Posted on April 12, 2024, 07:51:55 PM by indiekid
Beyond the Wall – Part Two
Beyond the Wall – Part Two
By rbuxton
Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two part article. You can read part one here.
Arturo’s Quest
Timmo on his horse.
My bus ride from Morelia to Patzcuaro was not altogether smooth. I followed the journey on Google Maps until we got to the northern outskirts of the town. I asked the driver if the stop was close and he nodded and said “Estación”. The next stop appeared to be the middle of nowhere so I didn’t get off, only to find us whizzing out of Patzcuaro the next instant (the town is very narrow in the north). I had assumed the driver’s answer meant we were heading towards a “bus station”, but they don’t use that phrase in Mexico and he was actually referring to the small, freight-only train station hidden beyond the trees at the stop. I decided to stay on the bus as far as the next town, where I might be able to get off and make some enquiries about tours to Parícutin. The journey through pine-covered hills was long, and in the end I just hopped on a bus back, this time to the centre of Patzcuaro.
Patzcuaro is a lakeside Pueblo Mágico (magic town) full of low, whitewashed colonial buildings with red signs and eccentric tiled rooves. It’s also the capital of Day of the Dead celebrations, but I was there at the wrong time for those. I stayed in a hostel in a traditional building just off one of the main squares, which had an inner courtyard and colourful streamers hanging everywhere. I climbed several hills (actually extinct volcanoes) to get views of the town and lake. There were cobbled streets and old buildings aplenty to explore. I went to a craft fair organised by a Canadian artist where I tried my hand at weaving on a huge, pedal-operated loom. One morning I stumbled upon a parade in honour of one of the saints. A lot of people were in traditional costume, which included long ribbons tied into women’s pigtails. I couldn’t stay for the whole thing because I was due to watch the Eurovision song contest remotely with some friends back in the UK.
I took a number of trips out of Patzcuaro by collectivo (shared minibus). I went further into the mountains to Santa Clara del Cobre, a centre for copper working. I also visited Tzintzuntzan, a name which means “Place of the Hummingbirds” and is often abbreviated, conveniently, to TZN. It is a unique ancient site overlooking Lake Patzcuaro, dominated by a series of connected semi-circular platforms. Historically it was one of the few cities strong enough to resist domination by the Aztec Triple Alliance during their heyday. I actually saw more hummingbirds at Ihuatzio where a pair of temples look over the islands of the lake, their bases encroached upon by farmland.
My biggest trip out of Patzcuaro, however, was to Janitzio Island. I got up at 5 am and made my way through the cold and mist (the town is more than 2000 meters above sea level) to watch the white herons and other birds of the lake in the dawn light. The first boats from Janitzio began to arrive, disgorging secondary school students and loading up on crates of beer. I took one of these boats with the rest of the morning’s tourists and we were treated to a display of the traditional fishing technique, which involved what I’d call a giant butterfly net. The steep-sided island was crammed with buildings: there is an entire town there, where the indigenous Purépecha culture is still very much alive. It seems odd, therefore, that the island is dominated by a giant hollow statue of Hidalgo, a champion of Mexico as a whole. I did some more birdwatching and spotted a number of butterflies and a snake. Then I followed the main (only) road as it spiralled up towards the statue. On the way I met an old woman, Carolina, sweeping her doorstep. She was wearing traditional clothing and was missing a lot of teeth. I told her I was from England and I wanted to visit Guatemala and El Salvador; she described all of these places as “far”. Otherwise the conversation was mostly about whether I was married, though after a few repetitions of “Dinero para mis tortillas” I realised she was asking for money. I felt I had to oblige her but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her for a photo – this is not really appropriate any more.
I was sorry to leave Patzcuaro and its lake but I had to get on to Uruapan. The city is not particularly interesting but I was lucky to bump into yet another parade when I arrived. A short walk from the centre is the Parque Nacional Barranca del Cupatitzio, which follows several waterfalls of the Cupatitzio river to the beautifully calm pool at its source. The valley is densely wooded and the water has been diverted into all manner of channels and “fountains”. I spent a happy morning birdwatching and trying to remember what my dad had taught me about the relationship between shutter speed and running water when aiming for specific effects on my compact camera. I still had not found out much about Parícutin: there was frustratingly little information online and Uruapan’s wooden “tourist information” box remained so firmly shut during my visit that I began to suspect it was really someone’s TARDIS. I decided to go there a day early for some reconnaissance and took a collectivo to Angahuán. I walked past the small town’s church to the viewpoint and there it was at last: Parícutin.
The story goes that in 1943 a farmer named Dionisio Pulido noticed a hole appearing in his cornfield and attempted to plug it with stones. He was soon repelled by the ash, smoke and sulfurous smell emerging from the widening fissure. By the end of the day the nascent volcano was two meters high; after one year it was closer to four hundred. Three people were killed and two towns buried by lava over ten years of intense eruption; the volcano is still active but much calmer today. It stands as a squat, unfinished cone, dark against the surrounding mountains; black lava fields stretch from its base into the avocado plantations below. I had been determined to get to the top since Arturo first told me the story, and I appreciated that, at 80 years old, the volcano proves my grandmother is “as old as the hills”.
My guide for the day was a local man named Timmo, who recommended I ride one of his horses to Parícutin’s base. Horses are a popular means of transport through the pine-clad hills of the area because the roads are so soft with sand and ash. I had read, however, that the journey is extremely uncomfortable for those unaccustomed to the saddle, so we set out on foot. I sorely missed the walking boots I had left in the UK. Timmo set a brisk pace and we quickly cleared the forest and started grappling with the crumbling, otherworldly sculptures of the lava field. A few plants had taken root on the volcano but for the most part it was a steep, dark heap of loose stones, sending occasional plumes of steam into the grey sky. The crater itself was spectacular if a little smelly. There was nothing interesting at the bottom, just the end of several scree slopes, but the views out were spectacular. I appreciated Timmo’s pace then, because the day’s first peels of thunder came very close just as we were preparing to descend.
We slid down a softer slope (skis would have been useful) and took shelter in a small building used by the guides. Rain was pelting down and it had mixed with the ash to form a sticky paste in my shoes – it would be many months before they regained their normal colour. Timmo dug around for plastic bags and bin liners to fashion some waterproofs for himself and we set off again. The weather gradually improved as we passed from lava into avocado fields and we stopped for my packed lunch of, appropriately, avocados and wheat tortillas. We passed a couple of small villages and Timmo taught me the Purépecha words for the fruit growing by the road (including, to my surprise, blackberries and cherries). Eventually we reached what is possibly the area’s most photographed site: the church of San Juan Parangaricutiro, which is buried up to its neck in lava. It was interesting to climb around inside and wonder what the parishioners thought of the biblical-scale destruction being wrought upon their village. Finally Timmo and I made it up the last hill and sat down outside the stables at the visitor centre.
“Este es para ti,” I said, handing over our agreed sum, “And this is for a new raincoat.”
“Or some new shoes!” he laughed, lifting his foot so that I could see the extent to which the rubber was peeling from his plimsoles.
With that Timmo mounted his horse and rode off into the (almost) sunset. I went to Domino’s for a pizza.
The next day I took a BlaBlaCar north to Guadalajara, the second city of Mexico. Famously the home of Mariachi music, the city now has a modern, studenty feel. I could not, however, enjoy exploring the old town: I was there on a Saturday afternoon and it is genuinely the most crowded place I have ever been. I suppose this is inevitable when a city with an attractive centre expands too quickly for the infrastructure to keep up. On Sunday I made my way to another church of expats; this was made difficult by the closure of many roads for a cycling event (Sunday closures like this are common in Latin America). I met some nice people and enjoyed the service: it was truly bilingual, with English and Spanish sometimes alternating on a sentence-by-sentence basis. After church I went to the expansive Bosque los Colomos, where the Japanese Garden was a particular highlight (as an aside, apparently Japan once tried to buy the Baja California peninsula from Mexico to give itself some leverage over the USA ahead of the Second World War. I’m not sure if this is true but there’s certainly evidence of cultural exchanges around Mexico.)
I was in Guadalajara for one reason: to take a flight to the South. I had not taken an internal flight like this before and I was hoping to treat both of my bags as hand luggage. This presented me with the problem of smuggling my penknife through security. In an effort to disguise the blade I wrapped all of my metal possessions around the knife and secured them with electrical tape – to my amazement, and alarm, this worked. I was not so successful, however, with actually getting to the airport. My usual bus station strategy of seeking help from as many people as possible let me down: I asked one too many conductors and found myself bundled onto an inappropriate bus. The conductor obviously hadn’t realised that when a tourist asks for the “airport”, they mean the terminal, not the god-forsaken stretch of motorway on the far side of the perimeter fence. By the time I realised my mistake I had given myself a walk of several kilometres. I had a similar problem when I touched down at Tuxtla Gutiérrez airport: emerging into a beautiful, and noticeably more humid, evening I looked around for transport to the city. There was none, because the airport is very small and in the middle of nowhere. A single stretch of barbed wire was all that separated the airport access road from a field of cows. I trudged towards a junction in the hope of picking up a collectivo before nightfall. “It’s nice to be met at the airport,” I said to myself, “Just not by cows.”
