A large part of deciding what our Fantasy subgenres feel & look like is the quasi-historical backgrounds we use for them. What real-world era or setting do most people envision when they think, “Fantasy”? Usually, it’s castles, knights, lords, stone-walled cities, and so on.
Most Fantasy Role Players have a version the Middle Ages, especially the High Middle Ages, as their default state. I think we do this largely out of habit, and partially because we have trouble grasping a society that lacks so much of the dominating infrastructure that we swim in: Overarching governments, litigiousness, regional communication, & order.
That’s all fine if it’s your preference, but we have a swath of largely untapped intermediary stages in between the Stone Age & the High Middle Ages that offers a rich otherworldly, truly Premodern, feeling which is sorely neglected. We can play in that type of a world without envisioning the people as just grunting cavemen with clubs.
So, relying on a little knowledge (and a lot on postulation) I’ll explore here a picture of the societal evolution to show the fertile realms where a Fantasy setting can thrive without any kingdoms, cities, money or nobles. These changes can have significant impact on the players' expectations & experiences.
Stone castles, walls, iron-clad armies and crowned kings did not appear overnight, nor without good reason. Why did people labor to build/maintain walls around a city? Why were there even ‘cities’ in the first place? Where did the notions of knights, peasants, kings and taxes come from?
Let’s start by glancing at what we know about the first scattered sprouts of civilization.
The Neolithic Revolution (planting crops/keeping livestock):
Once people move from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to farmers, life becomes more stable, and populations rise. Imagine a land with communities between 30-60 people who (for the first time, probably) can remain in the same place for many years because the food is dependably at their back door. There is still the fear of famine, drought, blight, and monsters in the world, but infant-survival & lifespans have increased. No one pretends to “own” the region. People establish villages & homesteads where they will, but there is no notion of “crossing into another nation” because nothing like nations or kingdoms exist. In fact, often there are no other peoples to be found in the land!
Most of these people are related to each other by blood, all at least by a marriage somewhere. Neighboring villages (perhaps between ~2-6 miles away) will also have many of their relations.
The common tradition has the mid teen years as an acceptable age for marriage. While a pair may have endured the disapproval for one reason or another, by-and-large, youths are permitted to wed of their own accord; no one at this stage has the notion of dowries or of selling one’s daughter for gain.
These people are, from our Modern viewpoint, exceedingly superstitious. The world is vast, unknown, and unstable. They know that different gods and spirits affect their lives, and fear angering those beings lest monsters attack or starvation strangles them. Remember, they likely have no idea what is 100 miles away, and rely on legends to inform their worldviews, legends that they take as real.
While certainly more secure than in the Stone Age hunter/gatherer days, life is still focused on food, shelter, & safety. Everyone works for the good of their village—their family—a deeply enmeshed group of people bound together by blood, marriage, and toil. So, only rarely will there be large-scale tensions developing between villages that erupt into actual violence.
There are no ‘laws’ in any formal sense, and certainly not in any written one since writing itself does not exist. Instead, villages in a region will have shared customs (bound up by whichever mythologies and random elements formed them). These are all commonly accepted rules of life, using the most elementary thinking. If an issue is ever in need of adjudication, each village would have a small number of elders—
respected grandparents—to make such a judgement. Crimes of magnitude would be rare, I believe, for people here are so deeply enmeshed with their villages (their relatives/lifelong friends) that the notion of being shamed by (or even expelled from) their village would be horrifying. But surely heinous crimes would occasionally occur, and inevitably, grave punishments would be handed out. No concept like ‘imprisonment’ would exist for these people, but execution or banishment (which could easily mean death) would exist for the worst cases.
Surplus Food – The Seed of Society
Food is the foundation of society; only when it is stable enough to give a surplus does it evolve. Food surplus can save not only your own village, but your neighboring ones (and they, in turn, yours). Once this has happened for generations (assuming the land is fertile/safe), the population grows, and more fields are sowed/filled with more & more livestock.
When the population of a village grows & stability lasts, a few inventions develop with it. Our minds naturally want to jump to the Bronze & Iron Ages from here, but remember that the remarkable discovery of ore/smelting/smithies doesn’t have to follow for many thousands of years in a culture that is isolated from others who have it. (In fact, they may never discover it on their own; for the most part, inventions like smelting were spread to them from other cultures.)
Things like stone mills (usually with an ox or mule walking in a circle) is very helpful invention. Instead of individuals having to grind the grain by hand, a village could gather their grain together and have the mill grind it for them far more efficiently. Additionally, once the notion of using oxen to drag plows occurs to someone, the annual yields of food increases.
At some point, the amazing discovery of iron-ore and smelting may get made. A smithy greatly improves the quality of life for villages. Instead of stone tools (like stone-headed plows), actual iron-bladed plows can be made, instead of heavy stone arrow heads, iron ones are made and attached to arrows for superior hunting.
We can create rich Fantasy settings in this kind of world. What is intentionally absent is any notion of (what we call) ‘government’. There is no kingdom, no bloated city where people run to for big problems. It has no broad or fast “information network” as existed even by the 14th Century, for nothing like global trade exists. Everyone’s world is largely the 15-20 mile radius surrounding their little villages.
For RPG campaigns, this creates a very different texture for a large array of factors. Swords may exist, but there is scarcely a market you can travel to in order to buy them. Does any armor exist? Is there much metal at all? These are all optional, and the players can enter a hitherto unusual realm of scarcity. When dangers arise, a setting like this means that only the PCs can try to counter them. There is no king, lord, or any powerful group of people to race to in order to get help. It’s just the PCs.
In following essays, I’ll explore the factors leading to towns, cities, & kingdoms. But I believe that pondering this kind of ancient, premodern world can help GMs generate a novel, rich background for players to explore.