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!”
Perhaps it is an interesting thought exercise to explore what kind of socio political factors might drive rural taverns to be the recruitment location. My best effort would be to assume that adventurers are privateers. Nominally independent, but hired by the state to solve problems. Assume that there is an general agreement that fielding armies leads to warfare, or that the only reason to field an army is to rebel against legitimate authority. Overtly hiring mercenaries is a causus belli. The monsters are attacking, so if you don’t want peasant mobs, you need to covertly hire privateers to solve the problem, and if you want to do it covertly, you want to move it out of town and away from oversight.
One confounding thing about the typical D&D setting is that there is a vast amount of wealth (in GP, ordinary arms and armor and magical items) out of circulation, specifically in dungeons or in the possession of monsters who do not participate in the normal economy. You don’t usually see a tribe of kobolds going into a village and buying food with the wealth in their dungeon. And the sword +1 in that dungeon might be worth a significant fraction of the total wealth in that 500-person village. So the money the PC’s can get from killing the evil goblins and taking their stuff might be significantly greater than what the village could pay the PC’s to kill the goblins. A dragon hoard might (depending on the value of magic items) be comparable to the local Big Man’s total wealth.
So being paid by the Big Man or his associates might work for NPC’s or people less special than the PC’s, but the wealth and power the PC’s get from killing and looting gnolls means they would soon become far more wealthy and powerful than people being paid by the Big Man.
The result of this should be then that the adventurers that became wealthy from looting the local dungeon would then become the local big man. Potentially displacing the existing one violently. This somewhat makes sense with lots of D&D settings where local authority figures are high-level characters. The assumption for why they’re hiring adventurers for local threats is that it simply isn’t worth their time to clear out dungeons themselves. But we would then expect the long-term steady state to be local adventurer-lords gradually making their lands safer by clearing the threats, pushing the frontier back further and further.
This is kind of how Pathfinder: Kingmaker plays out. The PC is a local lord/ruler in an area packed with various threats. Throughout the game, the PC and his/her party gradually address these threats, thus decreasing the need for adventurers in the future.
I think the basic idea of most DnD settings is that this totally happens a lot, but high level adventuring ability isn’t hereditary, so in the next generation the adventurer-lord’s son inherits all the wealth but not the personal combat ability, so some combination of losing ground to new monster incursions or foreign invasions and using the wealth to hire adventurers happens. And you can go on an adventure against the orcs who came down out of the mountains to invade, and maybe launch a raid to take out their new warchief in the mountains, but you can’t purge the mountains of orcs permanently because the Great Wyrm Red Dragon in the mountains would get annoyed you’re interfering with his orc tributaries enough his hoard isn’t growing as fast as he’d like and he has to go out and get cows rather than having them delivered and go burn down the town, and the adventurer-lord isn’t anywhere close enough to high enough level to handle that. Or maybe there isn’t a red dragon but killing every orc in the mountains would be really, really time consuming and he has stuff to do.
So you get a cycle where an adventurer lord rises and disposes of the immediate threats but can’t destroy their source, and then he dies and his heir is weaker and another orc warchief comes out of the mountains. And then another adventuring party deals with him and may or may not replace the current lord, repeat until a level 20 party takes exception to the dragon and settles matters for good, which rarely happens because there are few level 20 parties.
Pathfinder Kingmaker is basically dealing with the dragon after literally almost a hundred iterations of this courtesy of the final boss in the dragon role via creating problems like fireproof trolls and presumably becomes one of the stable major cities eventually, with relatively few problems and the cash to hire a big-name party when one arises.
Which brings up the question I keep asking: How are we defining “inhabited”? In most games a goblin cave is considered uninhabited, which makes sense from the perspective of the NPCs–they’re not human or an allied race so you can do whatever you want to them. We see PLENTY of similar situations in our own species, it’s how we worked until recently and how many still work. But from the goblin’s perspective, they’ve got a whole town here. That changes the equation significantly. The adventurers aren’t walking into a wilderness, they’re invading a local town.
Without serious consideration given to how a society composed of overlapping but mutually hostile civilizations would work, it’s really impossible to tell how taverns would play into things. For example, a village may NEED a tavern as a local defensive structure, and in that case it’s a perfect place for people looking to exchange violence for coin to congregate. And there’s a pre-existing problem (another village, violently competing with yours) to manage, which the local Big Man is likely to appreciate help with.
Speaking of – there’s been a, for the lack of a better word, “Darkest Dungeon clone” (meaning the mix of sideview, linear position-based, turn-based combat with base management) just a few years ago, called Goblin Stone, which had (apparently – it’s still on my backlog) depicted the typical goblin cave situation from the perspective of the goblins.
There’s also this online “gamebook” (if the words “Fighting Fantasy” and/or the names Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone mean anything to you, you ought to be right at home) Lair of the Troglodytes, which really exploits the incredible (by human standards) weakness of the main character for all it’s worth. (If anyone does attempt it, let me know if you manage to beat it (get true ending) – you’ll know once there’s a golden symbol (a star, AFAIR) at the end instead of the skull one.
http://www.ffproject.com/trog.htm
If you “elevate” the kobolds/goblins/etc. to the status of a near-peer society, capable of seriously threatening the PoV(?) humanlike village, then you will find the villagers are going to wage war on the kobold polity. They will pull together a village militia. (If a single kobold lair threatens multiple villages, those villages will tend to team up for the war; if many villages have their own local kobold lair, they might form a mutual-help coalition to overwhelm them one after another.) The justification for the big man’s position will include defending the villagers from the kobolds. (Indeed the big man may be unimpressed if you plan to show him up at his job.)
To be blunt, villagers have little coin, at least moderate capacity for violence, and a high willingness to kill those gmflbmf kobolds. The transaction for them to hire adventurers with a moderate amount of coin (maybe not right now, but the lifetime average wealth level of adventurers is higher), high capacity for violence, and little internal motivation to kill these specific kobolds, is not quite obvious. They are likely better off “paying themselves” as village militia. The situation is much more obvious if you supply not the muscle, but a specialist skill the villagers can’t get otherwise. Then they would hire you, drum together the militia, and whole group would go off to kill kobolds, with you as some kind of semi-leadership important support element attached to the main mass formed of the villagers.
Link to misplaced comment.
“Usually in the original settings the goblins/kobolds are a raiding threat, usually one that happens to have escalated very recently to a point where the village agrees they need to proactively do something about it, and the village is pretty demilitarized and has maybe a couple guys who own actual weapons and possibly armor.”
Aaand that is not a combination you can have happen.
– If this is a non-state society, or a region with lots of small states (e.g. classical Greece), it will not be demilitarized. The locals will muster up an army and chase off the goblins.
– If the locals are demilitarized, they live under states both internally “strong” enough to police them, and large enough that a village militia is not militarily useful. In which case, they will have army detachments squashing the goblins.
“However there are conveniently a number of elite fighters (in 3e even at level 1 PC classes are generally stronger than NPC classes and especially the Commoner class most of the villagers have) who […] and have armor the villagers couldn’t possibly afford”
Other than dismissing this as a feature of entertainment (wish-fulfillment) with no referent in reality: how is there a social role for “elite fighters”, particularly with expensive and militarily useful equipment?
– In a militarized society, they would be the retainers of the local big man, or some of the several variants available (e.g. several households brigaded together to afford one set of kit, particularly the armor, and he’s the young man chosen of these several households to wear it).
– In a demilitarized society, WTF? That would be like some random person having an ATGM at home.
One of the foundations of D&D is that PC’s going together into a dungeon to kill evil will relatively quickly become very powerful and wealthy, while the Big Man’s retainers will not climb the power curve. And if one group of adventurers stops adventuring at level 4 they stop climbing the power and wealth curves while another group that continues adventuring gains levels and more powerful equipment, rapidly outpacing the group that became the Big Man’s elite troops. In a militarized society a group of level 10 adventurers are comparably powerful to a local lord’s company of soldiers; in a demilitarized society adventuring is a path to wealth and power that cannot be obtained through other, more normal means so there will always be people who choose that vocation.
None of this is close to how the real world works, but D&D is not the real world.
That really depends on “why” they’ve become a local problem and why there’s a bunch of free, armed and specialized people around. A not uncommon one I’ve seen is that there is/was a war, which has drained the resources/combat power of the local Big Man. Said armed travellers could then be some combination of heading towards(mercenaries intending to sign up) or away(deserter, former retainers of a now-dead lord or just wanting to avoid it) from said war.
Under one set of assumptions regarding their behaviour, yes. Under another set, the village might well find it makes more sense to ally with them – especially vs. a rival village of their own kind. I.e. if another human(like) polity has considerably more valuable loot than the goblinoid one does, and if goblinoids don’t really value the same things (i.e. if they find silver outright toxic, any silver loot is useless to them), are social enough to keep to a contract for at least a while and are decent enough fighters, then the cold calculus points in one direction. Of course, we all know that cultural reasons often quash things that would work hypothetically, but nevertheless…
P.S. To develop the near-peer society theme: on a larger-polity level (i.e. an outright empire), the advantages of being able to employ/integrate goblins even semi-reliably ought to be really significant; i.e. if the amount of food needed for one human would sustain two or three goblins*, then they become very useful for padding out the numbers in so many contexts. Granted, with the median-ish depiction of one, it’s going to be a multi-generational project; “are they not just going to stab us in the back/in our sleep?” question probably limits initial deployments to those with at least 2/1 split in favour of standard human soldiers. (Even then, increasing the size of the force by 1/3rd while only packing 1/10th of the provisions helps substantially even if we assume their physiques would generally cause them to lose to similar numbers of human soldiers and so they shouldn’t be used as the rank-and-file.**)
If you do manage to overcome the trust issues eventually, lots more space opens up. I.e. if they are primarily nocturnal, watching just about anything at night becomes very easy, and vice versa for setting up night-time ambushes. Dragoon units could potentially have each horse carry both a human rider and a goblin. (If horses could be taught not to fear elephants, goblins shouldn’t be too hard.) Goblins might not be able to control full-sized horses on their own, but if they could be taught to ride ponies (which eat half the hay of “proper” horses) and be trusted not to desert with them (probably easier the farther away from home you can deploy them), then you get an extremely efficient foraging unit, as their (presumed) difficulty to keep pace with humans won’t matter (and the square-cube law allows ponies to carry more weight per unit of body mass than full-scale horses, so overall amount of supplies shouldn’t take a hit.) Similar calculations apply for guarding caravans/army wagons. Etc., etc.
Given how many manga/anime fans have already replied to this, I wonder if anyone could name a series which had already explored something like this? (Could be Western/other fantasy too, but I suspect Japan is more likely to have done this by now.) So far, a cursory search had only revealed this story…which looks interesting, but isn’t quite the same. (And it apparently hasn’t been updated since 2023…)
https://www.scribblehub.com/series/787628/my-sons-and-i-got-isekaid-to-the-losing-goblin-side/
Technically, Drakengard, the debut game of Yoko Taro, had the enemy Empire (who worship the Watchers (I think just Angels in the original Japanese?) that aim to purge the world of sinful humans once they come back, with the backstory of how that came to be contained in Drakengard 3) use goblins and such occasionally (while your Alliance works with fairies occasionally, who are…not that great) – but that Berserk-inspired PS1 game is certainly no logistics exercise and their presence is only really there to parody the “always evil race” tropes.
As in, they aren’t inherently hostile and in one timeline, you get to fight in their arena for…reasons, and yet, the subtext of much of early fantasy is made text, with the approximate Gandalf counterpart, Hierarch Verdelet, repeatedly referring to them as subhumans and rewarding you for wiping out their units specifically in sidequests – even as he is horrified by the violence he witnesses the main character (a total maniac – the only kind of person who, in Taro’s eyes, would be able to perpetrate the thousands of kills defining certain genres) unleash on the regular brainwashed soldiers of the Empire. (If you have any familiarity with the much-better known Nier, which is kind of an alternate universe to Drakengard, you can probably see how this foreshadows the themes of those later games.)
*Kobolds are probably way trickier, since they are generally depicted as being close to either canines or to lizards. Either scenario would suggest they are pretty much pure carnivores – so at best, this would be like trying to feed hunting dogs. Hence, “gutter-level” roles are cost-prohibitive for them, so if they could be allied with on a long-term basis at all, they would perform fairly specialized roles for Big Men. Perhaps as a pure status symbol in their court, like the exotic animals have been throughout history; perhaps something else is open. (Now imagining a world where humans cannot learn magic, but goblins/kobolds semi-frequently do, and thus are your most realistic (perhaps the only available if elves, etc. are absent) option for a sorcere(r/ss).)
**Although as I have remarked on here last year, the flip side of goblins and similar short races being small is that they would require much less metal to be heavily armoured – and the square-cube law would actually enable them to carry significantly more relative to their body weight than humans. Pure metal shields potentially become feasible. In the early gunpowder age, it might be possible to protect them with steel armour of sufficient thickness that humans cannot carry it at all*** or that’s too expensive to make for humans.
***At least if they have to move, that is. Kliment Voroshilov, the Lu(g/h)ansk-born head of the Red Army in the 1930s, was once said to have made a unique suggestion to resolve the insufficient protection of contemporary tanks (15mm armour, which struggled to protect from even 12.7mm machine guns, never mind anything greater): why not clad the crews in thick carapaces, since they would just be sitting in them, and it’s much easier for the engine (roughly comparable in power to a 1980s family car) to propel extra steel worn by 2/3 humans than extra thickness of armour even in the frontal plane, let alone all over the vehicle? Obviously, even if this idea was ever viable, rapid growth of shell calibers and capabilities (and the contemporary growth of engine horsepower) left it behind very quickly.
Kinda Reincarnated as a Slime? The main character is a reincarnated human who is a slime and gets a super-useful skill called Great Sage that basically gives perfect answers to any questions he asks and a couple other powerful skills, and he lucks into meeting a sealed hugely powerful dragon who makes a deal where Rimuru uses his skill to get him out (he has to spend a while in an extradimensional space before they have a way to get him back to the material world) and the dragon gives him an enormous amount of magical power. He soon teams up with a goblin village, gives them all names (this confers a bunch of power on them and upgrades them to bigger goblins, something he doesn’t realize until he passes out from mana depletion after naming them) and works to establish a peaceful society with good foreign relations. This is pretty rough because there’s a bunch of powerful, ambitious people around who want to crush the upstart or have long-range plans that happen to involve sending an army of orcs through the area killing everything in their way, but between his personal power, integrating rivals including the orcs after triumphing over their leaders, and the fact that the most powerful person in the world is the childish daughter of the creator dragon-god and easily bribed with sweets when she shows up to check the village out he’s able to build up strength. The human and other traditional good-guy race realms are all initially hostile towards goblins and his coterie of other monsters, but some of them are willing to be reasonable once he’s able to sell them on his lack of offensive ambitions. Others send a major army to try to exterminate the village and it’s a tough fight but their heaviest hitter is also a reincarnated Japanese person he’s able to talk down after persuading her he didn’t murder her best friend, and taking out the rest of the army gives him the power boost to be recognized as a Demon Lord and thus a political player the other Demon Lords take seriously as a peer to negotiate with (one of them is secretly the “goddess” the main human realms worship).
“Kliment Voroshilov, the Lu(g/h)ansk-born head of the Red Army in the 1930s, was once said to have made a unique suggestion to resolve the insufficient protection of contemporary tanks (15mm armour, which struggled to protect from even 12.7mm machine guns, never mind anything greater): why not clad the crews in thick carapaces, since they would just be sitting in them, and it’s much easier for the engine (roughly comparable in power to a 1980s family car) to propel extra steel worn by 2/3 humans than extra thickness of armour even in the frontal plane, let alone all over the vehicle?”
Voroshilov was very far from being a military genius and this asinine suggestion very much backs that up.
For a start, the crew is not the only bit of the tank you might want to protect with armour. You might want to protect, say, THE AMMUNITION. If I have three armoured men sitting in a tinfoil tank, and an enemy round hits the ammo stowage, that tank will explode and the armoured carapaces will merely serve to ensure that all the bits of each individual crew member land in the same rough area.
Second, if you look at the frontal area of a tank in cross section, quite a lot of it is made up of the bodies of the crew – so you’d still have to carry quite a lot of armour, especially when you consider you’d want to protect them against oblique shots as well.
I am not sufficiently invested to start doing area and weight calculations over this, so I’ll instead observe there was another dimension in play. Armour-grade steel is obviously different from regular steel due to its density (and hardness); some of that density is achieved via alloying, but the finishing treatments are also very important. The most typical tank armour (until it was displaced by composites – at least for frontal areas) is abbreviated as RHA, meaning rolled homogenous armour; that is, steel which had been through a rolling press while still hot to make it uniform. In the late 1920s-early 1930s especially, this was not a trivial process to perform to steel of armor-grade density, and any increase in the desired armour plate thickness required upgrades to the rolling presses. (Merely upgrading T-26 from 13mm armour thickness of the early, small-scale production models to 15mm required not-insignificant reworking of the presses.)
In fact, this was so hard that the French in particular ended up going in the other direction entirely and assembling a number of their tank models out of pre-cast pieces. During WWII, a great reason why Sherman production could be scaled up so rapidly is that some factories were allowed to cast it instead of rolling; however, casting requires about 15% more steel to achieve the same protection, so those Sherman models had to have bulkier dimensions. (This difference was also seen with KV tanks: some had 75mm RHA turrets, others 90mm cast, but the protection was effectively the same.) It had also been a great motivator for the adoption of sloped armour on T-34: suddenly, armour protection doubles (at 60 degree angle in front) without requiring a press with double the capacity. Anyway, the additional logic of the carapace is that it can either be cast, or made with a relatively low-capacity press, substantially simplifying production.
True; though you are also exhibiting presentism here. Nowadays, we have all seen catastrophic damage sustained to tanks from ammunition explosions, but back then, it was comparatively rare. For one, armor-piercing munitions were solid metal with little-to-no explosive filler; while they still got hot from the propellant and the friction of their journey, the amount of thermal energy they could transfer was well below molten copper from those HEAT warheads which destroy virtually all tanks nowadays. Secondly, the small caliber of 1930s anti-tank weapons made connecting with ammo storage specifically unlikely. Last but not least, the ammo itself was much less dangerous to the crew.
That is; the high-explosive shells used with the 125mm gun of every Soviet/Russian tank from T-64A onwards contain about 5 kg of explosive filler each. The equivalent shells used with the 45mm gun installed on nearly all 1930s Soviet tanks (around 10,000 T-26s, some 5,000 BTs – and several thousand more BA-3/6/10 armoured cars; additionally, thousands more of the wartime T-70) contained 118 grams of explosive filler; i.e. the same as 2 standard hand grenades.* While there were also more shells carried on those tanks (generally >100) relative to now, a large number of them was armor-piercing (virtually no filler to go off) and all of them were spread around quite a bit (some in a ring around the turret; some at turret’s crew feet) so it was far from guaranteed shrapnel from one shell going off would detonate everything else, and the carapace could be conceivably made thick enough to withstand such grenade-level shrapnel.
If anything, the much greater issue (and probably the main reason this concept was never ultimately adopted) is that the odds of some element of tank’s engine/gazoline storage getting hit and causing it to be set on fire (usually not explode outright, as that requires a specific fuel-air mix) were substantially greater, (not with diesel, but basically the only diesel tank in the world at the time was the Japanese I-Go) which would obviously force the crew to abandon the tank; lots and lots of tank crews have escaped burning tanks during WWII (during the 1942 Caucasus campaign, there was an ambush on the SS Wiking tank division passing through the narrow mountain valley before the pivotal city of Malgobek (present-day Ingushetia; next door to Chechnya), where the commanding officer was said to have gone through five tanks by the time it was over) – but good luck doing so while having to remove the carapace first.
P.S. Voroshilov was certainly far from a genius, military or otherwise, as evidenced by the limited role he played during WWII itself; however, he had a substantially better understanding of logistics than most of his Soviet contemporaries, and while that wasn’t a high bar to cross, it nevertheless counted for a lot. There’s the easy pop-history narrative which posits his conflict with Tukhachevsky as that being a hidebound incompetent and the visionary who “invented blietzkrieg and taught it to the Germans” (in Weimar times, when the two militaries had actively collaborated in violation of Versailles; most of the publicly-known Molotov-Ribentroff provisions had essentially only restored the late-Weimar level of cooperation that was broken off with Hitler’s ascent for 6 years.)
The reality is that while Tukhachevsky’s “deep operations” might have had the same principle, he paid very little attention to the logistics required for it to work. He only focused on the output end of logistics: i.e. how to produce things quickly and efficiently, while sustainment would have been someone else’s job (mostly Voroshilov’s and like-minded officers like Khrulev and the later-notorious Mekhlis). Hence, while he deserves credit for at least not being “a cavalry man” like a few other contemporaries (whose proposals would have likely left the Red Army as a larger version of 1939’s Polish army), his brilliant early-1930s concept for the armoured force was to make everything as interchangeable with the civilian cars and trucks as possible, to easily achieve annual output of tens of thousands in the wartime. Since those chassis could obviously carry very little once burdened with even “tinfoil” armour, he literally wanted an armoured platform for each type of gun: i.e. a tankette with a regular machine gun to fight infantry formations and an identical one with a 12.7mm for machine gun nests.
Another one was the desire for universalism: i.e. trying to make the same 76mm gun function as both standard artillery, anti-tank and anti-air; never mind that anti-air guns have to be much heavier than the rest (they have to be able to rotate around a turntable to track aircraft, and so the turntable has to both be present and weigh more than the barrel and breech). The push for amphibious “scout” tankettes (which were so weight-constrained they couldn’t even fit radios), even in units deployed on the Mongolia border, was of a similar nature. And I think I have already remarked last week on his belief that massive multi-turret tanks (which again could only have relatively thin armour across those volumes, and required a myriad of spare parts) would intimidate enemies into giving up. That’s not even going into those proposals that barely got off the drawing board, like his push for polygonal rifling (only used on sport pistols and the like nowadays) for artillery and for large-caliber recoilless guns for aviation, or the desire for combat dirigibles (yes, a bit like Red Alert; unlike Red Alert;, they would have immediately become fodder for anti-air artillery.) He did see value in jet/rocket development, admittedly; sadly, everyone else (who didn’t get executed/purged alongside him) eventually assumed it was equivalent in value to those other proposals.
In all, even a fraction of that insanity left the USSR of 1941 stuck with >7000 of largely useless tankettes (even the amphibious ones didn’t develop that capability reliably until the eve of Hitler’s invasion, so only a small fraction of those was made before the plant was switched to a more conventional design); with a gap in heavy artillery development as Tukhachevsky’s dead-end ideas were pursued for most of the 1930s; and perhaps worst of all, that would-be unified artillery/anti-air gun, F-22, was captured en-masse by the Germans as its weight made it very difficult to evacuate by a retreating unit; that gun ended up as one of the few things in German hands which could reliably destroy T-34s at a reasonably safe distance before their own long-barrel Pz. IVs/StuGs and PaK 40s started to arrive on the frontline en-masse. (Obviously, 88s could do it too, but they had to defend their own skies as well, so the thousand or so converted guns were of great relief.) That gun was regularly installed onto the chassis of Pz. IIs (as Marder II) or Pz. 38(t) (a Czech design, making it a “double trophy” in a sense) as Marder III. While both of those were later produced with Pak 40s, there were still several hundred of each that carried the trophy gun; some were even sent to North Africa!
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/germany/panzerjager-38t-fur-7-62-cm-pak-36r-sd-kfz-139-marder-iii/
*This was actually impressive for the time; HE shells on the French 37mm guns had 40 gram filler – equivalent to those cylindrical grenades from contemporary underslung launchers on infantry rifles; the British decided such small amounts of explosive filler for their 40mm tank/anti-tank guns would be worthless and didn’t design an explosive shell at all (instead creating dedicated infantry support versions of pre-1943 tanks which carried adapted 94mm mountain howitzers could only fire high explosives and smoke, forcing them to flee if an enemy tank were to come across them); this was soon found to be a mistake, since soldiers in e.g. dug-in machine gun nests cannot really rationally access how little explosive filler your tank’s gun has when it’s firing at them – but they can notice when it’s merely making small holes around them that pass through.
As such, even the American Stuart with worse armour than most British tanks and a similarly-weak 37mm gun was preferred by the infantry in North Africa, as it could actually suppress emplacements and close-range artillery. (Likewise, the Germans invaded Poland with no explosive shells for Pz.IIIs, but rectified that by the time they invaded France.) “Long” 75/76mm-armed tanks (first T-34/KV, then later Pz. IV, the Sherman the following year, and even some Italian/Japanese/Hungarian designs produced by the time their originator was essentially defeated) really were a revolution as the first models capable of engaging armor and providing infantry support with similar effectiveness.
