Article Stubs of 2024
The December 2024, end of my first year in the TTRPG industry reflections series continues!
A lot of research goes into a lot of my articles, particularly the history ones, which means sometimes a topic gets completely abandoned after I've begun researching it. So, without further ado, here's a few projects that I started and abandoned for lack of what I really wanted to write about.
Taverns & Inns
The Article Stub
In many ways, this post has two sources of inspiration. The first is that I've been thinking about restaurants in my home D&D game world because I just binge-watched The Bear on Hulu. I know that I'm a little late to the party on that one, but too bad. Side note: if anyone knows of a good RPG that allows you to run a restaurant, let me know. As a result of The Bear, I've been trying to learn all that I can about the history of fine dining.
The more immediate inspiration was seeing a 3rd party supplement for taverns on DriveThruRPG. I haven't actually purchased or read through the entire supplement, so I can't vouch for or against the content of it, though the free preview does look like it provides pretty deep, high-quality information about the taverns that the author creates. (Obligatory 'this is an affiliate link' disclaimer, for anyone who does decide to check out the Taverns supplement).
The problem with Traven's Travelogue of Treasured Taverns is the semantic one. Steven Chabotte, the author, writes in his product description that one of the selling points for the taverns is that they each have "Distinctive Culinary Offerings: Unique food and drink menus for each tavern." Well, unfortunately, that is no longer a tavern in the historical sense of the word.
People in the modern world dine out a lot compared to their historical counterparts, but there is a long legacy of people who did not have access to a stove needing some sort of public dining. In ancient Rome, residents of insulae – basically apartment buildings or tenements for the urban poor – could visit a local thermopolium to buy hot food, since most of the insulae did not have private kitchens to cook in.
With the collapse of urban life after the fall of Rome and the move to a more agrarian society of the medieval era, more people gained access to some sort of private kitchen in their farmhouses. For those who persisted in staying in the cities of the medieval world and did not have the means of a private cooking space, residents could bring their own meals to "cookshops" to be cooked. This was common for the lower and middle classes who lived in cities.
A tavern, as opposed to a cookshop, was a place where people could go to buy already-cooked food, rather than bringing their own to be cooked. However, these were NOT taverns as Traven's Travelogue or Lord of the Rings would have you believe. Going to a medieval tavern would not have you get a private table – even a scary cloaked ranger like Strider would be taking their meal at a single, large, common table. There would be no waitstaff, characters well-described and detailed in Traven's Travelogue; you'd go up to a bar and be handed your food to take to the table, where you'd crowd in among the rest.
The Problem
The problem that caused me to abandon this article is that... this distinction isn't really true? I read Rebecca Sprang's influential work on the origin of restaurants and the conclusion is that while restaurants were something "new" in the industrial age, there's not actually a clear line between a restaurant and a tavern. Some taverns were just bars, some taverns provided common-table service as I was all prepared to argue, and some taverns did have private tables. So while I still think we should have more common table, no menu taverns in our RPGs, this is by no means an actually universal trait of the medieval or Renaissance tavern. So the whole delineation that I was trying to draw, it turns out, does not actually exist when you go back to the academic literature.
Lessons from Interview with the Vampire
The Article Stub
I just finished watching Interview with the Vampire on AMC, and it is a great show, and it is all I'm thinking about when sitting down to write a post.
A major theme of Interview with the Vampire is about narration and perception. Some of this is subtle--people forgetting details over time, like whether it was raining in an important moment. The show does this well, showing us "revisions" to the memory as the "truth" is revealed.
For the most part, these sorts of innocent slips are pretty natural occurrences in our TTRPGs. Real people, players, will forget details from a GM's narration, and if it is that important to the story, you can remind them. I've written previously about the idea of a mission report as a sort of recap--a party journal that records those memories, and so allows us to compare memory to written record. An additional perk of that mission report is bias; by making it a canonical text that is being written, you allow for a character's bias to shine through in the "official" recap, just as Claudia's journals in Interview with a Vampire provide a different perspective from Louis's recollections. While sometimes Claudia is more accurate, unmanipulated by the distortions of decades of memory, she is an unreliable narrator in her own right. And this magical manipulation has made me think about an issue in TTRPGs: illusions and charms.