The Sweaty South
Marimba night in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
The southern state of Chiapas has had a turbulent history. As independence movements surged across Latin America it briefly considered becoming part of Guatemala. When Mexico achieved independence its first act was to subdue Chiapas by force. I’ve often wondered what it must have been like for the soldiers in the new Mexican army: having thrown off the shackles of their colonial masters they immediately marched south to defeat a very similar independence movement on their own turf. Chiapas did not go quietly and most of its contemporary history has been violent. At one point the government relocated large numbers of indigenous groups to Chiapas, ignoring those who had lived there for millennia. In the late 20th Century the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was born, a complex fusion of Marxists and indigenous groups. Chiapas was a no-go area for tourists as recently as the noughties but, for better or worse, it’s now extremely popular with them.
I arrived in the capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, at night and was given a warm welcome at the rooftop bar of my hostel. The next morning the mountains which separated the city from the Sumidero Canyon were clearly visible. I visited a coffee museum and the botanical gardens, where I was struck by the sheer variety of endemic plant species. I also caught several marimba performances in the city’s plazas. The marimba is a large percussion instrument, comparable to a xylophone but with an individual soundbox for each note. It is usually played by three people and combined with brass and other instruments; local people salsa the night away, especially at weekends. The origin of the instrument is unclear: it’s either indigenous, brought over by the Spanish, or a hybrid of the two.
The highlight of my visit to Tuxtla, however, was my tour of the Sumidero Canyon. It started with a boat ride upriver to where the canyon juts onto flat ground like a wall. It’s thirteen kilometres long and, in places, one kilometre high; it’s home to birds, monkeys and American Crocodiles, some of which I managed to photograph. There were many interesting formations on the sheer rock walls and someone had put a shrine to a saint in one of the caves. The canyon opened out onto a beautiful lake where pelicans skimmed the water’s surface. After boating through the canyon we had lunch in the Pueblo Mágico of Chiapa de Corzo, which is known for its handicrafts. After that we piled into minibuses to ride to the viewpoints above the canyon. Since it was May the views were obscured by haze, but we could still enjoy the sight of sight of mighty eagles, much diminished by distance, wheeling below us.
The collectivo journey from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal de las Casas took just over an hour but the two cities could not be more different. While the former is very modern the latter was, to me, a more touristy version of Patzcuaro: all colonial buildings and funny streets. In Tuxtla I couldn’t sleep without air conditioning; in San Cristóbal, more than 2000 meters above sea level, I had to ask for an extra blanket. The city has been an important junction for backpackers for some time. Every night, from about ten o’clock, groups of them walk the streets with big bags on their backs and determined expressions on their faces. They are inevitably on their way to catch a night bus to the Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca State or even Guatemala (I did not join them – night buses are my least favourite means of transport).
The hardest thing about travel is, for me, the social pressure, or “fear of missing out”, which I feel on arrival at a new hostel. Everyone seems to have loads of friends already; they’ve all got more energy than you and they all speak better Spanish (the Germans also speak better English). This anxiety is misplaced, of course, because by your second evening you’ve made a lot of friends yourself and you’re in a position to extend a welcome to the next road-weary traveller to hover uncertainly outside the communal area. I went through this process on arrival at my hostel in San Cristóbal, a beautiful old school building on one storey and with a large central courtyard (a lucky find – I had not booked ahead). In the centre of the courtyard was garden of sorts with a feeder to attract the resident hummingbirds (known in Spanish as Colibrís). One morning two travellers, one Irish and one Austrian, pulled chairs into the sunny part of the courtyard and started seeing to each others’ dreadlocks. Watching from the shade, pen hovering above diary, I felt that this, too, was a little slice of history. A few days later I celebrated my 31st birthday with a traditional barbecue cooked by one of the Argentinian volunteers at the hostel. Between the nine of us we represented nine different nations; our ages ranged from 18 to 83.
I lingered for a long time in San Cristóbal, enjoying its churches, markets and murals. I went to the Museum of Amber, which contained both natural preserved flora and fauna and handmade jewellery. The translations on the labels of the former described them as “shapes from nature’s whimsy”. I took a collectivo a little way out of town to Parque el Arcotete, a mountain park which is home to a cave with a river running right through it. A thunderstorm started while I was exploring the cave systems above the river, and the sound of it echoing off the rock walls was awe-inspiring. Upstream I sat in a meadow and must have seen at least twenty different species of butterfly and dragonfly. Later I played a game of chess at the Centro Cultural del Carmen and met José, a guitarist who was playing duets with a double bassist (they had a great arrangement of Libertango by the Argentinian composer Villa-Lobos). José invited me to listen to his solo set at a bar that evening, where he was delayed by a passing parade. This parade was “not very cultural: more about the drinking”, as Arturo would say: it consisted mostly of backpackers and had some silly connection to the full moon. They made a lot of noise and it was a relief when José was able to resume playing.
José (left) at the Centro Cultural El Carmen.
My biggest excursion from San Cristóbal was to the mountain town of Chamula. I had been told it was a place where the indigenous culture was very much alive and tourists had to adhere to a strict code of conduct – taking photos in the church, for example, could lead to permanent confiscation of the offending camera. I took a collectivo to the turnoff for the town and was faced with a huge concrete archway reading “Bienvenidos al Pueblo Mágico de Chamula”. There was no one else around; the only movement was the literal dust cloud being thrown up by my rapidly retreating bus. I felt a sudden sense of foreboding, as if I was about to enter the Fey World or something. Taking a deep breath I passed under the archway and followed the hairpin bends towards town, camera safely stowed at the bottom of my bag. I was soon reassured by the familiar sight of whole chickens roasting over charcoal. Less familiar were the outfits of the men: despite the heat each wore a long woollen tunic and carried a hat and staff. The colour of tunic (white or black) and style of hat and staff seemed to denote which village the man came from. It was market day and the men had assembled on a platform while the women saw to the buying and selling. The unassuming white and green church, the Templo de San Juan, stood at the far end of the market.
I bought my ticket and stepped into the darkness of the church. There were no pews, and the floorspace was divided in two by cabinets containing effigies of just about every saint in Mexican Catholicism. There must have been over a thousand candles burning, but they were releasing so much smoke it was still gloomy inside. The biggest, meltiest, droopiest candles were reserved for spaces on the floor, which was otherwise completely covered in a carpet of pine needles. Family groups stood or knelt at these candles, their heads bowed in prayer. They brought offerings with them: in recent years water has been replaced with a cheaper alternative, Coca-Cola. For music they had a small tinny speaker playing such Christian classics as Silent Night and Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer. I didn’t witness the most interesting of the San Juan practices: the in-situ sacrificing of chickens. San Juan, if you hadn’t guessed, is one of the more striking examples of Catholicism adapting and mixing with indigenous religions in the Americas. Although it sounds weird to write it down, actually being there felt perfectly normal. It was, as I reflected while sitting on a bench in the market, just ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. As if to reinforce this point, a toddler at whom I had been quietly giggling suddenly stopped whatever adorable activity he was engaged in. He looked at his family and pointed at me in a “Look at that man, isn’t he funny” kind of way. I couldn’t deny that in Chamula I was, indeed, strange.
I left San Cristóbal expecting to take the road north to Palenque, so I was surprised when the bus set off south-west, towards Tuxtla. We were on a “three sides of a square” type journey, and I managed to gather that the direct road had been deemed unsafe. I wondered if this was related to a recent drug-related shooting I had heard about. A film was showing on the bus’s entertainment system: something about police busting up crime gangs. It did not lighten my mood: suddenly, after so much success, it seemed the naysayers had been right about Mexico after all. Should I have stayed safely behind the Wall? I later found out that this diversion was routine because the Mexican government was not “fully in control” of the road in question. Gangs connected to the cartels sometimes set up blockades and rob tourist buses – I think this technically makes them brigands. We stopped at a military checkpoint – the first of four – where my passport would have been taken out of my sight had I not kicked up a fuss. The diverted bus route did turn out to be a brilliant tour of the mountains of Chiapas, or at least it would have, had the next film on the entertainment system not been Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon. Talk about divided loyalties.
(Talk about a divided paragraph. Don’t worry, we’re nearly at the end.)
After a loop through green and banana-ey Tabasco State we arrived in Palenque and I booked a tour for the following day. My bus picked me up at 5 am and we set off into the Lacandon Jungle. It was proper jungle, with Tarzan-style vines hanging everywhere. Every so often the silence would be broken by a sort of wave of insect song or the roars of sparring Howler Monkeys (the loudest land animals in the world). We transferred onto boats for a journey down the Río Usumacinta (meaning “howler monkey”) which forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. I felt a long way from civilisation and it was nice to imagine the ethnographers from Na Bolom making journeys like this themselves – the river is still the only way to access the ruined Maya city of Yaxchilán. The main buildings of the city occupy a hill which would once have had a commanding view over a great curve of the river; now, having been reclaimed by jungle, everything is obscured. After disembarking at a beach our first sight of the city was a very green stone wall emerging from the vegetation. The site is not huge but is incredibly atmospheric; its inaccessibility means that it is not crowded with tourists. There were a number of small houses, temples and stelae (stone blocks carved with mythological figures and records of royal successions). A beautiful, wonky and overgrown staircase led to an extraordinary building at the top of a hill. Its roof was adorned with a huge stone lattice, which would once have been visible for miles around.
