Getting Medieval: An Interview with our Narrative Consultant and Song Writer, James Baillie

Hail and well met! How farest thou? Ahem. As you may be aware, Steam is about to host a medieval festival. This seems like a good opportunity to chat about Innkeep and things medieval with our narrative consultant and song writer, James Baillie. James is a bonafide academic medievalist, specialising in Byzantine and Georgian history, as well as a game developer, writer, and all-round creative type. He is the founder of the online creative community, Exilian, and also runs Coding Medieval Worlds, an ongoing yearly conference that brings together medievalists and game developers. When you’re encountering some particularly interesting lore in Innkeep, or listening to a cool song, there’s a good chance that James is behind it!

Hi James! Could you tell us what medievalism actually is? What is a medievalist? Tell me what you get up to.

A medievalist (noun) is a fairly general term for people who work with or study the medieval in all its forms. Medievalism, though, and medievalist as its related adjective are a bit different: whereas medieval history is the study of what actually happened or was written down in the medieval period, when academics talk about medievalism we mean the ways that the medieval appears today, and the things we associate with the middle ages as an idea. So there can be things that are medieval but not used much in medievalisms (people often think of the medieval period as somewhat lawless and its lawgivers as brutally arbitrary leaders whose word was the only law, for example: in reality law codes and documents are some of the biggest segments of medieval evidence we have), and very un-medieval things that people today associate with the middle ages anyway (orcs in the way people think of them today, which are largely an invention of the later 20th century but are nonetheless a quintessential part of “medieval fantasy”).

As a medievalist I both study ‘actual’ medieval history (or at least, the traces and discussions about it we can have based on our surviving evidence) and also medievalisms today. My particular focus points are the medieval history of the Caucasus region, particularly the small country of Georgia, but also the ways in which computers and history interact. I work on databases and data structures for studying history and the ways in which our ideas about history get turned into those formats – which as well as academic database work also includes studying computer games, as one very common way that people today interact with medievalisms in computer formats.

So what initially got you interested in the medieval period?

I was so young when I got interested first that it’s almost hard to say: I read books, especially historical atlases which I always loved, and I watched shows like Time Team and read books on mythology and visited castles with my family, so there was a fair bit mixed into my childhood. I played Civilisation II and Age of Empires I & II as a child, and the Total War games, which I think influenced how I think about history in quite structural, computer-represented terms and what we can do with that. 

My more specific interests grew as a teenager when I went to a second hand bookshop and picked up Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople, which is not fantastic history but is brilliant storytelling about the dramatic end of the Byzantine/east Roman world. I’ve always had a fascination with things outside the box, and the eastern Christian world as something that was neither classic knights & castles nor the medieval Islamic world with which it’s more often contrasted particularly caught my attention. That eventually brought me to the study of the complex worlds and religious and ethnic co-existences in the medieval Caucasus, which is now my main historical area of interest.

Works in the fantasy genre (including Innkeep!) typically use a medieval-like world as a kind of starting point, into which then we insert the ‘fantastic’ elements like magic, and elves and soon. What do you think draws us in this direction? Is it a romanticism for the past? Or maybe the relatively blank canvas it affords given our distance from that time?

I think the distance is a huge element: the medieval period is far enough back that it represents a world that has a particular balance of familiarity and distance for modern western/European audiences (I think the dynamics are a bit different in e.g. China and Japan, and you often see other parts of the world trying to adapt definitions of “medieval” backwards or forwards to try and capture a particular sense of the medieval instead of a strict time period).

There’s also a complicated romanticism involved: today most people don’t have the sort of 19th century idea of demure damsels and holy knights, but people still often impose a sense of simplicity and heroism back onto medieval settings – or, more worryingly, take very dark and ahistorically unpleasant imaginings of the middle ages and romanticise those as somehow a good thing, especially inventing ideas of “traditional” manhood or womanhood or Christianity and papering over the much more colourful and varied realities of how people lived and expressed themselves. So there’s always a tension in how we romanticise and re-imagine the past, and you’re right that it can give, if not a blank canvas, certainly lots of space to write different sorts of stories for better and sadly also sometimes for worse.