“I.e. if another human(like) polity has considerably more valuable loot than the goblinoid one does, and if goblinoids don’t really value the same things (i.e. if they find silver outright toxic, any silver loot is useless to them), are social enough to keep to a contract for at least a while and are decent enough fighters, then the cold calculus points in one direction.”
In biology there’s a concept called resource partitioning. You use the resources here, I use the resources there, and while we occasionally have some friction we mostly avoid all-out conflicts. Classic examples are birds nesting in various parts of trees, and predators with territories.
It would be easy to do this with humanoid organisms. If goblins can eat acorns but not wheat, whereas humans can eat acorns but it takes a lot of processing, it would make sense for humans to focus on areas where wheat can easily be grown and goblins to focus on areas where oak trees can easily be grown. Or look at the Drow–they have trouble with direct sunlight, whereas humans have trouble with darkness. So Drow live in the Underdark and humans live on the surface. It doesn’t make sense for the Drow to conquer the surface, they’re at a huge disadvantage, so they stick with short raids.
By increasing the variety of resources that can be converted into citizens you can expand your population fairly well. Maybe not with acorns–forests are routinely turned into fields–but that’s also not the weirdest fantasy group. If trolls eat rocks you can have trolls and humans living in the same areas without competing for food resources. If elves are tied to the land in some magical way (dryads and the like often are depicted this way) they may not need food in the first place, so you could have a much higher density population than mere farmland would indicate. If the magical creatures are undead in ways that don’t require living flesh to sustain (liches, certain types of sentient zombies, and the like) you could have a population uncoupled from agriculture entirely. As long as the resources partitioning minimizes friction you can easily end up in a situation where you have dense populations, areas generally stable enough to sustain towns and villages, and yet still have enough for at least low-level adventurers to do.
The other thing is, again, these are sentient groups. They can make alliances. Goblins may be allied to Drow or Orcs, and the Drow/Orcs can use them as expendable fighters to engage in low-level harassment of the enemy to keep their forces spread out. You see this in WWII, when Germany sent captured soldiers to fight for them (“What did he say?” “Look, I washed my hands!”). A city may be able to field an army that can eliminate one threat, but not if they have to send small groups of soldiers to defend a large number of towns/villages/roads/whatever. Think Hadrian’s Wall–Rome could easily have pushed into Germania in any point they chose, but only by fatally weakening other points. This again would allow adventurers to have something to do. Low-level adventurers can help with the town defense; as they get more powerful they shift the balance and can engage in raids of their own; once they get powerful enough they can actually launch an attack against the enemy without overly weakening the area’s defenses.
“If you “elevate” the kobolds/goblins/etc. to the status of a near-peer society, capable of seriously threatening the PoV(?) humanlike village, then you will find the villagers are going to wage war on the kobold polity.”
It’s hardly an elevation, it’s simply a recognition of the fact that the kobolds/goblins/etc have settlements that are indistinguishable from a village. From a game mechanic, sure, it makes sense; kobolds and goblins are basically EXP piñatas for the party. From a world-building standpoint, however, I feel that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, calling it a dog is silly. What I mean is, if the kobold group functions as a village refusing to call it a village makes no sense (again, from a world-building perspective). It leads to some very bad assumptions, many of which are present in your post.
For example, you say that if kobolds are a threat the villagers will go to war against them. What you’re ignoring is that the kobolds may in fact already be engaged in warfare. Raiding is a type of war–the first type, in fact. And the villagers may be engaging in a certain amount of that themselves. Direct conflict may not be a great idea–villagers have a MODEST capacity for violence, typically limited to forming groups to hunt down criminals, and to raiding/poaching. A full-scale assault may wipe out the village instead of the goblins. It’s entirely possible for two sides to engage in such raiding in an attempt to get rid of each other for a long time–see Scottish cattle raiding.
The addition of adventurers to this mix has obvious benefits. Adventuring parties are, basically, raiders, and extremely effective ones. Payment is going to be an issue, but there’s a whole goblin settlement that can pay for it. The debates among the Admiralty over the Spanish treasure ships captured in the early 1800s is an example of this–they wanted to use the Spanish gold to pay the sailors who captured the ships. So what could happen is a village and a kobold settlement reach an equilibrium, then adventurers arrive for some reason (likely passing through), and that gives the village enough strength to risk an assault. Or the villagers can encourage the adventurers to conduct the assault so that the village doesn’t risk its own people.
The other thing to remember is that kobolds and goblins aren’t animals. They can think. They can PLAN. They will be well aware of the existence of red lines and will actively work to avoid crossing them until/unless it’s to their advantage. This can reach an equilibrium where both side accepts a certain amount of violence, but neither side wants to attack the other side yet. Of course, if the goblins get stronger (because remember, the village is only one thing they’re dealing with), or something else happens to them, they may opt for more aggressive tactics. At which point, again, adventurers come in handy.
Finally, it’s a kobold village. This implies the existence of a kobold city. Which implies the existence of a kobold army (or mixed kobolds, bugbears, and others). It could well be that the village doesn’t want to cross the kobolds’ red line because they know the kobolds can escalate beyond the village’s capacity to cope. It’s better to lose an occasional person, and to conduct raids, than to bring yourself to the attention of an army. It’s only the assumption that these creatures are animals–and thus do not follow the rules that every other settlement does–that allows us to gloss over this. For those who have to deal with the kobolds and goblins, such oversites would not end well.
“The situation is much more obvious if you supply not the muscle, but a specialist skill the villagers can’t get otherwise.”
That’s the other side of the coin. This is a world with magic, and that changes things. It’s likely that villagers don’t have a lot of powerful magics–even if everyone has an aptitude for magic (not universal in fantasy) only 10% of people can be specialized in anything but farming, and of them only a fraction will study magic. If the goblins/kobolds/whatever are protected by a mage, the villagers may not be able to do much about them. It may take someone with magic to deal with them.
Speaking of; Battle Brothers (which our host is familiar with, as evidenced by e.g. the “shield wall” post) is so committed to “humans as the average sapient species” that it actually has goblins who are, in general, better ranged fighters than humans, more magical than humans, and are arguably smarter/more socially developed as well; at least, their great cities are said to already be run with a kind of democracy (even if it often results in the cities fighting each other instead of dealing with the other threats; I suppose that’s an Ancient Greece parallel for you.)
So yes, they do have a great city, and it would in fact respond to the destruction of smaller outposts by sending out a massive force (often on the assumption that the indiscriminate destruction is most likely the work of orcs, who cannot be allowed to grow and overwhelm them with raw strength in numbers.) Narratively, though, you are specifically trying to trigger that (assuming that you are so inclined and that your characters get far enough to attempt it in the first place), on the advice of a Goblin Slayer expy – so that when this massive force leaves to seek out a phantom orc warband, you can take on the rest of the city and literally slaughter everyone.
https://battlebrothers.fandom.com/wiki/Rul%27gazhix
Just looking at these quest summary screenshots is fairly stunning; on one hand, it appears to be one of the few accurate depictions in gaming of how the aftermath of storming an ancient city worked more often than not (recall that one of the earliest blogs on here cited Polybius’ account of the Roman custom being to explicitly order the legionaries to slaughter everyone they see (“dogs cut in half” included) until the commander was satisfied they have done enough and could “merely” begin to pillage); on the other hand, the fact that the writer of the game had attempted to join Pillars of Eternity 2 team and was almost immediately dismissed after a number of his forum posts came to light naturally makes one suspect that quest was meant to have more…contemporary…parallels.
One issue at stake is what scale of ‘monster’ we’re talking about. RPG settings tend to come with a built-in “leveling” mechanic: the player characters’ power and ability to tackle monsters scales over time. Narratively, to work within this mechanic, you need two conditions.
First, you need ‘monster’ threats that range widely in power, from things that can clearly be handled by a well-prepared and physically fit human with no special powers, up to things that take truly phenomenal saga-hero type abilities to deal with.
Second, if the underlying paradigm is “be hired to slay monsters,” you need the narrative to support a smooth progression from “being hired to fight the giant rat in the basement” to “being hired to fight goblins” to “being hired to fight ogres” to “being hired to fight dragons,” This kind of thing is where (in authorial settings that deliberately lean into RPG tropes) you start to see far-ranging adventurers’ guilds, because they have the ability to coordinate and bring in dragonslayers from a far-off land (dragonslaying being needed rarely enough that even the average city doesn’t necessarily contain any mercenaries tough enough to fight a dragon without a much better reason to take the risk than “a paycheck.”).
Farm villages are generally going to be capable of putting together a militia capable of fending off relatively normal or symmetric threats. A tribe of humans and a tribe of goblins are more or less evenly matched in strength, numbers, tools, and so on. The humans can have a militia that fights the goblins, and from the goblins’ own point of view their adult population has a militia that fights the humans. Likewise the farm village will be able to band together to handle animalistic ‘monster’ threats that are nasty for a single human caught alone in the woods but manageable for large armed groups, such as a pack of wolves.
But then you ask what happens if the tribe of goblins is replaced by a tribe of ogres, who are far more physically imposing and greatly overmatch the physical ability of the average human (i.e. one who has not leveled up several times). Or if the pack of wolves is replaced by a pack of paranormal hellhounds that breathe fire and cannot be permanently injured by steel weapons, or something like that. Suddenly, the village militia can’t handle the problem and it would be suicide to try. Their solutions boil down to “use the loot from that goblin village the lads managed to burn down five years ago to hire mercenaries ourselves” or “go ask the duke to send his knights, they’re fifth level and he has a bunch of them so maybe he can handle it.”
Of course, such higher-level monster threats must necessarily be either rare, or have been recently introduced to the region in some fashion, because otherwise it invites the question of how a human civilization (or any civilization other than that of the ‘monsters’) can exist in the region at all.
In classic DnD when you’re being hired by the villagers to take on a monster threat it’s usually arrived or escalated unexpectedly to a point where the locals can’t really deal with it. Like, there’s been goblins in the area for a while and occasionally they go cattle rustling but it’s nothing the militia can’t handle, but suddenly they’ve got a new shaman/warchief who is both a big deal personally because they’ve got a few levels and/or a PC class and has whipped the tribe up to be more aggressive, and maybe the militia could go into the caves and take them out but a lot of them would die.
And the Duke does have knights who can handle it but either the village is unconvinced he’s gonna for them because they aren’t very important and he’s busy (possibly because the new shaman is part of Grummush or whichever monster deity making a big push into the area and suddenly there’s a ton of PC class casters with several levels moving on more important areas) or it’s super time-sensitive because they just kidnapped the blacksmith’s daughter and are gonna sacrifice her within the day (the setup for the first Draw Steel adventure is that you’re in a tavern and the blacksmith shows up frantically looking for someone to rescue her daughter from goblins and you run out the door and interrupt the shaman mid-sacrifical ritual).
In Adventurer’s Guild settings the local Adventurer’s Guild generally is the militia; there’s low-level threats that a moderately competent guy who is up for risking their life for modestly good pay often in the hopes of getting to the big leagues on a regular enough basis to be stable employment, and there’s at least an implict understanding that the mayor can ask the guild to issue an emergency quest that all local adventurers are obligated to accept in case of emergency at standard rates. Sometimes this is actually a formal legal obligation and you can get blacklisted if you’re in the area and meet the minimum requirements listed but refuse to participate. The town might also have full-time guards who always report to the mayor but generally they just provide security in the town itself and if you have the makings of a serious fighter your career path leads through the guildhall. There may also be knights and a formal military, but generally they have a limited number of people who can handle adventurer problems, which usually aren’t amenable to throwing a bunch of low-end fighters at them, and they prefer to reserve those guys for international war and politically sensitive stuff and handle the daily background of monster threats by sponsoring quests or just have a standing “four silver per goblin head” bounty at the guild. Often when there’s a really big issue the ruler will both dispatch some elite knights and issue an emergency quest to get adventurer support. And in wars they’ll often hire adventurers, though usually they’re not obligated to show and a chunk of the good ones aren’t sure they’re up for killing human soldiers just following orders, and a number of others are well aware a bunch of the people hired are gonna end up dying and they only like fights they’re sure they’ll win.
Terminate the Other World! has the main character join an adventurer’s guild that’s integrated with the military on the condition that she will not intervene in international conflicts because she’s trying to find some people she was told to seek out after the thing that got her transported to this universe and hasn’t yet figured out she’s not in the same universe as them so she doesn’t want to burn bridges with people who might know something. The local guy accepts because a military emergency elsewhere called away both the regular military (who are suited for fighting humanoids, not monsters) and pretty much all the adventurers so he’s got a ton of monster problems and only one existing person he can count on to handle any of the big ones (and monsters are diverse enough she can only handle certain types) so he’s not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. When there’s an invasion with no realistic possibility of reinforcements in time he tries to talk her into helping but everyone is abundantly aware he can’t make her.
This was actually how Gygax ran things a lot originally. The PCs didn’t go to taverns to get hired by people to go kill things, they went to taverns to run down rumors of where treasure might be. Old School D&D PCs were more treasure hunters than heroes so they didn’t really care about saving the locals from the nearby monsters but rather looking about for where treasure could be and trying to find stories about likely monsters that might have good loot.
Exactly. Castle Greyhawk, one of the prototype dungeons, was abandoned and supposedly cursed, before being looted by a group of lunatics willing to brave it several years later; presumably this was Gygax’s home group, but that’s deeper lore than I’m familiar with. The published adventures all started after this, when word got out and people realized that there was a bunch of crazy wizard stuff lying around there ripe for the taking.
More basically adventurers are informed by the perennial archetype of the military mercenary wanderer, which actually shows up a bunch of places. In no particular order Vikings, Questing Knights, North African Pirates, Greek Heroes and mercenaries, Ronin, Border Reavers, and even tribal raiders (of which figures like the Border Reavers and Vikings are later variants) all vaguely gesture at the transcendental social profession here in either myth or history. The perennial truth is that if your society has excess young men with weapons they’re going to use them to get stuff.
A state of affairs that ends up being quite annoying to world builders who start wondering where the heck those swords of +1 are coming from.
This is another one of those cases where repeated imitation of elements found in older fiction trips people up. For purposes of modern fantasy RPGs, the ‘foundational’ example of “our heroes go on an adventure and find magic weapons” is probably the magical elven and Barrow-king blades in Tolkien.
Glamdring, Orcrist, and Sting are elven blades made several thousand years ago and show up in a troll-hoard in The Hobbit. The blades used by Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings were made by the Dunedain, the northern descendants of human refugees from Numenor just as Gondor represents the southern branch of that descent.
For the barrow-blades, the explanation of “why are magic swords lying around” is very simple: the Dunedain of the time possessed the art of making magic swords, they were at war against the Witch-King of Angmar so they had a strong incentive to do so, and the specific blades in question were grave-goods buried in a tomb, which helps to explain why they went undisturbed so long, especially since the region surrounding the tomb had been largely depopulated either before or after the tomb was made.
For the troll-hoard, the question boils down to “why were the trolls keeping these elven weapons, and why didn’t anyone succeed in stealing them back.” The trolls being quite strong and dangerous, to the point where even Gandalf did not choose to confront them but instead preferred to trick them into staying out until dawn would turn them to stone, helps with this. It is plausible that some other group of robbers or tomb raiders who found the elven weapons in ruins somewhere could in turn have been robbed by the trolls.
I have more to say but I think I’ll make it a separate comment.
More broadly, to explain “where are all these +1 swords coming from” is relatively easy if you can handle each of the following components. It’s not hard to do but does require a bit of intentionality in the worldbuilding.
1) Magic weapons in general need to be long-lasting. It helps a lot if they don’t tend to just rust away to nothing over time the way real swords usually do without careful preservation.
2) +1 swords need to be significantly easier to make than other, more powerful magic weapons. If it takes a month of prep time to prepare an enchanted weapon regardless of power, but once it’s prepared, it’s just a matter of “cast the same spell once, twice, or three times on the last day to get a +1/2/3 weapon,” nearly everyone is going to be making +3 weapons all the time.
3) There needs to be a society that has made a lot of these weapons over the years, and lost control of them. This is fairly easy to accomplish. If adventurers with shiny magic kit regularly go out into the wilderness and a lot of them die, then there will be a lot of magic swords dropped in the underbrush for someone to find and take later. If there was a powerful magical ‘precursor’ civilization that could routinely produce things like magic swords (Tolkein’s answer) then if some catastrophe which magic swords do not defeat (like a plague), that handles the issue too.
Honestly, that’s it. While clearly any creatures capable of using a magic sword they capture will probably be swinging it against the adventurers who come to take it away from them, that is fundamentally separate from “where do the magic swords come from.”
The reason this is even a problem in (some) RPG settings is usually a result of the game rules being balanced to make item crafting unattractive compared to looting dungeons. I can’t speak for modern D&D, but old school (pre-2000) D&D from when Gygax’s influence was stronger had this problem, for instance. There were rules for how a magic-user could make a magic sword, but they involved putting in a lot of time and effort after attaining a quite impressive amount of personal power, to the point where it kind of invited the question of “why does anyone bother making these in quantity and where the hell do the ones we keep finding in dungeons come from.”
I think pretty much all D&D settings have an advanced civilization that is wealthy and capable of making lots of magical stuff, then a horrible cataclysmic event that destroys that advanced civilization and scatters its stuff all around the setting. The Cataclysm in Krynn, the Invoked Devestation and Rain of Colorless Fire in Greyhawk, the Great Rain of Fire in Mystara, a bunch of horrible stuff in Athas, an absurd number of cataclysmic events in the Forgotten Realms, all can explain why there are a bunch of gold pieces and swords +1 hidden in dungeons. Whether those explanations survive scrutiny, well…
I think this being an actual problem is largely a result of how 3e did balance. Basically there’s an assumed “wealth by level” and you’re expected to have magic gear worth X GP at a given level, and the way all the numbers are set up assumes this. The DM guide says you should give players treasure at approximately this rate to have the expected level of challenge. This is in contrast to the earlier games, where magic items existed but it was not assumed you’d get a bunch and maybe your 7th-level fighter has one or maybe he doesn’t, and there’s an estimated market price but you can’t expect to reliably find a +1 sword store; maybe a merchant has a couple random items that may or may not suit you.
The fallout of this change is that humanoid NPCs built using the class mechanics (which is how you’re supposed to build stronger ones) need magic weaponry to be level appropriate, so you end up with +1 swords around every corner. 5e has apparently rebalanced things (particularly with limits on how big a number you can accumulate in general) so magic items are mostly not mandatory but the expectation you get them a lot has stuck.
…
You know what’s also a great deal of potential wealth that’s out of circulation and requires a good deal of specialized effort to exploit? Mining for precious metals. I don’t think I’ve seen a setting that contextualizes adventurers as professional “miners”, but it’d definitely fit with the gold rush vibes of early D&D.
Yes, it tends to show up in LitRPG and Japanese light novels the most, there are settings where the “dungeon” is a fixture and typically served by a frontier-themed settlement or a massive city. In these settings the dungeon tends to grow and regenerate itself supernaturally.
I can’t for the life of me truly remember what system, but an old friend of mine recommended what I think was dungeon crawl classics…or maybe it was dungeon world…after this exact topic came up. If my Googlefu was better I might be able to figure it out, but I can at least tell you there’s a game system out there, albeit one that might not be played.
For those looking for a different reason to subject characters to travel and discomfort, I recommend “Professor Primula’s Portfolio of Palaeontology”. A D&D 5e supplement about, well, being a palaeontologist in a fantasy world.
Parts of this logic are why I really hope someday Bret writes or recommends a blog post on tomb robbers. There have been times in history when huge amounts of wealth were locked away underground leftover from a past civilization. What kinds of people went after it? Did they fight each other? If you were one of the people who plundered most of the Valley of the Kings before modern archaeologists got there, what was your life like? That might be another interesting model for D&D adventurers.
“Stephanie McCarter, who works on Ovid, Horace and Catullus about the art of translation and the role of the translator’s choices.
I read her translation of Ovid’s /Metamorphoses/. It was really good. One really feels Ovid’s personality through her rendition of his words.
“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).”
I don’t think it’s the cozy vibe. Or at least that’s not what it started out as.
Typical initial setup for a dungeon-crawling game involved a village, with a tavern (and likely an inn), and within walking distance is the dungeon.
It’s small so a) the players don’t get distracted by e.g. big city intrigue or other things to do in town and b) the DM doesn’t have to make up and describe lots of things.
So there’s one tavern, one inn, one tavern bard, one mayor (village chief etc.). Maybe one potion seller or something. One sage you could ask for information on that statue you saw in the dungeon…
Most of the game was planning the next dungeon crawl, or doing it.
The dungeon was within walking distance because everywhere outside town was not safe. Or at least outside the fields and in the wilderness around the dungeon wasn’t. Which limited how long you could actually stay out there. Eventually something came by you couldn’t handle so “clearing” the dungeon wasn’t really a thing you could do.
You came back to town (which was safe), and turned in your loot for XP to advance. Or at least that was the idea – you could advance levels, or buy stuff, but not both. Most players opted to advance, except for enough to buy more supplies for the next crawl.
The loot you turned in ended up “elsewhere”. Not used by the PC except to advance, not really used elsewhere in the village. I suppose the DM could say after a while “The village now has a new town hall paid for by your contributions”, but he didn’t have to.
That’s not really realistic, but that wasn’t the point.
I think it’s more of a case of D&D owing a lot to Westerns in its basic structure and Westerns had small towns with one saloon, not big cities. With Westerns having faded so much as a cultural touchstone a lot of people forget just how much of a massive force they used to be in American media.
and/or the sagas of the questing Knight/Hero
While modern fantasy in general and RPGs in particular do owe a certain amount to the medieval tradition of “questing knights…”
The literary element of “the civilized community closest to where the adventure happens is a small town with one tavern and a handful of businesses,” in particular, does not come from that source, I think.
not likely, but in european Fantasy and RPG the travel may be longer
Indeed. For a demonstration, see the ingenious hidalgo don Quijote of La Mancha.
In the start of his adventures in Book 1, he visits an inn that he regards as a castle… and complains when he´s asked to pay. Pointing out that in the chivalric books he has read the knights errant are never asked to pay for their stay.
Which is probably correct about the books. Not from that set, but see Odyssey. Telemachus is received as guest by Nestor and Menelaus and never asked to pay. He´s recognized as Big Man at home and probably expects to reciprocate if and when visited by other Big Men.
That is a setting where inns do not exist, and a traveller is either welcome in local Big Men´s halls – or not welcomed to travel at all.
While the chivalric books are set largely in 6th century (Arthur) or 8th…9th (Charlemagne), they´re largely based on conditions of 11th…12th century (Cid…).
For some conditions between 11th and 16th century, see the foundational statutes of Scottish legislation. May 1424:
https://www.rps.ac.uk/trans/1424/5
Note the Riders and Gangers Act:
That none shall go [by foot] nor ride in the country with more men than is appropriate for their estate
Item, it is ordained and decreed that no man of whatever estate or condition, riding or going [by foot] in the country, lead or have more persons with him than may suffice to his estate, and for whom he will render full payment. And if any complaint is made against such riders or travellers, the king commands his officers of the land where they happen to be, to arrest them and put them under secure surety while the king is certified thereof, and has said his will about what shall be done to such trespassers.
and Sorners Act:
That none oppress householders in the country
Item, the parliament statutes and the king forbids that any companies pass in the country, dwelling upon the king’s lieges, to beg or sojourn horses, either with churchmen or husbands of the land. And if complaint is made of such trespassers to the sheriff of the land, that he arrest such folk and challenge them, taxing the king’s scaiths upon them. And if they are convicted of such a trespass, they are to be punished and to find surety to assist the king and the party complaining. And if such persons take any harm in their arrest, it shall be punished to themselves. And in case no complaint is made to the sheriff, the sheriff shall inquire at each head court that he holds if any such wrongdoers are within the sheriffdom. And if any are found, that they be punished as is written before.
As you see, Scotland as of 1424 had a problem with groups of men who travelled the country and demanded supplies, accommodation and horses from ordinary peasants (“husbandsmen”), without “full payment” and on implied threat of violence.
And another Act passed the same day – Innkeepers Act:
Of hostellers in burghs and thoroughfares
Item, it is ordained that in all burghs, towns of the realm and thoroughfares where common passages are there, be ordained hostellers and resetters having stables and bedrooms so men may find bread and ale and other food for themselves, and also for horses as much as men, and for a reasonable price after the custom of the country.
Looks connected to Riders and Gangers Act and Sorners Act.
Scotland in 1424 was a place where there were not enough hostellers in “all burghs, towns of the realm and thoroughfares where common passages are there”. And it could well be tied to sorning – since there was no hostel in many thoroughfares, travellers had a pretext to stay in unspecialized homes.