Our pilot with Guatemala (left) and Mexico (right).
Back on the main road our driver turned to us and asked who wanted to watch a film on the big TV screen. Everyone else – I’m not exaggerating – lifted their hands and cheered, so I pressed my face against the window and, in the gathering jungle gloom, thought about the Maya. In their heyday they were a collection of city states with such complex interrelationships they make A Game of Thrones look like a picnic. Several hundred years before the Spanish arrived the Mayan cities, but not their culture, collapsed. We’re still not sure why this happened, but one possible explanation has a certain appeal to me: in clearing ever-increasing swathes of jungle to support their ever-increasing population, the Maya may have realised they risked causing irreversible damage to their environment. Perhaps its wishful thinking to suggest that they chose to go back to a simpler, more village-orientated lifestyle, but even so there’s possibly a lesson for us here. As a bit of a tangent, I’d like to point out that American civilisations were not as technologically backwards (that really feels like the wrong word) as they’re sometimes portrayed. Although the Maya didn’t have them, metallurgy and wheels both existed on the continent. The latter are not much use without roads, and roads are hard to build in mountains and jungles, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that the only wheels I’ve seen were on an artefact which was actually a child’s toy. One thing the Maya did have is writing, and this posed a bit of a problem for the Spanish colonists. In order to justify their atrocities towards indigenous peoples they had to portray them as savages. So they set about “re-educating” the Maya scribes and destroying every Maya book they could get their hands on. Three survived. Three. Three books. If there’s one thing this trip brought home to me it’s the sheer scale of the histories and voices lost to the European land grab. If the Spanish come across badly in this story we can be sure that things would have been at least as bad under the British or another colonial power. I’m not sure if that’s much of a defence, but what do I know? I’m just a backpacker.
I had one more set of ruins to visit: those of Palenque itself. These are much tamer and more touristy than Yaxchilán and Bonampak, but still breathtaking. On arrival at the site I was confronted with a steep hill covered in vegetation: an unexcavated temple. To date less than a quarter of Palenque has been excavated and it was interesting to be see part of the city as it would have appeared before work began in the 20th Century. Palenque had a ball court, a royal palace complete with tower, and some truly immense temples – no cheating by running up the side of a hill here! One of the most spectacular temples is the tomb of K’inich Jabaal Pakal, better remembered as Pakal the Great. Maya kings liked to equate themselves with gods, so Pakal’s sarcophagus shows him curled in the foetal position and emerging from a seed in the style of the god of maize. It also has a jade likeness of his face which is one of the finest examples of Mayan art in existence. Visitors can’t access the original but the site’s museum has an excellent replica, as does the Museo Nacional de Antropología back in CDMX. After my visit to Palenque I walked down its nature trail and thought longingly of my upcoming dip in the pools of the Roberto Barrios waterfalls.
Throughout my time in Palenque the heat was excruciating. On the second night I abandoned my bed in favour of a yoga mat on the floor with two fans over me. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and attempting to have a cold shower, only to find the “cold” water getting warm after a few seconds. I also fought a losing battle over my breakfast cereal with an army of Small Ants (the Medium Ants and Big Ants were significantly more peaceable). I was not the only one struggling: passing one of the few other groups of backpackers I heard one say to another “That’s his third ice cream this morning.” I jumped on the earliest air-conditioned bus I could. I went back to Tuxtla the long way around then changed for a bus to Tapachula, Mexico’s southernmost city – a journey of fifteen hours in total. At about 11pm I checked into a hotel.
I woke up late. I watched some Mexican TV. I turned my air conditioning on, then off, then on again. I ordered a pizza. I had planned to do nothing other than relax on my final day, but Mexico had one more surprise in store for me. In venturing onto the balcony to watch the approach of the evening’s thunderstorm I met my neighbour, Rodrigo. He told me his story: as a young man he had spent ten years working in the USA. It was hard work and he never had the opportunity to learn English: even the American taskmasters spoke to him in Spanish. Nor was the work steady: a job for someone “from El Salvador” was, he told me, easy for someone from that smaller country to obtain, whereas those “for Mexicans” are hotly contested. At some point, his passport and papers were taken from him. He met and fell in love with a woman from Guatemala; they married and had a son. His family was all he had left but they were now in Guatemala and refusing to tell him exactly where. He was trying to find them, and he asked me if I thought it would be easy to cross the border. I told him, sheepishly, that for a tourist like me it probably was. I didn’t know what to say to Rodrigo. He seemed harmless enough but it was possible his wife had good reason to hide from him (the position of women in Mexico is – how can I put this – complicated). I had set out to find out what life was like Beyond the Wall and it seemed, in Rodrigo, I had succeeded. The evening with the students in Chile suddenly seemed a long time ago.
The next morning I crossed a bridge over the Río Suchiate on foot and entered Guatemala. I had been in Mexico for nearly three months and had left much undone. It was a shame, for example, to have flown straight over the mountains and beaches of Oaxaca. I was already devising two more three-month tours: one around the Yucatan and Caribbean coast; the other across the desert and up the Baja California peninsula for a spot of whale-watching (both tours would, of course, have to include a visit to Arturo in León). The latter presents the possibility of arriving in the USA in some style: by crossing the physical Wall into California.
Thank you for reading this article to the end, especially if English is not your first language. Thanks also go to my proofreaders and to Jubal. There are probably some factual inaccuracies here so, as ever, please do point them out if you see them. I have changed all the names of individuals. Mexico has stayed with me, and I do expect to go back. No wall lasts forever.
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Posted on March 17, 2024, 11:30:50 PM by Jubal
How to think about history in your games
How to think about history in your games
By Jubal
Even very "historical" games can produce wild ahistorical outcomes. Does that matter?
The thing that people always expect of me as a historian is that I will talk about accuracy, and will mostly be here to complain about games getting things wrong. “Oh, you must be so annoyed at all the things Total War gets wrong” is something I’ve heard rather more times than I care to remember, or the sometimes even more awkward “oh, I bet you love Kingdom Come Deliverance!”
This hits a pretty rapid problem though: making a totally accurate simulation of the past is impossible. I think most people and certainly most game developers understand this on some level: the demand for medieval RPGs where the player character has to take a dump regularly is pretty low, despite the fact we can be pretty sure that’s a period-accurate thing for them to do.
Even if you did make a terrible game where you were doing everything ‘accurately’, there’s a further problem: your player is not, themselves, a medieval person. Growing up in medieval cultures, people had different thought processes and mental structures – different assumptions about how the world worked, what was important, and what was valued. They had a whole lifetime to grow up into that world, and learn huge amounts of expected knowledge about things the average player today can’t be expected to know. A medieval person’s knowledge of how one gathers moorhen eggs or the right conditions for digging peat turves or of stories and folk tales many of which are now lost aren’t to be judged better or worse to a modern person’s knowledge of how to use a spreadsheet or which stores one buys cheap clothing at or what the order of Marvel movies to watch is, but fundamentally you cannot, in a ten or even hundred hour game, replace one lifetime of knowledge and assumptions with the other.
You may be wondering, then, what the point of my research into history and games even is, if we can’t produce accurate computer games. They’re often seen as just an entertainment medium in the end, after all, and most gamers don’t actually understand games as a good way to learn about history. Should we not just decide that computer games are so much fantasy, and not bother thinking about how they relate to history?
My answer to that is “absolutely not”. The relationship between games and history is far more complex than a question of accuracy, but the relationship between games and history is there and it matters immensely. Games are just there as entertainment in the same way that paintings are just there to be pretty: which is to say, they’re not. They are art, and do project ideas and influences, whether we choose to acknowledge that fact or not. Games are a space where imagination, selections of ideas from history, and a selection of modern ideas and concepts all frequently collide. That makes them an amazingly fertile space for imagining and reimagining the past, and taking past concepts and imaginations seriously in that matters a great deal.
Hades' "Ancient Greek" underworld has medieval stained glass windows: history inspires in places we don't expect.
In other words, rather than thinking of your games in terms of whether they’re accurate, as a historian I’d encourage you to think about them as a selection process. Even if you’re not setting a game historically there’s a good chance you’re including a number of historical elements and ideas, and that collection helps signal various things to your players about the sort of world your characters inhabit and your contribution to their wider imagined past.
There’s a dark side to all this which I want to discuss head-on: extreme ideologues, especially on the nationalist and racist far right, love using games and their iconography to sell their ideas. People at far-right rallies hold up Deus Vult flags as much because of its popularisation into internet culture via games like Crusader Kings as because they’re actually reading any serious literature on the crusades. People may not think of the games they play as accurate, but they’re still taking parts of that curated collection away and re-using them, and we’re still building expectations about what the past can and can’t look like. In a world where people often hold pre-modern history up as a grim age of human misery, or as a golden age of “pure” nations that we should hark back to, or indeed as a grim age of human misery that we should hark back to, the sorts of imagined pasts we tell stories about do matter.
