Make campaign
>Demons are actually evil and not just misunderstood.
>The God of the setting is benevolent and the clergy is trustworthy
>Villages are well cared for population centers with happy families and strong traditions
>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
>Local monsters are ugly malformed beasts with either little intelligence or malicious nature.
>Men and women are hardworking and loyal
>Burning witches is 100% justified as they often invoke evil spirits which even if controlled end up corrupting the summoner
Anyway, roll up a character. We're going monster hunting.
Remember not to drink too much ale, its good to be sober in a fight.
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>This campaign
Great meme, great for the thread, but the timing is off.
related
>Men and women are hardworking and loyal
That's not the medieval utopia I was promised
I prefer working only 120 days a year, with frequent breaks, in easy jobs, like medieval peasants actually lived.
They also had free healthcare and all lived in castles with a harem of beautiful virgins to cater to their every whim.
Yes.
Farming is not an easy job.
yeah it is
Not interested. Pretty cool campaign otherwise.
Why brown people in the forest?
Brown people being sequestered almost exclusively deep in large forest is very cool.
>frogposter is moronic.
Do you people get tired of being a stereotype?
At this point, the moronic 'subverting expectations' is the sterotype, so doing something straight is now subversive. It has come full circle.
Not true. It was common to work at a leisurely pace even during the 4 hours a day you did work.
So... the only thing to do in this campaign is kill monsters? A combat slog? There's no chance for roleplay encounters or moral dilemmas or interesting choices beyond how we kill the monsters this week?
I'll wait for the next campaign.
You could also do great deeds, but I wouldn't expect a demoralized weakling to understand what that means, let alone how to roleplay it. You aren't welcome.
What great deeds?
Great deeds like killing monsters, the only source of conflict in the campaign? There's a reason these childish settings are used for video games and not tabletop games.
Sorry you have no imagination.
>kill monsters
>navigate dangerous areas
>disarm traps
>solve puzzles
>kill bigger monsters
>explore
>get ebin loot
>ugh. BORING
Wrong board
>Kill monsters
>Hunt bandits
>Dismantle crime syndicates
>Search for lost treasures
>Rescue lost people
>Battle witches and their foul demonic masters
Did you even read the setting document?
>Villages are well cared for population centers with happy families and strong traditions
>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
>Men and women are hardworking and loyal
Nobody becomes a bandit or starts a crime syndicate under these circumstances. Monsters have no use for treasure and there wouldn't be much of it anyway since there's little status posturing that needs doing when you have nobles focused on keeping people prosperous and healthy. If you said monsters kidnapped people, that at least might have been believable, but that's still just a "go out and kill" quest. Boring, mindless hacking and slashing is best left to video games.
>Nobody becomes a bandit or starts a crime syndicate under these circumstances.
False
The losers who can't exist in polite society get banished and form bandit camps
They get hunted down by real men.
Why not pre-emptively kill all non-conformists? The only thing we don't tolerate is intolerance, right? The nail that stands out gets hammered?
That might be something the adventure party finds in another town.
It would be interesting to see how they deal with it.
Maybe a group of people will try and pay them for safe passage out of the township
Because that wouldn't be consistent with the tone of unironic Lawful Good the setting is very clearly going for. Non-comformists might end up committing crimes, true, but they might also straighten up with age and wisdom, or simply live as hermits doing harm to none (and potentially acting as sources of information for players and society alike). If you kill them pre-emptively for crimes they haven't yet committed then that's at the absolute best pragmatic villainy.
This is actually interesting. How would you write an interesting story with moral dilemmas, intrigue, and ambiguity in such a setting
hard mode: no massive conspiracy where the king / nobles / clergy were ackshyually evil all along
Invasion plans by neighboring countries.
Cloak and dagger spy stuff
Sabotage plots like foreign agents poisoning wells or collapsing iron mines.
Witch covens summoning demons
Monster lairs getting population surges
Use. Your. Imagination.
Moral dilemma: demon is possessing a valiant prince who went to slay it. Finding a way to break the possession without killing him would mean that he has time to kill more, but killing him would surely shatter the kingdom's morale as well as break his father's heart.
>intrigue
Can't be done without just making it demons since everyone is a goody two-shoes, unless you really get excited about town hall meetings where people disagree on how to fund a new bridge in the park.
>ambiguity
Can't be done as there is no room for people to behave ambiguously, unless you resort to le demon possession.
Constant politicking? Look at King Arthur's Camelot, it was a hotbed of intrigue even though most of the people were well-intentioned.
Hell, look at the Jedi Council! This was an institutionally good organization, where EVERY member of the Council was honestly, earnestly doing their very best to keep Galactic Order...And they got sucked into a galactic war anyway.
The Jedi Council situation requires that the government - i.e. the nobility/upper class - be full of scheming corrupt buttholes what would welcome fascism if it meant more space yachts for them, so that doesn't really work here.
The Jedi also had some fairly unambiguously evil buttholes among them, like Ki-Adi-Mundi.
>it doesn't matter how many people i soviet to death throwing them at the enemy
>it doesn't matter how many civvies my actions kill
>it's all within the will of Force so it's cool
>also because we're all extensions of the Force, i have no culpability for my actions
>i'm just a tool for the Force to work through, can't blame me
>let me just sit back on my high seat in one of the greatest organizations in the planet with my harem of wives
>btw don't let anakin in, i have a feeling that he fricks
Why would I want ambiguity, commie? Killing evil is its own reward.
Spit-balling here, but how about using the Players themselves?
Have their decisions slowly ripple out and occasionally create anomalies within the setting - not necessarily negative, but events disruptive to its regular function that wouldn't arise in isolation.
You could try to do something meta with it, have the PCs being separate entities to the Players. As in, one day the PCs wake up with this foreign entity, this OUTSIDER, influencing their actions - have conflict arise from that.
Maybe tie these ideas together, maybe being burdened with this Outsider, causes their actions to carry absurd portance. Disrupting the balance of their idyllic world of tradition and simple virtue and warping the aeon-storied rules and tropes that their world rotated upon and changing it into *something else*.
You'd probably need to be quite a skilled GM and storyteller to make such a set-up work satisfyingly.
Because there are two types of moral ambiguity
“There’s no black and white, everything is grey because everyone is evil and a dick” is edgy, but is pretty old these days- GRRM didn’t go too overboard, but the GRRM copycats didn’t understand the nuance and most media these days just has every character be a murdering butthole for no reason, just for “muh morally grey”
But the more interesting type is where things are grey because all sides have decent motivations and are good people interacting with their comrades- but they’re acting in the interests of themselves and their families, and those interests are clashing with someone else
Make it Christians vs Muslims. They worship the same God but under a different name and religion. There are plenty of stories and scenarios that can arise from that alone. A setting that fluctuates between Medieval Europe, the Levant and Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and Russia is always awesome if done right. Especially because now you can use regional mythologies from those real world counterparts as inspiration for your encounters
Heroes vs rapist savages. I like it.
