Sell me on "Magical Medieval Society" WE

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

You might want to take a look at Urbis instead, which was created specifically to address these questions.

I can't make the same claim for completeness as MMS:WE, but I do think I came up with some nice ideas. Oh, and it is free - at least for the time being...

Are cell phone base stations any less hazardous to our health than Nexus Towers I wonder...?

Some good stuff here, Jurgen!

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Are cell phone base stations any less hazardous to our health than Nexus Towers I wonder...?

Different approaches.

Cell phone base stations might, under certain circumstances, do some long-term damage to your Constitution. Nexus Towers, on the other hand, do short-term damage to your Charisma - but this damage is recoverable if you spend a few months away from the towers...

But in the end, I wouldn't like to live near either one.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I guess there are really no fast/pat answers for what a truly magical society would be like - there are endless possibilites. In buiding my homebrew, I just can't get past the notion that powerful wizards would be ruling all aspects of an organized society, and was thinking this book might provide some alternate possibilites for me.

Well, powerful wizards would certainly be very influential, but they aren't neccessarily the actual rulers - just as in the real world the military doesn't neccessarily run the country.

Running a country requires lots of specialized skills - a firm grasp of economics, buerocracy, political intrigue, etc.. While most powerful wizards would certainly have the neccessary intelligence to acquire such skills, they became such powerful wizards precisely because they focused their powerful intellect on matters of magic.

So, unless the wizard in question is a mere figurehead, the actual rulers will be other people. They will treat powerful wizards just as another powerful special interest group (like the military or really big companies in our world) - they pander to them and give them all sorts of perks and tax breaks.

This benefits both sides. The wizards don't need to involve themselves with all that political work and intrigue, and can focus on their magical studies - thus becoming more powerful. And they still gain enough money and gifts from various "advisor's fees" and the like that they won't need to worry about money.

On the other hand, the wizards have an interest in maintaining the status quo - after all, if the status quo changes, their perks might vanish! Thus they will help out the ruler if it becomes neccessary...

Of course, all this won't stop a really determined archmage who wants to rule his own country. But he will learn that either he will have to leave running the country to others - thus becoming a mere figurehead - or he will gain levels in classes like aristocrat or expert as he learns about this "ruling stuff". This means he will slip behind against rival wizards, which makes him vulnerable to them. Or he stays ignorant of politics and economy, but tries to micro-manage everything nonetheless. And in this case, the country will soon go broke or be wrecked by civil unrest...

 

[jgbrowning]

Thanks everyone, especially Joshua for basically representing the same viewpoint as mine. I can see this sourcebook being VERY useful for an ultra lite magic setting, but the fact that magic changes SOO much if there are only a few competent wizards in a society ( not to mention a few clerics, druids and sorcerors ) a traditional fuedal society would be practically an impossibility (IMO!).

I guess there are really no fast/pat answers for what a truly magical society would be like - there are endless possibilites. In buiding my homebrew, I just can't get past the notion that powerful wizards would be ruling all aspects of an organized society, and was thinking this book might provide some alternate possibilites for me.

Heya BFG,

One of the things we thought about when makeing MMS:WE is the, in our opinion, somewhat wanky demographics where you simply can't have a 9th-12th level wizard in a metropolis. The demographics we suggest in MMS:WE actually create a world with more spellcasters than suggested in the DMG. This was for the purpose of creating a medievalesque social system and semi-converting it to game mechanics.

The main focus of the book is to help GMs create a medieval-esque world despite magic. The title "Magical Medieval" tries to place equal credance upon both aspects. It's both magical, and medieval.

One thing that strikes me odd (and tells me that either we need to write a better introduction , or that you simply didn't have enough time to get the gist of the work) is your impression of a ultra lite magic society. The main difference between MMS:WE and almost any D&D game is the idea of society.

One of the things that has bugged me about D&D since I started playing in 80 is the idea that a society would allow adventurers to run around like most D&D games do without putting some limitations upon them. The medieval period had a lot of social ties and restraints, the whole feudal system was a (generally) codified system of personal interactions. We took this idea and tied magic into the system just as the strengh of arms was historically tied into the system.

To be brief, we viewed magic as something that the society would have codified behavior about. There's a lot of different ways that could have happened so we chose the one that would be less different than traditional medieval society: integration. We made magic just another way of getting things done: and, it should be noted, a very costly way. Often its just easier and less expensive to not use magic.

