Hello, dear patrons! A few weeks ago I offered a poll on House Alexus. I have the results of that poll up now. It’s not a full write-up of the House, that will come later (when I have time!), but it should give you an idea of what the final version will look like. If you’re a $7+ Patron, check it out!
I was bothered by how uncertain my history was. How much time should really be in each era? Did I cover enough? Could I cover more? To solve it, I broke everything out into a much more detailed timeline. I don’t intend to release the timeline in the final book (who reads timelines?) but it’s still a useful reference for me, and I thought my Patrons might like to read it.
So, if you’re a $3+ patron, you can get the complete timeline here. It also necessarily includes a slightly deeper look at the setting. I’d love some comments if you have them. If you’re not a patron, as always, I’d love to have you!
UPDATE: the information in this Patreon post has been outdated for some time. I’ve opened it up to the public who are curious about the older designs, and for those who want a more up-to-date version, there’s an article on History on the Psi-Wars wiki
History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes
-Mark Twain
Four thousand years before the rise of the Galactic Empire, the Republic verges on collapse. DARTH MALAK, last surviving apprentice of the DARK LORD REVAN, has unleashed an invincible Sith armada upon an unsuspecting galaxy.
-Knights of the Old Republic, Opening Crawl
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| The First Jedi Temple, from the Force Awakens |
The Star Wars universe boasts a considerable history, often a cyclical one. In it, Luke goes in search of the “First Jedi Temple,” and we’re treated to visions of the ancient city of Jedah, and we have an entire game series set in the “Old Republic” which nearly replicates the galaxy in its later state, only with a few minor changes (convenient for an RPG!).
This isn’t that far from how history actually works. History tells the story of humanity, our struggle to pull out of primitive and poverty-stricken barbarism, then to rise to the dizzying heights of civilization only to experience a total system collapse and be driven back into the depths of barbarism. The history of China studies of the rise and fall of dynasties, and our own history has the rise of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire (you might call the 14th century collapse of High Medieval society brought on by the Black Death such a fall, but Europe recovered with its identity largely intact), and Rome itself rose after a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, which followed the Late Bronze Age collapse. It is this last that some scholars argue give rise to Greek myths of a “Golden Age” that preceded the darker classica era.
Whether there’s truth to that, those myths do exist, and they shape our myths. The notion of ages, of civilizations rising and falling, followed by heroes plumbing the depths of those ruins to find lost treasure and secret lore. Star Wars, following the trope of fantasy and mythic stories, whispers of lost Jedi temples and ancient Sith empires. It’s not the only to do this: Warhammer 40k has a loose sketch of its considerable history (and has recently released Warhammer 30k!); Dune likewise hints at considerable history, such as references to the Butlerian jihad; Foundation features an Empire that was ancient and on its way our before the series even begins, and also has an archaeologist hunting for the origins of humanity in the Galaxy; Traveler sets its current game in the third Imperium, and has details to the previous two.
Thus, a truly ancient history certainly has a place in Psi-Wars, but as before, we need to justify it by determining what questions it answers. The most obvious to me are “So, what kind of cool ruins does this game have?” or “What’s the story behind all of these aliens,” though I would caution against making every alien race older than humanity. But the biggest one players will probably want to know is:
Christian heresy is related to diversity of thought within Judaism. This is more historically accurate than the first quotation suggesting truth, and unity, before error, or heresy. Christianity grew from the very diverse soil of Second Temple Judaism and never had the original unity claimed by orthodox historians or theologians.
-Robert M. Royalty, Jr., Heresies in Early Christianity
We probably know more about the origins of Judaism, as well as who wrote the Old Testament and why, than we do about the true origins of Christianity and who wrote the works of the New Testament and why. Jesus Christ and his followers didn’t leave any written works that came down to us; the works that claim to come from those disciples were almost certainly written a generation or two after Christ was crucified. Thus, our image of the message and philosophy of Christ comes from those who followed him, and particularly from the Apostle Paul, so much so that some academics argue that Pauline Christianity is Christianity, as he had surprisingly little contact with the original apostles who would have actually known Christ.
But Christianity had numerous other competitors in the old world. The Mysteries of Mithras, a Persian mystery cult held the attention of many of the military men of Rome. Greek, Roman and especially Egyptian paganism, especially the Cult of Isis, held strong sway over Mediterranean populations before the advent of Christianty. The philosophies, or even “philosophy-religions” of the Greeks had long held Roman fascination, especially Stoicism and Neoplatonism. The compelling ideas of Neoplatonism so gripped the ancient world that the Jews of Alexandria began to weave those ideas into Judaism; Philo of Alexandria tried to show that the Bible held Greek philosophical ideas and, that since they predated Socrates by centuries, that Socrates must have been influenced by Judaism! His ideas managed to creep into early Christianity, which fused with all sorts of interesting faiths and philosophies swimming around the ancient Middle East at that time creating numerous “heresies” that so bedeviled the early Church; among them the much-discussed Gnosticism. These heresies resulted in outright violence, usually over points that might seem utterly pedantic to modern ears, such as the exact nature of Christ’s divinity, but it was enough to come to blows over. Eventually, Constantine pushed the Empire towards Christianity and tried to enforce an agreement with the Nicean creed.
Judaism as it came to be in the time of Christ was forged by two major events: the scattering of the tribes of Israel, and the Babylonian Exile. The conquest of Israel by the Assyrians triggered the first An exceptionally brutal people, the Assyrians scattered many of the Israelites and their refugees flooded into Judah, where their prophetic tradition of YHWH merged with the Judaic tradition. For example, the repetition of stories, such as the two tales of the creation of the world found in Genesis, likely stem from this synthesis of two related traditions into a single work.
Thereafter, once Babylon defeated Assyria, it eventually took over Israel and Judah. Babylon had a tradition of “stealing gods.” In those days, it seems, people identified their gods with physical manifestations, such as statues, and Babylon would often hold those “gods” hostage. So it was with the Ark of the Covenant, and the elites of Israel. While in captivity, the Jews began to form this idea of Jewish identity, because they lived in Babylon, but were not Babylonian, and clung to the remnants of their old identity, which meant clinging to their old documents, whether it was literal holy texts, or oral traditions. Once Persia defeated Babylon, Cyrus the Great had a policy of religious tolerance, and he allowed the Jews to return back to Israel and to rebuild their temple (though this would take quite some time). The result was that these returning Jews brought back with them a distinct sense of Jewishness, and it was likely around this time that the Old Testament really took its form. It was likely redacted from five different documents, and it was probably ultimately redacted by “the father of Judaism,” the prophet Ezra.
What strikes me about the history of these two deeply connected faiths is their mutual origins in adversity. Judaism forged its identity not by being the best or more powerful, but by synthesizing ideas from other cultures as well as hardening and intensifying its own uniqueness under the pressure of oppression. Christianity did likewise, pulling from its Jewish roots and refusing the yield under intense Roman pressure, but also adapting to a new world, a new outlook, and forging a faith that would take over the world… though, perhaps, not with the message its original founder had intended.
