Reviewn June 2025 part 3: Game books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

Part three: TTRPGs and game content

 

What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).

It's Reviewn June!

 

Tiny Spaceship

An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth 

By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)

A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).

I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0. 

Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.

 

RPG Design Zine 

A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design

By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)

Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.

Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.

The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.

I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.

 

Sinister Hovering Orb

(Sinister Hovering Orb)

By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)

A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).

For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".

There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.

PUBLIC GUEST 5

Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5

By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five) 

A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).

The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)

PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.

Writing With Style

An editor's advice for RPG writers

By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)

A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.

There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.

Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.

Dwarf Mine

A mapping game of adventure 

By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)

Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.

There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
 

The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.

A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:

• I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
• The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways, and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
• Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
• The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room. 

There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.

The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly? 

The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".

The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.

 

GURPS "Discworld Also"

A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG

By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!

Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).

It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed

• A mangled seven-clause sentence
• "almost" should say "always"
• "could" should say "would"
• "fall off" should say "falling off"
• "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
• "They not" should say "They are not"

The alternative troll stats, and the extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').

Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.

The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger and Fourecks get more space here.

• Smarlhanger is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
• Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of armour.)

The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.

'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.

Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl

By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice) 

A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.

A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.

There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.

Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:

• Satellite shamans
• Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
• Robot prosthetics
• Hive drones 
• Sky bandits
• The Spinal War
• Sindovar
• The Maze 
• Josung (game)
• etc 

Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
 

In progress

By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.

I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!

Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.

So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.

Reviewn June 2025 part 2: Fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part two: Fiction 

 

It's Reviewn June! 

In the modern melange of media that blurs the line between traditional and web publishing, it's hard to say what's a 'book'. For the sake of a clean division, I'm looking here at the physical fiction books I read in the first six months of 2025.

...But now that I come to write them up, I find that means very few are left after I take out webfiction, manga, poetry collections on Project Gutenberg, books on archive.org, and ebooks. We're left with:

A bunch of John Allison's superb comic books

Maybe ten or twelve of them: volumes of Solver, Bad Machinery, Steeple, The Great British Bump-off, etc. Most of these I'd read in webcomic form; having them in print is a little luxury and a way to support a great artist. I wish that Conan and the Blood Egg hadn't been taken down since I'd have liked a physical copy of it. I also wish there was a nice, straightforward timeline of all of John Allison's creative outputs; he has a long history of different interlocking series and I have a completionist spirit.

Game-ready ideas: This stuff is just riddled with inspiration for modern settings. There's lots of semi-supernatural stuff going on. Especially check out the mystery-solving comics; you could lift one of the premises wholesale for a game of Kids on Bikes or maybe Fiasco.

Guards! Guards! (1989) and Men At Arms (1993). Terry Pratchett

Discworld re-reads after looking at GURPS Discworld last year, and reading GURPS Discworld Also this year. I've read every book in this series about a dozen times, apart from the last few. Pratchett in his best years remains unparalleled.

Guards! Guards! and Men at arms are comic fantasy detective books that I think anyone who likes even just one of those genres would enjoy.

Aside: I noticed there's a few lines in Guards! Guards! that appear almost verbatim in Shrek (the movie, not the book) in what one must charitably assume is convergent evolution.

Game-ready ideas: It's hard to make a comic fantasy TTRPG. Comedic elements develop in practise, at the table, unless everyone involved makes a dedicated effort to prevent that. Part of Pratchett's comic genius was taking ideas to their humorously logical ends (retrophrenology, the rate of million-to-one chances coming true in genre fiction, animal responses to their own reflections, etc).

I think 'taking ideas to their natural conclusion' always helps with verisimilitude, including in TTRPGs. Suppose X is a fantastic element true of your setting. Then you really ought to take what we know about how worlds / people / processes operate, puzzle out as many consequences that follow from X as possible, then add those to your setting or modify X to remove the ones you dislike. Otherwise some of these will inevitably be explored in play and come up short, revealing the world as shoddy papier-mâché.

Pick of Punch. William Davis (ed). (1975)

Punch had a surprisingly long history. I have a few of the really old compiled volumes, so old that they don't list dates (I'm guessing early 1900s), which I should dive into some time. This particular book is comparatively recent. It suffers from a boatload of unfortunate 'signs of the times' (racism, classism, misogyny...)

Game-ready ideas: Reading this was being immersed in British culture of a specific period; it was not always easy to parse. It's interesting that even things close to you in time (less than a century ago) and culture (English-speaking Commonwealth country) can end up almost incomprehensible; you don't need huge gulfs for a text's meaning to become eroded and for a different culture to seem strange. Corollary: If you pick up a book like this and discard the parodic and inappropriate elements, you'll be left with a mass of very specific setting content and tone you can borrow.

More

There's a few novels on my table that I have no hope of finishing before the end of June. Fingers crossed for getting them over the finish line by Christmas!

I may have to change how I approach reviewing in the long term, if my slow shift towards reading more digitally continues.

That's been especially true of my TTRPG reading, so next time, as I wrap up with part 3 (game books reviews), I'll be looking at digital publications too.

Reviewn June 2025 part 1: Non-fiction books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

And pick out some ideas you could put in a game

Part one: Non-fiction 

 

I read a medley of materials.

The modern melange of media blurs the line between traditional and web publishing. Most books are available online; many bloggers edit their writing into self-published volumes; plenty of web texts are book-length or longer. News and commentary and user content and blog posts and tutorials and metafiction all start blurring together.

For the sake of a clean division, I'm only going to look at the physical books I read in the first six months of 2025. It's Review[i]n[g] June!

 

I externalise my memory by writing reviews every so often. 

 

Games and decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey. R. Duncan Luce & Howard Raiffa (1985)

A game theory textbook.

Do you ever dive into something thinking you'll be able to hack the technical writing because you have semi-relevant education? One of my majors was in formal logic, but I still couldn't really parse large chunks of this book.

Game-ready ideas: Any sufficiently technical work can be a good source of esoteric jargon to cram into a wildly different domain, like wizardry or mythos occultism or sci-fi engineering. By the way, a dryad and their tree are a dyad: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dyad

A brief history of mathematical thought. Luke Heaton (2015)

An introduction to maths through a history lens. 

Brilliant, but dense going in parts. The rare book where I wish it had been twice as long so that some of the inferences and arguments could be laid out in more depth.

Game-ready ideas: Everything is weirder than you thought. 'Non-Euclidean' has a specific meaning which is not just synonymous with 'unknowably eldritch'. Geometry was useful to ancient societies for e.g. recalculating field boundaries after seasonal flooding moves markers. Mathematics has historically intersected massively with religion and spirituality.

