Mediaeval Roleplaying: Your Social Standing

For this short post, I’ll mostly quote an email I recently sent to my players. For translations of the Latin bits, simply hover over the text with your mouse pointer.

The treasure coveted by all players, but which always is just a bit too far away.

Lūsōribus lūstricibusque optimīs fēlīcissimīs lētālissimīs, ​dominus excarnificandī​ salūtem plūrimam dicit.

A fancy greeting is the best way to make sure one will plummet head first and with style, right?

So I found a new interesting chapter in the Game Master’s Guide, and I thought I should share a bit of the information with you. I expect you were just as ill-informed as I was, when first picking up Hackmaster, but after a few sessions, chances are you are all slowly realising that you really are – with a couple of crazy exceptions that look like godesses – run-of-the-mill people with few options to improve your lives, and even less of a chance to succeed should you choose to try; most people, they don’t try.

This is where you stand out: You have decided to try. And even though you still are – as most people – the degenerates of society (or so any nobleman with honour to hold on to would claim), not even worth as much as you are able to pay in taxes (because, let’s face it, your offspring can take care of that), you have started to show that you could – just maybe – be able to cut out a place for yourself in this world. You have reached the peak of your social class, and that’s not something to be trifled with. I quote:

The Social Classes are as follows:

Slaves – They’re slaves. Or indentured servants, which is a nice way of saying the same thing. Lower Lower Class – the lowest of the low. The dregs of society: drunks, degenerates, hobos, thieves, and escaped or ex-convicts/slaves.

Middle Lower Class – barely scraping by on subsistence level living. Working the worst jobs for the worst pay. Often tied to a noble’s lands. This is the vast majority of people in the Kingdoms of Kalamar: men-at-arms, peasants, latrine diggers, etc.

Upper Lower Class – no lands and barely any property, but free men. Some small amount of pocket money (most player characters fall into this category) as do slightly better thieves and criminals.

Happy hacking!

Y​ours in hacking​,
Tor-Ivar Krogsæter
​dominus excarnificandī

부사범 크록새테르 투르이바르 삼 단

​​Virī virtūtis spem nōn dēdunt.

As you might have understood, this is not from our old-time favourite Dungeons & Dragons, but rather from a quite different game, developed by Kenzer & Company, called Hackmaster. I was tipped about this game when asking for tips on better ways to handle injury and healing in the group Game Master Tips on Google+, and wrote a lengthy post about this in Norwegian not long after. A series of posts on what the game Hackmaster is is planned, and I hope you will check back for these later.

So what implications does the above have for your game? As a dungeon master / game master / hackmaster / storteller or whatever you might call yourself, it is your job to create a believable world for the players. One important tool at your disposal, is actual lived history. What were the living conditions for most people? What about those slightly wealthier business owners, not to mention those powerful minor and major lords the player characters hopefully will get in contact with? A game like Dungeons & Dragons starts by giving the poorest of players, i.e. the monk starting capital worth more than ⅓ what an average unskilled labourer’ yearly wage. Starting out with that kind of ready cash when you are well off with just buying a wine skin and a backpack (the monk is an unarmed fighting specialist, after all, so what else would he need?), means a D&D character clearly starts off at least as upper lower class, if not higher.

So my tip of the month is fairly simple: Figure out what kind of people your player characters are, and try to describe the world they live in based on this. It will greatly improve their understanding of their place in the world, and –what’s more – will make it far easier for you as the dungeon master to convince your players of the realism of the world you are describing, which in turn will make the fantastic element just that: fantastic.

Mr. K.