Founding inns may have been partly done in response to market demand, but here we see the national government addressing the issue. And there may have been a lot of action by local Big Men “ordaining” hostellers. Otherwise the Big Man would have to host strangers in his own castle, or allow them to impose on his unspecialized lieges, or repel them – all of which were bad.
Also note how don Quijote fares in Book 2! Now he´s a famous person (thanks to printing of Book 1) – and he´s taken in as a non-paying guest by a Duke, who also gives Sancho Panza an island to govern. Just what Don Quijote expected in Book 1 and was disappointed in not getting.
Between the setting of Don Quijote´s chivalry books (based on 11th…12th century conditions) and setting of Don Quijote itself (17th century, maybe end of 16th), Spain changed from a society where high status travellers (knights errant) either were hosted by Big Men or were not welcome at all to a society where some high status travellers were hosted by Big Men for free (Don Quijote in Book 2) but there were ubiquitous innkeepers who expected payment from their lower and middle class guests.
It’s worth noting that both primeaval dungeon crawls, castle blackmoor and castle greyhawk, have their main hub inns in *cities*. For Greyhawk the castle is five miles or so from the city, and the city is more akin in size to Milan than anything else; it has a population between 100000 and 200000, and at various points it’s territories have included several satellite cities. For Blackmoor the city was based on Ciudad Rodrigo in Spain (with a dungeon bolted on), which had a relatively small population of a few thousands but was still a walled city…and Blackmoor and Ciudad Rodrigo were frontier towns so of course they had inn and taverns.
The small town inn seems to trace back to the welcome wench, which is in the small village of Hommlett, but Hommlett sat at the crossroads between at least three major trade routes and was a rapidly growing town. It’s precisely the type of outlier that might have an inn despite its size. There was an explanation for why the early inns existed, basically.
The conflation of inn and tavern is best explained through a Doylist lens; particularly with Blackmoor the author added his favorite pub.as a real world location, and it was named the come back *inn*, so of course it was both pub and inn in game. Everyone copied that trend.
Here is something that I find somewhat fascinating. The prevalence of dungeons in LitRPG and the dungeon-core subgenre took dungeons as interpreted by video games, and then absorbed them into their canon as a sort of trope.
Unlike TTRPGs, videogames tend to have respawning monsters due to limitations on fun and narrative.
First, playability. A player adventurer walking around depopulates the environment of monsters like a cat does rare and endangered songbirds. Putting the monsters back after a period of time means the player never faces a totally depopulated map, and can continue to have fun, where a TTRPG can just make up a new dungeon.
Second, economics. Games with crafting systems usually get materials from monsters. If monsters are a limited resource, then so too is the crafting.
Third, narrative, to a degree. For games with MMRPG elements, it can be a fudge so that you can still have a challenge where other players have gone and killed off all the challenges.
And then dungeons were imported into LitRPG, leaning on the nostalgia of old school games. But they incorporate the respawning fudge, because it was so integral to how games worked.
So what we see are dungeons where monsters either come back to life by magic, some other author fiat, or some handwaving about ecology and animals naturally breeding.
But that wildly and fundamentally changes the economics of a fantasy world. If your little village has a Malevolent Boar Pit appears, that has an effectively unlimited supply of evil boars, you suddenly have very distorted economics regarding pork and leather.
The crucial bit is that a dungeon is a potentially valuable, if dangerous, source of income. Like a salt mine, or stripping Chernobyl for copper wire. And they can appear anywhere.
So the dungeon appears close to some farming hamlet. The villagers don’t have the specialists to manage it safely, nor can they really exploit the economic boon it represents.
In comes the combination tavern and guild hall. In this scenario, it represents a forward operating post for what appears to be a boom town. The tavern/guild hall, funded by outside interests, provides the food, lodging and logistics to support the adventurers who are the specialists exploiting it.
It is usually dangerous though, people die all the time. So you get a slightly odd combination where (analogues to) independent mercenaries, sellswords, soldiers of fortune, who have specialized in dealing violence, willingly throw themselves into the dungeon, which has attrition rates of the average salt mine. But with rare massive windfalls, like going to Vegas.
The intersection of the nobility isn’t usually well explored in such stories, but I’ll take a stab at it. The benefit to the nobility is to toll the dungeon, and tax the exploited materials. As the adventurer stays in the town, they have to continually spend money extracted from the dungeon to keep themselves afloat, which powers the economy of our boomtown.
As to why they farm out the exploitation to adventurers? Well, similar reasons to sell rights to collect taxes. Soldiers might do marginally better in a dungeon, but again, attrition isn’t to be underestimated, and ideally you don’t want to voluntarily throw away knights and doers of violence when adventurers willingly do it to themselves.
Its interesting, because once you take a game mechanic fudge and have to explain it within the narrative, you get different sorts of stories than the ones that inspired the genre and trope in the first place.
These sorts of stories are usually the province of web serials, light novels, and anime, so not necessarily mainstream in Western media. I do adore Delicious in Dungeon though, its an anime on Netflix which takes some of the tropes, but subverts others.
“Games with crafting systems usually get materials from monsters. If monsters are a limited resource, then so too is the crafting.”
DOMESTICATION.
It would also be an important point that there would be a significant bifurcation between the unskilled adenturer-workers and the skilled adventure foremen in the adventure mines.
Monsters usually aren’t practically domesticatable. Animals usually need certain group instincts you can co-opt, preferably ones that make them like to stick together rather than pack tactics where they split up to pursue a coordinated strategy. We can kinda get lions to do what we want via a lengthy training process, and it’s still really dangerous to get within pouncing distance without protective gear. Our only real predator domestication success story is dogs; we do have cats but it’s notoriously difficult to get them to do specific things or stay in specific places and if they could casually break down doors we couldn’t meaningfully control them in any way.
The web novel Magus of Genesis explores this a bit when the modern guy who got reincarnated as a dragon in the paleolithic decides it’s time to get some domesticated animals; most of the wildlife on this world is too nasty to easily capture, a troubling percentage tunnel, and the behemoths are not very aggressive but they can’t build a fence that stops them from just walking out whenever they feel like.
Some settings do have Tamers who use magic or other techniques to control some monsters, but usually they’re pretty limited in the number they can keep under control and there are very few of them so it’s not really practical to set up a breeding program and they’re more valuable as combatants .
You are basically correct besides slandering cats, but there’s quite a bit of nuance to what makes a species possible to domesticate, which means some monsters likely would be valid targets. Even in our world several mammal species are valid domestication targets or *very nearly* valid domestication targets, they just haven’t been targeted.
There are at least two examples of carnivorous wild animals that are absolutely in the process of being domesticated; foxes and hyenas. Foxes were successfully domesticated in a farm in Russia, with their one big flaw being that they pee everywhere. This actually wouldn’t be a deal breaker for most of human history, but we live in environments that are too sterile now. This is why you don’t see more of the domesticated population being sold as pets.
Hyenas, meanwhile, are currently self domesticating to better exploit human environments. Several groups in parts of Africa have completely lost their fear and aggression to humans, to the point where they routinely wander up to people begging for food and locals have a tourist trick where they balance meat on a spit with their mouths then have the hyena eat it, which is well down our model of the wolf to dog pipeline. Even if it’s a “tamed” behavior the population is breeding true, meaning that over time they will domesticate, to an extent.
The other major carnivorous animal that’s *very* close is, perhaps surprisingly, Cheetahs. Cheetahs don’t have hunting instincts towards humans, and also don’t really fear us; you can turn your back to a cheetah and it’ll walk over and say hi, not rip out your spine and start juggling it like a Lion will.
The problem with Cheetahs is that they’re basically genetic clones; they are one of a few species that can accept generic skin grafts, meaning their immune systems identify other cheetah tissue as being them. They had two major population bottlenecks, one 100000 years ago and one 10000 years ago, and are now facing another. This means they can’t be inbred for traits-they barely breed as is-which slows domestication a lot.
In all cases the lack of a real niche when dogs exist further keeps the cheetah domestication project from going anywhere.
There are also numerous herbivores we could domesticate if we wanted; capybaras come to mind as a herd animal for food in South America, but there are others. Capybaras aren’t smart enough to fear things, eat grass primarily, and breed like rabbits, which are the primary concerns.
My point is that the presence of undomesticated carnivorous animals on earth does not imply pre domestic traits are all that rare; humans did a bunch of it and there’s still low hanging fruit. I don’t think you were implying otherwise, but want to emphasize that it’s plausible. The rest depends on specifics, and on what tools exist to be used; we’d struggle to domesticate a flying horse because of fencing, but if there was a magical or technological technique that could effectively fence them then that’s not a concern.
We haven’t domesticated other predator species because we didn’t need to. But if e.g. lion mane hairs had some highly sought after property we couldn’t reproduce otherwise more cheaply, we would absolutely stand up a lion breeding program. And once we were going to do that, we would also quickly optimize the lions both for docility and for yielding more mane hairs. A hundred years from now they would be halfway to looking like yaks or another woolly animal.
If you can’t build a tunneling-proof floor (use masonry) or a mammoth-proof “fence”, your game ruleset is letting you down. (Dig a ditch, build a retaining wall from its bottom, pile back the dirt behind the retaining wall.) It’s labor-intensive, yes, but with modern knowledge, it’s conceptually straightforward to take control of the reproduction of a population of some species, test the individuals for reactive aggression (“feel threatened -> attack”) in particular (and dominance-display aggression, if applicable), and let breed those that show the least of it/them.
There are a bunch of animals that had valuable pelts or suchlike which we did not domesticate and set up a breeding program for. A lot of them are extinct because we hunted them to death. Also, it can be pretty difficult to actually set up a working breeding program; witness how much trouble we are having with our panda breeding program. Or for historical references, war elephants were super-valuable but no one succeeded in setting up a breeding program for them.
@guy,
There’s actually a different canine species that was independently domesticated in South America, although the domestication process doesn’t seem to have gone as far as with dogs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuegian_dog
As @Terry points out, cheetahs have definitely been tamed before (I believe they were used as hunting companions in South Asia and the Middle East, sort of like a terrestrial equivalent of falcons).
Adding to Terry’s list of self-domesticating animals, it appears raccoons are coming down the pike: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-showing-early-signs-of-domestication/
As for cats, while housecats often aren’t quite as social as dogs, they are still more social than most of their wild counterparts. While wild cats raised together in captivity can learn to get along with each others, in the wild adults keep to themselves until it’s time to breed. The only two exceptions I’m aware of are lions and cheetahs. My family used to have a Nat Geo videocassette which featured a group of barn cats being observed by scientists. They were found to behave like a lion pride. Mothers would nurse kittens that weren’t their own, and toms which ascended to the top of the pecking order would kill kittens that weren’t theirs. With cheetahs, while the females live alone, litter brothers will often share territory, even if they don’t always hunt together.
Mothers would nurse kittens that weren’t their own,
That’s really interesting! I was hearing on NPR a couple years ago, a discussion of how cheetahs are one of the few animals observed to “adopt” unrelated kittens. I had thought that maybe that’s an evolved strategy reflecting the fact that the cheetahs are all inbred to a crazy degree- they are so similar genetically that group selection and kin selection end up more or less as the same thing. But, if it’s also been observed in cats, then maybe there’s something more general to felids going on.
Some have pointed out that species such as raccoons and foxes are theoretically domesticable and can certainly be bred in captivity. But the ‘economic value’ type monster parts tend to come from creatures that are a lot more dangerous. It’s one thing to breed, say, tigers in captivity because tiger pelts have incredible magical properties when properly treated. It’s another thing to breed flying, firebreathing, self-regenerating tigers, and sometimes the threat level of the creature in question is up at that point.
Sometimes it’s fairly easy to understand why this has never been tried and acquisition of the needed monster parts remains the territory of particularly skilled and/or incredibly strong hunters.
As I’ve understood it, feral domestic cats form female only “colonies” which are mainly baby-sitting co-ops. You look after kittens that aren’t yours today while their mother is out hunting, because tomorrow she will look after your kittens while you hunt.
Males are not allowed, and indeed are the primary threat being defended against, because they will kill any kittens they can, because the kittens are unlikely to be theirs, and the mother will come into heat again sooner if they are all dead.
I recall a radio pet advice call-in show where someone was worried because their two momcats were stealing each other’s kittens. The expert said not to worry, that’s perfectly normal behavior, as above.
” It’s one thing to breed, say, tigers in captivity because tiger pelts have incredible magical properties when properly treated. It’s another thing to breed flying, firebreathing, self-regenerating tigers, and sometimes the threat level of the creature in question is up at that point.”
Tigers alone are plenty dangerous enough. I brought up Cheetahs in part because they display such divergent behavior to other big cats; Tigers and Lions have ambush instincts towards humans, Cheetahs do not. You can find videos of zookeepers who are absolutely adored as parental figures by their animals being *violently* pounced on by Tigers after briefly turning their back on the animals. Even if the Tiger doesn’t mean to hurt their parent they often cause some injury because their instinct is to go for the throat, and even if they have sufficient socialization to not bite being wrenched by the neck, head, and shoulders is very dangerous.
You can see big cat sanctuaries demonstrate this in a less brutal way-the zookeepers often make videos of them turning their back on the cages. You can walk into the Tiger habitat and hand feed them while they purr like kittens, but you just are not safe if you turn away. They can’t help it, it’s hard wired-with other Tigers they play ambush games too, but their friend is tough enough to survive a good play pounce.
Cheetah don’t do that. You can sleep in a tame Cheetah pile, they like to cuddle.
You can’t do that with Tigers.
Well, once, maybe.
Even if Tigers were partially domesticated it would be very hard to breed that instinct out of them.
Zebras are another example of animals with just absolutely horrid natural instincts. First, they duck, so you can’t wrangle them, but also they *bite* and *kick*, and do this even to their friends. Horses have the decency to warn you before they try to break you into bits, and also they don’t mutilate their friends for fun, but Zebra establish their hierarchies by beating each other up until they have a vague sense of order-not that they really have a society to begin with.
The key trait here is dangerous actions towards *friends*, which is a hard wall to get over with domestication. You can select for friendliness (and *assess* friendliness) easily enough, but if being a friend *still gets you killed* then that’s not terribly useful. It’s not impossible to overcome, but it’s a huge complication.
As pertains to this, many DnD monsters have the unfortunate distinction of being lethal by mere presence-imagine a horse which greeted you by sidling up and releasing a cloud of poison gas. Not because its threatened, but just because that’s the doing thing with friends. Now you understand why taming Dragons in many settings isn’t a thing you can accomplish. It’s not just that they’d escape or are too physically dangerous, it’s that they’re dangerous even if they *like* you.
was the dungeon first or the village?
The nobility can only toll the dungeon though as long as the noble’s retinue can overpower any normal party. Which tends to break under most TTPRG rules relatively quickly.
Mind you, that’s also about when the party that can do that stops getting much benefit from delving that dungeon. So I suppose they move away and delve something else.
I’m not sure how the noble intent on tolling *that* dungeon fares though.
If a person’s power grows quickly via dungeon delving, much faster than e.g. daily practice, then where does the lord’s retinue come from? Why do they work for him?
“Authority comes from the crown”. Says who? Why is the adventurer not king?
It’s a big rabbit hole, and really deep.
So really, adventurers should be hopeful heroes turning up at the local lord’s mead-hall ala Beowulf?
Yup, although the local Lord could also be the local mayor, or the richest free holder, or a notable local as such. If you think of The Hobbit, *Bilbo* is the local big man volunteered by Gandalf to act as the inn/tavern at the start. Bilbo’s house is their version of “you all meet in a tavern”.
The other plausible place to meet or rest would be a local church or monastery; in the early medieval period in particular monasteries were a key source of safe hospitality if you didn’t really know many locals, or they weren’t rich enough to support your party. That was one of the key functions of the church, you knew you were safe there, no one would dare attacking travelers receiving sanctuary.
How this interacts with a polytheistic world is a good question.
One god (in the case of Zeus and Jupiter, coinciding with the head god) has formal guest-friendship (xenia) as part of his domain. So you can knock on the local big man’s door and if he doesn’t let you stay a night, he invites the disapproval of Zeus on his head. The temples of the several gods large enough to get temples work more as short-term sanctuaries (flee there from the lynch mob; you may have to physically touch the altar, depending on culture), probably not as places to sleep (though they may have some option).
It’s not quite the later sort of monotheism, but the Old Testament God is enforcing the equivalent idea in the story of Lot (Genesis 19) and the people hold a select levy to enforce the idea in Judges 19-20.
My sense is that you could hold out in a temple basically indefinitely if the priests decided to help you but they had limited formal obligations to, say, feed you for a week.
This shows up a bunch in Greek myth and history, actually. It’s mostly associated with Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and Artemis. Zeus because he was the head god, Athena because she was associated with guardianship, war, and peace, Poseidon because he was often reversed as Zeus of the sea, and Artemis as guardian of young women. Athena, curiously, might actually be most associated with temple sanctuary than Zeus, though this may be Athenian source bias.
The Greeks also explicitly respected these rights and at best worked around them when someone claimed sanctuary, with *many*, *many!* mythological lessons reinforcing it. The most famous was Ajax the Lessers violation of Cassandra as she knelt at the temple of Athena during the sack of troy, and act which is heralded to have *utterly doomed* many of the greeks.
Athena was so enraged she *smote him with a thunderbolt*, which lest we forget was the weapon of Zeus himself. She was angry enough she successfully petitioned her father to let her personally smite the bastard, making her the only non zeus god we see using that weapon. For the crime of *not killing Ajax themselves*, she led the gods in sending a storm against the Greeks as they left Troy too.
In actual history we see the treason trials of Pausanias of Sparta and Cylon of Athens as the extreme end of what sanctuary did and didn’t require. Both sought sanctuary with Athena; in Pausanias’s case the Spartans bricked him into the temple, starving him, and when informed Athena was still pissed and demanded his return they did so by building two bronze statues of the man they killed. With Cylon the Athenian assembly ensured him they wouldn’t kill him if he stood for trial, so he tied a rope to the statue of Athena and went. When the rope spontaneously snapped they sentenced him to death, seeing it as a sign Athena revoked protection. In both cases we can conclude that these tricks were viewed as necessary, and that without them the accused would never need leave.
Hence the Greeks weren’t above bypassing the protection of sanctuary, but at least for Athena it was meant to be pretty absolute and they were utterly terrified of going too far.
I do wonder how that translates to a society where the gods aren’t a big happy family though (which the Olympians were, compared to some religions). How would the idea of asylum work if you claimed asylum from the followers of something like Set in the temple of Osiris? Those religions hated each other. I don’t know of any real pantheons with oppositional gods where asylum was a concept, mostly because most pantheons don’t have oppositional gods that you were allowed to worship.
@Terry:
“How would the idea of asylum work if you claimed asylum from the followers of something like Set in the temple of Osiris? Those religions hated each other.”
Speaking of nonsense RPG tropes: actual polytheisms don’t work like that. People following the Egyptian religion effort to keep both Set and Osiris happy (or at least contented enough not to screw them). Now, if you offend one badly enough that a mob is chasing you, and you try to seek asylum in the temple of the other, that could be interesting. Sort of how today, there are countries without pairwise extradition arrangements.
Yeah. Set and Osiris may hate each other, but that doesn’t mean you as a mortal can afford to get caught between them.
We think of the scenario “what if someone fleeing a mob of angry Set-devotees claims refugee in the temple of Osiris?” Well, look at that scenario from the point of view of a member of the angry mob.
You are a conspicuous devotee of Set. You probably have, I dunno, Set devotional jewelry, a tattoo of Set religious iconography, something like that. Do YOU want to be the first club-waving rioter to charge into the temple of Osiris with intent to violate the sanctity of that temple? What horrible curse or instantaneous blasting destruction do you expect to get hit with as a result? You’re going into the house of a god that already disliked you strongly even before you started breaking-and-entering in his aforesaid house. This almost certainly does not end well for you.
Those religions hated each other. I don’t know of any real pantheons with oppositional gods where asylum was a concept, mostly because most pantheons don’t have oppositional gods that you were allowed to worship.
Yea, the way in which I generally think of polytheistic pantheons is that there are different deities sharing more or less the same moral valence, that supervene different aspects of reality. Depending on what you need at a given time you might be worshipping the goddess associated with prosperity, or with knowledge, or with rainfall, or with sickness and healing, or with the destruction of the wicked. There’s a concept of evil supernatural beings, of course, but none ones that you’re intended to be worshipping. As far as as I know, outside of horror fiction, there aren’t/weren’t people worshipping the Rakshasas or Angra Mainyu / Ahriman or the Norse Giants, though it would be interesting to know if I’m wrong!
As far as I’m aware you only worship oppositional gods in religions where the gods are all basically people with varying personalities and a ton of power but pretty much all of them do stuff that the accepted moral code would consider wrong sometimes. Like, Zeus notoriously cheats on Hera a bunch and this is both legally and ethically wrong in Greek society but what are you gonna do about it? But don’t cheat yourself because Hera cares a lot and while she can’t actually stop Zeus she can take it out on you.
Now, in Runequest you have a lot of gods that are outright at war with each other and if you chase someone into an enemy god’s temple maybe you stop if you don’t think you can take the fight but if you’ve got a big angry mob with some big-deal worshipers of your god in it you burn that sucker down. The god tries to stop and punish you but your god has your back so you probably win the fight and the enemy god already didn’t like you and was gonna back his followers or send spirits to try to kill/enslave you anyway. There are also tensions within the gods you do worship which you navigate very carefully so Issaries doesn’t get along with Lhankor Mah, but even if you primarily worship Issaries because you’re a merchant and he gives merchant blessings you don’t attack the Knowing God’s temple because you would like to remain able to read. And you get together with them occasionally for a big-deal ritual reenacting the time they went on a big journey with Urox and Issaries asked a stupid question while Lhankor was busy pondering something meaningless because this gives everyone a ton of trade magic and the ability to discern the truth.
Also interesting sacred-law related note: Devotees of the grim god of oaths and death Humakt symbolically kill their family ties and assume a status “separate from the clan but connected to it legally” like Humakt did with Orlanth before giving him The Thing Called Death to kill Yelm the Bad Emperor (which turned out to be a mistake because Yelm is literally the Sun). This can come in handy because Orlanthi society has extremely strong religious taboos against various actions based on clan membership but as non-members the Humakti are partially exempt yet can be directed by the clan leadership to do things. For instance, sending Humakti mercenaries in exchange for pay is not considered getting involved in a clan war the same way sending any other troops is; the clan they end up fighting might be unhappy but will generally acknowledge it is not a legal offense against them they have a right to seek redress for. They do still have normal legal restrictions and also are obligated to make some stupid arbitrary vow like “I will kill anyone who asks me what my name is” (the bodyguard of a pretty prominent character) and Humakt will take away their powers if they don’t follow it. I’m pretty sure this is more about proving they’re serious about oaths in their role as enforcer of oaths than Humakt actually wanting them to do the thing.
Incidentally you can actually do the Issaries-Lhankor Heroquest in King of Dragon pass, with two different versions depending on which of them you want a blessing from, and it’s really hilarious doing both and seeing how little a shit each of them gives about the other’s goal, with Lhankor telling Issaries how to get sabertooths and mammoths to show up to a meeting to hash out the level of predation they’re gonna settle for in order to get him to stop bothering Lhankor while he’s trying to untangle the Truth, which got all twisted up after Issaries traded it away, and it turns out this is exactly what Lhankor needed to do.
Incidentally one way in which Runequest isn’t quite accurate as a representation is that everyone becomes a devotee of a specific god, usually either one relevant to their profession or the same-gender member of the divine ruling couple, and only directly get god derived magic from that god. It is possible and pretty common to become a “lay member” of cults of other allied gods, in which you make some cheap sacrifices and show up as a backup dancer for big rituals in exchange for access to some temple services and a slightly greater expectation you can ask the priest for stuff, but everyone has a single usually fixed primary god. Though every settlement will have at least shrines to a bunch of gods with the general understanding you can’t run a society without help from a bunch of them, and if you don’t need a notable one who you can’t get by asking their mom to ask them for you enough to justify maintaining a shrine or you need more help than your regular shrine stuff will get you’ve probably made arrangements to be able to send someone to ask for help at another clan’s temple.
It is worth noting that my example, Set and Osiris, seems to have been openly oppositional primary during a period of religious conflict where all the followers of Set conspicuously disappear from the historical record. In our world you do occasionally get religious persecution in a polytheistic society, but it tends to be terminal to one cult or another. Or all of them-our best models for the development of Judaic monotheism is that the ruling clans cult was made the *only* cult, which very nearly happened in Egypt with Aten too.
Point being that questions of religious sanctuary being violated in our world don’t tend to include long term consequences for violating a gods domain, because part of the theology is that this god doesn’t actually exist or have power in the true gods kingdom, so who cares if they’re pissed? On a practical level this melds into state power-the State, backed by a powerful god is almost always involved in religious persecution, so reprisal from mortal followers isn’t as much of a concern.
