Almost everything you think you know about history is probably wrong (or at least staggeringly incomplete).
At least, that’s the impression I’m getting as I spend more time learning about aspects of our history.
Even if you know some of the bigger points – that there was a American Civil War, that there was a battle at Bull Run, and so forth – you’re probably missing a lot of the context of those events. And, even when you know a bit more context, there’s still things to uncover. What was the social and economic structure of the time? How did this apply to the individual villages and cities?
My own view of history is unsurprisingly Anglocentric. I know more about the history of England than most other places, and even there it’s incomplete. And, being born in the 20th Century and living in the 21st Century, I tend to make assumptions about how things worked in the past – both in England and other countries – based on my own experiences.
This isn’t odd. It’s how everyone tends to do things. Shakespeare wrote plays set back in history as though setting things in his era. Homer’s descriptions of Bronze Age warfare are remarkably non-Bronze Age, owing more to his era’s Iron Age warfare than how people fought then.
The thing I learnt recently that changed my conception of Russia was this: For many centuries, the village community portioned the land amongst its residents on an ongoing basis – the land was held communally. (Well, it may have been held by the nobles, but the village community determined how it was apportioned for work). My naïve view was that individual farmers owned their own land. Not the case! (It’s called Obshchina if you want to look it up). So, this idea of communism where people share the resources… that’s been around for a long time in Russia even before the revolution.
I’ve been spending more time of late studying English history, and it’s fascinating how poor the grip of the monarchy on the land was. Even if you discount the ambitions of foreign princes, there are lots of struggles for power between the barons and the king. Shakespeare puts it well in Richard II:
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d.
Kingship is no sinecure in many cases. It seems to me that one thing that helps keep a kingdom together is a foreign threat. Get the potential of an invasion, and the nobles work together more. Although, not always. There are plenty of times nobles will want to swap sides.
This gets a bit more complicated when you want to apply it to a Dungeons & Dragons setting. You could very easily run a campaign set in a kingdom where much of the action derives from squabbling nobles. (Eberron can be very close to this). If you want the main villains to be human, there are plenty of examples from history to inspire you.
Complication comes from the other races inhabiting the world: elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblins, ogres, hobgoblins – the list goes on and on. They often provide that foreign threat which allows you to ignore the inherent instability of the kingdom and just concentrate on external matters. And, when you have orcs that want to enslave anyone who isn’t an orc, then it’s a lot harder to work for them, though it’s still feasible.
A game of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t enslaved to history, but you can have it informed by it. Look at an area of history and see if there are any aspects you want to include in your game. It doesn’t have to be big-picture stuff. Even the way trade worked in a given era can give ideas for scenarios. It’s just a case of finding something that intrigues you, that you think will intrigue your players, and then transforming it into a D&D scenario. “Just”? Well, the process isn’t trivial – but it’s part of the fascination of the game!