Thinking about Warhammers while reading Wolf Hall

I recently read Wolf Hall, partly because it's well regarded and I needed something to read but mostly because it's mainly set from 1520 to 1535, or about the time that a bunch of ne'er-do-wells are getting caught up in goings-on at the Schaffenfest in Bögenhafen. It seems well-researched but, even if not, it's plausible enough to be taken at face value, especially as my primary interest is for insights for an RPG set in a fictional, historical-ish world.

I'm not sure what themes Mantel was hoping to bring to the fore when she was writing the novel but to me a number stand out -

• The functioning of power
• The role of religion (clearly a major theme of the book, and of the time)
• Status, class and wealth
• The emergence of modernity
• The medieval family 

 

 The functioning of power

This is central to the book, given the viewpoint is that of Thomas Cromwell who rises to become Henry VIII's chief minister. But the key point is that all power comes either from the King, or the Pope (although some claim to be servants of God) with nothing by way of checks or balances other than "what will other kings think" (e.g. if you de-throne their niece) or "what does God think". Being human that source of power is rather arbitrary, especially when (depending on how charitably you look at things) they're a man in their late 30s / early 40s with a roving eye or a king with no heir whose father siezed the crown on the battlefield (or both!).

First Cardinal Wolsey and then Thomas Cromwell gain tremendous power and wealth by gaining the ear of a king who's prepared to delegate, but having gained that ear he still needs to be treated with kid gloves. Both are clearly very able men, one being the son of a butcher who's risen to become the preeminent churchman in the realm, the other the son of a blacksmith who's become a successful lawyer and investor. Being close to even a fickle source of power they almost can't help but enormously enrich themselves, with all sorts of people just wanting to shower them with gifts for some reason, while the king is also awarding them propery, incomes and titles.

I'm not quite sure how to take stock of this in game terms, and am not at all comfortable with the idea of a game with the players functioning at these sorts of levels. Nightmare GM pretty much describes both how the game would need to be played and how it would seem - not a fun prospect.

So I think the take-home needs to be not to even think of the term "power" without the modifier of "fickle".

The role of religion

There are two connected religious developments which are highly significant for Cromwell and his peers - firstly Henry's desire to break from Rome and hence grant his own divorce (and handily also get hold of those taxes which would otherwise go to the Pope) and also the stirrings of Protestant reform and in particular the forbidden tome that was Tyndale's Bible.

There are two aspects to this which I struck me as eminently gameable -

1. The absolute belief in God
2. Heresy

On the first point you have a king who's trying to divorce his queen, and nobles who are trying to dispose of a cardinal who's displaced and undermined them, and in both cases one of their major concerns is "what will God think?".

From a secular modern perspective this absolute belief has always been the hardest part of a game for me to "get", and in most game settings it's even more important than it was historically given that, in the words of the great Terry Pratchett, the gods have "a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows". Why do players very rarely seem to give as much weight to the gods as their historical or fictional counterparts would?

This leaves me wondering whether some sort of mechanical impact of divine disfavour is needed, not just for cleric types but for anyone. Perhaps (for minor disfavour) once per day a successful roll is converted to a fumble (the player gets to chose which roll). For severe disfavour, who knows?

On the heresy front it seems to me that the Warhammer world is missing several tricks. After all, what could be more WFRP than this Wolf Hall quote - "They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press"? In Warhammer of course you have witch hunters and rumours of forbidden gods, and more openly the rivalry between Ulric and Sigmar, or the displacement of the Old Faith by newer gods. But what's entirely lacking (as far as I've seen) are struggles within the following of a particular god, which is both far more interesting than the chaos / not chaos choice but probably also rather vicious.

The two heresies we see in Wolf Hall are Lollardy and Tyndale's Bible - heretical primarily because they undermined the authority of the Catholic church but also in the case of Lollardy being seen as a threat to the establishment more generally. Given how close it is to the establishment in The Empire I think some heretical beliefs about Sigmar are called for...

