Exploring History, Game Design, and Writing with Jason Kingsley

My pleasure, it's delightful. It's very cold. We were just talking earlier about how cold it is here. It's not cold by standards of really cold places on the planet. Well, it's warmed up here finally today, it's only minus 10. But yeah, I know the cold. Well, I'm afraid we're only minus 2 degrees centigrade here in the UK, which means it's frozen, which means the horse troughs all have to have the ice broken, which means that when you walk the mud is now frozen and is a bit lumpy, so you have to be careful you don't twist an ankle, and you're carrying hay bales and things like that. So very reminiscent, and it kind of it's quite a leveler, it takes you back down to what it must have been like quite recently for most of humanity in the winter. This is what we would have experienced, whereas we now with central heating and cars and paved streets, we don't experience it in the same way. But the vast majority of human history has had frozen landscapes for some of the time anyway.

Okay, as it happened. Well, I was a very precocious reader at school. I remember when I first went to school they showed me the books and I said, 'Have you got any bigger books than that to read?' And the teacher went okay and they gave me the books from the year above, and I went, 'No, no, those are too still too rubbish.' So I had to go three years ahead according to my mother. I didn't remember this, so I'm being told this. I had to go three years ahead of my reading age because I wanted to look at adventure stories. And I liked books with pictures but not too many pictures. In my reading, I was always interested in escapist fantasy from a very early age. King Arthur, obviously not the original King Arthur stories but the sort of modified stories for children because the original King Arthur stories are quite dark and have a lot of adult content in them, but they're interested in the quest and the narrative in general. Then I had a bit of a problem at school which was I loved my English and I loved my creative writing, but I also loved science as well. Under the English system you had to sort of choose arts or sciences at quite an early age, sort of more or less at about 12 years old. You sort of if you wanted to do science you did biology, chemistry, physics, maybe maths, and you have to drop arts, English, music. You were bundled into one of two. I went through this sort of process of thinking, well, I can study story and narrative on my own which I've been doing anyway. I can't really study physics and math and science in the same way, I kind of need a bit more formal training, you got to read the textbooks and everything. So I chose the science part, but I kept going with my love of storytelling as a background task throughout it.

And then I went to university, did a zoology degree at Oxford University, did a master's there, and then started Rebellion with my brother. So computer games started to come in. I wrote a book called 'Steel Line: The Lost Magic' for Ladybird, which is now defunct book publisher, but they published hardback books, very small ones that were informational and interesting. This was a competition book where you have to like a Choose Your Own Adventure. This is roughly the same time as the choose your own adventures were kind of coming to prominence, and that was very successful. It was a British number one, and they paid me £800, which when I was 16 was a lot of money. It was like wow, this is great, full buyout. And I've got the rights back actually because they were bust, and I managed to actually literally buy the rights back for the book. And so I was interested, but that was a game book, you could flick through it and choose paragraphs you went to, so you'd sort of unravel the story. I felt that that could be done with a computer, and my brother was really into the technology and the computers, and I thought wow we could computerize this. So I started to look into computers. We're talking about the very earliest, not the very earliest computers but pretty early, like Commodore Pets and Commodore 64s and 8-bit computers. We never did computerize that, but we started our journey in making computer games.

I've retained, my brother and I both, we're the co-owners, co-founders of Rebellion. We've got nearly 600 full-time members of staff now in the UK, quite a big turnover. We make big games like Sniper Elite, Zombie Army. We got a new game out called Atomfall which is coming out next year. There's another Sniper Elite game coming out. So we have a huge catalog and growing catalog of things going on. We also published comic books, we publish novels, other people's novels, and in my case we're publishing one of my novels called 'The Lord of Blackthorn' which hopefully we'll talk about a little bit later. Great. But we focus very much on storytelling in different media because you can tell a story in a linear way like a novel, you can also tell a story in a kind of branching way like an interactive game book, you also tell a story in a computer game which is non-branching, it is more 'here's the landscape, now you make your story by your actions as you go through the adventure.' For me they all have their own challenges and structures, and it's really interesting to have grown and matured in that world with telling stories in lots of different ways. That's where I am now, and I've now got my first novel underway. So wow.

