“Untapped”? Heh. Sounds like someone here has little experience of East Asian fantasy media. The term “bishonen” describes that very thing, with too many examples to count EVEN for TVTropes, let alone for any comment I or anyone else may write on here.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Bishonen
Probably the most emblematic example in video gaming is that of Yoko Taro’s Nier. (The original one, not the far better-known Automata.) It was literally released in two versions – Nier: Replicant for the domestic Japanese market, where the titular protagonist is that exact kind of a young effeminate male, and Nier: Gestalt for every other market, where he is a gruff middle-aged man like the protagonist of The Road, etc. Besides the difference in visuals & VA, this also changed the relationship with the girl, Yonah, you are trying to rescue – Replicant is her brother and Gestalt is her father. (Though as those terms imply, things are a lot more complex than that.)
After the success of Automata in 2017, however, the subsequent remake of the original Nier was Replicant-only, as Taro and the producers were no longer concerned that the bishonen protagonist would not appeal to the Western market.
You are mistaken, and I was making a rhetorical point.
I agree, there is a market in popular culture for effeminate male figures, whether it be anime characters or Ziggy Stardust. But those effeminate males don’t have the kind of female anatomy I was thinking of, the kind featured here. https://eschergirls.tumblr.com/
That type of effeminate male mostly has the anatomy of a eunuch, as historically described, or perhaps a pre-pubescent male.
This very post showed that it’s possible to avoid that. Henry VIII’s armor ought to cut a plenty masculine figure even to current sensibilities. I think a lot of what’s wrong with fantasy armor would be cured if someone published a picture book or online gallery of curated historical arms and armor, with the goal of sampling many historical periods, cultures and styles, with some narrative and illustrative examples of what those people did for various degrees of decoration.
I bet video game artists would eat it up. Not to say they wouldn’t silly-looking things, but if they faced a graphic design problem that one of Henry VIII’s armors would solve, they might favorably remember Henry VIII’s armor.
I think the bigger factor is that animating them accurately is really hard, and then bending looks really bad. Vavra, the KCD lead, praised another dev for getting them to work since his own team determined it was too much effort to be worth it, if it was even possible for them and their engine.
I feel like this is one of those ‘two wrongs may actually form a right’ situations.
The simplest way of disguising a potentially too-feminine-looking waist to modern sensibilities would be to disguise it with textiles. Give them a broad sash around the waist (nattily embroidered!) to disguise the pinch and square out the torso. Bonus points if it’s got a dagger or a stiletto stashed in it somewhere. A broad belt with embellishments would work too, and may not be quite the same degree of sin as ’30 belts because we don’t know what armour should go here’ if it’s clear the belt is going above the armour.
For us armour geeks it would say ‘at least they know there’s supposed to be armour there’ and for everyone else it might say ‘looks a bit like a WWE belt so I can happily play that character without damaging my sense of masculinity’ or whatever lightly-bonkers reason they have for thinking it looks wrong.
For what it’s worth, while Armor K probably is meant to bring forward some of Inquisition’s design elements, it’s also a special tie-in with Mass Effect that was released on N7 Day, meant to invoke Shepard’s armor (or, I suppose, the Pathfinder armor from Andromeda). So it’s actually a twofer, in that regard, bringing in both The Problem Of Sci-Fi Body Armor AND The Problem With Fantasy Armor.
I had never come across the Roman sarcina before… seems like the origin of the hobo “scarf tied around your belongings, and put on the end of a stick.” Which would seem sort of appropriate for the … um … murder-hobos.
I’m not really sure why they would do that. Possibly it’s easier to drop than to shrug out of a backpack or a hunting bag. Though it’s not often that a soldier ends up having to fight that quickly.
Maybe it’s easier to carry because many would also be carrying a spear slung over a shoulder, so you could sling that pole with your bag on the same shoulder?
It’s probably also easier to come by a sturdy pole than the straps that would allow for a pack to be comfortable. The pole would be a branch you smooth out and remove all side branches except for a little bit of one or two. Take a blanket and tie knots and slide it on the end of the pole. The side branch bits you leave in keep the knots from sliding down, so it stays where you tied it.
To make a pack you’d have to strongly attach pretty good leather or cloth straps to the blanket, with good stitching. It’s probably a lot more work and expense. Plus you can’t unknot it and use it as a blanket anymore.
That’s what I think happened anyway.
I think I soldier would need to be able to drop the bag very quickly, if they get ambushed while traveling. Armies need to spread out in order to fit on a road, which made them vulnerable.
I feel like a backpack would be more expensive than a bag on a stick, but still very cheap compared to armor.
Let’s not forget that according to the sources, each legionary carries two pilums and a wooden palisade stake while on the march. Adding another stick to that is probably more convenient than a backpack.
If they’re already carrying a stake I’m surprised they didn’t just tie the bindle to the stake. Finding an additional pole seems like an additional, unnecessary step.
Are you sure about the stakes? I’ve read that they carried around the tools for building fortifications, but used local wood for building materials and burned it down when they left.
A palisade stake is basically a log, and that’s an awful lot of weight to carry around when you could cut local wood instead.
when you already have to carry a long stick, tying things to the stick is more convenient than to your body.
Dropping a backpack while carrying something in even just one of your hands is almost impossible. Dropping a bindle while carrying a shield in hand is simple, and in addition you can fling the burden to the side, out of the footspace of your fellow soldiers, in a way that just can’t happen when shrugging out of a backpack.
All this talk of backpacks and how easy or difficult they are to drop reminded me of Outward – a game whose premise was basically “open-world Dark Souls (years before Elden Ring did it) + relatively extensive survival mechanics and a touch of the classic Gothic series (once the closest thing to a rival The Elder Scrolls series had)”. It was made by only a dozen or so people, so those limitations are apparent everywhere, yet one of the fun things it did was really making it important to craft a good backpack – and to potentially drop it as you are ambushed. You could also do things like attach a holder for a lantern to that backpack – since otherwise you would have likely had to sacrifice a shield or the ability to use a two-handed weapon in order to fight at night with any degree of effectiveness.
Also, this point is rather subjective, but I think its soundtrack can be pretty great and deserves to be mentioned more often when video game music is discussed.
Neat! The other game I’v found that seems to do backpacks well is Kenshi (again a game with an adventure-survival element). It still falls down a little with the amount you can carry in your hands, but it’s far less generous than the vast majority so a backpack of some variety is an absolute necessity (there are multiple different backpacks, with different compromises to storage space, running speed and combat ability).
The expense is what comes to mind: if a Roman had to make a backpack big enough to carry a legionary’s kit, what would it look like and how big would it be? What would it be made of? It’d be complicated to make, and expensive.
When do we actually start to get backpacks at all, for that matter? The first bergen rucksacks are derived from mountaineering kit in the mid 19th century (no mountaineers before that). Napoleonic-era soldiers had small packs, Civil War soldiers only had shoulder bags – satchels. The thought strikes me that a backpack is something you only need if you have a lot of possessions that you are expected to carry by yourself, and that just wouldn’t be the case for many people – rich soldiers had pack animals or porters, poor soldiers didn’t have possessions.
This https://www.fubiz.net/en/2014/08/25/inventories-of-war-from-1066-to-2014-2/ seems relevant. If you gave a ninety-litre backpack to a mediaeval archer… what would he have that he could fill it with? If you gave it to a huscarl, already burdened with shield, axe, knife and mail, how much more would he have the strength to carry?
Bear in mind that it was originally thought that soldier’s heart, diagnosed among American Civil War vets, was organic damage to the heart from that marching with packs. Weight is a very important issue for marches. There’s a Bill Maudlin cartoon where one soldier advises another to throw away the jokers in the playing cards as unnecessary weight.
(Soldier’s heart is also known as DaCosta syndrome from the physician who proved it was conversation symptoms. Thus beginning the study of PTSD.)
Soldiers have a long history of throwing away or loseing things that don’t want to carry.
But they away’s carry the same things: a mess kit, a grooming kit, cold/rain weather gear, a few days worth of food, then maybe some dice an a few trinkets.
“When do we actually start to get backpacks at all, for that matter?”