Status, class and wealth

Part of what makes the Renaissance interesting as a setting is the emergence of the merchant class and how this plays upon the gulf between the nobility and the commoner. But the gulf is still very much there.

Henry VIII is notable for advancing people based on merit, but both Cromwell and Wolsey are commoners in a courtiers' world. Cromwell and his merchant friends are in many cases significantly more wealthy than the nobles they interact with, with at least one noble being heavily in debt to them. But the nobility have status and, equally importantly, heritage. The word of the son of a blacksmith is worth very little, but even physical evidence doesn't stand up particularly well to the friendships that the nobles have nurtured from a young age, or the fact that their grandfathers fought together on some battlefield long ago.

Couple this with the gentry being concious of their relative loss of status and these elevated commoners are on oncomfortable ground.

The emergence of modernity

Another aspect which makes the Renaissance a refreshing change from the pseudo-medieval setting of most RPGs is the emergence of recognisably more modern elements of architecture and culture. The elite are now building palaces rather than castles (Mantel suggests that one reason Henry was keen to reduce Wolsey in status is so that he can claim Hampton Court Palace for Anne Boleyn) and gentlemen are laying out impressive gardens and worrying about the cultivation of strawberries. As a GM you can mix in a dash of costume drama into the grim dark.

The medieval family

The family though is still thoroughly medieval - there's a high mortality rate and a lot of interdependence. Cromwell's wife and daughters die of sweating sickness when he's in his mid-forties, while his nephew Richard Williams adopts the Cromwell surname and prospers as much as Cromwell's own son thanks to Cromwell's favour from the king.

Cromwell also gains a wide variety of hangers-on, running a large household and having minor gentry "apprentice" their sons to him in the hope of them learning his knack for making incredible amounts of money, while Mantel also speculates at various wardships. Certainly his household is exceptional in some ways, considering both his humble beginnings and the high status to which he arises, but the complex, fascinating and slightly melancholy picture which emerges is hopefully one that will stay with me and enhance my game worlds.

And finally...

Most of the way through the book WFRP was at the front of my mind but it belatedly occured to me that it was also saying something about Warhammer 40K, and probably other sci-fi settings as well. In a dystopian future the messages about the fickleness of how power is gained and exercised, as well as in the importance of status and how it influences or limits people's rise and hastens their fall are well worth bearing in mind.

Game-related historical snippets

I'm reading a lot of history resources at the moment (slowly, as I need to keep a notebook on hand) and in my typical fashion this is a bit all over the place although mainly focussed on the dark ages early medieval period.

I've also at the strength of this intro at Ex Urbe started watching Borgia: Faith and Fear. That intro is fascinating in its own right (a couple of highlights: pink was for poor people, Vikings loved clown trousers), if anything after that the TV series itself is a bit of a disappointment although still worth watching. The main problem with the series is that the writing seems really clunky - characters spend an awful lot of time describing recent events to one another - but when I can overlook that it's very worthwhile for the scenery and mood.

The scenery because it's a good reminder how much more modern the Renaissance was, and hence WFRP is, than the vanilla pseudo-medieval RPG setting. Think palaces not castles - on which note, having also just watched Sam Willis' The Silk Road series, it's worth adding that the Doge's Palace in Venice is also in-period as far as WFRP is concerned.

The mood because it's great to see the cardinals being incredibly corrupt and self-serving while at the same time being devout and god-fearing (this is also a lesson I'm hoping to take on board from the Robert Low I've been reading recently, of having characters be properly influenced by their religious beliefs). Borgia is at times teaching me things I was just as happy not knowing - I'd dimly heard of the Breaking wheel in the past, I now have a much more gut-level appreciation of it thanks to the beginning of the second episode. I don't think there's anything gameable in that, but it always good to be reminded of other sorts of grim for the grim-dark.

On the early medieval side of things I'm struggling slightly to get my bearings. Thanks to Monty Python we know that in many ways the Romans were quite sophisticated, then you had the Dark Ages and then 1066 and all that. The general sweep of the period is quite easy to pick up but the day-to-day, which seems to me essential in a game setting sense, much less so.

