Tales from Dragon Magazine: The Malding of Kadesh

    One of the great joys of reading old Dragon Magazine is that it offers a perhaps-unintended amount of insight into the gamer mind, and nowhere is this more true than the letters pages. In these, Dungeons and Dragons players from across the world compared notes, bitched about movies, and called each other idiots. I would like to share with you all a story that unfolded around the time I was born, which I am calling The Malding of Kadesh. First, however, some background:

What's a Kadesh? 

Via Wikipedia, an Egyptian depiction of the battle of Kadesh. Note how Ramesses II is larger than the figures he is fighting. That's some grade-A propaganda.

    The battle of Kadesh was a battle fought between the Egyptians and the Hittites in the 1200s BCE. One of the reasons it stands out is because it is the first major battle where we have enough records to make out invididual tactics, and it led to what is possibly the oldest surviving written peace treaty. Those actual tactics aren't going to be relevant here, but it is worth noting the nature of the evidence-pretty much everything we have was written by the Egyptians. According to one of my graduate professors, Dr. Brand (who I trust given he wrote a biography of Ramesses II while I was taking his class) there is a lot of ambiguity given that provenance and we should take Ramesses' narrative that he was super badass and in mortal peril as simply a differing kind of propaganda than his predecessors (who simply recorded that they battlemogged all of their opponents effortlessly). All of which to say, the nature of the evidence is complicated, and should be treated as such.

Legends of the Nile 

    In March of 2000, I was born. Also Bruce F. Beyers' article Legends of the Nile was published in Dragon Magazine #269. Legends of the Nile falls under the perennial Dragon page-filler "Let's give this real person/fictional character stats!" (For those curious, for instance, the Red Sails setting from Dragon 290 lists Atilla the Hun as a 17th-level fighter...and that's it). Beyers' Ramesses is a 20th-level warrior, who has some fun nonweapon proficiencies and whose portrait cuts an imposing figure.

Bruce Beyers' stats for Ramesses. The magic items are further down and I wanted to keep the screenshot small. 

    Something notable is that as Beyers moves forward in time-away from figures more cloaked in legend to figures more firmly constrained by historical fact-their levels go down. Imhotep is 34th level, Ramesses II (600 years later) is 20th level, while Ramesses III (who ruled but 30 years later) was 15th. The most interesting (and odd) bit, however, is how Beyers writes that the Hittites used iron at the Battle of Kadesh, and in the "roleplaying notes" he mentions Ramesses being eager to learn of these new iron weapons, despite living hundreds of years before the Iron Age. So let's talk about metallurgy for a second.

    Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, two metals that basically never occur naturally in the same place. However, because bronze has a much lower melting point than iron, it's a lot easier to work when you're at the bottom of the tech tree, assuming you can get your hands on both metals. This made the Bronze Age world particularly reliant on international trade, and when that went away, people had to learn how to work with iron. All of which to say that to Ramesses II and his contemporaries, bronze weapons would have been of better make than iron weapons, and thus much more desirable.

Oliver's Cage Gets Rattled

    In the letters page of Dragon #273 (July, 2000), Oliver Dickinson, a now-retired archaeologist specializing in the Myceneans, had some stuff to say about Beyers' approach to history. As he says, "Academics who are interested in fantasy and roleplaying need to accustom themselves to reading dogmatic but erroneous statements about topics on which they know a good deal without doing more than uttering a few imprecations." which...if that doesn't describe my fucking life I don't know what does. He has a few chief issues:

1. Bruce didn't cite any sources
2. Dickinson quibbles with Bruce's interpretation of the battle (again, this is an easy thing to disagree on because our only major source is state-funded propaganda). 
3. The iron thing I discussed above-the idea the Hittites were using iron is, frankly, nonsense. Dickinson describes steam rising from his ears, and frankly I don't blame him.

    This is the point where Dickinson exits the story, as best I can tell. He wrote some Glorantha material, and presumably is enjoying his retirement, though according to his academia.edu page, he got published as recently as 2019. I guess old habits die hard.

"School is now in session"

    "My suspicions about modern man's insecurities are confirmed on a regular basis..." Bruce opens a letter published in Dragon #275 (September 2000). "The facts are that the ancient man was physically more adept, more intelligent, and most assuredly more gallant and honorable than we are." Bruce goes on tangent after tangent about the degradation of man from a past state of superiority to a state of weakness today, citing Homer describing the men of his past as stronger, lots of cool stuff ancient scientists did, and how the Spartans had an unmatched espirit de corps-only 300 against the Persians!-despite the fact that scholars had known for decades that the number was higher than that and the Sparta contingent was mostly made up of the people they owned-Herodotus himself counts the helots as war dead. 

Bruce uses the world balderdash, which I find delightful.

    In the rest of his rebuttal, Bruce basically unintentionally admits that he bought into the (again, intentional state-sponsored) propaganda of Ramesses II uncritically, saying "To suggest that Ramses' interdiction of the Hittite Army was a mere accident is to sell short perhaps one of the greatest tactical minds of all time." 

    "Sources. He says he wants sources. School is now in session"

    And so Bruce exits our story, I couldn't track down anything specific about him. He never did bring up Dickinson's critique about the iron, though.

A New Challenger Approaches

    One of the curious things about the Dragon publication schedule is it means that response via snail mail takes two issues to be published, so in Dragon #277 (November, 2000) we get Nicholas Gregorio of Pennsylvania fulfilling the role of rebutting Bruce, specifically his "Modern man has declined" argument. Gregorio argues for works of brilliance like those of Isaac Newton, Rene Descarters, or Albert Einstein, moments of comradery like the Alamo or French Foreign Legion, and brings up the ever-relevant "Roman roads don't have to deal with the stress of modern cars" when discussing the monuments of the past. He even caught stuff I didn't, like the purpose of the Hubble Space Telescope and how calling Ptolemy the father of calculus is "Hogwash." Most delightfully, he asks of Bruce "Did you even read the Almagest?" and "Do you even read bro?" is just absolutely perfect.

    I looked a few issues ahead, there doesn't seem to be any follow-up. So what did we learn here?

Conclusion, or: The Way We Talk

    So, you might be asking, why did I share this with you? First off, because Bruce's letter is funny. It's peak "Guy getting indignant and using big words to hide the fact that he's mad." The second reason, however, is because of this note the editors put at the end of said letter:

    A lot has been said about how social media platforms are deliberately pushing provocative content in order to gain greater engagement, and I don't want to repeat that here, but I do want to point that the TTRPG sphere is not immune to this, and that the powers that be have been encouraging it as a way to sell you stuff at least since I was born. And we're still trapped in these outrage loops today-someone says something dumb, everyone dunks on them, someone else who said something less dumb but similar gets their feelings hurt about it, etc. It's been a thing since the days of forums and, as we can see, exists in print form too.

    The solution is, as Christian Hendricks puts it, not more discourse, or imposing a tax on discourse, but better discourse. Being thoughtful, being positive, maybe being willing to hedge yourself a bit. Lord knows this is all something I struggle with. I've had a few existential crises over the fact that the two of the most popular things I've ever written (at least at time of writing) are essentially dunking on a crowdfunding campaign. Am I an outrage merchant? Is that my legacy? Am I contributing to it even now by delving into this decades-old magazine argument where up to 2/3 of the participants might be dead?

    I don't know.

    I...I don't know.