Understanding games as a selection process helps us understand this and helps us ask the right questions about how it works. Accuracy here can be a double-edged sword: some games that sell themselves hard on “historical accuracy” very much use accuracy in specific areas to cover for the things that they left out of their curation of the past in other areas. A really nicely 3D modelled historical sword is a lovely and very exciting thing, but it doesn’t ‘counterbalance’ having a world which takes over-simplistic and ahistorical pictures of faith, rulership, gender, and identity. For that we particularly need our curation approach, to ask what’s missing from the historical picture. Note that I’m not saying that games should be moralising in this regard, or always contain modern assumptions about what’s good or bad regarding those things, or always contain as many medieval elements in the curation process as possible on the other hand. I’m a firm believer in the idea that there are many routes to a good game. I am saying, however, that devs could do more to recognise which ahistorical tropes are likely to be beloved of those who would use history for bad purposes, and consider that when it comes to design, community engagement, and talking to writers and historians alike about our work.
I don’t want to give the impression, though, that thinking about games as curation of the past is solely about the modern political impacts and tropes. I want to give the positive case as well: thinking better about what we include and exclude can be a way of unlocking new ideas for our games, new parts of the past to explore and new ways to see them. There are immense amounts of untapped potential in building imagined pasts and historical or historical-fantastical settings that aren’t worked into modern games effectively, and I’d be very excited to see more of that rich diversity of human experience tapped more effectively by game developers.
A medieval 'grotesque', British Library Arundel 83 f55v. The medieval imagination is a wonderful place to explore!
For me, that’s all a more positive approach to history in games, thinking about what we’ve got – and whether we really want it in our collection – and thinking about what we haven’t got and what’s still there to be discovered and used. Using history in games better should be a win for everyone, unlocking new stories and spaces: more different things for players to relate to, history-interested folks to discover, and developers like us to build great narratives and gameplay around.
It’s also something that’s not as hard to do as you might think: if you’re sitting there thinking “that sounds great but there’s no way I can find anyone to talk to about history” or “I’m too small to pay a historical consultant” – well, here I switch to my historian’s hat and say talk to us anyway. Whilst I’d love to see more devs hiring historians as part of their narrative and design teams, if that’s out of reach there are plenty of historians out there who’d love to share ideas with small and independent developers, and spaces like Exilian’s Coding Medieval Worlds workshops or the online Middle Ages in Modern Games conferences where there are resources and networks available.
To sum up, if there are three things I’d like you to take away from reading this, they are these:
> History in games matters. It helps us unlock new stories and material, and affects how our game takes part in wider discussions and imaginations of the past and present, whether we want it to or not.
> Rather than thinking about overall “accuracy”, think about the history in your games as a curation process. Considering what’s there, what isn’t, and why you’re using it are key to working out how to use history better.
> Remember that you can talk to historians! Academics are often keen to engage with the public and there are many more fruitful connections that can be made.
I’m an optimist about what we can do with games and history – and I think there’s a huge amount still to be done and a great many fascinating stories to be told, fresh historical and fantastical worlds to discover, and more besides. I hope this piece has helped give you some new tools to look afresh at your games and game settings, and that it’ll help you to explore building games in a wider array of medieval worlds.
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Posted on March 12, 2024, 10:38:56 PM by indiekid
Beyond the Wall – Part One
Beyond the Wall – Part One
By rbuxton
Which wall? Trump’s wall.
In 2017 I visited my brother in Chile. After travelling together for a bit I set off alone and soon made friends with some European university students. They were involved in the university’s International Society, which put on cultural events. I was invited to “France Night”, a pleasant evening in which two French students talked for half an hour about their country’s history and culture. “Mexico Night”, on the following evening, was completely different. There must have been at least thirty Mexican students pulling out all the stops with food, music, games and a Zapateado dance show. I was struck by how good-natured, proud and interesting the people were. In that moment I realised how insulting the then-US president’s rhetoric was – insulting to both Mexicans and those crossing it from other Central and South American countries.
A young organillero plies his trade.
I’d like to make one thing clear: Mexico is not a “developing” country. It has great infrastructure, huge cities and a booming tech scene. The streets of CDMX follow a grid layout – perfectly intuitive for most of the world’s population but strangely confusing to the British. Music is all around, often coming from the Organilleros – an army of smartly-dressed musicians pumping away at organs and doffing their caps for change. They sometimes rub shoulders with busking saxophonists, while efficient recycling trucks whizz by and traffic wardens whistle to keep everything under control.
During one outing in CDMX I jumped on a double decker bus with another (male) backpacker. After a few minutes people started nudging us and pointing at the floor, but our Spanish was too basic to grasp what was going on. It turned out we were standing in the “women and children only” part of the bus, an area taking up most of the ground floor and demarcated by pink handrails (which were yellow elsewhere). In weighing up the pros and cons of this system, I felt, one could cover many of the gender and equality issues which have been thrown up in the UK in the past decade or so.
My favourite public transport story, however, comes from CDMX’s metro. I was standing by the doors of the carriage with a young man to my right. He was seated and had very stylish hair, moulded into some complicated shape and looking wet as a result. Suddenly a few bubbles whizzed past us accompanied by a cry of “Cinco pesos!”. What on Earth was going on? Looking up, I saw one of the many one-item salespeople who ply their trade on the metro; his product was children’s bubbles. He had a neat trick: by holding the bubble wand towards the stream of air from a fan he could literally bombard his potential customers with his wares. Unfortunately for my neighbour the wax holding his hair in place was quite attractive to bubbles, so several stuck without him noticing. I didn’t have the confidence – social or linguistic – to point this out to him, so I’m pretty sure he was still wearing them when we emerged onto street level a few minutes later.
In venturing beyond the Wall I got a little more than I bargained for. In reading this, you will too. You have been warned...
Around the Capital
I had decided to ease the culture shock by making my first stop in Mexico the small town of Tepoztlán. Getting there was not too much trouble but in order to find my hostel I booted up Google Maps. I was charged £72 for the privilege, having missed the text message from my network which said something like “Welcome to Mexico, we’ve turned off the data roaming cap you sensibly set yourself, wasn’t that helpful of us?”. On top of this I was struggling with the heat, the jet lag, a sore throat (probably my fault) and a bad back (definitely my fault). When I arrived in Tepoztlán a light dust was swirling through the cobbled streets and saloon-style doorways; some sort of festival was going on and a man in a skeleton costume waved at the local tourists. Mexico, it seemed, was not holding back.
Tepoztlán, it turned out, is turned out to be a “Pueblo Mágico” (magic town), one of several hundred in Mexico which have done much to preserve their heritage. Its old buildings, murals and mountaintop Aztec temple no doubt contributed to this accolade. I spent a day acclimatising and shopping around for a big sombrero to replace the weedy cap I had brought from the UK, eventually choosing one made of straw (the material of the peasantry; posher sombreros are of felt). The next morning I rose early to climb the mountain before the heat set in. The path was beautiful and led to some brilliant views; the temple wasn’t overly interesting but the wheeling clouds of Mexican Eagles certainly were.
From Tepoztlán I backtracked to Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos state and an important cultural centre. It had some interesting churches and a nice cathedral but otherwise didn’t hold much for a backpacker. The city’s most interesting site is a squat castle built by the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1528 (making it perhaps the oldest Spanish building in Central America) but it was closed during my visit. Like Cortés (well, kind of) I now turned my attention to the Aztecs’ Tenochtitlan; Frida Kahlo’s Ciudad de Mexico; Instagram’s CDMX.
The Aztecs (technically the Mexica) chose the location for their city based on the omen of an eagle killing a snake while standing on a cactus; this image still adorns the national flag. The location was a lake, so they developed a land-reclamation system involving plants grown at the water’s edge. This gave them a handy system of canals which helped the city become very efficient. When the Spanish conquered it, they built their city directly on top. I’m not really sure what this means, but the result is that the centre sinks by about a foot every year. This, combined with the tectonic activity of the area, has led to some buildings sitting at a jaunty angle. Over the next few centuries the city expanded into the surrounding mountains at a frightening rate; by 2005 it was (by one measure) the second most populous in the world. Recently there have been many efforts to address the social issues associated with such growth, including an extensive cable-car network.
I stayed in a hostel a few blocks from Zócalo, the city’s main square and venue for both political demonstrations and free concerts. It’s surrounded by beautiful examples of Spanish colonial architecture, including universities and a cathedral. Latin America in general is home to some amazing architecture which might look vaguely familiar to those of us who’ve visited Europe. These buildings tend to be on a significantly smaller scale, and this could be due to practicalities like sourcing materials, the aforementioned tectonic activity, and the desire to erect colonial status-symbols speedily. They helped form a national identity as independence movements swept the region, and I imagine the conversations going something like this: “You can’t be your own country when you don’t even have fine, neo-classical buildings”, “Oh yes we do!”
Easter celebrations in the Zócalo.
