Steps toward Immersion

I have been working on the Streetvendor's Guide for a little more than 18 months now.  I have completed 156 pages and have written something like 140,000 words.  I finished "wood" today, wrapping up incense as the last wood-based product.  I'm just getting started on paper and books.  I know readers must be tired of my talking about it, but it has been a pretty big part of my life for a while now ... and it's undoubtedly the largest single project I've ever embarked on in my lifetime.  So, with the reader's patience, I'm going to talk about it a little more.

The guide includes products of all kinds that physically existed in the time period between 1100 and 1650, all of them non-magical with two exceptions, because I just could not restrain myself.  The intent of the book is to provide information that ought to inform any dungeon master on how to create a more believable and immersive world, or rather, how to worldbuild in a realistic, practical way.

Most of those who play D&D only understand game's era through those things that can be imagined and understood in a direct, visceral manner.  They're not interested in sweeping generalisations about culture or technology, or who ran what kingdom or what peoples migrated wear.  To the actual people themselves, living in that time, little if anything seemed to change about them.  They did the work their ancestors did, they survived in the same manner, the momentary changes that did occur had little effect on their lives.  If we're going to comprehend how they saw the world, then we have to see the world in the material way they did.

For example, clothing was a deeply personal and practical aspect of daily existence.  A peasant rose each morning and put on simple garments made from wool or linen, materials that were affordable and durable. These clothes would be homespun and hand-sewn, possibly by a family member, reflecting the labour-intensive process of textile production. These were not just practical but also part of the peasant's identity, shaped by the availability of resources and local traditions. Their straightforward style remained largely consistent across generations, with minor variations in style influenced by local customs rather than sweeping fashion trends.

But we want to know, for the sake of understanding the world, where did the clothes come from?  How were things translated from field to fibre to cloth to pieces of wearable?  What sort of things were available, and what kinds of fabric?  How did one culture differ from another?  I could have written a history describing clothes and trying to connect these things together, but instead I've provided as much detail as possible for the clothes and provided a baseline for the reader to search for as much information as they could wish for ... as the guide's value is in describing what to search.

If the reader were to search for "medieval clothes" at this moment, most likely what would come up is an uncertain list of some vaguely recognisable terms, a few that were immediately familiar, and a great many that looked or sounded completely strange.  The first hurdle that any of us would have to overcome — me included, since I had to do it — would be to define a lot of terms.  Essentially, the most boring part.  This is the work I have done.  Flip through the pages on clothes and the reader will find a lot of things that are conveniently and simply explained, a simple system that explains what's more valuable than what, and a very convenient guide to how many more hours can be spent on google, youtube and chatg.

Okay, but why care?  I must admit, this one puzzled me for awhile too.  I had written a story and in it, I'd described the character's appreciation of a cup of coffee ... which I thought of as just a normal moment of a person doing a thing.  But I found that some readers really tapped into the visceral description of the moment, specifically describing their wanting to get a cup of coffee because of the short two-sentence passage.

After that, I began to notice that my D&D players cared about the colour of their imaginary gear, and about the nature of the food they were buying from the market, because I'd already taken the time to give separate prices for different vegetables, fruits, meats, breads and so on.  Why did it matter?  They couldn't taste the difference, and one would think they'd automatically just buy the cheapest type of food and save themselves some money.  But in reality, as they gamed and bought at the market, they'd ask each other what sort of food they should buy this time around, making jokes about not being able to eat another potato, not caring the least about what things cost — only what did they "feel" like eating over the next couple of weeks.

This began to connect with me.  If they cared about food, naturally they'd care about clothing.  And if they were going to farm anything, they'd obviously care about what they wanted to grow.  If I could have provided options for which kinds of inn they could stay at, instead of always proving the same basic McInn no matter where they went, surely they'd start to care about where they wanted to stay at night, or what sort of room they'd be comfortable staying in.  It wasn't that they didn't care about these things ... it was that, for decades of playing D&D, I'd failed to recognize that chain mail armour is always chain mail ... it's never four or five different visual kinds of armour that provides the same benefit, but offers the benefit of being personal.

I'd never minded if a player said they wanted to paint their armour green, or get a flag for themselves and put some motif on it; I assume people want to personalise their characters.  What is a backstory, if not a personalisation?  But most such things, including a backstory, are stagnant.  Once you've created them, or bought them, or designed your character's flag or whatever, it soon becomes stagnant.  It's nice, but as with most material things, it's momentary and in the long run, unsatisfying.  But there's something strangely different if the character's uniqueness can be expressed in a normal way, all the time, in a manner that doesn't annoy other players.  The flag, for example, has the potential of the character unfurling it before a fight.  The flag is a nice thing to have, but it's the unfurling that makes it meaningful, alive.  Saying after the combat, "I fold my flag and put it away," is so extraordinarily natural that it doesn't feel like the usual pretense that players adopt to feel their character's animation ... yet it does feel important and necessary, and therefore REAL.

But this only works if the player has some understanding of what a flag is beyond a line on a sheet saying how much the flag costs.  Having knowledge of what the flag is made of, and being able to have knowledge of how that material feels to the touch, or how heavy it is, or where it comes from ... produces a more tactile understanding of the flag itself in a way that D&D usually just doesn't offer.  It's always been assumed that it's having the flag that matters, not how it's used or how it affects the character's actions.

We are motivated by more than the things we want to stuff into our homes ... it is the way that we use up the products that make us happy, like the coffee in the morning and the last bit of ice cream in the tub before we go to bed.  It's the way the new washcloths feel on our face when we wash, compared to the old washcloths.  It's the painful reminder that cars need the brakes checked and the tires rotated from season to season, and how it costs us, even though we love our car.  And every little detail we can add to our fictional existence along these lines provides another thing for the players to consider when divesting themselves of coins in exchange for things.

I want us, suiting up in our clothes, girding on our armour, to have the same close personal attachment to the things we interact with as that peasant does in the example earlier.  But that's not possible if we don't know what clothes are, or how things are made, or where they come from.  It's not possible if we can't guess for ourselves that this item has a little drawer in it, or a top that flips up, or a wheel that's as high as our hip, or any other imagined detail that's been sketched out in a very large book with thousands of such details.

It's this sort of worldbuilding that I'm trying for ... the one that goes beyond making a map that says how many miles it is between the village and the dungeon.  I'm describing the worldbuilding we find in the books we read, where the character cuts the outer red waxy covering off his cheese, before carving off a cube and adding it to the crust of rye bread that he's bought that morning.

Obviously, we don't want this sort of description taking over the process of the game — it would be hell on a DM to have the players constantly remarking that their shoes are made of calfskin, not cowhide.  But there's nothing to keep the players from thinking about these important details when their not immediately playing, when they're carefully rewriting their characters and noticing how full of depth and feeling.  This lets them connect with their characters on a deeper level — and, in turn, creates a great deal more "world" for us to employ in strategising things that can matter in the future ... the macguffins we choose, the stakes the party can fight for and the subtleties about the players' characters that we can challenge or support.

The Guide is about understanding and envisioning the tangible elements of a richly detailed world.  By educating ourselves.