By: Chris Acuff

Welcome to another edition of Institutions in world building. The core concept of my argument is that by defining the organizations of a world, how they operate, who is in them, what they do, etc, you can build a more richly written world that – when combined with the personalities, goals, and flaws of characters, essentially runs on its own. It is an engine for storytelling.

You can see the original here, or the one where I examined how this concept works in the TV show Andor here.

This time, I want to take a step back and look at an institutional system as a whole and break down how we can use it in writing, for TTRPGs or otherwise. The institutional system I will use for this first one is Monarchical Feudalism, the primary system (In a few different forms) of Medieval Europe (~400 to 1688/1791ish depending on where you are) which is the basis for most fantasy worlds. While this is a primer for primarily this system, I would like to note that Medieval Japan was similar enough that you don’t have to go far to be able to build something that looks plausible.

Brief history lesson, as the Western Roman Empire was falling, they started assigning different “barbarian” peoples to govern certain areas. This was not a gift, this was done out of weakness. The brittle Imperial system could not handle the constant wars it found itself in, and massive wealth inequality, poor handling of the financial system, disease, and strings of terrible leaders were causing a system of otherwise strongly built institutional systems to slowly, and then all at once, collapse.

These barbarian tribes were led by individual strongmen whose right to power came solely from their charisma and skill at war, and as the authority of Rome receded, they were left holding this land, profiting from it, but also having to protect it.

“Civilization” in the post Roman world was much smaller and less well organized, (population of peak Ancient Rome- 1.3 million, population of Paris in 1337, right before the plague, and the largest city in Western Europe, nearly a thousand years after the fall of Rome, 100-200 Thousand) Indeed, the only people who could actually organize things were the clergy, who could read and write. Feudal societies, in this capacity, are fundamentally a post-apocalypse society.

A king is only a man, and he only has direct authority of that which is in his line of sight, everything else has to be governed by others, by appointed lords and knights, and administered by people who can read and write, which especially early on, meant the church. That means any place that is not directly near the king is actually controlled by whoever the local lords and priests are, who claim their power from the king, but in truth are sovereign unto themselves as long as they do not run afoul of the king.

Feudal society is therefore structured like this- peasants (if not serfs), the vast, vast majority of the population, produce nearly everything in the society, a certain amount of which is owed to the lords, and even then many pesants live wholly on subsistence. There are a few numbers of skilled tradesmen and crafters who make higher value goods and don’t have to spend all their labor on growing food, but all the land is “owned” by the king and administered by the lords and the church. It is a societal pyramid with a very, very wide base that narrows quite quickly. The responsibilities of the church are to run society, manage much of the bureaucracy, and give legitimacy to the lords and kings rule by saying it has a divine right. Meanwhile, the main responsibility of the lord is to fight.

Now, stories almost never really have to do with peasants because they aren’t able to do much (except the very few who break the mold, and often the law). But, our few knights and lords and clergymen are fascinating because they have a lot of agency, a lot of power, and because the rules and laws are more or less whatever the king is able to get away with saying they are. Therefore the personalities of individuals plays a HUGE role, which is great for storytelling.

Lets think about how a Feudalist Monarchy world affects our plot and characters:

1. The King/Queen has as much authority as their lords and the church will allow them, and their personality and personal favorites matter immensely to what actually happens
2. Nothing actually gets done without the church and its clergy (kings started trying to find ways around this by building their own educated bureaucracy or by appointing people to prominent roles in the church themselves) All births, baptisms, marriages, the rare divorce (ahem… annulments, catholics can’t divorce) and even deaths were registered through the church in France until midway through the revolution.
3. Local lords are very protective of their own privileges and lands, and are in a prisoners dilemma when it comes to banding together against the king vs vying for power and land against their neighbor
4. Marriages within the upper classes are for politics not love, side pieces are common, and in some societies, it is a role that is competed for
5. All the work in this civilization is still done by peasants, they must be appeased enough to keep them from rebelling, (what do you think all those castles were for?) and if anything happens to them en masse it will destabilize the society, as all the lords don’t actually do anything except collect rents. (good example is the peasants revolt in England after the black death.)
6. Almost all of society is intensely religious and superstitious, only knowing and understanding what is passed down to them from within their community. Education, even basic reading and writing from VERY EXPENSIVE books that all have to be hand-copied is rare until the invention of the printing press. Science happens within the church, for the most part.
7. Militaries change over time, but the backbone of them for most of this period will be some version of knights, experts literally born and bred to be warriors from families who own land and kept in the field by the economic production of that land and the peasants on it. Their armor and horsemanship – a good war horse might as well be the equivalent to a ferrari in terms of economic value- made them dominant. For a lord, maintaining knight’s loyalty was tantamount to maintaining power.
8. War is primarily conducted through sieges of the afore mentioned castles and strongpoints until siege cannons, the first kind of true black powder weapon used in Europe, show up. The large scale field battles from movies are very rare, and sieges take a long time, assaulting castles was also rare, as it is a great way to lose half your army. Speaking of losing half your army- up until like the 1900s, more soldiers die from disease in camp than from battles. Raids, however, are very common, as horsemen can cover a lot of ground quickly and can be difficult to stop. This concept is the same in the hundred year’s war as it is in the American Civil War.
9. Communication and travel is very slow- the maximum speed is the speed of a horse, or ship, both of which can be waylaid (we moderns have suuuuuch a difficult time understanding this now that pretty much every fantasy world has some element of quick messaging or teleportation)
10. Trade is also super slow, especially overland. Anything from far away inherently becomes quite valuable due to scarcity. Silk and exotic spices are a good example.
11. This is a concept that is incomprehensible to moderns, but most people knew very little about the world and its overall geography and the only access to new information was from someone they directly knew, an official, or traveler gossip, none of which underwent any kind of fact check. Therefore, a person’s word and reputation was extremely important, but truth could be quite moldable.
12. “New” peoples could just sort of appear out of nowhere. An example of this is when an army of Mongols comes out of nowhere, cross the Carpathian mountains into Hungary, defeated the army, killed half the population and then just… left. (They left because the great Khan died, but the Europeans didn’t know that)

This system is going to have different flavors depending on when and where you are, for example the viking ages of 800-1066 are going to look very different from the hundred years war to the crusades to the enlightenment, but by and large the power structures are the same. It doesn’t really start to break down until cannons and guns come on the scene- once any peasant with his 2 front teeth and both arms is able to kill a knight at 100 yards with early muskets, the system starts changing and peasants start to be able to- slowly- build and demand power.

It is these institutions that make a story like Game of Thrones feel the way it does, Martin has obviously read his history and he integrates it expertly so the institutions of a medieval world are what drive the story. To get good at world building in this sort of time period, I recommend doing that reading yourself, as a general guide, one must understand the rules in order to break them (and build a fantasy). This blog is meant to serve as a primer, but there are many great resources out there.

Books I’d recommend:

The Plantagenets – Dan Jones (anything by DJ is a good place to start really)

Crusaders – Dan Jones

Children of Ash and Elm – Neil Price (Viking era)

Empires of the Steppes – Kenneth W. Harl (Mongols & co)

A Distant Mirror – Barbara Tuchman

The Greatest Knight- Thomas Asbridge