From a medievalist perspective, what do you think are some of the major tropes or misunderstandings we have about the medieval world that you see in games? 

I have a particular bugbear about the way that a certain grey-brown “gritty cynical” aesthetic becomes a totally assumed norm in medievalism-filled worlds. Medieval people saw and heard a whole range of diverse colours and sounds in their lives – including much more abundant wildlife than most people come across today, and night skies without light pollution which nowadays one has to be more or less out in a desert to witness. Medieval texts are full of people being very flamboyant about their emotions and piety, too: I think there’s a lot of interest that we can miss in exploring the different things that medieval people valued and the ways they express themselves through game-worlds. I’d like more games to explore medieval human interactions and their senses of fun and beauty, and sometimes to challenge players with situations that feel less familiar and less part of a standard fantasy narrative.

Also, as much as it’s core to the game we’re building, the fantasy trope of every tavern being a big coaching inn! Tiny alehouses in people’s front rooms, caravanserai type structures for traders, and travellers and guests being expected to stay in someone’s actual house or in their own encampments in most villages, would all have been pretty standard possibilities in the past and I think mixing things like that up more can create some interesting social situations when running D&D games or writing RPGs. We’re building a brilliant tavern-centred story, but you, dear reader, don’t have to! 

Conversely, people often ask me about whether “inaccuracy” bothers me – to which the answer is, not really because total accuracy isn’t possible anyway! What’s included and what’s excluded from a game are more interesting questions than what it gets accurate, a lot of the time. As we can’t include everything, I’d often rather have a game that says something interesting or lets you experience a more interesting different idea from the past – maybe playing with medieval ideas of hospitality, or exploring less common different medieval texts, or thinking about how people dressed or lived in particular inhospitable places –  than a game that just spends a lot of time making their 3D sword models look right and then runs as a generic fighting simulator that doesn’t give people much new sense of the past (or even what combat is actually like). 

Even if we assume that being “historically accurate” is not our goal (especially in the fantasy genre!), how do you think medievalism can help enrich games with a medieval-inspired setting? 

Oh, so many ways – there are tons of things in medieval worlds and thought that I’d love to see turn up in games. Medieval worlds can give us lots of ideas for how people explained, imagined, interacted and believed in a world that looked like our own but didn’t have all the same foundations of big regulatory states and empirical scientific world-views that ours rests upon: that gives us a powerful baseline from which to explore what sorts of fantasy worlds we can create in ways that feel real and say interesting things about how human societies can work.

There’s also lots of more specific stuff: the medieval world, especially when we get outside western Europe though even there, has so much more strange stuff and under-explored ways of doing things than we give it credit for. We’ve got mad hermits sitting on giant pillars with monks collecting around them, local law-codes giving precise details for how much you get paid for killing wolves and what to do with corpses you find on the road-side, people having to physically move churches because so many people had illegally buried relatives under the foundations that it was impractical to move them, details of horrifying earthquakes that tail off into monks giving tips on local fishing spots, different ways to try and reduce coin counterfeiting, and all the different ways people lived that aren’t just farming and fighting. I can’t think of a single computer game that models annual movements of pastoralists between high pastures and valley-bottoms with their flocks, despite this a) making for some really interesting differences in a setting and b) being actually quite a common system across lots of bits of Eurasia. And that’s just things that we think plausibly actually happened! In medieval thought-worlds and texts there’s even more involved – blemmyes and sciapods and kadjis and devis, people who wrap spell-scrolls round their legs to be able to walk at incredible speed, arguments between Nature and Nurture over what gender a character will turn out to be, female Islamic saints who are surprisingly snarky in direct conversations with God, and so much more besides. We still have so much out there to explore and make fun games with.

What was your process like for writing world lore for Innkeep? There’s so many interesting details, particularly when it comes to odd little beliefs that people might have about certain things. 

A lot of it is finding the crossover point between the everyday, the world, and gameplay.

