Class rework: Magic-User

How do you fix the Magic-User? It can't be fun to have one spell and then not feel relevant once that's used.

Option 1: Barbarians of Lemuria-ify the Game

Steal everything from Barbarians of Lemuria (the best magic system, imo). Here's such a take (only magnitude 1 spells, so far).

If the result can be achieved by training and hard work, it's possible to cast as a Wild Spell (working name).

• Reach the top of a cliff
• Chop down a tree with the snap of your fingers
• Find the book where the information you're looking for is

The result is ordinary, but the method shouldn't be:

• Vines reach down and lift you up
• A whip of fire lashes out and chops the tree in two
• All the books gather in an enormous whirlwind, until the one you're looking for lands on your shoulder, like a bird.

Any Wild Spell costs 3 HP to cast. You can lower the cost by adding restrictions:

• Obvious (chant wildly, dance, etc, you're Doing Magic and everybody knows it)
• Line of Sight
• Casting Time (1d6 * 30 minutes of meditation, wild dancing (possibly naked), etc)
• Personal item (lock of hair, clothes, etc from the person)
• Special Knowledge (tedious, and long, research is necessary in order to cast the spell properly)
• Hour Power (must be cast at a specific time of the day or year: morning, midnight, sundown, solstice, etc are all perfectly valid. "Right now" is not.)
• Ritual cleansing (bathe in clear spring water, anoint yourself with essential oils, etc

A Wild Spell always costs 1 HP to cast, no matter how many restrictions are added. Remember: in my system, the party regains 1d3 HP every 10-minute break on the hour, if they have water and rations as group resources, so the cost is pretty low, still.

Furthermore, a Spell Slot spell, such as Sleep, can only be cast through the regular spell slots the MU gains as they level up; spells cast from Spell Slots cost no HP. 

Discussing this in the OSR discord, it was agreed that keeping both Vancian spell slots with the Barbarians hack was too fiddly (something I suspected when I wrote the post). We'll remove that.

I've always liked Lemuria's magic system, even if it's very much Storygame (with limits). I think this is a reasonable compromise.

BONUS: If I switch to the Barbarian hack in the current world, it would mean that spell scrolls (with stuff like Speak with Dead or similar) are remains of a past paradigm of magic, which means that MUs in Endon (Falbo) would be much more interested in spell scrolls because of how rare they are? It's a possibility.

Furthermore, spell scrolls could still be a regular reward that has no HP cost attached to it; that'd be a good reason to keep and carry them.

This requires Magic-Users to have a HP floor of 2. I'm fine with that. (Remember, death isn't a given at 0 HP in my game.)

Third (?) edit: ALSO this means that CON becomes an important attribute for wizards (you get to re-roll your Hit Die on level up, and keep the better result, so the CON bonus is important). Witches and wizards also eat a lot so they have the energy reserves to regain HP.

Vayra in the OSR discord also came up with this gem: "Also it makes sense why wizards and witches and other magic users are the ones people go to for medicine stuff. Since they have to know it all, they have to stay healthy to do magic."

I love it when rules inform the world. I wish I could come up with something similar for my Thief rework.

Option 2: Risky Casting

Each day, your Casting Value resets to 0. Casting an unprepared spell raises this value by the spell's level. When casting a spell outside those you've memorized, roll 1d20 and compare. If you roll over, the spell goes through. If you roll equal to, or under, a Chaos Burst happens instead.

If I use this system, I'm removing Sleep from the game. Casting Sleep an average of 10 times per session wouldn't be any fun for me as a GM; I also think that the goal of the game is to work with what limited resources you have, and by making the best resource (at lower levels) basically infinite, you make the game too easy.

Furthermore, with this system, we can add in FEAST OF BUKAKO spells too.

Option 3: Cantrips

Each spell you memorize unlocks Cantrips that you can cast however many times you want. Sleep would unlock Tired or Sleepy for instance; you could make someone yawn at just the right time to sneak past them. Charm Person cantrips could be making someone give you their full attention (good for when the nobles are ignoring you) or making you appear slightly more attractive to the person. Floating Disc cantrips could lighten the load of what you're carrying, but you'd still need to carry it yourself, and so on.

I've used a system like this earlier, but my mistake then was probably that the Cantrips were lost if you cast the spell. If we want to make MUs more active and have more options, maybe it should be the other way around: If you memorize a spell, it unlocks a list of Cantrips for that day. Even if you cast Sleep you still have access to the Yawn cantrip.

That sounds pretty good. I'm gonna go with that for now. If I started a new group or the current group's MU dies, I'll probably switch over to the Barbarian hack completely.