One thing that we tried very hard to remember and understand, is that medieval society has a very different world-view than we moderns do. The things we would do with magic and how our modern mindset would create a world with magic would be very different than what a medieval person would imagine. As one goal of the book was making a medieval-esque world including magic, things that would alter that pattern are easily explained away through the use of culture and society.

There are plenty of cultures on this planet that do, from my perspective, mind-boggaling strange things. Cultures that are really really foreign to me and don't seem to make much sense. And this is even without magic. Perhaps its because the terminology we used is historical, it's hard for people to think that the feudal lord can easily be a wizard or perhaps we simply didn't explain our idea well enough.

But in the end, our take on the thing, is just our take. There's a lot of different ideas about how magic would alter a world and make it different than what we know. The goal of MMS:WE wasn't to show how magic would alter a world, it was to help GMs make a medievalesque world despite the magic. How to use magic to increase the "medievalness" of a place as opposed to reducing it.

Edit: Just re-read what I posted. It seems so serious so I'd thought I should just jump in and say thanks bunches for picking it up and giving it a go. As a starting publisher, that's one of the biggest hurdles we face. Even if it doesn't suit your style, its appreciated.

Joseph Browning
Expeditious Retreat Press

 

[WizarDru]

Well, speaking for myself, I loved the book. It fleshed out the medieval period in a way that no previous source had. Some of the information was known to me, but a lot of it was not. I didn't know about the peasant legal and political systems that existed outside of the main feudal caste system, for example, or many of the roles of an individual noble's retinue. Maybe it was common knowledge that bee-keeping was a valuable and important skill around the manor, or that a dovecote was a valued food resource...but I didn't know that, and was certainly never taught any such things.

I certainly didn't have any idea how to translate the granite quarries for one of my PCs lands into in-game income, or how his estate actually worked. MME is wonderful for this. Undertanding (and I mean really understanding) the guild system, the differences between different types of guilds and their places in society, the system of land distrbution and investment....discussion of these factors in terms of a gameworld was invaluable information for me.

One thing that always bothered me about a typical D&D game is how two-dimensional the world appears to actually be. Players enter a village, go to a tavern, travel to a dungeon, return to a village or town and magically sell the wealth of a small nation in treasure, and so on. The motivations of the villagers, the social, econonmic and political structure behind the village and a host of other factors were missing for my verisimilitude.

WS: MME isn't the only way to run a game...but it is a wonderful way to integrate such elements if you desire. It's game elements are low-key, to be sure, and if you're looking for a high 'crunch' factor, you won't find it here. The economic simulator is worth the price of entry alone, however, and the focus on gaming is priceless. Sure, I could get the same information from reading some dry 800-page tome on peasant life in the Rhein River Valley...but not as readable, not focused on gaming and not with actual open-content gaming material included.

 

[Desdichado]

How does this compare to, say, Harn, in terms of setting material?

 

[Darth Shoju]

I haven't picked up this book yet, but after reading this thread I'm really quite interested. I think the key is not to look at it as a psuedo-history book and just as a gaming supplement. It seems that they are presenting a lot of historical information, but I don't think any one is trying to present it as a history lesson. In the course of obtaining my history degree I learned a lot that I could apply to creating my homebrew campaign. But I found that most of my courses offered very little coverage on the social, day-to-day aspect of people's lives in medieval times. I ended up having to do a fair amount of research in my spare time to uncover this info, distilling the bits I needed from much larger works. That was fine when I was in the university library anyway, but my life is much busier now and I don't have time for research on that level. This book sounds like it contains a lot of the info I would be looking for without me having to look it up. That's a big plus to me to be honest. Now, I doubt I'd use this supplement if I ever have to do another history essay, but I'm looking at it as a gaming supplement, not a history book. Although, if they have an extensive bibliography listed it would give it a bit more credibility for me.

 

[Remathilis]

I picked it up and for the most part am pleased with it. I haven't found it to be terrible use yet. When my game becomes alot more political, it will be invaluable.
My question is, how does it compares to GG's World Builder?

 

[Carnifex]

I prefer my gaming material to actually be gaming material, thankyouverymuch, not some pseudo-historical tract masquerading as gaming material.

.

From what I've read of the book so far, as a History degree student specialising as much as I can in the medieval period, I believe the writer has very much done a good job of thorough research into genuine medieval facts and concepts. There's even a moderately extensive bibliography at the end. It is an excellent resource for helping bring the medieval into the magical, though not so much for adding magic to the medieval, if that makes sense

 

[Crothian]

Although, if they have an extensive bibliography listed it would give it a bit more credibility for me.

That's page 142. Not it's on page 142 as much as it is page 142.