On History, Perspective, and The Victors of Time

You're not from around here, are ya?

I recently stopped reading Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilization, which is a dense, thorough, and incredibly detailed book regarding humanities relationship with the sea over the last 4 thousand ish years. While the book is amazingly complex and well researched, it is quite tiring, especially as I have taken to keeping a commonplace book, of sorts, with me as I write, where I write down interesting notes, quotes, and observations about what I am currently reading. I have found that it helps me remember things to a much better degree than simply underlining or trusting myself to remember everything I read (Spoilers: That does not work.)

As such, I have decided to take a break from that book and move on to another, Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. This book is radically different from the previous. Where that book was chock full of citations, direct quotes, and dense historiographic information, Ansary’s book reads more like a storybook. Characters come to life on the page; Mohammed, Omar, Abu-Bakr, and Ali all take prominence on the page not only as an important historical figure, but also as a personality unto themselves. Abu-Bakr is Gentle, where Omar is strong and hot-headed (these associations are backed up by source material, of course, but not in the excruciatingly deep details as before), and Mohammed’s legacy is felt throughout the entire story.

I picked up this book as I am particularly interested in learning non-western history at this point in time; I have been doing a lot of reading of European, or at least “Western” history previously, and find my self in search of a different story entirely, rather than grasping for every little crumb of detail regarding a small part of the world. I did a deep dive on Vikings last year — which is fascinating, by the way — but now am feeling the need to explore other areas of time and space.

All that is to say, I am reading Destiny Disrupted now because it directly addresses a question that has long gone unanswered for me: How did Europe win? For thousands of years, the center of learning was not in Europe, but in the Middle East. Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Kabul, Babylon, all great cities of culture, knowledge, and most importantly, military strength. Until about 500 years ago, with the exception of Rome, Much of Europe has been disorganized, small, and chaotic, while the Middle East grew and flourished. Of course, this is not to say that there were not problems along the way. The Crusades are probably the biggest example of foreign powers interfering directly with the Dar al-Islam but there were numerous other issues that the Middle East faced over the course of the multiple-thousand years that it has effectively been the “Middle World” as Ansary calls it.

How did this happen? Well, I don’t know yet, but I am hoping that Ansary tells me.

In the meantime, I was thinking about how Perspective can be used in your TTRPG games. All of us have grown up with biases towards our own culture; that is simple human DNA. Even if you felt like the “odd one out” as I often did in school and in the workplace, I still have a bias towards western culture; towards individualism, towards independence, towards entrepreneurship and the ideal of the “Self-Made Man”. Just as we have all grown up with these biases, so too have your characters.

Your characters are obviously up to you; that is the beauty of TTRPGs in general. You can be the comedian you never were, or the athlete, or the scholar, or the tradesperson, or the investigator, or the blah-blah-blah, and you can do it well! Heck, play long enough and you might even be the best in the world! And by all means, if you don’t feel like bogging your character down with things like biases and preconceived notions of the state of your imaginary world, then don’t do it! That’s another beautiful thing about TTRPGs, and something I have said before, is that you can pour your heart and soul into your character, or not. Some people just want to kill people and get loot, which is totally fine. This substack generally tends to lean the opposite way, towards “deep culture” but that is simply because that is what I find more interesting, not because I believe it is better.

Another important thing to remember is that these biases only ever really come up if you visit a foreign land. For example, if you are from the United States like me, I can go pretty much anywhere in the US and fit right in, with some small regional differences. However, visiting somewhere like Morocco? Thailand? Mongolia? These places are immediately places where I am out of my element. Similarly, if your campaign all takes place in a single city or region, issues like a language barrier may never come up. There may never be a cultural faux pas, or an altercation stemming from a poor translation, in which case, your DM may never need to think about things like that.

However, in a world-or-galaxy spanning campaign, it can be important to add elements here and there that remind players that they are indeed, not from around here. The kingdom your party is visiting may seem like a run of the mill city, smaller and less developed than where you came from, but a thousand years ago, they ruled the world, and that pride still runs deep in the veins of the region. They are not going to forget any time soon. In fact the reason you may be visiting is to find ancient wisdom, or an artifact long lost to time, a key to a mystery thousands of years old that no-one has been able to crack yet because maybe this kingdom that rose and fell did not leave behind any written record, or maybe their records were lost in a war, or maybe they just didn’t bother to write anything down.

Even though your characters may be from a certain time and place, the world that they inhabit is older and wiser, and it is the responsibility of the Game Master to bring that out in the world if that is what the game calls for. The most important thing, regardless of game setting, or type of game, or system, or whatever, is that the GM and the players are all on the same page. While it is great to have a deep history for your world, you will only resent your players if they don’t care about it, and your players will begin to resent you if you try to force feed it to them.

Get on the same page. Roll dice. Have fun!

Let me know what your thoughts are on this! I know it has been longer than normal since my last post, and for that, I apologize. I have been feeling particularly de-motivated the last couple of weeks due to a combination of work stuff and , but I am back now! I am going to try to get back to a weekly-ish posting schedule, and I will also try to share some more about my homebrew World, Al-Amyr! Having it be a part of my substack makes me want to work on it far more actively, for which I am grateful. Worldbuilding is something I really enjoy doing, and Al-Amyr is a great exercise in creativity as I am already reading a lot of non-fiction. Also, would people be interested in reading reviews of the fiction books I am reading? I recently finished The Bloodsworn Trilogy, and I have thoughts.

Cheers,

Henry