Ideas for Games that I Stole from a French Museum

Being in places where history happened tends to fill you with a sense of awe. Today, I got to see the Musee de Cluny, which is a super rad museum full of incredibly ornate medieval French stuff. The basement houses an old Roman bath, and the entire place is filled with religious and cultural artifacts beyond the typical old swords and more old swords. There was a lot of ruined statuary and a room just marked "treasure", and pretty soon the place was being mapped out as a dungeon in my head.

Look at these guys and tell me they're not about to animate, Ray Harryhausen-style. 

The "abandoned fortress/castle/manor with a horrible secret underneath" is a pretty classic trope both in literature and in games, but there's no problem with the classics if they're done well. Every room had a unique encounter idea in it. This is probably the lamest response to seeing some of the coolest stuff in the world, but I think it's key to solving a big problem I have with role-playing games.

A lot of fantasy RPGs (I mostly play older editions of D&D, for reference, but I've bounced around enough to be roughly authoritative here) are tentatively set in faux-medieval settings. More modern games (3rd/4th edition D&D and Pathfinder, for example) tend to deviate off into something some people call "dungeon-punk" in aesthetic. Think too many belts and also manbuns and other awful renfair nonsense. It's terrible, but I'm kind of getting off-track here. Anyway, if we're going for faux-medievalism, and faux European medievalism at that, we've got sort of a concrete setting and set of social rules and aesthetics and all that fun stuff.

This one was pretty tiny!

My big issue is verisimilitude. It's an awful, awful word to use in conversation and in writing, and it's horrible to try and spell. BUT, it's super important to game design, especially in the tabletop world, where half the action is all in the theater of the mind. It's a term ol' Gygax himself loved, and it essentially means refers to internal consistency and how believable something is, at least in game terms. How do you describe what a space in a castle looks like? How much do you explain? We've all seen pictures of castles, interior and exterior, but what does the floorplan look like? Is it going to come up? I've seen a thousand abandoned chapels in published adventures, but what does an actual medieval chapel in a castle (or an underground dungeon) look like? But most of all, how do you make these spaces feel real, or lived in, or like you could really go there?

It's cool to know how architecture works that's actually used. It may never really come up in a game, but it's useful to help describe a place evocatively, so that people can imagine what it looks like themselves.


Also, what the hell does treasure actually look like? Besides coinage (which is occasionally an anachronism), what's actually in a giant treasure mound? The answer is, if we're still going for faux medievalism, a lot of Jesus stuff. Most wealth got split between the church and the nobility (who were closely tied to the church) in Medieval Europe, so most precious metals got made into crucifixes or reliquaries or statues or got used in books or tiny crucifixes or a million other tacky pieces of religious knickknackery.

To me, this Catholic bling is so much more interesting than another big ol' gem or another sack of coins. That's not to say those are bad, of course. but as a player, I've always felt more immersed when the treasure I get is specific and weird. What's the golden foot worth? Is it magic? What happens when Hegdus the dwarf puts it on his orc-induced leg stump?

This has been long and rambly, but there's a few key points here that I think are super important.

1. Steal ideas from your surroundings. If you can picture it, you can describe it so that other people can.
2. Make things interesting and specific in a way that draws people in. Don't get over-long unless people ask for details, because the exact dimensions of the golden foot don't matter until Hegdus has it stuck on his leg and it's become self-aware.