Hey folks! Fireside this week! Last week’s post was a monster (over 10,000 words compared to our more typically ~6,000) which left me with some non-blog catching up to do. Next week, we’ll be starting our next Teaching Paradox series, this time looking at Hearts of Iron IV, which has been requested for quite some time.
We had a water issue over the summer – fortunately, no damage to any of our things, but the basement where my office is has to be refloored. Which has delayed me setting up the new bookshelves I ordered and instead forced me to go through the long process of boxing up my books with the family library taking up about thirty of these ‘medium duty’ banker’s boxes.
Percy’s sour expression at the situation, as you may imagine, matches my own.
But for this week’s musing, I wanted to riff a bit off of a bluesky conversation I had concerning the fantasy staple: the tavern where the party comes together and gets quests. It was prompted by seeing the trailer for the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons: Long Rest Tavern. Indeed, the fantasy tavern as the hub of questing has become such a staple that it has an entire genre of games built around it. But I thought it would be interesting to think about the sort of role such a place could take.
What immediately struck me is how the role of the tavern has kind of metastasized, from the place where Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin happen to meet Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings to a sort of standard ‘you all meet in a tavern’ start to many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to what we get in many of these ‘tavern management’ games, where tavern-keeping is an explicit, institutional part of the ‘adventuring economy.’ In Long Rest Tavern, to judge by the trailer, the tavern owner is even responsible for assigning adventuring parties to specific quests, acting as a kind of ‘violence-specialist temp agency’ from the look of it.
Now I don’t want to say this vision of the fantasy tavern is entirely crazy, but I think it is missing some elements, in part because my sense is that it evolved not as a sociological story-telling device saying something about the nature of fictional worlds, but rather as a kind of gameplay convenience: every DM must, for almost every campaign, come up initially with a reason why the player-characters – a group of exceptional strangers – meet up and decide to work together. “You all meet in a tavern” is simply such wonderfully effective shorthand that it become broadly common without needing to be very tethered to the actual fictional worlds. Here, after all, is a place that a regular person can think of and visualize, where strangers might meet. It works.
But I want to overthink it.
We first need to begin not with the tavern but with the question of “who employs adventurers here?” It sure isn’t likely to be a tavern keeper – no one could can shell out the payment for a party of level 8 adventurers is washing dishes. Instead, we should probably expect the biggest employer of adventurers to be the same as the largest employers of mercenaries more generally. Adventurers, in the D&D sense, are largely just small groups of mercenaries who specialize in particular kinds of problems – we might broadly define the ‘occupation’ as something like ‘monster slayers.’ And in a magical fantasy world, it actually makes sense that fighting magical or monstrous things might be a distinct, if overlapping, occupation from warriors, soldiers and such hired to engage in normal intercommunal violence (that is, warfare).
Which is to say, we’d probably expect the most common figures employing adventurers would probably be the state or local Big Men in non-state societies. They’re not going to do this personally, of course, they’ll use a cutout to do it for them. That may well be the tavern keeper, although I suspect that some junior aristocrat or official is more likely: someone whose job is ‘coordinate the recruitment and assignment of adventurer-mercenaries.’ Essentially a military contractor of the sort we were just discussing! Of course other individuals in a non-state polity where violence is fragmented might well also seek adventurers: a village with a problem, a smaller Big Man and so on. But the obvious place for them to go when hiring is where the Big Man (or the state) hires, because that’s where the adventurers will actually be.
The next question is where to find these fellows. And the answer is in large towns. Which is striking because a quick glance at the genre of ‘fantasy tavern keeping games’ and most of the taverns seem to be set in small towns, villages and forests (presumably for the ‘cozy’ vibe). There are exceptions, of course (the Yawning Portal in Waterdeep comes to mind), but often the ‘fantasy tavern’ is quite location-independent, which it wouldn’t be.
The issue here is that ‘adventurers’ are, for the most part, specialists, in societies where the vast majority (upwards of 80%) of the population are non-specialist farmers and herders.1 If your goal is to find a specific specialist in a society that has very few of any kind of specialized labor, you are going to want to seek them in the largest, densest population centers you can find. If ‘wizard’ is a job held by one in every thousand, you’ve got a much better chance of finding one looking for work in a town of 50,000, than in a village of 500. A large town provides both a concentration of specialists (of all kinds), but also a concentration of wealthy people who can afford to hire those specialists.
And this isn’t all entirely theory, we have a good guideline for how the private recruitment of violence specialists might work in a pre-modern or early modern context because of course there were quite a lot of mercenaries getting recruited in pre-modern or early modern contexts! And what is striking is that even in cultures where the aim was to recruit farm boys (because they were assumed to make better soldiers than city-dwellers; this was the dominant assumption in early modern Europe, for instance), you recruit them in a town. Or in many cases, you recruit them outside of a town. A lot of towns, quite understandably, are touchy about letting armed bands of violence-doers inside the city walls and if they have the political and security position necessary to forbid such groups entry, they usually will.