A couple of interesting (to me, at least), and related snippets so far concern the development of agriculture. At the start of the period the two-field system was used for agriculture, but was relatively fragile leading to lower surpluses and more frequent famines. The three field system, which apparently was first used in the Loire region in the 8th century, seems to have spread slowly and erratically (both systems were in use in England in the 14th century). But the greater yields from and robustness of the latter not only reduced the likelihood of famine but in addition produced surpluses which in turn made horses more "affordable". Also the horse collar doesn't make its way to Europe until after 900AD so prior to that yoked oxen were the main source of power for ploughing and so on. Over the next few hundred years horses (being more powerful, faster, and having greater endurance) made agriculture still more efficient and made day-to-day existence less precarious.

So, oxen and famines it is!

What does the medieval family look like?

Rick Stump's recent article about village and family demographics, and in particular the graph on there, really got me thinking about what the medieval village and family looked like.

The graph shows population before the first demographic transition which is yet another reason that, despite enjoying medieval game worlds, I really don't want to live there. In simple terms, people are dying as fast as they're being born, mainly from the old standbys - disease, famine, war and famine caused by war.

From the starting points in Rick's article I thought I'd try and visualise what the population of a village really might look like but then, deciding that particular rabbit hole was a bit too deep, thought I'd instead try to get a picture of just one family. I'm sure there's been all sorts of scholarly study on this but only a few interesting data points came to light from my initial hunting. This gives me enough to hang some ideas on to while seeming to me at least to be plausible, however wrong those ideas may in fact be!

• Högberg et al, Maternal Deaths in Medieval Sweden: An Osteological and Life Table Analysis has all sorts of interesting information, but of most use is the life expectancy graph.
• There's a widely quoted figure of 14.4 maternal deaths for every 1,000 births in 15th century Florence. This initially seemed a bit low to me given the gap in life expectancy for men and women in Högberg's paper, until you remember Rick's figure of 6 children per family and hence a 9% chance of dying in childbirth for the average mother...
• The life of Lucrezia Borgia is interesting anyway, but especially so in this context, giving the stark reminder that a limiting factor in the size of a family wasn't the parents deciding not to have more children, but one of the parents dying! Again from the Högberg's paper it can be seen that the average life expectancy for a woman was around 33, for a man around 40 (although interestingly if they can reach age 50, life expectancy is actually slightly higher for women - presumably due to the risk from childbirth being removed).

From there I had enough (probably dodgy) data points to get started from -

1. Given that 33 year life expectancy and an average family size of 6 children, in hand-waving terms I called that a 1/3 chance of a child being born per year from when the mother is age 16 until age 40
2. Rick furnished figures for death in infancy and up to mid-teens
3. The Högberg's paper allows me to generate life expectancy for those who make it to the advanced age of 15!

With some random number generation and the WFRP name generator I came up with the following for a family on a farm somewhere in Reikland in 2504 -

Klemens runs a farm where his recently deceased wife's grandfather still lives, her father having died just a few years before. They have four surviving young children (although the random number generator says Gustaf will be dead within the year). Brother-in-law Friebald and his wife Esmeralda are an invaluable help as is his sister-in-law Carlotta, although she'll probably be married off soon. Rigo (aged 13) and Eldred (aged 11) are both expected to do a full adult's share of the work as well.

I found generating the above an oddly poignant process, as the random number generator killed off children that various stages of infancy, or mothers with families, and that was just for entries on a page with labels like "Son A3-2"! But it did bring home those bare statistics about mortality rates in a way that will hopefully give my in-game villages a bit more soul in the future. 

There's are a few things I might give some more thought to when I get the chance, such as making couples more varied in age, especially if I ever tackle the "village" problem - the (fairly obvious) thought being that the smaller the community the more it comes to who's available, or simply not related to the suitor, rather than any thoughts of romance. Passing adventurers who show any sign of success and who have all of their limbs and some of their teeth suddenly move from "we don't like their sort" to "eligible"...!

