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.

Things I'd like to be writing about

I'm hoping that at some point Real Life and the remorseless paint queue will get to the state where I've time to blog about subjects beyond my latest paint job or wargame that I've played, as I'd always planned to do. If that ever happens there are four main topics I'd like to spend more time on:

• The early medieval period as a game setting
• The WFRP careers system in an early medieval setting
• Wargame campaign systems
• A grimmer Logan's World

The early medieval period as a game setting

I've seen Warhammer's Old World critisised as unoriginal and derivative but to me it's a genius piece of world design. The design criteria appears to have been "how do we fit all of our historical miniatures in" but I enjoy digging into the real world history that it draws from, be it the Holy Roman Empire or the Spice Road. Currently a lot of my gaming is Dark Ages early medieval related so naturally I've been reading up on that, and in many ways it's as much of a breath of fresh air from the generic pseudo-medieval setting that I grew up playing D&D in as a more exotic setting such as Tékumel. For example, what happens when there are no inns (or pretty much no towns for that matter)?

The WFRP careers system in an early medieval setting

WFRP is my favourite system of the admittedly relatively few RPGs I've played, and one of its great strengths is the way the careers system embeds the character into the world. However it means that to use the game in a different setting the careers system needs to be tailored to that setting. There are a couple of settings that I'd like to try it in one day: Middle Earth (which despite the Peter Jackson films should be Anglo Saxon in flavour, or so I understand) and the "time of Sigmar" (which seems to be early medieval / Ostrogoth-ish, both according to the Brief History of WFRP Time and this fantastic concept piece by Stefan Kopinski).

Wargame campaign systems

I've rambled about this before, and I'm looking forward to any insights that Tomahawk Studios forthcoming The Age of the Wolf offers.

A grimmer Logan's World

I'm trying hard to avoid being drawn back into Warhammer 40K, not least because of the paint queue implications but also that the the setting's not very attractive - but in a certain way it's also deeply fascinating. I've various ideas milling around in my head, the most recent of which was triggered by thoughts on the Oldhammer forum about a Logan's World game at this year's BOYL. The thing I find interesting about the game universe is the technology-as-religious-dogma aspect: science has been discarded, artefacts are built via ritual, and fear and superstition are positively medieval. To my mind, if a world was cut off from the Imperium then it wouldn't spawn an 80s mirror-shades view of the future, it would result in something much grimmer (and far more interesting).

(Why) I still prefer Warhammer Fantasy Battle

I spent last Sunday playing the good guys for a change, in a scenario organised by Paul of "more orcs than Sauron" fame, and on the drive home was pondering not just that I prefer WFB to the more modern games that I'm generally playing at the moment, but why I prefer it. Aside from the familiarity and no doubt nostalgia value it boils down to -

• The excessive detail (in troop characteristics, weapon bonuses, etc.) make it both easier and more prone to having a role playing game feeling
• It still handles a breadth of scale from handful of miniatures to small hundreds

To explain what I mean a few details of the scenario are relevant. I was leading a small band of samurai whose goal was to rescue some kidnapped damsels - facing me were around 100 barbarians and half-orcs, and some people on a war mammoth (very cool model - not room for one in my paint queue at the moment though!). A good number of the samurai characters had magic weapons, which naively I thought was to balance things out a bit...

One of the weapons was a Frenzied Blade.

In Dragon Rampant, to take a counter example, things are very much abstracted. You can build a narrative using the fantastical abilities, the various troop types and the Reduced Model rule. But actually the number of levers which are available to twiddle are fairly limited. This has a lot of good things going for it - the game can be more balanced and less open to abuse - but at the end of the day units end up somewhat alike and it's harder to really feel you know a character as an individual.

Back to the scenario: the Frenzied Blade wielder saved my bacon at a crucial interval (frenzy being a bit of a monster when it comes off) and looking back he becomes one of the key narratives that emerged from the game. There were also several other narratives, actual and potential - an interesting wizard duel, and the barbarian horde being held off by some seriously unlikely dice rolling. But those two factors - the detail and the breadth of scale - are what made the scenario truly memorable.

It can so easily degenerate into Herohammer or a "win in the army design" mess, but with a good GM and scenario Warhammer Fantasy Battle still seems, in my admittedly limited experience, hard to beat.

More Dragon Rampant - still learning

I got my second game of Dragon Rampant this week, and I think it's fair to say I still have much to learn. Not so much the game itself, as I think it could fairly claim the old "simple to learn" feature, but more fundamentally wargame tactics. Which in a way is more worrying!