Yes, yes. And one of the things I'm often telling the team, because I've got teams of people, that I'm still the creative director and CEO of the company. I've kept that term creative director in there because it's important to me because I don't want to be just CEO. Whilst I'm one of the bosses with my brother, I see that as almost as an obligation, not a right. The thing I choose to do is to tell stories in interesting ways and focus very much on what matters to the player, what matters to the reader. So sometimes when you're designing a computer game, you have this view, like being an author, you have this view of the landscape that the reader or the player doesn't have. And if your story only works because you have this sort of helicopter view of the landscape and you're not telling the story, you've got to tell the story from ground level. Including with a computer game, including with a novel, you got to imagine what these people can see and what they can't see as well, and you got to explain that to them somehow. So anyway, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, okay, cool. So I've fallen into being a YouTuber, so I have my own YouTube channel called Modern History TV. It's a weird choice of name, I agree, but it wasn't meant to be a success and then it became a success, and then I didn't get around to changing the title and now it's kind of stuck, and I'm like I should have paid more attention up front, but never mind. So there we are. I in particular I'm fascinated by the medieval period because it's such a transitional period between kind of Imperial Rome and then you go through what I think poetically works called the Dark Ages, although one is not supposed to call it the Dark Ages anymore, but I still think that kind of works as reference to the sort of Empire of Rome and then no Empire of Rome, and what happened to the island I'm living in, Britain in particular, and knights and armor and horses and the chivalric code that never really was, or was sort of only a vague notion that some people had. I studied the chivalric code and the more I studied it, the more I didn't understand what was going on. It moved away entirely. Some of the earliest rules for knights were don't rob from the church and don't fight on Sundays, which is kind of quite basic rules for violent men to adopt. Fairly easy to not rob churches, obviously the church set these rules up: don't rob churches or holy ground, and don't fight on Sundays because you should be praying. That was the very beginnings of the chivalric code, and then it expanded into the thing we understand it vaguely about today. But I'm also particularly interested in ordinary people. Kings and nobles are great, they get written about, and you know wonderful talk about King this and Emperor this and whatever it might be, but I'm fascinated in particular by what it meant to be who most of us were, which was ordinary people that didn't get written about in names. Although in some cases they do get written about because one of the areas I'm very keen on is primary evidence, so I'm keen on actual archaeology and written documents from the time period. We have some wonderful original documents. Some of them are obviously written by people at the time with a nod to the future, like the Venerable Bede in the Dark Ages is sort of writing a history of Britain which is filled with real stuff and not real stuff, and then very clearly not real stuff. So for example, he talks about Britain was founded by the castaways of Troy, and you're thinking what, and then Brutus gets involved, it's all very weird and surreal, it's like fanfiction for history. But then you go up to 11th, 12th century, you start to get court records. We start to have the notes taken by scribes in court cases, and these are always very practical, and they illustrate what mattered enough to people for people to go to court. These are very primitive forms of court, but nonetheless they decided they had enough of a peeve with their neighbor to take them to court, and that would have taken years and probably cost an equivalent amount of money as it does today. But it's things like this person's name, you know, Patrick whoever, his pig escaped and ate my turnips. And you think that's funny, but it's also in an agrarian society very serious because if your turnips get eaten, that's a big chunk of your food because there weren't supermarkets. And other people, if they had a bad harvest and you had a terrible harvest because your neighbor's pig ate your turnips, you are going to potentially starve, and if not starve to death, you're going to be very hungry because maybe you don't have the money to buy tops from anybody else, maybe there's no surplus. And there's a huge amount of cess pits overflowing, for example, and people's boundary walls not being maintained. These are the sort of thing that neighbors fall out about today: you put the fence in the wrong place, you know, and then a massive fight ensues between two neighbors who live next to each other but now hate each other. We've all probably either heard about it or experienced it ourselves. Somebody's making too much noise. They had that as well. After curfew, so-and-so is playing the bagpipes excessively, and he was fined 2 shillings and 6 and told not to play the bagpipes after sunset. And you go, what a brilliant story. So there was one person madly playing the bagpipes in this village for months, you know, driving people crazy. That kind of stuff is fascinating, but very, very human stories. So I talk about a lot of my videos about that. How did poor people travel? It's all right to talk about rich people, they had money to spend, but if you wanted to travel on pilgrimage and you didn't have any money, how where do you stay, how do you survive? And the answer is monasteries. The whole religious institutions had a duty of care to poor people in need, and so you went from monastery to monastery having very modest food but being looked after by the church. And I think again that's a wonderful background for a story as well.

Hugely, but in the background. So for example, I have, I do joust, I fight real fighting in tournaments, and I've really jousted with solid lances in exactly the same way that knights of old, on my horses with real steel armor, in a competition at the Tower of London, same exactly the same place that Henry VII did joust. I've done it at Pendennis Castle, Dover Castle, you know, Corfe Castle. These are all real places where real knights in the medieval period jousted, and I've jousted there for organizations like English Heritage or the Historic Royal Palaces, which are all charitable institutions in the UK that look after old buildings. And these some of these buildings are very, very old. I mean, they go back pre-Roman. You know, Dover Castle has got a Roman lighthouse on one end and then a medieval castle and then World War II bunkers. This is just the place is so steeped in history, including up to the modern day. So I've done that. So when I'm talking about weapons in my games or real armor, I know from personal experience what it's like to wear plate armor. I know what it's like in the cold, I know what it's like in the heat. I know what it's like to have a fly fly into your helmet just before you're about to take a pass down the lists, and how distracting it is to have a fly going ting-ting-ting-ting inside your visor, and then you suddenly realize what if it's a wasp, and I can't open my visor because I've got one hand on the reins and I've got a lance in this hand, and he's just signaled, so I have to go and I have to ignore the fact that I've got a fly in my visor. And you're saying, yeah, I wonder if Henry VII felt this. I've sweated in armor so much that I can't get my helmet off at all because it's stuck on my head because the linen lining, because it's made of natural materials, the lining has got so soaked in sweat that it's swollen slightly and stuck on my head. And then I have to have the ground crew very carefully sort of wiggle the helmet up off my face. And when a helmet is halfway off, it's the worst feeling ever because you can't see, you can't hear, really uncomfortable, but you can't do anything about it. You're relying entirely on your ground crew and your horse to stay still, and you think, oh my goodness, if the horse panics, I can't see what I'm doing or where I'm going, how's this going to end? I've had a saddle break underneath me, pushed down into a horse's spine. The horse was fine, horse called Warlord is still with me, he's brilliant old boy, but he panicked because he had this nasty feeling on his back, and I had to throw myself off the saddle at a full gallop in plate armor to get my weight off his back. And then as soon as the weight was off his back, the saddle was fine and he slowed down and he was fine. But I had to make a decision: where do I try and fling myself off the saddle? Because it all looks very hard down there, it's all six foot down on the ground that I'm traveling at 30 miles an hour. This is going to hurt, but I've got to do it. So those facts kind of go into the background. I also know about researching history. So the Sniper Elite series of games that we do is all about the sort of war behind the war, so it's all about spying and assassinations behind enemy lines. And to a certain extent, we play on the idea of the super weapons against each other. In the case of Sniper Elite, the Nazi super weapons, the Wunderwaffe as they called them, the V2, the V1, all the other special weapons. The Allied side had their own super weapons as well. And so there we try to lean on history in a plausible way. So I think sometimes when people say, 'Oh, is that accurate?' It's like, well, it's plausible. We won't ever know what actually happened because nobody wrote it down, but it's plausible. And I sometimes think our historical research is a bit like that. Obviously some things that are impossible, you know, if somebody was born 100 years after somebody else, they could have never met. But things could have happened that weren't recorded because so little history that was actually written down survives today, which is incredibly frustrating but also gives us a bit of scope. So that's how I look at it. I look at things like historical plausibility in my writing.

