Preliminary Research

I have recently seen the movie "The Illusionist," which takes place in Austria in the late 19th century, and I think that settled in to the back of my brain. When I started thinking about my campaign, the Austrian nobility jumped to the forefront and I started thinking about Germanic royalty in general, especially titles like Markgraf (Margrave), Graf (Count) and Duke. But I didn't want to start big, I wanted small to start small. I also don't have a lot of experience with political games, so I wanted to skip that for now and start on easier things.

That got me thinking of Germanic culture in general. I don't know a lot about German history, so a trip to Wikipedia started to get me up to speed. The country we know as Germany hasn't really been around very long. The cultures and the peoples have been there a long time, but "Germany" is a pretty recent arrival. I was thinking about medieval Germany at first, and that is actually the Holy Roman Empire. That looked good, and that's where I really started my research.

Unfortunately, that article is really kind of dry and has a lot of names and dates, and soon my eyes started to gloss over. Poking around for related articles didn't get me much at first. I turned to some experts for help, and posted a thread on EN World asking for German-themed game resources.

Based on the feedback of some of those folks (a number of native Germans, I gather), I looked in to some more specific things about the HRE. The HRE was composed of many smaller states that were very different from each other - feudal states, free cities, and the Hanseatic League. I adjusted the time period I was looking at slightly, to a more modern 15th to 17th century. (D&D is typically considered "medieval", but the technology level is usually quite a bit higher than the medieval period, and the social structures more complex.) I started to poke around at the German states to get a better idea of individual cultures. I mentioned the Templars as a knightly order of the time, and someone else mentioned the Teutonic Knights, a Germanic knightly order. I noted some non-Wikipedia sources for more info, but haven't looked through most of them yet.

Other resources mentioned included the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game. I grabbed a copy and read through the section on the Empire, which was obviously based on the HRE. Unfortunately, I didn't find as much material as I had hoped. I'll also be borrowing the Empire Sourcebook to see if there are some good ideas to swipe there. (And I've just now discovered that Warhammer Fantasy has a surprisingly detailed network of Wikipedia articles, so I'll poke through those too.) There were also a few tidbits from other game systems and campaigns, including Terra Veijo and Codex of Erde.

I should clarify that right now I'm still in information gathering mode. I need to build up my knowledge of the subject so that I can make better decisions about designing the game. This will also pay off later when the PCs go to new areas and I need to come up with stuff on the fly that still fits the setting.