Paradoxes from A to Z: Second Edition. Michael Clark (2007)

An encyclopedia of paradoxes with a weird design.

The gimmick is that the paradoxes are arranged in alphabetical order; this makes it almost impossible to read. The introductory entry on 'paradox' is under P, more than halfway through. The implication is you should be using this as a reference work, but the audience for that has to be miniscule! Reading it cover to cover, I was told constantly to flip elsewhere to get necessary background information, because of course all the formal approaches to paradoxes are interlinked. There are no page references. 😡

Seriously, why not just present the paradox in a sensible, mostly-chronological order? Introduce concepts as needed and build from there? Luke Heaton's book may have spoiled me.

Aside: It's interesting that many famous paradoxes are either resolved by the things mathematicians do to make mathematics useful (define countable and enumerable infinities, specify axioms of set theory, etc), or become trivial once you understand that human language isn't and can't be some perfect mirror of reality.

Game-ready ideas: I'm not a 'riddles' guy when it comes to puzzles. Don't use paradoxes for that. You could reskin some paradoxes as challenges that academics in a fantasy world are working on. Preference intransitivity might be turned into an interesting game challenge, e.g. some group prefers A > B > C > A under certain circumstances.

Zeus grants stupid wishes. Cory O'Brien (2013)

Myths from various cultural traditions, retold.

Absolutely redolent with early 2000s internet era writing style, down to ending with an insufferable take on science and religion. There's a line break after almost every sentence clause, like a text conversation or a certain type of free verse.

The author admits to having two orthogonal premises, and vacillates between them. Paraphrasing:

1. "Modern retellings of myths are bowdlerised; I will tell you the weird nasty original bits [implied: and lean into the troubling stuff by making unpleasant jokes]"
2. "I will just make stuff up to make myths more exciting"

Can't recommend it. I counted seven jokes that actually got a grin, out of (~20 'funny' lines × 275 pages) maybe 5500 stabs at humour. (Lots of typos, too.)

Game-ready ideas: When a cultural tradition is admired, it can end up reflected through massive gulfs of history into art, scholarship, etc. I also like (a) a more adversarial relationship with one's pantheon; (b) living in a magical gourd; (c) a sun that's capable of making mistakes and suffering retaliation for them.

Battle castles: 500 years of knights and siege warfare. Dan Snow (2012)

The story of a set of specific castles.

This was written in the wake of a TV series, and reads like television travelogue narration. The prose is sort of breathless and sometimes borders on legitimising tyranny (letting all the 'divine right of kings' slash 'conquering warlords should have a monopoly on violence so that they can govern' stuff go unexamined).

A useful primer on castles. The actual history content is decent, e.g., addressing the common misconception that a fight goes until you're dead or the enemy is wiped out. But I noticed a few absolute howlers too, old debunked canards like: "Beer was then a basic necessity of life because, unlike the water supply, it could be trusted not to cause disease."

Game-ready ideas: Castles are a specific response to a specific kind of socio-military-economic situation, and might not plausibly crop up in your fantasy world. If they do, there's enough info here you could just lift out a castle and its context entirely.

How to. Randall Munroe (2019)

Pop science with a twist: silly ideas taken seriously. 

'The xkcd guy' has written some books, and now I think I've read them all. Pretty light reading until the physics gets heavy. Covers how to play tag (against champion sprinters and marathon runners), how to power your house, how to decorate the world's tallest tree, how to land a plane on various surfaces, etc.

Fairly interesting stuff, but not the sort of thing that geared my mind up to go down some research rabbit hole. If I had any criticism, it's that it's a little America-centric.

Game-ready ideas: A lava moat is surprisingly near-feasible in real life, so in fantasy it should be even more of a staple.

 

AI Morality. Edited by David Edmonds (2024)

A modern collection of philosophical essays looking at AI and its implications.

The essays are about AI in the broad sense, not just 'generative AI' or 'LLMs', as people are increasingly misapplying the term (which is bewildering to me, like if some specific advancement in orthopedy for hockey injuries led to an explosion in popularity and people just started using the umbrella term 'medical care' to mean 'orthopedy for hockey injuries').

The book's anchors – philosophy, computer science, and writing – are at the intersection of my university study and brief academic career. I picked up a few places where a writer just obviously didn't know what they were talking about, but those were few and far between, so it didn't sap my respect for established academics too much. The book covers a lot of interesting topics, but I found myself skimming a lot due to the curse of existing familiarity with them.

Game ready-ideas: Nothing specific, but lots of inspiration for near-future science fiction. The ethics of insurance denial, cyberattacks, and Asimov's Laws. The chapters on faceless algorithms might be good for Cyberpunk / Shadowrun.

Tune in for Reviewn June parts 2 (fiction I've read) and 3 (game books I've read).

Fantasy pseudo-anachronism part two: Aetheric boogaloo

Following up on yesterday's post, here are some thoughts on pseudo-anachronisms that didn't end up in the main article.

Additions

First, there were a couple of pseudo-anachronisms I had intended to mention. Nice beds with mattresses and pillows are major investments, certainly not something every person owned, even when they're just pallets made from straw sitting on the floor. (If you think a bed is expensive today, consider that it would have been a large fraction of a house's value in many pre-industrial places and times.) Also, inns for travelers to stay in. Inns were only common on major roads, pilgrim and trade routes, and in cities and market towns. The chances of a random village having an inn would be close to zero, even a village in the middle of civilisation. And even in a reputable inn, it would be a luxury to get your own private bed that you didn't have to share with a couple of strangers or traveling companions, let alone getting your own private room!

To have nice beds and pervasive inns in our fantasy world, we need a reason to have a culture of travel, in particular to non-notable destinations. We also need a cheaper way of making sleep furniture – maybe some ancient artefact has been churning beds out at a rate of fifty per day for thousands of years, or maybe there's a widespread plague of puffball pigeons (all feathers and no flesh), or maybe when a domesticated slime dies it dries up into something superficially like a beanbag chair.

Second, reader Lauren suggested the addition of "well-lit rooms after sunset". It's true! If you've tried to light a room with candles before, you've found that candle light is really very weak. Any kind of fire doesn't, uh, hold a candle to electric lighting. Lauren also pointed out that many modern people are used to the ambient light pollution of a big modern city; complete darkness is very disorienting. It's hard to keep your balance standing up in true darkness, let alone move around, but TTRPG rule penalties are often just a slap on the wrist. As with many things, inconvenient truths get handwaved away unless they provide excitement in the game.

I think well-lit rooms at night is particularly common in visual arts and film, where the viewer's ability to see most of the shot is pretty much the most important thing.

