Well-Armed Entrepreneurs
A few thoughts gathered while reading Kim MacQuarrie’s excellent book, The Last Days of the Incas, an account of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire…
If you’ve played D&D more than a little, you’ve almost certainly had a character who was a member of an “adventuring company”. Such a construct is notable for its rarity in actual adventure/sci-fi/fantasy literature – its a mechanic borne of gaming needs (or more precisely, gaming when such gaming is based on commerce and profit motive), rather than narrative needs. The few exceptions I can think of, such as Joss Whedon’s Serenity/Firefly, serve only to help prove the rule…
If not from literature, well then, perhaps from history? Looking for a historical precedent for the idea of adventuring companies is an instructive task, and it leads us straight away to the Spanish conquistadors. However, an examination of the historical precedent may leave us feeling morally inadequate when we return to our D&D parlors and basements.
The Spanish conquest, plunder, and colonization of the New World was hardly an organized affair. It was not carried out by career soldiers, and indeed Europe had been bereft of such ever since the Roman legions ceased to be. Rather it was carried out by adventuring companies, who applied for and were granted charters by the government to explore blank areas on the map; rather not unlike getting a fishing license. Would-be adventurers typically hailed from the poorest and meanest regions of Spain – Extremadura (best region name ever!) and its surroundings produced not only Cortes and Pizarro, but also Balboa, Ponce de Leon and de Soto.
A novice adventurer would sign on with a seasoned band of leaders who were recruiting a new company, themselves likely veterans of the same system. Such a company might have a few hundred members – what could reasonably be transported and deployed with a few ships. The charter would detail the value of what each member was contributing in material value – weapons, armor, horses, tack, other provisions, and the proceeds of the expedition were to be divided among any surviving members in proportion to what was “put in”. Basically these were commoners or thugs with not a shred of practical experience – MacQuarrie called them “well-armed entrepreneurs”.
So… proceeds? Implicitly understood and necessarily vital to the entire enterprise was that the adventuring company was going to wade into some area of native civilization heretofore unclaimed by the Spanish crown, and, well, claim it. And loot it. And subjugate the natives and carry a great many of them off as slaves, and reduce the rest to serfdom. This “profit motive” was the driver of the entire system.
Many such expeditions met with failure, either heavy losses of members, or an inability to find a native peoples of sufficient wealth to make the trip “pay”, or both. On occasion someone like Cortez would hit the jackpot by stumbling upon the Aztec empire and looting it silly. There was a real “game” here in that adventurers depended on news of others’ exploits to find out where the action was, but of course if your group stumbled upon some new vein of wealth, you did everything you could to keep it a secret. In such fits and starts did Spanish holdings grow across a century.
Pizarro himself had been kicking about on New World adventures for a good twenty years: he was well past his prime and embittered over how the much younger Cortez had found and conquered the Aztecs. In his late forties and fifties has led his own company on an exploration down the Pacific coast, south from Panama. As such, he was the first to reach the outskirts of the massive Incan empire. (Unbeknownst to Pizarro, the Incans were in a state of major upheaval and ripe to be conquered, sliding though a particularly nasty war of succession, which was in fact precipitated by the arrival of European smallpox in advance of the actual European conquerers. But I digress.)
Pizarro, recognizing the moment he had been waiting his whole life for, acted shrewdly. He gathered up the best evidence of riches and culture he could from that first contact with the Incas, packed it up a secretly as he could, and then hightailed it all the way back to Spain. There, he secured an audience with the king himself, and managed to get granted a very special charter that gave his company exclusive rights to “explore” this new region. This to-be Viceroyalty of Peru was modeled after the Viceroyalty of New Spain granted to Cortez in Aztec Mexico. While it seemed extremely generous on the Crown’s part, the major stipulation was that it provided no financial assistance whatsoever. In essence, it said: sure, it’s all yours, you just have to go get it yourself.