I spent three Sundays at an Anglican church near Chapultepec, which served some of CDMX’s expats and digital nomads (the city almost irresistible to the latter due to its climate and amenities). On arrival I was confronted by a pie chart showing the ethnicities of its members, and was surprised to see Nigerian in third place (after American and Mexican). It was nice to be able to relax there and chat to people who had called the city home for most of their lives. Semana Santa (Holy Week) was approaching and on Palm Sunday we paraded around the church equipped with crosses and, for some, bagpipes. Easter Saturday found me back in the Zócalo watching a huge display of music and dancing, accompanied by a sermon from a very charismatic woman, who spoke so fast I could only really pick out repetitions of the phrase “pueblo de Dios”. I had been advised to stay in CDMX over Semana Santa because, as in many countries, holiday destinations get very booked up. The city, Zócalo concert notwithstanding, was comparatively empty and I had some nice relaxed walks around the centre.
My first excursion was to the mountain Pueblo Mágico of Mineral del Chico. It was very nice up there among the pine trees but it was so hard to reach by public transport that I only had an hour there and had to spend much of that time on the toilet. My trip to the ruins of Teotihuacan was rather more successful. This vast site of stone temples, walkways and marketplaces was one of the largest, and most cosmopolitan, cities in the world in the 1st Century AD (so cosmopolitan, in fact, that it’s not clear if it was the Olmecs or Toltecs who built it). What is known is that the Mexica, arriving in the region about a millennium after Teotihuacan’s decline, believed it had been built by gods and modelled Tenochtitlan on it. The so-called pyramids of the Sun and Moon dominate Teotihuacan’s skyline and are connected by the wide, temple-flanked Avenue of the Dead (we’re not sure about any of these names, by the way). The pyramids would have had structures at the top, perhaps of wood, but were not used for human sacrifice, a practice which was mostly confined to the Mexica in the 14th and 15th centuries. More subtle are the stone animals, pillars painted with deities, and houses which show a cross-section of the building techniques used throughout the city’s history. It was very hot and I was fortunate to have a sombrero to protect me from the sun, though it was dwarfed by those of the souvenir-sellers.
I had a blast in CDMX, but it didn’t feel that way the whole time. I was preoccupied with my money, which was supposed to last nearly a year, and Mexico was significantly more expensive than I had expected (I had unwisely used my India trip of 2011 as a budgeting reference). I was also overwhelmed by the sheer size of Mexico and the fact that I was right in the middle. It turns out that having the world as your oyster is more than a little daunting. One day, sitting around in the hostel nursing an upset stomach, I was on the verge of booking a flight to Colombia when I received a WhatsApp message on a group which had been defunct for more than two years. It was an old travel friend asking where everyone had got to and the answers came back as follows: Mexico, Belgium, Tenerife, Canada and Mexico. It turned out that my American friend Henk was just a few hours away by bus! I mention this extraordinary coincidence because I had first met Henk under very similar circumstances; sometimes lightning really does strike twice.
The American and the Mexican
So it was decided: I would set off Northwest for my rendezvous with Henk, stopping off in the cities of Querétaro and San Miguel de Allende. The former is Mexico’s fastest-growing city and its tech capital. On my first day I stumbled upon a crowd of people in traditional costumes, including rattling anklets, dancing to the beat of drums. I visited a number of churches and the Santa Cruz convent. The convent forms the terminus of the city’s impressive colonial-era aqueduct, indicating how important these institutions were in the operation of early Spanish settlements. The bus journey to San Miguel de Allende was dramatic and afforded great views of the city and the famous pink church tower of La Parroquia de San Migeul Arcángel. Another famous site in the city is the house of Ignacio Allende, one of the leaders in Mexico’s war of independence (1810 to 1821). The city is no stranger to war: it was a front line during the 16th century Chichimeca War and had to be abandoned several times before the Chichimeca leaders were bought off by the Spaniards.
Finally I reached Guanajuato, surely one of Mexico’s strangest cities. This arid mountain town experienced a “silver rush” in the 16th century and was soon producing 30% of the world’s silver. There was no planning so buildings popped up wherever they could; thanks to the region’s wealth many of them were very grand. The result is a maze of staircases and alleyways giving out to cramped squares and neo-classical façades. With space at a premium the roads are all in tunnels below street level; I felt like Indiana Jones as I approached by bus. The city is popular with backpackers and international students, who are drawn here from Guadalajara by the promise of techno music and cocaine.
I met Henk on the steps of the market building and we caught up over pork sandwiches with plenty of offal. We donned hard hats to explore one of the mines and visited the church where some of its silver ended up. We joined a walking tour organised by one of the volunteers at the hostel and wound up at the museum of the artist Diego Rivera (husband to Frida Kahlo). We hiked up to a viewpoint where my sombrero was nearly lost to a gust of wind; Henk helped me to attach a chin strap. We spent several evenings at the statue of local independence-era hero El Pípila, from which we could watch the sunset picking out the many colours of the city. In the hostel we ate sopes, a kind of thick tortilla, and drank mezcal, a smoky cousin of tequila which is also derived from the agave plant. I did not visit the city’s most famous attraction: a museum of naturally preserved corpses, exhumed and displayed in glass cases. My reluctance to visit surprised many Mexicans; their relationship with Death is certainly different to my own.
The finest busker in León, if not Mexico.
Henk took me to a leather market where skins of cows, snakes, crocodiles and more could be bought. I was interested to find out that Iran is the world’s biggest exporter of snakeskin. I asked one man where he had bought his elephant hide and he did not answer – I suspect this was not due to my poor Spanish skills. We also visited the city’s triumphal arch and the church of El Templo Expiatorio, which was built in the 1920s. I’m no architecture buff but I could see this church was very different to others I had visited: built in a neo-gothic style it had the colouration of a Battenberg cake and eschewed fancy decorations in favour of simple stained-glass windows. Every evening, sunset would bring out brides-to-be and their entourages to have photos taken in advance of their weddings. I ventured into the extensive catacombs, which had a number of rooms dedicated to different saints. I was surprised to find them very brightly lit – how could anyone sleep? I also took a couple of buses to a big lake for some birdwatching.
It is impossible to overstate the generosity of my hosts. Despite often using his house as an Airbnb Arturo invited Henk and myself to stay for free for two weeks. Henk is a brilliant cook and would sometimes wake me up with pancakes before taking me to the local market to buy fruit and vegetables. Arturo invited me to Sunday lunch with his extended family, most of whom lived locally. There I met his sister Mariana, who had worked as a nanny in the USA. Her host family had given her a Scrabble set as a parting gift but she had not found enough English speakers to play it – until now (unfortunately we never got around to playing in Spanish). Henk and some of his friends, also one-time landlords of his, took me to a karaoke bar, where we – what’s the word – surprised the local people with our renditions of Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The bar “ran out of beer” that night, so we drank a lot of mezcal. At one point Henk asked me if I thought we were in a richer or poorer area than that of the cumbia bar. I guessed it was richer and more middle-class. How could I tell? Let’s just say there’s a correlation between physical appearance and affluence in Mexico which is depressingly familiar to those of us from the UK.
Henk left to attend to business in the USA and Germany, and I lingered. Over the next few days I encountered a number of people with very inspiring ambitions, some of which I’ll reproduce here:
“I work in the leather market but I’m hoping to train as a teacher.”
“I’ve been invited to Spain to do an interview on TV about my beauty products.”
“I’d like to turn this place into a seafood restaurant, like the one outside of town. They have shrimp tacos there. Come on, let me show you!”
I have not covered half of my adventures in León here. They culminated with my desperate attempts to clean the bathroom on my final morning before my host returned from a friend’s house. I had rocked up at 2 am the previous evening and blocked the sink with my vomit. Too much information? Let’s get back to the backpacking.
From León I did two day trips, the first to Aguascalientes. I looked around some nice churches and the Museum of Death, which contained historical and artistic pieces relating to Mexico’s fascination with all things morbid. I considered spending the evening at the city’s famous festival, but since it was, in Arturo’s words, “not very cultural: more about the drinking” I decided to give it a miss. A longer trip – and a night in a hostel – took me to Zacatecas, the northernmost city on my trip and situated where the Central Plateau gives out to semi-desert. It’s another old mining town but, unlike Guanajuato, it has enough space for the grand buildings to really stand out. The most interesting site was the ”Mina el Edén”, or Eden Mine, which has some beautiful caverns running for several kilometres, and a train. The name is both deceptive and cruel: hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were killed while working as slaves in the mines, and in the associated wars with the Spanish (many African slaves would later share the same fate). While walking the streets of Zacatecas I stumbled upon an open-air display of traditional music and dancing. As far as I could tell it was actually a cultural exchange of sorts: the dancers were from a university in the distant state of Oaxaca (woh-ha-kah). With the exception of a terrifying dance on stilts most dances were calm affairs of ten or so couples in traditional costume. One seemed to tell the story of the Spaniards’ arrival in Mexico: the dancers acted out some domestic scenes, gradually giving way to joyful twirling. Towards the end the “lead” woman took up position in the centre of the stage, squatted down and flapped her skirts around. Eventually she laid an egg, which her partner promptly ate, to much applause.
