Going Medieval on Women's Role in Fantasy RPGs
When reading through "Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen" a few months ago, I couldn't help but wonder, whether the mayor Raven Uth Vogler of the village of Vogler would have also been a young woman of color, had the book been published, say, a decade earlier.
As far as I am concerned, I am very happy with the authors' choice that Raven Uth Vogler is a young woman. There are several reasons, most of them regarding the way I view society and what I consider progress in our society, but here I want to focus on one particular aspect: story telling.
How many ideas for embellishing the mayor's background and personality would I have gotten, had the mayor been an older man? None. But with the mayor a young woman, ideas come flying. How did she assert herself against the village's patriarchy? Was there a single feat she performed? Was it the shear force of her personality, that made her mayor or maybe constant and dedicated service to the village's community since she was little? Or, maybe, there is more of a matriarchy in Vogler, the women driving what is happening? Also this would be interesting to explore!
Broader representation in RPGs may challenge our preconceptions. Such challenges are good for many reasons. For the game master, they are a gift: Wherever a preconception is challenged, there lies the seed of a story.
Why am I writing about this now? Today, I read a very interesting article in the Observer called "Think women have never had it so good? You should take a look at medieval days." It references two book, "The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society" by Eleanor Janega and "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" by Marion Turner. The article says the following:
Both [books] contend that women were not only bawdier but busier than we thought: they were brewers, blacksmiths, court poets, teachers, merchants, and master craftsmen, and they owned land too. A woman’s dowry, Janega writes, was often accompanied with firm instructions that property stay with her, regardless of what her husband wanted.
This feels like a new discovery. It isn’t, of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment.
It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women.
So it turns out, that the authors of "Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragonqueen" did not at all take huge liberties with the history of the medieval ages, in which so much of the fantasy RPG tropes are grounded, when making Vogler's mayor a woman. Not only stories sometimes challenge our preconceptions, also a closer look at history may do so from time to time. The medieval age suddenly looks a lot more interesting to me than it used to!