I Love The 1380's!-A Childhood View of Medieval Settings

To anyone who has played RPG's, it is no surprise that medieval and faux-medieval fantasy settings are among the most popular genre settings in the hobby, mainly due to the immense popularity of D&D and its imitators in Pathfinder and the OSR. You have your typical Sword & Sorcery and Tolkien-esque High Fantasy settings such as Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms, Gothic Horror medieval settings such as Ravenloft or Dark Ages: Vampire (the latter of which is actually set in the High Middle Ages and not the Early Middle Ages commonly associated with the term "Dark Ages", but I digress), Arthurian settings such as Pendragon, and even RPG's that claim to be "Medieval Authentic" and try to hew closer to actual medieval societies such as Dark Albion and Lion & Dragon.

But this is not so much a debate on which variant of medieval fantasy or ancient fantasy is better, nor is this a debate on historical realism vs. fantastical whimsy, but rather a look at how I used to think about the idea of medieval-styled and ancient-styled settings as a kid and how that can come into play with RPG campaigns.

I was always a weird kid when I was young. I literally read high school-level and even college-level history books for fun when I was in grade school and I had a near-autistic obsession with learning about different historical subjects and jumping from one subject to the next after I got all the information I wanted. Maybe having Asperger's Syndrome (now Autism Spectrum Disorder) and ADHD had something to do with that, but I'll probably never know for sure.

I had many eras of historical interest in my childhood. Trains and railroads, the Wild West, the American Civil War, Dinosaurs, Cavemen, Ancient Rome, the Celts, the Middle Ages, Ninja, and Vikings were but a few subjects that had caught my fancy over the years when I was a kid back in the late 1990's and 2000's. And I am going to focus on the medieval and ancient interests of mine for this article.

My view of the Medieval world was heavily influenced by a mix of historical knowledge learned from books (and watching the History Channel back when it still showed historical content), fantasy video games and TV shows, fairy tales, mythology, films such as Braveheart and Gladiator, and the typical stories of King Arthur, knights, dragons, princesses, and heroes that permeate our popular culture. I also had a love of Ancient Rome that I still have to this day, and when I was really young, a love of Celtic history and culture that faded away later in childhood, only to resurface when I was an adult.

When I was a very small kid, I had a whole castle play set that my grandmother got me for my birthday, and it came with knights and a catapult, and it was very cool. I had that castle for years, although by the time I turned eleven, the castle toys were long gone and I still don't know what happened to that castle or how I lost it.

We even bought a bag of "Army Men" styled knight figures that came in silver and bronze colors (the figures themselves were cheap soft plastic, obviously) and I remember that when I was a small child and my brothers were just toddlers, we referred to knights and any other ancient or medieval warriors as "Hitons" because they used swords and other melee weapons to "hit on" against their armor in fights instead of shooting at each other with guns like our cowboys and commandos did.

In our defense, we actually meant "to hit against" when we said "hit on" and we did not imply that the knights were making passes at each other. We were very small kids and didn't know any better, dammit!

Even as we grew a little bit older, my brothers and I still jokingly referred to armored knights and legionaries as "hitons" for a little while.

I had nearly completely forgotten about "Hitons" until I was thinking back on my childhood days of playing medieval make-believe with that castle play set my grandmother got for me and my brothers so many years ago.

But the discourse on "Hitons" brings me to my next point. My view of the Middle Ages when I was a little kid back in the good old days was a blend of the historical facts I knew and the fiction I loved.

Thanks to my bookworm habits, I knew that Vikings didn't actually have horns on their helmets and that full plate armor knights didn't show up until near the end of the Middle Ages, and of course I knew that dragons and wizards were not real, but I'd like to think that they were when I was out playing and pretending or daydreaming.

It was fun to blend fact with fiction when I would play games of make-believe or come up with stories in my head while I daydreamed. And when I got into role-playing games as a young adolescent, starting with a heavily house ruled Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 when I was thirteen, I sort of rediscovered that love of the medieval and the faux medieval, as well as a newfound love of role-playing and world building.

And I sort of want to go back to that view of the pre-modern world that I had in those halcyon days where historical fact and gonzo fantasy were freely mingled. Obviously, Dungeons & Dragons (and specifically the Old-School Rules or OSR movement within it) gives me the tools to make the kind of faux-medieval RPG that I would have loved to play when I was a kid (had I fully understood what RPG's were back then, of course)

Personally, I wouldn't mind making my own OSR game that would most likely be based on a simple variant of the old Dungeons & Dragons rules such as Holmes Basic or Rules Cyclopedia, and have it incorporate a lot of the tropes and ideas I had about medieval and faux-medieval fantasy when I was little. A strange blend of "Medieval Authentic", "Disney Fairy Tales", and gonzo weird fantasy.

Yeah, it'd probably be similar to the myriad generic OSR clones out there, but I don't care too much about that.

I might even name the game Hitons for old-time's sake.