The world is the starting point: we’re trying to tell the player about the world, so they can then understand it better and interact with it better, and also so that they feel like they’re in a rich, defined culture, not just a thin frame veneer over people who think and talk just like modern Brits, Americans or Australians. So having a good sense of how the big social and cultural structures fit together in the back of my head is an important starting point – what are the big divides in these societies, how do people identify themselves and how do they assess each other, what sorts of networks between people can happen, and so on.

The everyday I think is then an important filter. It’s very easy for fantasy world-building to get caught up in endless lists of historical world details as an author tries to create a deep “canon” of “things that happened”. Whilst it can be good to have that for reference as an author, there are two problems with this in a game, one of which is that it’s often almost impossible for anyone to remember. The other more interesting problem is that this isn’t really what historical information is like: we do have annal and chronicle type accounts, but they’re often messy and contradict themselves let alone each other. Theology and spiritual beliefs are often even more personal and messy and argued over. So much more interesting is going to be the question of what individuals think and what people do each day – sometimes literally I end up thinking through activities and situations that might come up through a day in someone’s life – and then using that as a basis for thinking about what matters to these people, about what they believe but also  what they do about those beliefs in practice.

Then the things to develop from that have to be things that the player can interact with and see. Little beliefs are great for this, because they can be casually dropped into conversations, and they can show that these people do have particular beliefs and ideas that might not be familiar to us in ways that involve that interaction with the immediate world around them. A good sized well of cross-cultural folklore and history knowledge is really helpful for this sort of exercise!

You’ve also written a number of songs for Innkeep! When did you start writing your own songs? 

I first wrote songs in high school, though my first recordings of anything were done at university. I’ve sung for as long as I can remember, I think it’s such a good form of expression and one that it’s a pity we often kind of restrict to something we imagine professionals doing in the modern world.

Over the years since, I’ve written a lot of songs, including fan songs about a whole bunch of games and fandoms (including but not limited to Pillars of Eternity, Discworld, Dragon Age, Blue Prince, Baldur’s Gate, and Mount & Blade), and quite a lot of my own, mixing some more purely folksy songs with more specific fantasy-world pieces. I also wrote tavern songs for my own game the Exile Princes so it was a pretty natural jump to doing that for Innkeep too.

I’m generally a lyrics-first songwriter, or perhaps I’m really a poet who adds tunes to the poems sometimes: my accompaniments are usually very sparse, and I rely on the words more than the tunes to carry what I’m doing. That translates pretty well to tavern singing I think, where you want something one person can perform in a reasonably simple and memorable way. I think one thing a lot of fantasy music digs into which I’ve tried not to follow for Innkeep is telling very specific character stories, whereas tavern songs need to have that quite generalised quality and be accessible to everyone in the room.

Your songs are written in a number of different styles, to reflect the different classes that make up the world of Innkeep. Was there some historical forms of songwriting you were drawing on to help you do this? 

Absolutely. A lot of my songwriting is mostly heavily based on English folk styles. There are several sub-varieties of song within that, and those who know the genre will be able to see those resonances. Folk song is interesting in that it’s another thing that helps us produce that “medieval” feel without actually being medieval, most of the sorts of songs I’m drawing on were collected much more recently. Some probably have much older roots but like most non-elite culture we have no way of proving that. I think there are some things that make them well suited to reflecting pre-modern life though – some of the rhythms and choruses are particularly helpful for memorable, communal singing, having refrain lines that a whole tavern or group of farm-workers could echo. There’s also a use of unnamed “stock characters” – the vagabond gone wandering, the bandit about to be hung – who as archetypes help us tell you what sorts of concerns and imagined people might be of interest to the ordinary folk who come to your tavern.

However, there are other influences too. When moving up the social ladder and thinking about the songs our posher guests might enjoy, I tapped into the feel and wordings of religious hymns and more formal 16th century song styles (think e.g. Greensleeves). Some of this explicitly appeals to feel more than actuality: for example, whilst I have planned a “lore retcon” ingame reason for why this turn of phrase happens, there’s one song that starts with the words “Thou gods”. This is plainly wrong in and of itself – thou is the traditional informal singular form, you was originally just the plural and potentially more formal form, which is why we say you are not you is. However, we’re so used to thee/thou having a sort of older-timey, formal connotation that it adds to the feel of it being older, more sacred music.