I think personally, I think so. I think the human emotional side of an experience connects us more to the past. You know, saying you know if I say that the plate armor I wear is quite heavy and is hot in the summer, that's factually true. But if I was to say that the joust was delayed by half an hour but I already had my armor on, but for reasons outside my control I had to wear it for half an hour longer, I'm now quite tired, I'm now much sweatier than I'm expecting, I'm desperately thirsty, and I can't find my squire. My squire's gone off to do something else, and I desperately need a drink. How do you get a drink into your helmet when the helmet's fastened to you? Can you take it off? Some helmets you can, some you can't. Some of the ones designed for jousting are very specifically designed not to come off very easily to protect you from the lance, which is going to kill you if it hits you in the wrong way. So you know, good on you for wearing armor that stops you dying, that's the principle. Then sometimes I look at criticisms of fiction. When I look at even in a fantasy environment, let's say Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, if the armor doesn't protect people from the threats they're going to face, for me I'm instantly taken out of the story because you only wear armor if it's going to protect you, because it's heavy, it's expensive, and it does slow you down and it tires you out. So if it doesn't actually add to your survivability on the battlefield, why on Earth are you wearing it? It's not costume, the real thing. So when I look at a jousting show for example, or jousting sequence in a movie, and there's a big gap in the armor around the neck, for example, the gorget doesn't fit or the rerebrace doesn't fit properly because it's costume armor, it slightly freaks me out because I know that I wouldn't be able to take a joust. I wouldn't take a shot at that person because their arm is broken. There are ways you can signal to your opponent. You put your arm, what we used to do is you put your lance out sideways and you signal to everybody you've seen something, and maybe other people haven't seen on their armor, so you're not going to take a hit, you're not going to try and hit them because it's dangerous. And if there's a piece of armor not attached or their visor is not down, I've had people charge at me without the visor down. They've forgotten, they're so nervous they've forgotten to lower their visor, and you're thinking you lunatic, you're coming at me, and it's like no, no, don't take a shot. Things like that. The armor protects you. You cannot, unless you have a magic sword I suppose, you're not going to cut through plate armor. Steel is good at its job. You could maybe stab through it if you're super strong, and I guess if you're talking about really super strong or unnaturally strong characters in certain circumstances, that's fine. But when you see the hero without a helmet, because heroes rarely wear helmets in movies because you want to spend the money on your actor and you want to see their face, I guess, you rarely see them in a helmet, and you're thinking yeah, the slightest tap on that head with even a piece of wood is going to put you out of the combat. And they're slicing across the belly armor of heavily armored orcs coming towards them, and you're thinking that orc armor looks pretty much bulletproof, you are not going to cut through it, even with Glamdring, even with a massive, unless again unless there's a magic sword involved, and maybe magic kind of trumps the physics of it. So I'm always keen on seeing, even if you've got dragons, the armor still needs to protect you from the ordinary threats.

Well, I think it's quite interesting looking through history, trying to imagine yourself into the role of characters from that age, because it's a bit like doing a role-playing game. If you're genuinely trying to role-play, you sometimes have to forget what you know as a player. I'm a huge believer in role-playing for fun and not necessarily metagaming, not necessarily playing the game to get the best score. You could do that, that's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not how I play it. I play it to pretend to be somebody else. So if I'm playing, I don't know, a heroic character who is desperate to show his worth on the battlefield, and the DM says to me, 'There's a giant thing coming down the corridor, you don't stand a chance.' It's like, I don't care, my character thinks that here's my chance to prove myself. And all the other players, 'No, no, no, he's got more hit points than you, he's got all this.' It's like, no, no, no, my character wants this moment. And I know he's probably going to die, but that's the point, that's the narrative point. His motivation is to prove himself against insurmountable odds. And mostly in real life, you go in against insurmountable odds and you're done for, aren't you? Most of us aren't heroes. But in a narrative environment where you've got a good DM and other players, everybody leans into that, and then they can make it into a heroic moment. And maybe the barbarian who isn't quite as brave as me, the knight or paladin or whatever, I often play paladins, what a surprise, but maybe he trips me up on the way there and drags me, binds me, and drags me away because he knows that my character won't not fight this monster coming, and he wants to get me away. So now I've got an annoyance, my character's future has been stolen by the other party. Now how does he deal with the fact that you've prevented him from trying to seal his destiny by having this magnificent fight and dying heroically? And that's where narrative comes in. So now you've got an interesting kind of conflict to resolve as a party, and in a narrative as well. This is where story comes from, it comes from this kind of conflict. But if it's artificial conflict, it doesn't work. But if it genuinely comes out of the characters, then that's cool as well.