The thing about DnD settings-and Runequest, apparently, that was truly fascinating!-is that there are oppositional gods who A. Absolutely exist, B. Aren’t *reliably* going anywhere, and C. Are often all valid patrons for worship in civil society.
This combination drastically changes the calculus, and I think the most likely result is what Simon_Jester points out. Most followers, even religious mobs, aren’t going to want that smoke. Even if you worship Loki, not Thor, you aren’t going to be the one to volunteer for a good thundering.
There’s potential for fun stories there too, where maybe the followers of Loki are fanatical enough to just suicide run into the temple swinging, or even a situation where a powerful Loki follower has “proofed” themselves against divine retribution in a PR stunt.
If Thor habitually strikes non-believers who enter his sanctuary dead with lightning and Loki’s high priest is of a species (or has an item or technique) making him secretly immune to lightning then what happens when they stroll into the temple at the head of a mob, daring Thor to strike them down, and *survive*? Thor, of course, is not renowned for his intelligence to figure out what’s going on.
If gods need followers that might be a *critical* blow against their church; while the historicity of such events is always questionable, Catholic records are rife with stories of saints converting pagans with precisely that tactic. Dare their god to strike them down by chopping down their sacred groves or breaking their sacred symbols, and then show that *nothing happens*. Or brave a traditional trial (sticking your hand in fire shows up a couple times I think) displaying your gods power when you are unharmed.
But larger picture I think this idea-to emphasize that temples are a critical part of adventuring via sanctuary customs-is the perfect type of worldbuilding element because it invites all sorts of fun consequences and storylines.
An angry mob destroying a temple of a hostile god is actually the background of one of Runequest’s starter sample quests.
Basically there’s a big religious war between the Lunars, who worship a goddess who managed to ascend from being a mortal to godhood and hold her own when the other gods tried to take her down, and essentially everyone else that the Lunars had been winning before Kalyr Starbrow pulled off a huge ritual that got a ludicrously powerful dragon to wake up and go to town on the Lunars and the starting city was recently liberated, at which point the Orlanthi formed an angry mob and burned down the temple to the semi-divine crew of heroes who backed the moon goddess’s ascension. We don’t get much detail of how it played out but the Orlanthi top priests in the city are a much bigger deal than the priest of a minor outlying shrine so presumably they didn’t have much trouble. However, the temple’s guardian spirit assigned by the top gods is naturally furious and egged on by the surviving cultists’ desire for vengeance and is going around driving people insane while the cultists who haven’t quite figured out the full story are trying to keep it from killing anyone. In the end you can either smash the holy object keeping it anchored in the mundane world or figure out how to let the one surviving acolyte calm it down.
Also the Lunars are in a bit of a funny position here because their leadership has gained insight into how the cosmology actually works, namely that all the gods are faces of the same force that only appear separate to the unenlightened, so they’re willing to mess around with using other people’s divine powers in a way most other cultures won’t. Pretty much everyone hates them because this enlightenment includes understanding that Chaos is also an aspect of this force and you can use its powers and creatures without being corrupted if you maintain a clear understanding of the true nature of reality, and everyone else responds “Chaos? The ontologically evil force that slaughtered the gods and destroyed the world and was only thwarted when Urox the Storm Bull slew Wakaboth the Devil and followed him down to hell to defeat him there? The reason why the gods had to set up the world in a way that limits how much they can bless us? The force our adulthood initiation rituals teach us we must all oppose at every turn? I am obligated to kill you!”
Also they have a giant Chaos bat that makes other people’s god magic not work for miles around and has to eat a hundred people a week or it screws off to the Godplane and they have to do a big ritual to bring it back. It has stats but you cannot kill it.
@Terry,
Catholic records are rife with stories of saints converting pagans with precisely that tactic. Dare their god to strike them down by chopping down their sacred groves or breaking their sacred symbols, and then show that *nothing happens*
The thing that always bothers me about those stories is that, at least as far as pagans in Northern and Eastern Europe, and in the Americas go, we’re dealing with preliterate cultures (or at best on the border of literacy, or where Christianity itself was the vehicle of alphabetization), so we’re only really hearing from one side of those encounters. It would be great to know how the pagans themselves processed those encounters, but outside of oral tradition from some of the last areas to be Christianized, i don’t know how we could possibly know exactly what it was like to be them.
Kind of a similar issue in terms of Christians dealing with Christian-adjacent religions and heresies in southern Europe and the Middle East, though there the issue is about source survival not literacy itself. At least we have some writings there from the Christians’ opponents, as opposed to none.
Speaking of: NetHack, the most renowned of classic roguelikes, could very easily have the opposite situation occur. That is, the player character worships either a lawful, a neutral or a chaotic deity* – and which pantheon they come from depends on your character class. (Shinto ones for Samurai, Ancient Greek for Healer, Roman for Ranger, Ancient Egyptian for Wizard, Ancient Chinese for Monk, Aztec for the Archeologist, Scottish/Welsh Pagan for Knight, Conan for the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (yes, really!) for Rogue and Discworld (yes) for Tourist (yes; in a hawaiian shirt which makes shopkeepers charge them more, with a camera whose flash potentially blinds your opponents and a credit card that can be used as an improvised lockpick.) There is also a Priest(ess) class, whose pantheon is chosen from one of the other classes at random.)
Anyway, Valkyries are obviously associated with the Norse pantheon, so the Lawful God is Tyr, Neutral is Odin and Loki is Chaotic. Valkyries also cannot be chaotic unless you happen to encounter a generally cursed artefact known as the helm of opposite alignment (you can change the alignment back if you find the way to uncurse it and put it on again; otherwise cursed items literally stick to your body – especially problematic if the Barbarian’s signature two-handed sword gets cursed), which purges your divine protection, amongst the other things, so is generally to be avoided. Hence, they either worship Tyr or Odin (dwarven characters are always Lawful, and so dwarven Valkyries are always Tyr.)
Given that Valkyries are also by far the strongest class (i.e. they, Barbarians and perhaps Samurai are the only ones who can reliably kill giant soldier ants (giant by ant standards, so they are more like cat-sized; but still with powerful jaws, thick carapace and are very fast, so most other characters probably won’t even connect a blow before the swarm bites them to deaths) and they have the strongest late-game artifact) and that dwarven ones are easier to play as (slightly better stats – but more importantly, neither gnomes nor dwarves which populate much of a key early area, Gnomish Mines would attack you; gnomes attack all non-gnomes/non-dwarves and dwarves attack all non-Lawfuls – and they are in top 3 player death reasons according to the game’s online server), it’s fair to say that Tyr is the closest thing to NetHack’s “default god”.
While Lawfuls will virtually always be attacked by chaotic-aligned denizens of the dungeon and vice versa (and both will usually be attacked by neutral-aligned creatures/beings) and can often (though far from always) count on their alignment being peaceful), the altars you can find in the dungeon are initially uncontested; you can drop an item whose provenance you don’t know onto any altar and realize whether it’s cursed, blessed or normal by its flash regardless of who it belongs to, and it won’t make a difference to any deity. However, praying on a wrong deity’s altar often leads to negative effects generally described as “smiting”: in the worst case (10-12 on 2D6; i.e. 25% of the time) that does in fact lead to a lighting bolt – and then to a disintegration beam if you are lighting-resistant (the deity will give up if you also have the ludicrously rare disintegration resistance – especially since the beam will probably destroy your other stuff anyway). Less drastic effects involve a your stuff getting cursed or a cursed ball and chain appearing on your ankle or some divine servant appearing and trying to kill you. (This also happens if you attempt to pray to your own deity too often, funnily enough – since doing it at an appropriate time can literally heal you, remove a curse, get you out of a trap, etc., this prevents you from doing it every time such a thing happens.)
There’s also virtually no reason to pray on other altars (unless you really wanted to turn water holy and somehow thought not your altar would work for that), so don’t. However, you do have an incentive to sacrifice a creature on an altar of another deity – since that can succeed at permanently claiming the altar for them! If you fail, you’ll get similar smiting…unless you attempted it while your own deity was already displeased (from praying too often or perhaps violating their other prohibitions, such as cannibalism for non-chaotics) – which is the other way to get converted to a different alignment, permanently.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Altar
* The entire reason you need the Amulet of Yendor – which had since become a recurring reference in rogueli(k/t)es – is to deliver them to said deity, since it is apparently akin to the Iliad’s golden apple for determining deity pecking order, and you’ll be rewarded with demi(god)hood for it. The specific nature of that demigodhood is only revealed in the final level of the game (potentially – it’s extremely hard to get there, and those players who do get there may not do one or two exact things needed to reveal it; though, chances are they only got there by studying the game’s wiki, which would also reveal it.) Worth noting, though, that delivering the amulet without ever praying or using any other altar in a way which implies you believe it does something (i.e. no dropping stuff to see if it’s cursed, but standing on altar to scare a nearby vampire is fine, as you do not have to believe the altar itself works to do that – only to believe the vampire believes it works) is part of the atheist “conduct” – basically an “achievement” before there were things like Steam or game consoles.
Minor correction: you actually do have a reason to pray on opposite aligned alters. If you do it with water on the alter, it becomes unholy water and will curse anything you dip in it like how holy water blesses anything dipped. With most things a curse is a straight drawback, but sometimes the backfire can be useful. E.g. if you read a cursed scroll of genocide a bunch of whatever monster you name appears around you. When you’re doing this with an unknown scroll you just picked up this usually means you die pretty much immediately, but if you’re kitted out and leveled to fight a bunch of the chosen monster it’s a way to get guaranteed dragon scales and usually enchanting them into dragon scale mail, particularly grey (magic resist) or silver (reflection) is part of your endgame kit. And eating a wraith corpse is an automatic level up (though this is dicey because they have a level drain attack and if you fight a bunch you probably end up in the red) and it’s probably not worth the scroll but aquatic monsters are really easy to kill on land so you can get a good chunk of XP at low levels by summoning a bunch of kraken that are usually a tough fight for much higher level characters.
Usually these settings either exist for 4-8 players or one person running up to 8 or so unique characters to have adventures on or are created by writers trying to capture the feeling of playing such a game, so generally they have threats that are somehow ill-suited to handling with numbers and you want 4-8 badasses instead of 50 dudes with spears in a way you generally don’t in our history, either because combat effectiveness varies much more with experience and/or innate potential or because the threats like living in narrow spaces where you can’t bring numbers to bear, meaning veteran adventurer parties have little use for greenhorns except to do camp chores and watch the horses while they’re in a dungeon, and usually the missions they get aren’t suitable for using to train up the greenhorn until they can meaningfully contribute.
When there’s a systemic adventurer system like in a lot of Japanese works, the staff who administrate the system are on the lookout for likely-looking greenhorns to give easy jobs to in the hopes they’ll eventually get to the point they can handle big stuff, and in the meantime Farmer Ted did need that wolf killed. Usually the qualifications to get in the door are just being physically fit or magically capable and being aware you hold a sword by the hilt; sometimes the protagonist doesn’t look like they meet that bar but the guild is legally obligated to run them through a test (usually a veteran sparring with them, usually going easy on them and just requiring that the veteran think they look like they’re capable of the grunt work rather than necessarily even managing a single touch). Generally the (pretty much always female) secretary responsible for admittance and issuing quests will try to get them teamed up with other greenhorns or a moderately experienced party that’s still at a level where it’s practical to bring the new guy along to get seasoning.
The Looks Like A Job For A Maid! series has one of the secondary characters, Emily, a reincarnated Japanese girl, have a history of being recruited by parties while basically unable to contribute because she has the potential for Fifth Degree Magic (legendary archmage territory) but has only unlocked First Degree Magic (a couple rungs below the point where someone will pay you to use magic; your biggest fire spell can start a well-prepared campfire). Eventually everyone in the area gave up on her but she was too stubborn to quit and eventually a recently-fired maid named Nina who knows highly classified elven magical secrets because the strongest archmage in the world thinks she makes the best tea and gets chatty while sipping it hires her for a simple tour guide job and unlocks her potential, and now everyone wants her to join them but she remembers they were all assholes when they didn’t think she was useful and sets out with Nina both to see the world and to stop Nina from causing a war or something by accident. She then recruits a supergenius magitech inventor and a girl from an incredibly strong race of wolfgirls in similar fashion. None of them are making anything close to what they’re worth but Nina has savings banked and there are various well-paying odd jobs they’re all wildly overqualified for they pick up and they’re basically on a two-year vacation.
I like how you place this right at the end, so that if the median reader is like me, the reaction goes roughly “Hey, seeing the inherent nature of reality? Chaos not being inherently evil (or even something that needs to be kept in strict proportion with Order like in Shin Megami Tensei/Persona and probably a few other settings I’m forgetting*)? That sounds great!” to “OK, I can see why the others hate them, but maybe this gets worked out somehow?” to “Oh, no, no, NO!”
Though, since you have brought it up; does the setting elaborate if it needs human meat specifically or souls/whatever equivalent there is? If it’s the latter, then given what we already know about the mortality of pre-modern societies, one would expect these Lunars to be feeding it children before the age of five, since half of them die anyway?
And even more morbidly (though perhaps inspired by all the talk of farms/domestication elsewhere in the thread), wouldn’t one expect the incentives to align for these Lunars to literally force a sizeable (four-five digit?) pool of human captives to breed so that they can maintain a stable supply for this living superweapon? I am not sure where else the logic of it would take you. I guess that the Aztecs didn’t do either thing historically because they believed captives specifically captured in battle were sanctified in the way other sacrifices generally were not, so if a rule like this is somehow true cosmologically in the setting, the Lunars wouldn’t do it, but otherwise…
P.S. I mused in another thread just now that I wasn’t sure if there have been stories with practical, empire-level goblin/human integration motivated by logistics (thanks for the mention of the slime story, by the way, even if it’s not quite the same – I heard of it, but didn’t know it involved goblins – or a lot of the other spoilery stuff you mentioned!)…and this thread made me recall, that I actually do know of one, in a manner of speaking. That is, the Bazil Broketail books are about a military unit of sapient, talking flightless dragons and their keepers, who are the elite of the elite. It’s literally fantasy military fiction, with the keeper of the titular dragon tied to that unit and following orders to be deployed whenever the superiors (be they the direct commanding officers or Bene Gesserit** equivalents) decide – only one or two entries involve anything akin to adventuring as usually defined in such fiction.
Anyway, primary opponents, Padmasa, generally only place humans in the field as officers – the rank-and-file consists of imps, who are somewhat comparable to goblins, but they only exist via magic which…artificially inseminates captive women. (The first book has the liberation of such a camp at its conclusion – which came as a real shock since I happened to start reading the series out of order and it’s easy to miss this detail in the later books.) The ghastly logic of this includes a very fast replenishment rate (the imps become combat-ready after only a few years) – and that it leaves more supplies to be fed to trolls, who appear when the same kind of process is performed on cows. (Who don’t survive.)
While the trolls are quite stupid and are still smaller and weaker than dragons, they are nevertheless powerful enough and numerous enough that these dragon units are pretty much necessary as a counter. One of the later books had a slightly smaller but faster and smarter variety appear from experimenting on race horses. There was also a book where Padmasa’s ally revived some ancient deity – and sacrificing humans to it en-masse allowed the ally to animate giant golems made out of mud with their blood. Thinking back, I almost certainly read these (most of them – didn’t find the last book in my library) a) at a much younger age than intended by the author, but oh well…(I also cannot claim to recall their merit objectively and unclouded by nostalgia, as it’s really been a long time..)
P.P.S.
Yeah, I actually ascended once, but it was a while back and I didn’t need to bother with unholy water or reverse genociding (yes, any random scroll in the dungeon can potentially wipe any species from existence across the entire planet, humans included…it’s also assumed that killing 120 of any one being permanently renders it extinct (does not matter if it’s a rat or a demilich…just go with it)) so while I recalled something like that could be the case, I wasn’t sure and my explanation of the other mechanics was probably already very long and bewildering to any non-player as it was.
*The one other example I can recall was a shared social media thing once which started out by merging the universes of one of the cartoon Spider-Man iterations with the Gargoyles (both are set in the NYT, after all!) – and eventually encompassed a ton of other comics and cartoons, and to give all those characters an appropriately powerful villain to fight, someone there came up with the idea that chaos requires things to exist, so the ultimate representation of Order, the Man in White, seek to wipe the multiverse because nothing can be more orderly than the void. (Ultimate Chaos isn’t quite as bad, but still terrible and the ideal is to balance both.) Unfortunately for everyone participating in it, whoever originated the idea had the misfortune of choosing Formspring as its abode, which went bankrupt and got entirely wiped sometime in the 2010s.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DarthWiki/TheSpectacularOmniverse
**I guess one could say Aes Sedai equivalents – but not only are the latter also most likely inspired by Dune’s order, but the timeline (the first Wheel of Time book published in 1990; the first Broketail book in 1992) makes this implausible.
It looks like wordpress is acting up and when you click on a reply link in an email and leave a reply, then subsequently leave a reply on another comment, it ends up a reply to the comment you replied to from the email, which I don’t think is how it usually worked
This one was supposed to be an answer about adventurers recruiting greenhorns for chornedsnorkack
Has to be souls. Also if you don’t feed it on the first day of the week you have the rest of the week before it goes back but you need more souls to stop it from leaving at the end of the week, and in that case the souls must worship one of the Lunar cults (also at least in the main focus culture you have to complete a rite of passage into adulthood before you can qualify as a cult member). The peacetime system is actually that it has a big cult of it’s own and they show up to villages and say “we’re accepting applications and if you sign on as a lay member you don’t get eaten by the bat as long as we can get a hundred nonmembers, so if there’s anyone you don’t like…” and then the lay members are eligible sacrifices on the second day if they can’t find enough people. The Lunar Empire is both pretty big and holds a lot of rebellious territories where removing several hundred troublemakers is something they’d be doing anyway, so this is an affordable price for the biggest military asset in the world. Just its inherent ability to shut down all non-Lunar rune magic on a battlefield would be war-winning by itself because rune magic from their god is a big part of literally every useful soldier’s combat power, and the Bat itself has three-digit physical stats in which PCs can’t break 20 without a ton of work. Basically the only way to take it out temporarily is a Heroquest, a huge and extremely dangerous ritual where you send a guy into the Godplane to reenact a legend with him in the role of a god, and to perform godlike feats even empowered by hundreds of worshippers and mass sacrifices probably on a high holy day you need to be a real badass so there’s like twenty people in the entire world who can potentially pull a big enough one off and the prep is a big investment on the scale of polities. Then Jar’el the Razoress, a reincarnating demigodess, goes on a Heroquest reenacting the Lunar goddess taming the bat and they have it again.
There’s also a ton of evil Chaos monsters and gods around even the Lunars don’t get along with, mostly because their behavior is contrary to good social order rather than because of them being inherently evil.
Other funny cosmology-related story: While basically no one in the current setting truly understands this, what is “true” about a god and events that happened before Chaos destroyed the world and the dead gods worked together to fix linear time in place going forwards when they recreated it and came back to life is kinda a product of belief. If you do a Heroquest and you take a different route but pull it off (e.g. in King of Dragon Pass there’s a Heroquest where Orlanth gets in a fight with the incarnation of drought, loses, and has to go on a quest to get backup for a rematch but if you’ve got a super-good fighter at max stats and have done all the prep work to make it easier and get lucky you can just kill him and prematurely end the quest) that in some sense actually happened, coexisting with the traditional route having actually happened, and if you can convince enough people this is how the story went it actually has a meaningful effect you can use. The God Learners in the backstory partially figured this out and went around doing Heroquests and messing with beliefs to get them more powers while completely disrespecting the gods, which kept having disastrous side-effects because they didn’t really understand the stuff they were messing with and managed to swap two patron Earth goddesses without thinking about how their portfolios overlapped, resulting in a village where you can’t get married. Eventually they screwed up so bad creating a robot god that threatened the integrity of reality that the other gods (which one depends on who you ask and all of them are right) risked the consequences of directly employing their full power to smite the entire civilization out of existence. Some of their studies stuck around as terminology used by scholars to categorize magic from different cultures, but everyone has a vague awareness you shouldn’t start asking too many questions about why some people think Vinga is Orlanth’s female alter-ego and some people think she’s his daughter and both of them get Vinga’s blessings.
OK, the stuff with the bat makes sense if Lunars are an outright Empire!
This (and what you have described next) actually reminded me of what I picked up regarding Homestuck’s* lore (never really tried reading or watching more than a few choice bits, having only found out about it after hearing that reading it start-to-finish amounts to something like multiple LOTRs worth of text – and I am also unsure how well that works nowadays, with the death of Adobe Flash). As in, after Act 4 (I believe), ends with the main characters losing and the world about to get wrecked, they attempt a reset but it instead functions more like trying to replay a vinyl record; as you know, those records often get scratched. The literal Scratch upon the universe** manifests as the alternate version of main characters, whose core relationships are inverted – i.e. for a pair of blonde Strider twins, Rose and Dave, the former’s alternate is now the mother of their family while mother’s alternate assumes her position; the latter’s alternate takes on the role of original Dave’s stepfather (significantly younger than his and Rose’s mother, to the point Dave just treats him as a cool elder Bro) and vice versa (that Bro-as-Dave, Dirk, becomes one of the most pivotal characters from then on.)
Moreover, even that doesn’t work at first, as the main characters end up secluded from the alternates, and we instead see them attempt to navigate the same challenges they did – and generally fare worse (particularly as a number of villains also get alternates), to the point Act 5 ends in an impressive orgy of violence (often aimed at those who ought to have been allies) simply titled GAME OVER. See for yourself: it was pretty much the first thing I really learned about the setting, and realizing there was actually justification for everything finishing the way it did, which was more-or-less internally consistent*** was quite impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IDKxUEiuyc
(Note: the “prologue” and “epilogue” of the video (the parts with no fighting), are the discovery of an in-universe attempt to rewrite the story itself by one of the villains and its thwarting, respectively, so it’s even weirder than the rest.)
After that, from what I recall, Act 6 finally allows both sets of main characters to work together from the start, but it still manages to be longer than all the previous parts put together. Of course, that happened in large part because the creator, Andrew Hussie, was hit with the same apparent affliction as the other creators of long-running works, like ASOIAF‘s Martin or Berserk‘s Miura (RIP) – seemingly, the feeling the initial ending, conceived when they were substantially younger and the work was never meant to be all that large, now would be a frighteningly conventional letdown and not befit the effort they invested into the rest of it. Unlike those two, though, Hussie did manage to break his promise “to end with something deeper than another massive battle” and ultimately settle for just that a decade ago and (mostly) move on.
P.S. I keep hearing – and then forgetting – that the King of Dragon Pass belongs to the same Glorantha as Runequest. That is, I heard praise for the former much earlier than I had ever heard of the latter. That, and also its continuation, the Six Agesgames. I.e. this was a remarkable line from the RockPaperShotgun review of the second one of those:
*If you are unsure what it is, or better yet, why it’s important – suffice it to say that in its absence, there would have almost certainly been no Undertale (the only video game known to have ever been gifted to a Pontiff (the late Francis), amongst all the other things, even if its influence on the medium had been surprisingly limited to date) – and pseudonymous dril (best known for sarcastic tweets like “the wise sage bowed his head and solemnly spoke – “there’s zero difference between good and bad things””) could well have not become what he is.
**This idea was also used in an otherwise extremely derivative Finnish video game series Alan Wake: the evil (evil-er, really) version of the titular character calls himself Mr. Scratch for this reason.
***Real-world consistency is obviously limited, given that almost everything is set within an ultimate MMO, Sburb, whose purpose is to wipe the world and select those capable of creating a better one. Its mechanics include permadeath – until players ascend to “God Tier”, where they are only able to die if the internal logic decides their death would advance the narrative by being either “Heroic” or “Just”.
Yeah, LP’s of King of Dragon Pass were my intro to the setting, with commentator chatter being how I learned about the deeper cosmology and God Learner stuff almost no characters understand, and I played Six Ages before actually getting the books.
King of Dragon Pass is basically the backstory to the formation of Sartar, the kingdom that’s basically the default protagonists and where most of the official adventures are set, with the Prince(ess) of Sartar being the de-facto head of the loose anti-Lunar alliance. Basically “the Pharaoh”, a big deal guy who claims to be a living god and usually comes back to life by possessing someone when he dies (at the time of the TTRPG Jar’el the Razoress killed him while he was distracted by an unrelated invasion and the normal resurrection process didn’t happen for unknown reasons) invaded the place where the Orlanthi lived as a Gaul-like nonstate kingdom of clans. He talked a chunk of a number of clans into working with him and to Orlanthi killing kin under any circumstances requires immediate outlawery, possibly followed by having a Humakti devotee (who becomes not-kin for many purposes as part of devoting themselves to Humakt, which comes in handy) kill them after they’re outlawed, followed by a ritual to counteract the Chaos influence caused by kinstrife. So the clan members who didn’t like this peacefully split off and headed north to some wild lands that lacked any significant human population (there’s a number of intelligent nonhumans in various parts of the map).