So 'convenient modern lighting' is a fantasy pseudo-anachronism. It's one that any number of fantastic technologies could solve (glowing magical crystals, cold-burning lanterns, the ubiquitous luminescent dungeon wall fungi, minor spells and charms, enchanted or holy candles, unusually bright domesticated fireflies, rushlights from the will'o'wisp marshes, whatever). Think carefully before making it a solved problem for the common person, though: clean, cheap, portable, bright light like we have at hand nowadays is a powerful technology. It takes terror away from the night and eclipses and deep dark caves. It drastically changes warfare. It changes sleep patterns and therefore labour patterns and local economies. It removes a constraint that can serve to drive gameplay.

Missing technologies

Rarely, fantasy takes things away from the generic 1300s-to-1600s technological milieu, rather than adding pseudo-anachronistic technologies.

For example, central heating, chewing gum, concrete, contraception, ice skates, and lighthouses were all invented thousands of years ago. I've seen a setting where characters in a snowy town had no way to cross a lake which froze every winter. And there's no excuse for not having a lighthouse guarding the dangerous shoals near a major wealthy port city. Some of the others aren't likely to come up, depending on what kind of ground the fantasy is going to cover.

Complex financial instruments, too, are fairly old (the word "credit" appeared in English in the 1520s, and at the time English-speaking states were economically a bit of a backwater; I don't know much about the history of banking but I would be surprised if continental Europe didn't have entrenched banking and other institutions in centuries prior, and the Islamic world and the East earlier still). I think sometimes TTRPG settings leave out promissory notes, banknotes, loans and interest payments, insurance policies, and so on due to a false perception that these are modern innovations.

The elephant in the room in this regard, of course, is gunpowder. Cannons were widespread in the West from the start of our supposed fantasy technological band, and early man-portable guns were in use well before plate armour reached its apogee. In China and its neighbours, gunpowder had been used for at least five hundred years prior to the period, initially as an incendiary weapon.

There are good reasons for not wanting gunpowder in a setting, reasons which have been discussed to bits. Everyone reaches a different answer to the question (some, possibly, because of misapprehensions imported from modernity about how powerful, fast, cheap, light, or accurate an early gun could be; I personally don't think preindustrial firearms being 'too good' is an adequate reason to exclude them from a fantasy setting). Gygax was notoriously against gunpowder in D&D, going so far as to say that the laws of physics in his fantasy universe were such that chemical reactions were weaker. I don't think that's a great solution, because it's both underspecific and implies weird knock-on effects.

If we want a world where 'black powder' gunpowder was just never invented, is that historically plausible? On the face of it, no. It's three ingredients, of which sulphur is very common in nature, charcoal is an incredibly important part of metalworking technology, and saltpeter can be refined from fairly common mineral deposits or bat guano. Additionally, 'classic' fantasy has early chemist analogues trying things out (I think modern fantasy has sadly transformed the word 'alchemist' to mostly mean 'magic potion-maker', rather than 'a philosopher obsessed with the idea of attaining physical, mental, and spiritual perfection via a mixture of study, experiment, religious ceremony, allegory, chemical means, mystery cults, etc').

But what that argument overlooks is that having access to magic might impede the development of gunpowder weaponry. Early experiments with explosive or incendiary mixtures probably wouldn't have been (a) taken as far, (b) seen as something remarkable, or (c) suggestive of exciting military applications, if two streets over from the workshop was an academy of war wizards suiting up for another day of hurling explosive fireballs, turning city walls to mud, and setting things on fire with their minds. Even assuming magical arts were at the time in their infancy rather than developed, they would have a competitive advantage due to their comparative versatility. So, inverted pseudo-anachronism: Solved.

(Conversely, if you wanted to take it in the other direction, and have gunpowder keep up with or surpass violent forms of magic, a world with fantasy materials might have better ingredients for a propellant. Materials that were more common, cheaper to make, easier to discover, safer to store, produced a more powerful reaction, burned smokelessly, negated the sound of their own explosion, or whatever.)

Pseudo-anachronistic systemic technologies

There were a few technologies I left out of the first article because they are more processes than inventions.

1. Classic fantasy has machines but no factory mass production.

There's an artificer, wright, engineer, or (sigh) 'alchemist' who makes devices. There's steam power, clockwork, waterwheel power, or complex systems of gravity power or compressed springs powering elaborate mechanical traps. There might be non-magical 'automata'. Sometimes it's almost a genre shift into steampunk or clockpunk. Sometimes it's subtle: the dungeon gates open and close with the right series of lever pulls and Detect Magic doesn't turn anything up, but further details about the mechanism aren't forthcoming.

Luckily for our settings, there are major societal factors necessary for factory mass production to flourish. It's not enough to have the idea and the metalworking skill. Labour must be at least moderately expensive (compared to thoroughly pre-industrial eras, not compared to today). There has to be the wealth and systemic control to acquire, move, and stockpile large quantities of raw resources. There must be pretty good ways to transport input and output goods. There must be at least a little hint of standardisation in the cultural zeitgeist. Things must be sufficiently peaceful and stable locally that the wealthy feel confident investing huge amounts of capital starting up a new kind of business whose nature is that it must be continually fed or suffer major costs. And it probably helps if there are enormous costly wars going on in the background to drive both demand and development.

Two thousand years ago, the Ancient Greeks had clockwork, a simple steam engine, and Heron of Alexandria described mechanical automata and a vending machine (a coin-operated mechanical holy water dispenser). But the conditions weren't right for industrialisation: It wasn't Steam Engine Time.

Still, if you want to play it safe, consider adding a rare, non-scaleable magical element to the setting's contraptions (some bit of fantasy metallurgy or alternative physics power source or unique irreplaceable artefact).

2. Classic fantasy implies advanced food production.

My impression of the typical TTRPG fantasy milieu is that even small settlements have great numbers of skilled workers outside the fields of food and textile production. Compare that to almost all preindustrial places and times, where the farmer-to-specialist ratio is somewhere between 90:10 and 99:1. The implication is advanced food production technology, but this is seldom directly shown.

There's two avenues to resolve this. You could say there's an enormous spiderweb of little farming hamlets and fishing villages, mostly ignored by the setting focus, diligently toiling to feed and clothe themselves and send their crop of food or textiles to market to pay their taxes (or send them directly to the tax collector, in less moneyed societies).

