Fantastic Medieval Campaigns

The first role-playing game manual is a work whose implications have been drowned out by history. It is vague and often unhelpful, offering not a system but a collection of loose guidelines and ideas which contributed to the proliferation of numerous (and conflicting or mutually exclusive) play styles and cultures.

The character arcs are unlike any which have followed, even unlike its successors, and they lucidly foreground the game's fantasy as players lead their characters from looting the underworld below to conquering the wilderness above. Fighters become lords, mages become industrial wizards, and clerics become patriarchs of their church. The organizing principle is not historical accuracy or genre emulation, but the wildest desires of some two typical men from the American Midwest, communicated through a mishmash of wild west power fantasy and pseudo-medieval aesthetic.

The rules themselves have many obscure qualities which resist being understood considering later texts, or do not align clearly with what we expect from "classic", "traditional", or even "old-school" play. Certainly, it is a manual for a war game, but for a war game that shifts its own goal posts, and whose subjects are not masses of nameless troops but named personas who inhabit a simulated world of the table's making. We take this idea for granted now, but it is unlike anything that came before it just as well as it is unlike what came after it.

The goal of FMC, rather than to offer a new take on the original role-playing game, is to refresh our memories and problematize our preconceptions of a text (or even of a whole genre) that we have taken for granted. The rules are one-to-one with the original, even where there is confusion or falsehood. There is no benefit of a standard vocabulary. There is no one way of doing anything. There is only unadulterated fantasy.

And a clean, modern layout that’s easier to navigate!