So for a society which has need for a second kind of ‘violence specialist’ (beyond regular soldiers or knights or what have you), who specialized in what we might term ‘monster removal,’ you might expect the local political authority (who would be the largest employer of such), to set up a standard place for recruiting them, perhaps just outside the town/castle/city walls. It’s not hard to imagine a combined inn/tavern springing up next to that, to cater to the traffic, and thus get roughly to the ‘fantasy tavern.’ That said, I find myself wondering: if a locality has so many ‘monster’ related problems, why is the king/lord/state contracting adventurers on a one-off basis? Why doesn’t he have them on permanent retainer?
The easy answer, from a world-building perspective, is to make ‘monster’-type problems rare enough that there isn’t any cause to keep adventurers on permanent employment, but that is the death of the fantasy tavern, since it would lack the kind of continuous clientele necessary (instead, we might imagine adventurers functioning something more like itinerant craftsmen and other specialists in such a world).
The other option I can think of would be some kind of guild, with a legal monopoly on offering ‘monster removal’ services. Often ‘adventurer’s guilds’ in fantasy worlds are vast, continent sprawling institutions, but we ought to expect this to work like other guilds: extremely local, perhaps with each large town having its own guild of adventurers which controlled membership, extracted fees, regulated the trade and provided for widows and such – the sort of things historical guilds did. In that case, the place you would go to hire an adventurer wouldn’t be a tavern, but a guild hall. It might well have some of the same facilities (a kitchen, dining spaces, lodging), but they would be for the members, rather than public. Such a guild would then have a fair bit of price-setting and bargaining power, even potentially against the state or local lord. Of course, they’d also have a role in preventing non-members from offering services – one might expect rather violently.
Alas, neither of these options – itinerant companies of monster-hunters or local established guilds of them – offers much space for the freewheeling fantasy tavern. Crucially, they also don’t offer much space for the fantasy cliche of a group of unrelated adventurers meeting for the first time. That, in turn, I think, speaks to the degree to which pre-modern societies simply don’t throw strangers together like that very much, as human mobility is much lower. “Here’s a room full of people you don’t know, make friends” is a very common modern life challenge, but an infrequent (not unknown, but infrequent) pre-modern one. Tolkien seems to understand this: both Thorin and Company and the Fellowship of the Ring are unusual groups in that they include members who are more or less strangers to each other. As a result, it takes quite exceptional circumstances for them to form.
That said, because Dungeons and Dragons campaigns – and similar other rulesets and settings – demand as a part of the structure of the game (as distinct from the story) that player-characters generally be strangers to each other, I think the ‘fantasy tavern’ will continue and I would expect to see its steady drift from a convenient storytelling assumption to an established part of the lore, to becoming a customary institution of sorts, to continue.
On to Recommendations:
First again for my own stuff. I am back at Foreign Policy with “The U.S. Is Learning the Wrong Lessons in Iran,” arguing that the focus on smaller-picture, often narrowly military issues (magazine depth, drone defenses, minesweeping, etc) runs the risk of obscuring the much more foundational strategic failures in the war. In particular, that the mission the military was asked to accomplish – regime change entirely from the air or, failing that, neutralizing Iran’s long-range strike capability entirely from the air – was probably always impossible. At the very least, no one has ever managed to achieve these tasks before and many have tried.
I also made an appearance on The Rest Is History discussing the Marian reforms, though I think the episode is a ‘bonus episode’ that requires being a subscriber. Of course if you want my take on the Marian reforms in written form (in a bit more detail than one can fit in a podcast), you can find that here.
Meanwhile, also at Foreign Policy and worth your time is Lucian Staiano-Daniels (author of The War People, recommended here), writing “The Straits Are Not OK,” on the historical impact of maritime choke points and in particular on how the Sound Toll deformed Danish policy. In short, because tolls from the Øresund went directly to the Danish crown, it enabled Danish kings to engage in a lot of warfare (like involvement in the Thirty Years War) without consulting their parliament. The result was disaster for Denmark and one wonders, should the IRGC likewise end up with its own revenue source in the form of tolls on the Strait of Hormuz, if those funds will likely fuel foreign adventurerism that may prove disastrous to Iran and the wider region.
In somewhat old but still interesting museum news: I remarked quite some time ago on social media that there were a pair of iron kopides (singular kopis; forward-curving Greek swords) in the Met which, given their thin provenance and the general rarity of such weapons (it is very hard to find a well-preserved kopis) I figured they were unlikely to have been obtained fully legally. I had waited until after I had the information on them I needed for my research to ask the Met the forbidden question (“could you please confirm if there is any additional provenance information for the items…” – sent back in 2021) after which the Met has never returned any of my emails ever again. So you may imagine my amusement to find that both swords had been restituted out of the Met’s collection in 2025, repatriated to Greece as part of a Justice Department fraud investigation. Let us all hope that, now that they are home, they are soon put back on display for the public and made available to scholars, as these really are unusually fine examples of the type.