Ötzi is alleged to have had an open-frame back carrier that secured with shoulder ties, but he was killed by being shot in the scapula, so it wasn’t something he was wearing at the time or when he was found; it could have been some other kind of carrier or even a snowshoe. So maybe 5,-6,000 years. He did have a belt with an attached pouch.
Evidence of humans repeatedly ‘inventing’ the idea of repositioning a carrying waist-belt onto the shoulder for short trips is everywhere. So single-strap back carrying is certainly prehistoric, and attested for things like heavy shields in antiquity. The value of balanced carrying for pack animals also seems to be prehistoric knowledge.
I tend to think the two-strap carrier was an ancient invention that simply wasn’t useful enough in most contexts to be widely adopted. It only gives you a balanced load for distances if your hands are empty, and a single-strap carrier can be continually repositioned to achieve a balanced load if you are holding something else heavy.
Combining backpacks and armour is _nightmarish_. It’s the worst thing ever. Armour often has lots of fastenings and edges and tangly bits all up in your shoulders and upper chest area, exactly where your backpack straps are. A satchel is somewhat better because you can mostly just lift it up, but that sucks somewhat as well.
This is extremely true.
Experimental archaeology strikes again!
‘Huh, why didn’t they use backpacks’
*Tries backpack in armour
‘Ah…this is why they didn’t use backpacks. This is horrendous.’
Experimental archaeology strikes again!
To be completely honest, this conclusion wasn’t derived from experimental archaeology, but from experience of trying to carry a modern backpack and wear modern armour simultaneously.
I don’t think it’s an origin so much as a recurring convergent evolution from the fact that it’s a fairly effective and low resource way to carry stuff.
Nit: “but not how high that belt is” -> “but note how high that belt is”
“fetal blood loss” -> “fatal blood loss”
I’m running a campaign of The One Ring (great tabletop RPG, incidentally), and the main antagonists are Black Númenóreans. Neither the sourcebooks nor Tolkien, I think, describe what the armor of elite warriors from Umbar looks like, so when talking about them I just defaulted to Byzantine armor. Gondor is already somewhat Byzantium-coded, so Umbar might as well. So, uh, yeah, history is an easy source of inspiration even for lazy GMs.
It’s a running joke that a friend of mine’s campaigns all end up having metaplots that look like they were borrowed from 19th-century Europe. (especially circa 1848)
The many-belts problems always seems especially weird to me because the artists have to know how belts work. They’ve seen many people wearing then, and probably even worn belts themselves!
Taking the opposite side: how come these belts always close with buckles? Never with annular/penannular brooches (the ancestors of the buckle) or with double-rings or with any other means historically used to secure belts and similar items.
In my fantasy illustrations I try to cleave as close as possible to historic examples, except when going for ridiculously baroque things like Githyanki armor.
It strikes me as very unwise to put important combat gear where it’s easy for your opponent to cut it off you, like on a leather strap across your chest.
Cutting a thick leather strap on someone’s chest who is actively fighting back would be, in nearly all cases, much harder than just killing or disabling them.
If you can slice off someone’s thick leather bandolier, you can probably just stab them.
Maybe, but it’s also outside the armor and is a potential place for someone to grab or hook onto. In the real word where the soldier with the bandolier is probably using a gun, this is not very meaningful. It might be a small factor in the fantasy potion bandolier use case – but I’d guess still outweighed by ease of carry and access.
I’d think it’d be pretty hard to effectively grab something on the chest of someone who is actively trying to stab you.
Fights are rather more chaotic than that. You don’t want the enemy to be able to grab anything.
I think the risk of something being grabbed applies more to something that might hang loose from the body and flap in a direction away from it than something like a belt that is tight against the body.
I also think that, even in fantasy settings, a bandolier makes more sense for weapon-like effects used in combat than for, say, preparatory buff potions.
Melee strikes or wrestling moves targeting what is effectively a bundle of unlabeled, special-purpose grenades… could happen. But I suspect that most people standing nearby would not consider it a good move.
Regarding magic potions on a chest bandolier, it could make for a fun role play gimmick when shattered by say a blunt weapon strike. I don’t think magic potions usually mix well together, do they? The result could be some pretty unintended chaotic magic effects.
The Potion Miscibility Table was a thing in the first edition — chiefly for drinking them together — and from the greatly reliable source of “heard some dudes talking online” I don’t think it was continued. (To be sure, a DM saying that he couldn’t wait to spring the table on his players is better evidence than many other forms of random conversation.)
I can confirm that there was a potion miscibility table in the First Edition DM guide (c. 1980), and not in the Third Edition guide (c. 2000). Not sure whether there was one in the Second Edition DM guide.
NetHack, the Grand Old Roguelike which many of the players in that scene love to hate nowadays but which still enjoys more cultural purchase than virtually anything else from it, does it slightly differently. Potions do not get shattered by melee attacks but they ARE vulnerable to sudden cold or heat if you haven’t placed them into a bag of any kind. The former freezes and shatters them, so you lose the thing, but at least it doesn’t do anything. Heat actually boils the potion, though, causing it to explode and affect you with its vapors.
That’s not too bad if it’s healing or the like, but there are 28 potion types altogether, and that includes both the mundane unpleasant things like acid or oil and far worse, something like confusion, hallucination or paralysis. (Blindness too, but at least telepaths don’t care about being blind that much, and often wrap towels around their head like blindfolds so that they can “see” every sapient creature on the floor through the walls at the expense of having to feel their way around.) Thus, encountering a pyrolisk or a fire ant early on without either a bag or a towel/blindfold can be a really great misfortune. (By the time you encounter other fire enemies, you are far more likely to have complete resistance to fire anyway.)
Did I mention that you only see the potion colour when you first find it (and the relationship between a colour and an effect is randomized every run), and have no idea what it actually does until you either drink it yourself, throw it at an enemy or see someone else in the dungeon use it? The potions you enter the dungeon with are obviously an exception, but you would at most have 2-3 out of 28. There is also an additional fun thing that regardless of what it actually does in your run, a “milky” potion could potentially summon an enemy ghost (slow to destroy, easy to avoid but annoying because such a summoning paralyzes you for a few turns) and a “smoky” potion could summon a genie who grants a wish – meaning, you can get ANY item in the game, including the strongest piece of armour it has (gray or silver dragon scale mail, depending on whether you find indirect or direct magic protection easier to obtain in its absence) or a scroll which wipes out nearly any species from the entire world. Thus, you may well end up trying to drink acid or paralysis potions if they are “smoky”, or gaze at potions of full healing with great suspicion if they are “milky”.
In all, there a reason NetHack inspired a song like the one below some 15 years ago.
D&D spell component pouches seem like a great place to do the bandoleer trope, since wizards canonically need to carry around a bunch of random items they can pull from their belt on a moment’s notice. And now I have the mental image of a wizard pulling open his robes to reveal a tactical webbing full of wands and scrolls like a fantasy version of that scene from the Matrix.
“You’re saying I’ll be able to dodge spells.”
“No. When your Elemental Magic Resist VI is high enough, you won’t need to.”
“Oh.”
“Now, train that stat by standing in front of this slime and letting its 1/4 chance magic attack hit you.”
“… For how long?”
“Three… No, four hundred hits should do it. Here’s some healing potions, have fun.”
(Yeah, yeah, that’s more Fire Emblem than D&D, but whatever.)
Wanted to chime in that the thigh pouch in Photo A is very specifically borrowing from modern military/tactical gear–it’s basically a drop holster, and those weren’t invented until the early 1900s. They’re popular nowadays because a) tacticool and b) belt space is at a premium, especially if you’re wearing a plate carrier and have a lot of kit (or are going to be in a seated riding position a lot, which can make it a hassle to arrange belt-hung stuff comfortably).
Armor B also has the straps for something like that, on the other leg, but there’s nothing visible mounted on them.
1st para after D E F G
> That lets the wearer wend at the waist and rise the legs
Bend and raise?
2nd para after E H G I A
> more time wearing and marching in any kind of armor than fighting in it and so lots of sharp edges.
… sharp edges something?
I wonder if the ubiquitous bubble pauldrons derive from Warhammer 40k space marines. There they provide a good surface for painting insignia that allows the miniature to be identified from above on the table top. This is not a design requirement for video games.