Or you could add the milieu-appropriate equivalent of spray pesticides, antibiotics, massive greenhouses, John Deere tractors, chemical fertilisers, advanced irrigation, and GMO crops. Let's say that stirge blood repels all insect larvae, and breaks down into a decent fantasy fertiliser. Water mages harness tiny elementals for drainage and irrigation. Weather witches work the weather. Migrating flocks of giant eagles regularly fix the soil nitrogen. The obsidian bullock pulls a plough slowly, but forever, night and day, without needing to eat or drink. A growthstone is costly, but all plants within two leagues of one grow at twice the rate, so you just have to keep up with the weeding. The peaceful living dead keep birds away for a while before degrading and nourishing the loam. And to cover gaps, the magic temple is happy to dispense endless miracle bread to the sufficiently needy.

3. In classic fantasy, big things don't decay.

Speaking of nourishing the loam... In the real world, everything is subject to entropy. Even stone degrades over time. There are startlingly close to zero stone buildings whose original roofs have stood the test of centuries. Earth settles, tunnels collapse. Most metals corrode. Wood rots or gets eaten, even in the dry. And – you know where I'm going with this – dungeons aren't usually well known for being dry. Ancient megastructures like lost castles and sprawling dungeons are sort of a fantasy anachronism, in that they are basically supernaturally well-preserved archaeological sites. In our world, furnishings and materials in them would be rotten within years, everything mechanical would have completely seized up within decades, the entrances (at a minimum) would get thoroughly sealed by a bunch of debris blowing in, and eventually the structure's integrity would fail.

This is of course no fun. Luckily there are plenty of possibilities. Lingering enchantments. Automata or invisible demons or extensions of the Gygaxian 'cleanup crew' which eat dust and grit and drifts of leaves. Magical materials that don't corrode or rot. Something to bear in mind is that most of these anti-entropy fantasy technologies are going to be valuable to people in the world, so by adding verisimilitude to your dungeons and ancient monuments you are also adding stuff that people are going to want to mine/harvest/tame/imitate and put in their own homes.

4. Classic fantasy makes outdated arms and armours contemporaneous with later ones.

Okay, this is mostly just a pet peeve, but it's close enough to the topic for me to justify cramming it in.

Particularly in the case of armour, your generic fantasy setting offers armours from radically different warfare/civilian contexts (almost always getting the armour itself wrong, but that's another story) as if any of them could be reasonable choices. In practice, people going into battle wore the best armour they could afford, perhaps modulated slightly by considerations of comfort. Let's look at mail vs plate, which is the biggest example (apart perhaps from 'leather armour' which is somehow both protective enough to sometimes be chosen over metal and quiet/fast to move around in; yeesh).

If a setting has the technology, expertise, and capital investment to make plate harness, then a fully protective suit of mail (hauberk including coif + aventail + chausses + gloves etc) is strictly worse than a suit of plate armour: the mail is either heavier or much thinner (because of ring overlap!), and more expensive (it takes more labour to make and rivet the large number of rings than to shape the smaller number of plates, and both are kinds of skilled labour!), and less protective (because mail flexes at points other than the joints!), and no less encumbering (assuming the plate armour is properly made, you can't do yoga in it, but that's about the limit of its limits).

The only advantages you could argue for mail are that it's slightly less hot to wear, due to its breathability (except, it tended to be worn over thicker clothing), and that it's easier to don and doff (definitely true: maybe twenty or thirty times faster, and you don't need assistance from a servant or colleague). Did both mail and plate exist at the same time? Sure; transitional armours increasingly covered the body with plate and retained mail at the tricky gaps (goussets, and then just voiders). Should a setting book place 'full plate' next to 'chain mail' and 'leather clothing armour' as options that just have different tradeoffs? No way.

Can we find a good rationale for having mail hauberks in the same setting as sophisticated high-coverage plate armour? Only, I think, at places and times when expertise in making armour plates is tightly controlled and/or slowly leaking out into the wider world. The only good reason to offer both these armours as reasonable options to player characters is if the massive difference in time to don/doff them is actually going to matter in play, and this must be the way the opportunity cost is framed instead of nonsense like 'plate costs more than mail' or 'plate is heavier than mail'.

This all applies to some extent to weaponry, too: fantasy TTRPGs love big lists of weapons from across many centuries, and some of them ought to be modeled as strict improvements of others. And to weapons platforms, like the chariot, which was thoroughly superseded by horseback riding, but still pops up in fantasy from time to time. Also the galley, which has three core assets (incredible maneuverability, naval ram, and capacity for beach landings) and three core drawbacks (high crew requirement, low cargo capacity, and relative fragility), but I've seen settings which included galley-like ships to evoke an Ancient feel while managing to ignore all of those factors.

Arms and armour are the products of a continuous technological competition – hence the term 'arms race' – and classic fantasy almost never includes what you would actually expect: weapons and armour (and tactics, troop formations, earthworks, etc) that are specifically designed for fighting giant enemies, invisible enemies, winged enemies, hordes of extremely small enemies, enemies that can't be cut or pierced, enemies that are slow but kill with a touch, and so on. Instead, at best, real-world weapons are used against them in novel ways. This is one of the few areas where fantasy actually needs to make more stuff up.

Pseudo-anachronistic societal features

Finally, I'm going to briefly go over a few things that aren't technologies. They're arguably pseudo-anachronistic, but are beyond the main scope of what I've been talking about with and frankly would need a whole series of articles to get into, and touch on topics which deserve a deep and sober treatment. For many of them I also think they could have become widespread features of societies earlier in our history, they just didn't happen to do so.

Actually, in an attempt to rein in my impulse to go on typing for hours, I'll switch to bullet points. These tropes show up in 'classic' fantasy quite often:

• General stores and grocery shops. Pretty modern idea.
• Lots of off-the-shelf products rather than things being custom-made, commissioned, or at least assembled on the spot. Historically, if you wanted to buy a knife, you'd likely visit a blade seller (who sells blades bought from a blade maker), and a hilt maker, and possibly even a separate knife maker to join them together if neither of the first two offered that service, and then you would go somewhere else to get a sheath made for it. If you were rich, you would possibly have any or all of those parts made to your preferences, and then might visit yet another craftsperson specialising in decorations (embellishing, engraving, insetting, etc).
• Civil police forces, or town guards who for some reason serve as constables. Not completely unheard of historically, but you're more likely to run into the local aristocrat's enforcers, or a town militia/guard with strictly military responsibilities, or just three people (a reeve, a coroner, and a magistrate) to be the law system for an entire shire, county, or small fief.
  
