European Medieval history has long influenced the fantasy genre in both fiction and tabletop games. And you would be forgiven for thinking it all played out, exhausted as a resource for modern gaming tables. But it turns out, after you strip away preconceptions and stereotypes, actual authentic Medieval history is rich with inspiration. I spoke with Zoe Franznick and Mac Boyle about their current crowdfunding campaign for Marginal Worlds, and why we still have so much to draw from the Medieval European well.
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Brent: Thank you all for taking the time to talk with me! For our readers not yet familiar with your work, please tell me a bit about yourselves.
Zoe: For sure! Mac and I are both medievalists who met while in university at Purdue, and decided to start the Maniculum podcast while we were graduate students. We really fell in love with the weird medieval stories we were translating, but didn’t see that same kind of material in many TTRPGs, so we decided to start adapting medieval stories into TTRPG content for others. Now Mac has just finished his PhD and I’m working full time as a game dev, so we’ve come a long way, both professionally and in the podcast!
As for my personal game design and medieval qualifications, I received an M.Phil in Medieval Studies from Trinity College Dublin, and then went on to write for Pentiment, a medieval mystery narrative adventure by Obsidian Entertainment, which received a Peabody & GCD’s Best Narrative awards, along with a BAFTA and Nebula nomination. I’m now working at Wolfeye Studios, continuing in video games, and, of course, the Maniculum and TTRPG dev.
Mac: I suppose as far as relevant qualifications go… I’m an academic who just completed a PhD in English Language & Linguistics with a medieval focus.
B: What drew you into tabletop roleplaying games? What was your “hero (or villain, we don’t judge) origin story” in the hobby?
M: Fairly standard, I think – as a kid in the late ‘90s, a couple friends introduced me to AD&D. When 3rd edition D&D came out, I bought the books, dove into them, and they kind of permanently rewired my brain.
Z: Unlike Mac, I’m fairly new to TTRPGs. I grew up playing video games and only discovered tabletop gaming in college. They really resonated with me because they felt like a modern version of the oral tradition, like Beowulf, Homer and the Iliad, etc.
B: How and when did you shift from players/GMs to designing your first game content? Was the shift gradual or did you burn to design something right away?
Z: Oh man, I played in a few games as a player, but they fizzled out quick, so I volunteered to be a homebrew GM and have been perma-GM ever since. I adapted my own fantasy world to D&D 5e rules, wrote up a guide, and threw it at my players. I find I really enjoy GMing more than being a player because I can keep the focus on the overall arcs and stories they want to play.
Once we had the Maniculum up and running, it just felt natural to offer the ideas we came up with as supplemental materials (which are on our patreon or in our discord). After that, our homebrewing became bigger and bigger until we ended up with Marginal Worlds.
M: Hard to draw a line, really, because to me designing content is part of being a GM. This is probably a matter of the culture of your local gaming group(s), and a degree of personal preference, though. For me, I was designing my own adventures and settings right out of the gate – partially because I was a kid at the time, and couldn’t afford to buy a lot of the pre-made stuff, but also just because I enjoyed doing it. I still do a lot of… basically recreational worldbuilding that never sees the light of day. It’s my equivalent of, like, whittling or doodling. Then it’s just a short jump from there to also making your own magic items and creatures and such, though the complexity of the D&D rules in particular is a bit more of an obstacle there.
If you mean designing stuff for public consumption, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but I wasn’t sure where to start – and also I’m tremendously disorganized. Once the podcast had been going a while, I felt I had a bit more of a foundation to build from, and wouldn’t just be tossing stuff haphazardly into the void. Also I basically wouldn’t be able to produce anything if I weren’t working with Zoe, who’s much more organized than I am and also understands things like “business” and “public relations” and “interacting with the real world” better than I ever could.
B: Since 2020 you’ve recorded the Maniculum podcast, exploring Medieval history through the lens of TTRPG adventures. How did that come about?