Reinforcements (Hole in the Oak, pt 2)

I had a new player lined up for the 2nd session of Hole in the Oak but he declined. He cited an unwillingness to learn a new system. This was plutonium-grade bullshit since he signed up for another game with a GM I know, in a system he doesn't know. The real reason he didn't want to play was because of OSE's lack of skills. I have many things to say about that but in the end, it's the player's loss.


Instead, I recruited a friend to join in. Robber-Allan joined the party. Totally not a thief.

Pre-session prep

In the last post, I had some things I should prep before the start of session 2. Here's how that went:

What else is out there?

• In a hut, a few miles from Utböle lives an old woman. She is wise in the ways of strange things, and she knows that this is not the only world, that other existences connect through various portals.
• Something is stalking the streets of Utböle. People are going home before night falls, and they're shuttering their windows.
• Mevverwen, a traveling merchant, brings a caravan of goods to Utböle every so often. She also deals in illicit goods.

What bigger city connects to Utböle?

Falbo is the nearest city. I've not done any work on it, figuring that I'll do that work when the time comes.

Answer Jeff Rient's 20 questions

I didn't. I answered 2. There are more interesting things to answer than those questions, right now. Instead, I answered 20 questions about the rules.

Map a hex next to Utböle

Utböle and surroundings

0205: The Hole in the Oak
0602: The old woman's hut

0604: Utböle

The session

People in Utböle are behaving oddly. They never stay outside in the evenings, and they shutter their windows. The players made some inquiries about it, but the innkeeper wasn't willing to talk about it. He claimed that it's nothing. The party opted not to press the issue since Johannus is the only innkeeper in town. Lergax, their man-at-arms, pressed the issue of pay from the last session. The party agreed to pay him, and the other hirelings, daily instead of after the delve.

What follows contain spoilers for Hole in the Oak. You're warned. As ever, my players shouldn't read this.

20 questions about the rules (Hole in the Oak, pt. 1.5)

Once, Jeff Rients posted a list of 20 questions about your game world. It is decent. Someone else posted a list of 20 questions about your rules. That is more interesting, I think. Here are the questions.

Ability scores generation method?
3d6 in order, swap one attribute with another if you want to.

How are death and dying handled?
Characters are knocked out at 0HP, and their injury is rolled when they receive treatment. Until then, you don't know if the PC lives or dies. There are various modifiers to the treatment die roll, such as time lapsed between wound and treatment, wisdom modifier of the one treating you, and so on.

What about raising the dead?

1,000 gp * level, it takes 1 * level days to raise someone. There might be side-effects.

How are replacement PCs handled?
Promote a hireling, or roll a new character which will be introduced whenever possible.

Initiative: individual, group, or something else?
Something else.

Are there critical hits and fumbles? How do they work?
There are not.

Do I get any benefits for wearing a helmet?
Style points, perhaps. No mechanical benefit.

Can I hurt my friends if I fire into melee or do something similarly silly?

Yes. If there are 1 PC and 1 monster in a fight, you have a 50% chance to hit either, if there are 2 monsters and 1 PC, it's a 67% chance to hit a monster.

Will we need to run from some encounters, or will we be able to kill everything?
You'll probably need to run.

Level-draining monsters: yes or no?

Yes.

Are there going to be cases where a failed save results in PC death?
Yes.

How strictly are encumbrance & resources tracked?

Not very strictly at all.

What’s required when my PC gains a level? Training? Do I get new spells automatically? Can it happen in the middle of an adventure, or do I have to wait for down time?

You can't level up in a dungeon. You need to describe a training montage for your character, preferably with background music fitting for them. You get new spells automatically, but, again, training montage.

What do I get experience for?

Treasures and monsters. Monsters pay very little XP.

How are traps located? Description, dice rolling, or some combination?

Description. I will try and telegraph traps, I don't find gotchas to be engaging or fun.

Are retainers encouraged and how does morale work?

It's probably a good idea, given the inventory system. Morale is rolled when necessary -- if PCs are knocked unconscious or if other retainers flee and so on. Morale cascades, so if one hireling fails their morale check and flees, any further morale tests are done at -1. If three or more flee, morale is rolled with -2.

I figure it's a good approximation on how one person panicking might trigger a group to panic.

How do I identify magic items?

I don't know. I've asked my players for suggestions.

Can I buy magic items? Oh, come on: how about just potions?
Potions can be bought in larger cities. Magical items are very rare to find on the open market.

Can I create magic items? When and how?

I don't know yet. I'll think of something.

What about splitting the party?

If you think it's wise, go for it.

