Fireside Friday, September 4, 2026

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Literally “what a changing of things!”