• Minor professions inexplicably organised into guilds; guilds that lack a religious/charitable structure; guilds operating like labour unions rather than corporations trying to suppress competition; guilds envisioned by people who learned the word from MMOs; guilds for major military technologies that really ought to be state-controlled... I could go on. I usually just shake my head and assume the word 'guild' is a spotty translation from the invented language the characters are speaking, not meant to bear any relation to the real world.
• The (correct, to be clear) modern perception held by almost all individuals and even by most states that war is bad.
• The notion that a war is likely to be for some abstract goal of 'power' or to extend a ruler's 'reach' rather than for territory and loot. In a world where land equals wealth, a successful war is a financial investment with a huge payoff (things like holy wars, wars of succession, etc, notwithstanding).
• People (correctly, to be clear) being viscerally and morally repulsed by what we now call war crimes and torture 'even' against 'the other side'. It's a depressing reflection of how groups of people operate that this is only a modern concept.
• Modern principles of individual liberty and rights, personal equality, and other individual rights. Anyone with basic knowledge of history knows that these were incredibly hard-earned and we are lucky to mostly now live in societies that have them at least in principle. It's not clear whether fantasy imports these because we're so immersed in them or because it's not fun to play without them.
  
• People living without major societal obligations and without a rigid societal, contractual, or familial relationship with the people ruling them. e.g., vassalage. I think fantasy settings tend to just pay lip service here, because it's not fun to have to bend the knee to your 'betters'.
• Conversely, in some settings, absolute tyranny existing unchallenged. Arguably more historically plausible, but even more plausible would be: the lieutenants and rich vassals think the rulers have far too much power + the rulers think they're giving up too much power and are trying to claw it back + there's a backdrop of masses of poor tenants and peasants desperately trying to get their established rights upheld. See e.g. the Magna Carta.
• (Pseudo-)democracies where everyone is franchised.
• Large numbers of empowered women with equal rights and with societal roles overlapping with those of men (or without distinct societal roles). Again, to be clear, a good thing, but rare historically. I have absolutely no expertise here but I usually see an explanation for how the systemic oppression of women came about that goes [average male physical strength advantage + power derives from strength-based violence + societies were more likely to succeed when the powerful set the rules + people tend to support existing rules (or, successful societies encourage supporting existing rules) → men seize and then hold and maintain power almost exclusively]. The good news is that you can excise this from a fantasy world by having magic more powerful than strength, or by reducing biological differences between the sexes, or by having interventionist gods who support equality, etc.
• More generally, no bigotry, slavery, or systemic prejudice. Sometimes this is because everyday common people are space aliens, by which I mean they aren't under-educated, clannish, selfish, fearful, violent, and ignorant of the wider world. Sometimes people are portrayed plausibly but intolerance magically doesn't happen at a wider scale. There are good and obvious reasons not to want bigotry in your setting or to confront it in your games, but (and now this list is just making me sad) pervasive intolerance has historical verisimilitude. Yeesh. How about we say that the fantasy world's populations are massively cosmopolitan, driven by ancient diasporas of hundreds or preferably thousands of peoples; everyone looks different to each other, even very locally, and innumerable culture are constantly blending. Or maybe we resort to magical divine intervention again to fix things.
• Speaking of which, there's the trope of 'everyone's religious beliefs are strictly compatible'. In a classic TTRPG fantasy, the gods definitely exist, everyone agrees on what they're like, everyone mostly agrees on their names, most people worship a single god even though there's a pantheon, and nobody is erroneously worshipping a god who doesn't provably (or provably doesn't) exist. This has always been quite funny to me. Maybe I'll write an article about interesting alternatives.
• Immortality as a desideratum only of evildoers (e.g., liches and sorcerer-kings). Likely imported from major modern religions; I don't think many nonreligious people are keen to grow old and die. The trope is kind of compatible with there provably being a good afterlife, but that's not always the case in a fantasy world, especially when you're not one of the tiny number of people with a divine magic pipeline.
  

There we go. If you think I missed any notable pseudo-anachronism, leave a comment!

Lockpicking! Windows! Maps! Burning oil! The concept of fantasy pseudo-anachronism!

Let's look at pseudo-anachronistic technologies in fantasy fiction (with a TTRPG lens as usual, but I think this also mostly applies to other media).

When Arneson invented the first fantasy roleplaying game, he incorporated numerous science fiction elements. This could be viewed as weird rough edges of what would bloom into the greater hobby, but it was also a product of the concurrent boom era of pulp fantasy and pulp science fiction. Most people coming to D&D and its burgeoning successors could be assumed to have an interest in those kinds of stories. Science fiction aspects (machines, martians, rayguns, etc) stayed in early D&D and the emerging fantasy TTRPG traditions for a while before dying off and it's easy to imagine an alternative pathway where that was the default today. In reality though, in contrast to these roots, 'classic' fantasy is now regarded as a set of tropes which include a setting's technology conforming to a certain band of real-world history and geography.

Interestingly, those tropes are imperfect: they deviate from that implied band of technology in a few particular ways.

Pseudo-anachronism: Or, how we can "know" that Elrond doesn't own a skateboard

What do I mean by 'pseudo-anachronism'? Well, just 'anachronism' doesn't work; it's a word that only applies to historical real-world settings. It's Ancient Romans wearing wax lips and wristwatches. It's Kamakura shoguns carrying shotguns and sherrif badges.

'Anachronism' doesn't apply to fantasy worlds. But there are 'classic' fantasy tropes: default values, as it were. Many settings are designed as if they mostly conformed to certain real-world historical settings, so that players' brains automatically fill in the gaps of what 'ought' to be there. And to drill down into 'certain real-world historical settings', classic generic fantasy tends towards vaguely Late Middle Ages or Renaissance European pastiche. (There's an argument that this particular imagined pseudo-historical window represents a drift towards a later period from the initially D&D roots which blended pseudo-Arthurian jousting-and-castles with Hyborian Age ancient sword-and-sorcery, but nowadays that 1300s-to-1600s Western European default is quite strong in stodgy 'classic' fantasy.) Game masters and players alike will tend to fill in any blanks with what they understand to be a pre-industrial technology level beginning at clocks and the three-field system and ending at huge ruff collars. Then add to the mix a melange of societal assumptions drawn from modernity and pop history, seemingly divorced from available technologies.

So in a 'classic' fantasy implied setting, there is an expectation of a certain tech level. If it turns out that, say, consumer plastics exist, players won't think "oh, these people happen to have plastics technology". They'll think "huh, I wonder what unique magic is producing plastics". Or more cynically, "huh, that's stupid and immersion-breaking."

Nowhere in Tolkien's corpus does he write that Elrond doesn't own a skateboard. And yet we can confidently state that to be true. That's the essence of pseudo-anachronism.