M: I listen to a lot of podcasts just… generally, as something to keep myself occupied while I’m doing other tasks. Also, it’s been my experience that a lot of people who aren’t medievalists are still quite interested in the medieval period — I’ve had a lot of conversations where someone finds out what my field is, and immediately brings out surprisingly specific questions about medieval stuff that they’d just been wondering about recently. (This might have something to do with me mostly hanging around with other nerds, though.) This all kind of came together when, at an academic conference in 2019, I met some medievalists who hosted their own podcast — Saga Thing — and I thought, you know, this seems like a really fun way to engage with medieval texts, and there seems to be an audience for it. So I asked my friend Zoe if she’d like to do a podcast in a similar vein, and for a while we were kind of sporadically talking about it… then the COVID lockdowns hit. You may recall a lot of people picked up hobbies while in quarantine, and finally getting this podcast thing off the ground was ours. The TTRPG aspect kind of happened organically: it’s something we’re both into, so our discussions kept drifting in that direction even in the planning stage, and as time went on, it became more and more of a focus of the show.
Z: To elaborate on Mac’s answer a bit, since he nailed it – I see a lot of accessibility issues with modern fantasy and TTRPGs. Folks want the history of the middle ages, but it’s locked behind paywalls or translations or education barriers. This is our way of bridging that gap. To relate medieval stories to TTRPGs seems like a natural thing to do.
B: To your minds, what makes the Medieval period a rich resource for Game Masters? What aspects of it do most GMs miss or sleep on, that you think should be explored?
Z: Well, it’s no secret that most traditional fantasy derives from the European Middle Ages, and there’s a good reason for that – it’s a huge, vast world where magic was real and culture is similar enough to grasp but different enough to intrigue.
However, most GMs are following and using works that are already removed from the original sources of the period – and that have their own influences. There are a lot of awful stereotypes and language that the Victorian translators stuffed into their renditions of medieval sources that are not accurate. Plus, those translators cut out a lot of stuff they found too lewd, risque, or weird – so many people miss out on the true genre-bending, boundary-pushing themes of Medieval literature.
There’s so much to explore: the medievals had different senses of gender and spirituality than we do, and of course, there are so many little cultural differences. Medieval folks also had extremely different rules surrounding magic. That’s my favourite thing that I think GMs sleep on: magic. It’s my specialty, and I work it into all my fantasy material. To give a brief primer: many TTRPGs use magic transactionally, as mechanics, but that is not how medieval magic worked. Many times, magic could be transactional, but there is always a level of intentionality and will behind spells, prophecy, etc. that is hard to turn into mechanics, but is perfect for storytelling. Medieval magic always carries risk, and always has a price. I think many TTRPG systems neglect that.
M: The whole high fantasy genre, of which D&D is a part, takes a lot of inspiration from medieval history, literature, and aesthetics. But as the genre’s gotten bigger over the past several decades, it’s also become kind of self-sustaining.
For instance, elves and dwarves are kind of your default Fantasy Peoples, and in large part that’s because Tolkien’s interests lay in Old English and Old Norse literature, then D&D adapted their set of Fantasy Peoples mostly from Tolkien, and now you see them everywhere. A lot of work often goes into reinterpreting elves & dwarves over and over in new & different ways, and I’m not saying that’s not interesting, but you could also go back and pull inspiration from the various mythological peoples that never made their way into the fantasy genre.
The ones you see most often in medieval European texts are the various imaginary peoples described by Pliny the Elder, but those barely ever show up in modern fantasy. (Umberto Eco put several of them in Baudolino, C.S. Lewis had sciapods in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and I recall a story with a blemmye showing up in an issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction some time ago,* but they’re thin on the ground.) This is I think emblematic of the general point I’m trying to make — it’s common for GMs to recycle the same set of medieval-inspired bits & bobs that everyone’s been iterating on for decades, but there’s so much there that just never found its way in. It’s beneficial to go back to the well, as it were, and pull inspiration from the pre-modern texts everyone except specialists has forgotten about.
*N.B.: some Googling informs me that I am thinking of “The Blemmye’s Stratagem” by Bruce Sterling.
B: Your current project, the Marginal Worlds: Magic Item Deck, flows quite naturally from both your podcast and your backgrounds. What prompted you to delve into creating a physical product after so long creating virtual media?