I played another character where there was a psychic, one of the other characters was a very strange and sort of thiefy type of character. But we'd set it up that this thief had been given a side mission to look after me. My father who was very wealthy, but I hadn't been told as a character, but the thief character had been told that there was a big bag of gold at the end of the adventure if he keeps me alive. So he's got this meta, he's desperately trying to keep this stupid paladin character alive. And I know it as a player because obviously you can have those moments outside the story, but within the story, we were on a boat and I'm in plate armor and I wanted to jump into the river to fight the monster. And the DM said, 'Well, you can't swim in the armor.' I said, 'Right, no, I know I can't, but my character is ignoring that.' So I jumped in, and everyone's going, 'What are you doing?' I'm doing what my character does. And now I'm going to start drowning, so somebody better come in and try and get me, you got to get me out of this situation. And it became a really interesting moment in the adventure because they were all really angry with me because they had to keep me alive. And I had a few people going, 'Yeah, but that was really annoying.' I said, 'It wasn't annoying, it was wonderful, it was wonderful storytelling because we created this scene of this lunatic paladin who jumped in the water and was starting to drown. The thief had gone in after him because he's worth a lot of money at the end of this adventure. And you got the magic user and the druid going, 'This is insane, we've got the monster to fight as well.' And the DM went with it, and it was great. We survived, I was dragged out of the water, water was pumped out of my lungs, I was revived. But it was a really memorable moment of role-playing. And I think when you're constructing a novel, it's the same. You almost need to do things with your characters that you definitely wouldn't do, but your character would, your protagonist would, because of their motivation. So anyway, I probably talked too long and passionately about it. I love it, I love it.

I try, but I very rarely find the time. I've got a young family and my horses, and I've got my business, and I've got the YouTube channel, and I've got my writing to do. So anybody who's a parent knows it's hard to find time. But I do find the time very occasionally. I'm also trying to find people I enjoy adventuring with. My ideal role-playing team is a bunch of people that are having fun. The idea isn't to kill all the monsters and get the gold, the idea is to have a brilliant adventure and all sit back at the end of the evening and go, 'That was mad but brilliant.'

Well, it's an interesting setup because it takes place in what we would think of the 14th, 15th century, so the late 14th, early 15th, so plate armor is a thing, but it isn't our world exactly. But the characters in it don't know it's not our world because it's their world. So the king is not named, for example, the king is just the king because everybody knows who the king is, it's the king, isn't he? And the place is called the realm or the kingdom, and there are places outside. There's the northern tribes and there's the western tribes of sea people as well that are being shut off. Our character, the protagonist, is a fairly lowly knight, and he gets involved. The book opens with a siege, the siege of a rebel baron, and our hero succeeds in being the first man over the wall. And the king has said he'll earn the castle anyway. It turns out the king wasn't quite being true, so he does earn a castle, but he doesn't own this big fantasy castle. He gets sent to the borderlands to a thiefdom, still significant, but a thiefdom that's not had a lord for a long time. He gets sent out of the kingdom to a place he's not comfortable with, he's not well known, he doesn't have much in the way of money, and he's got to rebuild on the borderlands and forge new alliances. It is heavily based on the medieval period, but in this world magic does exist, but in a background, in a very background type of way. So there are two competing religions. There's the religion of the book, if you like, which is sort of more of a medieval Christian economy, a similar thing to Christianity with bishops and church people and monks and things, so it's very heavily real. But then there's the old ways as well, which aren't talked about very much, and in fact still exist, but nobody talks about it because it's impolite to do so in high society because it's the old stuff. The peasants, the ordinary people know it exists, so they know but don't have any direct experience of goblins in the woodlands, and unicorns have definitely been seen, but not by me, but by somebody whose friend I know has definitely seen a goblin. People have tales of dragons. Our hero learns about one of these dragon tales from his grandfather, who tells it as if it's a myth, but his grandfather, according to his grandfather, did fight a dragon. But he of course thinks it's all nonsense, it's all fanciful. And as the story goes on, we learn as the reader that maybe some of it is true, maybe some of it isn't, but maybe some of it is true. But it's still very realistic, it's still very grounded. So they have people casting magic spells, but it happens in the background. There's weird stuff, there's a weird set of woodlands, a big forest with a path through it that our hero has to take, and the woods seem to be encroaching as he rides through it, the woods are encroaching on him, and then he manages to get outside and they sort of back away again. Is it his imagination or is it something happening? So that was the idea, to try and imagine what a world would be like if these things almost certainly might exist, and everyone was quite sure, but some people are sure they don't exist, some people are sure they do exist. Lots of people exist in this sort of limbo state in the middle, which is kind of yes, kind of no, but doesn't really affect me very much. I've got to get the harvest in anyway, I've got to look after the horses, I've got to look after the pigs. So all of that stuff, who knows.