It’s also noteworthy that each faith had numerous interpretations and subdivisions that later groups would try to overcome with documents that blended those various traditions together, and where that failed, ostracizing the “wrong” traditions as heresies (which, incidentally, comes from the Greek word “choice,” and refers to the school of thought to which one chooses to adhere). If we wanted to be accurate to the history of religion, there would not be one Jedi order, but many, and if there were not many, it would be because the Jedi order suppressed those heretical schools of thought (like the Sith…)
It is one’s self
Which one should see and hear
And on which one should reflect and concentrate
For by seeing and hearing one’s self
And by reflecting and concentrating on one’s self
One gains the knowledge of this whole world
-The Great Forest Upanishad
Early Western philosophy, and especially Western theology, has most often concerned itself (if I might oversimplify) with the question of God and on finding a singular origin of things. Indian philosophy, by contrast, is far more concerned with the question of “What is the self?” and how it relates to the universe at large. Moreover, whereas Western philosophy and theology see themselves as distinct traditions, Indian philosophy and religion blend together seamlessly (so much so that one can find epistemological discussions in religious texts). What we often think of as “oriental wisdom,” the sort of thing that suffuses the philosophy of Star Wars, with its koans and meditation, mostly stem from Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions which, themselves, have their roots in India. And I personally find the discussion of “self” and “the universe” to be exceptionally well-suited to handling how one might view Communion, as Communion is all about how one views oneself, and how one connects oneself to a larger, greater universe of psychic phenomenon. In my research through the world of philosophy and religion, I’ve found loads of great ideas from a variety of traditions, but none more suitable than Indian philosophy.
Destiny is a gift. Some go their entire lives, living existence as a quiet desperation. Never learning the truth that what feels as though a burden pushing down upon our shoulders, is actually, a sense of purpose that lifts us to greater heights.
-Blinky, Trollhunters
India had a variety of other religions, at least one of which was Jainism, of which I’m afraid I know very little. Some sources I’ve read suggest that it might even predate the Vedic faith, but it seems to me to be closely interrelated to it. Jainism might be best understood as an extreme ascetism. Devoted Jainists took things like ahisma and karma very seriously, and would struggle to do nothing, forming attachments to nothing so that they could escape the cycle of rebirth, and would studiously avoid harming anything. They would refuse to even boil water or prepare food, because that always caused some form of harm, and they relied on the generosity of others to keep themselves alive (and, eventually, wouldn’t even accept that, letting themselves wither away and die once they felt they had fully escaped). The Jainists were very critical of the Brahmins and their accumulation of wealth, their rituals of animal sacrifice and their catering to power.
Buddhism seems to have evolved in part as a response to both Jainism and Brahminism, which is why it calls itself “the middle way.” It rejects the extreme asceticism of Jainism, but accepts its criticisms of Brahminism (and, thus, accepts many of the arguments and beliefs of the Vedic texts, but argues that the Brahminism doesn’t take things far enough). One noteworthy departure from Brahminism is the Buddhist reject of atman. Buddhism argues that there is no self, no ultimate, deep central core, and that the very notion that you have some unchanging element is an illusion, one of the many illusions that keep you attached to the cycle of reincarnation. It also seems that the earliest texts detailing meditation are Buddhist.
I wish I could find a quote about the Romans first encounter with the Middle East that I enjoyed very much. It pointed out that the Middle East was full of self-consciously ancient people, people who had traditions so old they utterly dwarfed the traditions of the Romans, or even the Greeks, whom the Romans saw as an ancient people. The pyramids, when Caesar first gazed upon them, were already impossibly ancient.
If we want a more human cause, we have the Sea Peoples. All across the ancient Middle East, we have evidence of massive destruction of cities, caused mostly by fire over a 50-year span, as well as numerous references to invaders. The evidence we have seems to suggest a mass migration of people, similar to the massive migration that caused the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the sudden pulse of migration caused by the Mongolian conquests. In fact, we regularly see these pulses throughout history, where some movements on the Eurasian steppe results in waves of people being kicked off their land, who seize nearby lands, which kicks those people off their land and so on until there’s a sudden crashing immigration that threatens to topple an empire. Most often, the Empire can handle this, but if you pair it with bad weather and excessive complexity (“degeneration”) and you can topple a mighty empire.
Your father’s light saber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times… before the Empire.
-Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope
Now that we’ve settled on the basic outlines of the history of the Empire and how the Republic collapsed into autocracy, we’re left with some questions:
But I, personally, have a question that I think is far more pressing and likely to be asked by your players, even Brent, more often than any of the above:
More to the point, the Jedi Knight seems to be a blending of the concept if a knight, in the sense of a noble warrior who wields an elegant weapon and regularly practices martial arts, and a warrior monk, someone deeply dedicated to a mystical or religious ideal, withdrawn from life, who also dedicated himself to the arts of war. To understand the space knight, we should look at both elements in detail.
Prior to the 15th and 16th centuries, do you know what the favoured weapon of the samurai was? It certainly wasn’t the katana, the broad sword, or any other type of sword. In fact, there’s no mention whatsoever of the sword as the “soul of the samurai” prior to a statement made by Tokugawa Ieyasu at the beginning of the 17th century. Prior to this time, the samurai were in fact mounted archers who were highly skilled with the bow and arrow, occasionally using other weapons if necessary. For the greater part of their history, the sword was not an important weapon to the samurai.
If you’ll allow a brief detour through history: The title “samurai” started as a low-level bureaucratic position, one step below the courtiers and aristocrats that dominated the Heian-era courts. At the same time, the Emperor made use of regional clan warriors, mounted archers for the most part, to fight his wars, and slowly these clan-warriors began to take over most of these low level positions and, through their strength of arms and practical importance to the empire, overtake the more ritualistic aristocracy in importance, giving rise to the shogunate.
The shogunate was unable to keep a lid on the increasingly decentralized power of the various samurai clans, who regularly bickered and battled with one another, and when a succession crisis spawned into a succession war, it triggered a general free-for-all throughout Japan, resulting in the Sengoku-Jidai, the warring states era so famous in Japanese lore and legend, when samurai were samurai. This is the era referred to above, when the bow and the spear dominated the battlefield, and this era saw the rise of the firearm in japan (One source I read claimed that Japan had more firearms in their country at the end of the war than Europe did).
Samurai were, in this era and in the previous, similar to knights or, really, any aristocratic warrior. In these days, the centralized power didn’t arm and armor its armies, but called them up and expected them to be armed. Those who could afford to arm and armor themselves especially well could usually also afford to arm and armor some local men too, and bring an army with them. Aristocrat warriors are, thus, men who can afford better gear than everyone else, and have more spare time to practice with said gear, and can then turn around and use that superior arms and training to either oppress peasantry or wage war on a king’s behalf (and, in both ways, improve his income and thus his access to arms and training).
When the Sengoku Jidai ended, the katana/wazikashi combination (the daisho) would come to define the samurai because the shogunate made it so. Weapons had proliferated throughout Japan during the era, and the Shogunate demanded that all peasants turn in their swords, but samurai were allowed to keep them as marks of their station. This era, the Edo era, gives us the image of the kimono-clad samurai wearing his daisho in his obi, and suddenly drawing them to cut down his opponent in one, swift blow. The samurai wore that daisho as a badge of their status, especially if they’d fallen on hard times. Sure, that rapscallion over there might look as unkempt as any ruffian, with his shaggy hair and shoddy kimono, but he wears daisho, so you know he’s really a samurai.