It's not nice to call Christians that, but if you're going to do so, at least be accurate and call them rapist pedophiles.
>hey worship the same God but under a different name and religion.
Debunked and not true
Well... if the name is different and the religion is different then that could be fundamentally true for any form of worship.
>A succession crisis leads to a civil war, no secret evil demon worshiping required
>A nearby empire has sent spies to sow unrest among the peasantry
>The Church has excommunicated a powerful duke for the sin of blasphemy, the king has stripped the duke of his lands and titles but the duke has raised his knights and men-at-arms in rebellion and defiance
>A barbarian horde is raiding along the kingdom's borders
>An evil hag is brainwashing/ensorcelling people to do her bidding
>An evil spirit was trapped in a tree but it's pretending to be a good spirit unjustly cursed
>An dragon that has been terrorizing the kingdom dwells in a mountain atop a pile of gold, he claims the king's ancestor drove him out of his original den when he was still a baby and the gold he's been collecting is just the money rightfully owed him
You can just keep going on and on and on, man
Men and women are hardworking and loyal criminals. No contradiction.
Sounds like someone's still bitter over the Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings has tons of corrupt humans wo aren't wise rulers. It's a defining fact of the setting that shapes the story immensely.
Yeah, but most of them were trying their best. It takes supernatural manipulation or shattering personal tragedy to make them really corrupt, but Middle Earth still has plenty of threats.
Most people IRL are trying their best. We still end up with a shitshow.
>Instead of doing epic quests to save the world and protect the perfect world in which we live, I instead want to spend each session arguing over the moral implications of what to do with a surrendering goblin!
You are what's wrong with the current player base.
"Epic quests" that only concern themselves with climbing a mountain and slaying a troll are not epic at all. They are bags of XP for an MMO.
>he wants to judge what is possible by the pathetic metric of what is possible for him
Just cut to the fricking chase and claim every quest ends in suicide
It doesn't matter how many steps you have when the only obstacles that can exist are "kill the monster" and "cross the difficult terrain," there is nothing there to care about. It's completely binary. There are no decisions to be made. Go over there and kill that thing, that's your epic quest. There's never anything else wrong in the world, no sense of wonder or mystery.
It won't matter how many posts you make when the result will be that I am happy and you are sad.
must really piss you off that you would be the troll getting righteously murdered, huh israelite?
There are more than enough moral quandaries and sympathetic foes in real life. I long for a foe I can fight simply because he is definitionally evil
I'm sorry you haven't reached enlightenment yet.
You need an invading horde of sub-human barbarians who are simultaneously weak and pathetic, but also an existential threat to civilization.
Read Ur-Fascism for a more comprehensive outline of the setting.
Medieval Europe was in now way fascist. Hell, they didn’t even have the technology or sociological development to be fascist.
What OP is describing is not medieval europe, though.
It's how a fascist would portray (lie about) their medieval past, "before they took it from us!!!"
Fascism is not a reactionary position you mong. It's social progressivism on crack.
>15 posts
>5 posters
I roll to run 360 degrees and leave
Really putting the fantasy into fantasy rpg, right here.
Looks like a masturbatory exercise of subversion motivated by politics and contrarianism. Not interested, sorry.
Beat me to it. If there'd been a wheelchair reference I'd have had a bingo.
How do you figure?
>askually, playing to type is suvursib and contraryn and childish and
Shut the frick up.
Playing to what type? This isn’t a setting that exists anywhere.
You're fricking stupid
You would know about subversion seeing as your types have been doing it for years in the opposite direction.
You forgot the best bit:
>The holy order of the setting are also the biggest bankers of the region, and end up getting killed by the king for the sin of usury
Not a problem as usury is already illegal
Which means the church is breaking its own laws.
Why don't you actually run this campaign instead of just fantasizing about it and posting here?
Okay I'm going to play as a pirate.
>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
Even for a fantasy setting this is simply too farfetched and unbelievable.
>grrrrrr I'm going to be a dickheaded butthole for no reason because I'm RICH
gay.
That's the attitude required to get and maintain riches, yes.
work harder, lazy fricktard
>the people who earned the wealth and built the empire die
>the whole thing gets inherited by their dickhead kids
that's how hereditary government has always worked. there isn't one royal family in history which hasn't institutionally fricked kids, engaged in recreational torture, or ended up as inbred mutants
You do understand that the rich nobles are historically the only people with any access to education, either secular or moral, and that their reputation for being dickheads is a combination of libellous propaganda from their political opponents and a case of the leadership always catching all the shit whenever anything goes wrong, yeah?
I mean of course you don't, you're one of the libelers yourself.
He probably doesn't even know that the Goths were the most magnanimous heroic warrior kings in European history and thinks they were all naked arsonists.
Literally no one likes nobles. Not the peasants, not the king, not the citymen, not the burghers, not the clergy.
No one likes nobles.
>"I am everyone"
Yeah okay bud. You're not even SOMEone.
Black person you have never opened a history book
>being this eager to lick the boot
Personally I don't want to lick billionaires' boots, and when today's investor class tells me that nobles were awful, I look at the sheer sociopathic evil of the investor class and have to doubt their claims of the nobility really being that bad.
>these boots are bad to lick.
>mmmm these boots are just right.
Bootlickers are pathetic.
nta but you probably lick gommie boots
don't talk the way you do unless you lick my boots(the best boots)
Pathetic post, have a nice day
>You do understand that the rich nobles are historically the only people with any access to education, either secular or moral
Not true at all, unless your definition of education is extremely limited. Everybody knew how to speak, for one. Everyone learned the social requirements of their location, for another. Then there's all the knowledge associated with tradesmen and other skilled laborers. There's also learning the gospels and hymns at church, folktales at bedtime, and oh yeah, what about universities? You're a fricking moron.
Well-off Nobles had access to libraries worth of knowledge from both ancient and contemporary sources, and had the money and time to bring in private tutors in instruction in various fields. Everyone had basic social knowledge, but that's not the same thing as actual education and you know that. You can't be an effective leader and diplomat in the political game just from knowing the social dynamics of your peasant village, you need to learn history, geography, languages and customs, theology and philosophy at least at a basic level. Then there's all the practical and martial concerns of travel and warfare, which entire noble institutions were built around.
Some peasants were quite well-traveled and experienced because of their trade or participation in wars, etc. but that wasn't intentionally cultivated among the peasantry.
>What about universities
Who do you think was going to universities, anon? Until the rise of the skilled middle class in late medieval/early renaissance days, they would have been attended entirely by the clergy, many of whom were second sons of noble families.
Really? You've checked all of them?
Yes.