M: The idea came from, as I recall, the episodes we did on the Old English Wonders of the East (the title of which is a bit unfortunate in an orientalism sort of way). It’s a text that describes various places, creatures, and peoples that the author thought you might find if you were travelling outside Europe, all of which are either wholly imaginary or so dramatically changed in transmission that they’re unrecognizable (e.g., a description of a very shy humanoid species was actually originally about a hippopotamus).
When reading it, our reaction was basically “this is a campaign setting!” So, we started talking about developing that, and it turned into the idea of writing for a setting that was based partly on manuscript marginalia, partly on the imaginary places medieval people placed on the edges of the map, and partly on general material from medieval literature & history.
The name “Marginal Worlds” itself comes from the combination of manuscript marginalia and the “edges of the map” idea — peoples like blemmyes and panotii were sometimes drawn in the literal margins of old maps. As for the physical nature of the product, the idea to start with a deck of magic items was Zoe’s, so I’ll leave that to her.
Z: Mac nailed it. To the deck itself, we wanted to start with something small. An entirely new TTRPG system and ruleset intimidated me, and we wanted to ensure that we didn’t alienate folks playing in established settings – hence the idea for a system-agnostic magic item deck. Anyone can play with these real medieval items, in any setting! Plus, it leaves room for us to grow the Marginal Worlds universe.
B: The items from Marginal Worlds run the gamut from weapons of lore like the Gae-Bolga to more homely items like The Helpful Pot of Mouse. How did you decide what should appear in Marginal Worlds? And is there a particular item you wanted to include but didn’t?
M: This is also one for Zoe. When we were designing the items, I spent I think a couple months just throwing as many ideas as possible into our shared document; Zoe’s the one who made most of the decisions regarding which should be included.
Z: The items we chose were mostly from manuscripts we covered on the podcast or that we read in university and already loved. When it came down to choosing which ones to include, it came down to making sure that no two items were too similar, and that each item was actually feasible to play. There’s a few items we didn’t quite find the best stats for – yet, anyway.
There is one I just discovered that I would want to add (maybe to our expanded deck if we hit that stretch goal): a Bridle of Fast Travel. The item itself is from the Munich Handbook of Necromancy, and includes a spell for how to enchant a bridle to summon a demon in the shape of a horse to transport you quickly to wherever you want to go. Seems like a cooler teleportation spell to me.
B: Marginal Worlds is designed as system agnostic while remaining compatible with D&D 5e. What were some of the challenges you faced balancing that agnosticism with compatibility?
M: The compatibility takes the form of an appendix that provides D&D 5e stats as necessary for those who want them, so I wouldn’t say we balanced agnosticism with compatibility so much as we focused on agnosticism and then also did some compatibility on the side to make sure people with less experience adapting TTRPG material could use it.
We chose to write a D&D 5e appendix specifically because that’s the most common entry point to the hobby, so we figure people who are new to TTRPGs are most likely to be familiar with it. Challenges, however, included making sure that the mechanics of each item were clear while still being as broadly described as possible, and the actual writing of said appendix — I never learned 5e, so I was of minimal help there.
Z: Like Mac said, we started with system neutrality, so adapting each item to D&D 5e stats after the fact wasn’t too hard, since it’s in the glossary and we had a fantastic team of playtesters familiar with many systems. Most of the challenge came with ensuring the system-neutral language itself was internally consistent and easily adaptable.
B: There’s no question Medieval art has a distinctive appearance. What were the challenges in pulling from that art style while updating the images for this project?
Soojin (our artist!): A lot of the items or props you see in medieval marginalia were very small on a physical page, which meant they usually were very simplified and abstracted. Since Marginal Worlds is a deck all about items, this posed a lot of design and style questions for how we wanted to approach the look of the project. In the end, we chose to use more realistic item proportions with medieval marginalia’s bright colors and heavy lines to evoke a period-appropriate feeling.
Z: To echo Soojin, most marginalia we referenced wasn’t done by artists, but by doodling monks, so some of it can have a cartoonish vibe. We wanted to blend the beautiful art styles of the D&D books and travel journals of the period with these doodles. Luckily, the colors and strokes of medieval ink and pens are distinct, so we used those heavily in our design. Additionally, most of the items don’t have marginalia – the Gae Bolga or the Nithstang, for instance, only have descriptions, so we utilized what’s been written in the text itself. Mac and I would translate for Soojin as necessary.