This marks the next evolution of most of our aristocrat warriors. The centralized power cannot afford to have loads of armed men running around the country, but he also knows better than to kick off an armed revolt by demanding that this powerful class surrender their power. So, he honors them gives them what they want (guarantees of wealth and prestige) and removes the need to fight. Their role becomes ceremonial, and they maintain the badge of their office: the sword. Why the sword? Well, Lindybeige has some interesting commentary on that. In essence, the sword, unlike the spear or the bow or the axe, has no real purpose outside of the killing of others. Simply wearing it around people who are not allowed to wear one emphasizes that you carry the power of life and death over them. This is cemented by the practice of iajutsu, which is not particularly effective against an armored opponent, but is an excellent way to cut down an impertinent peasant and then eleganty clean your blade. The sword and your mastery of it emphasizes your station, even if you are not an active participant in war any more.
The next major era for the samurai is the modern one, especially World War 2 and the rise of chambara cinema. Neither featured real samurai, but the myth and mystique of these warriors. This might seem an irrelevant notion to the historicity of the samurai, but much of what we think of as “bushido” or “the way samurai fight” comes from these stories, legends and exaggerations. This also matters because, first of all, the Jedi are based on these myths, and not on the reality of the samurai and, second, the notion of a mythical warrior hailing from a golden era of chivalry and honor is a key aspect to the mythos of the Jedi, and thus our space knights. They wield more elegant weapons of a more civilized age, before the random barbarism of this, our fallen modern era. More than anything, our Space Knights need to evoke this ideal.
Today, the survival and secret activities of the Knights Templar rival UFOs and the Kennedy assassination as atopic for conspiracy theory. Details vary from one account toanother, but most agree that the Templars are wealthy andpowerful, moving in the shadows to control governments andcorporations around the world.
-Graeme Davis, Pyramid #3-86: Organizations, “The Knights Templar”
Myths and lies swirl around the Crusades into Europe, but few elements of the Crusades inspire more mythology than the Knights Templar. George Lucas definitely drew some of his ideas for the Jedi Order (an Order of Knights) from the Knights Templar, especially including their precipitous and likely unfair fall.
A brief introduction: The Knights Templar came after the Crusades had established a foothold in the Holy Land. Europe fought the Crusades, ostensibly, to ensure that Christians could make their pilgrimages to Jerusalem, but the road to the Holy Land was still fraught with troubles, especially banditry. 9 knights forswore allegiance to any king and swore allegiance to the Pope himself and offered to the King of Jerusalem to protect pilgrims from the plights of banditry, etc, and he allowed them to take the Temple Mount as their headquarters, hence the “Knights of the Temple of Solomon,” or the Knights Templar.
Or possibly, they didn’t. Most historians note that the Templars, ten years after their supposed founding, went to a monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, who had already established one monastic order and “asked him for help” in setting up their rules and gaining the Pope’s stamp of approval, which St. Bernard did, and wrote a treatise praising this “new form of Knighthood,” whereupon the Templars suddenly had a huge influx of members. Given the close ties between Bernard and the founders of the Templars and a lack of evidence of their presence in Jerusalem before this point, many historians (Including Graeme Davis) argue their origin story is a bit of retroactive storytelling to make the order seem more mythical and to get a cool PR boost.
The Templars seemed to have a complicated relationship with Islam. Kingdom of Heaven depicts them as fanatical enemies of Islam, willing to provoke suicidal wars, and I can find some evidence for that. On the other hand, one of the accusations leveled at the Templars during their dissolution was that they were secret Muslims (“Baphomet,” the God they supposedly secretly worshipped, might be a French variation of Mohammed), and I can find evidence that they were respectful of Islamic customs and that they even had dealings with the Hashashin.
From here, the Templars pass from history and into mythology. The most common story I’ve found is that the Templars who escaped Philip’s pogrom became the founders of Free Masonry or various other conspiracies, especially against the Kings of France. This idea of a secret conspiracy of knights working against the order of the day reshapes how one might see the Jedi Order: If they really were conspiring against the Republic (or for whatever their secret aims were), that totally changes the tone of the Emperor’s actions.
Another common story, one echoed by tales of the Crusades themselves, is that the Templars brought back some great secret or power with them from the Holy Land. We have this idea that the Crusades allowed ideas to flow between the Middle East and Europe, and this is probably untrue (most of those ideas were already flowing from al-Andalus to France), but it’s an interesting idea we can borrow for our Space Knights nonetheless.
For me, one of the more interesting elements of the Knights Templar, and other knightly orders, is their unusual relationship with the secular power-structures of the day. The typical knight, like the typical samurai above, served his leige lord and lent military power to his state. The monastic knights served no state. They served their church. This didn’t prevent them from controlling territory, however. While the Templar never controlled, for example, the Crusader States, the Tuetonic Knights definitely controlled (and colonized!) some territory of their own. We picture the Jedi as this peaceful order of sage-warriors, but I find this image of armed, armored and highly military men conquering a swath of territory in the name of a faith to be a particularly fascinating and very un-Jedi idea. We’ll need some un-Jedi ideas to make our space knights feel unique.
And, of course, the other aspect of this religious-allegience is that the Knights Templar were more than knights, they were also monks. Warrior-monks, specifically, which perfectly fits what the Jedi were and what our Space Knights need to be.
Channon spent time in the 1970s with many of the people in California credited with starting the Human Potential Movement, and subsequently wrote an operations manual for a First Earth Battalion. The manual was a 125-page mixture of drawings, graphs, maps, polemical essays, and point-by-point redesigns of every aspect of military life. Channon imagined a new battlefield uniform that would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, food stuffs to enhance night vision, and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit “indigenous music and words of peace.”
This is referenced in “The Men Who Stare At Goats,” which is a book detailing the CIA’s efforts to creation psychic spies, assassins and soldiers. In principle, then, the First Earth Battalion was a new age military, in the sense of spooky psychic powers, inner enlightenment and so on, which makes it a fascinating blend between New Age mysticism (on the rise during the same era in which Star Wars was first released: the 1970s) and Cold War psychic experimentation, the likes of which we see in Psi-Ops, the Mind Gate Conspiracy, which makes a fascinating alternative to the warrior-monks of the Jedi.
More in the vein of our classic perception of the warrior-monk are the warrior monks of Japan, the Sohei, and to understand them, I need to make a brief foray into the religious landscape of Japan. By the Heian period, Japan imported Buddhism from China in the form of the Tendai sect, which enjoyed the patronage of the court and aristocracy. To protect their own, and to intimidate rival sects, some of the monks of the Tendai sect, especially from the temple Enryaku-ji just outside Kyoto (the Capital of Japan at the time) took up arms. They seem to have worn the same sort of armor and fought in largely the same way that samurai did, though traditionally with a greater focus on the naginata over the katana. It might be better to think of these warrior monks as more akin to the knights templar, as they seem very similar to samurai, except with a strong religious focus.
