LMFC 01 Entering: The Late Medieval Fantastic Campaign (LMFC)
For quite some time now, I have been working on a project that I intend to publish bit by bit on this blog as the writing progresses: The Late Medieval Fantastic Campaign (LMFC / Frisia Orientalis), a dense hexcrawl set in late 14th-century CE East Frisia, a coastal region located in what is today northwestern Germany.
Inspiration and Anachronism
As a source of inspiration, the LMFC draws on historical information about medieval Frisia, North German folklore, and a generous helping of (folk) horror tropes. I do not shy away from appropriating historical source material to populate the hexes: databases of castles, academic treatises, archaeological field reports, you name it. Yet the resulting brew will inevitably amount to historical anachronism. Shiploads of historical anachronism. Two-d6 Hanseatic cogs at least, filled to the brim.
What I am striving for is the creation of a historically informed milieu for OSR-style adventure gaming that embraces the fantastical, rather than one that claims to offer “historical authenticity.” Not only do claims of “historical authenticity” in fantasy adventure gaming necessarily fall flat; they are also prone to conveying oversimplified, and sometimes outright problematic, views of history.
A great deal of the anachronism in this setting, beyond the inclusion of explicitly fantastic elements, will derive from incorporating local folklore. In the German-speaking world, as in many other parts of Europe, folktales were frequently collected, edited, and sometimes even invented wholesale during the 19th century by individuals ignited by patriotism and Romanticism.
Some of these tales may certainly echo stories once told around late medieval hearths. By and large, however, they are deeply rooted in the conceptual world of the (early) modern period and often contain unmistakably early modern elements: place names, institutions, objects, and social realities that simply do not belong to the late Middle Ages.
One might therefore ask: why not simply cherry-pick themes and elements from history — as is often a good idea, given that real-world history provides the most dramatic set pieces and WTF?! moments — and throw them into a kitchen-sink D&D setting?
My answer is simple.
I hope that this approach will result in an adventure-gaming milieu that communicates a very specific sense of time and place, while allowing historical and folkloric themes to be explored through the powerful lens of tabletop gaming. Ideally, it will also spark interest and curiosity about the history of medieval East Frisia.
The LMFC is therefore not an attempt to reconstruct the late 14th century. It is an attempt to create a low fantasy setting that feels rooted in a particular historical landscape - one where history, folklore, horror, and the fantastical do collide.