Over the course of a game on the long setting, you do a bunch of Heroquests, specifically including the Making of the Storm Tribe, to get the political clout and divine support to assemble several clans into a tribe (usually making some political concessions to each that may come back to haunt you when the other clans get frustrated with the extra privileges of a given clan) in which a king is elected on death with a rebuttable presumption they shouldn’t be from the same clan as the last one who leads large-scale wars and resolves disputes between member clans. Every clan who isn’t part of your tribe or the one preexisting tribe does the math on how they’d do in a tribe-vs-clan fight and form other tribes in a hurry. Eventually two of the other tribes get in a war and you have to do stuff to persuade them that instead of fighting over trade everyone should get together and build a merchant town and split the profits, then establish a joint town government to handle legal disputes within the town. Then you have to have someone as tribal king when the Feathered Horse Queen/Luminous Stallion Queen unites the Horse People and offers to marry the winner of a series of challenges. Succeed, and you become King of Dragon Pass and establish the tradition that the Prince of Sartar marries the leader of the Horse People (if this doesn’t happen the ruler isn’t considered a proper Prince of Sartar and has limited legitimacy).
Six Ages is set in the deep backstory, with the second game ending with a sole survivor of the clan being one of the people who contributes to the Cosmic Compromise that creates time. My understanding is that stuff prior to that follows mythological story logic where if you try to line up all the events into a coherent timeline it doesn’t work, but for the purposes of the humans involved the cycle of the seasons works normally and their experience is linear. Basically there used to be an authoritarian semi-utopia ruled by the sun god Yelm (“Yelm the Bad Emperor” to the King of Dragon Pass characters) but Orlanth is the god of Freedom so he wasn’t gonna take being bossed around and specifically told he couldn’t marry Ernalda, so after some stuff happened he got the Thing Called Death and killed Yelm. Elmal the Loyal Thane took up the position of sun god after subduing the other sun rune gods but he wasn’t really strong enough to fully do the job and the climate got steadily colder. Glaciers advanced on the Golden City behind a wave of frost giants and the citizenry got out, with the viewpoint faction led by a guy who teamed up with a horse goddess (who used to be a hippogryph but wound up on the wrong end of several berserker gods) who have some respect for tradition but symbolize their philosophy with blank golden tablets that are their Kings List, for Riders shall not have kings. Other, more dickish people subdued horses and forced them to draw chariots and are known as Wheels and do not get along with Riders.
Meanwhile the Orlanthi, who the Riders call Rams, know their god killed Yelm and is the biggest badass around so they’re generally warlike and think they can push everyone else around. Over the course of the game, the weather gets steadily worse, the war in the heavens results in some major disasters, Chaos is slowly leaking in without Yelm around to keep it out, and a Romeo-and-Juliet scenario eventually leads to your clan merging with a Ram clan after putting together an extremely impressive dowry.
Lights Going Out is set several generations later, when the Ram priestess in the marriage has ascended to divinity and you’re a syncretic Ram-Rider fusion in which Orlanth convinced Elmal to become his sworn thane. All the Ram clans had been part of a kingdom ruled by you for a while but after a previous king died and the regalia divinely blessed for a king was lost they’re basically independent. There’s still a hereditary king in your clan who you may or may not make chief, but the other clans aren’t gonna respect him unless you get the regalia back (you cannot get the full set back; in a deeper sense Chaos has destroyed kingship and it cannot be restored until the Cosmic Compromise) and your clan is divided on whether they should keep respecting the royal line and trying to reassert its authority over the others or just accept the tribe is gone. The story is pretty much a long string of things getting worse; at the start Orlanth has embarked on a quest to defeat Chaos with a number of other important gods, and no one is sure if they’re still alive but they’re definitely not answering prayers except for a flicker of power in his temple, which you may decide to dismantle so you don’t have to keep it up and make regular sacrifices but which you can occasionally call on to deal with bad events. Chaos keeps getting stronger, Elmal is barely able to hold on and thus has a very limited ability to help you, and the gods start getting picked off, and you have a cow-based subsistence system and when the cow goddess is killed you know you’re screwed; you can do an emergency ritual to keep some of her power around temporarily but your cow population starts declining to the point you’re barely able to keep people fed long enough to still be around for the actual apocalypse.
Fun bit: Elmal defecting to Orlanth and then his heroic struggle to defend the home against Chaos monsters while Orlanth is away are in King of Dragon Pass in the heroquests Chala Arroy Heals The Scars (in which in the normal path she heals him of his foreignness, yes that is actually what the text says) and Elmal Guards The Stead. You even face off against his enemies the Eater of Skin, Maker of Bad Growth, and Author of Sores in the endgame and are periodically visited by the Teller of Lies with offers that will give you a temporary benefit but strengthen Chaos long-term to cause bigger problems in the future.
“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.”
Even within those groups, most of them knew other group members well. They just weren’t a band of brothers before they joined.
Everyone knew Gandalf in both groups (how they perceived him was variable of course).
Everyone in Thorin’s group knew each other except Bilbo (most were fairly close relatives IIRC).
The Hobbits in the Fellowship knew each other of course. I think Aragorn and Legolas had previously met, Gimli was Gloin’s son who was in the Hobbit.
I think Boromir was the closest to being a stranger to all the other group members for either group.
A lot of games now include rules that give you bonuses if you can set up relationships like this beforehand. Or outright require them.
Also note that both groups had oaths to bind them together and to their common purpose. Which is another thing not part of most game groups…
Thorin’s company does have a lot of his relatives in it:
Fíli/Kíli are brothers and Thorin’s nephews
Balin/Dwalin and Óin/Glóin are two sets of brothers where the sets are first cousins, and third cousins of Thorin (For good measure, Dáin is Thorin’s second cousin, and third cousins of this lot)
Dori/Nori are brothers and Ori is their cousin. They are some unspecified distant relation to Thorin
Bofur/Bombur are brothers and Bifur is their cousin. They’re the only ones that aren’t of Durin’s line
Legolas and Aragorn do seem somewhat acquainted, though probably not as much as the films seem to think. If nothing else, it’s likely they met when Aragorn took Gollum to Mirkwood.
Boromir and Gandalf don’t seem to know each other very well, but Gandalf has spent time in his home and does know both his father and brother. And in one of my favorite timeline fun facts, Boromir was a child of 2 or so when Aragorn was his grandfather’s favorite captain. Still pretty much an outsider, all told.
Was Gandalf not mentoring Faramir and Boromir
I think Gandalf passed through Gondor and no doubt gave wise advice from time to time, but in the century leading up to the War of the Ring he is busy trying to juggle preparing the entire West in between fighting fires. Working out whether that ring that his favourite hobbits have is the One Ring and the critical key to victory or defeat – something he can do by throwing it in a domestic fire – is on his list of things he must really get around to doing once he has the time.
I recently read an amusing webcomic about the party relationship bonuses.
https://www.awkwardzombie.com/awkward-zombie/rapporting-for-duty
Elrond specifically does not lay an oath on the Fellowship. There’s some discussion among them whether that’s right. (Elrond may be mindful of the consequences of the Oath of Fëanor.)
Bilbo and Thorin’s company have a contract rather than an oath.
It’ also worth noting that in the Fellowship most were nobility. The Hobbits were, outside Sam, technically noble, but in a way that no one cared about outside the Shire. Legolas was a prince. Aragorn was the king of Gondor. Boromir was the heir to the Stewardship of Gondor. Gimli was the son of a Dwarf noble. And Gandalf was on the White Council.
The average person probably wouldn’t be thrown together with a bunch of strangers (outside pilgrimages, travel, and other situations where it happened). But nobility expected to do it from time to time. It’s pretty clear that they expected to occasionally go on quests–no one was shocked that Boromir went to find the answer to a dream-riddle, or that Gimli came to Elrond to seek advice, or the Legolas came to say Gollum had escaped, for example. There are also things like fostering, being taken hostage (we don’t see it, but it was part of war in the past), political marriages (Arwen and Eowen both do this), and others.
Adventurers are supposed to be a bit more powerful than the average commoner, so it’s likely that they are more used to “Here’s a bunch of new people your life now depends on, have fun”.
*Especially* true of female nobility. Most people just don’t realise (or don’t want to accept) that the *entire job description* of an ancient-world or medieval princess was to be married off to a foreign man she had never seen and might not even have a language in common with, and be packed off to his kingdom, out of reach of any of her family or childhood friends who would be unable (even if willing) to help her if anything went bandy.
It’s been a while, I think you’re right. Sorry.
It does indicate though that the normal expected thing for a fellowship like this would be an oath, and this is an exception because of the difficulty and possible unforeseen circumstances that would make the oath impossible to fulfill.
So the local types getting together to delve the local dungeon, would likely expect to have to swear an oath, both for specific goals and also mutual aid.
I think the ahistoricity of tavern-as-adventurer-meeting-place is downstream of the ahistoricity of the adventurer-as-profession itself. It has been frequently proposed (though I know nowhere near enough about the topic to judge the truth of this) that the fantasy archetype (a martially skilled person, yet disconnected from any institution or social bonds, rootlessly travelling the lands looking for situations where their skills are useful or rewarded) is derived from soldiers whose war, and thus employ, was over: pirates (who used to be privateers), the lone samurai (post-Meiji) or cowboy (post-US civil war), or even more directly for D&D: the renaissance german mercenary (post 30-years war), colliding with aspirational folklore figures such as Arthurian knights seeking quests or William Tell/Robin Hood/etc. The generic adventurer archetype is then abstracted from these more specific archetypes by ignoring the “backstory” (to be filled in for specific characters). Given this context, I think your interpretation that “adventurers” are basically just mercenaries with a coat of paint is a pretty accurate interpretation.
When it comes to the question of where “adventurers” would meet, I think it’s helpful to distinguish where the characters would meet each-other from where the characters learn of a quest. These two events do not need to coincide; it is merely convenient for the setup to proceed quickly by having both events happen in the same place. I’m personally quite fond of putting the tavern at the docks in the big city, where people with wildly different backgrounds are much more likely to meet than a village in the woods, and rumours of big problems/big quest payouts are easy to overhear from the next table over. The city itself then offers any variety of big men to be the quest giver, street crime to practice the level 1 encounters, shops to purchase equipment, and ships in the harbour to teleport the group to where the adventure actually starts.
The D&D adventurer is explicitly based on figures like Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Neither of whom are in any way historical, even if you buy the Fremen myth that plays a large part in Conan’s character – though I think you may be right that Arthurian knights and myths of the American frontier may be somewhere in their ancestry.
The closest comparison I can think of to the “ranger” archetype of the completely untethered (but still useful to their civilization of origin) adventurer are the American frontier scouts like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and the later mountain men. You’ve also got militias like the Queen’s Rangers in the American Revolution, though they were more organized (and more tethered) than your average fantasy adventuring party. Cowboys are also a step removed, since they’re usually ranch hands, sheriffs and their deputies, or outlaws. Meaning they either had attachments to a specific place, or were the kind of people adventurers would be recruited to fight.
Yes, but both Conan and the duo of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in turn owe a fair amount of inspiration to some of the other sources that Scorpion is mentioning, as you say.
Howard is pretty specific when he writes about Conan that he’s inspired by some of the frankly violent and roving men he encountered in his own life in Texas (past the Wild West era but not so far past that it wasn’t still a fairly rough-and-tumble place during the early oil booms).
Leiber, likewise, is drawing inspiration from wandering heroes, wandering mercenaries, these are common fictional elements that appear all over the place. There are huge thematic differences between Fafhrd (let alone the Grey Mouser) and Hercules with his twelve labors. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bit of Hercules in their ancestry.
In TJ Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome he draws attention to Claudius’ exposition of the Etruscan version of the origins of Servius Tullius, as an aristocratic freebooter called Mastarna – a story given credence by an Etruscan tomb-painting showing the liberation of a group of captives and their revenge on their captors, with names matching. The tl-dr is that Italy of the time may have been home to numerous bands of adventurers, at least one of whom made king.
From what I recall Cornell suggests it was fairly commonplace for roving adventurers to wind up seizing/earning power as kings or magistrates. And archaic Italy wouldn’t be the first place; 1 and 2 Samuel in the Bible arguably describe something similar, with David spending a while as chief of a homeless adventurer band until Saul dies and David’s tribe invites him back to be king over them.
Which lines up fairly well with early envisionings of D&D, because from what I understand the intent was for player characters/parties past a certain level to begin settling down and becoming local notables or magnates.
On the vast guild thing: while their relationship to the government isn’t usually very well-explored, most settings with them do have a need for them being multi-town.
Basically, while everywhere has regular security problems, they don’t generally have regular S-rank (This is too formal for the settings, really, but most of them have an explicit ranking system) security problems. A dragon might come out of the mountains and threaten to burn down a given village once in a generation. So you need to be able to call in a dragon-slayer when needed but cannot afford to have one on retainer all the time dealing with goblin problems and gathering herbs in the forest with wolves in it. Having a multi-town organization means the dragon slayer can show up and provide proof they’re a dragon-slayer so you know you can count on them to do the job, and the local adventurer’s guild being part of an organization gives the dragon-slayer confidence they won’t get screwed on payment.
In general, the regular goblin culling and suchlike is done by adventurers who stick to one town; in settings with mechanical levels or otherwise an ability to get much stronger through experience the expectation is that successful people will graduate to itinerant once their skills get to the point where they can handle irregular higher-paying jobs. Sometimes you do get a village with a high-ranking more-or-less permanent adventurer, but they’re explicitly taking a major pay hit for some non-financial reason.
Also while it doesn’t necessarily come up explicitly adventurers are usually supposed to only contract through the guild, and when there’s a contract not through the guild it’s almost invariably either for something illegal or from someone who got blacklisted for trying to screw the guild on payment or giving bad information so an underqualified party got sent out and killed by something way more dangerous than expected.
Admittedly they’re generally pretty loose on entry and promotion requirements, mostly just requiring demonstrations of capability, sometimes in a formal test, sometimes by having the grunt-work open to anyone who walks in and opening up the good jobs once you complete a certain number. This is often a mechanical plot necessity because they’re Isekai settings and need to get the main character into the monster-hunting business despite having zero history in the setting. It does make some degree of sense when the potential to become a big-deal monster hunter is basically distributed at random so maybe the farmboy who just walked in will be a dragon-slayer when the generational dragon shows up, and this depresses the prices you can charge but if you don’t have a dragon-slayer available at dragon time it doesn’t matter how rich you are because that’s the dragon’s money now.
As an alternative to guilds, there could possibly exist small numbers of taverns in large towns that become known for specifically catering to adventurers. Such a location could become known throughout the mercenary monster-hunting community as a location to find employment, gain information, and so on. As a possible real-world parallel, Lloyd’s of London started as a coffee house where ship owners and insurers congregated to do business. The shop then specialized to provide those customers with valuable information regarding maritime commerce (Drachinifel’s channel on Youtube recently had a great video on this topic).
Additionally, I’m interested in the preferred recruitment of farm boys over city-dwellers into both classical Roman and early-modern European armies. I’ve encountered the trope in literature: for example the hero in Arany Janos’ Toldi trilogy set in 14th century Hungary is a disaffected farm boy invited to join a passing army due to his casual feats of strength. Is this simply because the same economic and societal forces are still in play? (ie. the majority of the population are rural laborers and the surplus population of young men used to hard manual labor make good soldiers)
So I’m basing this specifically on a book I read a couple of years ago regarding inns in Amsterdam in the late middle ages/early modern.
But innkeepers could also be traders or acted as the agent of a foreign merchant. And not just drink, because of the nature of the business they had access to storage space which was also of interest for foreign merchants that needed to assemble a cargo for shipment. Or the innkeeper would slowly get enough goods together for shipment once the season was right.
I believe the city council also required them to report their guests, so that they could keep track of outsiders and know where to go if some incident happened.
And that’s where you could see the intersection of innkeeper and adventurers. As an agent to find or get a team together to solve a particular problem. A place for adventurers to store their loot while they figure out buyers. But also, if the adventurers are outsiders, they need somewhere to stay and the innkeeper will probably be held liable by the city notables for his guests as a way to maintain some control over them by authorities.
> I believe the city council also required them to report their guests, so that they could keep track of outsiders and know where to go if some incident happened.
Not just back then — I believe a lot of modern European governments still require something like this.
Regarding taverns: You say that the best place to recruit adventurers is just outside the city. Based on how cities work (they are the hub around which a network of towns and villages function), that’s either going to mean 1) at the city gates, or 2) in a nearby small town. And it makes sense from an adventurer perspective to prefer the small town. Odds are monsters are going to be in the hinterlands, rather than the city proper (exceptions arise of course), so the average adventurer is going to spend more time away from the city than in it. Makes sense to have recruitment sites and places to get paid away from the city–that way you can save time and money (small town inns are going to be cheaper) and get back to monster fighting.
Perhaps a good model for this is woodsmen in colonial America, rather than armies. The incentives are different, so the behavior is different. People who went into the wilderness in that time weren’t soldiers, though they by necessity could fight. They were people who didn’t, for whatever reason, want to be full participants in civilized society. In many cases the furs they gathered (many if not most were hunters/trappers) were bonuses; the point was to be away from people.
The other option, of course, is knights errant–a group that goes around verifying that the local Big Man’s rules are being obeyed. Charlemagne did something of this sort, and the Heralds of Valdimar series does as well, so it’s neither ahistorical nor unknown in fantasy. It would explain the “party” aspect, as you’d want several people on such a mission. And where will you meet up to start the mission? Same place you meet up anyway–the local tavern, which acts as a community living room.
Also, people of the past DID get thrown in with random strangers during traveling. Pilgrimages were a thing, and you’d often end up with people you didn’t now. It’s why the Canterbury Tales works–these are essentially strangers telling each other stories to pass the time during the hike and to get to know each other a bit. For that matter, you’d often share a bed with strangers (it was the only reliable way to keep warm). But if you know your local Big Man uses taverns for recruitment and pay distribution (via whatever mechanism), odds are you won’t be completely unknown to each other–even if you don’t know the individual, knowing they’re part of your guild or know someone who knows you will be enough in many cases.
As for size, I chalk it up to people really not understanding scale. In the case of towns, people DRASTICALLY under-estimate how big a town is. I grew up in a tiny village with less than 2,000 people in it and the town could have swallowed Balmora from Morrowind without noticing, for example. Multiply the size of any fictional town by 10 and the scale works better (still not great). In TES games, go with 100. On the flip side, people drastically over-estimate the distance between towns. This matters for taverns. Most of the time you’re going to see villages and towns about a day apart. Any further apart and you get a new village because the farmers can’t get their goods to the distribution centers quickly enough. Most people in the past didn’t sleep beside the road (it’s a good way to get robbed or killed); they slept in taverns when they could. So regardless of whether the Big Man wants to use the taverns for this purpose or not, he’s going to have a network of taverns lying around, and these taverns are already being used as travel centers and communications hubs.
The video game towns are the size they are for performance reasons. And also for money reasons.
You don’t want to spend Arcane money (rumored final cost $500 million range) on rendering the small town.
You also don’t want to hire 500 voice actors for background conversation in that town.
There are ways around that, though.
Fable does it in large cities by restricting the areas you have access to–if you can only see certain streets you can imply (via cheap background images) that the city is much larger than what’s shown. Include enough areas and players don’t feel too constrained.
Balder’s Gate: Dark Alliance does the same thing. You can only see the parts of the city relevant to the plot, the rest of the city is implied to exist via environmental storytelling, but not shown.
Another way is to have the whole story within one city. GTA does that, more or less. Mansion games (early Castlevanias, 7th Guest, etc) sort of do this as well. Since the game’s entire world is the one location you can devote more time, attention, and resources to that location.
But ultimately I think we as players need to accept that games are a representation of a thing, not the thing itself. Balmora is meant to signify Balmora, not to BE Balmora. As you say, limitations of hardware and finances mean that we’re never going to see a fully-realized major city! That said, I do think it’s important to keep that in the forefront of your mind when evaluating games and when doing any sort of world-building, because it’s one of those biases that tends to creep in without you noticing. If we’re asking how a realistic Adventurer’s Guild could work, this scale matters a great deal.
There are various genre-appropriate solutions, but they don’t really work in the specific context of Elder Scrolls games, where you’re supposed to be able to explore the wilderness and basically go anywhere you can see on screen. In Morrowind in particular you can fly so it’s hard to put in an impassible barrier without raising major setting questions; Oblivion and Skyrim ditch flying in part because it let them have larger and more detailed settlements by having a loading screen when you go through a gate.
Even in the games that use environmental storytelling to imply larger cities, the stuff you do see is usually more compressed than makes sense. Games like GTA or Spider-man that do let you run around an entire to-scale city make the concession of having most of the people and buildings being props you have limited interaction with; you can knock over or kill civilians but not talk to them and if you decide to spend your time just following one around they will not do anything interesting until there’s an excuse to despawn them.
The fact that Gary Gygax was an American probably had a lot of ripple effects on the fantasy genre that we just take for granted. In America there was the well established trope of the saloon being the core of a frontier town. There was also the real history of plenty of sheriffs having day jobs and deputizing people to deal with dangers. Maybe if D&D had been invented in Europe everyone would be meeting on the front steps of the church and you form your posse’s from the best of the local militia instead of the have gun will travel crowd.
And they are called “Taverns” because in Wisconsin the trade association for bars is called the Tavern League and typically bars in the state have a little sticker on the door declaring membership.
All of which came from Europe.
European pubs, taverns, etc are basically communal living rooms, where people would go and hang out. Remember, until very recently your “house” was likely built the same way your pig stye was–it often WAS the pig stye, as many kept animals in their houses to keep everyone warm–and was one room (or two if you kept the animals in with you). This reflects the fact that most of their lives were lived outdoors, tending fields and animals and gardens and the like. If you wanted to meet someone you went to a pub. Coffee houses took the place of this to some extent (enough so that folks attempted to ban them, since people attending the penny university got uppity ideas about liberty and whatnot), but still, for a long time the local pub was where you went to hang out with people even in parts of the USA. The disreputable, rowdy, violent reputation is a somewhat later addition.
Sheriffs also were derived from European laws. Specifically British. Sheriff is an abbreviated form of “shire reeve”, an administrative official (typically a peasant) serving a local lord. Mostly the originally managed the lands for the local lords, ostensibly under the steward but often enough acting fairly independently. The lord had one or more stewards, each of whom managed one or more manors/estates/whatevers, and each of those had a reeve. This evolved, after the Norman Conquest, into a combination tax collector and law enforcer. This is why the Sheriff of Nottingham was collecting taxes. Law enforcement could include chasing down dangerous criminals, in which case the sheriffs could raise a posse to hunt them down (if you were an adult man you were expected to participate in the posse). Depending on the size of the shire, the sheriff may have to travel quite a bit to perform these duties. Again, see Nottingham.
This could fit with an adventuring party–the sheriff goes to raise a posse, in the pub because that’s where people are, and the adventurers, who are there because they’re traveling and staying in a tavern is what you do when you travel, hear about it and offer their services. The town could, probably, handle it themselves, but why risk people you know when there are outsiders who are willing and, apparently, able to do it for you? In that sort of society no one would care if the strangers got killed. Worst case scenario they fail and you raise the posse anyway; best case scenario they succeed and you give them a few gifts (likely from the local lord, who does have money, and who’s going to be aware, through the steward, of what’s happening) or a feast or something, then you go back to your normal life.
This also explains where the magic items come from. There’s a LOOOOOOOOONG tradition of lords giving gifts for services, and lords by definition are in the 1%. Think Theoden giving Gimli the shield from his own armory, or Merry getting the horn from Eowen and Eomer. This would be the lord, either directly or through a representative, performing the act of lordship in a way that any Medieval society would be familiar with. Which, of course, makes the lord look good–he’s doing what a good lord is supposed to do! And since even a minor lord will have mages and the like with them (think favorite priests in the European Middle Ages), and his family has had centuries to accumulate stuff via gifts for services performed, he’ll have a few trinkets he can give away.
Do we have reason to believe then, that at least some stories about knights-errant were real (though still possibly exaggerated)?
Also, I feel inclined to bust out my own inner pedant and point out that taverns and inns were typically not combined in real life as often as they are in fantasy. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/7Xc8EBenUbw?si=YaLo-Y02PTVcAbX1
There are a few ways they can be real.
