Whenever we think about the concept of nobility in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or later, it is hard to disentangle the life of the upper class from the role of their servants. In an era before washing machines or laundromats, the wealthy– and even many of the upper bourgeoisie, like

Over my Spring Break, I went to Texas, and one of the places that I visited was the Fort Worth cattle Stockyards. It made me start thinking more about the cattle industry--of prime importance to the settlement of the American West, and something that I completely skipped over in my

This is part 2 of the most esoteric post I've ever written. Last week, we went over the rules that nobles had as part of their land ownership. What were the options for what a noble owed the king as a condition of their land ownership? Be sure

Welcome to quite possibly the most esoteric post I've ever written. I recently went down a rabbit hole of research on what land ownership looked like in the late medieval period, ostensibly for worldbuilding purposes for my own game. Should this show up in most TTRPGs? Probably not,

Two weeks ago, I talked about how we should stop using thieves' guilds in our medieval/renaissance fantasy worlds because a guild hierarchy would not really make sense for a criminal organization. So today, I want to talk about three different historical modes of organizing criminal activity, as potential

This week's post is sort of a continuation from this post about the ways that we misunderstand feudalism in our fantasy worlds, and how we can have more engaging worlds by learning more of the real world's history. This week, we're focusing on a

One of the most ignored parts of D&D's core rules is the idea of alignment. I get it, I ignore it too! For those who aren't familiar with it, D&D gives every creature--PC, NPC, monster, beast--an alignment on two axes. One axis

The focus on bone magic that has dominated the blog for the past three weeks has made me start to think more about how we treat religion in D&D and other TTRPGs. Because of the "real" nature of the gods, who go around and directly intervene

Something that came up while I was writing last week's post on the Luddites is how hard it is to imagine a world that is based on any system other than capitalism. The motive of individual profit, the majority of individuals living in cities and towns, the ability

Readers of the blog may have noticed that both of my newly published homebrew work is centered very much on the Wild West. This is because my current home game is set in a fantasy version of the American West, so it has been dominating my personal homebrewing for the