Two sects split off from the Tendai sect. The first is the Shugendo sect, which is a highly syncretic faith that blends Tendai teachings with shinto traditions, and their monks travel high into the mountains to practice extreme asceticism in pursuit of supernatural powers. These “mountain men”h the yamabushi, needed to be masters of combat to survive the harsh, bandit-ridden mountains of Japan.
The second major sect I want to discuss rose to prominence during the Sengoku Jidai, Jodo Shinshu, “Pure Land” Buddhism. The founder promoted a new way to find enlightenment and escape what he believed to be a fallen, degenerate world, in a way that was remarkably easy: simple prayer and deep faith. In contrast to the more expensive rituals and aristocratic patronage of Tendai buddhism, Jodo Shinshu appealed to the common man and the poorer samurai (one might draw a parallel between Catholicism and militant Lutheranism). The followers of Jodo Shinshu began to come together for the same reason Tendai Buddhists would take up arms: self-defense (at first) and then to intimidate or defeat rival sects. But the fundamental character of these “warrior monks” differed from previous ones as these were commoners. These more closely resembled peasant uprisings or village militia than well-trained armies. The name “Ikko-ikki” means “Ikko-shu uprising” with “ikko-shu” being a reference to Jodo Shinsu.
In all cases, like the Crusading Orders, these warrior-monks weren’t associated with a secular power, but with religious thought. Thus, while a samurai owned the land and was fundamentally attached to it, and thus concerned with borders, a temple could be placed nearly anywhere; in fact, where samurai demanded taxes, buddhist sects usually just requested donations and their followers themselves would put up their (sometimes heavily fortified) temples. And also, like the crusading orders, while they did not need territory, they sometimes ended up carving out religious states anyway, such as Kaga province in the Sengoku period. Finally, while I’ve discussed the sohei indimidating rival sects, buddhism of all sects taught pacifism, and sohei generally took up arms in self-defense (like the Jedi), and only when it was clear that they were a force to be reckoned with did, occasionally, ambition run ahead of moral qualms.
The last of the warrior monk orders that I want to point to are the monks of the Shaolin monastary, whom I’m sure need no further introduction. You can read all about them in GURPS martial arts. Like our Japanese warrior-monks, these warrior-monks were also buddhist, and they primarily learned martial arts for self-defense (though they would later adjust their theology retroactively to justify it); The primary thing I want to draw your attention to is, like the Knights Templar, they were destroyed and scattered by a secular power, the Qing Dynasty, and like the Knights Templar, legends state that some of them survived and scattered into the world. These five elders of Shaolin (including a nun!) supposedly spread their martial arts knowledge throughout China and a variety of martial arts school love to claim one of these legendary elders as the ultimate founder of their style, including Wing Chun, the ancestor of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do.
So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.
-Padme Amidala, Revenge of the Sith
When you design a setting element, or a story, or a hook you’ll use to inspire yourself later, you should try to build a question into them, some element you want to explore and touch on, or let your players explore. I would argue that all of the Star Wars prequels revolve around the question of “How did the Republic become the Empire?”
George Lucas answered that question with a bit of Roman and German history, plus his own personal political philosophy. I also thoroughly believe that George Lucas wanted us to ponder this question ourselves and relate it to our daily lives, which quite a few people have certainly done, with gusto, in regards to the recent elections, if my Google Search for the above quote is any indication.
I’d like to revisit that question, using much of the same inspiration that George Lucas had, and show you how we can come to a very different conclusion than he did. I want to revisit how democracies die, and more than that, I want to look at the broader implications of the histories from which George Lucas drew his inspiration, and use that to expand the setting beyond the narrow scope Star Wars has.
It’s nice to think that a government that Goes Too Far will eventually cause the citizens to rise in righteous wrath and throw the rascals out. It’s also convenient when all the defenders of the Evil Empire wear uniforms (except for the occasional Secret Police spy). Unfortunately, we know from centuries of experience that it doesn’t really work this way. The worst tyrannies imaginable have been enthusiastically supported by people no worse than you or me
-GURPS Space “Why People Support Rotten Empires”
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| Death of Julius Caesar |
I’ll allow you to study the history of the fall of the Roman Republic on your own. There are plenty of resources out there. Just hit up some of my sources back in my history post. Allow me to sum it up.
I wanted to begin with history because history often explains how we got to where we were. Thus, history and cartography are usually amongst the first choices of setting-builders when they get started, as history represents where things started. History will explain why everything is where it is, making it the foundation upon which we’ll build the setting.
That said, I almost held off on it, because history needs to explain how the setting came to be in the shape that it is, and without knowing what that shape will be, how can I write its history? I could just write the history and then from that history derive the setting, but if I have some crazy-good idea later on as I’m working on, for example, geography or technology, should I discard it just because it doesn’t fit my history? Of course not. The intent here is not to set everything in stone, but to build, collect and curate inspiration, and tie it together well enough to create a cohesive setting. So, perhaps it would be better to write my history after I’ve finished coming up with the setting? After all, that’s how Star Wars wrote its history: George Lucas said “Space war! Evil magical samurai! Giant planet-killing space station! Details to follow!” and made his movie, then expanded his universe.
I propose we do both. Having a decent grounding in the history of our setting well help guide us in our creative efforts. It’ll create a framework that will inspire the rest, but as we work on other parts of the setting, we’ll fold their stories and histories into the greater fabric of the history we’re writing. Thus, we’ll do this largely in two parts: Up front, to inspire our work, and at the end, a final edit of all the history we need to explain the setting we’ve come up with.
Before I begin, though, I’d like to do my usual discussion of setting creation theory. First, we need to justify doing this at all, and get an idea of what our intent here is. Second, we need a picture of how we’re going to proceed, and finally, we need to tools at our disposal.
I want to make a final note on the difference between the work you do and the work the players see. You can do as much work as you like, the above considerations mostly focus on what the players see. Much of the work I’ve done in Psi-Wars will never make it into a book, and never end up before the eyes of your players unless they read this blog, and that’s okay! Much work I do is to provide tools for myself. For example, I worked out Cultural Values so I have an easy grab-bag of ideas I can use to quickly construct cultures, but my players only need to see the final cultures of various races, they don’t need to see the design process.
History can and should work like that. Go ahead and have richly detailed timelines. Go ahead and work out the economics of ancient empires. But in the end, you need to give the players a digest, something they can relate to, not the full body of the work. The extra work you’ve done should mean that your history hangs better and makes more sense and that you can answer questions if you need to. The only reason I would argue against this is that if you get lost spending a year in writing “the perfect history,” you’ll never get your setting finished, and a playable setting with a crappy history is always superior to an unplayable setting with a wonderful history, ergo: “Remember your objectives.”
How long does it take to build an Empire? That depends, of course, on how large an empire is, but we can get some ballpark figures if we figure out, first, how long it takes to find decent worlds to colonize, then how long it takes to colonize them, and then how long to get those worlds to carrying capacity.
First, we have to find a suitable world. With a hyperdrive, you can effectively get to any world in zero time, speaking on the scale of civilizations. That is, one can reasonably visit several worlds in a single year. How long it takes to find a world depends on how rare worlds are, but if we say that one in 100 worlds are nice enough to colonists in shirt-sleeves, and that we can survey one world a month, then it takes about 10 years to find a new world to colonize.