I am, I am trying. Things like, for example, it occurred to me that in a way, unicorns do exist in our world, they're called rhinoceros. So a single-horned creature, albeit not very frail and pale looking, but there is a creature with a single horn, it's called a rhinoceros. But it doesn't resemble the unicorns we know. But in the medieval mind, in medieval Europe, clearly people were telling the truth when they'd seen a single-horned beast that galloped like a horse, happen to be quite stumpy. But also the narwhal exists, and people had real unicorn horns. So you've got this weird balance. And unicorns are mentioned in the Bible as well, which is true obviously as far as those people were concerned, and it was all literally true for those people. And therefore you had real tales from Africa from travelers of unicorns over there, and you had proof because you'd seen somebody's actual unicorn, but you've never seen one. So unicorns exist in the same, well, yes, in the medieval mind I think they probably did. And this idea that the further away from home you go, the more strange everything gets, is still prevalent today. Let's face it, lots of people don't travel very much, and when you travel you realize that people are people, they live in cities or live in the countryside, they might speak a different language, but they all pretty much want to live a decent and peaceful life and get on with doing things that people want to do. They don't have a single foot that they shelter under to keep the sun from their face, they don't have dog heads or fishtails. But I think that stuff is fascinating. We still do it to a certain extent today. So what happens when you take a book like that where there is that authentic sensation and feeling and mindset of a historical setting, and then you inject real magic? What does that do to those narratives when suddenly there is real in-your-face spellcasting or a magical object? Well, it causes confusion. People deal with unpalatable truths today. They get into denial or they figure out a rationalization. They go, 'That can't be true.' Like, well it is. 'Well, I don't believe it.' Or it's fake news. We're living through really fascinating times at the moment.

Geopolitics and you can see the same kind of justifications. Some people go, 'I'm going to have to completely reevaluate my understanding of the world,' and some people go, 'No, I don't want to reevaluate my understanding of the world. I'm just going to deny that that happened even though I've seen it. It didn't happen that way. I'm going to reimagine it and rethink it and put it in a different context and I'm just going to say it didn't happen.' People back in the medieval period did the same. People in 400 years are going to be doing the same, sadly. Human beings do this because it's a way of coping. And I think if you're writing a story, you can do the same. There's one of the characters in the story that sort of has personally witnessed things that are very unusual and almost certainly magical, and when asked, it sort of goes, 'I haven't got time. I'm not bothered about it. It hasn't had much impact on me. I'm not that bothered. So you can worry about it if you like, but I'm just going to pretend I didn't see it' because he can't deal with it. It doesn't have the tools to deal with it, whereas other characters do and other characters lean into the whole thing. But you've still got horses, you've still got lances, you've still got castles that need to be repaired, you've still got a moat that's got to be dug out because it's just a mess and it isn't really a good moat. You've still got trees in the wrong place, brush that got to be cleared out, roads that got to be improved. In this particular place there's a bridge, a very significant strategic bridge, that's got to be dealt with. And there are neighbors that have got to be communicated with. And that's where true narrative is, in the kind of situations and conflicts and how people in the story deal with those conflicts in a meaningful way. One person might deal with it by being very aggressive, the other person might want to talk, and everything in between. And there's probably a time for talking, hopefully most of us will talk first, and then sometimes you have to get into a physical altercation, but hopefully you can wind that back. Misunderstandings happen as well. Misdirection, I always find misdirection or people assuming the worst about other people is fertile ground for novels and stories because we as the viewer and the reader know both sides. 'No, no, don't think that because this person is good as well,' but the characters might not see it that way. They might interpret it in a much stronger, more aggressive way, and that's part of the story. So I've tried to bring that out.

So magic. If magic exists, it depends on how all-encompassing the magic is. If it's magic like Dungeons and Dragons where pretty much every other person has some kind of incredibly powerful magic spells, society would be very different because you know who would fix your plumbing? And if you can do magic spells, wouldn't you have magic spells to make your life easier to heat water? Because you don't want to wash in cold water. Does somebody go around heating up everybody's water? Is that their job? Are they the water heater? They just walk around the village quickly zapping everybody's jug of water for their morning ablutions, heat up, and you've got hot water. Great. And you pay the fire mage some money to heat your water. Not very adventurous or heroic, but probably how it would happen. You've got minor magic spells to heal things. You've got an injured pig or an injured horse. Well, you're going to go to the magic user and pay them a penny. 'Can you cast a spell to fix my lame horse, please?' 'Yeah, sure.' Done. These are the sort of ordinary level things. And I find that would be really intriguing to look into: how would you use those magic spells for everyday circumstance?

Lighting a fire in the wilderness is a pain sometimes, especially if the wood's dry. Well, if you can control fire, brilliant, you don't have to worry about it. Get it going and then rest. That was probably what fires would be doing most, rather than casting fireballs at monsters. They'd probably be lighting campfires because it's more convenient than using a flint and steel. If you can fly, what does that do to the transport infrastructure? If you've got a spell where you can run incredibly fast, you make a great messenger. So you could set up a whole postal system of mages that can haste between various places. Are they going to be doing that? Yeah. Some people don't want to go into dangerous dungeons and risk their life. Some people are just happy to make decent coin by doing an ordinary job. And if you had a flying spell you could do it once a day, you make a great postman. There you go. I love those kind of worlds where they extrapolate what society would be like if magic was extremely common. It's fascinating.

