I’m a polyfantasist: any degree of fantastic content and any degree of naturalism are both fun. For the moment, I’m focusing on one historical cluster of play-and-design: variously called hedge fantasy, mud-and-shit fantasy, “iron” fantasy, sometimes overlapping with historical fantasy, with games that sought it through the lens of deep culture and realism. It’s played as naturalistic as possible, to the extent of not particularly supporting “adventuring party” play. You play in the culture, of the culture, daily life in the culture, with events arising from the geography, ecology, and immediate social history. Play-acivity includes family, society, camping, weather, seasons, daily life, bodily functions to some extent, pain, fatigue, and the ups & downs & details of wealth.

I like it, and as far as I can tell, most people do, but it tends to get overtaken in practice. Although it’s not hard to do it with Chivalry & Sorcery, early RuneQuest, Ysgarth, and aspects of Advanced D&D, these games do grade into more extravagant and colorful magic and party-squad play, and a lot of games like Rolemaster only glance this way a bit and effectively set it aside in favor of a melee/missile arcane/divine assault/sneak squad on some kind of mission, “fantasy” or not. So really dedicated examples are not very common. Bushido goes this way easily if people want to. Powers & Perils is a pretty good one, as is the early Burning Wheel (I don’t know about the later versions). Maybe Ars Magica if play focused primarily on Grogs and occasional Companions. Circle of Hands and The Riddle of Steel wouldn’t count despite being notably gritty, as they are both also heinously all-Elric all-wild-magic all-the-time. I’m talking about really going all-out on this variable and excluding most others.

Footnote: role-playing terms or spheres of play have mostly swerved toward magic as super powers or at least hyper-significant psychedelica, but this “grunty dirty” version has swerved away. So a somewhat artificial split has arisen between (i) dressing up modern values and fun-to-watch powers in thin fantasy clothes and escalating self-reference, vs. (ii) playing so deeply into the fictional culture and content, and expected to take it so seriously and humorlessly, that you can’t do anything except to grind through the elaborate character creation algorithms and, in play, to act out the textual descriptions. Let’s ignore these. I want to talk about real play, not weird gamer swerves.

The strongest example I can think of is Harnmaster. I should clarify: all I know of the game is the original 1986 core book, which probably shocks anyone who’s familiar with this title. I’ve been recently educated (and alarmed) to learn how extensive and contentious its development became, so, insiders, please don’t data-dump about it. For anyone who’s interested, there are two competing “official homes of” sources: Kelestia.com | The official online home of Hârn and HârnMaster and Intro to HârnWorld – Columbia Games.

Surprising no one, I have dipped into all that material only minimally, taking the original core book as given and using one or two other early sources to round out my understanding for the purpose of using it (the core book). Here’s a character for you to look at.

Briefly, she’s a villager born to a wealthy thrall but fostered by a freeman tenant farmer family, whom she doesn’t get along with. She’s also a niece of the clan headman. Metaphysically she’s born on Savon 6, therefore under the sign of Tai the Lantern Bearer. She’s not strong, agile, or alert, but is good with more intimate senses and has a nice voice, as well as having a good memory. She favors the goddess Peony and is pretty pious and law-abiding. She has problems with alchohol and a fear of drowning (these are considered minimal or potential for player-characters). You can see from the attached notes that I considered religious training, thespian, or embalming, and I chose the latter, adding some physician and knife skill  on that basis. [the attached sheet is from a later version of the game so I had to write in some of the features and ignore others]

There is a faint chance, perhaps upon making seventy or eighty characters, to arrive at someone with higher social status or a good shot at sorcery. For many of the more likely, humbler outcomes, there’s still room to bulk up combat abilities via the militia. But most characters, made up one at a time, per person, for play, are going to look a lot like this. And believe me, she’s healthy and hale compared to the possible nearsighted, agoraphobic, Will-deficient, metaphysically unfortunate stableboy with intestinal worms whose whole family hates him … and he’s well-off compared to other results you might get.

The really practical question is this: given a demographic, probabilistic, representative approach to character creation, you get someone who would indeed emerge from and fit right into exactly this imagined semi-historical low-tech location … but, given their extreme ordinariness, so what?

OK, one bit of critique for clarity: it’s easy to see how playing this way can falter: long lectures about things like currency and customs, or the historical run-up to current circumstances, or ever-proliferating and ever-more-elaborate maps … basically, the error of explaining without anything happening right now being fun enough to be worth explaining. All of which is extra excruciating when applied to magic. Again, though, I want to take the positive view, so let’s set bad play and complaining aside, and look at the strengths and potential for good play.

• The location, which I decided is in fact the island of Harn, and which is subject to difficult feuds and slow-burning religious politics; therefore, a rural region somewhere there; also, one must have some orcish presence in the area as orcs in this game are very much their own irresistible thing. So we have effects upon the precise place of play which operate at a larger scale, but which might land any number of events or persons in our laps. It’s village life, yes, but village life with disruptions.
• The person, whom I hope you can see is both “just some village corpse-handler with a drinking problem,” and “someone who may decide to do a thing, some day, tomorrow, or perhaps even today, which changes everything for everyone in ways she may not even understand.”

Anyone who’s cared even a little about anything I write about can see what this is really about: an actionable situation, from the point of view of anyone playing. Everyone is doing something: clan headman and everyone else in the village region, player-characters, various high-status people whom we might not even ever see, the local orcs … what happens and even what it’s about are effectively thrown into the air to see what comes down, and the player-characters operate at the very least as a lens for the primary experience, and often as key actors even if they or anyone would never have expected it.

This was originally a Patreon post, about three months ago. I asked people – instead of debating or seeking clarification – to mention more role-playing titles which qualify, especially those which go pretty far down this road at the expense of most modern wizard fantasy tropes, and about their experiences playing this way, whether in bits and parts, or entirely so. The comments are included here as well:

Everyone is invited to add more thoughts here to continue the discussion.