Could be, though it could also just be convergent evolution; the small sizes and top-down view of Warcraft units in the original RTS games also make large shoulders useful for defining the shape of the unit and making animations cleaner.
Well, that particular example is not exactly an argument for convergent evolution, since Warcraft AND Starcraft can be uncharitably described as rip-offs of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K, respectively. After all, Games Workshop and Blizzard were literally in talks about making games in the former’s settings, but the deal fell through so Blizzard first filed off all the copyright-protected parts of either setting, and then went further with less self-consciously grimdark writing and lifting parts of OTHER fantasy works wholesale. (I.e. as was already pointed out on here below, both the very word “Azeroth” and the entire “Enemy horde as refugees from a dying world” plotline which Blizzard assigned to Orcs were lifted out of The Morgaine Cycle books (though, there it was a largely human-vs.-human conflict with almost no pure “elves” and somewhat more halfbreeds).
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/world-of-warcraft-could-have-been-world-of-warhammer/
Thus, Blizzard would have been operating with GW miniatures as references all the time. I played quite a few other RTS games, but I struggle to recall any others (not counting the actual Warhammer-based ones, of course) going for the same sort of exaggerated shoulders. (Granted, a good number of RTSs do not even have any infantry in the first place and are entirely about vehicle-vs-vehicle conflict.) The closest example are probably the power armour troops in some of the Command & Conquer games (i.e. Zone Troopers and “Enlightened”), but those just seem to follow the established power armour tropes, and basic infantry in any of those games does fine without that design element.
Regarding the pauldrons on Warhammer minis (not just marines, for example Imperial Guards have them too) I heard that they were used because is that it made easier to hide the seam between the torso and the arms. Same thing in video game, where the pauldrons would make animating the arms easier.
Yep, as well as putting a glob of material there makes the arms more durable for transports, etc. (arms, like polearms, have a tendency to break off)
Dr. Devereaux observes in the post itself that live action photography/filming often rely on cheap materials that cannot provide the material strength necessary for historical armours and that modern western culture is made for a modern western audience familiar with the visual language of modern armours and gleaming alwyte metal. To this ey81 comments that in video games the accentuation of gendered features might be a priority given that their audiences are what they are, and there’s this comment that the size of coloured surfaces is really important in tabletop miniatures where tiny scale figures still need to be visually distinct.
The selection pressures that go into the modern evolution of armour designs in fantasy settings and how that feeds into visual language trops that are realistically implausible is probably a really good master’s thesis topic.
…I kind of wonder if that paper already exists.
“though my sense from others is that it avoids some of the historical missteps of the first game, offering a lot more depth to the wide range of people and lives one might see in medieval Bohemia”
I don’t mean to be overly critical, but I wrote my MA thesis on early-modern Silesia and personally felt that the first Kingdom Come Deliverance was a pretty fair depiction of its people and lives. Except for the Cumans, but I am not quite sure if that’s what you’re referring.
Correct, the depiction of the Cumans was the specific nub of my complaints with the first KDC. I am told that point is much improved in the second game. Likewise, the action of the game eventually intersects with a trade town, so we get to see a few characters (again, I am told, not there yet) from outside of Bohemia.
The Cumans are still a standard enemy alongside bandits and later Sigismund’s non-Cuman forces, and their gear remains unchanged from the fist game they’re still wearing 13th century traditional Cuman armor, but the Cumans do get quite a bit of humanization. Whether it feels in character for Henry to accept that instead of doubling down on his “kill them all” policy is another matter, but that’s a choice for the player to make and is about what a traumatized and vengeance fueled teen would do encountering the group that killed his family and burned down his hometown, not some message from the devs that a given ethnic group are evil barbarians.
The “pouch-heavy designs” point reminds me of a Tumblr post about “dungeonpunk” as an aesthetic, which I read the other day. I’ll try linking it in a reply to this comment.
It’s a pretty straightforward way to signal practicality when the character you’re designing can’t actually do anything as practical as own a pack animal. Especially when the audience does not actually know what’s practical or impractical for premodern people.
I’ll construct a light defense for the pouches. Most fantasy characters dressed dungeonpunkly are not soldiers per se, but adventurers (or whatever any given setting wants to call them). An adventurer might prefer not being encumbered, but if they don’t have a nearby fortified camp to store their assorted gear in (or if some of that gear is necessary for adventuring and they can’t double back to the camp between fights), they might have to just put up with the inconvenience.
Dungeon Meshi’s Marcille Donato (who admittedly only has one traditional pouch) might not want to bring that pouch and her backpack and a book hanging by her waist into battle, but where else is she gonna put them when a fight breaks out? Should she drop them and hope they don’t get crushed by the rampaging dragon?
Link to the dungeonpunk post: https://greatwyrmgold.tumblr.com/post/774737103597731840
Hennet is wearing All The Belts
All the main characters in Dungeon Meshi carry backpacks, which as Bret points out, is a pretty normal and practical way for soldiers to carry things. Marcille’s book carrier is the exception, and the wizard having a special piece of wizard gear ready to hand is a bit different from the Big Belt Of Unspecified Equipment trope.
I don’t remember if we ever see them drop their packs in preparation for combat, but it wouldn’t be that strange. Most of the monsters they encounter aren’t actively hunting them, so they have time to prepare in a safe spot before they engage.
Plenty of people historically got into precisely the same scenarios. Did they use bandoliers of pouches?
The key problem is that fantasy adventuring parties are much, MUCH smaller than the kinds of forces that would have historically been used to deal with similar threats. It’s common to see fighter characters in fairly heavy plate armour with no servants or attendants in sight, when in reality people would rarely have been able to afford that much armour without being able to at least pitch in and pay a servant for a small “chamber” of combatants (say, four or five people). Same with wizards — a big fat well-bound spellbook and a bunch of costly spell components would usually correlate to a whole small army of servants and slaves in an equivalent real-world historical setting. It would have been historically even more reasonable to extend this to second-tier combatants to protect the camp and/or baggage. These people would have been the historical adventurers’ bags and pouches, as politically incorrect as it may sound to our modern sensibilities.
Ah, the problem with that is that you are dungeon delving. Narrow tunnels and all that. Also, there’s no safe place to leave your baggage trail while you deal with the orcs in room 34B. A gelatinous cube might eat them in your absence.
I think that’s a bad argument because in earlier DnD editions (and in some OSR systems) it was expected to have a few, if not a few dozen hirelings/porters/second rate combatants with you. I do genuinely believe this shift has a lot more to do with gameplay (commanding hirelings is not the tactical tabletop experience modern DnD has shifted towards, and there are out of game limits to the amount of people you can have at a table/in a Discord call before you have issues) and cultural reasons (it has become unusual for even the wealthy to maintain servants the way it was normal for them to do even a few generations ago, and nowadays people find the concept a bit weird/uncomfortable)
I’m almost as old as D&D, and I’ve never met anyone who has or is a servant.
Oh, no. Once you’ve noticed all the pouches, your immediate next question should be: ‘why can I never see my character’s feet?’
At least the armor keeps us from having to find out how many abs are hiding under there.
“wearer wend” –> wearer bend
“which reduced the chance of your musketeer exploding at an inopportune time.”
There’s, uh… opportune times for musketeers to explode?
Well, comparatively speaking, yes. A musketeer exploding while he’s off taking a leak in the woods while you’re on the march is much less inconvenient than if he explodes in the battle line as the enemy pikemen are closing in.
“The back displays a concentric circle motif ”
Wait, it has a target on the back?
I don’t remember the source, but in one game a military doctor would say something like “I can’t heal injuries to the back”. Meaning, fight to the end and don’t turn your back to the enemy.
protect the next => protect the neck
Wu-Tang Clan comin’ at ya…
they appear to attack => they appear to attach
I’ve seen that ‘vials on strings against the torso’ arrangement for a musketeer in the manga ‘The Dragon, the Hero, and the Courier’ before, I assumed it was historical since the author likes referring to historical art for his designs but I wasn’t sure what the source was so that was cool to see.