Class rework: Thief

The goal with the class rework is to fix the B/X (OSE) thief. There are various issues with it as written, but Hear Noise is the worst offender.

As the table shows, Hear Noise is not a good tool. Not all rooms are populated, and so we're looking at maybe 75-80% chance of "hear nothing", all things considered. Even when you succeed, you might get "hear nothing."

We can leave it on the thief, and rework the function instead. Here's a sketch:

Hear Noise
When there's an encounter, the GM rolls Hear Noise for everyone.  Those who succeed are not surprised. Those who fail roll for surprise.

This makes the thief marginally better at not being surprised, but still not immune to it.

The class itself needs reworking though, so here's a sketch. Inspired, obviously, by the OSR discord.

Thief

Has access to Thieves' Equipment List. Rolls 5d6 * 10 for starting money if buying from Thieves' Equipment List only.

Open Locks: Requires Thieves' Tools. A lock can be automatically picked if you spend enough time for an Encounter check (whatever that is in your system). If you want to pick a lock immediately, you need to roll for it. A failure means you cannot pick the lock again.

Remove Traps: Requires Demolition Kits, expensive single-use items that disable traps (small explosives, acid to destroy gears etc). To use it, the thief needs to know where the mechanism is.

Pickpocket:  Leave as-is.

Move Silently, Hide in Shadows: Requires Thief Clothing.

Climb sheer surfaces: Thief skill only. Requires Thief Clothing.

Equipment list (no costs have been balanced or considered for more than a few seconds, sue me)

Thieves' tools -- 25gp
Thief clothing -- 60gp
Black clothing, muffles sound. Small hooks in the palm of fingerless gloves to aid with climbing. AC as Leather.
Crowbar -- 10gp
Backpack -- 5gp
Grappling hook -- 25gp
Mirror -- 5gp
Rations (iron, 7 days) -- 15gp
Rations (standard, 7 days) -- 5gp
Rope (50') -- 1gp
Lantern -- 10gp
Oil (1 flask) -- 2gp
Waterskin -- 1gp
Sack (small) -- 1gp
Sack (large) -- 2gp

Smoke bomb -- 25gp
Fills a 10' square area with smoke. Within the smoke, it's impossible to tell friend from foe. Certain monsters are immune to the effect (infravision, undead). Lasts for 1d6 combat rounds; lingering smoke afterward means all combatants fight with disadvantage.
Flashbang -- 25gp
Hits automatically if the thief is in the first row (marching order). Roll to hit from 2nd row. It cannot be used further back. Save vs Paralyze or stunned for a combat round. The thief automatically pass their save, allies roll with Advantage. Noisy, check for Wandering Monsters/Encounters.
Disguise kit -- 50gp
Demolition kit -- 50gp
Document forgery tools -- 10gp
Wax to copy keys -- 10gp

Poisons
Each poison coats 20 arrows (if you bookkeep these) or 1 blade, and the poison is potent during the entire delve (that is, returning to town means the poison loses its potency).
Paralyze -- 50gp
Save vs Paralyze or paralyzed for the next activation.
Anti-magic -- 25gp
Save vs Spells or lose casting ability for 1d4 combat rounds.
Murder -- 75gp
Save vs Death, can only be delivered by a blade. Only potent for 1 victim. Perhaps gate this by HD, where 4HD or greater only take additional damage? I dislike Finger of Death-ing a dragon (ya'll know what I'm talking about).

Thoughts

The main problem is if we're creating a checklist. You know what  I'm talking about. Where players always look to their character sheet for the answer to whatever situation. We don't want that. We want to give the thief tools that they can use occasionally. Not always. There should never become a "standard approach" to something.

How do we curtail this? Risk/reward is certainly something we can use. The flashbang, in particular, has both good and bad things that can happen. Document forgery tools might land you in trouble with the authorities. Climb sheer surfaces still require a climbing check, and with quadratic falling damage (10' = 1d6, 20' = 3d6, and so on) there's enough risk there.

Within my own mutilated corpse of OSE, there's another limit: inventory. Each item takes a slot. Cost is also a thing that can limit things, although perhaps not as much as soon as the PCs have had their first successful run. A minor treasure is 400gp, that's enough to buy plenty of smoke bombs and whatnot.

Have we moved too far away from the B/X thief now? Are we in GLOG territory? I don't know.

I might give this a try.

A first descent into the underworld (Hole in the Oak, pt 1)

This is a retrospective of Troika, Let there Be Blood, B/X and what else?

The Group

Halvar, a level 1 fighter who arrived in Utböle (a frontier town) from Castle Bloodthorne.

August-Wilhelm, Cleric of Helm.