(Oh and by the way: actual elapsed time before Pizarro got back and underway with the serious business of conquistadoring – four years. And while he was, in game terms, something like a 20th-level character – probably a fighter or rogue rather than Cavalier, since he was notably averse to mounted combat, to say nothing of the fact that Cavaliers have been missing for the last two editions of D&D! – he was just as susceptible to a rattlesnake bite as he was at first level. What an enormously goofy game system we subscribe to!)
In D&D parlance, we are expectant of a similar truth – there’s gold and jewels and magic just lying around in dark and dangerous places. It’s all yours, you just have to go get it yourself. A necessary evil of this conceit is the necessity of evil: adventuring companies are good, because monsters are evil. Perhaps we use “good” to mean “civilized” and “evil” to mean “not so much”. Such as how the Norse who made it to North America tagged the Indians as Skrælings – “barbarians” at best, but with a generally more sinister connotation. But even this idea comes under moral strain with the Spaniards, who explicitly sought out the most civilized cultures they could find, specifically because that’s where you found the most riches (and people) to plunder. So instead of going after the goblin rabble, you are setting out to discover, demolish, and plunder the Yuan-Ti kingdom. (Seriously – go finish off the Dragonborn instead, please!)
A second and equally weak line of defense is the spread of your “good” diety, which was the best moral cover the Europeans could provide themselves, in a pretty wink-wink nudge-nudge kind of way. Again, in D&D it’s a no-go. It’s not reasonable to expect that your adventuring party hopes to make converts to the sun-god Pelor out of those goblin hordes. No no no, you’re going to smash and destroy them exactly because they aren’t followers of Pelor. Imagine the disappointment if, before that climactic final boss battle, the boss and his followers capitulated and embraced Pelor…
So anyway, the next time your good-aligned character is asked to join an adventuring company, he or she would be well-advised to consider the grave moral peril of such a shady relationship… As DM I might just have to bust you down to “Unaligned”.
Posted on September 30th, 2008 at 1:04 pm. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
Really interesting post. Makes me think of a whole new bunch of adventure hooks.
But when looking back at D&D for us old-timers, I can think of two areas where this really was the MO of the campaign world.
First was the plain D&D ‘Mystara’ campaing module X1, The Isle of Dread. Big unexplored map for the PC’s to fill in, loose idea of riches and danger to be found, a big sea voyage, and natives that were at best a small threat to the PC’s equipment.
This was 1981, so early on in D&D History, that the Mystara campaign was not even called that. But it opened up the world to something just like you detailed with Pizzaro and Cortez.
They later approached this more systematicaly with module CM1, Test of the Warlords published in 1984 by the great Douglas Niles. This was a big open map of tundra, and wild forests that two great empires (Thyatis and Alphatia). Frost Giants, wild Dragons, and other big old baddies populated this wild area, and the new kingdoms that were forming in this land needed brave nobles to stake out the wilderness and claim the land for the crown (or mostly themselves). Wonderfully, the DM’s half of the Companion (CM) level rules for PCs 15-25 level were well suited for the business of building kingdoms, taxing the populous, fieldign armies, and maintaining castles. A little more civilized perhaps than the Spanish conquistadors, but more appreciated when remembered through the filter of your analysis. Thanks.
Posted on September 30th, 2008 at 2:09 pm. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
At the time of Gygax’s death there were a couple of articles that actually did take issue with the problematic moral ethos of D&D, and laid that right at Gygax’s grave.
I’ve been involved in a few D&D games where “tomb robbing” was actually discussed within the party as to whether it was morally problematic or not. In fact, I have this vague notion that our friend “The Emperor” played a paladin in one of those games many years ago…
The usual justification for tomb robbing, of course, is that the adventurers really, really need the magic weapons in order to save the kingdom from monsters and evil gods, etc. This rationalization makes the whole process run so much more smoothly.
Posted on October 2nd, 2008 at 10:34 am. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
Hey, before you pick on Paladins, figgure what the heck a paladin can do, anyhow.
DM’s rarely throw noble quests where nothing but good can happen.