Once a world has been found, it probably takes effectively zero time to colonize. That is, once you know where the world is, it likely takes longer to build the colony ship and the colony itself than to actually get there and, of course, transportation is easy enough that you could simply ferry people back and forth as many times as necessary. Think of how long it would take America to colonize a continent that magically appeared in the middle of the Pacific: not very long at all!
Finally, we need an idea of population growth. I think it’s safe to say that survey ships constantly look for new worlds to colonize, and that once a suitable world is found, colony efforts begin as soon as any nearby worlds begin to feel the pinch of overpopulation. Thus, we can treat colonization as a straight up measure of population growth.
Starting with a single homeworld a carrying capacity (say, 2 billion people), how long to fill one more world, and then another? Well, Pyramid #3-3 has a handy spreadsheet that requires a few assumptions. Keeping their standard birth/death rate (14 per thousand births and 8 per thousand deaths), with 90+% of children surviving, each woman having a modest average of 3 children each, and each generation is 20 years long, we come to a doubling of population every 50 years or so. That means that in the first 50 years, the homeworld can “fill up” one additional world (provided it can find it and build the necessary resources, but both of these tasks take less than 50 years). In a century, it would have filled 4 worlds, 200 years to fill 16, and so on. How large is “an Empire?” Well, I’d argue that once you get more than 150 worlds in a single polity, most people stop thinking of them as individual worlds and as a larger conglomeration. It would take our homeworld about 400 years to fill up that many worlds (Actually 256, but that’s “more than 150”), and we can round that to 500 if we account for disasters, problems and little minor wars.
The Galaxy almost certainly has more worlds than that, but it gives us a good “realistic ball park estimate” for how long it takes to build a teeming galactic nation from scratch, one that I think most players won’t blink at: 500 years.
What about the rise and fall of empires? Well, there’s quite a few models of history, and really, you can grab whatever you want. Ideally, you just need enough to get an idea of the rise and fall of various eras, and something that creates a believable course of history. Personally, I dislike histories that have “And then for a thousand years, everything was great,” but it should be noted that, like all other parts of history, our history should serve a purpose. If there’s 1000 years of “nothing interesting,” and I’m just padding my year count to get to particularly awesome artifacts, then that’s fine. It’s better than cluttering history will tons of things the players don’t need to know. But, on the other hand, if we want to track history in greater detail, consider how those details impact the player: do they represent events that he can trace his lineage to, or that affect his character’s background, or that provide backstory for interesting relics that he can acquire?
For this, I find that the Strauss-Howe generational model works particularly well, not because it’s necessarily accurate, but because it fits the “fractal” model nicely. I can define a period (“The first Galactic Empire,”) then break it down into centuries with one major crisis per century (“The Trader Wars!” “The Rise of Communion!” “The Mad Emperor” “The Civil War”) and then, if I need even greater detail, I can break open the generational model to describe how each generation interacted (contributed to, responded to, resolved, overreacted in such a way to contribute to the next) the crisis of their century. Then it’s just a matter of filling in a timeline.
Of these numbers, I’m inclined to take the Thaumatology standard, and shoot for about 10,000 years of maximum history.
I’m afraid I can’t find the quote by Kenneth Hite, but it amounts to this: No matter how creative you are, the real world will come up with something stranger and cooler than you can ever come up with, and you’d thus be a fool not to pillage history.
This is especially important for Psi-Wars, for two reasons. First, Star Wars, from which Psi-Wars draws is principle inspiration, is very thoroughly based on history, especially the History Channel favorites like World War 2 and the Roman Empire. If we want Psi-Wars to feel the same, then we need to draw our inspiration from a similar source. But more importantly, Psi-Wars must necessarily be larger than Star Wars, given that Star Wars is “only” a movie, while Psi-Wars needs to be a setting that supports a huge variety of different possible games. That means we need more material to steal from, and there’s hardly more material than all of human history.
As before, though, I intend to pursue emulation rather than imitation. I don’t want Psi-Wars to be the the Fall of the Roman Republic with the serial numbers scratched off, I want to understand what made Rome fall, and then draw parallels with that with the fall of my Galactic Empire. This is the same thing Lucas did in the prequels though I’m quite sure I’ll draw different historical conclusions than he did (It takes more than a single war to turn a democracy into a dictatorship). We need to do our homework, and I certainly have (Look, I like history, okay!), and I’ve noted some sources below. Those are just some sources, a place where you might start. The point here is hunting for ideas, not necessarily a rigorous historical thesis, thus I’ve happily included semi-fictional works and well-researched RPGs. It’s not meant as an exhaustive bibliography of books I’ve gone through.
So, what part of history can I draw on for inspiration for Psi-Wars?
All of it.
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| Gladiator, from Wikipedia |
Star Wars clearly draws a lot of its inspiration from the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic. Here, too, the Republic (with its Senate) is overthrown in a time of crisis by a man who becomes Emperor, only to face a civil war from his rivals, while barbaric (alien) threats press in on the civilized core. The rightful order of the world is on threat from all sides, and the Emperor destroys the Republic to save it.
And, really, why wouldn’t Star Wars draw inspiration from this rich source? Rome is nearly as far back as you can go and still run into, as Dan Carlin puts it, “full color history,” where we have a pretty good picture from the records of what’s going on. Suddenly, a strange and alien culture springs up that’s utterly unlike our own, and yet still so recognizably human. If their democracy could fall, then surely so can ours. George Lucas clearly wanted us to pay attention to that danger.
An empire is defined as “an aggregate of nations or people ruled over by an emperor or other powerful sovereign or government, usually a territory of greater extent than a kingdom
–Wikipedia
The change-over didn’t happen all once either. Every school kid knows about Julius Caesar, but he was never Emperor. His adopted son, Augustus Caesar, was the first Roman Emperor. Instead, what we see are long serious of events where to increasingly entrenched and violent sides come to blows, and when they kill Caesar (a hero to all of Rome!), that was a bridge too far, and then when Augustus Caesar wins, it’s clear to him that the only way to end the cycles of violence is to clamp down with an iron fist.
And the “rebellion” wasn’t nearly as clear cut as we see in Star Wars. Instead, we see the Republic vs Imperial side, of course, but then once the Imperial side wins, that side devolves into a horrid conflict between the victorious triumvirate until Augustus Caesar is the last man standing. This, by the way, is surprisingly typical for uprisings of this sort. Moreover, the “liberty loving side” was largely aristocratic. The war for the soul of Rome was fought by those who stood for the constitution, the aristocratic, land-owning, slave-holding elites, vs the dictatorial populist demagogues. The land owning class had gained enormous wealth and power during the rise of Rome, and didn’t want to share it with the increasingly impoverished common man, and one of the core justifications of the various power-grabs during this era was to better the lot of the common man. This rather puts a new spin on the rebellion being led by a Princess, doesn’t it?
In Star Wars, Palpatine definitely rises to power on the back of a war, as did the various populist Tribunes of Rome, but in Rome, the wars were of conquest and genocide or, more occasionally, in defense of the Republic against vast barbarian incursions. Desperately frightened Romans would give more and more power to their best and brightest, who would turn around and impose some serious reform that would incense one side of the other and, especially if they were making reforms that benefited the people, resulted in their assassination.