Well, I always wonder about economy as well. As we all know, I've studied economics a little bit at a very basic level, but supply and demand is a thing. In the medieval period there were times when nobody was making coins anymore, and coins get lost, used up, hoarded, and buried. Sometimes there were times in English medieval history where there weren't coins to go around, so they had to drop to a barter system or there weren't enough coins to do big things, so somebody had to invent new coins and make them work, and all that around coin clipping, and it's not pure gold, it's 50% gold, and then what's it actually worth, and all of that wonderful complex economic arguments. But at the same time, if you have a village shop and there are adventurers coming in with magic weapon after magic weapon, who's going to buy those magic weapons? If you buy them off the adventurers, people are going, 'Okay, so it's a plus three magic sword, but I've got six of them, dude. To be honest, nobody in this village wants a magic sword. Other adventurers, yeah, but do you want to buy it? No, my shelf is filled with magic swords. I'll take it off your hands for a penny, just do you a convenience. But this is a magic sword.' 'Yeah, I know, and I've got six of them and they're not selling very well because everybody around here has got a magic sword from that bloody dungeon over there that seems to be endless that everybody goes into. Some people come out of it laden down with jewels and gold. I've got more rubies than I can shake a stick at. The kids are using them as marbles in the street because nobody wants them.' Because if something becomes so common, there's no scarcity value, so suddenly the price collapses. Diamonds in our modern society are only valuable because it's a diamond cartel that artificially restricts the amount of diamonds released to the market. If they released all the diamonds all the time, diamonds would be dramatically cheaper. They've created an artificial system. Would you have the same system? Would you have guilds of adventurers going, 'You know what, I know you've got six magic swords, but we cannot release more than one magic sword to the public. We just have to have a massive warehouse filled with magic weapons of all sorts and we will slowly release them to the community.' That's literally what we have in the modern day. Oil prices are hugely influential on the modern economy. Price goes up and down because people decide to get more oil out of the ground, and then suddenly the price comes down, everybody goes, 'Oh no, all those people who are trying to get oil from shale, which is expensive, suddenly can't make any money anymore, so they close it down.' And you can imagine a fantasy setting where you can't buy a turnip for a magic sword, just too many of them. The economy would collapse.

There's only so much gold an economy can swallow before gold becomes like silver, and before silver becomes like copper, and copper is totally valueless. So I find all of that fascinating. I'm not trying to take away from the heroic fantasy trope or whatever, but sometimes especially in a computer game you can model this, but it does frustrate the player because they've risked their life and they've got nothing of value. It plays with their expectations. It would be a fun world-building exercise if nothing else, just to take it as far as you can and see what comes out of it.

Let's go one of the other things that occasionally occurs to me is magic animal. If an animal can talk to you, I tell you what, I train horses. One of the things about training horses is trying to communicate with a horse with body language because you can't talk to a real horse verbally. You sort of can, but not. If you could explain to a horse, 'I want you to do this for me,' maybe they'd say 'No, go away, I'm too tired,' or 'Yeah, okay, cool, that sounds good, let's have a go at that.' If the horse wants to have a go at jousting, maybe some horses that are talking horses go, 'No, I don't like that, it's a bit dangerous for me. Can I just fart around pulling a cart, please?' 'No, but you're a mighty warhorse.' 'Yeah, but I don't really want to do that. I just don't fancy it. I've got a headache. I'm having a bad day. I don't want to joust.'

And then the other thing I stumbled across was inns. Inns exist, they're basically travel lodges, motels whatever. In the medieval period you go there, you pay a bit of money, you stable your horse or your pack ponies, stay overnight, drink and eat, and then on your way again. In an adventurous setting, a tavern would be attached. If you're traveling on different creatures, which probably could be in a high fantasy, you're going to have to keep them in the inn as well. But some of them aren't compatible. Horses and horses are fine, horses and ponies and donkeys and camels, fine, they're all herbivores. But if you're riding a war cat the size of a huge tiger, that's not going to mix with the horses. You need special facilities. You're going to have to pay more money to the animal handlers. There's going to be this whole group of society that are going, 'I tell you what, we can deal with hippogriffs but we can't deal with battle cats.' Battle cats you'd have to go to a couple of inns down the road specializing in battle cats and war dogs, giant war dogs, and dragons. They've got a fireproof place, but it's going to cost you a fortune. So you suddenly think, that's really fun. You could have a whole roleplaying session around an inn with incompatible creatures that all turn up at the same time and they all want to bed for the night, and the innkeeper doing his nut trying to work out how to make it all work. And I just think yeah, that would work really well, that's such fun. That would make a great story, even that's fantastic, brilliant.

Yeah, and my last idea is about gong farmers. Have you heard of the term gong farmer? G-O-N-G farmer. Gong farmer was a real profession in the medieval period. Their job was to empty cesspits of human waste. Very important. People poop into pits, it gets dug out by chimneys, put into wheelbarrows, and sold to farmers or sold to people who are using it for tannery or sold to make gunpowder in the later medieval period of saltpeter. These people became very very wealthy because they were dealing with other people's poop. Okay, that still exists. In a medieval fantasy setting you're going to have a category of worker, sort of municipal worker, that are gong farmers, the poop trucks. In a lot of medieval societies they did this stuff after dark. They didn't do it during the day because people don't want to look at wagon loads of poop, right? They want to have this done undercover and out of the way. So you've got a whole tranche of society, not just the thieves and the thieves' guild and assassins going around at night, you've also got the poop trucks trundling around. And it suddenly occurred to me: the gong farmers' guild is going to be powerful. It is going to know stuff because it is going out at night totally legitimately. It is going to have a relationship with the thieves' guild because thieves and the gong farmers in cesspits sometimes things drop down there, and the gong farmers will need to shift a jewel that they found in the cesspit of the local castle. That jewel could be really important, a magic ring that's fallen off the finger and fallen into the poop and taken it. They're going to know the assassins as well. There's going to be some kind of deal done with the poop guild and the assassins' guild because the assassins know they've got cesspits that need to be emptied as well, and the thieves' guild does as well. The thieves' guild has garderobes and toilets that need emptying. So the gong farmers are going to be very well connected with all strata of society. And it suddenly occurred to me there's fertile (if you pardon the expression) ground for storytelling in an urban environment in a fantasy city. Somebody is emptying the cesspits and they know a lot about a lot of people. Now that is a brilliant setting for a story. Really interesting, and you don't think about it.