Will the Met ever answer my emails again? The world may never know.2
Meanwhile, over at Pasts Imperfect, a bunch of neat stuff as always, including an interview with Stephanie McCarter, who works on Ovid, Horace and Catullus about the art of translation and the role of the translator’s choices.
An unusual recommendation, but I have commented a few times in the past that academic book reviews are often written in such a style that it is sometimes hard for regular readers to parse if the work is being endorsed or repudiated. For an example of what an absolutely savage academic review (that still fits within the bounds of etiquette for the form) looks like, check out Stefan Rebenich’s quite harsh review of M. Arnheim’s Five Thousand Years of Monarchy (2025). I have not read the book, so I cannot comment on the correctness of the review, though if its sins are as Rebenich describes, the review’s tone seems well-warranted. The “quae mutatio rerum!” (“oh how things change!”)3 is an especially biting bit of academic knife-turning.
And for this week’s book Recommendation, it’s time for one I have been holding in my pocket since October of last year, N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (1986). For those unfamiliar with the periodization of British history, the ‘Georgian’ period runs from 1714 to 1830, so this is a study of the Royal Navy in the 1700s and early 1800s. Much like Lynn’s Giant of the Grand Siècle (1997) which focuses on the French army of a century earlier, The Wooden World is not a campaign or battle history, but an institutional study. Rodger is thus focused not on individual events, but on how the Royal Navy was organized, how its officers were selected and prepared, how its sailors were recruited, what the experience of life on ship was like, how discipline was conducted and so on. Such an approach has perils, of course, particularly the tendency towards historical compression, to treat the institution as an unchanging constant when of course all institutions change, but Rodger, like Lynn is alive to the way that parts of this institution are changing over time as well, though equally the approach benefits from the fact that in this period the Royal Navy was a fairly famously conservative institution and so changed surprisingly little.
What this sort of approach can give, however, in a sense of what it was like to be in a given institution in a given time. Rodger gives a lot of focus – frankly, even more than Lynn – to the experience of being in the Royal Navy at this time, for both ratings and officers. He discusses the role of drink, the food, life aboard ship, the role of wives (invariably ashore), recruitment (including the role of impressment) and so on. I find this sort of approach important, both because institutions and conditions of life in the past are very different than those for us today and so may catch us by surprise, but also because one of the core questions we bring to history is not just “what happened?” but “what was it like?” Part of the reason we ask that question is because when we want to reason about decisions we may today, we’re not just asking, “what might happen?” but also “what might it be like if that happened?” and history can form a useful guide, but only if we have some sense of what it was like to live through an event. In this sense, The Wooden World also serves as a handy counter-point to another of our recommendations, Spector, At War At Sea (2001), focused on the experience of naval combat in the twentieth century.
Equally important are the insights about institutional culture that come out of a study like this. Reading through, for instance, the career path of an officer, one begins to get a sense of why the Royal Navy as an institution acted the way it did, for better and for worse. This was a somewhat famously hidebound, conservative institution (navies tend to be such) and with a promotion system defined by demonstrating skill in seamanship combined with a heavy dose of patronage from senior officers, it isn’t hard to see why. At the same time, this is a somewhat closed society with very strong shared values and so the command culture of aggressiveness, even in the face of difficult odds – which would continue to serve Britain well into the 1900s – is also understandable here.
Overall, I think it is simply very valuable for anyone interested in one military institution to read as many studies of this sort about other military institutions as possible. In some cases, you will discover remarkably similarities – the systems for officer preparation here, effectively a series of command apprenticeships, helped shape my thinking about the way the Romans prepare their officers, for instance – as well as notable differences. If one is too focused on a single institution, it is easy to lose sight of what is exceptional, unusual, normal, typical or ubiquitous about it. Comparison points are essential. Which is why, even if you aren’t already interested in 18th century naval warfare, I heartily recommend The Wooden World.
- While we might think of ‘farmer’ as a specialist job, in an agrarian society where farmers make up the vast majority of the population, it is as close to ‘unspecialized’ as you can get. Labor ‘specialization’ is culturally contingent. In the United States, an Uber or DoorDash driver is ‘unspecialized’ labor because most Americans know how to drive, but the same is not true of societies with fewer cars.
- But I feel no regret: I asked that question knowing it would burn that bridge because, to be frank, I refuse to launder antiquities fraud if I can avoid it and I felt I could only footnote my concerns over the provenance of the objects if I first asked about them. Now, I suppose, I will have to update that footnote again.
- Literally “what a changing of things!”