It is interesting that, as you note, WoW cast a long shadow on fantasy armor design with its huge pauldrons (though that clearly wasn’t the start of the thing, 90s anime was full of wizards with pauldrons or armored mantles the size of their whole torso, which in turn I guess came from a design lineage aiming for the lines of 80s high fashion?) but WoW also had a dedicated tabard slot you could use to customize your look from the get go which has some good design as discussed here but didn’t catch on to the same degree.
The huge pauldrons go back to Warcraft in 1994, and are as much about the limitations of 90s graphics as anything.
Pretty sure the massive pauldrons go back to Warhammer.
(IIRC it’s partially a mini holodver: thing, Warhammer minis tends to have outsized arms and weapons to make them stand out more, and the pauldrons help keep the arms attached to the model)
I’m sure you’re right. I meant that within the Warcraft property, they are a founding visual motif. It’s a real departure from the standards of High Fantasy art that you could find in America through the eighties, which strongly emphasized completely bare shoulders regardless of gender.
These thoughts of Order of Armor and general movie armoring sins were also on my mind when playing Enshrouded recently, which is frankly even more ridiculous in terms of mixing almost-historical designs with complete fantasy stuff.
Have a look at this: https://enshrouded.wiki.gg/wiki/Armor/Melee
At the Level 13 Tier, we at the same time got the looks-like-from-a-museum Tank, Guardian and Mercenary sets (although I notice none of them get the faulds right and for some reason they’re done in bronze) but also the couldn’t-be-less-protective Metal Donut of the Warrior set.
And then for some reason we progress from full plate at Level 13 to chain mail and scale mail for Level 23.
> As an aside, sharp or spiked armor is very rare, historically, for the obvious reason that you are going to spend more time wearing and marching in any kind of armor than fighting in it and so lots of sharp edges.
People were willing to put up with a lot of inconvenience for battlefield advantage. Didn’t plate armor require an assistant to put on? Surely you could screw some spikes on if they were useful.
I think it’s just that spikes are another thing to grab on and apply leverage to. A leg-mounted spike could be a decent weapon to kick with, but you’re also offering a lever attached to your leg. A pauldron spike only offers a handhold, you can’t even kick with it.
Bret may just have forgot to spell out the implications of wearing armour on the march. Spikes are much more likely to harm the wearer or their allies than the enemy. Even things that _aren’t_ meant to be spiky have historically been sources of injury and inconvenience to soldiers on the march — ask any Cold War infantry conscript about how many mysterious bruises they used to collect from their weapons, bayonets, compass cases, poorly-finished buckles, and other assorted bits of gear.
A lot of the later plate armour was self operable but also quite incomplete in terms of coverage.
The issue with spikes is well, there not all that good against other people in armour and a sword will deal with anyone not in armour.
As a thought exercise: what would spikes actually protect against? If a non-armored creature bodily collides with you, sure, spikes can passively hurt them (assuming they make contact from the right direction). But humans (or so I’m led to believe) don’t generally throw themselves bodily at one another on the battlefield, preferring to use tools (i.e., weapons) to hit each other at range. So spikes seem to be a disincentive to do something humans are already generally not doing in battle. (At least as far as I know, I acknowledge I could be wrong here – maybe full-body tackles to bring down priority figures were more common than I think.) There might be some intimidation factor, but armor on its own already seems plenty intimidating, and that’s metal which could otherwise go into better protection for you or your fellow soldier. I’m sure it’s possible to theory-craft some situation where spikes on armor would be beneficial on a battlefield, but they mostly seems superfluous to me.
Spikes seem like they’d mostly be useful against animals or monsters which don’t/can’t use tools and have to attack by bodily contact. And here, I don’t know: did people doing hunts historically (boars/crocodiles/lions/whatever the big game of choice to prove the Big Man’s competence was) wear spikes?
If we look at manuals of combat methods from the High Middle Ages/Renaissance period, we do see some evidence of plate-armored infantry sometimes fighting by getting into grappling range and shoving a dagger through a gap in the armor. However, it would be suicide to try this if you aren’t armored yourself, and if you are armored, the odds of an opponent’s armor spikes doing you much harm are reduced.
There may be at least some precedent for the use of spiked armor when fighting wild beasts, but it seems rather doubtful to me.
Given that this takes place in a world where monsters large enough to bite somebody in half exist, spikes probably would serve as a way to deter dragons or other large creatures from eating someone. Much in the way a hedgehog or thorny devil’s spikes act.
To the extent you want your armour to be made of sharp things, it already is without spikes – there are plenty of edges which snippety snip against each other and things like that. Adding deliberate spikes just makes it painful and uncomfortable to wear and move in, in a whole bunch of ways without adding any real advantage for fighting.
Screws, by the way, are super hard to make until really quite recently. That’s not really a fix.
You’re also fighting in formation, or at least close by to your compatriots (or physically on a horse). If there’s an option to push the spiky knight into his buddies/steed and maybe spike them, that’s not all that difficult to do with a polearm.
I agree that the box-pouches are silly, and I definitely like setups where the pouches have clearer uses (potion bandoliers, spell component pouches, lockpick sets). That said, I think it makes sense more generally for D&D characters to have a bunch of easily accessible “generic” pockets for the following reasons:
a) There are a lot of things you need to grab on short-notice: potions and reagents yes, but also alchemical weapons, one-use magic items, and various special-purpose tools. When you run unexpectedly into a wizard who tosses a web in your way, you want to be able to quickly grab your tindertwig to set it alight, even if on most days you don’t need to use it that way.
b) Many of these things are scavenged on the fly from the ruins of different civilizations with people who had different priorities. Wood vials make sense if you’re making equipment for soldiers at scale, they don’t make sense as a valuable tincture kept in the prince’s bedroom thousands of years ago.
c) Many of the rest are jury-rigged solutions put together from equipment that’s built for other people. Classic adventuring equipment like chalk, marbles, or caltrops are not mostly going to be made for adventurers.
Of course, all of this plays really weirdly with the economics of the setting, as you pointed out in your post on gold: it doesn’t make sense for adventurers to both be outsiders who have to jury-rig most of their equipment and people capable of earning the yearly income of a small kingdom from a week’s adventuring. D&D is both trying to tell a story about people thrown together by narrative circumstance and to describe a world where there are lots of adventurers and industries that cater to them, and these things don’t go together all that well.
Investing in someone to carry your loot seem to be a better solution than keep all the loot on yourself which may harm your fighting ability.
You don’t need to keep all your loot on yourself, I agree with that, and there’s a lot of appeal to the old-school D&D setup with hirelings and pack animals. But there are a lot of things you need on short-notice. For example, I’m in a campaign right now where there is a dragon bearing down on us that we can’t beat, and we recently picked up a genie in a bottle from some dwarven ruins. If the bottle was jumbled up somewhere in a backpack or kept back with a hireling or pack animal out of danger then I wouldn’t be able to make the wish on time.
“Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?” (Or Danmachi, ignore name, publishers were stupid) has “supporters” who’s entire job is to carry equipment down, scavenge the loot while the fighters keep guard and then carry the loot up. In the bigger, more established Familia’s(too long to explain, think Adventurer Companies) it’s common for the newer and/or weaker members to act as supporters, sort of like a page/squire.
Of course, their treatment varies. General rule, the better and more professional the Familia/Adventurers, the better they treat and pay Supporters. In contrast, the more scummy ones have a bad tendency of mistreating Supporters, using their superior strength and that they’re the ones doing most of the fighting as license to abuse them. Which does not help with performance nor loyalty, as you can imagine.
that person needs to be supplied and quite possibly guarded; the people guarding them also have to be supplied, and so on. If you’re trying to make a profit on this venture, it’s important to not let costs compound on themselves. Even if we do bring along porters/pack animals, it’s probably safer to bring the loot to the train than take your porters and pack animals into the dungeon [for porters etc anyway].
if you gonna guard the stuffs you carry on yourself anyway, then you can guard them better when they are on another person, and the porter can also guard themselves as well.
“if you gonna guard the stuffs you carry on yourself anyway, then you can guard them better when they are on another person, and the porter can also guard themselves as well.”
You are making unwarranted assumptions of realism.