This week we tried the Sacred Mole of Ukkert scenario (attacker has to get the McGuffin diagonally across the table, the defender (me) starts from one of the other corners and has to stop them / return it to its start point). We also used leader traits for the first time, and it turned out that my warlord was Wise while my co-conspirator's was the rather useful Commanding.

Interestingly after the experience of the previous game we'd both decided to forgo magic. Given the problems I encountered in the game this may have been a mistake, but on the other hand magic is very expensive and the points seemed better spent on my newly painted warlord and some goblin wolfriders (light riders with Fearful).

Grack the Wise and his bodyguards

Apropos of which I've decided that my approach to goblins is to treat them as normal troop types with Fearful, rather than as Ravenous Horde (for infantry) or Scouts (for missiles). My reasoning being that they're decently equipped, and quite happy to get stuck in when the enemy is under the cosh, but not at all keen on a fair fight.

Early disposition. The pesky elves are trying to get the Mole to the bottom right corner

Shooting in Dragon Rampant is reasonably effective against lightly armoured troops, rather less so as armour improves. I've not yet worked out how to close with a missile-heavy force, although in hindsight lack of aggression, bad positioning of my warlord and not thinking sufficiently about the troop types were all factors.

Key (and fairly obvious) lesson for next time is to keep my warlord in a central position (so enabling him to stiffen the courage of his followers), but equally obviously that slow moving infantry are not good for flank attacks. There are plenty of other things I could have done differently, but those are all fairly specific to the scenario and table set-up, so of little use for next time.

Another part of the answer is probably to bring more goblins (probably Fearful light missiles or light foot), but that has serious implications for the paint queue!

Campaigns for large skirmishes

My gaming at the moment is mostly large skirmish - SAGA principally, Dragon Rampant perhaps, and hopefully some Oldhammer next month. After our first game of Dragon Rampant our thoughts immediately turned to putting a campaign together, hampered by DR not including any campaign rules. My co-conspirator unearthed this thread on The Miniatures Page, which suggests a variation of the Warhammer Ancient Battles system but, although a nice straight-forward, low-paperwork system, for me that doesn't have the right ingredients. So I put some thought into what I think are the right ingredients -

Scale

Apart from the low figure count from a painting point of view, the thing I like about large skirmishes is the idea that each figure is an individual. So if your warband / army is somewhat more than 40 strong, but less than a couple of hundred, there's a limit to the scale of the campaign†. You're not going to be conquering swathes of territory, your objectives will be somewhat smaller (although not less interesting).

Related to that is that the personalities should be the same from battle to battle (survival permitting). And here too, if it's a large territory that's being battled over then the chances of Mandraks the Murderer running into Corma Lightmantle again at the next battle are slim.

The bad guys

I don't like the conquer-territory-and-get-related-troops (you now have a chapel, you can recruit a priest) setup as it doesn't work for the bad guys. You have fantasy armies that might settle territory, then you have those that raze it to the ground. Orcs (or Vikings for that matter) are raiding for loot, prestige or just because they enjoy it. Successful raids get them status which get them further recruits looking to get in on the action, and you need a mechanism to reflect that rather than the settler approach.

Scenarios

One of the great things about Dragon Rampant and SAGA is their scenario-driven gameplay. To me a campaign system needs to encompass this too, not just be a way of linking a number of line-them-up-and-knock-them-down sorts of game.

In summary

I'm almost sure what I'm looking for isn't out there - it'd be a miracle if it was, as I'm such a picky so-and-so. But I'm hoping there are elements of it in the campaign system for 2nd edition, and probably Dux Britanniarum. So I have an excuse to by the latter in the name of research! Over the next several months I'm planning to get some more concrete thoughts down on how such a system might work, but I'm rather hoping that after more research I find an existing system that roughly meets my criteria.

†One of my pet peeves (or my view of the "George, where did it all go wrong" moment for Warhammer) is the switch from WFB scenarios with forces in the 800 - 1600 points range to the 3000 point standard. From there it was only a small step to the emperor riding a griffon...

Belated goals post

I intended to write this in January - not a good omen...

Painting

My main motivation for this post is to keep me focussed. Having fallen very short of my target last year I'm hoping that a regular diet of gaming this year will keep me painting, so on pure numbers I should do OK. However I have a tendancy to be distracted by fascinating new projects and so waste time planning rather than executing and also not getting far down any one road (as my "goals" posts for the last few years will attest). There's loads of things I'd love to spend some time on but they'll have to wait for another year...