One thing to point out on the fantasy tavern side is that it also draws on other genres of fiction rather than just being an amalgamation of history, particularly Westerns. In Western’s, the saloon tends to serve as a focal point, particularly early in the story, where various disparate (and often unknown to each other) groups will meet to kick off the plot. That might be a meeting that sets up the conflict or a meeting to set up an adventure (such as in Butcher’s Crossing for example).
In medieval romances taverns don’t exist. Knights put up with hermits or in mysterious pavilions and encounter strange ladies who lead them to adventures. People, chiefly damsels, needing a knight either hang out at a ford or crossroad until one shows up or head to Camelot where knights of the Round Table are always happy to head out.
Taiwanese/Chinese film makers have made three (I think at least three) fantasy/action movies based around “Dragon Gate Inn”, where rival adventure types meet up at, you guessed it, an inn. Not a series or a sequel, the subsequent films are remakes/reboots.
The first, which I haven’t seen, was made in 1967 so definitely not influenced by D&D. The others are 1992 and 2011, so could be, but I think it’s more parallel trope evolution.
Water Margin (水浒传) is considered to be one of the great works of Chinese literature; it is a story about a collection of bandits, fundamentally very similar to the English stories of Robin Hood. There is plenty of discussion of the societal underworld inhabited by these people.
And taverns are mentioned frequently. They primarily give the impression of being places for travelers to eat, although I expect they provide lodging too (I don’t recall this being mentioned offhand). They can be located near or within settlements, or “far” from them, along roads. Criminals do sometimes encounter each other there, though this is mostly because they are one of the places where criminals may be found, not because they are a place where criminals go for the purpose of meeting each other or seeking work. Meetings between the primary characters usually take place outside of taverns, but the story heads through taverns often enough.
This is a novel set in the 12th century and published in the 15th or 16th, drawing on an extant tradition of stories about the characters which is harder to date, but obviously earlier, than the formal publications.
Odds are good that the Dragon Gate Inn is at least partially drawing on this tradition.
I do think there’s a kinda point (connected to the entire Jianghu/Wulin literary construct) of a world of wandering martial artists. And I presume in those kinds of stories Inns and similar places often take centre-stage because *that’s where people hang out when travelling*.
(and presumably to a lesser extent, if you wnat to hire someone from outside of your community, you hang out wher ethe wanderers hang out)
wandering martial artists fighting in taverns is a trope as frequent as cowboys fighting in saloons.
The RPG Stewpot assumes you’ll be managing a fantasy tavern. But when we played it, our establishment was primarily a steam bath – called The Copper Kettle if I remember rightly. The assumption was adventurers coming back from a dungeon would be filthy and the first thing they’d want is a bath (including magical decontamination).
In my version of Sanctuary i had tavern where mercenaries and travelling merchants tend to take lodging.
A social rule was if you came from the road you could be as dirty and smelly as you want and it was fine, but a hour or so later it was expected you took a bath and clean clothes if not it was a very serious social faux pas if you d not very good reasons – like needing a doctor
To take a more grounded example, your post reminds me of “The Seven Samurai”, where the villagers must travel to the city to find some soldiers of fortune who are capable of solving their problem.
An Iranian colleague thinks that Iran fell victim to the Resource Curse the day Mosaddegh nationalized the oil. As you say, its not just that it drives up prices relative to wages, but that it lets the government see the people as a problem to manage not as a source of strength. But passage fees have more of a future than fossil fuels in 2026.
It seems to me that recruiting soldiers in the fourth century BCE involved precisely having your xenoi go from farm to farm mobilizing debtors and their sons and day labourers, or a rural district like Cape Tainaron, not a city. If you stopped at a city it was to get permission to raise them, because as Rop emphasized raising troops was always a political act and your enemies would try to pressure anyone who let you raise troops.
The recent series covering recruitment principles covers how states raised their armies, but in the case of DnD adventurers the people hiring them either don’t have the rights and/or personnel to go door-to-door or need professional violence dealers beyond the capability of recruited farmers with a spear because their problem is some kind of monster that for whatever reason basically can’t be killed by farmboys with spears no matter how many you have.
So they’re more like the mercs who hung out in cities waiting for a client to come by, which wasn’t the only way you got mercs in the hellenistic era but did exist.
I don’t think mercenaries waiting for employers in cities was a thing in the societies I have studied. There was a floating market (hyuk yuk) of oarsmen and sailors in ports, but when a group of men-at-arms in the Rhineland needed cash, they got together from their estates, equipped themselves, and traveled to Edward III only to find that he was cash-shy at the moment. To go back home they had to sell their kit or borrow money. If you wanted a hire Thracians, you sent a man to a village where he had a xenos, or to a prince like Seuthes, and the big man rounded up some underemployed farmhands and goatherds and gave your man permission to wander around recruiting more. The knifeman hanging you from a tree and beating you today was probably a carpenter in farm country or a brickmaker in a small town last year.
That sorta depends what you mean by “mercenaries” as in, the big mercenary companies or individual soldiers? Because as can be seen on the art, plenty of soldiers were picked up in cities.