Sure. The very first Indiana Jones movie showed us the doctor using a pair of porters in his initial expedition. That scene also showed us the flip side, as both of them turned on him – the latter deciding he doesn’t need him anymore when he could escape with the treasure himself (of course, that just landed him in the conveniently-still-operational ancient trap). (For that matter, this scene was also recreated a few months ago in the video game, which was acclaimed-for-what-it-is yet far too expensive for the limited interest the audiences appeared to have to have in it.)
https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/indiana-jones-enters-the-20-best-selling-games-in-the-us-for-december-but-black-ops-6-is-still-no-1/2900-6157/
Considering just how dangerous dungeons tend to be in fantasy, the risk-to-reward ratio for the porters is quite likely to tip towards leaving the adventurers behind and escaping with the loot at some point when they are distracted. For that matter, a single member of the party could defect with the porters about halfway through a sufficiently large and wealthy dungeon, giving them some confidence in being protected from any leftover threats or retaliation from the remaining adventurers. It’s probably easier to prevent in settings where, say, you could magically track people, but that’s far from ubiquitous in every fantasy that involves dungeon-delving.
I initially interpreted your post to refer to a pack mule, which seems to be the simple solution. Camp followers and such are a classic no-go, to the point that stories about good generals would include an episode where the general evicts all the noncombat personnel from the camp, showing what a good and disciplined general he is. If you can bring 5 combatants and 5 porters, better force the combatants to carry their own gear and bring 10 of them instead.
I’m not sure if they’re recently updated but D&D has published rules for what animals can be brought underground and how, that were apparently based on real world mining practices.
“D&D is both trying to tell a story about people thrown together by narrative circumstance and to describe a world where there are lots of adventurers and industries that cater to them, and these things don’t go together all that well.”
I would disagree–Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, just to pick one example, oftentimes form groups based around when they start or just because they meet at a shelter and decide to hang out (narrative circumstance), there are usually a decent number of them at any one time, and the hiking/backpacking gear business is a multibillion dollar industry.
It’s worth noting that Appalachian Trail hikers generally live in a much safer society with much stronger rule of law than most fantasy “medieval” societies. This level of trust people can afford to give to complete strangers may be less common than we think from our perspective of living in politically stable modern states with reasonably effective police forces and emergency services. Look back at the series on farming and remember the social support networks peasants used to form, and how hyperlocal those support networks were. Even today, there are places like some Arab countries where all but the most Westernised city folk have a hard time trusting people outside their clan and/or religious sect, and a stranger with no local ties is going to have a hard time finding any legal recourse for crimes perpetrated against them.
Another similar example which goes back to the Middle Ages – religious pilgrims! Which would be a very good hook for an RPG campaign, and one which I’ve never used.
After all, the oldest work of literature in English
a) describes a group of pilgrims thrown together by narrative circumstance
and
b) starts with the words, pretty much verbatim, “Your characters all meet in a tavern”. Actually it’s
…Bifil that in that seson, on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde….
By “thrown together by narrative circumstance” I meant thrown into adventuring itself, not thrown into hanging out with each other. Appalachian Trail hikers set out to go on a hike, so they can buy appropriate equipment in advance. Pilgrims set out to go on a pilgrimage. D&D plots can go from the generic chosen one farmboy who grabs what he can when the ringwraiths burn his village to wandering ronin out for vengeance to urban guild members contracted from a multi-planar metropolis…while also including the “there is an actual adventurer’s guild and the tavern is full of adventurers every day” stories. And all of these different narratives are supposed to draw from the same equipment tables and wealth system!
For people who didnt click the link of Henry VIII’s armor, the chest having a little “give” is called anime type. The jokes write themselves.
>in the The armor is an early example of the “anime” type, in which the breastplate and backplate are constructed of horizontal overlapping plates connected and made flexible by rivets and internal leather straps
“Anime” in Japanese is a loanword from French, from “dessins animés (silent ‘s’ at the end);” “anime” doesn’t just mean the same thing in both cases, it is the same word in both cases. Granted like most loanwords in Japanese, the meaning is transformed from the French original, and it’s a funny thing to imagine Mecha-Henry.
I have to wonder why you never see Henry VIII style armor in fantasy. That armor may not be graceful, but it announces “I’m the party’s tank character” like no other
It should be noted that the wide shape of the armor comes from the wide shape of the intended user, for whom the more typical narrowly waisted breastplate and flaring out faulds would not have worked. In terms of actual adding thickness to the silhouette, it might actually be thinner than those classical full plate armors because the articulated breastplate can follow the body more closely than a single-piece globular one.
The other thing I feel might be relevant is that apparently among historians this armor and ones like it are considered ugly (Bret himself piled on it the previous time he had that picture on the blog). Thus, even when a historian might be consulted for armor references, they might decide not to put that one in the lineup.
Brigandine (and the rest of the “transitional armors” gang) isn’t so much overlooked much of the time, but bastardized in the form of “leather with random rivets”.
Likewise, a “blue knight” (showing metal surface-treated by bluing) would be historical. Or perhaps I should say blue heavy infantry; this approach was a less maintenance-heavy alternative to alwyte, thus mostly used by soldiers in standing armies (who wear, or at least bring into the field, their kit more often, but have fewer servants per capita). Consequently, some of the early standing armies were widely called “black army”.
“metal plate which extends up from the breastplate to protect the next”
*protect the neck
“disabling or fetal blood loss”
*fatal blood loss
Fixed!
The image of a musketeer “exploding at an inopportune time” is amazing – in no small part because that was probably something that actually happened on occasion.
The *least* opportune time would be when he’s guarding the wagon that’s carrying everyone else’s gunpowder.
*musketeer on guard duty knocks ashes out of pipe in wrong spot next to wagon*
-KABOOM-
Count leading army: “…goddamn it, we’re going to need to turn around and go back to Zagreb for more gun powder now.”
A carelessly smoking private destroys an ammo dump. A tale as old as time.
Or at least as old as having both tobacco and gunpowder in the same location.
And still a problem in Russia, it seems.
You mention that tassets, faulds, pauldrons and spaulders are hard to make from pressed plastic.
I wonder how hard they would be to 3D-print? They seem like they’d be pretty straightforward for that, though doing it in bulk might be slow.
Same problem of using plastic to imitate metal; you might get the general shape right but, because the pieces need to be thin to work correctly in the historical sense, the plastic bends in a very not-metal-way too easily unless the actors to treat it properly. The only way around that is to have the actors practice with *actual metal armor* and then learn how to restrict their actions to get it to behave like it’s supposed to, which audiences generally won’t appreciate and which budgets *definitely* won’t appreciate.
The problem isn’t the shape, the problem is the durability of materials. If you’re making something from steel, rings, sliding rivets and buckles can be small and still very strong and able to resist the forces of movement. Make the same thing out of PVC or pressed plastics and such and those connecting elements don’t hold up. Consequently, a lot of costume armors avoid articulated components, not because they’re hard to shape, but because the cheap materials they’re using can’t stand up to the strain.
I wonder if the widespread availability of “AI” generated art will to some extent cure DeviantArt Disease among human artists?
On the one hand, we will undoubtedly be flooded with fantasy armours generated by AIs from what they find on on the Internet. And since most of what’s on the Internet is already non-historical, the AIs will generate more of the same. Sturgeon’s Law will still apply, it just won’t be humans drawing the slop.
On the other hand, maybe the only way for a human artist to remain viable in the face of this flood will be to actually draw historical, or at least historically based, armour?
AI-generated art is only going to make the fantasy armor problem worse, because the AI has nothing analogous to a ‘conscience’ about trying to be realistic or do independent research, and has nothing in itself that is capable of saying “my God, I can’t even imagine trying to raise my arms above my head in this armor without perforating my earlobes.” Humans are at least sometimes capable of this.
I’m curious about clothing worn *over* armor – would these clothes be likely to face significant damage in battle? If so, were the people wearing them just sufficiently wealthy to bear the cost of damaging good-quality clothing?
Yes, but I think most people were aware of the damage risk and wore relatively cheap clothing because of it. If you’re wealthy enough, sure wear silk or something just to remind everybody how rich you are.
Very important reason for clothing over armour is identification: surcoats, tabards, “livery” in medieval Europe, equivalents in other places. You want your friends and allies to know that you’re on their side.