If we borrow some of this for Psi-Wars, what alien menace represents our barbaric incursions that our heroic would-be Emperor can gain fame standing against? Who are the aristocrats that stand for “the constitution” of the current Galactic Republic? How does this Emperor die, and who rises in his place? And how does that particular civil war play out? We have the aristocratic side, but if they’re largely defeated, does the Empire have to deal with other, upstart imperials from the alliance-from-hell that they made to take control of the empire?
And what fundamentally changed the fabric of the Republic so completely to allow this?
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| from “Meet the Men who Hunt Nazis,” the Telegraph |
Sources:
If Star Wars is the story of how democracies fall and how they can be restored, I must admit that I find most discussions of the rise of Nazi Germany frustrating, as they seldom get into the root causes. Instead, Hitler inexplicably rises to power thanks to fear and his magical, hypnotic powers, which matches how Star Wars treats it. Personally, I found Hite’s discussions of the origins of the Volkish movement and its connections to German nationalism enlightening, as well as the Interwar Period’s discussion of the delicate balancing act the Weimar republic was forced to make, including its evident external focus and unwillingness to violate treaties the German people found increasingly inexcusable. Thus, the rise of the Nazi party has more to do with economic hardship and a defiant wish for Germany to “take its rightful place” with the other European empires (the fact they were empires is sometimes forgotten in these discussions), as well as willingness to be “unapologetically German” in the sense that there seemed a general sense that being “unapologetically German” was controversial (perhaps because it was!). You can also find a strong element of propaganda and secret police inside the Nazi party from the very beginning: one reason Hitler was able to rise to power was that as soon as he had any power, he used it to dramatically suppress dissent.
Thus, in Psi-Wars, what sort of economic hardships and politically incorrect ideas begin to give rise to the rise of the Empire? What sort of secret police does the Emperor deploy to enforce his will upon the people and thus end the Galactic Republic?
Star Wars also borrows heavily from the imagery of World War 2, with great capital ships acting as carriers and battleships, while starfighters act as fighter. Stormtroopers draw their inspiration from German storm troopers, the AT-AT from the German Tiger, and so on. The Galactic Civil War of Star Wars is fought very much like World War 2, only “in space.”
But the politics of the war is completely different. In Star Wars, the only two powers are the Empire and the Rebellion, which isn’t a foreign power at all. This is an internal conflict. In World War 2, of course, Germany allied with other powers (Italy and Japan) to form the Axis, and the Allies included freedom-loving British (including aristocrats and a commonwealth that contained colonized nations, like India) and America, as well as the decidedly unfree Russia. If we draw the parallel further, who takes on these roles? The idea of an aristocracy fighting to hold onto their old privilege matches nicely with the parallel for the Roman civil war, but how do we represent America? Are they heroic minute-men or grasping, corporate industrialists with imperial ambitions of their own, or both? And what could stand in for Russia in the most brutal part of the war? If communism represents the rise of a virtually enslaved labor class against their oppressors, then what if the role of Russia in Psi-Wars is an area of space where robots have overthrown their masters and seek to persuade other robots to join them in their revolution? And what represents Japan or Italy? Does some ancient and mDan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khansystical culture join forces with the industrial might of the galactic core? Or perhaps this is best represented by a fusion between a splinter sect of our not-Jedi-Order joining forces with the Empire?
The Germans sought to cleanse the world of Jews, but they had some rather specific reasons. Setting aside centuries of racial mistrust of the Jews, conspiracy theories often center on banking and Nazi Germany was no different. Germans held people like the Rotschilds responsible for their downfall after WW1 (and you can find this sort of conspiracy making the rounds every few years to this day). We might draw from this a quiet (alien?) consortium of bankers, lenders and/or technologists who quietly empower people from behind the scenes (the “banking clans” of Clone Wars). Alternatively, the Jews might represent the Jedi, hunted to the brink of extinction by the Empire… or perhaps they represented by alien races who are being purged by a human Empire that wants to remain “pure.”
Fascinatingly, the lethal super-weapon of WW2 wasn’t acquired by the Nazis, but by the allies. What happens in a setting where the Rebel Alliance is the one that acquires the Death Star and uses it as a last ditch effort to kill literally billions by blowing major Imperial worlds? What sort of tone does that set?
Some additional interesting characters or ideas:
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| Total War Shogun 2 Wallpaper |
Sources:
Using Japan as inspiration becomes difficult, because while the mood of a chambara film definitely comes across in Star Wars (at least the original trilogy), the history far less so. When we discuss Japanese history in regards to the samurai, two eras generally spring to mind. The first is the Sengoku Jidai, the warring era, where the Ashikaga Shogunate collapsed and various regional daimyos sprang up and vied for power until, at last, Tokugawa declared himself Shogun. This is the era that features samurai in armor and on horseback, cutting one another down and dying for their daimyo. It’s also the era that features ninjas.
If we borrow from this for Psi-Wars, interesting things emerge. If space knights are samurai, then this war is fought with space knights! And the emperor is a ceremonial position by this point, a religious figure head and a rallying figure dominated by the shogun. Each daimyo becomes the lord of a specific world, or a master of a few worlds. This, in short, looks nothing like Star Wars… but interesting nonetheless!
The second major era that springs to mind is the one most commonly featured in the “Jidaigeki” so beloved by George Lucas, is the Edo era, long after the Tokugawa shogunate has established its dominance. Now, the samurai has devolved back to his roots as bureaucrat and often enjoys a ceremonial position so long as his master continues to receive a stipend from the Shogunate. This is the era of the kimono-clad samurai who uses his fast-draw technique in a sudden duel, where the man to first draw his blade wins. It’s also the era of the geisha, where whores play at being ladies for the amusement of their largely fallen samurai customers who try to pretend to be more genteel than they really are, while gamblers and yakuza thugs similarly pretend to be classier than they are, and the lines between “noble” and “commoner” begin to slowly blur. It’s a somber and often sad era, not entirely applicable to the great galactic war… but the mood certain fits a galaxy whose best, most energetic days are behind it, which yearns to return to that golden age of yesteryear, even as time draws it relentlessly forward into a new and strange era.
Interesting Ideas
Additional Characters and Ideas
I must emphasize caution when exploring the templars as they represent both a very familiar history and a very strange, mysterious history, as conspiracies and magical thinking shrouds templar history in a veil of mystery and controversy. However, we can grab whatever crazed conspiracy theories we want, and mix familiar medieval history with other histories (the rise of the Ikko Ikki, the fall of the Shaolin temple) to create something new and unique.
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| The Fire of Troy |
I know I haven’t been around much. I’ve felt strangely about my blog for the past while now. I keep meaning to get back, to write some thoughts down, but like many things, it gets put off, alas.
Fortunately, I do have something to share with you today: 760 AD, our latest addition to History Lesson.
I chose 760 because it was exactly 1000 years before 1760, thus the eldest elders in my 1760 game would be from there, forming a nice frame on my game. I also chose it out of perversion, because I knew nothing about it and I honestly expected to find little, thus testing my premise of “In history, there’s always something interesting.” It proved half-right.