Woah cool it with the anti-semitism
>that’s how hereditary government has always worked
That’s just silly, because you’re saying that any monarchy is only good for one generation. The strength and weakness of a hereditary system is that your rulers will be “average” people in that their character and values don’t determine whether or not they inherit power. A new king could be just or sadistic, a warrior or a scholar. So yes, you will inevitably have incompetent or malicious rulers- but you’ll also get rulers who are the opposite. Look at the history of feudal Europe. For every evil tyrant, there is a king who genuinely loves and cares for his people, and most of them fall somewhere in between those extremes, neither exceptionally good or bad. Many of history’s greatest kings inherited power, and many of the worst tyrants were the ones who established the system
The issue with your proposal is that ultimately the king will be more likely to be evil then good, because kings (and ANY sort of ruling class) are going to be raised and educated to believe that they are inherently more valuable and important then the plebs below them. That they hold the power because they deserve it. And this is a mindset incredibly conductive to abuses of power.
Why would they be raised to believe that, and not to think of rulership as a duty?
Because it's not in the ruling class' interests? The modern corporate plutocrats, the 19th century Whigs, and the "superior men" of Hammurabi's day all sold themselves on versions of this concept.
When you've clawed yourself into that kind of position of privilege, you either find a reason why everyone else can't do what you did, some reasoning to tell you why you are innately more worthy and more important than the powerless commoners you can tread on.
If you don't do that, you will not be able to sleep at night. Because if you clawed your way to power and claimed the spot at the top from whoever was there before, what's stopping somebody else from clawing their way to YOUR spot, too?
>be the only people with any sort of education
>be told you're more important because you are the only person with any sort of education and must use that education to lead everyone else
>choose to be a dumbass despite your education
>this is an inherent flaw in the system
The issue is not that they're going to be a dumbass, but an amoral frickhead. If you are raised since birth to believe you are inherently Better then everyone else- the prosperity gospel, or great man theory, or divine right, or whatever it's calling itself this time- you are not going to take the well being of other people nearly as much as you take your own. If a king has to choose between a slightly less luxurious palace and a few commoners not dying of hunger, do you actually and genuinely think they're going to choose the person who, according to the worldview they were taught to believe, matters less then themselves?
>you are not going to take the well being of other people nearly as much as you take your own
This is just a backwards-looking assertion based on your experiences and perspective on modern people. Modern people are of a totally different moral orientation than pre-Modern peoples, due to the decay of traditional religious morality and the atomization of personal relationships.
Were there dickheaded aristocrats pre-Modernity? Sure. Were there also generally moral, levelheaded aristocrats in the same time period? Evidently so, or their entire way of life predicated on aristocratic rule by divine right wouldn't have lasted for thousands of years. Arguably modern elites have turned into what they are today - amoral, self-centered narcissists - because they lost that connection to a greater moral duty and divine right/obligation.
That is true, but it also produces professional leaders who are likely to take pride in their work of maintaining a successful state. But we can also compare it to the alternative that we currently have. Our ruling class are rulers mostly because they managed to fight their way to that position, either in business or politics, and by every known metric the people who commit to those single-minded pursuits of power are usually sociopaths. While we have freed ourselves from the possibility of being ruled by a petulant 14 year old, the cost is that almost all of our rulers are sociopaths in their 50s-80s. Neither of these systems are perfect, but I also don’t think either is inherently better than the other
I disagree. Ultimately, there's an issue that our modern system doesn't have nearly as much- the ruling class doesn't have it guaranteed. With a king, it doesn't even pass through their head that the commoners could be a meaningful threat, and neither do the commoners think they could upturn the system. Some obviously do, but that's not the norm.
In our system, the leaders need to pay attention. The fact that they are just the guys who won the rat race keeps them in their toes, because ultimately they know that every commoner they see in the street and every other employee of their company could be the one that will kill them. The rulers KNOW the lower class is a threat, and the lower class has, for all the talk of NPCs, a much greater awareness of their own power then they have in any other system. For as whipped as the average American is, not everyone is like that aroundd the entire world, and even they think they could one day take their boss' place. They're probably wrong. But the boss has also been raised to believe that at any moment someone could take their place. This is unthinkable in a monarchy.
> the ruling class doesn't have it guaranteed.
Sweet summer child. You are so so wrong. Open a history book. They are filled with succession wars and break away states. You think these things could happen without the support of the subjects?
>In our system, the leaders need to pay attention
In our system you could have a perfectly legitimate government with just the support of just 20% of the population exactly because the masses are duped into believing they have a choice, or no choice for that matter. Do you think a feudal king could rule if he only had the support of 20% of the population? Some third cousin would rally the populace and stage revolt in a heartbeat.
>I think it makes more sense to see the king as a warlord.
Kings depended entirely on nobles for military support.
>Sweet summer child. You are so so wrong. Open a history book. They are filled with succession wars and break away states. You think these things could happen without the support of the subjects?
Generally speaking, yes. It might be just a technology thing, to be completely fair, but I doubt your average peasant was all that updated in international affairs enough to support anyone at all.
You may imagine the average feudal peasant as some goat herder living in a community of 35 cousins but cities existed back then, travel and trade existed. You don't get to manage empires that span the Mediterranean sea and further without a communications system.
Cities generally tended to favor republican systems, since a wealthier, more educated, better armed population tends to have a lot more bargaining power. It wasn’t uncommon for the rural villages the be ruled over by nobles, the cities to be republics, and for the combined lot of them to be ruled over by a king.
You just as often see that rulership is a duty and obligation. Noblesse oblige, basically. The core idea behind monarchy in the first place is that a ruler has his title because he is expected to serve his subjects as their defender and steward. The king is king because he kills lions that get into the town.
Now, obviously that isn't always the case, but it's also not always the case that a ruler is brought up with the perspective that he is necessarily better and more deserving than his subjects. That's a very modern western perspective, because we're brought up with a very individualistic, egalitarian, free minded perspective. Not a perspective in which people are born with a duty that they are obligated to follow. Even if that duty is that you have to be willing to die to protect your subjects.
This is all just to say that it is trivially easy to imagine a scenario in which a king is instilled with the values that he is obligated to care for his subjects because it's his duty, just like you can easily imagine a king raised to be a stuckup prick.
Sounds fun, are there guns?
If so I will play a world weary witch hunter who takes great joy in defending the common man from the evils of the world and if not I will play the son of a smith who took up one of the blades he made to defend his home before being dragged into greater conflicts
>are there guns?
Yes but they are 1 shot per turn and you spend 1 turn reloading.
Armor piercing attacks
Small chance for misfire
Smaller chance for catastrophic misfire
Wet conditions will mean your powder does not work.
>1 shot per turn and spend 1 turn reloading
I guess I shall simply need a brace of pistols then, and a strong arm and stout blade for when the powder and shot run dry
>I guess I shall simply need a brace of pistols then, and a strong arm and stout blade for when the powder and shot run dry
Based and privateer pilled.