A second reason to wear clothing over armour is keeping yourself cool or warm. In hot climates you don’t want the sun heating up your metal armour which becomes uncomfortable to touch. In cold climates you’d like to keep the wind and rain further away from your body, especially if you’re wearing maille.
From what I gather about certain uses of ceremonial and festive wear, “bearing the cost of damaging good-quality clothing” would be one of the basic markers of Medieval wealth. Especially if you can afford to outfit a lot of servants and retainers.
By and large, yes. Even armour regularly got damaged in battle and people didn’t stop wearing them. Tournaments, if anything, were even _more_ common sources of damage to armour and any overgarments because they were more common than actual combat too, and people didn’t stop holding them all the time. Being able to eat the cost of repairing or replacing combat-related bling was an inherent part of most military aristocracies’ conspicuous consumption practices.
If you can afford armour then you can afford to replace your clothing.
Even people that couldn’t afford armour where usealy working for some one that paid for there armour and clothing, a.k.a livery.
I haven’t read the whole thing, but I want to comment on the pouches section. There are a few things that are worth addressing.
First and foremost, most fantasy setting heroes are not soldiers. While I imagine a game focused on a soldier may be fun for some, for most it would be far, far too dull. The primary thing about games is the concept of agency–what the player does matters, typically in a substantial way. And while pre-gunpowder soldiers didn’t have NO agency, they certainly didn’t have as much as your typical fantasy hero! (As an aside, I love how “Kingdom of Amalur: Re Reckoning” deals with it–you get detailed for a high-importance mission that puts you in the battle but not within the army.)
What this means is that fantasy heroes in pre-gunpowder eras are going to need to operate independently. They are an army that has no tail; they need to carry all their gear with them, everywhere they go. I’ll grant that this typically means a pack of some sort, but there are advantages to having pouches as well, for stuff you want readily-available. A healing potion buried in your pack isn’t going to do you much good mid-combat, after all. And frankly you have to be a complete moron without any experience walking long distances to not realize that having some food and drink ready to hand–meaning you can eat it while continuing to move–is a good idea. I think it took me all of a single morning the first time I really had to face the issue.
Belt pouches are hardly rare in the historical record. They’re not super-common in paintings (they’re fairly workaday, whereas Medieval paintings were highly stylized), but they do exist in them (typically expensive ones, because it’s the Middle Ages). And we have archaeological evidence of them. They range from simple sacks (leather or cloth) with a rope on them, to custom-built pouches with little pouches on them, to highly ornate pieces that function as much as decoration as anything else. This carried into the Long 18th Century, as women’s pockets were at times a separate article of clothing.
I’ll grant they didn’t strap pouches to everything that they possibly could. At least, not in paintings (the idea that individual soldiers never thought “I have a bag, I can tie it here and have it ready to hand!” is contrary to human nature). But we don’t often get paintings of fantasy heroes–such people would have been scorned in Medieval society as vagabonds. So I’m willing to grant that the excess bags are due to 1) fantasy generally needing to do things to the nth degree, and 2) artistic license covering an area where historic data are lacking.
As for potions and reagents being of non-standardized size, this is rather silly. It assumes that people of the past were morons, an assumption that is at odds with most of this blog. The benefits of some sort of standardization are too obvious for people of the past to ignore; even if the standardization was highly individual, there would be some sort of standard way to contain items.
The bigger issue here is how these items are used. A potion is going to have to be relatively standardized (the dose, after all, makes the poison), whereas reagents to make potions can be far less standard because you’ll dose it out as you make it. To give an example of what I mean: I occasionally drink various teas for headaches. I also take painkillers for them. The pills are pretty tightly controlled, but my tea collection is in bags and boxes and such. That’s because I dose the tea when I make it.
This is significant because it plays into how these things should be used in-game. You can’t really store pre-made anti-headache tea for very long; you have to make it. Which takes time. At least a short rest. Which means that if you’re using that mechanic, you CAN’T use it in battle.
I suppose that sword-and-potion warfare is closer to gunpowder than to medieval. Unlike a medieval knight, you do need access to a lot of consumables, on short notice.
> As for potions and reagents being of non-standardized size, this is rather silly
Maybe silly, but that’s what they are. The spell list in my D&D books has an incredible variety of substances and quantities needed for spell casting, with different requirements for flow, temperature, airtightness, whatever.
Someone would inevitably eventually find a way to standardize this in some way. Even if it’s just a collection of idiosyncratic and personal systems.
I’ve done some long-distance hiking and having random bits of stuff everywhere is a nightmare. You need to remember where everything is. It doesn’t take long at all for you to figure out that you’ve got to have some sort of organization. And that leads to realizing that things with similar requirements need to be grouped together. Like, hand samples of rocks should be about fist-sized (otherwise they get too heavy) and can be stored deep in the pack (because you’re just carrying them out of the field, you don’t need them while you’re there). Medicines should be in a specially-designated pouch, easy to access (because you do NOT want to have to search for it, gets blood all over your stuff). Sample bags need to be readily accessible, but are compressible and conveniently include bags( so you stuff them in one and stuff that in a side pouch). And we all have our own ways of doing this, which makes taking someone else’s pack extremely inconvenient.
Medicines are going to have to be carefully dosed. Doesn’t come up often, but D&D does have rules for what happens if you heal too much (see traveling in the Positive Energy planes). And any doctor will tell you that the dose makes the poison; even water will kill you if you take too much of it (or take it without electrolytes–had that happen to a few people working for me in a desert). Sure you can dose them as needed, but have you ever tried to dose out medicine mid-combat? I’ve had to as a sleep-deprived new father and that was bad enough! You want that stuff pre-measured so you can just hand the barbarian a potion without needing to worry about whether you’re killing them.
I’ll grant that some stuff doesn’t take as much thought. Mint tea for headaches doesn’t need careful dosing–to make it dangerous you’d have to drink FAR more than any reasonable person would. But then, it’s also not terribly effective. And even there, the benefits of standardization were immediately obvious; that’s not why the tea bag was invented (it was invented to transport samples of tea, it wasn’t intended to be used in making tea), but it’s certainly why it was popularized.
“Operating independently” doesn’t mean “no tail.” In this respect, even adventure _fiction_ like Dumas’ “Three Musketeers” still took care to note that each of the titular musketeers (and even D’Artagnan, who was canonically the poorest of all of them) had the money to permanently employ one servant each. Athos probably had even more waiting somewhere in his estate if he ever cared to claim the title. That’s still a tooth-to-tail ratio of at least 1:1.
Dumas wrote at a time when his readers were used to having servants.
“First and foremost, most fantasy setting heroes are not soldiers. While I imagine a game focused on a soldier may be fun for some, for most it would be far, far too dull. The primary thing about games is the concept of agency–what the player does matters, typically in a substantial way. And while pre-gunpowder soldiers didn’t have NO agency, they certainly didn’t have as much as your typical fantasy hero! (As an aside, I love how “Kingdom of Amalur: Re Reckoning” deals with it–you get detailed for a high-importance mission that puts you in the battle but not within the army.)
What this means is that fantasy heroes in pre-gunpowder eras are going to need to operate independently. They are an army that has no tail; they need to carry all their gear with them, everywhere they go. I’ll grant that this typically means a pack of some sort, but there are advantages to having pouches as well, for stuff you want readily-available.”
Some historic adventurers who really achieved something in numbers where individual agency kind of mattered were the Conquistadors. Pizarro had under 170 men at Cajamarca. And leaving tail behind was something they did do.
They also emphatically were not soldiers. They knew the word “soldier” – and applied it to salaried mercenaries who were paid irrespective of outcome. They claimed that they were not soldiers because “no purchase, no pay” backed their title to proceeds if there were any.
How were the conquistadors clothed and equipped? There are a lot of drawings by Indian artists…
hmmm — I’m more familiar with that in the piratical form of “no prey, no pay.’
Which the pirates adopted from privateers. Who were legitimate volunteers invited to fight for their (or someone else´s…) country against specified enemy, but self-funded and to be recouped by prizes if any.
The principle of “freight is the mother of wages” was generally applicable to (at least British) merchant ships into 19th century – rank and file seamen were not entitled to profit share, only a fixed salary in case of successful journey, but in case of voyage that failed (certainly in case of shipwreck or capture). It was navies of kings that promised certainty of pay, because they were not sent to deliver specific freight.
