World Building part 1, the village (con.)

My village is going to have a feudal lord but the lord is a remote power center. Perhaps represented by a baliff who comes around to collect taxes and adjudicate legal disputes. The lord isn't seen much but his presence is always felt.

More immediately there's going to be a local headman and council to run things on the day to day basis. We're going to have the better off peasants to fill these roles. The whole set up has the sanction of tradition but not in law. If you grow up in this village, you know these people run things and that's just how it is.

The other certain power center will be religious. Here's where we get into the fantasy aspect of the game. We're dealing with a world in which divinity has demonstrable power - power to heal, harm, bless, scry, etc. You'd have to be insane to oppose it. So the clergy will have more of a role than just exhorting the people to be good. Blessings and damnations are a large stick to rule with.

It is unlikely such a power center will be left on its own to possibly counter the secular power center, so religion will be intertwined with the feudal power in some manner that they share power. In a village there may be a local clergy, probably drawn from one of the more prominent families (one of the few who can afford to educate their children). Our cleric is responsible for a small shrine supported by the village and makes money on the side by educating the children. Smaller villages, hamlets, and thorps won't have their own clergy so they will either come into ours for religious purposes or our cleric will ride out to them.

The village cleric will have to answer to (and is somewhat protected by) a larger church. His immediate superior will doubtless be centered in the town that houses the local lord, and he may even be part of the lord's court. Our local cleric won't have much hope of advancing beyond his station.

In addition to the 'official' religion, there will be the itinerant preachers and religious crackpots. Plus, in keeping with the Normans and Saxons theme I have for this place, we can throw in an 'old' religion, suppressed but practiced in secret; its influence is still felt in the village in any manner of local customs and superstitions.

That's it for tonight. I'm tired.

World-building Part 1: the village (continued)

In the first post I was just trying to get a grasp on the geography of the village and to sum up, it is a narrow core of houses surrounded by strips of farmed land which are parceled out to the villagers. There are common fields for livestock, but also choice fields for the livestock of the wealthy. Running water is nearby.

Continuing on with Tomkeieff, the village, despite its small size, will have a social heirarchy. There will be a few local notables (one of which will be the clergy), 'free' farmers after that, and then the cottagers, who will be obligated to give up a day's work in exchange for the right to till some poor land. There might be slaves as well, but these will be very few and the property of the richest of the villagers - their living conditions might be no worse than that of a cottager except for less freedom of movement.

Politically we can have this two ways: one in which we imagine the village being subject to some feudal lord, or one in which, as Tomkeieff notes existed in pre-Norman England (albeit rare), the village is a self-governing entity. For my exercise in village-building, I'm going with the former. As a GM or writer, I'd prefer my heroes to have to deal with a powerful figure who is not necessarily their enemy, but does impose restrictions on what they can consider doing (or at least make them think twice about it).

I will explain myself a bit more here. I'm largely doing this world-building with a rpg in view. In most rpg's characters, as they gain in raw power seldom seem to gain in social status. I'm building this village with the view of, as a GM, starting off heroes in it. As sons and daughters of the villagers, our heroes concerns are going to be more parochial and intimate. They aren't going to care about stopping world-beating villians (that will come later when their power, influence, and obligations grow). Right now, they have to deal with the dire bear that is snatching sheep (and maybe the odd shepherd). Complicating matters for them is the local lord; maybe he is a good ruler, cognizant of his obligations, but can't have some yahoos getting the glory. He has to maintain his grip on power. So he might be trying to stop them, and maybe other villagers don't want to stir up trouble so they are also against our heroes.

Free Comic Book Day

I have only one post under my belt and already I'm off the schedule I set for myself. I can blame Alan Moore for this. At the library I found the Tom Strong series (at least the collections 1-4) and have been entranced by it all week. I've been overwhelmed by how good the writing is, particularly how well the various styles of pulp books / comics being paid homage to is handled, plus I love the way small things set up in one story pay off big in later ones.

My son's latest obsession is dinosaurs and this lead us to another comic: The Age of Reptiles. It is a completely 'silent' (i.e. wordless) and the fun part of it has been watching how Andras puzzles out the visual language.

His other favorite is Scrooge McDuck. Even dad pointing out that the Beagle Boys, who by their attempts to inject Scrooge's horded money into the economy of Duckburg, are actually the real heroes to the city's working class, can't diminish his enjoyment of the stories ("But dad, the sudden appearance of five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantasticatrillion dollars and sixteen cents into Duckburg's economy would result in runaway inflation!")

It is free comic book day. We're going down to our local and scooping up some stuff. I hope we can join up with Chance for the effort.

World-building, part 1: the village

To start world-building for a fantasy rpg, I’m going to start with the minimal social unit, which can be a village (or a neighborhood if I wanted an urban setting) but I’ll go with the village for now. The point is to create a base for low-level characters and give them a framework to create character background.

I’m going to base my village on information Life in Norman England by O. G. Tomkeieff. I figure I’ll describe a mundane village first and then in later posts start extrapolating what the introduction of magic and demonstrably real divine power would do to change it.

But Life in Norman England isn’t giving me a figure for village population, so I’m pulling the number 300 out of my … uh … thin air.

The climate and geography is going to be Southern England. The village will be ‘well-sited’ as described by Tomkeieff:

“[The village has] low-lying land near a stream… [O]n the outskirts of the village itself, between it and the arable land, there would be on or more hams, pastures reserved for certain people and limited in the number of animals allowed... within each field the villagers had their plots, in the form of long narrow strips, a furlong or furrow long and as wide as a double furrow.”