Nerdbait The curse of knowledge

If you're like me, then when you know a topic well, it's grating to see it portrayed badly in fictive media. It may even feel like the more you know about a subject, the worse and more common this problem is, and the natural/cynical conclusion is that pretty much all media only ever gets things right on accident but you're only equipped to notice it when it happens within your domains of interest.

I've certainly found that some of my interests (historical technologies) have ruined some quite major media works for me. Fortunately in the case of my favourite hobby (fantasy TTRPGs), all you need to do is work out what's bothering you and then tweak the world (in self-consistent, verisimilitudinous ways) so that it actually makes sense within the setting.

It's nice when things are self-consistent. And it helps at the table, because players appreciate it when things hang together, too:

Every time players discover that some part of their fantastical world is more logical and organized than they’d given it credit for, their faith in the quality of the GMing, strength of the worldbuilding, and reach of the GM’s imagination surge forward. They’re more inclined to think themselves about how the game fits together–they’re more inclined to think about what NPCs would do, about how the gameworld will react, than plan in mechanical and metagame terms.

(From a slightly older article but a short one worth checking out if you're into cases of fantasy verisimilitude)

Individual pseudo-anachronistic technologies

So, we're left with a question: what kind of stuff "shouldn't" be in the vaguely Late Middle Ages / Renaissance European default setting of 'classic' Western fantasy? Let's take a look at five common pseudo-anachronisms and, rather than just flagging them for removal, come up with some in-fantasy-world reasons to justify allowing them.

Modern locks and skilled lockpickers

For many people, Skyrim or something like it is the archetypal fantasy 'locks and lockpicking' experience. You (1) pop in a torsion tool to keep pressure on the barrel, (2) apply your skill to fiddle around with a lockpick in the keyway, and (3) the lock opens. This is also implied in the fiction of most fantasy TTRPG/novel settings: the roguish character needs both the necessary skills, and the sophisticated tools, to pick a lock.

Here's the problem: skill-based lockpicking with clever tools is really only necessary to subvert a specific kind of lock, which I will call a 'modern pin tumbler lock'. It's a tumbler with a stack of pins whose variable height at the shear line and rotating barrel mean that pins must be set to the exact height that the key is designed to lift them to. And it's a kind of lock that was only invented, and entered use, in the late 1800s.

Earlier locks were of two main types. First, there were ancient pin-based locks, but their pins couldn't be lifted 'too high'. Even a well-designed one could be defeated easily by putting a bent rod or stick in the keyway and pushing all the pins up. (A poorly-designed one that didn't protect the pins could be defeated in a single motion by putting anything in the keyway.) You could completely master subverting old pin locks in well under an hour, and you don't need special tools for it.

The second type, and the best lock technology for thousands of years, was a warded lock. This has complex 'wards' (metal shapes) meant to prevent the wrong key turning in it. A warded lock can be defeated by a skeleton key (a filed-down regular key). Picking a warded lock therefore amounts to using a big bundle of 'tryout keys' and if they failed, trying various bent rods until one was the right shape to move the latch or bolt. Again, lockpicking before the advent of the modern pin tumbler doesn't require much skill, so we have a pseudo-anachronism.

We'd like huge fiendish fantasy traps and complicated locking mechanisms with poison needles artfully hidden in them and cunning thieves with bundles full of specially-made picks, though. So can we say that a modern pin tumbler lock could have been invented in a much earlier technology level?

The idea for the modern pin tumbler doesn't seem like the tricky part. Ideas can be justified as coming from anywhere at any time. The little springs in the key stack might be tricky, as is the overall complexity of the mechanism. You need (1) good metallurgy (so bits don't break or bend), (2) fine engineering tolerances (so bits don't fail or jam), and (3) good manufacturing processes (so the key actually works and the lock doesn't have other security flaws). You also arguably need to keep the skilled labour cost down, at least to the point where wealthy people with things they want secured might invest in a lock instead of a magical solution. I think all of these are within striking distance of your classic fantasy world, as are the more epic extensions to huge fantastic locks, trapped locks, etc. In particular, the setting likely has supernaturally clever people with small fingers and an affinity for metalwork - gnomes and/or dwarves.

There's also an alternative. Maybe nobody's invented the modern pin tumbler lock, but there's still skill-based lockpicking, because fantasy metallurgy allows for entirely new types of lock. Fantasy loosens the constraints on the laws of physics: we can imagine particular metals that can pass through each other to a certain depth, mechanisms that magically seize up in the presence of common key metals, enchantments that are sensitive to the colour of things that get put in the keyway, and so on. Lockpicking could be a massively skill-based art without the actual locks being very mechanically advanced!

Large glass panes

Many classic fantasy settings 'get this right' but others don't. In general, a window in the form of a sheet of glass large enough to look through, and clear and flat enough to identify what you're seeing on the other side, requires modern technology.

Up until the 1800s, glass panes were distorted rather than properly flat, and not very transparent. They were also more brittle than modern glass, both chemically and because of inclusions and bubbles that weakened it even further. On top of all that, glass was expensive to make! So shutters and curtains were preferred in most buildings, in most places and times (certain cathedrals, palaces, etc notwithstanding).

There were a few methods of making 'flat' glass, mostly based on blowing a globe or tube, flattening it on a metal plate, then cutting it up (crown glass and broad sheet glass). These made for translucent or semi-opaque pieces, not transparent ones, usually riddled with imperfections and distortions. You could grind the best ones down into 'blown plate glass', which would be finer quality and even smaller. To make a window out of the little panes that a glassmaker could produce, you would make 'leadlights', setting a large number of small pieces into a lead (or occasionally ceramic) lattice.

In the late 1600s, 'polished plate glass' was a slight improvement that could make larger and higher quality glass panes by casting glass on a metal surface and then grinding it down, but it was even more costly to produce.

It wasn't until the late 1800s that broad sheet methods were developed into 'cylinder blown sheet' glass which could make larger panes, albeit ones that needed grinding and polishing. From this point, glass could be used as a building material (and became popular after its use in the Crystal Palace of 1851). To get true modern large glass window panes you need the 'float glass' method (molten glass poured onto large baths of molten metal, taking the form of long flat ribbons, gradually cooled and rolled off at the other end). So, nice big windows are a pseudo-anachronism.

The good news: it's possible to make large glass panes using relatively simple metallurgy, hot furnaces, and a truly enormous capital investment. My amateur view is that the fact we didn't get the technology until the 19th Century can be considered an accident of history. In a fantasy world that has glassworkers, metalworkers, and their extremely wealthy patrons, it should be doable, either at incredible decadent kingly expense, or with the help of magic.