Your nogames setting sounds fricking boring and over idealistic. Consider suicide
I dunno, I kind of dig it. To be fair I'm a fan of Pendragon, but there's something refreshing about not going down the deconstructionist rabbit hole.
It makes me think of classic, old-school fantasy stuff. Sort of like the Wheel of Time books versus the awful adaptation.
Ah yes, the Arthurian Mythos, a setting definitely not full of scheming lords and royal court drama. Wheel of Time doubly so
That's the thing. Drama.
There was a lot of intrigue, but both settings had an objectively 100% evil faction that is never really ambiguous in any way.
The objective was to unite everyone to kick its teeth in.
Except that doesn't happen in OP's setting because it's a brain dead utopia.
I mean, you had the Traitor Son six-book series that was exactly this, and it covered almost as much ground as ASoIAF
All of my characters are human men that use two-handed swords. Take your strawman and shove it up your ass
Cool setting anon. Shit thread though.
What about nonhumans that aren't monsters?
>nonhumans that aren't monsters
you mean monsters?
No, that's why I said "aren't monsters". Even Tolkien had non-humans that weren't monsters.
Careful, anon. If you remind OP that politics is the discipline of assigning limited resources on the basis of competitive ideological theories then he'll go leave shitposting and he won't get to keep pretending that stories have no agendas.
stories don't have agendas, sorry
>this setting
Anon any setting with a obvious "good guy" and obvious "bad guy" is honestly SHIT.
>demons
Are only truly dangerous when they can lie, subvert, cheat, or otherwise cause good men to do nothing to stop them.
>local nobles
Are human.
>men and women
Are human.
>burning witches
WHO determines "witchcraft"?
3/10 get better setting.
If witchcraft can only be accessed by devil worship, it's evil by definition. It's like if the setting's rules are "Yeah, necromancy is inherently corruptive, necromancers all end up necrophilic sociopaths", it's pretty logical for people to go "It's a god damn necromancer, torch his ass."
if you practice witchcraft, you're a witch. it's observed, not determined.
all such settings are objectively superior, rather.
>WHO determines "witchcraft"?
The scale. If she weights less than a duck she is a witch. Burn her.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hDyZNvJjVIA
>Anon any setting with a obvious "good guy" and obvious "bad guy" is honestly SHIT.
>Remember not to drink too much ale, its good to be sober in a fight.
This made me think, a sanity /stress mechanic in dark fantasy where normal men really do rely on alcohol to get them through dealing with monsters would be cool. Especially once you throw drunk mage shenanigans into the mix.
I fricking love all of the absolute seething the mere suggestion of righteousness causes in the petty evil trash who post here. Glorious.
Anon, the entire op is one huge seethe.
To deny the flaws of human nature is to deny humanity. Why deny the corruption inherent to man? Why pretend like the past was a mythical age of morality and rightceousness when we all know it clearly wasn't?
no one's pretending anything. fantasy isn't reality. it's better.
This (
).
Romanticism is a legitimate form of fiction.
Displaying what one feels the world ought to be rather than relying on stark realism or brutally nihilistic premonitions.
Culture warrior thread.
Sounds fun, I'll play. And I'll bring some beer.
Rolled 12, 3, 15, 16, 11, 12 = 69 (6d20)
Forgot to roll.
Alright, bumbling wizard it is.
Ingold Inglorian was certainly no bumbling wizard!
>D&D
>d&d
Marxist class consciousness? Mate if you look at like 90% of european myth a noble is always the bad guy. The king is usually the good guy, but the nobles? Almost always potrayed as wicked.
And it makes sense. Kings have a divine right to rule, of course the people would be in favor of them. Nobles on the ither hand? Nobles just happened to own that particular plot of land.
No one ever, EVER liked nobles. The peasantry hated them for taxing them to high hell, the king hated then for being rebellious and power-hungry, the merchants and burghers hated them for fricking up their trade with their blood feud war autism, the clergy hated them for acting uppity and thinking they were above the priests, no one fricking liked nobles.
Why does a slave revolt need to be successful in order to show people weren't happy with the ruling class? Also, Haiti.
>kings/nobles are shitty leaders and/or immoral
>peasants revolt
>somehow manage to not immediately be shitslapped
>peasants pick a new king and nobles who won't be such poor leaders and moral figures
>continue on being peasants
"WTF what do you mean CLEARLY the peasants hated the oppressive patriarchy!" lmfao
You're missing a few steps on the chart here.
You're high off your ass comparing peasant rebellions to the cyclical rise and downfall of Empires.
You're the one who brought up the peasants replacing the nobility and king not me.
That isn't how a single Empire ever fell except France, and nobody on the planet would argue the French peasants were morally or logistically more capable of running their own country.
Empires typically fall to the standards and morals of the population rotting from within, especially once the plebes who have no real access to education get their hands on government functions.
Feudal and Imperial societies survived dynastic changes or crises of succession all the time specifically because the populace preferred stability over individual right to rule.
>France before the Revolution was a stagnant empire whose power over the world was quickly diminishing
>France after the Revolution literally conquered Europe
Idk
Napoleon conquered Europe. His empire collapsed the nanosecond he died. He also had nothing to do with the revolution or revolutionary government whatsoever.
The French made huge gains across Europe before Napoleon took control. They were already well established in Belgium/netherlands, Spain, the rhine, and northern Italy.
>napoleon had nothing to do with the revolution or revolutionary government whatsoever
Except the fact that he was in it.... he was the commander of the interior.
What the frick are you talking about? There have been fricking thousands of peasant revolts across history. The fact that they were all failures is irrelevant, the peasants clearly didn't like the nobles, and clearly REALLY didn't like shitty nobles, which, a lot of them were.
What the frick are you talking about? The kings were the ones usually shown as pious and rightceous. The nobles, as in, the land owning elite that wasn't the king and his immediate family, they were potrayed as bad.
In my own country, Romania, you're more likely to find a boyar being the villain of a fairy tale than a dragon.
You do understand that fairy tales are impactful and constructive to their original audience because they talk about notable or unusual circumstances and teach some kind of lesson, right?
Obviously nobody - especially in pre-literate oral traditions - is telling the story of Duke John the Acceptable who maintained a sensible tax policy, had a few good tilts against the pagans and died in his sleep.
I don't think you understand. I have never, ever seen a fairy tale of any eastern european country that had a boyar be a good guy. Ever.
The king? Usually the good guy, sometimes bad but 9/10 times good. The boyars? Always bad.
Okay, and? You think that's a solid foundation for understanding real world history? Seriously?
No, obviously, but it is a foundation to what the peasants THOUGHT of the nobles. Am I saying that all nobles were corrupt pieces of shit? No. But the overwhelming perception the people had of them was that they were bad.