This is part one of a two-article coverage of rbuxton's adventures. You can read part two by clicking here.
You can also read about rbuxton's previous Accidents in Andalucía, or discover more travel writing from other Exilian members via our travel writing index.
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Posted on January 18, 2024, 10:32:45 AM by Jubal
Exilian Interviews: Phoenixguard!
A Conversation With: Phoenixguard!
Your Interviewer: Jubal
The RPG design team at Norbayne have been key parts of the Exilian community for many years, especially their captain and lead designer James Gatehouse (Phoenixguard09). We caught up with him for a chat in our latest Exilian interview, now going up as Exilians 150,000th post! Read on to find out more about the project, the influences and issues on indie fantasy RPG design, and a fair bit of nerdery besides...
Jubal: So, we’re here mostly to talk about your tabletop RPG project Norbayne, but first, let’s talk about you: what got you into tabletop RPGs to begin with?
Phoenixguard: Hey Jubs, thanks for having us here. For anyone not aware, my name is James Gatehouse. I am the initial creator and lead developer of the Norbayne tabletop role-playing game.
The story as far as my initial tabletop experience is, I think, at least a little atypical. I went to a pretty fundamentalist school in my early years. Dungeons and Dragons for instance was a complete no-go, I was somewhat ostracised because I had read Harry Potter, the whole Satanic Panic made somewhat manifest in suburban Queensland, Australia. Narnia and Lord of the Rings were fine though, so there was some form of acceptable fantasy - though I must admit, I did not get into Lord of the Rings until just before The Two Towers came out in cinemas. I think my first dabbling with a tabletop game was perhaps around early 2003, with a kind of bizarre, dice-less, largely solo-player narrative adventure game with a real kitchen-sink fantasy setting. Somehow, I managed to rope my poor mother into playtesting it for me, which still to this day means a great deal to me, though she has never let me forget what a sacrifice it was for her to sit through!
Around that same time, I got absolutely hooked on Lord of the Rings and devoured absolutely everything Middle-Earth related I could get my hands on. At the end of 2003, after the theatrical release of The Return of the King, I received a copy of the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game starter box. I was quite young at the time and it took me a fair while to properly parse the rules, but I found it absolutely fascinating. I spent truly unreasonable hours learning the game, painting the miniatures, crafting terrain, playing against myself, memorising the rulebook by rote and soon, I was creating my own rules content as well, coming up with new units and an unreleased ‘campaign’ type system for you to create your own little warband. I would have been insufferable as a child (still am by most accounts).
I progressed into Warhammer pretty smoothly from that point, crafting another homebrew RP system to use with the Warhammer Fantasy setting, this one relying on D6 dice pools. Not long after running a few games of this at school, I was introduced to the concept of Dungeons and Dragons and played a few games, but I was never really enamoured with the D20 system.
Since that time, I’ve dabbled a bit in a few different tabletop systems, particularly enjoying the 2nd edition of Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game, which gave me a great appreciation of the versatility of a percentile-based system. It is an appreciation which has informed many of the design decisions which have, in turn, given rise to Norbayne.
A draft title page from an earlier Norbayne version.
Phoenixguard: I think it was late 2011. I had been struggling for months to write a story. I had all the ideas for an interesting setting and world, but could not come up with a compelling story to write. The depression was setting in alarmingly quickly, until a friend of mine at the time (now wife), Stephanie, told me one evening, “Don’t write a story then, use the world you’ve created for something else.”
In hindsight, that advice seems very simple, but at the time, my mind was blown. It hadn’t occurred to me to even consider such a thing. So I think maybe ten months passed, where I worked on this thing basically in secret. I put together what I felt was quite a robust system to go with the setting and then began to invite a few people I thought may be interested. At the time, we didn’t actually have an explicit table as such, it was the playtesting of this game which brought our gaming group together. Thus was the Three Coins campaign born, which would last approximately nine years in the end, albeit with a couple of hiatuses in there due to various real-life scheduling issues.
Jubal: Can you give us a quick pitch – what makes Norbayne stand out for you and what makes it differ from other TTRPG settings out there?
Phoenixguard: From a setting perspective, there’s a bit of everything. We’ve got some allusions to an almost space operatic in the deep past of the setting, a classical fantasy kind of feel with some unique twists to the formula and then a legitimately in-depth evolutionary origin for the various species at large in the world. I think we’ve hit a really good balance between providing a detailed framework and providing enough freedom to come up with your own parts of the setting.
On the mechanical front, it’s elaborate. We’re a hard class-based percentile system with a fully independent ruleset and multiple ways to play baked into the core rules. While we may have a hard class-based design, the customisation available to you within your Class selection is prodigious, and to be fair, is probably the biggest part of why we’re still in development.
Jubal: If you could pick one place and one character that really sum up the setting for you, who and where would those be – and why?
Phoenixguard: I’m afraid I really can’t pick a single place or character right off the bat, but I think the initial Three Coins group is pretty representative of the setting. For that matter, there are worse locations to consider than the independent township of Summer Hill, in which we spend a great deal of time throughout the course of the Three Coins campaign. A Midland town sitting on the border between two powerful kingdoms, Summer Hill society is a conglomeration of various peoples, as are most towns throughout the Midlands of Norbayne come the modern era. One big design concept I wanted to emphasise right from the beginning was to stay away from the idea of great monolithic cultures being demarcated by species. In some places, this is still the case, but these cases are largely the exception, usually due to remoteness of location and the deliberately insular nature of the culture itself. By the modern age of Norbayne, most of the more populous settlements will have a mixed species population, and the society reflects this.
As for our initial playtest group, in large parts they defined the quintessential member of their people. For instance, George’s character, Harold Oakenshield provided us with a great example of just what an Invarrian was. He threw himself into the physiology of the species, for example always asking specifically if he could smell anything when I asked for Perception Checks, but he also really embraced the mentality of the Invarrians, their dualistic nature and dichotomy between their generally fun-loving personality and their inherent thrill in causing destruction.
He wasn’t alone in this. For instance, Steph’s Danann, Maebh Preachain-Eite really delved into the psyche of a Fell Clan Danann who had imposed a form of self-exile upon herself.
This is not to say we have not had similarly well-fleshed out and compelling characters since this time. Steph again has really hit the brief perfectly with another Danann, Bedelia Ceanndorcha in our Forgotten Glories campaign for example, nailing the concept of the Fell Clan Danann trying to exist in a society she really doesn’t quite understand, all the while dealing with her own, personal historical trauma.
Jubal: The aesthetics of much of Norbayne have a European feel – with for example the highlanders having very Scots aesthetics, some celtic myth terms like Danaan used. But, of course, you and your team are all Australian. What do you think is the attraction of building that Europeanism into your worlds – and how do you think your experiences and surroundings growing up in Australia might have influenced Norbayne?
Phoenixguard: In large part, this particular influence has come from me. The Lord of the Rings in particular was a huge influence upon me and most of the work I have done, even outside of the Norbayne project. I’d consider the Warhammer setting to also be a significant influence too, which definitely has a fairly strong European feel to it as well. I think personally, it’s a matter of comfort. I understand European folklore and languages quite well and can therefore incorporate it more easily as inspiration for my own works.
That is one thing to note, I guess. A lot of the structure of the setting is built around my personal love for and interest in languages. We use real-world languages to help us represent the in-game dialects (similarly to what Tolkien did, what with using Old English to represent Rohirric for instance, though I am not talented nor mad enough to construct my own languages), and as such, relationships between languages in the real world can help reveal various relationships between the languages, peoples and cultures of the world of Norbayne. It’s a fun little game you can play while you make your way through our years of collated lore.
Some highlanders from Norbayne's, well, highlands.
Jubal: To return to the other part of the question about whether there's any 'Australian-ness' in how Norbayne has come together, do you think your relationship to that European folklore differs from authors who live in Europe, in aspects of landscape, wildlife or culture that might resonate differently for you?
Phoenixguard: Oh definitely, no doubt at all. I think being so far removed from that European ‘base’ has given our development a sense of other-ness. There’s a sense of it still being mysterious and foreign, without it being wholly unrecognisable and unfamiliar. Particularly from a landscape perspective, Australia doesn’t exactly have mountains, or at least not really in the sense other continents do, so there is a sense of the mountain ranges of Norbayne feeling perhaps a little more fantastical as a result.
There’d be quite a few things in that vein too, for instance, wolves. Wolves in many places in Europe are a very real and somewhat mundane creature (for all they are endangered in many regions today) however from an Australian perspective, there is so much mythology built up around those animals which cannot be experienced in day-to-day life. The Norbayne setting treats various species and variety of wolf perhaps more seriously and with more reverence (not sure if it’s the correct term) than other comparable settings may.
Jubal: You mentioned Warhammer and Tolkien as core inspirations. Warhammer in particular is a sort of "bucket of oddments" approach to a setting, whereas Tolkien's work has something of a more internally consistent and less anarchic feel (Tom Bombadil notwithstanding). Which of those approaches do you think better characterises how you build fantasy?