• Complete my SAGA Viking warband (25 further figures)
• An apprentice to go with my chaos sorcerer to enable me to field a starter "evil" Frostgrave warband
• My Oldhammer forum avatar (still!)
• An orc warlord, 7 orcs with crossbows, an archer, a warrior and 3 wolves to field up to 36 Dragon Rampant points (or a bit of variety in my 24 point warbands)
• A wizard and apprentice, 3 dwarves and a Norse "thug" to allow me to field a dwarf / Norse Frostgrave warband

And depressingly, that's all I'll likely get finished this year - and that's assuming I paint twice as much as last year!

Rab's rather impressive Geekstarter tracking also inspired me to add a couple of stretch goals -

1. A spare Viking warlord - even now he's painted my existing one is bound to get killed eventually, so for narrative purposes it'd be good to have some options. And as SAGA likes the warlord based differently I can't really substitute one of my other troops
2. An orc apprentice and some lesser armoured orcs for a third Frostgrave warband. My challenge here is that Frostgrave is geared towards a number of lightly armed and armoured soldiers bulking out the warband, and pretty much all my orcs would be at the more expensive end of the scale. I could always do "counts as" but I don't really like doing that at the warband scale, which means seeking out appropriate figures or doing conversions, both of which are time consuming

Blogging

I'm going to try again at my "more than weekly" target. My other main goal is to have at least ⅓ of my posts not be either "here's something I painted" or battle reports. Not only are there other things I want to write about, but also posts in the former category tend to get delayed while the painting is finished, so scuppering my goals.

Speaking of which, the reason this post is finally seeing the light of day is that I've painted the orc champion given to me by Erny over two years ago

And with some of his minions -

And that's about it for goals. My gaming is ticking along nicely at the moment, with plenty of dark ages and fantasy stuff going on at my club, and hopefully some Oldhammering lined up for March. And I daren't collect much at the moment, given how slow my painting is going...

Dragon Rampant - first impressions

Dragon Rampant seems to be a reaction to a certain overly rigid, win-the-game-in-the-army-selection style of wargaming, and from the first page comes across as a breath of fresh air. Throughout it emphasises keeping things simple, and using your imagination to field whatever models you have in your collection.

That simplicity can be strangly intimidating at first - "what if I want to give these guys two-handed weapons?" - until you start to get it. And then the freedom becomes a whole different sort of intimidating.

To illustrate the point, there are a grand total of 13 different types of troops, of which there are 5 non-missile infantry types (Elite Foot, Heavy Foot, Light Foot, Bellicose Foot, Ravenous Horde (e.g. peasants, zombies, etc.)). Each have a few specific options available, for example Heavy and Light Foot can have the Offensive option, which makes them better at attacking but means they can no longer form a shield wall. And then there's 12 "Fantastical" options (some of which aren't available to some troop types) and the concept of Single or Reduced Model Units - for example you might want to represent a unit of ogres as 4 Bellicose Foot - they hit just as hard and can take just as much damage as the standard unit of 12 orcs or humans, they're just represented differently on the table.

But how then do you represent say goblins (assuming you're going for the archetype that they're cowardly, not much good in a fight but not to the point you can turn your back on them)? As I see it, there are at least 3 ways -

1. Light Foot with the Fearful option
2. Ravenous Horde
3. Light Foot, but with 24 models rather than 12

Not exactly the worst dilemma to have, but the freedom with which you can draw up your warband is a bit of an adjustment for me, where I usually have to just field everything that I have painted!

I eventually settled on a warband as seen in my second impressions, needing only to paint up these two (who were selected for their ease of painting) to fill out my heavy foot -

The other challenge presented by this openness is to (ideally) agree on what sort of theme you're going for with your fellow gamers. Personally my preference is to emphasise the grunts, with the odd fantastic element thrown in. But conversely I was shown the campaign list of a friend of a friend which initially seemed a bit cheesy to me (everything was in some way "special") until I realised that it could just be that their reference point is much higher fantasy than mine. Of course you can just pitch your low fantasy grunts against their high fantasy whatevers, but it might be a bit hard sustaining the narrative.

I've now got all sorts of ideas I want to experiment with one day - I'm trying my hardest to push them to the back of the queue rather than gather up even more unpainted stuff...