I’ve often felt as though the hippodrome is underrated as a kind of location where people of disparate backgrounds might meet.
I also wonder if it makes any kind of sense to think that the less experienced adventure occupies a niche more akin to itinerant labourer than mercenary.
“I also wonder if it makes any kind of sense to think that the less experienced adventure occupies a niche more akin to itinerant labourer than mercenary.”
Quite possible! But a matter of definition, too.
If you look at the places of recruitment for early modern societies…
Consider a sailing ship – either a merchant ship or a naval ship.
Sailing ships employed “landmen” – quite a lot of them.
Why?
Because running a sailing ship had a lot of unspecialized jobs that took only muscle power and basic ability to follow instructions. Like pulling a line together.
The sailing ship also needed a number of skilled workers. Like the men who climbed the masts, tied the lines where and how needed and instructed the landmen when and where to pull.
As well as navigational officers.
Or take the infantry units. Sure, mercenary units gladly recruited skilled, experienced men like soldiers discharged at the end of war elsewhere.
But if they only recruited these, the pool of soldiers would have rapidly shrunk by attrition!
Obviously someone must have been recruiting completely raw recruits – mostly peasant boys come to seek their fortunes. Mercenary units did, alongside the veterans.
The moment he´s recruited, a totally raw recruit to a mercenary unit is as much a mercenary as his veteran comrade is.
Note how two different professions – sailing ships and mercenary infantry – were open to raw recruits of the same qualifications. And they recruited in some of the same places – like sizable port towns, like Seville, Amsterdam or London.
A peasant boy come to Seville to seek his fortune might not have a firm prior decision whether to get a job on a ship or in infantry – he might be open to accept either depending on which offer came along. And there were some other jobs that took unqualified recruits, like lackeys of the elite.
Do adventurers recruit greenhorns like ships and infantry companies do?
Depending on the qualifications needed for successful adventures, they might. Or else they might set a higher bar, and recruit among the veterans of the less adventurous previous trips (ship or land).
In written fantasy, adventurer parties and their equivalents are often of staggered experience levels, so you can have multiple parallel stories of mentorship and add new mentees to replace casualties on an ongoing basis. For tabletop, typically all of the Players will have characters of the same level, even when some of those are replacement characters. Both patterns show up in computer games, but systems where new characters are introduced at a dynamic experience level matching the party are ascendant these days.
“This was a somewhat famously hidebound, conservative institution (navies tend to be such) and with a promotion system defined by demonstrating skill in seamanship combined with a heavy dose of patronage from senior officers, it isn’t hard to see why.”
“Parkinson’s Law” has a wonderful example (slightly tongue in cheek) of how this ran at the recruiting stage:
The British method (old pattern) depended upon an interview in which the candidate had to establish his identity. He would be confronted by elderly gentlemen seated round a mahogany table who would presently ask him his name. Let us suppose that the candidate replied, “John Seymour.” One of the gentlemen would then say, “Any relation of the Duke of Somerset?” To this the candidate would say, quite possibly, “No, sir.” Then another gentleman would say, “Perhaps you are related, in that case, to the Bishop of Watminster?” If he said “No, sir” again, a third would ask in despair, “To whom then are you related?” In the event of the candidate’s saying, “Well, my father is a fishmonger in Cheapside,” the interview was virtually over. The members of the Board would exchange significant glances, one would press a bell and another tell the footman, “Throw this person
out.” One name could be crossed off the list without further discussion.
Supposing the next candidate was Henry Molyneux and a nephew of the Earl of Sefton, his chances remained fair up to the moment when George Howard arrived and proved to be a grandson of the Duke of Norfolk. The Board encountered no serious difficulty until they had to compare the claims of the third son of a baronet with the second but illegitimate son of a viscount. Even then they could refer to a Book of Precedence. So their choice was made and often with the best results.
The Board of Admirals were unimpressed by titled relatives as such. What they sought to establish was a service connection. The ideal candidate would reply to the second question, “Yes, Admiral Parker is my uncle. My father is Captain Foley, my grandfather Commodore Foley. My mother’s father was Admiral Hardy. Commander Hardy is my uncle. My eldest brother is a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, my next brother is a cadet at Dartmouth and my younger brother wears a sailor suit.”
“Ah!” the senior Admiral would say. “And what made you think of joining the Navy?”
As with many Parkinson stories, this is pretty much false in every particular. You joined the navy either by entering as a volunteer or being taken on as a midshipman by a captain. The captain had the choice, not the Admiralty. The examining board came when you applied to pass for lieutenant, was composed of captains and was usually a short examination in seamanship (you had to do a minimum of five years sea-time to apply). Patronage applied, particularly to further promotion, but the Admiralty insisted on performance as well – if you recommended duds they would turn down your proteges. Once you made post-captain, seniority applied, except that promising officers got temporary admiral postings (‘commodore’) and dud ones were ‘yellowed’: promoted to admiral ‘without distinction of flag’ (marked as not fit for active command).
