What Elfgames Can Learn From Kingdom Come: Deliverance

     I've been spending a lot of time playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. To sum the game up briefly, imagine if Skyrim or The Witcher 3 were made by the most annoying person you know, and that would be pretty close. The game sets itself apart from other fantasy games by being decidedly non-fantasy: it's set in Bohemia (modern Czechia) in 1403, and aside from the occasional hallucination features exactly no magic. The game's devotion to this kind of realism is admirable, even if it seems like the Czech nationalist kind of racism that spawns such attention to detail. But the sequel lets you be a gay man, and it has at least one black person in it, so we're going to move past all that, even though the higher-ups at Warhorse can eat a bag of dicks. There's lots of cool things to talk about, from the way the game adheres to pre-modern economies even when that's really inconvenient, to the feeling of looking at a town I've never been to and recognizing the layout because I'd beaten the snot out of a punk-ass nobleman I might be sleeping with in a few dozen hours, to the way the KCD2's second area features a city that felt more massive than the sprawling metropolis of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. Instead, I want to talk today about something I found kind of interesting, but is also kind of obvious:

    The protagonist, Henry of Skalitz, has accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior.

 

    On some level, this isn't surprising: the game is set in 1403, of course Henry is a Catholic. But it's refreshing in a way because so much of modern roleplaying (both tabletop and computer) is divorced from that kind of faith. Off the top of my head, there's...Dragon Age? The Pillars games? And that makes sense: the world of Dungeons and Dragons is a polytheistic society as conceived by a former Jehovah's Witness, so of course it won't match up with historical polytheism. That's not even necessarily a bad thing, of course; you shouldn't need to write a treatise on theology to pretend to smooch an elf. But I wanted to share a few things from the game that made an impact on me during my playthrough:

• Commonplace Invocation: People make the sign of the cross a lot in KCD2. Like a lot a lot. Going on pilgrimages is a way to improve your reputation if you've been a naughty boy, and leads to Henry giving prayers like the one above. A Scholarship perk lets you do such a thing at any altar, including in the players home in one DLC. Shrines can be found throughout the world, as can various church representatives all willing to share their thoughts with you. So when playing a cleric or paladin or whatever, consider just having a little pray on things every so often, if only to flavor your character's decision-making process. 
• Sectarian Conflict: Sectarian conflict is one of the underlying currents of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. On the one hand, the entirety of the game's story has the prelude to the Hussite Wars, and the gradual breakdown of religious norms in the Christian world is what's gonna lead to a whole lot of strife for the next few hundred years. On the other hand, even small-scale bits of conflict, such as a group of monks trying to prevent a book from being censored, or those monks and the town clergy arguing over whether a church should be constructed, are rich grounds for adventuring. This matters less in societies where orthopraxy (right practice) is valued over orthodoxy (right belief), but arguments over funding the Temple of Tyr are rife with potential patrons.
• Faith as a Political Force: Those monks aren't just concerned about that new church for the sake of it, but because building a new church would cut into their tax base. Rather than just being a source of healing and quest hooks, make the local temples matter. Much like nobility or burghers, the leaders of any given faith often have access to money, in some cases because those are the same people. Make them throw that weight around. You don't get the big fancy temples just because people like you, and sometimes a group of adventurers makes for the perfect deniable asset.
• People Believe in Their Own Religion: We live in an increasingly secular world. I can count the number of times I've been in a church on two hands, and most of those were for weddings. To paraphrase Bret Deveraux again, there is a tendency to assume that "smart" people (which usually means wealthy people) couldn't possibly have believed in older religions, but they did. They followed and they listened and they were concerned for their souls and religion brought them spiritual comfort (for a great example of this kind of thing in a modern movie, watch Wake Up Dead Man. It's also just a good movie.) People often wonder at what a fantasy world would look like, given that divinity and magic are real, but magic and divinity were real to these people too. In KCD2, that perk I brought up above gives Henry a "Guardian Angel" buff that makes him harder to kill, because his faith helps him feel stronger. In a world with Bless spells and Turn Undead, I can only imagine that would be stronger.

    I'm a little biased, of course. I am a massive history pervert, with a Master's to show it, so of course I think this kind of thing is interesting. But I do feel part of the reason that KCD2 feels so fresh to a lot of people is because fantasy RPGs (including lots of elfgames) have fictional foundations built on pink slime rather than anything original (Hayao Miyazaki talks about the same thing happening to anime) such that simply basing stuff on actual things that actually happened feels fresh and new. Plus, in what other game can you say to yourself "I really need to get a new waffenrock"?

You're running a campaign inspired by the Italian Wars? Sign me up!