Charlemagne sent out representatives to verify that laws were enforced and the like. This is basically a knight-errant, whether or not the official was an actual knight. Other lords may do the same, dispatching one or more knights (which, remember, were the core of a fighting group, not just one person) to deal with the issue. Lawful, certainly, but whether Good, Neutral, or Evil is open for debate.
You also had knights going on crusade. Crusading wasn’t as methodical as raising a modern army is, and sometimes got a bit silly. But getting an army together from all of Christiandom meant that you had a lot of knights wandering around trying to get to the Holy Lands, Poland, or southern France. Lawful Good in their own eyes, often Chaotic Stupid in practice (the Crusades in the Holy Lands were LAUGHABLY bad).
There were also pilgrimages. Everyone went on them in the Middle Ages, so seeing a knight on a pilgrimage would hardly be surprising. That said, a knight is a knight so may have to deal with issues that arise along the road (oaths permitting).
There were also tournaments. A big issue in the Middle Ages was what to do with third and fourth sons–there wasn’t enough land to continue dividing up your holdings in perpetuity! Crusades and monasteries were good options, but tournaments were another way a younger son could do something with himself that didn’t threaten his older brothers to the point where they put a knife in him. These would probably tend more towards Chaotic Neutral.
for what it’s worth, in my games I always solved the tavern problem here by just reskinning it as the local Lord’s manor house, who has a courtyard or guest hall open to the public. It serves the identical function of “place where strangers might congregate in a new town” with the added bonus of giving them direct access to the local magnate instead of that needing to be a secondary location.
I’ve also found this helps with one of my biggest pieces of advice for building role playing opportunities in “town,” which is to double up everyone’s roles. The tavern keeper/host works as a steward for the local baron, running his guest hall. His brother is the blacksmith, who is engaged to the local apothecary. Her apothecary shop is the upstairs room of the stable master’s house, who has a long running grudge against the tavern keeper.
the more individual NPCs are all tied to each other, the more the players have to ping pong back and forth between established characters and locations to get the next thing they want in town, the more opportunities for them to engage in conversations and schemes instead of treating the various shops as isolated, separate locations.
“I’ve also found this helps with one of my biggest pieces of advice for building role playing opportunities in “town,” which is to double up everyone’s roles. The tavern keeper/host works as a steward for the local baron, running his guest hall. His brother is the blacksmith, who is engaged to the local apothecary. Her apothecary shop is the upstairs room of the stable master’s house, who has a long running grudge against the tavern keeper.”
This is excellent advice and reminds me very much of the setup process for the improv-heavy RPG “Fiasco”, which if you haven’t come across yet you should look at!
“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.”
Does it? IME there’s no issue with having all the characters know each other before the campaign starts, it’s just more work to figure out the details. As awesomescorpion notes, a lot of historical adventure fiction is set in the aftermath of major wars, so you could just as easily have the PCs be old war buddies. Though I guess that raises the question, “did they get any XP from the war?”
Really, the real problem is not how adventuring parties form but who keeps letting these bands of 1st level adventurers run around unsupervised. There’s something to be said for forcing 1st level adventuring parties to undertake lengthy, moderately dangerous journeys for relatively unimportant tasks like delivering letters. The more seasoned professionals are too busy and the job isn’t important enough to be worth their time!
One thing I always did at the start of campaigns was have the PCs gathered by the authorities and told that their lives were not important to the authorities. Then, off to the sewers to investigate and/or feed whatever is currently killing people in the sewers. Taverns were always more of a fourth level and above thing.
Ah, the confined space rescue problem. Air foul in a way that isn’t so repugnant as to drive away motivated people (e.g. colorless, odorless carbon dioxide has displaced air) kills someone, then kills the people coming to rescue them, then kills the people coming to rescue them…
The players need to roll a WIS check in real life or their characters die. Even if they have all required magic PPE, the GM would have to be more than a bit sadistic to pose this challenge, I suppose.
A whole family got killed by rotting potatoes in that way just this year, didn’t they? In Russia, maybe?
Sometimes it’s environmental hazards, sometimes the magical creature installed as a ventilation system laid eggs. Either way, the in-game elites are applying a Modest Proposal type solution to lots of the new 1st-level miscreants who come to town without being PCs.
You totally can collaboratively write up characters who have a shared background, but in the case of DnD, especially in 3e but also in both older and newer editions creating a character is a big process it’s really convenient to be able to go home and do separately over a week and social convention limits what the DM will say “that’s not a viable background, come up with a different one” to. Game systems with more emphasis on social interaction over going to a dungeon and killing everything inside often have a formalized “figure out how you know these guys” step, and DMs can do it informally if they’re running a campaign where they really care.
WRT Fantasy Taverns I’m going to defend them a bit.
Please note that the stereotype says “you MEET at a tavern” and get given your first quest there not “you get handed quests by tavern keepers when you have massive earthshaking power.” A lot of the questions that are handed out by tavern keepers in D&D are Baby’s First Quest such as “please clean the annoying large rats out of my cellar.”
For an adventuring party’s first quest, getting hired out of a rural tavern makes a lot of sense. If a rural area has a problem that the locals can’t solve and they need it solved NOW (because they don’t have time to go to a large town) and they need it solved CHEAP (because they’re a small village that can’t pay for the kind of big deal adventurers that hang out in large towns) then the tavern is the logical place to look for people from out of town who might be good at killing.
I’d assume that these small towns with taverns where newbie adventurers can be hired are:
1. Small: so they don’t have the resources to hire more than newbie adventurers.
2. On a frontier: hence dangerous critters and on the edge/beyond the edge of state power.
3. Be located near some kind of trade route: hence having a number of outsiders commonly at the tavern.
4. Not be located near any monsters that are THAT powerful: hence the town not having been wiped off the map ages ago.
As far as the inspiration for this kind of thing, like many things in how D&D is set up, I think it owes more to Western and less to Tolkien than most people think. “Local town on the frontier has a Problem and asks for randos from out of town at the local saloon for help” is something that comes up a lot in Westerns and the fantasy tavern is just that Western trope translated into fantasy. So much of D&D owes a lot to Westerns.
The other thing is that the party is meeting at a tavern but may have signed up for the job elsewhere. Or they’ve travelled there together and are just getting breakfast/meeting up with the local intel before heading off to the dungeon. If at all possible, a wise GM wants to avoid giving the players a chance to turn down the quest (unless they have particularly biddable players).
Even Thorin & Co. met at the Green Dragon Inn the morning after the Unexpected Party.
From a literary perspective, the tavern makes sense as a place where adventurers would spend their time. They tend to be itinerant, travelling to where there are adventures to be had, so they have no fixed address but need a place to stay. They tend to intermittently get large sums of money (either from a treasure trove or as a reward from a patron). Once they have upgraded their adventuring gear, they don’t have much use for money, so they spend it sitting near a tavern fire, swapping stories and planning their next adventure.
Those seeking out adventurers would come to the tavern because that is where adventurers spend their time. Local Big Men would not be the only source of adventurer patronage (and, as our host points out, might likely not be a source because they have their own household retainers). One source of adventurer patronage would be other adventurers (“On my last quest, I found a treasure map, but it leads through a dangerous area. I need a healer, a mage and a stealthy fighter if I am going to survive.”)
There are many other possible patrons. A man whose leg was bit off by a dangerous monster might seek a crew at a local inn to help him get revenge. Poor peasants who are the prey of bandits might spend more mon than they can afford at an izakaya buying potential guardians sake. People on the run might go to the local cantina to hire adventurers to smuggle them elsewhere without any entanglements with the authorities.
Given that a lot of fantasy authors had at least Freshman English, and some took Middle English literature or even Grad School English Chaucer, I think the Tabard Inn is somewhere in the background for a meeting place of soon-to-be comrades.
Yes absolutely. One of the oldest works of English literature starts with all the characters (none of whom know each other) meeting in a tavern before going on a quest together…
This is pure pedantry, but can you really say that about Thorin and Company that they’re strangers? Everyone is at most two degrees separated from everyone else. The Dwarves all know each other (and many are related), and Thorin added Bilbo on on the recommendation of Gandalf, an old friend, who also has known Bilbo for a very long time. It’s more mutual introduction than bunch of strangers meeting to do a job.
Bilbo does not know the dwarves, and while Gandalf and Thorin know each other fairly well, I’m not sure the rest of the dwarves know Gandalf beyond “that guy who used to visit the king sometimes,” and Bilbo does not know him much better than that. So there’s *some* stranger-ness going on (in spite of having been introduced the day before). But yes, it’s mainly a dozen dwarves who have known each other their entire lives, plus a couple semi-strangers, not exactly a ‘band of strangers’ in my book either.
Importantly, all the dwarves know and honor Thorin, and it’s Thorin personally vouching for Gandalf from their point of view, so he’s not quite a ‘perfect’ stranger. Bilbo’s the real stranger… and they bond with him by crashing at his house for a dinner party, making him their host at a party, who is by definition no stranger, eh? Eh? 😀
“a dozen dwarves who have known each other their entire lives” …know _of_ I’d definitely accept, and Thorin knowing all of them personally, but aren’t some of them from the Iron Hills and some from the Blue Mountains? (AKA as far apart east-west as the Shire and Mordor). Which would make family reunions a little challenging.
Percy has the same expression I always make when I have to use supplies bought from Staples.
In my current role playing game the PCs are agents of the local aristocracy because I was tired of the “you meet ina tavern”
I feel like the [Tavern] “wants” to be a [Third Place] where variously disreputable types – outcasts, criminals, bohemians, etc. – can mingle and socialize and find gossip and work. Non-adventurer types found there might include pickpockets, sex workers, and starving artists.
While this isn’t really the way Tolkien did it with the Prancing Pony in Bree, it very much is typical of “low fantasy” like Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. Conan spends a fair amount of time in the kind of disreputable drinking establishment one might call a “dive.” And, yes, you find those kinds of people there a lot.
They’re not places respectable members of the community normally go. But for exactly that reason they tend to draw people that aren’t respectable but have money (mercenaries, sailors and caravan guards who just got paid off, successful criminals, with Conan often fitting into any of the three categories). And they naturally also draw the kind of people who would be chased out of a reputable establishment and who are angling for a slice of that money.
I don’t have a particular emotional attachment to the fantasy tavern concept one way or the other, so I’ll probably sit out most of this week’s discussion. Though, since I have already linked to a (bite-sized) online gamebook once, I might as well do it again for The Black Lobster.
http://www.ffproject.com/lobster.htm
Written by the same author as the other gamebook, it provides quite an amusing look at a (particularly dramatic) day in a life of one fantasy tavern-keeper. It also sidesteps some of the aforementioned pitfalls, as it is both set in a bustling city and adventurers are only a small fraction of your clientele – and they are far from from your greatest concern either.
That, and I am sure this blog is read by other Fighting Fantasy fans, who’ll appreciate all the references to canon stories. (After all, I once managed to get a reply to a comment which namedropped Basil Broketail book series by someone who had also read it – and that one is so obscure, it does not even have a Wikipedia page of its own, only one for its author. Fighting Fantasy is way better-known.)
You suggest that Iran’s new income stream from tolling the Strait might encourage it towards foreign adventurism which would get it into trouble. I’d point out that it’s Iran’s foreign adventurism over the past 47 years which already has gotten it into trouble, like the fix it was in before February.
Iran’s strategic position has inherently been difficult for a long time. Prior to 1979 it was basically stuck as the colonial client state of various European powers; attempting to chart an independent course in the 1950s with a democracy is how they got coup’d and saddled with the Shah in the first place, who perpetuated the relationship of “American client state” until being overthrown by the religious fundamentalists in 1979.
Then the Iranians found themselves targets for Saddam Hussein (who was himself willing to act as client for foreign powers, and who both the Americans and the Soviets would cheer on as long as he was fighting the Iranians, which he spent most of the 1980s doing). And of course, the very fact that the fundamentalists had gotten into power by overthrowing the American-client Shah meant the US saw them as an adversary and always would. Especially because even now fifty years later there are elderly people around DC who are all “never forgive never forget” for the embassy hostage crisis and the Beirut barracks bombing.
Given that the US has a lot of cash to throw around arming and preparing various Middle Eastern states to ‘contain’ Iran, and occasionally sort of randomly threatens to attack Iran, Iran has strong incentives to do the following:
1) Cultivate proxies of its own so that rivals in the region have something to worry about other than tooling up to specifically harm Iran. The Houthis have kept the Saudis pretty busy; Hezbollah has kept Israel somewhat busy. Since hostility by the US (and Israel, and Saudi Arabia) dates back pretty much to the founding of the current Iranian government, it is questionable whether not backing those proxies would have left Iran better off.
2) Develop or at least credibly threaten the ability to develop nuclear weapons, because once you have a nuclear deterrent it is much less likely that someone will just randomly decide to attack you for funsies one day, with declared intent to overthrow your government and/or exterminate your entire civilization, as is now happening to Iran right now.
Quite frankly, it is kind of absurd to expect Iran to react to the strategic situation it’s been in ever since 1980, purely as a consequence of how their government even took power from the Shah, by doing anything much different from what they have been doing. Changing that would require restoring mutual willingness to have a peaceful status quo, which Obama worked on but Trump immediately scrapped in 2017 and has now scrapped permanently.
While Iran has good reason for many of its actions since 1979, the Iranian governments over the years have often acted in ways that seem irrational and menacing to everyone else. If “Iran” were an individual, even the well intentioned neighbours would be saying “mate, you need to get help”. Best example is Iran’s obsession with harming Israel, a small country over a thousand kilometres away from Iran.
Israel was a supporter of the Shah before his overthrow, but it was the Cold War, so was every other western country. Israel oppresses the Palestinians, but there are plenty of other countries, closer to Iran, committing atrocities against their own populations. Israel is largely Jewish, but Iran didn’t participate in the mass expulsion of Jews that most other North African and Middle Eastern states did, and Iran still has a large Jewish population today.
During the Iran-Iraq war immediately after the fall of the Shah Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor that was thought to be a key component of Saddam Husseins nuclear weapons program. Israel was the supplier of weapons and parts for the Iranian military in the Iran-Contra deal. The major suppliers of weapons to Iraq were France, Russia, and China; not Israel.
And yet, in 1992 Iranian proxies made a suicide bombing attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, South America. An Argentinian court, not US or Israeli, determined that Iran was responsible, and Argentina expelled some diplomats etc.
The Israelis at the time, more than 30 years ago, could reasonably ask “what the hell did we ever do to you?”. As you say, Iran has reason to sponsor proxies against regional rivals, but doing so on a different continent is really going above and beyond. Not surprisingly, faced with constant Iranian attacks for a generation, Israel is now equally obsessed with Iran.
Iran has achieved nothing by attacking Israel, or even made its own position worse. Notably in June 2025, the Twelve Day War, Israel bombed Iran, Iran fired back at Israel. Iran’s neighbours, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, could have stayed neutral: the Israelis were clearly the ones who started it. Instead these countries shot down Iranian drones and missiles in defence of Israel.
I’ll agree on the “menacing” part; until this year, at least, international opinion polls had consistently ranked Iran at or around the very bottom of global perceptions of major and middle powers (well below Russia, China, Saudi Arabia – and, at least as of last year, Trump’s America, which was tied with Saudi Arabia in one major poll.) “Irrational” is deeply arguable, however. I.e.
“Russian Federation had been so good to unified Germany. Cheap gas, massive export market for cars, you name it. Why did it have to irrationally ruin such a good thing that could have kept going for so long just for the sake of Ukraine?”
This is effectively the mirror image for your favoured framing of the Iranian foreign policy. Never mind that Israel wasn’t “just” oppressing Palestinians – from the second half of 1970s onwards, it literally gave away (upgraded) Sherman tanks to Christian militias in Lebanon and otherwise helped them to massacre Palestinians and Shias alike. Literally the year after Israel and Iran cooperated to eliminate the lynchpin of the Iraqi nuclear program*, Israel had invaded Lebanon, besieging Beirut for a while and ultimately occupying much of the country up until 2000 – i.e. that Argentinian embassy bombing, though utterly against the international law**, had occurred in the midst of this Israeli occupation, and must be viewed in its context.
Remember, many of Hezbollah members had fought and died for Iran all throughout the Iran-Iraq War (not to mention devoting a suicide bomber to hit French military barracks in 1983 in retaliation for France supplying Iraq with Exocet missiles to hit the Iranian tankers with), so there had been a perceived debt to repay – and that debt became acute once the leader of Hezbollah had been assassinated via Israeli helicopter – exactly a month before that embassy attack.
In 2024, the Ukrainian intelligence service claimed it had helped Tuareg rebels set up a successful ambush on Mali troops and Wagner members assisting them, known as the Battle of Tinzaouaten. Their role was denied by the rebels themselves (to be fair, they also denied fighting alongside Al-Qaeda spin-off JNIM in that battle, even though independent sources seem to disagree) and during wartime, it’s hardly uncommon to claim credit for things that haven’t happened. However, assuming that they were being honest and actually did take part, would you also call it “excessive”? (Particularly if their role did in fact involve cooperation with an Al-Qaeda affiliate?)
“Constant”? How many other attacks throughout e.g. 1990s can you list, then – particularly ones that weren’t intended as retaliation for attacks on allies? Furthermore, this framing would have been a lot more credible if there hasn’t now been increasingly high-profile talk of Israel aiming to attack Turkiye once it it is “done” with Iran; the same Turkiye which might have had suspended trade in response to the genocide – but which also actually recognizes Israel as a state, as opposed to not just Iran itself, but also a whole lot of countries Israel seemingly does not intend to attack in the near future (basically the rest of the Gulf sans UAE***, Pakistan, etc.)
Please spend some time looking up the degree of these countries’ integration into the American security architecture and economic sphere. Iraq in particular literally has its oil revenues administered from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York!
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-us-controls-iraqs-oil-revenues-2026-01-23/
*Perhaps one of the most fascinating recent alternate history scenarios is one where Saddam waits to complete that program before doing anything else.
**Then again, so was the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 intervention – which the Observer had concluded was intentional all the way back then, yet by now almost everybody outside of the two countries appears to have effectively memory-holed it or to accept the denials by the US government itself or the NYT.
***The same UAE whose genocide-committing allies in Sudan have been photographed using Israeli weapons and have gone onto Israeli state TV claiming that they are fighting terror just like Israel in Gaza (in spite of not even being the actual Sudanese state…) Such a pity I have but one link to expend per comment if I don’t want them stuck in moderation.
” And of course, the very fact that the fundamentalists had gotten into power by overthrowing the American-client Shah meant the US saw them as an adversary and always would. ”
This isn’t quite accurate. Yes, the Shah was a US ally, but the US was far from committed to supporting him no matter what. Many powerful people in the Carter government took the view that the Shah was past his sell-by date and that the revolution looked likely to replace him with a secular coalition, and regarded this as definitely a good thing. (True, others thought supporting the Shah was the right move.) DCOM CENTCOM, for example, visited Iran personally to dissuade the Iranian military from trying to keep the Shah in charge through a military coup.
Of course, the people in the US government who thought the revolution would benefit Iran were completely wrong. Khomeini butchered his revolutionary allies by the thousand as soon as he was securely in power. That, and the hostage-taking, soured the US on the Iranian revolution very quickly.
But your suggestion that, to the US, the unforgivable original sin of the Iranian government was “getting rid of the Shah” is not supported by the sources.
It’s not the potential Iranian income stream, it’s that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would be the ones controlling the money.
The IRGC already has a lot of economic power inside Iran, but banks and factories and shops all depend on government support and the Iranian people being willing to buy their services. If the IRGC get too extreme and lose too much support, they lose their income.
If the IRGC is controlling Hormuz and imposing tolls, the money comes from largely external shipping companies and is paid directly. The IRGC would need only a small number of missile/drone sites to enforce the tolls, presumably crewed only by their own troops. The IRGC would not be totally independent, they’d still be part of Iran, but they would have more autonomy than now, with more ability to carry out expensive operations even if the Iranian government itself wasn’t entirely in favour.
The internant craftsman/specialist monster slayer is basically Sapkwoski’s Witchers, no? Going from village to village, town to town, looking for job notices or asking the alderman/lord/etc, if there are any monster problems that the locals can’t/won’t handle themselves, and when the job is done go to the next place where there might be work.
There’s a deep difference between D&D-derived settings and reality: in D&D you can get far more powerful by facing real danger but in no other way.
Consider a hundred similar people who have just come of age. 96 join the local lord’s army. They are instructed by the best teachers, equipped with the best weapons a noble can afford, and spend lots of time sparring with each other. The other 4 form an adventuring party and go looking for trouble wherever they can find it. By the time a year has passed, if the 4 are still alive, they will be able to utterly clobber the 96.
This is not how the real world works, but it’s deep in the game mechanics and worlds built around this need to reflect it.
So the dilemma facing rulers is how to maintain their power when they can’t have a plurality of violent capacity on staff. They can try to have an adventuring party on retainer and keep them busy enough to keep leveling, but this is likely to be a diplomatic nightmare. And keeping busy is likely going to mean being far from home a lot of the time, and quite possibly out of reach when needed.
One solution is to have really good taverns. Subsidize them if you have to. Adventurers will pass through. They’ll remember your town for its excellent dumplings or whatever. And they’ll socialize with the just-starting-out adventurers who can confirm that you’re a good employer (hire them even if you don’t need them so you can start building that reputation!). Now there’s a good chance that if you need to hire some serious muscle, you’ll be able to on reasonable terms.
The other advantage is that whatever happens to the adventurers is a win for you. If they kill the monster, they’ve, well, killed the monster. Obviously a good thing. If they get eaten, you’ve eliminated a potentially dangerous rival. And either way you come out looking good, because you’re making a clear effort to protect your town; not your fault the adventurers got ate, it’s a high-risk sort of occupation!
It also gives an outlet to those who want to break free from society’s norms. Goes back to the woodsman/trapper sort of Colonial type I discussed previously: Societies generally need a way to manage those who don’t want to be in them. The American Frontier was that for us. If you couldn’t hack it in civilization, or if you just plain didn’t want to, you could go West young man and make a life for yourself, or die trying. Monasticism and the Crusades did this in the Middle Ages. Slaying monsters is a good option for a fantasy setting. The whole “overlapping but competing civilizations” thing means that the Frontier won’t be far off.
It is the key verisimilitude problem that DMs face, that the setting and rules only make sense if the PCs are normally in situations where an overwhelming number of equivalent characters would simply die, but your players won’t have fun if they just constantly have to deal with getting wiped out and starting over.
Personally I just accept that, to use Spirit of the Century’s term, PCs in virtually all games are Exceptional Individuals and we just accept they are capable of doing things people with their background would not be able to, like in Spirit your character who the default setting says was born at exactly the start of 1900 can be a famous WW1 vet and is expected to have done something notable during it whether or not they ever saw a trench. Yeah they weren’t of an age that would generally allow them to join the army and maybe they’re a woman and it’s unlikely they’d have been very good at it at that age, but she is an Exceptional Individual so she faked her age and either hid her sex or got a recruiter and unit to overlook it and successfully stormed a machine gun nest and took out at least fifteen guys by herself and earned the Victoria Cross or Medal of Honor or whatever, and her ability to do that is why she’s a main character in a pulp setting and every other person who was a teenager during WW1 is not.
Just a word for the work of eg Elaine Murphy, who (while a real fan of Rodgers), demonstrates the wives weren’t *invariably* ashore….
two thoughts on taverns.. there is one route i can see where the tavern could be the center of the adventuring industry, even though a guildhall might be more logical. and that would be if the dominant adventuring industry largely grew out of a tavern or tavern, much the same way that lloyd’s of London and the maritime insurance industry grew out of a coffee shop. so you might well have a guildhall that adventurers use, but it might well be more of a YMCA type affair focused more on giving them a place to stay and train, while the actual wheeling and dealing for contracts occurs with guild-approved taverns that act as a combination of waiting area and meeting rooms, with the guild themselves operating as the third party that manages the offers, accepts and doles out the rewards/payments, and so on.
which brings us to the idea of the tavern keep handing out assignments.. while i agree that the most likely source of assignments is the representative of the local bigwigs, but i could see such individuals relying heavily on the Tavern keeper, owner, and staff to help point them towards the adventuring parties most likely to suit the contracts on offer.
A lot of the adventurer’s guild buildings in Japanese media are basically a tavern with a counter you go to in order to confirm a quest with the counter lady and usually sell monster parts with the guild basically guaranteeing they’ll pay a decent rate for monster parts and take care of finding someone who actually wants them to resell to. The tavern portion makes it the adventurer’s hangout spot so they can socialize and form parties and if someone barges in the door covered in blood screaming about their missing daughter there are people to help right there.