The other thing to think about is to have the deaths cluster more - although certainly people would die from isolated incidents and accidents, such as the "minor wound becomes infected" theme that I've started to notice from certain historical and dark fantasy authors, at least some would be clustered from disease, famine or violence. It'd be interesting to know what the balance should be between the isolated and the clustered - maybe 3 of the 4 deaths across 2502 / 3 / 4 could actually have been caused by the same event? 

Meanwhile I go back to being thankful for epidemiology and all the rest of our modern wonders.

Nor way to paint an army

I originally hoped to have 6 points of SAGA vikings painted by the weekend before Christmas, as my club was holding a competition. I always knew it would be a big ask, but I rather thought I'd get further than this...

For the benefit of the uninitiated that's only 4 points worth, and 3 of those points are elite quality, so that's about the smallest starter warband you can conceive of.

As always it took me ages to select the models - my starting point was always going to be Foundry's ex-Citadel Norse, and I was hoping some Gripping Beast plastics plus a couple of their berserkers would round off the force. Unfortunately although the GB plastics are 28mm they're realistic rather than heroic proportions compared to the Foundry Norse (i.e. a bit skinny, with small hands and heads), and GB's berserkers and character models look enormous next to them. Eventually I settled on one of the smaller GB berserkers and a Foundry character model who Marcus sold me on at Colours, along with a mix of plastics and Foundry Norse. There's definitely a bit of a variation in sizes, but I think once painted and based they'll look fine together.

I've since found that Crusader's vikings are a pretty good match size-wise for the Foundry ones, so I'll add a point of their hirdmen to the final warband.

I also found assembling the plastics to be a further hurdle - there's the decisions to make as to the pose to go with, then when you're obsessive like me also a question of filling some of the more obvious joins, all of which slow me down further. More of a reason to stick with metals where I can!

My painting approach may seem a bit odd, being neither a batch or single model. As can be seen from the photo I've undercoated everything then painted the metal (and flesh in case of the berserkers), I'm then adding the main colours (including shading) a model at a time, and will then do all the leather (belts, straps, scabbards, etc.), hair and finally give them shields.

There are a couple of advantages to this - firstly I can field them in the right company with only minor embarrassment from an early stage, but also the stage I'm at now has rapid results and is much more enjoyable than a standard batch process. Hopefully the whole group will slowly "come in to focus" - but time will tell...

Boars and dragons

Real life scuppered last Friday's plans for what looks like a fine scenario from Gaj over at Warhammer for Adults, pitching my chaos lord against a dastardly witch hunter, so instead I found myself playing Dux Britanniarum.

I was very impressed by the battle rules, both as a set of wargames rules and as an evocation of the period. The campaign rules are apparently even more impressive.

The pre-battle praying, fighting and boasting really helped add to the flavour, and I would think only really work within the dark ages setting. Most of the rules it would seem though could happily be warped into a more standard fantasy setup, which I'm definitely keen to try out for my Newhammer project (although it definitely falls down on my 4th rule for that, more on that later).

Some of the systems, such as the activation process and the random element to movement are probably old hat to people who haven't been out of the wargaming loop quite as long as me, but I quite enjoyed working within the constraints they imposed. The lesser control than I'm used to also seemed to add a slightly more relaxed air to the proceedings (although that might be down to a good opponent and GM). The system for shock (impacting both morale and fighting power) also seemed both a good idea and well implemented.

The real heart of the game though is the Fate card system, whereby throughout the game you can buy random cards, which may be more or less useful for a particular side (or even in some cases completely useless) and can then be spent to boost a unit during its turn, or help counter an opponent's move. They give a nice hidden element to the contest, vaguely reminiscent of the role of magic in Warhammer, and also I felt added a hint of the mythic over the mundane. However they also impose a real limitation on the flexibility of the game (or conversely creates the ability to produce supplements) in that each new army needs their own card set. While I'm sure you could invent your own, in much the same way as you could invent your own codex for modern WH40K, this would always be unsatisfactory and subject to debate.

So while I would heartily recommend the game for some dark ages skirmishing, I'm also disappointed that it's inherently limited in what it does. Although I do have some plans for some dabbling...