I think you are talking about a different period in history. You’re talking about the navy of the 18th and early 19th centuries – Nelson’s navy, or Aubrey’s and Hornblower’s navy if you prefer. Parkinson is talking about the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The reference to Dartmouth is the giveaway – the Royal Naval College only opened in 1863. The Royal Navy of 1900 was a very different beast to that of 1800.
Also, “Parkinson’s Law” is a humorous work and perhaps not to be taken entirely seriously, or at least to be taken as unseriously as your constitution allows.
Brett’s observation was on the Georgian navy. But you are right – after the crash in landed incomes post 1870 the aristocracy and gentry sought positions in professions like the navy, foreign service and colonial service, making them fit Parkinson’s image better.
The first-ever WFRP adventure, “The Oldenhaller Contract”, has an explicit way of recruiting adventurers – if you want to hire some, you pin up a notice on a big tree in the middle of the city of Nuln. The offers range from private-detective stuff (find my runaway child) to networking (anyone else here serve in X regiment ten years ago?) to straightforward caravan-guarding stuff. Kind of a permanent hiring fair for violence specialists of all kinds.
“a promotion system defined by demonstrating skill in seamanship combined with a heavy dose of patronage from senior officers”
I found this interesting in the book. Essentially, the Admiralty did not have much idea about the candidates for commissions or promotions, and so depended on recommendations. If you recommended someone, and he was later seen to have done well, your own star would rise. If he did badly it would fall. Everyone tended to rise or fall together, so it was as well to be recommended by people whose other recommendations also did well.
This tended to turn the officer corps (including NCOs) into a vast talent scouting agency.
(As a comparison, I once came across a complaint from an academic from a certain country that academics there recommended only people likely to be dependent on them in the future i.e. people who were not much use. So both systems were relying on patronage, but in one case it did so by bringing talent forwards, and on the other by smothering it.)
My understanding is that the US military still basically works this way, especially for commissioned officers. Their superiors are required to give regular reports on their performance, and generally the culture is that these are always positive at first glance but if it’s not super-glowing or has vague comments that the officer could do slightly better at some tasks it basically tanks any chance of a promotion because it tells the people who make the decisions the officer writing the report who has seen the candidate in action doesn’t think they’re a good choice.
This can sometimes lead to problems similar to academics; the promoted officer won’t generally be dependent on the officer writing the report once he gets promoted enough there isn’t an open slot in the unit, but in order to get to that point they have to have a superior officer who likes them. If the senior officer wants to sleep with them and they refuse, the next report isn’t gonna look so good. This is illegal but the structure of military criminal investigations means complaints are often buried; generally punishment ends up under the control of an officer directly in the chain of command above the accused and they tend to fall into “well that’s wrong but it’s not worth getting rid of an officer with his exemplary performance” at best.
Most militaries still work this way – your fitness report or your OJAR is written by your superior officers (your one-up and two-up), and then a board (none of whom have ever met you) reviews it, along with all the other reports on all the other officers of your rank and branch, and ranks them, and the ones at the top get promoted, however many there are vacancies for (or whatever).
So the report still has huge effects on the career prospects of its subject. What has changed, I think, is that the report no longer has quite such an effect on the career prospects of its author. I don’t think modern promotion boards think “well, General Jones says here that Col Smith is a great officer, but on the other hand Col Smith was the pillock who gave Maj Brown such a great report and Maj Brown was the biggest military disaster since Isandhlwana, so clearly Col Smith has terrible judgement and we shouldn’t promote him.”
“What has changed, I think, is that the report no longer has quite such an effect on the career prospects of its author. ”
IIRC, an unhappy recommendation did not directly affect your career prospects. But it would make your future recommendations less influential. And that made you less valuable to your followers.
You are looking for good followers, they are looking for good patrons. Good recommendations make you valuable, bad recommendations make you less valuable. No recommendations make you valueless.
Ah, I see – thank you. So it would be more like “Col Smith says Maj Jones is brilliant, but then as we all know Col Smith says everyone is brilliant, even that complete waste of rations Capt Brown, so I think we should ignore that when considering whether to promote Maj Jones”.
ajay, that would be pretty much it, IIRC.
Not sure
Drafted many performance reports (OPRs) and served on a few promotion boards. Yes you read the OPRs very closely for “damning with faint praise”, however the substantive achievements get the most attention and weight. “During the xxx exercise the yyy Munitions Squadron received the highest rating”, “Exceeded their retention goals for the last five years” and that sort of thing. It was also amazing how many folks had their package sent to the board without completing their required Professional Military Education (PME), a big minus. I also assisted an investigation where a candidate asserted some improper influence (thru the IG). Wow, we had legal beagles from State HQ and Guard Bureau in our stuff so fast and it was not a pleasant time.