Phoenixguard: I think I aim for somewhere in between, as close to the centre as possible, while pushing to one extreme or the other as the whim takes me. While that sounds anarchic and unfocussed, I think it adds to the depth of the setting as, ideally, we’d like to think there should be something for everyone.
It's probably fair to say I aim for internal consistency everywhere I can and have spent countless hours mulling over the evolutionary paths of any given ancestry in an attempt to tie their birth into the setting’s prehistory, but sometimes, just as in the real world, occurrences can be wild and unexpected and there may just be no explanation every now and then, which just adds to the mystery and excitement.
I hope so, anyway.
Jubal: Norbayne is a setting first and foremost but it’s also a completely independent game with its own rules. What made you decide to develop Norbayne as a totally independent system, rather than a setting supplement for a major published TTRPG rule set?
Phoenixguard: In light of the recent Wizards of the Coast Open Gaming Licence drama, I’m very glad I chose to do something different. Largely, I struggled to find a system which properly modelled the specifics of how I wanted the setting to be represented. The WFRPG, while excellent and a favourite of mine, doesn’t lend itself particularly well to being translated to other settings. I’ve never really liked most D20-based systems and I definitely did not want to work with Vancian-style casting for Norbayne’s various magic systems.
In the end, it almost felt like less work to build a system from scratch, as compared to chopping and changing something which already existed to make it fit reasonably well.
I remember the very early days of the project, trying to show people and explain it to them and I’d regularly be met with a barrage of, “Why don’t you just use the D&D rules?” Considering that fact, you would think I’d have a better answer for this question by now.
GMing Norbayne: Phoenixguard in action
Phoenixguard: Of course. I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible, as while on the tabletop this is usually pretty quick and efficient, in prose it might come across a bit rough.
On any given combat round, each participant would act in Initiative order, which is determined by rolling a single d10 and adding it to your character’s Initiative Statistic. For example, let’s say two of our longest running characters, the sisters, Mathlynn and Aracaeda Cild-Ailith are going to have a little sparring match to pass the time.
They’d each determine their Initiative, with the higher result acting first. In this case, it is likely Aracaeda would act first as she has the higher base Initiative, but there is a chance she’d be slow on the uptake. For the example’s sake, let’s say she rolled higher. Each character generally has a Movement Action and a Full Action to utilise on their turn. Aracaeda may move up to her Speed Statistic in feet as a Movement Action every turn. In addition to this, she may elect to perform a Full Attack with her Full Action or a Quick Attack with a Half Action. By electing to do the latter, Aracaeda may hold a Half Action in reserve to use as a Dodge or Parry should the occasion call for it.
She does so, moving into close combat with Mathlynn and making a Quick Attack with her longsword. She must then determine her target number to hit Mathlynn. By adding her Dexterity Statistic to any bonus she may have to her Close Combat Skill and her longsword Weapon Proficiency and then subtracting any situation negatives she may suffer to the target number, Aracaeda can determine her target number. She may then roll a d100 to determine her success, wanting to get as far under the target number as she can. She will then advise the Games Master of how many ‘degrees of success’ she achieved, by determining the difference between the ‘10’s’ die of the d100 and the ‘10’s’ place value of the target number. For example, if her target number was ‘87’ and she rolled a ‘24’, she would have achieved 6 degrees of success.
Mathlynn, should she have a half action available to her, may attempt to Parry or Dodge this oncoming attack. She would do this by either rolling a d100 and attempting to achieve higher than Aracaeda’s target number to hit, or alternatively rolling under her own Agility Statistic plus any bonus she may have to her own Dodge Skill. In this case, Mathlynn knows Aracaeda’s target number is very high and so would likely attempt to dodge the strike. Should she succeed, no Damage would be done, though on her turn, Mathlynn would only have a Half Action with which to perform any activities, as she would have used a Half Action to perform the Dodge Check. Should she fail to perform the Dodge, she would of course take damage, equal to Aracaeda’s degrees of success to hit, the damage value of her sword and her Strength Modifier, plus any other bonuses Aracaeda may have. This would then be mitigated by any damage reduction and resistances Mathlynn may have, with the final total subtracted from Mathlynn’s current Health total.
This is our basic close combat mechanic, though different weapons, armour, Talents and other abilities can cause this initial mechanic to take on further varied forms. On her own turn, Mathlynn, a Necromancer, may well seek to raise some nearby corpses and use them to apprehend and detain her sister.
Jubal: What have been some of the biggest problems and changes you’ve had to make on a mechanics and rules level to the game over time, and how do you approach those challenges?
Phoenixguard: We’ve seen quite a few major paradigm changes to the system over the years. I think the first big one (and likely the most contentious in practice) was implementing Soulfire as a generated Statistic for your character. Previously, we balanced magic by making it very dangerous, but it quickly became apparent this was not particularly working. As such, I reduced the inherent danger of Arcane Magic by a little and incorporated Soulfire as a way of tracking your character’s ability to sling spells around. There was a varied reaction to that change, let me tell you.
On the one hand, about half the party were very happy with the change, while particularly Steph, who was playing a Mage, could not have felt more differently.
I think the most important thing we’ve had to embrace with regards to this is the fact our stories to date, while the game as a whole is now largely realised, remain playtests. As such, when a balancing issue does become apparent, we normally try and implement fixes in between sessions. In recent years, this has become significantly less prevalent, but I can’t deny, it has taken some cooperation and understanding from the playing group.
Jubal: Can you talk a bit more about how you deal with that playtesting element? Are there particular guidelines you have to set yourself with how to approach rebalancing and other issues, like not changing too many elements at once, or do you just reshuffle the game as needed and eyeball the outcome you're after?
Phoenixguard: Again, probably a bit of both. I try my best to factor in the feedback from each of the players at the table and any reports I may get from outside it. I personally try to make changes to a certain mechanic or area of the game in one hit and hope not to change too many other major elements at the same time in an attempt to help the players keep track of changes when they occur. By dint of the various campaigns we play though, this can be somewhat difficult at times, which again, as mentioned previously, requires some understanding and cooperation from the players.
As the ruleset is, to be frank, pretty sprawling at this stage, there’s certainly an element of simply eyeballing changes and trying to monitor it in play. We are lucky to have a few members of the team with a bit of an analytical bent. Previously, one of our inaugural players, Geoffrey, provided us with some significant statistical breakdowns for a fair few concepts to help give us an idea of places we should look to redress, which was very useful.
We are bringing quite a few new players into the game in the next few months too, which I’ll mention again a little bit later. We’re definitely hoping to continue to build up our resources in this area as we are constantly looking for different perspectives and experiences to help us enrich the game experience.
The Norbayne team busy with a long Hallowe'en playtest session
Phoenixguard: It’s been huge, right from the outset. I mentioned before how we’ve had so many elements of the setting informed by the creativity of our players. So much of the Invarrian society for instance was laid out by George initially when he played Harold Oakenshield in Three Coins, but then a lot more of it was codified by Bri when she put together an elaborate backstory for Assar Eiliert upon the resumption of The God King campaign.
Skye has been huge in this area too. There’s a lot of depth in many different places which is owed to Skye, firstly as a player, then as part of our development team and, more recently, as a games master too. We have a private chat where Skye just asks me random setting-related questions, which I may or may not end up finishing the answers to.
The balancing act has been interesting. I think it’s fair to say, from a setting and lore perspective, the entire team is more than happy to cede overall decisions to me, but I guess I’m lucky in that the whole team has a good grasp of the feel of the setting. Most discussion surrounding, “Can I do this in the setting?” is normally very positive and built around discussing exactly how such a thing could work. It is very rare I’ve had to say to one of our players, “No, it doesn’t work like that, you couldn’t do such a thing.”
The rules and system differences can be a little more contentious. Again, normally the final decision pretty well comes down to me, but there’s been a few times where I’ve been outvoted. I try to remain as balanced and even-handed as possible and I’ve had to learn to take a step back and let others provide their input even in those situations where I disagree.
The key principle we’ve really tried to push recently has been the idea of, ‘Responsibility, not ownership.’ There was a tendency in the past where individual developers would feel a sense of ownership over concepts and elements of the game they had worked on, which led to a feeling of discontent upon other members of the team running an eye over those elements and offering feedback, or, in my opinion, even more distressingly, a sense one could not work upon a certain concept or class because it was one individual’s personal project. We’ve consciously tried to move away from this, seeking a holistic design process which encompasses the core team as a base and referring to our consultant team as required.
Jubal: And to give people an insight into your next steps, what can we expect from Norbayne in the near future?
Phoenixguard: At this stage, we’re getting mighty close to launching our Kickstarter campaign. We’ve been dedicated to making sure the actual content of the game is completed before launching the Kickstarter, so all we will need to do is fund the artwork and overall design of our product and then printing and distribution costs.
We’re currently in the process of really opening our playtesting group too. We’ve had a significant influx of interested newcomers looking to play some one-shot games with our development team after we put out a call to arms of sorts.
Steph and I got married last April, so we’re taking a little bit of time to enjoy that before launching into what is shaping up to be our biggest year yet. Between our newcomer one-shots, the launch of Arc 3 of Seven Stones and a Pale Shadow and hopefully the release of our Great Maw table-read, there’ll be plenty of content to experience in the lead up to the Kickstarter campaign.