When was the last time you played in a 170 person D&D group?
170 people is far more than a D&D adventuring party, but it’s a lot closer to the size of a large D&D party than a 20,000-man army would be.
While the Spanish conquistadores did sometimes leave their baggage train behind, they usually didn’t do it willingly for any great length of time. When Gygax crafted D&D, his concept of what the conquistadores did in Mexico and Peru would assuredly have been on his mind, and probably gets folded into the way he has mechanics for the player characters having hirelings and pack animals and careful rules for encumbrance tracking.
You can say quite a few negative things about Gygax, but to his credit, he did at least think through the question “okay, you slay the dragon and find a mountain of treasure. Now how do you get it back down the mountain” to some extent. Though Tolkein did it first, of course.
Tolkien’s short story “Farmer Giles of Ham” has some extremely astute comments on the entire problem.
The big difference between realistic medieval culture and “adventurer/dungeonpunk” culture is that it’s a lot safer to treat a traveling commoner as a vagabond if he isn’t a leveled-up murderhobo capable of killing an elephant with a teaspoon. If we imagine a sort of realistic ‘merging’ of the basic realities of an RPG setting’s world plus medieval culture, most leveled player characters are going to be getting the respect of a low-ranking aristocrat or a highly skilled professional tradesman, and those were people who often traveled without getting a kicking from every village they passed through. Stonemasons, for instance, were emphatically not nobles but routinely traveled long distances to where there was work for their skills. And the team of mercenaries who can kill an owlbear without unnecessary loss of life among your regular retainers are going to get at least that kind of respect.
The old ‘Dungeonomicon’ series (you can find it here and there on the Internet) talks about this a bit. There’s a sort of hidden reason why the traditional ‘reward’ for slaying the dragon is to marry the princess and inherit the kingdom. As a practical matter, kingdoms that don’t take steps to track down the kind of person who can slay a dragon and integrate them into the power structure tend to lose wars to kingdoms that do, because if they can slay the dragon they can probably slay the royal guard too.
So it’s easy to overstate just how much trouble adventurers would ‘realistically’ run into while traveling. Even if they’re not high-level enough to simply personally conquer the city they’re in (and for balance purposes they shouldn’t be), they are absolutely dangerous enough that most of the people they encounter will have a motive to treat them with some respect, especially if they have money on them.
All this talk of pouches and no mention of Rob Liefeld and his pouch heavy character designs from the early 90’s? I’m guessing he was riffing on the same sources you mention but he might be who the current artists are following ultimately (percolated through however many followers since). A lot of fantasy miniatures seem to go crazy with the pouches too (particualarly reaper) as much as anything they add some texture to an outfit I guess. The giant horizontal pauldrons look like a great lever to throw some off balance – not as dangerous as wearing a horned helmet but closes. That Japanese vest seems like the right way to provide the equivalent of 80’s womens shoulder pads to your favorite fantasy warrior without the possibility of having your shoulder dislocated with a glancing blow.
Ahem. I did make a ‘no feet’ joke.
I really enjoy these looks at fictional armors and how they compare to historical examples and physical reality. Not sure if it would be too repetitive, but I would love to see a similar analysis of Fromsoft armor (Dark Souls, Elden Ring etc.) as I think they have a pretty distinct style from the Western RPG tradition of armor design and often pull directly from historical sources for some of their more fantastical designs.
Elden Ring in particular even uses the kind of surcoats he was complaining are so rare in modern fantasy games.
A thing I have appreciated, playing too much Nioh 2 lately, it seems like the armor is almost all based on historical designs and (at least in the ‘medium’ and ‘heavy’ classes) seems to be pretty functional. I think the sode (pauldron equivalents) may have generally been affixed closer to the neck, but I appreciate the animation limitation, and almost every leg piece has kusazuri (tasset equivalents).
And many of the armors are still ridiculously ostentatious and allow for interesting visual details. A neat thing about using lamellar– the color of the cords attaching your lames becomes an interesting design element.
Unfortunately, you’re still forgetting the cosplay angle. I think you’re correct about the source of the visual language of large pouches coming from gunpowder- and more specifically GWOT-era military gear, but cosplayers have been a major part in reinforcing the trend since some game companies (notably BioWare) have explicitly said that they’ve added pockets or pouches to their designs due to cosplayer feedback. Regardless of how much or how little sense the pouches make in the game’s adventuring environment, having integral containers within the costume makes it easier for cosplayers to carry their belongings to conventions and similar events without having to wear separate bags that might break their immersion in the character. If the pouches are big enough, they can even be used to store loot purchased during the convention.
Do you know were those pouches interestingly do not show up? LARP
The overlap between LARP and Cosplay seems to be big. And larpers would have use for carrying around writing utensils, and little bottles and what not.
But two hours in the woods hitting, and getting hit by people, roots out stuff that is anoying astonishingly fast.
Lots of larpers use lots of pouches – but the placement, size and fastenings are all quite carefully chosen. Big boxy chest pouches are out, belt pouches are generally in.
This, and Dark_Tigger’s comment below, support my thesis above.
In groups with significant logistical capacity (a relative term, I will grant you) and things like baggage trains and set camp sites you don’t see pouches, because there are simply better options. If I can make a horse, mule, or ox carry my stuff, I will. A group of humans will find the laziest option for practically any task, and “Let the mule do it” is the second-laziest option (the laziest being “I’ll leave it there for now”).
Where you see a proliferation of pouches is situations where you DON’T have a baggage train or a set camp site. Cosplay, backpackers, and the like. And adventurers would fall under that heading. A solo adventurer, or even a group of 3-5 adventurers, isn’t going to have a pack mule along with them, meaning they have to carry everything themselves. And that quickly results in people saying “This would be really convenient right about here….And this would be handy over there….And these could sit here….”
A realistic group of 3-5 adventurers who are reasonably wealthy very well might have a pack mule with them, and are very likely to be riding horses rather than walking everywhere on foot.
Squads of Roman legionnaires, who didn’t find nearly as much gold and silver on campaign as D&D characters, would usually have one mule per squad.
Play Exanima, You’ll be so much happier!
My current miniatures painting projects are all Battletech miniatures, and hoo boy are there Opinions about whether they should be painted “in parade colors” (to be visually interesting/distinctive) or “campaign colors” (to be “realistically low-viz”)
I’m on the “visually interesting” side, though I have done up a couple of mechs in a sort of pseudo-campaign style (top side flat light green, the parts that would be visible from above; lower side a sort of skyish blue, to notionally reduce the skylining effect).
I wonder if Dr. Devereaux would like to take a look at Trench Crusade one of these days. For those who (luckily?) have no idea what it is – well, basically it’s yet another spin at what is either the first or second-most shopworn premise in fantasy (with humans fighting orcs or equivalent, whether with or without elves/dwarves by their side as its main rival) – the battle of heaven and hell. (In video games alone, consider Shin Megami Tensei, Devil May Cry & Bayonetta, Diablo, Darksiders and many, MANY more examples – i.e. Monster Train got surprising emotional depth for a “deckbuilder roguelite” by portraying a Hell which literally did freeze over as its fire was extinguished and now the last survivors are attempting to restart it by taking embers to the source on a train while fending off assaults from the fanatical followers of the Winged. Even Doom is about fighting demons, though at least the earlier incarnations were rather agnostic about anything divine.)
What is different about it is that it’s made by one of Warhammer 40K’s original creators who re-emerged from retirement, and so it applies both that same style and the theme of “ultimate evil is only to be defeated through massive suffering and moral compromise”. Hence, cloning was applied to Christ’s body to make supersoldiers with divine blood (culminating with the giant Paladins who are basically the new 12 Apostles – one of whom obviously had to turn Judas), some fighters are made to hear Voice of God all the time to guide the troops, sinners are used as kamikaze bombers, etc. – all justified in the internal logic of the setting because the alternative is even worse (Beezlebub’s plagues turning towns into moulds of screaming flesh, etc.) no matter the tenuous relationship with the whole point of the religion in the first place.