What I’ve mostly heard on the improper influence stuff, including from some official investigatory reports by Congress or IGs, is that there’s a lot of mechanisms for independent investigations but the final decision on actions taken tends to end up with a regular officer somewhere in the chain of command and it is the opinion of reporters, investigators, and many Congressional committee members that often these officers do not take allegations of abuse sufficiently seriously, so they assign some sort of token punishment and possibly move the victim but the accused doesn’t get forced out of a position of authority and often the denied promotion stays denied, and the victim gets a reputation of being “difficult to work with” that haunts their future prospects.
Reports generally recommend moving decisions on punishments to some sort of independent judicial body but this tends to get shut down on the basis of prioritizing military readiness. Personally I suspect this is corrosive to cohesion, recruitment, and retention in pretty negative ways that aren’t immediately obvious, but I don’t have direct experience.
Also your mention of State HQ and Guard Bureau sounds like National Guard, so it may be different in your individual state; I’ve only heard about regular military.
The Broken/Mended Drum in Ankh-Morpork seems to have operated as a clearing house where heroes could go to find work and people needing heroes could go to find them.
I find myself thinking of the Canterbury Tales where the Pilgrims meet at an Inn and are organized into a travelling party by the Innkeeper. A pilgrimage was certainly one time when you could expect to meet a lot of strangers.
Percy is adorable.
While we’re im fantasy settings – are you planning to disucuss dragon warfare, perhaps using the GoT universe for narrative? I cannot wait to read about ,,Dragons in Being” 😄.
He touched on that idea about 7 years ago, expressing ambivalence at best.
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/11/collections-the-preposterous-tactics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/
So a dimension you are missing is how magic upsets the farmer to non farmer ratio. To be fair, a lot of DnD setting ALSO fail to reckon with this, but, like, creating water is an unlimited cantrip. Just having the lowest level of magic in a town helps insulate from drought and cut down of travel time, but even beyond that, encouraging plant fertility and growth are fairly low level spells for certain clerics and druids, while completely replacing farmed food is higher and rarer a spell, it is also something possible and I imagine, say, a monastary to have at least a few clerics capable of doing so.
Long time reader, first time commenter.
Your comment about PC’s needing to be strangers really stuck out to me, as probably my favorite framing I’ve ever seen in a campaign was one where everyone had agreed to be at least half human…with the same mother.
It is in fact what you think, and led to some funny shenanigans. More generally though, yeah, everything is “you meet in a tavern (or tavern equivalent).”
I said it the last time this came up and I’ll repeat it here. Mapping D&D parties to historical mercenaries doesn’t work narratively because that’s not the kind of story D&D tells.
Old School D&D was Heist genre, newer D&D is Superhero genre.
D&D actually maps very poorly to Epic Fantasy ala Tolkien in most editions. Meanwhile 3e, 4e, and 5e all work decently well for Superhero or Spec Ops style stories, and probably work for modeling Xianxia too.
Fundamentally, a high level (6+ in 3e, 11+ in 4e or 5e) D&D party is rather modern. They will have access to magic that let them emulate a lot of things that no medieval combatant had; but which are often deliberate analogues for technologies that show up in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The guild-hall angle really clicks for me. It also neatly explains a trope we usually hand-wave: the “quest board.” A public board of odd jobs makes way more sense as a guild’s intake system than as something a random innkeeper maintains out of goodwill. It gives you the standardized posting, the vetting, and the cut off the top all in one.
The point about low pre-modern mobility is the part that’s stuck with me, though. It reframes “you all meet in a tavern” as less a place than a *rare event* — you need the pilgrimage, the war, the disaster that actually shakes strangers loose from their villages and throws them together. Maybe that’s the honest fix: keep the tavern, but treat it as the exception that requires a reason, the way Tolkien does with the Fellowship, rather than the default Tuesday.
This is how I designed the campaign I’m running with the kids. Their characters are part of a mercenary guild that specializes in protecting trade caravans. It has a lot of advantages as a DM.
First, they’re working for pay, so I can have a character say “You lot! Go guard this caravan!” They’re kids, some railroading is essential. If you let them pick….well, there was the fight with the giant crocodile where they decided, on their own, that the crocodile’s survival was of the first importance. I genuinely was planning on them killing it.
Second, it allows for episodic story-telling. Which is super convenient for a DM. If I don’t have an adventure planned out, I can quickly cobble together some random “Go rescue this trader who was captured by goblins” sort of thing for the evening and they enjoy it.
It also handles pay. They can do some looting, but their main source of income is the pay the traveling merchants give them to protect the caravans. Merchants can get filthy stinking rich, so it makes sense there’s a bit more gold floating around the cities they work in. You’re not protecting Level 1 farmers, you’re part of a larger force protecting wealthy rich people. The “part of a force” came into play several times, as their mission wasn’t to defeat the enemy, but rather to survive long enough to let their bosses know where the enemy was. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the knight, but it’s more fun sometimes to play as one of the members of the lance.
