Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ferratus" data-source="post: 4147431" data-attributes="member: 55966">Magical Medieval Society gets a lot of things wrong when it comes to real life history though.Examples include their description of Indulgences, which were described in the book as being "prepaid pardons for sins not yet committed".   This is completely wrong.  An indulgence, in Roman Catholic theology, is the (full or partial) remission of temporal punishment due for sins which have already been forgiven.  A simple perusal of wikipedia or the even better source of the catholic encyclopedia (<a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm" target="_blank">http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm</a>) would correct this.   The chapter on "those who pray" has numerous problems when it tries to say something about theology and workings of the Medieval Church. Other things they get wrong are the access the peasantry have to the courts and the rate of literacy that the peasantry had in order to have access to those courts.  In England for instance, the peasants were especially fond of suing each other which is a tendency that inheritors of English legal system continue to this day.It would have also been nice to give medieval women their due in the social roles in the early and high middle ages, who owned businesses, ruled territory, and managed finances.  There are also plenty of examples of women who fought for a living.Another major sin is that it treats the middle ages as a monolithic culture.  We are talking about an entire continent, over 1000 years, inhabited by millions of people.  Some places life was very good, so much so that I'd rather live there than certain parts of certain cities in the modern day.  Other parts were very bad, and I'd rather live in Basra, Iraq.  It is passable on the rules mechanics side for generating manors and cities, and the ideas they have for integrating magic into a medieval society are good ones.   However, don't take it as an authoritative guide to middle ages.  Of course, pop medieval history is so bad that I wouldn't trust any history books in your local bookstore.   My advice for those who want to learn more about the medieval period is to go to your local university, peruse the recommended textbooks for various courses on medieval history, and buy those.   I tell this to everyone I meet who is interested in Medieval history, because the idea that those frauds who sell books through the major bookstores should get one more thin dime personally galls me.</blockquote>

Verification