Muddled themes aside, Trench Crusade also has so many….remarkable designs that it’s hard to pick just one. I would probably have to stick with the Janissaries, who go to war in this roughly-WWI level setting dressed in chainmail and carrying wooden shields which leave their arms exposed. Of course, said chainmail is “forged from the metallic formula that the alchemagi of the Sultan gleaned from the very Iron Wall that protects the Sultanate from their enemies”, but even if we accept that somehow makes it bullet-resistant, it’s unclear why they also need that shield in that case – plus countless other questions I am sure a trained military historian would have.
https://trenchcrusadewiki.miraheze.org/wiki/Janissary
I knew there was a reason Trench Crusade wasn’t cutting it for me (and I’m a 40k man through and through, so you’d expect it to). Though I’d put it down to growing dissatisfied with the whole ‘humanity must sacrifice everything to beat ultimate evil’ thing when it’s played too straight. It’s fine for me when it’s painted that this is clearly a tragedy in the poetic sense, or has enough tongue-in-cheek to avoid making suggestions that are too overtly pro-fascist (preferably both).
Its best accolade in my mind is actually recognising that the arab world exists in any IP taking inspiration from history at any point from medieval through to the world wars (though I’ve not looked at the fluff closely enough to see if it’s treated with any degree of care).
More broadly though, I would love to see Bret’s take on some miniature modelling armour tropes. Appreciate that the fluff for stuff like 40k can be fairly daunting, but it’d be interesting to hear an outsider’s perspective shorn of all the baggage and assumptions an old grognard would bring.
Amen to that last paragraph!
And just to provide some extra context to others as to why Trench Crusade already seems to be more worthy of discussion then any random game people outside of the tabletop scene have never heard of – its Kickstarter already raised over $3 million, making it “the most-funded miniatures skirmish game ever launched on the crowdfunding platform”.
https://www.polygon.com/analysis/519488/top-10-kickstarter-campaigns-2024
Granted, it is still far from the most-funded “tabletop” game ever – that honour seems to go to Stormlight Archive TTPRG which raised nearly 5 times more last year. (Which could also be a reason to discuss Stormlight Archive on here one of these days, perhaps? Its logistics, armour designs like of that Shardbearer shown on the Kickstarter page, etc.) Nevertheless, that level of funding does not materialize without cultural influence, so even the relatively limited details that have been revealed so far have been pored over by many eyes. Any post on the subject (probably best saved after it’s actually out, though who knows what Our Gracious Host will decide) is likely to attract a lot of interest.
It’s probably worth noting that we are some 4 days after the publication of the post, and so far not one in over 100 comments appears to have anything to say about the game itself or reveal any interest in it. Those who follow gaming news would already be aware that it had officially been written off as a commercial failure by now.
Those links are easy to find, so for my part, I would instead like to note that it appears to have been played by substantially fewer people on Steam (yes, “all-time peak” does not neatly correlate to all-time sales and it’s not very useful for most indie games, but AAA games are different) than not only the recent Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (discussed far more eagerly in the comments on here) and the absolute juggernaut that is Path of Exile II (one which is nevertheless highly unlikely to have cost the same as Veilguard or more) but also relatively low-budget fantasy games from the start of the year like the ARPG Last Epoch and fantasy “survival” game Enshrouded (also mentioned on here earlier). For a non-medieval-ish fantasy example, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl also appears to have had more success on Steam last year. (On the flip side, another massive singleplayer release, the Indiana Jones game, was played by far fewer people still, though I also heard it could have simply been played through the subscription service.)
Looking further back, it’s notable that Veilguard’s numbers are dwarved not only by Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring, but ALSO by Total War: Warhammer III, whose “all-time peak” in player count back in 2022 appears to have been double of Veilguard. This is REALLY remarkable since the conventional wisdom is that strategy games are harder to play, inherently more niche and thus sell less than RPG games – particularly those as actionized and “streamlined/dumbed down” as Veilguard was even relative to the first Dragon Age.
https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=899770,1086940,1142710,1203620,1245620,1643320,1771300,1845910,2677660,2694490
These results can be interpreted in multiple ways – i.e. according to some gaming news, EA leadership only appear to have looked at the Veilguard vs. Path of Exile 2 data and decided Veilguard should have also been “live service” and that also ought to be the direction for Mass Effect 5. (Which I think we all know is going to be a disaster if actually followed through – we even have Anthem as the example of that already.) The fact that both Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 actually beat out Path of Exile 2 (or Last Epoch or Enshrouded) significantly seems like a good argument against the folly of this. I think the common thread here might be that gamers who are willing to play the full price of a game nowadays also want that investment to be rewarded with enough complexity to justify that investment – in contrast to the “streamlining” advice which tends to reign when making other hit media like blockbusters or pop music. The implications of that ought to be quite good for the writing you do here!
P.S. The numbers I cited above also STRONGLY suggest that any post dedicated to Path of Exile armour/equipment or even Last Epoch armour/equipment is likely to receive a lot of attention – and I say that as a non-player of either.
Yeah I was disappointed they did away with the strong sociological bent for veilguard. It’s what set DA, and broadly bioware in general, apart from the rest in a way I really liked.
Though to be fair, my days of gaming are pretty well over (it was at best a third place, possibly even fourth place hobby for me, and kids really wipe out those lower levels). So I was extremely unlikely to be a paying customer anyway.
I feel like it was a pretty good game but was seriously let down by the Antaam and Tevinter.
The Qunari were an interesting somewhat exotic society in the earlier games, a very collectivist group following a dietyless philosophy/religion. The Antaam have broken away from this philosophy and replaced it with… nothing. They want power, by which they apparently mean personal combat power, and don’t seem to have any particular idea what to do with it. They hate mages so much they revolted against the philosophy that defined their lives, then promptly swore to serve blighted mages and started collaborating with mage supremicists.
Meanwhile, apparently everyone in the Tevinter government except the Venatori and one beat cop have gone on vacation for the entire game. They can’t be bothered to respond to a dragon attack on their capital, much less the ongoing end of the world. I suspect BioWare just decided the topic of slavery was too fraught to include you being forced to ally with slavers by circumstance, so they just cut the Tevinter government from the game. Which would be okay were the game not set in their capital
That said, I really enjoyed the companions. Bellara was basically an elven SCP agent, and I loved Harding. Neve being the hard-boiled time wizard detective was great. I enjoyed hunting dragons and romancing Taash. Emmrich was wonderful as the affable necromancy professor. Lucanis I admittedly kept out of the party for roleplaying reasons involving concerns over him being possessed by Spite that I feel deserved more airtime.
I mean, I wrote of the Dragon Ages way back when DA2’s gameplay was so incredibly boring.
One thing I quite liked from Elden Ring is that a few of the common “soldier” type enemies did in fact feature decorated surcoats. It served well to give the factions a little personal flair, and it never seemed unclear to me that they were in fact wearing armor.
Googling lorica hamata got me a webpage selling an apparently riveted one for…160 bucks.
I suspect that is bargain basement pricing, and would not be entirely sure about its quality, but this is definitely not a dream you need to save for TOO hard.
While I have been the guy who regularly told everybody that mail shirts are a lot cheaper then people expect, I would not trust an offer for a rivited set of mail for under 300 bucks. But it also should not cost than twice that.
Riveted mail for under $300 is certainly available. It’s not a _good_ reproduction on any grounds (it will look wrong, fit wrong, and be built wrong), but it’s definitely out there.
If you want really good stuff, you’re paying over 10x that.
Potion bandoliers – albeit patterned on much later metallic-cartridge bandoliers – are fairly common in LARPs. I do have some issues with that.
– LARP combat generally excludes grappling for safety reasons. I don’t criticise that (grappling amongst the untrained can be hideously dangerous), but it changes the situation.
– the potions are in glass vials, which makes the metal-cartridge pattern of bandolier viable, but, of course, LARP weapons *are not steel*, so unlikely to break those vials.
– The bandolier is, for me, the exactly wrong mix between “flopping around” and “stiff and hard to move”. It gets in the way in a fashion that a cloth tabard just doesn’t – for one, the tabard is generally tied to the body fairly tightly, for another it’s fairly thin cloth.
This isn’t to say LARP can’t be fun, or that this is dumb – in the LARP context, it’s a viable solution. I’d be leery of wearing something potentially explosive where my opponent can hit it with an axe, though.