There’s a funny one called The Guild’s Cheat Receptionist where a person who got reincarnated as an elf and the god handling the reincarnation accidentally gave every ability to at max strength retires from a brief whirlwind global adventure and goes into hiding as the counter lady in a modest town accidentally made the tavern portion the vast majority of the income because she went all-in on showing off her cooking when interviewing and since she is the best chef in the entire world they have her help in the kitchen and people come from leagues around to try her cooking.
I had the same idea about Lloyd’s when I read this week’s post: The tavern first acting as a meeting place of the people involved in the adventuring business, which leads to the tavern keeper eventually acting as a broker between adventurers and the quest giver.
A client could approach a tavern keeper with a specific job in mind, and the tavern keeper could then suggest individuals or a party that could do this job.
It is also no coincidence that Lloyds popped up in the capital of the largest maritime trading empire of that time. It’s where the demand for insurance tended to be.
Likewise, such a tavern’s existence would only make sense in places that are in an area where there is enough demand for adventurers. It wouldn’t make sense for every hamlet to have such a place.
Arnheim’s grouping of all “monarchs” into
‘A, A*, H, and C—denoting, respectively, genuine (or “true”) monarchs “without specific popular support”, popular monarchs “ruling against the interests of the elite with active or passive popular support”, hybrids “sharing power with an elite”, and constitutional figureheads “with little or no actual power”’
is reminiscent of the Bad Kings, Good Kings, Weak Kings, and maybe ‘Right but Repulsive’ and ‘Wrong but Wromantic’, found in the seminal work of history “1066 And All That”. I guess that comparison would go too far for any academic book review. Out loud, anyway.
In Britain at least, I think most academic historians would unofficially support any reference to Sellars and Yeatman.
Whenever the social-role-of-adventurers discussion comes up, I plug Doomed Slayers from JürgenWerks. It’s a systemless RPG sourcebook I’m fond of. Pay-what-you-want on Drivethrurpg, so if you’re curious…
Gist of the Slayer’s social role is that they get to live outside of many laws in exchange for fighting monsters, living as nomads, and not owning anything that they can’t carry. I always thought that last bit was clever; D&D-esque PCs often have preposterous amounts of wealth in gold and magic gear, but few people want to play Premodern Economics Simulator. Saying that society will stop treating you as a legitimate adventurer if you buy a castle is a great excuse to not.
This is almost certainly a direct reference to Dwarf Slayers from Warhammer Fantasy.
Basically if a dwarf shames themselves badly enough, usually by breaking an oath (and dwarves take any oath real damn seriously to the point that Gotrek has a bitter vendetta against an old friend because of a disagreement over whether his two-penny printed book of shitty poetry from a local girlfriend constitutes war plunder for the purposes of their agreement to split the proceeds of mercenary activity evenly) they and their extended family get banned from the afterlife and the only way to fix this is to swear an oath to one of the Ancestor Gods to die bravely in glorious battle. Usually this happens pretty quick because while they’re not allowed to just commit suicide or stand there to be killed they are not obligated to wear any armor, but sometimes these guys are huge badasses who can’t be gloriously killed by local threats (being shot to death is not glorious) and they seek out progressively bigger monsters until they find one too big for them to handle. As dwarves they are obsessed with wealth but you can’t have a vault to keep it in when you’re traveling the world looking for a troll/dragon/greater demon to do you in so instead they get heavy golden armbands that usually end up being worth a fair bit.
The Gotrek and Felix series is about either the greatest or worst Slayer in history and a human bard who swore a drunken oath to record his adventures and glorious death after Gotrek saved him from the Rieksguard during the Window Tax Riots. They spend a while as wanted criminals dodging law enforcement but eventually are so successful in hunting down monsters and thwarting evil plots they get a de facto pardon.
The author commented on that in a forum post, actually. I dug it up:
“Some element of the Warhammer Slayers (with which I am familiar) is certainly in there – though ultimately, most Slayers in this setting would rather prefer a glorious life (or at least a profitable one) over a glorious death.
Not that there aren’t exceptions to this, of course – there is probably no shortage of Slayers with a tragic past, and they might be sufficiently depressive and/or guilt-ridden enough to seek such an absolution in death…”
Usually in the original settings the goblins/kobolds are a raiding threat, usually one that happens to have escalated very recently to a point where the village agrees they need to proactively do something about it, and the village is pretty demilitarized and has maybe a couple guys who own actual weapons and possibly armor. However there are conveniently a number of elite fighters (in 3e even at level 1 PC classes are generally stronger than NPC classes and especially the Commoner class most of the villagers have) who probably include spellcasters the villagers straight-up may not have at all and have armor the villagers couldn’t possibly afford in town. Also in starter adventures they’re usually willing to be paid way less than their worth due to being generally heroic types and having a reasonable expectation of getting quality loot off the goblin shaman or whatever who would kill a ton of villagers if they went the pitchforks route.
By the time adventurers are at a point where they’re dealing with problems that attract the attention of people with serious military force they’re usually not randomly trawling taverns, certainly not in isolated villages unless they already have another reason to be there.
Ack, this was supposed to be a reply to Basil Marte.
Incidentally Gotrek and Felix do get a number of adventure hooks in taverns, but this is because Gotrek knocks back like a gallon of ale every night so he’s always in the tavern and even before they get famous everyone knows a Slayer is probably a badass because Dwarfs are generally good fighters and a Slayer who leaves the mountains hasn’t found greenskins who can beat him so if they need some muscle and for some reason can’t get it from the militia/state troops and they hear a Slayer is in town they go looking for him. Then later everyone has read about Gotrek fucking up a Bloodthirster in single combat so they go to him when they have a problem the militia/state troops would like help with.
I’ve never had a game with “you all meet in a tavern” (although clients do sometimes meet the PCs in bars) but in my latest game there is a noodle shop that is the nexus of the local mercenary scene. But that’s more of like a convenience thing, the noodle shop was across the street from the building the people who ran the city were located so when they disappeared the noodle shop was a place where a lot of specialists suddenly looking for work got lunch. So the noodle shop became the neutral ground where you hire people and the local fixers would meet clients elsewhere then use the noodle shop to give the people they hired the deets on the job. That’s kinda the archtype I always assumed for the tavern, it’s not that every tavern has work for adventurers, it’s the place where the local fixers “hold court”.
What if the monster problems were seasonal or otherwise varying. Much like traveler communities, the monster hunters need to move around to where the monsters are? This at least explains why they aren’t on permanent retainer.
It’s common in fantasy for dead monsters to be useful/valuable somehow. Lets assume that the value of the dead monster is substantially more than the cost of killing it. Then monster hunters are no longer being paid by the big man to protect humans/livestock. They are looking for places where the state is too weak to tax their valuable monster corpses. If monsters spawn fairly evenly (or concentrated on one spot in the wilderness) then this makes the last village at the edge of the wilderness / monster forest a good place for monster hunters to meet up.
I don’t comment often, but I do want to go back to the origin of the travern trope as being not a matter of employment, but rather a matter of freelancing.
As Gary Gygax and the old grognards supposedly played it, people would just show up at his door on any random afternoon, and they could delve into THE dungeon. It was thus like a pick-up game of basketball at the YMCA: whoever showed up, that was your party. You didn’t choose to meet in a tavern, or randomly meet for the first time in a tavern. Rather, you came to the village closest to the known monster-locked pile of treasure, magic and relics with to grab whatever you could with whatever help was available. And yes, this led to some early luminaries of the hobby running their wizard (usually) on solo delves.
I also say THE dungeon because every game session was in the same, living dungeon. If Ted, Laura and Bill came through the upper levels on Weds., there’s going to be slim pickin’s for the Thursday and Friday crowd. To that end, every session is equivalent to a game day, basically real time. If you needed 3 days to heal, Gary would tell you, the player, to not bother coming back to his house for at least 3 days. If you were really unfortunate you might find in that time the goblins had shorn up defenses, or even that the neighboring Elf kingdom had secured the entrance and installed a toll booth (with turnstile) for would-be adventures.
From this point of view, I note that “Seven Samurai” does it correctly — the villagers go to a place that is at least a large town and likely a small city to hire the Seven. And their situation is so unusual that they must assemble a group of strangers.
In the older versions of D&D the Big Men actually WERE former adventurers. Because as others have stated, power in these worlds does NOT come from land ownership or control of agriculture it comes from magic and from personal prowess that can only be gained on adventures. Hit level 10, you can found your castle or tower.
The entire societal power structure dynamic is different which is why Brett’s analogies keep failing when he tries to apply the real world overlays. The world simple does not work like our world works on a very fundamental and basic level. Serfs don’t matter. Control of land doesn’t matter.
In those worlds the only realm cities and towns even exist is because some powerful adventure decides to protect them for whatever reason
As a result the Big Man is free to live wherever he feels like, has no need of specialists or cities really even and the adventures congregate where it is convenient for him
Now admittedly more modern versions of D&D shy away from this somewhat but there is a reason why Baldurs Gate is called Baldurs Gate
In that case I would expect most adventurers to be the sons of former adventurers, who would have acquired from their fathers the training, equipment, advice and contacts that gave them the best chance of leveling up.
“For whoever has, to him shall be given”
I feel like most RPG settings have a conceit with varying levels of explicitness that being capable of becoming A Hero is randomly distributed, and the son of a former adventurer is well-set-up to become a skilled knight who can beat goblins and some moderately tough monsters and most people, but there’s very low odds he can compare to a random orphan who is A Hero after the random orphan has some experience under their belt. So while former adventurers can carve out and rule large territories the ownership and legal authority passes to people who aren’t notable combatants but are generally recognized as being rightfully in charge and most Heroes go along with this. If they don’t they take over and the cycle repeats.
Remember, in the older editions of D&D where any adventurer who reaches high level is tacitly assumed to probably establish their own stronghold as a routine occurrence, mortality rates are high by design and the Gygaxian influence means that you have fairly high player-character mortality and (by implication) quite high mortality of NPCs with the same career path. Things like “roll a saving throw against a fixed DC or die” were relatively common.
The fact that the child of an adventurer has the best chance to make it as an adventurer in the next generation is counterbalanced against the fact that the retired adventurer parent is going to be painfully aware of how lucky they got just to be alive. Having the best chance doesn’t equate to having a good chance, so there’s a more complicated balance of risk, reward, and advancement.
Older D&D was also not shy about the idea that yes, characters could attain higher level in ways other than just “kill a lot of monsters.” A lot of the XP you gained was from finding treasure, not kills, anyway, and while options like “just train for ten years” were clearly not available for PCs, there tended to be language in the DM guides suggesting that NPCs who get their power this way could certainly exist.
That might discourage the eldest son and heir of a successful adventurer, but not his younger sons with nothing to inherit.
I think basically that is a valid adventurer background, but it still starts you out at level 1 with maybe somewhat above average gear and possibly a spare magic weapon (the old editions weren’t balanced assuming you got a bunch and they were pretty rare) and you don’t have a particularly high chance of making it to high levels compared to anyone else.
guy, if members of one group have a slightly better chance than another of surviving a dice role then after many dice rolls, the survivors will overwhelmingly disproportionately likely to come from the favored group.
That assumes they’re a large enough portion of the initial set. In practice most adventurers come from other backgrounds looking for a shot at making it to the upper class in a way that would normally be completely impossible. The adventurer sons have slightly better odds of making it through the early levels, but by like level four, well short of stronghold territories, the gear will pretty much have equalized and the combat experience will outweigh the training.
Plus younger sons aren’t gonna inherit the castle but they have contacts to get them in the door in a lot of reasonably good careers that are much less likely to kill them. The merchant family that owes the dad big time for saving their ship from a dragon could always use more people who can balance accounts. For farmboys it’s adventurer if they can get their hands on a passable set of gear or they’re gonna be a poor farmer their entire life.
Basically in these settings adventurer is generally a very open career path with a shot at serious social mobility so it attracts a lot of people from all walks of life who are willing to risk dying.
The thing is that a setting in which victories make you powerful, and being powerful brings you victories is very much a positive feedback loop. However equal people started off, by the end they will be very unequal. Positive feedback exaggerates prior differences; it does not water them down. So if any group of people have an initial advantage, they will dominate at the end.
And the children of the rich and powerful people generally start out with an advantage, because advantage for their children is one of the things the rich and powerful people tend to acquire with their riches and power.
An RPG can insist that the characters start off equal. People in reality do not.
That is true in reality, but we are discussing societies in settings where it is very much not, in ways that may or may not have explicit in-universe justifications. In DnD combat experience can very quickly make anyone far more powerful than someone with lengthy training and a far more privileged background. In many of the anime settings we’ve been discussing there is a System that distributes supernatural abilities of varying potency in a way that generally has at best limited relation to heredity, so an orphan girl has no resources to call upon other than a fellow orphan who is considered her big brother, but they score the Hero and Guide classes so he immediately gets a pretty potent set of starting abilities that help him teach and protect her early on and she rapidly ends up wildly more powerful than anyone else possibly can.
The cycle is in the context of a world where the son of a world-famous adventurer will have plenty of access to wealth but is level one when they come of age like everyone else and doesn’t necessarily even have a PC class.
In the real world this isn’t true and thus we never had adventurers in the sense the settings under discussion do so questions of how they interact with society are a moot point. In our closest comparisons of occupations with extreme danger and high potential payoff like following the Oregon Trail to get in on the gold rush or becoming Sir Francis Drake we do see a lot of people from variously poor backgrounds come in because there’s no barrier to entry, and some of them make it big due to a combination of personal qualities and a heavy dose of luck, while most people from backgrounds that would make them more qualified have other options that pay well enough and don’t have a good likelyhood of leaving them dead and a very good chance that they’ll survive but never make much off it. And most of the people in the deadly business have an explicit goal of striking it big enough they can stop and their kids don’t have to get into the business. Of course dramatic law dictates that when we tell stories about people like this either they’re addicted to the thrill or the big score they need is just out of reach until it’s time for One Last Job. Or if this is an indefinite serial they’re just very bad with money and get huge scores then completely blow them in a very short timeframe and Mr Johnson has a new Shadowrun for them. Though in Shadowrun money is a huge deal but a privileged background is actually a huge demerit because it means that when the cops run your prints they get a hit.
“In many of the anime settings we’ve been discussing there is a System that distributes supernatural abilities of varying potency in a way that generally has at best limited relation to heredity”
Well, if you randomly scatter superpowers among the population, I would expect the superpowered to marry into the rich and powerful families. Of course, the greater your superpowers, the better your bargaining position.
Basically the Adventurer’s Guild system or equivalent is how the nobility tend to get them on board, and usually there’s some kind of leveling mechanic so you need to do the low-level adventures but are expected to wind up exceedingly powerful and wealthy very quickly. Hence it being basically open-entry. A lot of people get out of doing jobs that might kill them regularly at some point but they aren’t interesting so we don’t write about them except for the ones who go into guild management, crafting, or light adventuring while mentoring newbies. The guildmaster in a town is usually a retired adventurer and has vague influence that’s not explored much in town affairs.
In settings that specifically have a Yuusha “Hero” (stock character who traditionally opposes the Maou “Demon Lord”; I understand this trope became fully formed in Dragon Quest and is never used without some kind of twist these days) as a mechanical thing they basically end up as de facto military commander of the allied forces of humanity and non-evil races for the duration of the war, then generally either they retire into whatever they feel like or the power structure tries to knock them off within hours of no longer being needed.
In some settings with this the draw is weighted towards nobility and either there’s a prominent commoner the nobility isn’t happy about having gotten a lucky draw or a major character is a noble who got basically or entirely disinherited for a percieved bad one. Generally in the latter case it turns out to be super-awesome as part of a subgenre that I think plays to a common Japanese feeling of being totally unappreciated in your job despite percieving yourself as important, which is exacerbated by a work culture where you work long hours and it’s difficult to just go somewhere else. There’s a pretty funny one where the heroine is kicked out for having a skill with a rarity marker no one recognizes and is assumed must be bad, and it turns out she’s in the world of a glitchy video game with a lot of ways to get items way before you’re supposed to and trivialize bosses, and her skill lets her use Google on the real-world internet to find walkthroughs.
I was going to toss a couple of contrarian ideas out there, or at least models.
One has already been mentioned: the saloon from the Old West (aka the Guilded Age et seq., 1870s-1880s post-Reconstruction US). It’s worth considering that saloons were the political movers of US politics up until Prohibition. This was the era of the ward heelers, who got men drunk, then took them out to vote in the local precinct. Maybe two precincts, three at the most. The distilling companies were addiction merchants, much like social media now, and like social media, they played a disproportionate role in US politics.
So yes, if a fantasy world had brewers and distillers running things (like, oh, medieval Japan, with the sake merchants, or the US with its saloons), then it’s entirely possible that the monster hunters would meet in a saloon. Why? They’re all alcoholics, and they’re paying off their tabs doing dangerous work, which drives them to drink to deal with their PTSD from killing monsters, and perpetuates the cycle.
A second model is a bit earlier: gold rush. A major point of going after monsters is looting them for what they looted from others. In the various gold rushes, the miners didn’t get rich, but the people who supplied them did. Leland Stanford made his fortune selling supplies to miners, for example.
So if you posit that monster hunting is sort of like a gold rush, where monster hunters swarm in to clean out the problem and loot the place, then one would expect taverns/provisioners/whorehouses/medical establishments to pop up at a safe distance from the dungeon fields, to charge the monster hunters exorbitant rates of loot for food and supplies. If these “taverns” are established enough, they might even put together teams.
A third model for why you don’t want monster hunters too close to cities is that, individually, the good ones aren’t soldiers, they’re more like sentient, veteran artillery. Imagine what would happen in, say, Washington DC right now if a 24th level lawful good wizard took it upon herself to clean the place up, and her equally powerful friends joined her. What do you think DC would look like when she was done? That’s why you want her in Wyoming, or possibly Ethiopia. But nowhere near where she might get ideas that would, erm, upset the political status quo.
Note that these are not mutually exclusive…
To be fair, your notional 24th level wizard probably has some really impressive options for “cleaning up” a city whose political and/or social order she does not like without making much of a mess. Area-effect mind control, summoned creatures that don’t cause a lot of property damage, things like that.
On the other hand, she will assuredly also have some very impressive options that are spectacularly violent and cause truly prodigious amounts of collateral damage… And she may well find those to be the easiest route to her goal, quite often, if only because they tend to shock people into giving up rather than trying to stand against her.
Yeah I think the bigger concern from the authority’s perspective is that the more time she spends in the city the bigger the risk that she thinks the President is one of the things that needs cleaning up.
Maybe? That is premised on the assumption the psychological effect would be more like a nuclear bomb, and not like the typical strategic bombing, which does the exact opposite.
Interesting interpretation! Though, I wonder if you have encountered this Fireside (probably not; it’s 6 years old, and Firesides devoted to specific subjects are much harder to find than the Collections and the rest.)
https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/
Whether monsters/dungeons could actually be more terrible than generalized ancient combat is quite a discussion. (And even if they can, how many monsters specifically?) That question also gets me to wonder if our host would be critical of Darkest Dungeon (which he does not appear to have ever commented on?) for this reason, since frequent PTSD is practically loadbearing there. Some of it is quite clever; i.e. the initial area, the Manor’s Ruins, is primarily filled with skeletons, who are fairly standard…except for Courtiers, who attack by spilling wine from their cups that had long turned to vinegar. That vinegar actually does scratch damage – but the point is that it brings to the affected fighter in sharp relief how impermanent life and its pleasures are, and this invariably results in psychological damage.
Another example I like is in vampire-themed DLC, The Crimson Court, where arm-length mosquitoes also cause substantial psychological damage just via the Maddening Whine of their wings…until they manage to feed on one of the fighters. This doesn’t just heal them (as well as potentially infecting the fighter with vampirism – if they weren’t already infected) but also engorges them, and so now their wings generate outright Deafening Whine, which has a lower psychological impact…but it can straight-up stun for a turn.
As one of this site’s editor noted right after that sentence, PTSD is not a generic term for combat stress-induced moment of weakness, but a very specific affliction with very specific symptoms (though I can’t personally say if Mr.Devereaux himself knows about this distinction):
> Note how a diagnosis requires one intrusion symptom (involuntary and instrusive memories, dreams, flashbacks, marked physiological reactions) and persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and two negative alterations in cognition and mood associated with the trauma and two marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the trauma. […] an individual who is voluntarily recounting the trauma – much less re-exposing themselves to it by going out to fight again – without significant reactions (read the guidelines – these are really very significant reactions) doesn’t fit the criteria. They may well have another form of mental wound, mind you; grief, fear, loss, guilt and so on are all very real things. But they do not, by our current medical definition, have this wound.
Uh, if there was any other editor here other than “Mr.Devereaux himself”, there wouldn’t have been somewhere around two dozen typos per post – as he is the first person to admit! So, he was the one who placed that, and yes, he absolutely does know about it (particularly considering the whole “many (most?) of my colleagues teach in military academies” thing, as remarked on the “Professional Military Education” Fireside.)
Admittedly, perhaps my own comment muddied the waters by using the term in relation to Darkest Dungeon, whose depiction of it is rooted in Lovecraft’s “mad from the revelation” trope rather than military specifics. Not to mention that the two games in general are…not all that realistic* or especially concerned with proper terminology anyway. For one, the second game has a force of undead soldiers (who decided to await a cult with reality-warping powers by building fortifications** in the middle of a thick forest, and so the cult just made the vines and the roots come alive, strangle them, and turn them into another group of enemies the player party has to fight***) called The Lost Battalion, which are led by a General (the area boss). Obviously, Generals lead divisions, if not whole armies, while Battalions are quite small; in most military systems, they consist of three companies (each one of those then consists of three platoons and some logistical support, which consist of three-four squads that are around 10 people each) and battalion-level heavy/logistical support – around 200 people in total, and led by Majors, AFAIR. However, Battalion sounds really cool, and so does General, so that’s what they went with.
*I.e. their load-bearing element is the ability to resist fatal damage (in the first game, potentially indefinitely, if you are really lucky with percentage chances; the second gradually hikes the odds against you) “at Death’s Door” via sheer strength of will. (Likewise, the physically strongest character is an expy of Baldwin IV, the Leper King of Jerusalem – reinterpreted as being equivalent to Guts of Berserk). And even if we set the immense effort eldritch powers must be exerting to keep beings so disfigured they sport e.g. exposed spines (dogs in the first game) or flesh so badly burnt it had half-melted (fire worshippers in the second) capable of any activity, never mind fighting effectively, all the fake fictional armor tropes extensively discussed on here are ubiquitous, with visible armor having very limited relationship to character (friend or foe) survivability. The backstory of a Highwayman party member begins with him escaping during a prison riot by beating four guards in metal helmets and gambesons (the ones which had decent odds of stopping some spear thrusts, sword slashes and arrows at >100m, according to this blog) to death with bare hands.
Perhaps even better, the Crusader goes from a peasant whose family is at risk of starving after an early frost ruined their cereal harvest (so far, so good) to apparently immediately getting handed not just enough payment to tide his family over the winter but both a sword and a full suit of armor upon signing up for the Crusade (LOL). Coming back home riding a warhorse (even more massively expensive, as expounded on here many times, even before the implausibility of learning to ride and control it over the period of a single crusade come into play) is probably a finishing touch to the absurdity. Though to be fair, representing that early attempt to harvest the crops in spite of the snow via the battle interface does kinda elevate the whole thing into a unique kind of surreal performance art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InxAk_W9xVY
** For some reason – the only cultists in that game who actually use normal weapons are Evangelists with twin swords and the rare Cardinals with massive axes, with the others spreading miasmas, relying on “music” or perhaps attempting to directly “re-weave” the flesh of their enemies at some distance – although they are more likely to heal each other like that. (Virtually all of them are so strongly mutated, their bodies from the waist down are just tentacles.) Basically the only thing they do which fortifications might help protect from are small black holes summoned by their Cardinals (which also simultaneously bleed, poison and set on fire whoever is nearby, because **** you, that’s why), and those guys are still weak enough your 4 party members cut them down semi-regularly. Otherwise, the one good purpose would be akin to WWI barbed wire – just delaying them at a distance so that they can be shot up*** for as long as possible. To be fair, the graphics for “Forgotten Outposts” kinda gesture at this (a small stone tower or possibly a chapel, surrounded by a palisade) – but if that was the intent, you would fortify like this on open ground with clear lines of sight, not in an ultra-dense forest!