We also know for a fact the nobles and the king hated and conspired against each other 9/10 times, we know that the merchants and burghers bickered with the nobles 9/10 times too, and we know the clergy didn't like them too much either.
Therefore, my earlier statement is still true. No one liked the nobles.
You've been memed into swallowing revisionist political propaganda. You believe that peoples who accepted their social structure on the basis of Divine Right to Rule actually hated the very people who they believed were appointed by God to rule over them, who were also their only suppliers of infrastructure and military protection. Because of literal childrens' stories.
Stories told to children are the most important stories a culture can have. They teach the child how to behave, what to believe, what is right and what is wrong. If children's stories say the nobles are bad... real head scratcher what the parents thought of them.
>vast oversimplifications of the real world we use to make people whose skulls are still soft go to bed on time are the most important literature we have!
I can tell you believe this given your refusal to pick up a fricking history book.
Hey dumbass, medieval peasants understood how marriages and aristocratic family relationships worked. They understood the Duke was of a relationship with the King, etc and that rising to the Throne through valid means would not transubstantiate someone into a magically more respectable person. The peasants generally saw the nobility as a whole as a morally higher class the same way they saw clergy as a distinctly higher moral class. The noble focus on appealing dress, cleanliness, martial and artistic pursuits, etc was all geared towards further cultivating both the image and the actual experience of being a more refined, rarified being.
lol
lmao even
Have you not noticed the worship of celebrities or RBG or Trump?
Who do you think the peasants were worshipping in medieval times?
top kek
>You believe that peoples who accepted their social structure on the basis of Divine Right to Rule actually hated the very people who they believed were appointed by God to rule over them
He specifically said the king was portrayed as good.
You seem to believe that what the only literate class wrote about itself is what the entire population also believed. Stop falling for hundreds of years old propaganda.
Who were they trying to propagandize? Themselves? Us? Many centuries later? Most commoners couldn't read.
My brother in Christ,
Knights are nobles too.
I thought Romanians felt Dracula was a cool dude
Sounds fun. Count me in mate.
>burning witches justified
you are aware that the primary role of the inquisition in the medieval era was to prevent witch burnings right?
...and other hilarious jokes the catholics tell themselves
The Spanish Inquisition preferred to focus on the crime of heresy and, consequently, did not consider the persecution of witchcraft a priority and in fact discouraged it rather than have it conducted by the secular courts.
>>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
How does this work? Is there a system whereby nobles depend upon the consent of the governed? Maybe a bicameral system where nobles are encouraged to curb one another's excesses? Is there some sort of surgical procedure performed upon the nobility that prevents them from sinning?
Because a healthy people means more tax revenue and a noble wants to pass his serfs onto his children.
A feudal monarch never ran up debts like we see governments run up today.
That's ahistorical
>no u
No u
I didn’t say debt didn’t exist, I said that a monarch could never have run up debt like a modern government, that is to say, a debt approaching the size of the GDP of a nation.
Show me a king who acquired a debt of 50% of his nations GDP, you can’t do it.
They didn't do it because they hadn't come up with the monetary schemes to do so, not because they had a moral qualm about racking up debt. Idiot.
>They didn't do it because they hadn't come up with the monetary schemes to do so
Numbers on paper are hard? These people weren’t fools.
>not because they had a moral qualm about racking up debt. Idiot.
No one has said that, the comment that started this said that nobles had a vested interest in keeping the land prosperous.
Economically, a monarch who owns the right to tax will be discouraged from siphoning off too much because he wants to ensure that he will have comforts into his old age and something to pass onto his children. In comparison a president is incentivized to siphon off the maximum amount of wealth possible because once his term is up he will lose his government forever.
>No one has said that, the comment that started this said that nobles had a vested interest in keeping the land prosperous.
Source.
See OPs post, moron.
>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
>It's fantasy.
K.
yes, it's a thread about a fantasy setting. did you not read any of the posts?
>source
All of history? This is the equivalent of when commies try to portray everyone in any position of authority as if their sole goal is just to make the lives of their subordinates worse. A noble is better off when his land is prospering, which is why every single old European building was funded by the aristocracy, to make his land wealthier. From the Sumerian irrigation system, to the Roman aqueducts and plumbing, to medieval water and windmills, nobles were investing their money in their land constantly
>Numbers on paper are hard? These people weren’t fools.
Convincing people to loan you immense amounts of money in an age where fiat money, stock markets and speculation don't exist is incredibly hard, yes.
Not to mention that they didn’t any of the modern concepts of financial safety systems that we have today. Today up to $250,000 per person, per FDIC insured bank is guaranteed per person. Not only did that not exist back then, but there was a very real possibility that the king would just take the banks money by force, or refuse to pay back a loan because the bank had no power to enforce its loans.
Yeah, that's one of the biggest reasons the Netherlands became such a center of banking and investment.
The king being an unnacountable figure that can just say "I'm not paying lol" means people WILL hesitate to loan anything to the king.
Yeah I always find it amusing when people try to use the libertarian “kings as private business” argument, when ultimately it’s corporations, a faceless bureaucracy elected by their many shareholders, that account for like 85% of the world’s private profits.
Everything you said is correct, but I think seeing a king as a private business owner is the closest analogy. To a king, the country was his property, along with everything in it and on it
The issue with your vision is that a king doesn't necessarily have to manage their property WELL to benefit from it. They benefit all the same, and in fact mismanaging it benefits them more. Just look at the French. It doesn't matter if the country is being ran to the ground because 4% of everything it produces is being siphoned to build a megapalace, the king still has his megapalace by the end. If they were a reasonable and responsible ruler they would have not built a Versailles. Being a BAD king means gets to enjoy the position more then a good king would.
I think it makes more sense to see the king as a warlord. He does own the country, yes, but it’s not out of some sense of private property rights, but rather sheer force of violence, the army at his back keeps him owning everything. It’s important cause that shapes how the king behaves. A private business owner might behave in a way to maximize profits and efficiency. A warlord is far more concerned with the loyalty of those he commands and the power balance of those whose loyalty he can’t guarantee.
Neither of those perspectives are correct. If we're talking about Medieval Europe then kings proper were neither warlords nor business owners, they were divine inheritors of the land and people who also had to manage armies and structure properties. The entire concept of medieval aristocracy was bound up in the conception of personal obligation to moral and virtuous behavior. That's why even when the peasants had to overthrow a king or enforce their demands on a lord, they didn't depose the entire system but instead elevated what they perceived as the righteous among themselves to the position of authority. It's also why the Christian Romans focused so heavily on Christianizing barbarian populations, because it made them ideologically servile to Roman rule rather than independently ambitious.
So they were basically the Catholic version of the modern Middle East. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, different governments but all unified under Islamic religion and law.