And the fact that they go out at night in a fantasy setting would also mean that they predominantly are nocturnal, like dwarves or orcs. So you're going to have that. Do vampires? Not all vampires are going to be wealthy. Is there a job that a vampire can do? The only job a vampire can do, if you follow the rules of being killed by sunlight or whatever, is at night. Well, that's a job that needs strength and persistence, comfortable at night with night vision, good at digging poop. You suddenly go, you know what, you could have goblins and vampires working together in a night soil team. They're called night soil men. A night soil team. You've got yourself a little team of municipal workers that are the underclass. That's cool. That's really cool. But they're well connected. The thieves' guild is going to steer clear of the poop collectors because they need their latrines emptied too. And you suddenly think, wow, that's really intriguing.

Vampires would you need a strong stupid character? Do you need a troll with a shovel who's really dumb but is looked after and doesn't really want to fight anybody? He helps shovel, he's the one that jumps down into it and shovels it all out, and he's big and smelly but he doesn't mind because he's a troll. He's right at home. There's so many opportunities. So you've got to do something with that. That's brilliant.

Well, I've got so many ideas. I might do, but I'm happy to fling the ideas out because as a principle thing, these are if you study history, you discover things like this. You discover simple things like tanneries were always downwind and downstream. So if you go to a new city in the medieval period, you will be able to find where the tanneries are because you know it's downstream and downwind because they stink, and polite society wants the tanneries to not cast their stench across their houses. So you've got a sort of geography. The posh houses are going to be upwind and up street, and the poor houses and industrial places that produce effluent are going to be downstream. So suddenly the geography makes sense. Things like that come from history. I would encourage people if you want ideas for adventures, look up history, look up history of ordinary people and ordinary jobs, and imagine what it was like, what it would be like if you turned it into a kind of prosaic, ordinary fantasy setting. Because fantasy can be fantastical, but you've also... I was watching Lord of the Rings recently, the extended edition, and I was looking at Lothlorien and thinking lovely, brilliant, majestic, but somebody's cooking the food, somebody's sweeping. There are elves presumably, but whose job is to work as chefs to prepare wonderful meals for their guests? There's going to be delivery services. There are going to be high elves that deliver food as well. And you suddenly think this isn't mentioned in Lord of the Rings, but it has to exist in their infrastructure to make Lothlorien the beautiful place that it is, to make it work. And you suddenly think you know what, there's a whole category of existence in wonderful places like that that I've not really thought about. And I wonder how it works, and then you start speculating and you can just go everywhere with it. I love exploring that idea.

My pleasure. My mind has always worked this way. I'm happy to share and I get excited with new ideas. I don't have the time to build on all these new ideas at all, so other people can have a go. I may steal a couple myself.

An ability to step outside yourself and the space that is familiar to you. It's something that I've always wanted to do. That's why I want to train horses, because I want to know what it's like to train horses. Some horses you can train easily, some horses do certain things more easily. And then I will use my imagination to imagine what it's like to train a battle cat or a giant riding warg or whatever it might be, or a dragon. How can you train a dragon? Probably the same way you'd train a real horse, with different commands, depends how intelligent the dragon is and depends what you wanted to do. Can you teach a dragon to roll over? I can teach a horse to roll over. It takes a long time, but I can teach them to do it. Can you teach a dragon to show off in the ring, doing all the fantasy pants moves? I think the answer is probably yes. And if the answer is yes, somebody's done it, somebody's tried it. So that's cool. I think the ability to go, 'What do I do that's mundane? How do I brush my teeth? How did medieval people brush their teeth?' Well actually they did have toothbrushes sometimes, but also they were expensive. They use twigs. And you suddenly think, yeah, they use twigs. And then people go, 'Yeah, and we use twigs in the subcontinent of India all the time. That's what they sell, twigs instead of toothbrushes in their culture. Chewing toothbrushes. Chewing twigs and using it to clean the teeth is a thing they do.' And you suddenly learn something about the real world as well, as thinking, 'Well okay, we don't do that in the West in the same way, but they do in some parts of the world, and they did in the medieval period in the West as well.' So brilliant, I've just learned about other people and I've learned about the past. So I think an ability to think outside yourself.

My pleasure.

What am I reading? The last book I read, I delved into The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant again because I hadn't read those for a long time. I read them as a young man so many decades ago, and I felt I wanted to reacquaint myself with that sort of Gothic worldbuilding, grand scheme of things: Lord Foul and the Illearth War and Ro F's Bane. I also refamiliarized myself with Lord of the Rings about a year ago because I loved the movies. Lots of things wrong with the movies, they're not perfect, but they are brilliant. I really love them. But I also felt I had lost a little bit of connection with the actual book, so I went back to the book to read it. And as usual with a good book, whatever the book might be, you see different things again because you're at a different period in your life, so you see it differently. And I'm reading quite a lot of books about medieval women at the moment because I'm really interested in a fairly unrepresentative part of history, which is what many women wrote about and how and why. It's something I'm interested in exploring because it's way outside my comfort zone, and obviously I'm not a woman, so I think it's really interesting to learn a little bit about historical perspectives if I can. There's some really interesting stuff about it, but there's also not much, which makes it even more challenging. And then court rolls... they're very dry and some of them are incredibly boring, but you flick through them and you think, 'Oh, that's interesting.' Tragedy like people falling down wells when drunk and dying is just awful human tragedy, but it brings it back that that happened to people back then. It happens to people now, but it happened to people back then and it was written down about. And there were some weird rules. Under the Danes and under the Normans in England, if you found a dead body, if you could prove it was Norman, there was a bigger fine. There was a fine for the whole area — murder fine. It was quite a lot of money. So the whole area (monasteries were exempt) would be fined unless you could find the person who did the murder. If the body wasn't Norman but was an Englishman, the murder fine didn't count. So there are stories of people desperately trying to prove this corpse is an Englishman, not a Norman, because if they can prove it's an Englishman they don't get fined. If it turns out to be a Norman, they do get fined, and the fine is the equivalent of thousands of pounds for each person. So it's well worth trying to pretend this person is an Englishman. It's called proving 'englisher.' It's designed to save you money. It's all very odd, but it mattered to people. So I'm reading court rolls because you find stimulation for the brain about unusual crimes as well. It gives you a viewpoint of history, but it also gives you a peek into the human condition in different ways.