Common use of accurate maps

We all know what a map is. A simplified top-down image of a place at a certain scale showing natural and constructed features positioned correctly with regard to their actual positions in space for use as a key tool of navigation and planning. Right? Well, no, that's a modern lens. Many early maps are some combination of (a) allegorical, (b) valuable art pieces for display, (c) neither top-down nor to scale, (d) extremely inaccurate. Despite being ubiquitous in the modern day, reading a top-down map or even understanding what a map means is a learned skill, and not trivially so. Don't expect pre-industrial people to be able to purchase a map, read one, or know what one is.

Cartography generally started out as maps 'of the world', produced by philosophers and scholars to chart what they knew about their universe and/or so their wealthy and powerful patrons could show off. Later, there were maps of territories, and early sea charts. Eventually, local maps of property boundaries were made for gentry, lawyers, and courts.

High-quality terrain maps were only made pretty late in history, driven by demand from military commanders for increased information as the nature of warfare changed. Using maps at all for the purposes of military planning is a recent phenomenon: even though it seems absolutely intrinsic to us now, ancient military commanders and most pre-industrial ones didn't use them at all.

It must be emphasised that people just didn't think in terms of top-down map-like views like we do. Navigation was landmark-based. The central navigational tool for armies was knowledge of the network of known major roads and locally-known minor roads and paths, i.e., institutional knowledge plus scouts and local guides. Not maps. The central navigational tool for civilian travelers was itineraries (codified routes between multiple settlements, usually major cities / ports / pilgrimage destinations), i.e., written or memorised lists of directions, supplemented with asking locals. Not maps. At most you might see sketch images of some terrain features you were navigating by, or a lengthy itinerary might be written on top of a crude map of the continent as illustrative backdrop.

Maps (as local navigation aids) could have been an extremely useful tool for pre-industrial merchants, sailors, military commanders, property owners, and explorers, and yet, they for the most part neither made them nor used them nor understood the idea. (To that list of occupations we might add: dungeon delvers.)

detailed topographical maps of the sort that hikers today might rely on remained rare deep into the modern period, especially maps of large areas [...] Getting lost in unfamiliar territory was thus a very real hazard. Indeed, getting lost in familiar territory was a real hazard

- ACOUP

But there's so much map-heavy fantasy media that it permeates our vision of the past! I think "fantasy=maps" because (a) a map makes a great visual, (b) Tolkien casts a long shadow, and (c) we end up importing all kinds of modern assumptions. Nevertheless, regular people having access to accurate maps and the skills to read them? As remarkable as it seems, probably pseudo-anachronistic. Here's a crude compressed history (drawn from Wikipedia and some AskHistorians threads like this one):

1200s: First maps for ship navigation (portolan charts). Mostly useful for particular known routes, required a good compass, and weren't much use in working out where you were if you ended up far off course. Note that adequately mapping inland regions is much more difficult than coastlines: travel is both slower and more difficult, there are more features to include on the map, and parts of the terrain are inaccessible or obscured by other parts.

Late 1400s: Latitude starts being measured for the purposes of navigating ships. Longitude is vastly more difficult to measure. Explorers like Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1460-1533) make charts and depict parts of coastlines, but as a supplemental part of a highly text-based, descriptive approach to navigation aids.

Early 1500s: Latitude information starts being included on maps, at least for ship navigation.

1500s: First accounts of battles and larger-scale military movements being planned using maps, as reasonable quality land maps start to become available. See e.g. '[Duke] Cosimo studies the taking of Siena' (set in 1553 and painted ten years after), whose subject uses compasses on a map supplemented by a visual depiction of the city.

1600s-1700s: Land maps slowly become more widespread, but far from ubiquitous; the average person definitely cannot read one and the average military commander may or may not be able to. Local usable maps are mostly 'cadastral' maps, i.e., depictions of the legal boundaries, areas and dimensions of particular properties and territories.

Late 1700s: Longitude can finally be reliably measured for the purposes of navigating ships.

Early 1800s: Government-directed surge of high-quality, detailed cartography for military purposes starts in Prussia. This is probably in reaction to a perception that Napoleon's military successes were information-driven. Something like the modern capacity for (and importance of) topographic map-making and map-reading finally starts to be promulgated across Europe (but still only for soldiers). The perceived importance of knowing the terrain is possibly spurred by some other big-picture changes in warfare like army size, logistics and railroads, the role of artillery, speed of battle, etc.

Mid 1800s: Reliable chronometers become common equipment on ocean-going ships; it is finally the era of both making and using good sea maps.

So, 'owning a map and knowing how to read it' is a pseudo-anachronistic fantasy trope unless you're a learned scholar with an interest in philosophy, a lawyer with an interest in property boundaries, or a wealthy lettered ruler with an interest in territorial boundaries - at least until the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, and even then, the list only expands to 'ship navigators' and 'military commanders'.

Whoof! Well, everyone loves maps, so what's the solution? Fortunately, (a) we can give pretty much any fantasy world a history of large armies and sorcerous or monstrous powers mimicking the role of Napoleonic armies as a driver for accurate cartography, and (b) there's probably already magical flight (and/or scrying capable of mimicking a satellite view). Having a mage with a view from high off the ground means having someone who can make accurate maps without the base of sophisticated mathematics and laborious surveying technologies which you'd otherwise need. In a world where flight or distance viewing is 'cheap', we can expect this to be done just out of scholarly interest and/or for the benefit of local rulers and wealthy patrons, so we don't even need maps to be warfare-driven. Pseudo-anachronism solved!

Metal doodads

Metal is a wonder material. It comes in many different kinds with many different properties, and the tools you can make from it are harder/lighter/more durable/sharper edged/etc. Metal is also precious. In our world, at least, most of the useful stuff is tied up in minerals: iron is abundant but a hassle to smelt from ore, and other base metals are either less abundant than iron, much softer, or both.

A couple of historical notes.

First, I discovered while writing this that doorknobs were only invented in 1878. That's top of my personal list of 'new technologies you would have expected Shakespeare to be familiar with'!

Second, threaded screws are fairly old technology, but they had to be hand-made. High-quality threading of the kind you can reliably join a nut to only came about with 'swaging tools' in the 1850s, so nuts and bolts should be considered modern. In general, early woodworking preferred skilled joinery over nails (because iron was expensive and nails had to be individually made), and in turn preferred nails over wood screws (because it's a nail plus a bunch of incredibly meticulous skilled labour cutting a thread into it). Fantasy carpenters, take note.

This is minor stuff, barely even pseudo-anachronistic, and I think is pretty much covered by the discussion of locks and glass above. Nobody's actually going to be thrown out of the flow if you mention doorknobs. You can also change things up by having useful metals be naturally more prevalent in your fantasy world without even getting into 'standing portals to the elemental plane of iron' and so on.