Finally, it lets you get weird. One problem with a lot of DnD games is the settings are all pretty boring. If your job requires you to travel, on the other hand, you can get more creative.
When are you going to feature on School of War?
>> But I want to overthink it.
Why I read this blog in a nutshell. Thank you!
> the command culture of aggressiveness, even in the face of difficult odds – which would continue to serve Britain well into the 1900s
“It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.”
-Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Crete, 1941
Not quite sure why a table-top RPG would require the characters to be strangers. I think this is more important for a movie or a video game where the viewer / player encounters these characters for the first time, so they can naturally introduce themselves to each other without need for “As you know, Bob” (same as for the hero with amnesia). But in D&D the players can tell each other years of backstory before the game starts.
Essentially in DnD, which is the big famous system and what people use even for stuff it isn’t really a good fit for and what tends to be used for stuff like Critical Role that is how a lot of new fans enter the hobby these days, creating even a starting player character is a big process and generally at most the DM explains the setting and sets some expectations for what kind of game this is then everyone goes home and shows up next week with completed characters, often with something like a page-long backstory and notoriously sometimes much longer, and if they talk to anyone during this process it’s running it by the DM, who hasn’t gotten the full details of everyone else’s characters.
So this can easily result in characters where you just cannot cobble together an explanation for how they’ve ever met before, much less why they’d set out on an adventure to risk death together without already having a specific objective. And in the published adventures that end up setting people’s sense of how adventures should go the idea is a group can buy it and run it with any characters they want, so it needs to have some kind of generic opening, and in the ones people who grew up to be module writers wrote the opening was often a tavern.
In some systems with a different intended experience there’s actually some number of steps in character creation that are explicitly figuring out how your characters know each other well enough to go on an adventure together, but these are generally much simpler systems where you can do it in a typical play session comfortably instead of pouring over rulebooks and contemplating over a week to create a starting character, much less one at a level where a fighter can be reasonably confident a goblin won’t kill them in one shot with a lucky roll. These generally are in settings and genres where you don’t start in a tavern unless the game is explicitly designed to let you play DnD with a different rules system. For instance, Spirit of the Century is 1920s pulp where you’re part of a secret society that’s built to support people born exactly at the start of the century who represent it in a complex mystical way that I never read the details of and basically you are Exceptional Individuals and go fight mad scientists looking for the Ark of the Covenant and such.
An interesting thing to note about taverns. In Baldur’s Gate II, while you can go to the tavern to get back party members you had to dismiss, the only ones you actually recruit there are Nalia and Anomen. Is it a coincidence that both are wide-eyed romantics who might just believe heroes ARE recruited in taverns?
Witcher (the book anyway) is pretty good at avoiding the trope about taverns, as far as I remember. There is a fair bit of tavern scenes, including the opening one, but Geralt gets most of his jobs from local nobles, rich men, or occasionally directly from peasants. And it’s pretty clear that peasants can only afford his services by pooling their resources and he still have to give a big discount to make it work.
With that said, in the world where monster hunters are traveling itinerants working solo or in small groups, what’s so economically implausible about the customary place for recruitment being a tavern/inn in a large enough town? They have to meet their clients somewhere, they probably can afford staying at an inn, might just as well use it as a base of operations? Or, if the higher class employers won’t stoop to going to a tavern, it may be upon the tavern keeper to inform passing adventurers that this lord or that merchant has a job for them.
If I remember correctly the opening of the novel ‘Treasure Island’ is set in an inn where an old pirate with a treasure map is basically hanging out (and trying to hide from former colleagues.) It might even have been an inn out in the countryside, somewhere, since the old pirate was specifically trying to avoid densely populated urban areas where he might run into his former colleagues…
My go-to for TTRPG openings these days is “you’ve all agreed to take on a job together, and you can decide how well you know each other beyond that. I think it’s a bit less awkward.
That said, I think most TTRPGs (at least, the D&D-esque ones where the PCs are adventurers or monster slayers in a historical fantasy setting) tend to posit that there is a bit more randomness to the distribution of capacity for violence, and that some of the people who have it will be a bit belligerent and erratic. Certainly those in power will still do what they can to concentrate military effectiveness under their control, but I think it’s realistic for something like an adventurer’s guild to be a bit less controlling, serving more to facilitate job-finding than control the supply of labor.
For my current campaign, the power of third-party adventurer groups is fairly marginal, because nobility and the crown treat such people as a “little league” to recruit from for their own retinues, and they can afford to pay well enough that few refuse, meaning that there’s really nobody in the position to set up something like a trade guild for monster hunters.
“most of the taverns seem to be set in small towns, villages and forests (presumably for the ‘cozy’ vibe)”
Could be because they’re thinking they should have it be a place on the outskirts near where the adventuring will occur. So, a small town or forest.