The one recently I did a thing on medieval fashion crime. There were times when the law says your shoes are not allowed to be pointed more than two inches from the end of your feet. The implication being people are going around with ridiculously pointy shoes, which they were. So they brought in a law and you could be fined for having shoes that were too pointy by the authorities, unless you were noble. So if you were noble, you could have pointy shoes. And guess what? People wanted to show off, so they had pointy shoes and they got fined, and then they had to prove they were noble and they didn't get fined. And then there are complaints about men's jackets being indecently short in the medieval period. So the young bravos of the medieval town were going around with indecently short jackets and showing off their bits. And you think, 'Oh my goodness, that's outrageous even today.' But you suddenly go, 'Yeah, you wouldn't write this down and have a law unless it was a proper menace.' So you've got these young men strutting around like young men do (they still do today) showing off with absurd fashions. So it's not just now, it's back then as well. Same thing happening. I just love it. Imagine the fine David Bowie would have got for Labyrinth, showing off the package! Absolutely. But is it a crime though? Indecent exposure still exists, but yeah, there was much about how short your doublet was. You had police going around saying 'Your jacket's too short, sir, we're going to fine you.' Imagine if we had that today. Maybe we do some places — they do have religious police, don't they, telling people what they can and can't wear. That's so true, still exists. Humans will be humans.

I've got a Kickstarter for a book, for special editions of my book called Lord of Blackthorn. It's the first of a trilogy. I've written the first one, it's ready to go, it'll be published to the general public next year sometime. I've committed to writing a trilogy and I haven't written the next two books, so I'm excited and slightly nervous about more writing. You know what it's like if you're a writer: 'Oh, what have I done? I'm going to have to keep writing.' But there's a lot more to explore in the book. It's called Lord of Blackthorn. If people want to hear me on YouTube, Modern History TV, there's tons of work there. I'm amazed to think that I've got over 860,000 subscribers now. It's doing hugely well. I'm very flattered that people like my work there. You can see me on a horse using swords, and also walking through the woods talking about fashion, poor people traveling, and that kind of stuff. And then if people want to see another part of me, all the Rebellion games — Sniper Elite, Zombie Army — very different from my hobbies of medieval and writing, but yeah, CEO of a big company with all the stresses and strains that brings. But I'm only CEO because somebody's got to be, and I use it as a vehicle to do cool things.

Yeah, well I thought it was a fun idea to try. I'm a huge believer in ethics in business. I think the world needs a little bit more ethical structure. Too many people, the media loves unethical business. The bad CEO is a trope, the bad business is a trope, but it exists. People are bad in business sometimes, but there are also a lot of people that run businesses very ethically. So I was having conversations with my friends and family and talking about the chivalric code and how it's a useful guideline for men who are good at fighting to know how to behave, to control the worst parts of an ability to fight. Fighting is necessary and good sometimes, but it could also be unnecessary and bad. So how do we formulate a plan to get the best out of being able to fight and control the worst? The rules of chivalry, I thought it was an interesting structure to write a business book called Leading the Rebellion: Questing to Succeed in Life and Business. It talks about how I've tried to use elements of the rules of chivalry to reflect my business. It can be as simple as tell the truth, pay your bills on time, be decent to people as a default. I'm a great believer in repeat business. If somebody buys my book or my game, I really want them to buy the next one. I want them to have a great experience, feel they've got value for money, enjoy it, and then go, 'What else has he done? Oh, he's done this. That's cool, I'll buy that now.' I'm not a believer in this rapacious business philosophy of screw the other guy over and move on, because you actually lose more than you gain without even realizing it. If you do a disservice to somebody, they will mention it to other people. You might not even know it, but they'll go, 'I wouldn't work with them,' or 'If you have to work with them, get your money up front or charge extra.' You won't know they're doing that, and you'll lose out. There are big figures on the world stage that have done that to people, and I think they probably could have been an awful lot more successful if they'd been ethical in business. That doesn't mean being a pushover, doing bad deals, or not fighting to win. It means working out when you do it and how you do it. It was a personal exercise and very successful. A lot of people have found it quite valuable. One of the key things for me was framing things in the quest because I love the quest narrative. You don't have to be searching for the Holy Grail. A quest can be to find a good job, to write that book at last, to get up in the morning when you're not feeling good about life and you're depressed, and everything seems like shit (it does to all of us sometimes). But if you frame it as 'this is the beast I've got to conquer today,' it almost makes it more of an adventure. You think, 'Right, I'm going to beat that beast. I'm going to get up, exercise a bit more, eat a bit better, just do a little bit.' It can make even a commute in the morning quite fun if you put a framework of a knightly quest over the top of it. It's just a little mind game to help people deal with ordinary things. If you frame it differently, you get a different perspective.

Yeah, just be nice to people as you can possibly be. Thank you for a wonderful evening.