Yes, roughly speaking. At least until the Reformation. Catholic does literally mean Universal, and both the HRE and later the Spanish Empire were appointed by the head of the Catholic church as more or less the "Universal" empire.
Islam doesn't have a similar doctrinally universal sect, but the universality of the Catholic church is in name rather than in reality anyways. The Islamic caliphate was essentially the attempt to realize a feudal state that would unify muslims just as the various Catholic empires unified Christians.
>A feudal monarch never ran up debts like we see governments run up today.
You fricking moron they did this on the regular. France had a revolution because of the debts of the monarchy. The Byzantine Empire was toppled in 1204 because of debts. The English Civil War happened partly because of the spending of the monarchy. Why were the israelites expelled from England a couple of times? The monarchy owed them money and kicking them out conveniently canceled the debt. Tons of nobles were in debt at various points.
The idea that owning people makes their owners more likely to treat them better has never held true. If it did you wouldn’t have had so many slave escapes and revolts throughout history.
Your flawed premise is based on a few fallacies.
>That people are perfectly rational
>That making profit is their primary goal
>That they care about the long-term prosperity of their descendants
>That they agree with all of your ideas of how an economy should be ran
nobles are infused with the spark of the divine and are thus intrinsically good.
Incels are so cringe
>The Church is comprised of demon summoners for the purpose of capturing and judging the sins of demons
I thought miracles =|= magic
>777
Why hasn't the god taken care of the world's problems? If cleric type magic exists, why isn't everyone a cleric?
Multiple god pantheon where gods have opposing agendas and can't/won't join forces against the actually evil gods of the setting
Do the gods grant powers?
Yes, but they're stingy about it, so you better be a good girl or no Smite 4 u
Gay, I'm out
Damn bratty cleric
Who are you quoting?
If you're not quoting anyone, please stop typing in a moronic fashion.
are actually evil and not just misunderstood.
>>The God of the setting is benevolent and the clergy is trustworthy
are well cared for population centers with happy families and strong traditions
>>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
monsters are ugly malformed beasts with either little intelligence or malicious nature.
>>Men and women are hardworking and loyal
witches is 100% justified as they often invoke evil spirits which even if controlled end up corrupting the summoner
is there even a setting the opposite of this? Seems like incel outrage over nothing.
>On the islet of Stac an Armin, St. Kilda, Scotland, in July 1840, the last great auk seen in Britain was caught and killed.[54] Three men from St. Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the bird was a witch and was causing the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick.[9][55]
Here's your witch, bro
The moronation of the plebs never fails to disappoint
Chances are the person running this campaign has cp on his hard drive.
All this good brings imbalance to the world, I have to create evil and destruction to bring back natural balance.
>I have to create evil and destruction to bring back natural balance.
I always believed that the idea of the natural balance of good and evil is a big kick in the butt for humanity, you can't be very bad, but you can't be very good either.
witches is 100% justified as they often invoke evil spirits which even if controlled end up corrupting the summoner
So why would any of the hardworking and loyal people even become witches if every other point is true?
I love this but I prefer to sprinkle in the occasional dark lord/corrupt noble/evil priest not as a majority but as a way to highlight how noble the normal ones are. Like a dickass bastard who inherited his father's title after poisoning the heir & makes life hard on his subjects. Who all the other nobility hate but social conventions tie their hands but providence comes in the form of the parties Paladin who challenges him to a duel of honor to protect the virtue of a young daughter of the Duke, & the bastard gets fricked up & the Paladin takes his lands.
Or a group of the kings personal bodyguards have to navigate the line between the rights of the king & the rights of a corrupt priest who is trying to usurp power unjustly.
I read a bunch of Arthurian stuff as well as the Three Musketeers & so I like to have singular evils among the noble caste for them to fight too
This is what I assume OP was trying to convey, honestly. That these points were, at least with regards to the actions of normal humans, that these are all generalizations.
If we're going to just be killing monsters and there will largely no moral dilemmas involved at any point, why bother bringing attention to the morality of the setting at all? I think I would probably just tune you out when you started ranting about how immensely prosperous and utopian your kingdom is.
Is this just the other side of too-perfect sci-fi civilizations?
It's not a utopia, there's still evil demons using witches to do their bidding and marauding monsters hunting in the wilderness.
The moral dilemma is that monsters exist and we haven't killed all of them yet, you limpwristed wienersucker.
Great. If the dragons are green and breathe fire, you can count me in.
This is a trap many RW DMs and authors fall for.
They get so negatively polarized against the hegemonic egalitarian anti-hierarchical fantasy world building that they overcorrect by assuming the nobles and royalty are wholesome 100 chunguses that can do no wrong ever no matter what.
The key is to remember the human. Ruling an estate or even an empire, especially before industrialization, was very much a 'chop wood carry water' type of activity. Going beyond that only betrays a passive form of histrionics on the part of the author.
>Anon just completely subverted every fantasy trope.
I guess return to form is subversion in clown world. "Truth is treason in the empire of lies".
Return to what form? Can you describe a single setting where what the OP describes is true? No? Then it’s subversion
Nice try loser, I do not agree to engage in your pilpul, I have no respect for your pathetic trash opinion that only seeks to drag me down to your disgusting level, seek righteousness (you can't lol you're fricked)
Nobody cares about your opinion, you worthless sperging homosexual.
Freakshit players malding hard over non-subversive fantasy again, I see.
>non-subversive
What fantasy setting does OP describe?
>Demon keeps malding and screeching pilpul
KEK
As we say in France "Clément Mérite"
>muh pilpul
Nice job outing your /misc/ tourism, normal people don't speak like this.
>seething tiny worthless impotent demon will NEVER be happy
Kekkkkk fricking destroyed
This coming from the kind of person who LITERALLY has to invent his own enemies and demons to keep himself from going insane at the prospect of blaming himself over the attractive and easy path of believing that literally everybody else is responsible for his problems.
Didn't read lol I can tell how much you are seething just by the shape of your post.
>only works 3 days a week for a few hours a day
>”hardworking”
Sir Goobins the Kobold
Power Level : Low
Starting Package : Civilian
Health 6, Edge 14, Starting Resolve 0
Abilities
Agility 6d, Might 6d, Toughness 6d,
Perception 6d, Intellect 2d, Willpower 6d
Talents
Academics 2d, Charm 4d, Command 2d,
Covert 6d, Investigation 5d, Medicine 5d,
Professional 4d, Science 2d, Streetwise 3d,
Survival 6d, Technology 2d, Vehicles 4d
Powers
Danger Sense 8d
Survival Expertise 10d : Crab Handling
Blind 10d : Pocket Sand - 3 charges, limited, item
Evasion 10d
Leadership
Luck 3d
Steed : War Crab - 5 ranks, 50 pts
Gear
Polearm - lethal melee +3d, two handed
Sword - lethal melee +2d
Crossbow - lethal ranged +3d, two handed, readied
Shield - defense rolls +1d, subdual melee +1d
Mail armor - armor +1d, bulky
War Crab
Health 6, Edge 4
Abilities
Agility 2d, Might 5d, Toughness 6d,
Perception 2d, Intellect 1d, Willpower 3d
Powers
Armor 8d : Shell
Strike 10d : Snippy
Extra limbs
Swimming 6d
Circular vision
Wall crawling
Immunity : mental states
I like how we went full circle from complaining about SJWs hamfisting their agenda into everything to morons proudly doing it themselves and screeching about Marxist israelite demon troons when people point out how gay it looks.
