Your Worldbuilding Needs More Sports

What sports are played for leisure in your world? I say this as someone who is not a big sports fan: it is undeniable that sports are a huge element of culture. From bans on sports being a mode of cultural repression (as in the suppression of traditional Irish sports) to the political power of mobs of Byzantine sports fans (the "Demes"), sports and sporting events are a ripe thing to consider in your worldbuilding and can be immensely useful in providing practical fodder for your campaigns.

So today we're going to talk about the general history of "sports" as a concept, before drilling down to talk about the specific sports or types of sports that would be popular in the common blend of "Medieval-Renaissance-Early Modern" that tends to be common in a lot of fantasy.

The History

Early Sports

Most early forms of sports focus on replicating some sort of useful skill, essentially as a form of practice. Evidence exists that even in pre-history, sports like running, wrestling (basically hand-to-hand fighting), swimming, and archery existed tens of thousands of years ago.

Usually, these tend to be individual sports. They're a mode of practicing essential skills (archery is just hunting, swimming is survival, wrestling is fighting, etc), rather than being pure entertainment. If you're a skilled hunter, showcasing your skills publicly by competing in the sport of archery is a chance to show off and gain status and prestige. That's a far cry from modern sports like baseball, where I'm totally not sure what regular life skills our sports stars are meant to be showing off, but they certainly do still gain a level of status and prestige and celebrity.

Over time and as societies developed, there's an increasing "elitism" to sports. Those with leisure time could dedicate more time towards training specifically for their sport. Someone who has the spare time to exclusively practice archery is going to be able to improve more than someone whose archery practice comes from hunting – where you also need to spend time practicing tracking and other hunting skills. This evolution arises in classical Greece, for example.

Classical Sports

As complex societies developed in Mesoamerica or the Mediterranean around the 1200s BC, we start seeing a more elaborate type of sport being introduced: the ball game, played in teams. In Persia, the spread of horses leads to developing polo. In Rome, a game similar to rugby develops. In Mesoamerica, the game is pitz. In Ireland, hurling, and in China, a game similar to soccer.

The introduction of this sort of "team" sport is a transformative innovation, and it usually involves some sort of mock battle or war – sometimes then significantly abstracted. However, most of these games do have some ties to historic warfare in their practice. Polo is an obvious link, leading people to practice horseback riding and hitting something from horseback (both useful for Persian cavalry). The ability to work in a team similarly demonstrates the growing complexity of warfare and armies.

With the exception of certain large societies, such as the Roman Empire, it does seem like professional sports were rare. Chariot races (teams) and gladiators (individual) were the main sports entertainment of Rome, and these were both careers that someone could be involved in. However, in much of the world that wasn't ruled by a massive empire, sports were mostly a form of recreation. Audiences were generally small, and participating in the sport was either something you did as an elite (as discussed earlier), or something to do in between your duties to blow off steam, not a career in and of itself.

Once the Roman Empire fell, this would be reflected across western Europe by a general deprofessionalization of sports. They kept their mock battle elements, which gave rise among the elites to sports like jousting – a classic image of media about the Middle Ages and TTRPGs. Commoners would keep up their team ball sports, but these were not large spectated events or professional activities: in fact, Kings often sought to ban ball games like football or rugby because they were a mode of peasant organization that could be a threat to the Crown's authority.

Some "professional knights" might perform on a sort of tournament circuit, gaining real fame for winning numerous tournaments. Tournaments were also times for audiences to watch sporting events, usually as part of a larger fair or festival. Still, even these knights also were expected to perform in warfare, and while jousting was not a perfect match for military service and scholars debate the extent to which these activities were seen as military preparation, it would be rare that someone would only be a jouster and not have an expectation of military service or another career (especially since most who could afford a horse and armor to joust also were significant landowners).

The Development of Modern Sports

The most interesting thing to me in reading about how we transitioned from the bans on rugby in the medieval period to the modern version of state-sanctioned and massively audience-driven sports, was the role played by gambling.