You also established an online creative community, called Exilian, which I believe has now been running for 18 years! How did that come about?

Yes, Exilian has been a big part of my life for what’s now over half of that life, which is strange to think about! We’re a community for all sorts of small creative projects, including a web forum and regular virtual meetup sessions.

The site initially grew out of game modding communities – I used to do a lot of modding for Total War games (Warhammer:Total War and Narnia: Total War for Rome TW) and for Mount & Blade (Southern Realms) – but then shifted towards more general thoughtful creativity, indie games, and writing over time. I think something that I’ve always wanted to do is build the sorts of communities where people can actually get to know each other through creating things together and discussing ongoing projects and gaming in more depth, so that it’s not just another ephemeral interaction lost on a timeline. We’ve lost some of that in the swamp of modern social media with everyone trying to yell over each other in the same space and I think that leaves many people feeling exhausted and unheard. A forum is in some ways a cranky older way of communicating, but I think it actually encourages a more thought out, more human sort of engagement which I really value.

We also have quite a few other community projects, in particular our articles section which has everything from creative writing and game dev ideas to curious information about weird animals. And Exilian co-sponsors the annual Coding Medieval Worlds workshops, which I launched as a space to throw computer game developers and historians together to exchange ideas. That series has now been running for over five years and always has some brilliant discussions: you can catch some of the talks and panels from over the years on our YouTube channel.

A final question! If any of our readers are interested in learning more about the medieval world, can you point them towards any helpful resources as a starting point?

It’s such a big topic! One thing I’d always say is don’t feel afraid to approach a specialist on whatever it is you want to know about. Academics are often pretty happy to share reading recommendations and thoughts on their subject areas. Following the references and paper trail is an important core skill: Wikipedia might not be a great resource but it often has useful references to better texts which you can then look at in more detail. From a gamer’s perspective, a few general interest resources I’ve contributed to include some pieces in the back catalogue of Exilian Articles; the blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, more classical than medieval history but is a really good grounding for a general enthusiast on the premodern world; and the Maniculum podcast, which is two very good scholars looking at medieval texts for D&D and tabletop game inspiration.

A couple of “don’ts” as well. AI is between slightly and spectacularly bad for knowledge of the premodern past: it tends to regurgitate old but common narratives over recent research, and is also bad at handling areas that go beyond its training data, either where the research is more niche or where we simply don’t know, appearing to confidently fill in gaps in pretty shoddy ways. There are also many, many social media pages and YouTube channels giving potted “history facts” which are often of pretty ropey quality. Do your research about the people you’re listening to, and ideally find out what other historians think about them – even if someone has “professor” in their title, sometimes cranks or scholars with bad credentials get a lot of online hearing precisely because they’re saying things that the material we have doesn’t support or using the Middle Ages in particular ways you need to be aware of.

One of the issues with learning about the medieval world that I’ve found is that often what people want to know and what academics work on are quite different. Partly that’s because academics know more about what we can know – what is, and isn’t, covered in our historical material, and what we can derive from that. The different ways historical people thought about time, for example, are fascinating, often much more cyclical than the linear ideas of progress we have today, but this often doesn’t occur to people. Conversely, I think many of us historians are over-nervous about trying to discuss what goes in the gaps where our material is silent, which often include the every-day realities that people want to think about and relate to. I think part of the power of using the middle ages creatively, as we’re doing in Innkeep, is making the sorts of spaces where we can use those past understandings to think through building fleshed-out worlds, going through a very human process of building understandings into stories, and – without necessarily claiming “truth” – nonetheless giving some life back to voices, ideas, and tales from the past.

Thanks James!

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Our next blog post is going to be a closer look at the setting of Innkeep: the world of Cirrhul! I’ve got something very cool indeed to show off then. In fact, here’s a little sneak peek…

Until next time.

Daniel

Wishlist Innkeep on steam!