What adventurer refuses to smash other peoples property, kill other sentients, defile their religions, and disobey the norms of a local custom. This is all the humanistic cultural relativism that D&D never fit.
Paladins can steal, loot tombs and defile - because those religions are not the on the “RIGHT SIDE”, which of course, is their side.
Posted on October 7th, 2008 at 4:01 pm. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
Come now, bringing good vs. evil debates into a game have been part of this genre for a while. Does anyone bemoan the fate of the “poor” players in a game of Monopoly as teh economically downtrodden? How about the Aliens(tm) who require another species for continued survival? Philosophy was never written into the game - it evolved in the “novelist” era of the 1980s politically-correct cultural upheaval. When the game was written you could still be a cowboy and kill indians (Boot Hill), you could shoot the bad guys in a game of cops ‘n’ robbers, and you could kill the orc families in their homes because they would only come back and kill you in your sleep anyway. It’s a game. Players wanted to add in the moral dilemmas to better “define” their characters or justify adding the newer classes (like the paladin). Don’t throw it all on old EGG. His original game only had 3 classes and 3 alignments, none of which were good OR evil. Then again, a game of D&D doesn’t have to be played one way or another. If the players like being moral paragons and pacifistically attempt to solve all the world’s problems, I say let them. But I like killing things in the game - a healthy release of all the pent up frustration of the week. And it should be seen as just that. Otherwise you have to ban all those shoot’em up video games and RPG games like World of Warcraft which basically pit whole species against each other for no other reason than they chose opposite sides of a conflict.
Posted on October 7th, 2008 at 4:50 pm. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
Exactly, Karasdjun. Well said. Let us play our paladins and kill those orc babies in their hovels for crying out loud, everybody. They’re only pieces of paper!
Posted on October 10th, 2008 at 7:59 am. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
I would argue that the moral overtones inevitably assert themsevles, whether you like it or not, when the “kid’s game” sticks around and becomes an “adult game”. Especially when the name of the game is open-ended choice and consequence, something markedly different than a board game such as Monopoly. My point was not to castigate as immoral the typical D&D fare of comic-book style orc genocide, but rather to stress the historical context from whence such ideas originate. By starting for a historically and literally centered appreciation of reality, your in-game world plays off and extends that same context in a meaningful fashion. One might even call that “art”.
An implied point is that while it’s easy to play toy soliders and stand up a bunch of bad guys and knock ‘em down like so many bowling pins - if that’s truly your cup of tea, you should be honest in accepting the limitations of the sandbox you’re playing in. History and literature are likewise overflowing with source material to inspire truly heroic happenings, which will make your game world resonate with awesomeness. My article was simply an opinion as to why the idea of “adventuring companies” probably doesn’t meet that standard, at least not in my book…
Posted on October 24th, 2008 at 12:58 pm. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
Before you make throwaway comments classifying historical figures as 20th-level characters and running into the “but then they’d be immune to snakebites” problem, you should read what is probably the best article on RPG theory in recent memory: Justin Alexander’s Calibrating your expectations.
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 8:34 am. About 'Well-Armed Entrepreneurs'.
I feel suitably chastised regarding a 20th-level Pizarro. And agree that that was an excellent article; thanks for the link.
After a lifetime of mucking about in the New World with little success, I suppose prior to his “big break” with the Incas, a D&D Pizarro might have been 3rd or 4th level at most, since by the reasonable logic of that article even Cortez, the most successful of the conquistadors, was maybe 5th or 6th level. And basically the Spaniards rolled a couple 20’s in their pivotal showdown encounter to seize a most improbable advantage and victory.
Interestingly, I think it’s easy to accept a 4th-level Pizarro as an NPC, but we wouldn’t like that as a player character. Why? D&D is not made to model well the very slow grind for active participants. We’re more than happy to accept an NPC who’s spent 30+ years slogging about in his profession of choice and only reaching 4th level, but no person in his right mind would enjoy playing a character who only advances three levels over 30 years of campaign time. Not even if you’re an elf! Perhaps that’s an expectation worth challenging…
Thanks!