The problem with 760 and, indeed, most of the dark ages is that you find yourself relying mostly on archaeology and legends, rather than a lot of hard fact. Is Roland real? When did he live? How old was Charlemagne? We know they did three field rotations around this period, more or less, but people aren’t recording much. What they do record is a chaotic mess of wars, tribes, treachery and collapse. Honestly, it reminded me a great deal of modern day Africa: Lots of petty warlords, occasional moments of prosperity and happiness followed swiftly by anarchy, civil war, rape and pillaging and disease. This is not a pleasant time to live.
So, in some ways, it proved hard to find any details, and when I did find details, I was blown away by how many nitty gritty details there were. England, for example, lacks any terribly important countries or organizations, and while it’s fun to talk about the different kingdoms of England, your mind begins to break as you realize you’re only talking about the kingdoms of one racial group, and that those kingdoms often have multiple “kings” and sub-fragments no larger than city-states, and then reading about how they go through three kings in a decade. Crazy.
I’m not complaining, though. I liked it, and found it enlightening. I’m a little less motivated to game in this era than I am in 1410… but only a little. What I enjoyed the most about it is that it really opened my eyes to what the birth of Europe really looked like, and finally taught me a great deal about the Dark Ages. And, naturally, I started giggling like mad when my random dart-board choice of 760 landed me right at the end of the Merovingian Dynasty and right before the rise of the Paladins, and the earliest date of Beowulf. So, it seems, if people are at least recording history, it’s true: Any period has interesting shit going down.
I’ve resolved to get somewhere with my Viennese Vampire game, so I picked up History Lesson again. Rather than going back at a predictable 50 year pace, I just grabbed a year, in this case 1410, primarily because Europa Universalis begins in 1399, and I was curious about the context (but still wanted to keep it near that 50-year mark).
I’m always saying that the amazing, eye-opening thing about History Lesson is how completely it proves my belief that if you pick a time-period, awesome things are going on. People are falling in love, crazy battles are going on, there’s intrigue and betrayal and murder and a surprising amount of culture, and 1410 didn’t fail to live up to my expectations! The worst part is all the stuff I didn’t have time to get into (this stuff takes too long as it is)! Do you know how much crazy stuff is going on in Eastern Europe, around Sigismund’s conquests, or the Queen of Bosnia, Elizabeth, and her daughter Mary (it’s kinda before this time, but it’s still awesome, with Louis, the Duke of Orleans marrying Mary via Proxy, and Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, invading and forcing her to marry him instead and thus securing his domain), or a deeper discussion of the fall of the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights and the Peace of Thorns, or anything regarding Byzantium! For that matter, I don’t touch on anything outside of Europe, and this is the era of Zhang He and Tamarlane!
*sigh*
You know, whenever I’m finished with one of these projects, I always want to run a game in that era. Perhaps I should. Do you suppose people would want to play any of the characters listed there?
But anyway, enough talking: Take a look for yourself.
I have a pet peeve that I’m sure I’ve mentioned before: When it comes to immortals, whether vampires, elves or highlanders, some series like to toss around numbers like they’re meaningless when they’re not. The average person doesn’t really have a true grasp of the scope of history, hence my other project (History Lesson), beyond broad eras. He knows about World War 2, and the Civil War, and then the Middle Ages (“That’s the bit with the knights and princesses, right?”) and then Rome, and then “a really long time ago,” and everything in between gets very fuzzy. As a result, you have vampires from the Civil War, and then vampires from the Medieval Age, and nothing in between, which makes me grind my teeth.
To help you understand my frustration, I’ve built an infographic (Yay for pictures!). For comparison, we’re going to use Vampire: the Requiem’s measure of immortality, as I think that’s a pretty well thought-out standard, though these ideas could probably apply to just about anything.
We start off, appropriately enough, with a baby:
What a cutey. Imagine that this baby was born yesterday. He’s represents the newest generation of humanity, those born in the 2010s. We’ll let every child, European or American, Chinese or African, rich and poor, punk and straight-arrow, nerd and jock, all be represented by this one baby.
Neonates
If we assume his mother was 20 years old, and that her mother was 20 years old, and so on, we can go back in time one generation, and 20 years, at a time. A human being lives, on average, 80 years, so if we have a child when we’re 20, and they have a child when they’re 20 (we’re 40), and our great-grand children are born when we’re 60, and our great-great grand children are born when we’re 80, so we have just a chance to see them born, touch finger to finger to pass on the torch, and then pass away. That means the great-great grand-father of this child might have served in WW2. This stretch of time, 4 generations, we tend to call “in living memory,” since the eldest among us were around to see those things. Such a “living memory” might look like this:
You’ll have to forgive my choices here. Obviously, I’m representing entire generations with a single person, a single picture, and anyone with a passing familiarity of these years will see the gross simplifications I’ve made. Our punk girl represents children born in the 90s, with Gen-Y’s explosion of strange subcultures. The gentleman with a phone represents a yuppie, which is more of an 80s thing, but he’ll serve to stand in for those of us born during the 70s (we’re the businessmen right now anyway), with Gen-X’s tech savvy. The hippy, of course, stands in for the Baby-boomers, those born during the 50s and got a chance to rebel during the 60s. The soldier represents the silent generation. Technically, if we followed our 20 year limit, he’d be born in the 30s, which is too young to participate in WW2, and so I’d plot a Noir character or one of the Mad Men there, but WW2 is very recognizable, so I’ll leave it there.
To get an idea of the scope of those years, stop and think of all the games you’ve played. Have you played in each of these eras? I’ve certainly played games set in both the cutting edge present (Gen-Y), and the present of my youth (Gen-X). I’ve played in a Vietnam campaign (Baby-Boomers), and while I’ve (surprisingly) played in no game set in the era of the Silent Generation, I’ve certainly played computer games that celebrated their greatness.
Vampire: the Requiem describes a neonate as a vampire who was embraced less than 50 years ago. They typically maintain a great deal of their humanity because the people they knew in life are still around. Towards the end of this phase, their supernatural nature is pretty obvious to anyone, as they haven’t aged while their friends and family have, but those friends and family are still around. A good example of this sort of character in TV land is Mick St. John from Moonlight. While the series isn’t great, I enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t an ancient vampire from the dawn of time, just a guy who had been around since world war 2. He even met some very elderly people who recognized him and feared him because of his youth. They also made a point of explaining how he’d spent his years as a vampire, giving the sense that they had accounted for time, something many series fail to do.
Ancilla
After neonates, Vampire: the Requiem classifies the second category of vampire as “Ancilla.” These represent vampires who have been vampires for between 50 and 250 years. These resemble what you’d expect a vampire to resemble: They’ve outlived friends and family and settled into their vampiric existence. They squabble with other vampires over power and succulent vessels, and while they still retain some of their humanity, they are clearly monsters at this point. To represent 250 years, we add to the previous infographic:
Technically, this is 240 years, but it still brings the point across. An Ancilla would have been embraced somewhere in the second or third rows, and he’s lived one to two human lifetimes. He comes from a different world, but not a completely alien one. For example, a vampire born embraced in the 1790s likely grew up in America, and still is in America. Firearms have been the weapon of choice all his life, and have merely improved over time. He was born after the industrial revolution and while some of the changes wrought in his lifetime are surely shocking, the idea of things like machinery and science are nothing new to him. The world has changed a great deal for him, but nothing we can’t conceive of.