B: Your Kickstarter launched on June 1. For those that haven’t visited the campaign yet, can you tell me a bit about what folks should be excited about? What stretch goals do you have planned, and are there any you are excited to reach?
Z: Yes, absolutely! The deck itself is a deck of 50 system agnostic magic items pulled directly from medieval manuscripts with a GM’s guide to match. The cards feature stunning art, excerpts from the manuscripts themselves, and quick-play icons for features such as sentience, cursed nature, or legendary items. The Guide is written like an adventurer’s journal, so there’s plenty of marginalia and additional lore for each item. The Guide also has three additional Optional Play appendices, a D&D 5e appendix, and a glossary of all our sources, so folks can read about where each item came from.
Our first stretch goals exist to fund better versions of the deck and cards: better quality paper, linen cards, and a faux-leather cover to make it all feel as historic and medieval as possible. Later stretch goals include and expanded deck (25 more items!) and a printed copy of our Art & Development book for those especially interested in what our sources were and how we adapted them.
M: One of our stretch goals is additional cards in an expansion pack (backers vote on the items). I’d love to reach that one; I have ideas.
B: As designers and artists, what other games out there right now excite you? What are you drawn to or looking forward to from other creators?
M: I’ve fallen a bit behind the zeitgeist, so I honestly couldn’t tell you what’s big right now — “catch up on the current TTRPG scene” is actually one of the items on my “now that I’ve finished grad school” to-do list. In general terms, things I’m drawn to are rich worldbuilding, plentiful random tables, resource management mechanics, and anything that uses a lot of d12s (I just like them). A couple specific things… I’ve got a copy of Penumbra City on my shelf that I’m hoping to have time to get into soon, and as far as creators go, I tend to keep an eye out for anything Zedeck Siew is working on.
Z: Like Mac, I’m a little behind the curve. Game dev tends to leave you with a lot on your “to play” list, and little time to do it! I fell in love with Vaesen when it came out and have really enjoyed the expanded world – Vaesen is based on Nordic folklore in the same period many of our translations come from, so it feels like coming home, in a sense. Anyone who enjoys folklore or horror should check it out.
From a video game angle, I’ve adored Baldur’s Gate 3. It truly is a masterpiece of narrative design and RPG, so I’d encourage every designer to play it simply to study its mechanics.
B: Obviously your focus is currently on Marginal Worlds. But are there other projects on the horizon you can discuss? If this campaign goes well, is there the possibility for more Medieval inspired item decks?
M: As alluded to earlier, if this campaign goes well, we have a lot of ideas for projects under the Marginal Worlds banner. We’ve talked about doing a bestiary, or adventure modules, or a full setting book, or even its own system — the idea is to start small and work our way up. This may or may not include more item decks, depending on how things go.
Z: To echo Mac, we would love to expand on Marginal Worlds! I’d especially like to write up short modules and adventures set in various stories from the medieval world – Egil’s Saga, the world of Arthuriana, etc. Think of it like paging through a manuscript – Marginal Worlds doesn’t just contain one story, but many, each of which a gaming group can wander through together.
B: Again, thank you all again for talking with me! Where can folks find you if they want to follow what you’re up to?
M: There’s the Maniculum podcast, of course. (A benefit of using the less-common “maniculum” rather than the Anglicized “manicule” is that we’re really easy to Google.) I basically don’t exist on the Internet in a personal capacity at the moment, so you can’t really find me otherwise, sorry.
Z: Yes! For those looking to follow the Kickstarter, they can check out our Marginal Worlds Magic Item Deck here.
Our podcast, The Maniculum, can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is www.themaniculumpodcast.com.
We also have a wonderful discord community for academics, gamers, and anyone else looking for a nerdy corner of the internet. Feel free to join us there!
You can also find us on our Socials:
Thank you so much for having us, and for your support of the pod and project!
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Nothing to add, really! Hit them up at all the links above!