The right's beliefs are correct and all humans shall be made to live properly or die.
So when does the game start?
OP checking back in because thats fun to do with old threads.
Game starts a week from this Friday due to one guy being out of town and my refusal to do campaigns where everyone isnt at the table.
So are you actually accepting characters or you're just shitting up the board pointlessly as per usual?
>So are you actually accepting characters
Yes.
6 Players
Friday nights starting at 7PM
LFGS is the location because they have big tables and rent private game rooms out for like 10$
Running on the WW d10 system using WoD rules
Three people have entered their character sheets so far.
Is there still gonna be a decent amount of roleplaying? And will there be SOME corrupt nobles to depose and replace with virtuous village leaders who will receive knighthood from the king for helping us reveal his local lord's corruption?
>advertising for a physical game on Ganker
kek, this guy really hates himself
U just described Diablo
right, there were no insane corrupted evil nobles in Diablo. that wasn't part of the core plot or anything. moron
Cool. Here is my character.
He's a partially self-taught sword savant that uses a combination of unreliable witch magic, acquired artifacts and even the occasional demonic ritual to gain the power to right certain injustices, and treats himself more as a machine than a man
He's intensely motivated to right wrongs and help people who're suffering oppression underneath larger forces, due to his background as a child slave in a mine. But his own prior traumas, willingness to violence, often unstable temper and lack of any true form of education mean that his efforts, while genuine, are often misguided, unhelpful, or non-optimal as an approach.
Over time, my plan is to have him develop by learning softer approaches to problems, being more forgiving in punishments, finding ways to manage his anger, possibly through art, and learning to view himself as more than a machine, but as a person with wants and desires beyond his beliefs and convictions.
After all, without obvious conflict presented in the setting, it falls to me to make a character that would cause this, as without conflict and friction, you don't have a game, or even a story.
forgot pic.
Only if the monsters are big and terrible
And sometimes evil and cunning
>Make campaign
are actually evil and not just misunderstood.
>>The God of the setting is benevolent and the clergy is trustworthy
are well cared for population centers with happy families and strong traditions
>>The local nobles are educated stewards of the land that have a vested interest in keeping their people prosperous and healthy
monsters are ugly malformed beasts with either little intelligence or malicious nature.
>>Men and women are hardworking and loyal
witches is 100% justified as they often invoke evil spirits which even if controlled end up corrupting the summoner
>Anyway, roll up a character. We're going monster hunting.
>Remember not to drink too much ale, its good to be sober in a fight.
That's not a very Christian thing to hope for.
Literally everyone deserves a chance for metanoia, redemption and salvation.
are actually evil and not just misunderstood.
>>The God of the setting is benevolent and the clergy is trustworthy
So that god must be pretty weak right? I don't see why else he wouldn't have taken care of that demon problem if they're evil and bad and he's benevolent.
Its a dualistic religion anon, the god of the setting is actually in a constant state of war with the demons threatening to overcome creation. He probably lost an eye or something during that war and was also killed a couple of times. Those were the ages of darkness where vampire lords ruled over the hepless mortals with their undead armies and demonic warlocks. When he is resurrected his priests regain their full powers and repel the evil hordes and a new era of light begins.
Yeah so he's a pretty weak god, as I said.
Even matched is more appropriate but destined to win. That is how dualistic religions work.
>"Come join the church of our somewhat powerful god Murpo, and receive eternal salvation probably!"
>>"Sounds good but why somewhat powerful?"
>"Oh he's about evenly matched with the hordes of rapedemons of the night"
>>"Ah"
>"He's probably gonna win"
>>"Aha."
>"About fifty-fifty."
I mean, if it's him or rapedemons, it's not exactly a hard choice.
>no no see the rapedemons only rape those who stand in their way
>easy mistake to make
>if you help them there is a presumption of consent so, technically,
Though in retrospect that does make for a pretty good incentive to convert.
>"Come join the church of Murpo he could really use your help"
>"(and you really don't wan't him to lose)"
It's amazing how easy theology becomes when your god is real and not made up.
In this setting, why would the PCs go adventuring instead of fulfilling their duties as peasants, or being part of an ORGANIZED milita under command?
Also, why would anyone play a game where you get to strictly abide by a social order & essentially have no personal agency? That's like playing a game about being an office worker.
Ideologues really misunderstand why people play games.
>In this setting, why would the PCs go adventuring instead of fulfilling their duties as peasants, or being part of an ORGANIZED milita under command?
They are part of the crown sanctioned explorers guild or church missionaries and scientists. You know like it was irl.
>Also, why would anyone play a game where you get to strictly abide by a social order & essentially have no personal agency?
Why on earth would you assume that choosing to abide by tradition and social order is somehow synonymous with lack of personal agency? Do you think that free will can only exist in degenerate lawless or tyrannical societies?
>They are part of the crown sanctioned explorers guild or church missionaries and scientists. You know like it was irl.
Which means they have a predetermined goal and answer to an authority/ Which means they aren't adventurers. Basically in-universe railroading.
>Why on earth would you assume that choosing to
Oh, so now you're even predetermined whether the players / pcs chose to abide or not. Basically literal railroading.
>Which means they have a predetermined goal
No adventurers petition their goals for funding and approval. That is how these guilds worked irl too. Historylet.
><esl nonsense>.Basically literal railroading.
Wot?
I'll stick to games where the goal is to enrich myself and then become the authority that funds and approves the other adventurers, thanks.
Enjoy your bootlicking simulator, though.
>I'll stick to games where the goal is to enrich myself and then become the authority that funds and approves the other adventurers, thanks.
Why would you assume that that is not something that can happen in this setting? Adventures can claim land for the king and eventually become nobility or founders of semi-independent companies, church missionaries can become bishops, patriarchs/matriarchs or even saints and so on. This is a staple of the genre since day one. You have a very weird bone to pick with this setting proposal and you can't even formulate the reasons why.
>Adventures can claim land for the king
No you idiot, I claim land for myself and myself only. Power is not to be granted, it's to be taken.
>Power is not to be granted, it's to be taken.
Yes? But taking power by actively opposing the current power structure is a very inefficient way of doing so. Taking power by working inside, or along side, said power structure is much more efficient and the likelihood of success much higher.