Again, I remind you that each picture represents a single slice of life from that generation. Our Napoleonic character could just as easily have been replaced by someone out of Pride and Prejudice, for example, or someone gothic like Lord Byron, or the gold miner replaced by a Mormon, and so on. A vampire who has lived through this much has lived through more than “12 people,” but 12 generations, each with their own ideas and advancements. I’d explain more of the little details, here, but you’ll have to forgive my lack of time.
For your own personal comparison, in your role-playing career, have you touched on every generation there? I certainly haven’t. I’ve played pulp games (right between WW1 and the Depression), and games set in the Wild West, so I’ve got the first and second row, but the third is tricky. I don’t think I’ve played in anything explicitly set there, though I’ve watched plenty of movies or TV shows inspired by that era. Our vampire, however, has lived through every one of these moments…
Bill Compton represents a pretty solid Ancilla. He was embraced during the Civil War, putting him somewhere in the middle of that chart, and he behaves the way we would expect a vampire to behave. He comes from a different world, with different manners and different values, but he’s forced himself to adapt. He carries a lot of baggage too, having left his sire, embraced a childe of his own, and gone through several paradigm shifts over his long life. The writers of True Blood also make a point of discussing his life. Though there are some blank spots (What did he do during the 40s? The 60s? The 1890s?) we do at least get to see more than just the civil war (we get to see the roaring 20s, for example).
Other solid examples of Ancilla include Louis, from Interview with a Vampire. Unlike Bill above, Anne Rice accounts for every year of Louis life, and we can see exactly how he grew from a neonate to an Ancilla on the verge of becoming a true elder.
Elders
Vampire defines “Elders” as any vampire older than 250 years old, but in practice, it suggests that vampires older than a thousand years tend to get a death wish, and its rare to see elders beyond this, so we’ll classify elders as between 250 and 1000 years old. In this amount of time, elders have often been elders longer than they’ve been Ancilla and Neonates combined, never mind human. They tend to have almost no shred of humanity left, having completely embraced what they are.
To give you a visualization of what that looks like, here’s an infographic that took me hours to put together (don’t say I never gave you anything):
That’s… really really long, isn’t it? It’s huge. 1000 years is 4 times as long as 250, and an Ancilla is already 3 times older than most humans will ever live to be, so an elder is well more than 10 times older than you’ll ever be. But those are just numbers. It’s easy to lose sight of what that really means. Remember how I said that every picture wasn’t a person, but a generation, and that generations are diverse, filled with numerous fashions and ideas and interesting people? Every picture up there, every one, represents people our vampire could fall in love with, fight against, form alliances with, and embrace. A vampire who has lived through all this has seen Christianity sweep away the pagan idols of Europe, watched knights rise from guys in chainmail with kite shields fighting vikings to becoming crusaders to becoming men with massive swords wrapped in steel, only to watch them get cut down by the rise of the gonne and pike… and then cavalry and infantry and bayonets. He’s seen swashbucklers, pirates, revolutionaries, monarchies fall and democracies rise, all the way to our era of computers and spaceships.
To grasp just how much time there is, has your RPG career touched on every line (never mind generation) above? Most of us have played in the top three, and the next two have been touched on in swashbuckling games, but we seldom distinguish them much. The next three lines have grown more popular lately with the Tudors and the Borgias, but most of us haven’t played in that era unless we know a history buff, though things like Warhammer are set more-or-less around the early point of that. The rest gets chucked together into “Fantasy gaming,” ignoring the nuance of the middle ages. Again, every picture up there is a generation, thousands of people (sometimes millions). Those people lived lives, loved, fought, had children, and died, and our hypothetical elder chronicled it all.
Selene from Underworld is an example of an elder, though I hesitate to call her a “good” example. She was born in 1382, putting her at the 8th row. She’s seen a huge swath of history, and yet all we hear is that she was embraced “in the middle ages” dot dot dot FIGHTING WEREWOLVES. She’s an example of what not to do in a vampire game. Despite all the lives she’s seen come and go, she never thought to question her orders until the movie starts rolling. She’s never fallen in love until just now. And for all her age, she’s not particularly powerful either. She’s a great example of just picking an interesting era and/or a really big number (she’s over six-hundred! years old!) and not thinking about what that means.
Eric Northman, from True Blood, is another great example of that problem. He’s over 1000 years old (from 900 AD), so one would think he’s vastly powerful, and yet he’s depicted as a peer to Bill Compton, who is less than a 5th of his age (It’d be like equating a 50 year-old professional with the work of a 10 year-old). Clearly, the writer wanted VIKING GUY but didn’t think about what such a person would have experienced in his huge lifetime. Why not just pick some 17th century swede?
Lestat and Armand from Interview with a Vampire work pretty well as elders. Lestat barely qualifies (born in 1760), and yet we have a keen sense of the weight of his years. Armand is significantly older at 500 years and close to Selene, above, and yet absolutely shows his years better than Selene does. He comes across as an elder, as someone who’s a little alien, who’s shed his humanity so long ago that he barely remembers it.
Ancient
The new vampire doesn’t really have a word for those who are beyond elders. The old Vampire called them “Methuselahs” and “Antediluvians.” We have no real classification for them, but we can assume that they’re any vampire that has aged past 1000 years without succumbing to the death wish that tends to consume such vampires. This makes them exceedingly rare, simply from attrition alone. Ancients might be as alien to vampires as elder vampires are to humans, since there’s no upper limit on how old they can be.
I’m not going to present a graphic. My fingers would break from all the pictures I would have to find, crop and paste into such a timeline. I will point out a couple of characters, though. First: Godric, Eric’s sire. According to True Blood, he’s described as over 2000 years old. So, take that bar above, and double it. That’s how old Godric is. Does he come across as Ancient? Not to me. He does come across as an elder, though. If they’d made Eric more like 400 years old, and Godric 1000, they would have fallen far more in line with vampire’s philosophy (which isn’t necessarily better than having their own, but I do find the lack of difference between a 150 and 1000 year old vampire rather jarring, which suggests that something is off in True Blood).
Methos, above, isn’t a vampire at all, but an Immortal from the Highlander (TV) series. Now, Highlander’s actually pretty good at discussing the age and the weight of years that the Highlanders have, what with their constant flashbacks and their intertwining stories. Methos, however, is over 5500 years old. Take the bar above, and multiply it by 6 at least. The amount of time he’s gone through simply breaks the mind. To their credit, they suggest that he’s forgotten more than you’ll ever remember, and that such much time has certainly worn on him.
Still, I have yet to see an appropriately alien ancient as one might expect, except possibly the Queen of the Damned, but I never finished watching that movie.
So, the next time you’re thinking up a vampire (or an elf, or an immortal) I beg of you, rather than pick some well known point in history, consider the actual scope of time. History is filled with interesting stories, and there’s nothing wrong with picking a more conservative age for your vampire. 300 years is still a hugely long time. Save the 1000 year old vampires for the truly old, truly strange, truly powerful, not just “I want a knight in the modern day.”
One last graphic, for your pleasure:
Mailanka's Musing 