***One significant difference between the two parts is that the first had a clear central villain in the form of its omnipresent narrator, the Ancestor, and all the evil is directly connected to his pursuit of forbidden knowledge; i.e. the wilderness outside is choked with deadly mushrooms that zombify people because his one-time girlfriend sought to access cosmic truths via fungal poisons, and kept going even as it rendered her into a Hag (who literally attempts to boil your party members in her pot when fought!); the Manor is full of undead partly because there had been a crypt of some ancient warriors from your lineage and partly because he invited a trio of foreign Necromancers (eventually killing them in their sleep and reanimating them as his puppets) to reanimate those and the random graveyard population and recent murder victims (Bone Rabble) to excavate the titular Darkest Dungeon after no living human would go past a certain depth. Bandits are present everywhere because he paid them to come so that they would keep the Hamlet in line and now the monsters see them as their own and they see no reason to leave; he was able to afford such expenses from selling women who became the Sirens of the Innsmouth-style aquatic monsters in tunnels beneath the Cove, getting paid with treasures from shipwrecks.
In the second, set in the timelines where the first game is failed, the madness spreads…and then it’s fairly arbitrary. Pretty much the only area with a clear origin is this version of Innsmouth, where at least a Leviathan did emerge and convert the inhabitants to worship it, mutating them in the process. Neither the fire cult in the city nor the plague of gluttony in the countryside has a distinct origin point; nor are the random people in every area who don’t succumb to the dominant affliction in the region only to instead become borderline-skeletal “Gaunts” – all while not just party members, but also random refugees and militias as well as “Pillagers” and some remaining (yet still hostile) soldiers at checkpoints are unaffected. It appears to go for the Dark Souls “Losing hope renders one undead” thing – except that in a world almost entirely like our own (the main difference is in the wild mix of elements from disparate eras – gunpowder weapons place it no earlier than Early Modern – except that there are contemporaneous Crusades – and the Crusaders’ religion somehow ended up incorporating Roman Vestals pretty much as is (punishment for vow-breaking via getting bricked in included)), with very little cosmology establishing that such a thing could happen – even as the concepts themselves are quite striking.
I.e. the first game had the dramatic irony of pigs (“Swinefolk”) whom the Ancestor made to be more like humans just to gain knowledge of manipulating life – and they promptly began treating the villagers the way humans generally treat pigs; butchering and eating them, turning skin into leather; even hunting them with spears. In the second, humans of the countryside (“The Foetor”) become like pigs; perhaps not quite physically (their flesh is too swollen and misshapen), but in terms of being obsessed with food***** and devouring corpses of even own allies in battle to become stronger. Same for the boss concepts like the Librarian who now revels in burning books and is strengthened by it; the “Chirurgeon” who is genuinely trying to heal both “Gaunts” and even the party members who came to kill him – it’s just that his treatments like bloodletting and trepanation can very easily kill. Sadly, some other similarly striking concepts (a now-skeletal Widow who obsessively checks her ruined appearance in the mirror and whose despair afflicts even your fighters; a Woodsman who used to carve wooden toys until losing an adopted child (implied to have survived and becoming one of the party members) and now protects other “Gaunts” to displace guilt) are cheapened by regularly recurring as standard encounter enemies.
****With crossbows; even though firearms are sufficiently widespread that random bandits have pistols or arquebuses, or even straight-up cannons. In fairness, those miss often while crossbow bolt can hit up to four people at once and perhaps also bleed them if they are serrated…
*****Worth noting that a typical peasant household would not have enough food to transform like they do even eating through the recent harvest (the game is implied to take place in autumn), since it has to be threshed first, which rather interrupts the gluttony – but I saw someone comment that we are meant to see them as more akin to the contemporary rural Americans, and this would actually make sense when the developers are Canadian and would know well how support for Trump is inversely correlated with population density – even if the game released during the Biden Interregnum. (Though, by the same token, we would be forced to interpret the Sprawl, with its constantly-burning city and the aforementioned book-burners as an allegory for BLM and “Woke 1”, respectively…..On the flip side, even the Lost Battalion might make sense as a metaphor for the American military and intelligence agencies failing to resist Trump and restore normalcy the way many at first assumed they would in his first administration…)
> Uh, if there was any other editor here other than “Mr.Devereaux himself[…]” So, he was the one who placed that, and yes, he absolutely does know about it.
Well, that whole block was watermarked as “editor’s note,” not “Devereaux’ note,” so I don’t want to assume off the bat that it was him. Though granted, I don’t think I’ve read that Fireside, or if I did then it’s lost from the piles of disorganized memory in my head, and I only had the time to read up to that block before my break was over, so that egg’s on me.
> Admittedly, perhaps my own comment muddied the waters by using the term in relation to Darkest Dungeon, whose depiction of it is rooted in Lovecraft’s “mad from the revelation” trope rather than military specifics.
My comment there was mainly on that Fireside’s applicability to OP’s comment about the Yuusha-PTSD Industrial Complex; both you and OP were using “PTSD” as a generic post-war/post-combat affliction, where that Fireside’s scope is the much more narrow, pharmasuitical jargon of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which might not even come from warfare.
Because of course people gets stressed from combat, and that stress can break their mind, or make them seek relief at the bottom of the barrel. That’s just being human. What is missing from the scribal record is the specific set of disorder that gets proscribed as PTSD (“persistent avoidance of trauma-inducing stimuli”, “flashbacks”, “involuntary reactions”…). Not that it didn’t happen, he noted of a passage describing a Epizelos exhibiting such symptoms with not-light amounts of salt, but it was a pin in a silo-sized haystack of scribes and poets describing the horrors (and horrific “heroism”) of war, unfiltered from modern sensibility.
Which contrasts to how many veterans, returning from the french tantrum in Vietnam or the lashback from the Levant recolonization etc., exhibit those symptoms, but says nothing on whether a prototypical Isekai village can Reccetear their way to infinite money through Taverns and Booze.
I’d be interested to hear you talk about Runequest or Glorantha, as it seems to do most of the things D&D does better, while also having more cultural and social realism than most.
With Glorantha, my problem with the Runequest edition I have a copy of is that it seems to expect you to play a DnD adventuring party likely made up of people from different nations but its commitment to historical plausibility creates a world where they basically shouldn’t exist. You’re supposed to have a character who is basically a clan’s military retainer or at least a person the clan can call up if there’s adventure-worthy trouble but there is no good mechanism to get them all into the same clan if they’re from different cultures a hundred miles apart.
I think the impact of magic on the society is underappreciated. Magic is in many ways like early technology; the society may be medieval on the surface but is closer to the early industrial revolution in practice. It’s not a parallel; more that it rhymes.
So, on one hand magic does not enable mass production – no factories churning out lots of stuff. Actual full-time wizards are rare. But the local wise woman has charms and potions against ailments, agricultural pests and misfortune that at least somewhat actually work. It’s reasonable to think that people are healthier and longer-lived; and agriculture and transport is more efficient and more reliable than the surface-level medieval technology would have you believe.
As a result the society would allow for more surplus, more wealth, and a larger number of people not working in the traditional primary professions, similar to the early industrialization. Having all kinds of specialists – including for problems caused by magic – isn’t far fetched.
Perhaps not – but both the Big Men and the mages themselves are likely to surmise that it becomes more of a force multiplier when concentrated. The latter would create guilds/circles/etc. whose key power would not just be training (as is usually the case in fiction where they exist), but the ability to deploy many members for a single person simultaneously. I.e. if the individual mages’ ability to cause rain (and vice versa) isn’t that strong, several dozen, deployed at a specific calendar, could well generate the kind of polity-wide agricultural surplus whose impacts would snowball with every year they are contracted/ordered to do so.
The flip side of that? Whoever controls these mages would likely soon become the primary employer of adventurers as well; in no small part because knowledge of the monsters would flow towards them. A properly run guild is very unlikely to let its members die (admittedly, if they are still subordinate to the local ruler, then a failson ascending to the throne and soon attempting to pave over failures by throwing prize assets into the fray is far from unlikely – even if that would sooner or later motivate a coup), so it would regain significant institutional knowledge and be able to replicate it via the written word; conversely, those who happened to learn something new about the monsters would know who to seek out to ensure their knowledge gets disseminated. Such a guild would always have the coin to pay rootless young people with a thirst for violence and sight-seeing; those who have issues with monsters would likewise know it’s better to head over there and let them handle the rest rather hoping to get lucky in a random tavern.
I suppose the above just reinvents the apparently-typical Japanese media adventure guild from first principles as far as “players who want to have an adventure” are concerned, but the implications for worldbuilding ought to be fairly different, in that city/state level contracts for utilitarian (generally) non-combat purposes would still most likely be the bread-and-butter of the guild, with the adventure stuff a side hustle…at least until it starts generating those city-killer-level heroes, I suppose.
P.S. Speaking of adventure guilds; I already linked to “FFProject” twice, so what’s one more time? Another short adventure*, which begins with the player having to compose a party to fulfil a dragon-slaying contract; but while you have five options, there are only three slots. Moreover, only one composition will work, and the others will soon lead to your demise – once in a genuinely amazing manner I would rather not spoil.
http://www.ffproject.com/ndr.htm
*Technically, a sequel of sorts to a much larger and more ambitious Outsider – though beyond a few recurring names, there’s virtually no other similarity, as one is urban dark fantasy that’s generally really serious and often reads more like an actual book, and the other is a very “DnDcore” parody. (Outsider is also much, much better in general – even if it’s far from perfect, with quite a number of things making virtually no sense by the end – especially if you attempt to pursue the true ending, rather than settling for one of the false (yet genuinely more satisfying) ones.)
Yes, though for most classical adventurer settings this becomes a bit of a problem for letting the players pick what they’re interested in, so I think it works better if noncombat utility magic is just rare enough that no one can secure a reliable supply of people who can use it to a meaningful degree and so you have court wizards and such who can help with some major problems and maybe a village can secure a cleric who can cast cure light wounds twice a day, but either there’s not enough to be worth sustaining a big guild or you have a Wheel of Time situation where they got together and made their own city that’s the only place you can get professional magical training and to do so you need to join an organization and they lend out their services to other nations on a limited basis in accordance with their organizational goals and make an effort to either conscript everyone who springs up with the talent or convince them to keep it on the down-low so as to neither provide competition nor make them look bad by association. In the Wheel of Time during the actual story due to a number of factors including a general decline in the number of women strong enough to be worth training and an increasingly bad international reputation they no longer have the ability to reliably recruit most people with potential and have let a significant if somewhat clandestine other organization run wild without having a real idea how many members it had, and societies outside the Westlands plus the Sea Folk have their own organizations that are more integrated with governments.
Alternatively there’s runequest where literally every adult has magic access, usually either for combat (in which case they are likely to be regularly called up as militia if they aren’t full-time professionals) or for their job. So farmers probably have plow magic and everyone has an earth goddess with crop growth magic and every society has a system for organizing and funding large-scale rituals (usually at Sacred Time, a two-week period considered outside the regular calendar in which most non-religious tasks are forbidden) to make sure they have enough to eat. And beyond the stuff that’s mechanically represented, everyone has broad access to low-level cantrips, so if you’re a society with horses you have a horse goddess who gives you horse magic that helps stay in the saddle. In Six Ages one of the offers in the wedding gift is horse magic secrets so the Rams can effectively ride horses, and you put up with the Pure Horse Tribe coming around demanding handouts because having them around makes your horse magic better.
“M. Arnheim’s Five Thousand Years of Monarchy (2025)”
I was sufficiently underwhelmed by the cursory level of analysis used to assert Athens was just a tyranny err monarchy with populist window dressing so no democracy to be found that I felt no need to read more.
Very glad to see a few people mention Chaucer – which seems very relevant – but I think silk road situations and stories (Wuxia literature is not as ‘tavern’ centric but does have them or their equivalents) is important to consider here as well.
A lot of specialists to be recruited on routes between or among population centers, particularly if at least some of the specialists have work that involves traveling out from population centers on the regular, and taverns are simply the ‘fishing hole’ where local problem-havers can set their hooks.
If you wanted to acculturate it further – you can have lots of local independent adventuring guilds (well as many as there are relevant big population centers) with a shared cultural assumption that ‘journeyman’ is a really literal aspect of attaining full master status.
You could even go further and speculate that some sort of adventurer caste ‘cursus honorum’ would have huge benefits for the cultures that could crank out even a handful of pro-social high-level types – so institutionalizing keeping your ‘likely-level-havers’ out on quest for significant parts of that cursus might serve the same function as sending likely-senate-possibles out with legions for a lot of their education.
“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?”
I think the answer is the same why military contractors didn’t become standing armies during their time. The governments only want to spend a sum of money to the contractors for the service, not recruiting, training, maintaining, commanding every soldiers themselves. So the amount of money spent will change depending of the current needs of the government, and unpaid regiments will be disbanded, while new regiments will be created for new contracts. It is easier to manage for the pre-modern governments than a fully state-controlled standing army. The “adventurers” would basically mercenaries.
Or, perhaps, monster hunters have such a low survivorship rate that it’s more financially and politically feasible to hire the veterans and let them see to finding and training their own apprentices, rather than setting up a monstrous regiment or guild.
Some of the other comments have touched on this, but I think that the relationship between the adventurers and the tavern changes substantially between level 0 or level 1 (strangers meet in a tavern) and the “level 8” noted in the text.
At low levels, a Old West saloon seems like a decent model. A place where you can hire people with a bit more propensity to take risk than normal (but who are fairly inexperienced) for your basic rats-in-basement problem, or transport job, or hijacking. Employers could easily be a small business (the tavern itself, shopkeeper bringing goods into town, mining interest supplying a camp, bandit gang) which might not need to be in more than a town. And the employers don’t need to know much about the employees/adventurers — stakes are low.
At moderate levels (what 5e D&D would call Tier 2), the adventurers should have a reputation with a wide footprint. If someone is within a month or two of trade travel of the adventurers, then I would expect that someone to be able to learn vague things about the party just by asking around — “anyone know where I might find a group who could deal with a small dragon problem?” would get enough travelers’ stories and caravan gossip to be able to send agents (maybe a low-level party) out to backtrace the stories. At these levels, the “meet in a tavern” story isn’t someone local looking for some thirsty nobodies; this is a regional big man (or their emissary) looking for a fairly specific group of adventurers, and finding the adventurers at their local pub.
The Broken Drum (sometimes Mended Drum) in Ankh-Morpork is another well-known fantasy tavern. Given that’s in early Discworld I take it that’s an indication that fantasy taverns with lots of adventurers in them were an established element of fantasy literature by the mid-eighties. D&D had been going for about nine years, but I don’t think the elements of fantasy specific to D&D would yet have been well-established enough to be worth parodying.
The Mended Drum isn’t a fantasy recruitment spot, though. It’s a different trope – the Bad Guy Bar in the Bad Part of Town.
(It was originally the Broken Drum because “you can’t beat it,” but it was renamed the Mended Drum because “you can get beaten.”)
I thought it became the Mended Drum because it was burned down down by its owner in a case of insurance fraud in the first novel, and rebuilt afterwards.
I was going to say that The Black Lobster, which I mentioned earlier, was probably inspired by that – and the city it’s located in, Port Blacksand, probably parallels Ankh-Morpork…until I checked the timeline, and lo and behold, the City of Thieves, which is where that tavern was featured canonically (the online thing with the same title I linked being a fan spin-off) was actually published 2 months (and 23 days) before the initial Discworld novel with Ankh-Morpork. Who knew!
P.S. Perhaps an apotheosis of the Bad Guy Bar trope occurs in this Outsider gamebook. The main character is an assassin (much of the story progresses from contract to contract – though you can technically refuse any of them, even if you obviously won’t get the true ending from skipping on the plot-critical ones) whose fixer resides in a tavern called the Pied Cow – and apparently, so do all the other assassins of the city. (They also have a code of honor forbidding each other from fighting in this tavern – if you are thinking John Wick, this is much older.)
Out of the various plot holes in that (otherwise remarkable, if still very “genre”) work, the greatest has to be how come the city authorities (whose true nature is not what it seems) never shut it down, even as they otherwise go to open war on the assassins across the fairly long story. (To give an idea of how long – the downloadable version you could print and play like the original examples of the genre is almost 100k words long, if that tells you anything – though the digital version ought to be somewhat shorter by skipping all the technical instruction text like dice roll instructions or “flip over to 174”. And of course, a lot of that length is due to its substantial non-linearity.)
http://www.ffproject.com/outsider.htm
P.P.S. According to the credits (in the aforementioned downloadable version), one of the playtesters for that story is Mayavan Thevendra – who appears to have also been an artist at Lionhead (the onetime developer of Fable high-fantasy RPGs, before Microsoft shut them down after ordering them to do a MOBA (“DOTA/League of Legends clone”) in that setting, whose costs ballooned to the point they didn’t even bother to release it.) Small world!
If you are familiar with Japanese fantasy or isekai light novels, manga, or games, their settings pretty much have an “Adventurers’ Guild” that is employed by the local authority and whose main purpose is handing out contracts for pacifying nearby monsters and whatnot. All the adventurers – i.e., bounty hunters – in the region then just go to the front desk of the Guild seeking contracts, commissions, and payments, and that is where most of the stories and plots are happening.
This image of the Adventurers’ Guild is so popular in Japan that the “front desk lady” is now a *stock character* in Japanese fantasy works.
There are even Japanese light novels or manga that portray the Guild as a bureaucratic or corporate organization that directly employs a semi-standing army of bounty hunters, essentially a military order or East India Company-style institution.
As a result, many Japanese fantasy works will treat Guilds and taverns as very different institutions; the latter is usually just a normal bar or pub.
Returning to NAM Rodgers and the Georgian Navy, contra Brett, it seems pretty radical for its time – careers open to merit, intensely interested in innovation (and prepared to fund it), harsh on unprofessional conduct while tolerant of eccentricity. Coppering, new sails, iron water tanks, cures for scurvy, the world’s first automated interchangeable parts production line, hydrographics, experiments with food preservation, carronades … a tradition that continued well into the 20th century (turbines, hydrodynamics, fire control, torpedoes, submarines ..)
I’m going to defend the tavern in a village or small town as the starting point for an RPG adventure: it’s the safest place for the local lord / Big Man / village council to meet with the adventurers. Sure they are “monster slayers” and being recruited to perform some socially useful service (well, for the humans, the kobolds won’t see it that way). But another way of looking at the typical adventuring party is that they are professional armed robbers.
Do you really want to invite people like that into your own mansion or richly furnished temple? Give them a good look at all your wealth and defences? I don’t think so, not straight away. So meet them in a tavern where’s nothing much to tempt them, and plenty of witnesses.
“ . . .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.”
One context in which it *did* routinely exist in Europe, at least since the Middle Ages and continuing to the present day, is the “wandering journeyman” system, in which aspirant craftsmen had first to complete an apprenticeship which was validated by their local guild, then as journeymen were obligated to spend several years travelling, getting work in different places to widen their knowledge. Wherever they went they had to check in with the local guild for their craft and present their credentials (which might be in the form of written documents, or signs/passwords) to be allowed to work, and be helped to find lodgings, or admitted to the journeymen’s hostel run either by that craft guild or collectively by that town’s guilds.
Possibly the most elaborate form of this tradition is the still live-and-kicking ‘compagnonnage’ system of France, in which the ‘Compagnon du Devoir’, having already completed an approved apprenticeship, is issued with a certificate, a sash and a walking stick and sent off to complete a ‘Tour de France’ which lasts several years, working as a journeyman in different cities while staying at compagnonnage hostels, each of which is run by a ‘mère‘ (mother) or maîtresse (mistress).
I don’t know if there are any games which use this perfectly genuine phenomenon as a basis – ‘journeyman adventurers from all over the continent, travelling to acquire the qualifications for mastership, meet at the guild hostel and are hired for an assignment which successfully completed will tick off a specific requirement’ – but it surely could work.
“One context in which it *did* routinely exist in Europe, at least since the Middle Ages and continuing to the present day, is the “wandering journeyman” system, in which aspirant craftsmen had first to complete an apprenticeship which was validated by their local guild, then as journeymen were obligated to spend several years travelling, getting work in different places to widen their knowledge. Wherever they went they had to check in with the local guild for their craft and present their credentials (which might be in the form of written documents, or signs/passwords) to be allowed to work, and be helped to find lodgings, or admitted to the journeymen’s hostel run either by that craft guild or collectively by that town’s guilds.
Possibly the most elaborate form of this tradition is the still live-and-kicking ‘compagnonnage’ system of France, in which the ‘Compagnon du Devoir’, having already completed an approved apprenticeship, is issued with a certificate, a sash and a walking stick and sent off to complete a ‘Tour de France’ which lasts several years, working as a journeyman in different cities while staying at compagnonnage hostels”
For one thing, note that it´s doubling as BOTH education AND labour mobility.
The guilds commonly had a choice to give the wandering journeyman a job (for some weeks to months) – or give him a short stay at their cost and a small sum of money to move on.
Fitting the fluctuating demand for crafts. A town guild that faced a boom demand retained the passing journeymen. When the guild faced a bust demand, the journeymen were sent on, for the towns that did have the demand.
Paying for passing journeymen when there was no work for them and the masters themselves were underemployed was insuring the system and the town guild´s membership in the system.
And now compare knights errant.
To be a knight errant and go on a Grand Tour doubled as education AND finding jobs for underemployed mercenaries.
If a young nobleman with too many brothers and peace at home (like, oh, the Hautevilles) travelled abroad and made short stints as mercenary then he did:
*get paid as a mercenary, not needing to be supported at home
*learned geography, foreign languages and methods of warfare
*earn a reputation
*gained a network of friends/allies in distant places
So if and when he came back:
*he had had military experience, which he would not have had in home at peacetime
*and his knowledge was more diverse than he might have gained by engaging in purely local endemic warfare at home
*and his qualities were testified to by outside witnesses
Thus the local lord could more confidently invest in giving the returned knight permanent employment, land or wife.
And the knight errant might return with a treasure, in which case he could directly participate in the investment
Alternatively, the knight might not come back but stay abroad, and use the training and qualifications to get the permanent employment from a foreign lord. Like the aforesaid Hautevilles did.
Thank you for highlighting the trade in stolen ancient artefacts and helping pit another grain of sand against its endless river…
I once used a variant of “You all meet in a tavern” and instead turned it into “You all meet in a jail cell.” That gave the adventurers a feeling of community (“We don’t like to be here”) and united them in purpose (“Let’s get out of here.”) The fact that the city they were in was under siege and on fire added incentive. It worked fine.
The reason tavern is in a small town or village is legacy. Adventurers in old D&D were not mercenaries or monster hunters, they were looters, grave robbers. They worked for themselves and no one else, they didn’t usually take quests. So if you wanted to find such people, you went to a small tavern on the frontier.
And D&D is still very often a game about grave robbers, only now someone gives them a question to do so. Which leads to these problems.
*a quest to do so.
I rarley player DnD toomuch about it made sense as someone you practes some the skills involved and who studied history. So prefered other systems, which had issues but not on the same scale.
A “tavern” where travellers and by extention, where “adventurers” would go and meet.
The trope of a random group of strangers meeting, never made sense, how did they get there, who did they travel with, because travel would be dangeorus, why arent you with at least some of them?
Working out connections. People you know or met.
Of course DnD etc. Too often forces a groupnof Lvl 1 characters to start together, like the first day of school.
🤷♀️
Narratively the 7 Samuari works better with mix of old and youngk experience. People who know each other personally or by reputation. All of which makes for a more intersting narrative.
Like the Royal Navy book, dealing not just with what happens but who makes it happen and what made them who they are.
I never unserstood. Thieves or Marcenary Guilds. Those professions seem antithical to the way a Guild functioned.
Konosuba has a funny justification for why the adventurer’s guild is a tavern – monsters are edible! And also provide bonus XP when you eat them. The guild provides the valuable service of hauling a dead monster home and cooking meals from it. Which also means that quests can end with everyone coming home and having a big party at the guild, enhancing the cozy vibes.
(Kingdom of Loathing has a similar gag where “meat” is the main currency of the realm, to explain why monsters drop money.)
It also has a gag where Kazuma joins the guild, and then immediately realizes that there aren’t any convenient “kill ten rats” jobs where he can grind XP, so he has to get work as a day laborer instead. Just because you’ve got a guild card and a stats screen doesn’t automatically make you a violence specialist!
That last part sounds like another work of Japanese media; the video game No More Heroes, published five years before KonoSuba. Hopeless otaku loser Travis Touchdown at first assumes he made it when the laser katana he got on eBay allows him to murder one of the top-ranking assassins (who lives in a luxurious mansion and much of the boss fight is filled with Travis’ internal monologue dreaming of living that kind of life) – but then the fees for subsequent fights far outnumber the rewards, and he has to do more regular contract assassinations – but the initiation into one requires being tested via a more conventional job (though the game being what it is, “more conventional” is still a minigame of limited authenticity.)
I think you gave a near perfect justification for the fantasy tavern there. When there is a persistent monster problem too significant for one or two wondering monster slayer craft specialists, I think you would expect the minor aristocrat to head to the nearest lodging and begin recruiting enough wandering specialists to deal with the problem, who would then want to stay at an inn and so would meet there.