omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it.
I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't, in short, care how realistic they are in those respects because I don't really know what that realism is nor how it has an impact on the game. I'm happy to live with a non-technical summary, and if something ends up not being realistic, I probably won't notice. Conversely, some of the people I game with are engineers who know enough about those topics to notice when they're not realistic and may be inclined to care about it when they're not, but drop them into an historical or historically themed campaign and they have not the first clue about the plausible range of technologies, social class structures, and the like. I can make an historical campaign as realistic as I like, and they won't be able to tell. (Similarly, I don't shoot for "immersion." I see that as a product of performance, not the written word, and not all gamers want to be method actors like that.)
Realism is often used incorrectly to mean what most games need to achieve, which is verisimilitude, the property of seeming to be real. Verisimilitude is achieved by presenting situations and resolutions to them which make sense to the player. It's framing things for the player in such a way that they're satisfied with the way it works out, or at least in a way which they understand and makes sense to them even if they're not happy about it in the moment. And making sense is not necessarily realistic. There are loads of genre conventions which violate strictly realistic conventions; just look at any action movie or superhero comic book. And rpgs are nothing if not heavily geared towards unrealistic genres. Indeed, I love me some wildly unrealistic approaches to injury and healing.
That said, realistic elements are often useful for promoting verisimilitude. Incorporating elements of realism into a game means that you won't be hurting verisimilitude for people familiar with them, and for everybody else, just the knowledge that the game is based on realistic elements gives it a certain plausibility. I know nothing about electoral politics in the early 19th century, says the player, but the author of "Tippecanoe and Geomorphic Tiler 2" has a PhD in it, so I'm going to trust it. The cachet of reality can be a powerful tool. The culture and events of the period and location may be unfamiliar and even weird to the player, but they get the assurance that everything presented to them actually happened, and there's little more convincing than reality (OK, I exaggerate, but it helps).
And from the "things to do" angle, human behavior and ingenuity are infinitely complex. Properly researched, an historical setting can provide countless events in which to participate and approaches to solving problems (and, of course, just as many challenges and obstacles to overcome) which would not occur to anyone on their own. Different societies have their own sets of political alliances to intrigue in. Other nations have their own distinctive terrain and architecture in which to fight battles and duel opponents. Material traditions provide endless vistas of fascinating treasures to find.
So, then, how does one go about using history as the basis for an rpg work? An historical ttrpg is an odd thing. It's history, but it's not. It has to serve many masters. Sure, it's largely technical rather than imaginative writing, like writers' guides to various historical periods with more material on killing things and taking their stuff, but that's true of rpg writing in general. The conflicts and contradictions go beyond that.
RPG writing is, first and foremost, entertainment rather than scholarly. It is literally for games. It's not even an educational game, since the point is to provide players with fodder they can use in making up new stuff, not to actually master historical facts and analysis (this is not Mavis Beacon Teaches The Investiture Controversy).
On the other hand, the point of the exercise is to provide useful bits of history. One of the things RPGs may strive for is verisimilitude, and being real, or at least drawing heavily from the real, provides buckets of verisimilitude. It's much easier to accept as realistic things which actually happened or existed ("A king standing barefoot in the snow? Forget it, Jack, it's Canossa."). Still, it requires a different approach than writing real history.
Then there's the question of who, in a metaphorical sense, is in the book. Doing history, it's nice to be able to make connections to the present day, but it's not necessary to make those connections immediate. But an rpg is all about providing tools and information to the user. It presents a fantasy of the past, but it's one which readers must be able to find themselves in. That's why I at least make an effort to look for sources which let me say something about race, gender, ability, and so on, so as many readers as possible can place themselves in the setting.
And, of course, there's speculation. Historians try not to do what-ifs, whereas historical games are all about what if. What if someone tries to sneak into the Forbidden City? What happens if Persian Immortals with AKs faced hoplites with fireball wands? What if Henry IV had a really good polar fleece? Good gaming works try to anticipate contingencies and suggest possibilities, both to ease the work of the game master in adjudicating games and suggesting interesting adventure scenarios.
So writing historically themed RPG material isn't doing history. It's not even doing popular history. But it's at least history-adjacent, like a based-on-real-events movie or costume drama. And sadly, that's the kind of history most people get, which puts a greater burden on the game writer to try to get the history right and not make actual historians' jobs harder.
Finally, one thing I've learned not to worry about is the availability of on-line sources. Indeed, if anything, my opinion of free on-line sources which the average reader is likely to encounter has gone down over the years. Wikipedia and the like sound like a threat to the historical ttrpg writer because they put a lot of information out there, but freely available on-line sources have, from my point of view, some profound deficiencies. I've addressed that before, but I'll do it again. Among other things, on-line sources are, it turns out, typically out of date to a greater or lesser degree. Our understanding of the past changes all the time (new evidence pops up, historians ask new questions, etc.), and older sources reflect things which we no longer believe are true. Worse yet, the farther back you go, the more likely sources are to be racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudiced. Online sources also often repeat one another. Search for a given person or place, and you'll hit a lot of sources which give you some subset of the same narratives and lists of facts over and over again, so you can read a lot but learn very little. And they don't focus on actually useful topics. I find that when I search for most historical locations and periods, I mostly get high level kings-and-battles type history, art history, and literature. That's all well and good, but it's not necessarily very good at painting a picture of everyday life which the GM can use to build a convincing setting, nor a lot of novel and interesting situations and relationships which can drive adventures which feel specific to that time and place. It remains the case that a lot of material remains behind paywall or locked up in physical volumes. And that doesn't even begin to get into the dangers posed by LLM-generated summaries, which often start by reading dubious sources and compound problems by not understanding them even on their own terms.
Now, will some people, wanting to add an historical gloss to their campaign, do a google search on the name of their location and base their campaign on whatever comes up? Sure. But, as an author, I can't really be concerned about that. There are always people willing to settle for what's cheapest rather than buy your painstakingly assembled book. And that's true of everything. Some people will go with a free core rules set rather than a proprietary system. Some people will adapt the rules they've got to a particular purpose rather than buy specialized rules for it. Some will make up adventures rather than buy them. And that's fine. They each want particular things from their gaming experience and will do what they feel they should to get it, and the existence of people who go those cheaper routes don't negate those who do not. I write for people going after a particular set of gaming experiences. People who don't were never going to be my customers anyway.
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