The problem with illusions and charms in TTRPGs, including but not limited to D&D, is that your players and your characters are not truly sharing a reality. And while the characters might be seeing an illusion, the players are more likely to see through it. All it takes is one person succeeding on a saving throw, in D&D, revealing the illusory nature of something, and the players know that it is an illusion--even if their characters are not yet convinced of that.
Similarly, charm effects are powerful on NPCs, where the GM can reflect that an NPC is feeling more warmly to the PC. But it can be trickier, as a player, with a stronger connection to their character and their character's safety, to be willing to "play out" disastrous consequences that might come from believing something that is a lie. If a known enemy casts a spell that makes you regard them as a friend, and then suggests you travel somewhere, that's going to make you--the player--think that it is a trap. And while we all like to think we'll be able to separate that knowledge, when push comes to shove, we'll often be expecting that ambush when the trap is sprung.
The Problem
I was all prepared to talk about how Interview with the Vampire gave me an idea on how to solve this idea of "unreliable memory" in TTRPGs. The article was going to talk about lying to your players, building false memories for them so that they (the players, not just the characters) think of the charm or illusion as real.
But the deeper that I got into the idea of what I was writing about, the more disconnected from Interview with the Vampire it became, and also, the more I found myself talking in circles about the idea. I kept putting in caveats--don't entirely gaslight your players, here's some strategies on working around it so that your game doesn't become an entirely false railroad plot--to the point that the core premise of the article stopped actually being anything novel or interesting.
The whole article basically got bogged down and muddled, and so I scrapped it. I still like Interview with the Vampire, and everyone should live out their Anne Rice Fanfic writing desires by using Thousand Year Old Vampire.
Bastions & Castles
The Article Stub
The 2024 D&D Dungeon Master's Guide dropped on November 12th. While I don't think I'm going to be doing a full "first impressions" like I did for the Player's Handbook, I do want to talk about one of the chapters that particularly stood out to me: the section on Bastions. There will be a discussion of history later in the post as well, so don't worry!
When I first learned about the new rules for Bastions in D&D, my immediate reaction was "Oh, like in Vaesen?" Most games by Free League Publishing have some sort of rules for base building, and Vaesen--the one I have the most experience with--is no exception. In fact, the Vaesen base-building system is pretty similar to the Bastions of D&D: as you advance, you can build rooms that grant certain mechanical boons. Vaesen has a more clearly delineated, episodic structure than D&D, and so D&D relies a lot on bastion actions taking a set amount of time, while Vaesen gives you boons for each mystery--a discrete unit of the narrative--but otherwise, the structure of the base-building mechanic is very similar.
The same holds true in third-party supplements. Balduran's Guide to Kingdom Building by Adam Hancock--a platinum bestseller on DMsGuild--similarly has you choosing new buildings to add into your stronghold, each of which grants you bonus features to help in adventuring or in base management.
And while not necessarily particularly historical, as a tavern and most buildings would likely arise without the ruler's intervention, I understand the benefits of this method for game design reasons. Just having a town develop and give tax revenue to the party would be pretty boring. This gives the party actual choices in a way that a medieval count would not historically have.
The Problem
This is pretty much all I had on the topic. I've already talked about feudalism. I probably will write more about manorialism at a later point, but I don't think Bastions and Castles is the right framing for that topic.
The result? I didn't have a real core to this article. It's basically: "hey, a lot of RPGs with base-building elements use this basic structure. Isn't that interesting, that it is so ubiquitous as the way to do base-building?" That's worth a few hundred words, maybe, at max, but I never found a full-length article in the premise.
So. Huh. Isn't that interesting? That there's one major model for base-building in TTRPGs? The end.
Conclusion
The end! I hope you all enjoyed this glimpse into some of the articles that I abandoned in the first year of writing Veritas Tabletop! Be sure to subscribe for some reflection on the articles that I did write, as well as for some musings on the products I wrote and played.