>That's how it would work in a video game, but we're talking about the freedom of tabletop.
That is how it worked in ttrpgs since day one of publishing more or less. I don't know what you are on about. It would help if you would elaborate a little.
>Taking power by working inside, or along side, said power structure is much more efficient and the likelihood of success much higher.
Sure, as long as the end goal is to backstab the king, become the new king, kill all his heirs, take his wife and daughters for myself, and rewrite the scripture to paint him as a demon.
Sure, whatever tickles your teenage edge fancy.
better than preteen little girl fantasy about le noble kings and valiant knights and shit.
you dress up as a princess on halloween?
>you dress up as a princess on halloween?
Of-course ,bitch, and I am the prettiest and manliest princess at the ball. Go smoke gays behind the dumpster at 7-11s now.
No, it's not and when your balls drop and you effectively stop being an effeminate goth wannabe troony you'll come to learn that.
That's how it would work in a video game, but we're talking about the freedom of tabletop.
it's how it would work in tabletop actually
I don't give a shit how noble your king is, how faithful your clergy is, how happy your peasants are to be rolling around in the mud, I don't even give a frick about your God.
I serve no one, and my ultimate goal is to be the one with the castles, harems and gold, while everyone else can keep being a chump "fulfilling their duties". Their duty being: doing what I tell them.
nah you'll do what I tell you to
Why is "kill people from other countries because they're evil" inherently more interesting than "kill people from your own country because they're evil"?
>because the evil upper class in my setting has XYZ feature!
Why can't the evil upper class of the neighboring country have that?
One brings people together in a society; the other tears then apart.
I'll take OP's setting, but without the drab, ugly, solemn emotionally castrated tone that is just a projection of protestant autism onto the medieval times anyway.
Instead, I want it with rainbows, unicorns, fairy creatures, magic, booze and festivals.
just swap the not!Satan for a fabulous evil fae/sorceress and you're all set
This makes me think, why did so much pagan folklore shit survive in Europe if it was christian for so long?
Wouldn't they want the population to stop believing in dumb heretical superstitions?
Much like the church would like evolution to not be taught in school, there's a severe discrepancy between what they want and what the actual world is gracious enough to let them have.
Forests are fricking spooky and doubly so when you don't know the world all that well, mushrooms and shit were eaten often as a frick around thing to hallucinate, pollen and spores and the like still happened so you also had that to distort perceptions, fear of the unknown, fun stories to share and really, faeries and shit are kinda just cool. We still fricking use them, we still like their design, their lore folk shared around, the variety of ways they change across the world, really they're just kinda cool. Christian saints and the like are very neat too, but pagan stuff as just an observational thing is already pretty interesting to behold, and if you got a community who's always done it, well its hard to fricking beat back an entire societal ritual or tradition.
Really, its kinda fricking impressive Christianity managed to cull down as much as it did along the times. For as relatively drab and boring as it is, its achieved good cultural victory anyways and managed to kill off a lot of that stuff. Only people really doing that these days are responsability dodgers, christians in repression and the very very few non contrarian pagans holding on traditions.
Let me put it this way:
Today, in this age of satellites and mass information and smartphones in everyone's pocket, if you live in a rural area in a sea of corn fields or by the edge of a big forest, you're gonna meet people believing that there's "something out there". This is without getting into cryptids, reptilians and assorted conspiracy crackpots; just normal people, educated, probably not even schizotipic, living in relatively isolated non-urban environments. They'll have some folk tales and some urban legends of that time uncle Bob saw lights in the sky or that time they heard a woman's voice from the trees and then saw a goat walk out of them. They don't need to fully believe in them, but they'll have their tall tales and spread them to spook kids and tourists and sometimes, deep in the night when the walls creak and the branches whistle, they'll hear a noise that's really just a fricked up bird's call and they'll be spooked themselves.
(cont)
In the middle ages, the church wasn't trying to eradicate superstition, it was just wrapping it all up in a christian narrative. Canonical tales of saints involve them going ghostbusters on all sorts of folklore spirits and monsters, fighting dragons and banishing ghosts and shit.
The attempts to fully eradicate Pagan-rooted folklore comes later, in the renaissance and then even further towards the dawn of the industrial age, when power structures became increasingly secular and science and religion became increasingly separated from one another (in the middle ages, in Europe, the church mostly embraced science as a means of discovery of God's workings. If you could time travel and explain evolution to a medieval abbot or bishop, they'd take it an explanation of *how* God did what they knew he did).
So imagine the struggle of ideologies and cultural narratives and put it in the context of villagers living by a big deep wood. Humanists want you to believe in science and reason, but science is still plenty mystical and there's more darkness than light, and humanism also comes with a 'human vs nature' narrative that demonizes the wilderness. Meanwhile the church absolutely wants you to hold a belief system based on faith and tradition rather than science and reason, but also wants you to cast aside SOME of your traditional supernatural beliefs, because there's a God and a Devil and angels and demons but definitely not spirits in the woods, and also the forest is now a symbol of Satan because the human vs nature perception is ubiquitous through belief systems.
It's no surprise that folklore flourished.
Makes me think if a platonist, monotheistic religion could have emerged at all outside the biome that it did: deserts.
I mean, it's way easier to accept that there ain't no fricking fairies n gnomes when you don't live near a spooky forest.
Notice how arab muslims don't have problems with persisting folklore either, aside from the stuff that was incorporated into the religion very early.
With jungle muslims, you have spooky folkloric fairy creatures again.
It's like cultural apophenia. Forests emit a lot of information, but difficult to interpret information, because it's all dark and obscured and shit.
if you can't see God and there are no woods for him to hide in, you gotta put him in the sky
Of course. The blasted dust of the desert is perfect for priming annihilation-aimed omnitheism. "The desert is Allah and we are but dust."
You hope that because you won’t personally do shit to anyone you hate, then or now, besides meanie words on the internet.
>take the fun out of the medieval times
>take the fun out of christianity
>take the fun out of roleplaying games
>ORDNUNG ORDNUNG ORDNUNG, DUTY, WORK ETHIC, ARBEIT MACHT FREI
Why are protties like this
they wouldn't be protties if they weren't like that
who are you quoting?
There's a fun story where Protestant missionaries had a spergout in Hawaii because the locals woke up early, got all the farming done quickly and reserved like a third of the day for having fun in the beach, because according to them they should be working using those hours.
Or that time they taught Cambodian farmers modern techniques and had them double their yield, only to be utterly baffled that they were now deciding to work less to produce the same instead of working twice for four times the profits like they expected.
Bro made the most boring game imaginable.
>pilpul
Bootlickers deserve the rope.
you first 🙂
Nice, finally a high fantasy game and none of the realistic grimdark bullshit
bump
fascism is good and medieval society is superior