There’s also been a little bit of talk around a streamed game, though I probably shouldn’t say too much more about that.
Jubal: And finally, where can people find out more about the game?
Phoenixguard: At this stage, a lot of our material is based here on Exilian. We will be moving to our own website in time, but we’ll be maintaining a strong presence on Exilian to discuss elements of the game moving forward.
If you’d like to join our community and keep abreast of any and all updates, please join our Discord. You’ll note we’re still taking expressions of interest for prospective newcomers. At this time, we’re only able to cater for players local to the South-East Queensland area in Australia, however we are working to incorporate a remote option for our friends further afield.
Lastly, we have an Instagram page at the moment, where we’ve historically posted all kinds of concept art, fan art and sometimes photos and snippets of video from our sessions. Feel free to give us a cheeky follow on there.
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Posted on September 17, 2023, 12:04:48 AM by Jubal
Unusual selections from a magical library
Unusual selections from a magical library
By Jubal
Whilst digging through the lost libraries of the depths of Exilian, I decided to note down a selection of the most intriguing magical texts, to give you all some more ideas about what might lurk at the heart of any magical libraries, wizards' towers, or other such spaces that you may be creating for your TTRPGs, computer games, fantasy fiction, or similar. As such, here are twelve magical texts that you might come across. Read on... though, as ever, remember that knowledge can be a dangerous thing!
The Aumanac
If read normally, is just a series of folk tales: but it can be read in a different way (back to front, in columns, every other line: it's a hidden text puzzle) and if this is done the Aumanac bonds with the reader, its covers forming a breastplate, the pages a robe and cloak, and the metal corner caps transforming into a helm. The Aumanac armour does not have a terribly high armour value but works more by providing beneficial effects (forcing opponents to fail or re-try attacks, permitting the hero to try again when they fail at something) and also meaning deus ex machina events happen to the hero a lot: it is, in fact, literal plot armour.
The Holy Laws Of Meryten
A set of laws devised to govern magic by some gods at the dawn of time: these were long since forgotten but are mostly technically still in force, meaning that a user who has properly read the book has the opportunity to resist almost preternaturally well or even produce a full counterspell any time they are targeted by a magical attack, as long as they can come up with a plausible sounding novel loophole or legal technicality that makes the action illegal. The book can only be properly memorised by one person at a time, because the lawyer who wrote it all down didn't want anyone stealing his business.
The Good Little Bullywug
A children's tale about a sad little bullywug (that is, a frog person, for those who do not know D&D monster lore). She wants to be a princess but turns out to actually just be a bullywug after all. The tale appears unimportant, but if a hero expresses sympathy for the bullywug and hugs or gives a kiss to the book, the bullywug will be summoned. She is neutral good, really really wants to help the heroes, and mostly has the stats of a bullywug, but is *completely indestructible by any means* - she could be lost by e.g. being portaled away, but no attacks or environmental hazards will ever affect her. She will also leave the party if they do too many evil deeds, because, well, she's literally a children's book character and doesn't want to be disappointed by you.
The Volumomanteion
A tabletop-game only option. Pick another book from nearby the gaming table (not a rulebook, ideally a novel). The user of the Oracle should roll d100, and count pages and pick a sentence depending on the phases of the moon:
- Crescent moon: Count from the back, first sentence on the page
- Waxing moon: Count from the front, last sentence on the page
- Full moon: Count from the front, first sentence on the page
- Waning moon: Count from the back, last sentence on the page
The reader then becomes the agent of this prophecy: they get a small penalty, at the GM’s discretion, until they can reasonably argue that they have fulfilled the spirit of their selected sentence, at which point they get a small permanent bonus.
The Periplus, Commesian the Navigator
Often wrongly assumed to be the periplus (travel account) "of" Commesian, but actually Commesian transformed himself into a book to better record his voyages, which encompassed everywhere on the prime material plane. Commesian did so hundreds of years ago, but this means he can basically be used as a historial hitch-hiker's guide who can reveal the locations of lost treasure, cities, etc, often in the form of slightly annoying reminiscences about how everything was better when he was young. The book is sentient, but only talks if provided with incentives either by threatening its fabric or by coaxing it with offers of travel and stories of what the world is like now.
A History of Swords
This is a book that rewrites itself to be the history of whatever sword the reader is actually carrying and/or any swords in the room. Could reveal who was killed with them, those people's life stories, any magic item secrets, etc. It may reveal things about non-sword weapons but will be incredibly rude about their inferiority due to them not being swords.
The Prophecies of Ceraphai
The Prophecies is not, in fact, a book that may tell heroes prophecies about themselves: rather, it’s a magical book that seeks to make the reader an agent of prophecy, and will open itself to pages relating to areas, families, or that it senses the heroes may be near. The prophecies will not always be happy ones, but the heroes can loophole them and the writing is often such to allow for this.
A prophecy being fulfilled will cause the book to replace that page with some information of use to the fulfiller – be that a small bit of local wisdom, the location of nearby treasure, or similar. Pointedly failing to fulfil a prophecy or refusing to, conversely, will cause the page to be filled with a minor curse, explosive runes, or similar.
Six example prophecies
1 - The last heir of (family) must admit their true love before the month ends
Note: This isn’t necessarily a matchmaking task! Finding what they already love, in any sense of that term, and getting them to admit it should count. Though matchmaking might also work.
2 - The ruler of (place) is fated to die before the month ends
Note: actually easily loopholed by finding someone already on their deathbed and temporarily making them the ruler until the end of the month.
3 - There shall be no king/mayor/duke upon the throne of x hereafter
Note: just persuade them to change the titulature! Though having a revolution also works.
4 - Their bones shall be broken, their flesh burned, their home shall lie empty in the dark.
Note: bones and flesh can be purchased by the prophesy-holder at all good local butchers, thus becoming theirs. Their home doesn’t have to be emptied for more than a night.
5 – Only when a sapling planted this year touches the roof of the tallest tower will the city be safe from the plague.
Note: the prophecy never states that the sapling’s roots still need to be in the ground. Behold, a way to include plot-critical flowerpots and roof climbing into your fantasy worlds.
6 – The lovers shall never be allowed to marry without bringing bad luck to all the fishermen of the area, unless they dance their marriage dance upon the sea-floor.
Note: I don’t have a good way to rule this one, but it is a really good way for someone who took control water or waterbreathing spells to have a moment to shine. Also, a scene where the heroes have to let the lovers keep dancing while fighting off an evil overlord’s angry fish-men/drowned dead/giant doom nautilus might have something to it.
The Three Walled Castle
A children’s book. When opened to a certain page and sung the right nursery rhymes the book opens out into a tiny castle full of little fey spirits who are excessively and bizarrely chivalric. The castle only has three walls, and takes up approximately a 4ft (1.2 metre) square. The inhabitants are tiny (7-10cm), equipped variously as knights, archers, and royals, and number around twenty: they are very persuadable to take on anything that can be made to sound like a chivalric enough task, but conversely will refuse to help with anything that sounds unchivalrous.
The Heresiarch
This book contains details of hundreds of lost heresies and minor gods whose cults were wiped out by various inquisitions and similar. Not all the gods in it are evil, but all of them are chaotic or otherwise opposed to the usual ordering of society. At least, that's a first impression. Heroes reading this book will actually tend to find more and more heresies or ideas that speak to their particular frustrations with the social order they find themselves in, as the book tries to give them the information and ideas to break out of those bonds or strictures - for better or for worse, as the book is an agent of heresy for its own sake.
The Doomscroll
When unrolled, the Doomscroll is always full of tiny annal entries containing the worst things happening in the world. This is useful for discerning what the heroes need to be doing in an up to the minute way, but there is a catch. It may cause temporary penalties to intellect and wisdom to use, and those who know of its existence, especially its mysterious original author, can manipulate it to show what they want the heroes to see.
Tapputi's Laboratory
Mostly an alchemy guide, but opening a hidden part of the book's cover correctly lets you into the extradimensional laboratory, which is a small dungeon-style adventure themed around potions and alchemy that needs clearing. If this is done, Tapputi's ghost will be found at the centre of the laboratory and will provide useful advice on potions beyond those which can normally be created by mortal kindreds.
The Nestognomeicon
The pages of this book are quite loose. All of them contain terribly done pictures of gnomes. If one falls out, a gnome is spawned. Note that the book is around 350 pages long so if all of them fall out at once there may be some issues.
The gnomes from the Nestognomeicon have entirely beetle-black eyes, a preternatural sense for where paintings, metal items, and mechanisms are, and a tendency to hoarding behaviour: they speak their own clicking and guttural language unknown to those around them. In general they will attempt to find a suitably safe, small space and busily start hoarding items that are precious to them there. They are otherwise, well, gnomes.
The lost librarians of Exilian hope you found these texts interesting and enlightening, and remind you that under no circumstances are readers allowed into the Forbidden Shelves of the site archives. Have you seen anything similar to these books in stories or campaigns, or do you have any entries to add? Do say, and let us know what you might do with these texts and ideas, in the thread below!