Basically, during the Renaissance, interest in anatomy led to people encouraging getting outdoors and exercise as something useful for health. This slowly started demilitarizing sports: sports like tennis, which were less focused on a direct military skill, started becoming popular. Steering people into these less violent sports made them more socially acceptable. And as they became more legally acceptable, combined with gradually expanding state power, sports started to re-professionalize.

Still, sports struggled from having very disparate rules, a byproduct of their years of operating underground and informally. While jousting and "elite" sports might be somewhat consistent from town to town and country to country, games like tennis or rugby would vary wildly. Some early efforts (around the 16th/17th century) to standardize the games would exist, usually through founding clubs or associations so that teams might play against each other under a shared set of rules. However, what really drove this was gambling.

Gambling--and a lot of sports--were banned in England during the Commonwealth era, where Puritan rule meant that public morality was being strictly regulated. Upon the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, however, these things were legalized again. For gamblers to feel as though their bets were fair, however, the sports that they were betting on also needed to be fair, and so demand from the elites helped drive the foundation of new clubs and associations to regulate the practice of a number of sports.

This standardizing influence, and the popularity and money behind sporting activities in England, helped make Britain the centerpiece of European sport culture in the 18th century. The expansion of the British Empire helped spread specifically British sports in regions that they controlled; their popularity then helped globalize those games, even back in Europe. Cricket, soccer/football, billiards/pool, and tennis all spread from England outwards during these centuries.

And while these sports spread, it would not be until much later that American sports started developing their own culture that so many Americans take as the standard suite of sports. Baseball is usually traced to the American Civil War, American football would arise as a form of rugby between colleges in the back half of the 1800s becoming increasingly standardized and recognizable, and basketball would be invented in 1891.

TTRPG Sports

What sports should exist in a TTRPG world therefore ought to depend on a few factors:

1) What is the history and present status of major powerful "states"?

Strong states have tended to allow more professionalization of the sports industry, whether they are Roman charioteers or British tennis pros. Strong states and professional sports tend to lead to less regional variety and more standardized rules, especially if they are backed by gambling money from the wealthy.

Strong states and professionalization also lead to more of an audience culture, watching sports rather than it being something played in town streets without viewers. This can then be used as stimulus for the culture of angry mobs of fans that occasionally cause riots – whether that is the Byzantine demes threatening the government or a mob of Eagles fans flipping over cars and climbing lampposts in Philadelphia.

2) Are sports primarily military practice or recreational?

To some extent, this can mirror question one – with more professional sports and stronger states allowing for less military practice in their sports. However, gradual evolution seems to be more of a driving factor here than state power, with sports developing for military practice and slowly becoming less military in character during the Renaissance as scholars and doctors started to voice support for the health benefits of playing sports.

Recreational sports also pose less of a threat to the state. Having a bunch of peasant men who practice mock fights all the time can be a big threat. Having a bunch of tennis players is less of one.

3) How moralistic is your society? Is gambling legal?

The reaction to the moralistic Puritan rule of the Commonwealth in England helped standardize and professionalize sports through gambling. Gambling was also a huge factor for ancient Roman chariot racing, so these feel very linked to me. More gambling leads to more standardization and less regional variation in sports culture during the time periods that we often draw inspiration from for fantasy.

On the other hand, an intensely religious and puritanical government might ban gambling. This can allow for regional sports to flourish, since it removes a pressure to have standardized rules. It might also involve some sports themselves being prohibited, further regionalizing them as playing those sports go underground.

Conclusion

Hopefully this is useful to you in thinking about the sports of your world, their professionalization, and the level to which there would be an audience for the sport! It can be a great opportunity to have a rowdy crowd including sports fans as a political entity; to engage with issues around morality, gambling, etc; and to take your sports in your campaigns beyond just "jousting, that's medieval!"

If people want a demonstration of putting this into practice, let me know via email or social media!