Explosively flammable lamp oil

Here's a classic fantasy trope: you toss the lantern onto the cobbles and it WHUMPHS into a fireball. You douse the monster in lamp oil and one strike of a torch turns it into barbecue. Fantasy oil is not merely combustible but wildly flammable!

The pseudo-anachronism is obvious if you have a basic knowledge of materials science: pre-industrial people weren't using volatile substances with low flash points for everyday lighting, cooking, and heating. They were using plant oils (mostly olive oil) and animal fats (mostly fish oil or whale oil). To make torches and candles, add pitch, resin, beeswax, and tallow to the mix.

None of those things burn by themselves if you touch a flame to them. All of them have to be heated up a lot before they will catch fire and stay burning, except in the case where they're serving as the fuel for a burning wick.

(Read these three articles and the comments on them for a more full treatment of the topic with regards to original D&D)

To have lamp oil catch like petrol it has to actually be, well, petrol (or something like it). Again, there is no overlap between 'things you can make a room-temperature incendiary weapon from' and 'pre-industrial materials used for domestic fires'. Even when you refine petroleum, you produce some fractions with a low enough flash point to ignite and burn even on a cold day (petrol, notably), but you also get a bunch of other fractions whose flash point is too high (diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel don't burn at room temperature and pressure - you'd have to stop and boil your 'lamp oil' over a fire for a while before throwing these ones).

Alternatively, I guess you could burn particular alcohol distillates, like ethanol, in your lamp. If you had more money than Midas and no fear of fire.

Now, technologies to refine rock oil and distill alcohol were discovered a long time ago, well within the classic fantasy setting era, but these low flash point substances are very labour- and resource- intensive to produce by hand. If you want old timey incendiary grenades on your equipment list, they have to be made of something other than 'lamp oil' and multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than it. There's a few more caveats: early incendiary weapons (e.g., 'Greek fire') seem to have been delivered by catapult or huge portable siphon more often than thrown vessels, seem like they were difficult to wield safely and reliably, and were a state secret. All those objections can be overcome by adding a new fantasy material that works as an incendiary, of course. Fire weapons are cool and well-entrenched in the genre, so I say go for it.

I like the idea of combining the two classic fantasy thrown weapons – holy water and flammable oil – as a single plausible substance. My pick for the 'holy fire' weapon is ethanol: it burns with a mysterious smokeless flame that is very faint and blue, it can be poured on wounds to stop them suppurating, and the incautious imbiber is struck with euphoria, visions, and sometimes a debilitating curse. It's an old technology but costly to get your hands on (because it has to be distilled by a learned sage, using up valuable farm produce in the process). And the concept of extremely evil monsters having a specific vulnerability to 'smokeless flame' is just as cool as the well-trod and curiously Christianity-centric concept of them being harmed by blessed water.

And then also

So that's my notes on resolving pseudo-anachronisms for specific individual technologies in classic fantasy settings.

Now available: Part 2, a scattering of addenda on missing technologies, systemic technologies, and societal features!

Consider other viewpoints!

There are perhaps 20 or 25 TTRPG blogs I read regularly, and three among them stand out because of something unique I get out of them.

• One is the column of a well-established, respected and successful RPG advice blogger who I have only ever agreed with on the most simple and obvious matters. The majority of the writing recommends doing things in ways I would not consider, either because they are incompatible with my usual playstyles, or because the blogger says they will achieve goals which I do not want to achieve (because I'm confident that achieving them would make my play experience worse).

• Another is a blog containing articles largely about a range of game systems that I don't run or play, or playstyles I don't engage with. They're informative, interesting even, but not immediately useful.
  

• A third has elaborately-argued articles whose conclusions almost always rest partly on premises I think are false (or, again, just aren't applicable to my preferred playstyles). Just once or twice, I have agreed with all the starting axioms, and thereby received food for thought.

Obviously, the common link is that these are blogs within my sphere of interest which there is little obvious benefit to me reading.

So why bother?

It's not 'I hate your blog' masochism.

It's because any of these (kinds of) writer could change my mind about something at any time. I've been floored by various jaw-dropping revelations from writers who appeal better to my sensibilities – but those could be considered particularly loud echoes in my personal echo chamber. I think it would be strictly more impactful to experience a major insight by reading these bloggers' work, if it does happen.

And it's because I think it's mentally healthy to be well-read and well-rounded.

And it's because sometimes there is the germ of a transmissible idea, a spark which I can work with. You can get creative sparks anywhere, of course, but getting them from an unexpected source has, I think, a certain distinctive valence or flavour or quiddity or je nais se quoi.

And it's a useful little reminder that other people think differently and like different things and that that's fine.

And it's possible that I'll be persuaded, changed, diverted, and that's not something we should automatically close ourselves off from.

If you're going to try to find work you don't like to start reading, I recommend picking some that is, at base, well-written. Also, focus on writers who seem to have acquired a reasonably large audience and seem to be popular rather than notorious, so you can be more confident that they're not just a crank. (And if they have a large readership, many of their ideas will propagate, so you get the added benefit of being better able to follow the zeitgeist.)

Important caveat #1: Don't go overboard. We live in a world of endless opportunity costs, and life is short. Three viewpoints that seem irreconcilably antipodal to mine seems like a fine number for my main hobby; ten would certainly be too many.

Important caveat #2: There's no need to engage with people with genuinely objectionable views.

This is about TTRPGs, but I'd like to think that the same applies to all hobbies, and probably many other spheres of life.

Fantasy setting peeves: Coda

All too often in audiovisual media covering a historical or historical-fantasy setting, peasants are depicted as wearing ill-fitting, ragged, crudely-made clothing to show they're poor.

But this is a world before automation. That means four things: labour is cheap, people make and repair their own stuff, more stuff is made locally, and stuff is expensive to produce.

...So there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ill-fitting clothing. Cloth is expensive - having loose-fitting clothing (pleats, gathers, ruffles, etc) is a sign of wealth, not poverty!

...And there's no reason for peasants to be wearing ragged clothing. Nobody is so pressed for time that they can't have ragged edges repaired, when it's all but guaranteed that there's someone who stitches within spitting distance. Tears tend to get worse, wasting cloth, and again - cloth is expensive.

...And likewise there's no reason for peasants to be wearing crudely-made clothing. A ton of people are going to be competent in simple tailoring. Even when the economy is relatively monetised and goods are traded at market.

It shouldn't take more than ten minutes of thought - or a quick phone call to a domain expert - to get at least a veneer of verisimilitude. This is low-hanging fruit!