Gullvar von Drax, another level 1 fighter.

Lafirth, torchbearer.

Lergax, racist man-at-arms.

Muir, man-at-arms.

Loldox, torchbearer, whines a lot.

I usually require clerics to come up with a clerical vow; something that their god requires of them. August-Wilhelm's player decided that their character obeys all laws and cannot tell a lie.

I'm warning you now: the rest of this post contains heavy spoilers for Hole in the Oak. My players should not read this at all.

What really happened? (The Temple... pt 2)

Follow-up from this post.

The group didn't really do too many things. A lot of exploration, a little bit of roleplay, but the temple itself was basically off-limits to them, and this comes down to a huge mistake I made when designing the entries.

The factions

The wombats are basically pacifists with stone spears (and I realize that you could absolutely read them as indigenous-inspired, but they're more inspired by Diane Fossey's Living with Gorillas. Still, for all my talk about trying to be careful about messages, what we have here are an underdeveloped civilization exploited by an industrialized one. Great. fucking. job. Cassie.

Anyway, so the idea was always "how would a new intelligence interpret religious illustrations?" What would they make of it? But I didn't really manage to convey that. The PCs are all sneaking around, there's nobody around (because they infiltrated during the day, didn't they?), so they're not getting this cool "it's like religion in the US, they just don't... get it. But in a kind way." thing. In a spur of the moment thing, I replace the decay spores with floating balls of liquid fire. That the benign creatures use for their baptism rites. Okay.

Oh, and human sacrifice. Great.

Right, so I've lost the way with my wombats completely. This is partly triggered by the players. Don't get me wrong, the fault lies with me, but the group just... wasn't what I expected. Since it's Grottröj you can do FLAILSNAILS and just bring a character over. I got a character with a machine gun. Another character considers killing 14 non-aggressive wombats to "teach them a lesson."

I don't really like that kind of game.

So yeah, their behavior ramped my own ideas up, for ... not great results. Back to the factions.

The second faction is the ants. Nobody runs into the ants.

The Demon is not present. The sun construct doesn't see play.

The Elders (Wombats) don't want to interact with the PCs at all. That's a real issue; you can't have a faction that's completely uninterested in the party. Or maybe you can, but still. Perhaps they could use better motives.

Jacquaying the Dungeon

There are 4 ways to enter the temple catacombs (where the interesting stuff is). However, one of the entries was made impassable by the sun construct. The other three are all located inside the temple itself, so you need to get inside the temple first before you can get to the dungeon. Since the wombats don't like visitors, that means you'll have a hard time doing that.

The biggest issue is, really, that there's no exploration possible if you don't get into the catacombs. I had all kinds of ideas about the temple grounds and the ground floor of the temple, but the group also always got caught by the Wombat Choir (14 individuals, pacifist) when they were heading somewhere (bad luck on the encounter rolls) so they felt blocked by that too.

When we're rewriting the temple (next post in this series), I'll make sure that there are more (and different) ways to enter the catacombs.

Encounter tables

The encounter tables need to be reworked. I like some of the events, but others I'm not a fan of. There needs to be more of the "hell. yeah." things on there. Hole in the Oak, which I'll review sometime... later, has a good encounter table, I think. It's not only "you run into these monsters!" followed by "and now you run into these monsters instead!"

As noted over on False Machine, "beige as fuck" is not fun, and gives nothing. I feel that my Temple might be beige as fuck.

Final Words

I waited too long to write this; most details are gone. The players liked the world, what little they saw of it. The baptism by fire thing creeped them out properly, but overall I wouldn't call this a resounding success. I learned stuff, though, so next time it'll be better. The Demon will return.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at the current layout of the temple (zoomed out) and then we'll start re-working it.

The Temple in the Valley of the Wombat People

The initial purpose of the Temple wasn't even a temple. At first, there was a demon that kidnapped babies, as demons are wont to do. This demon took over, corrupted, a wombat warren. At first, the idea was cramped spaces, having the PCs crawl through dark, narrow tunnels while continually being mocked by the demon. It was a journey through the underworld, from the normal to the supernatural.

The largest issue with the idea is this: I am writing this for a single mission, to be part of a collection of small hooks. It isn't designed or written in a way that furthers OSR play (exploration, faction play, etc).
Then, Grottröj, an OSR convention in Sweden, went digital because of COVID-19. I figured I'd run something and it seemed like a good choice. It was, after all, already written?

There's very little "adventuring" in Grottröj's play, focusing more on the Mythic Underworld and exploration. It didn't quite fit the bill.

I didn't want to give the warren up, though. When rewriting the dungeon, the warren connected to a buried temple. The demon took a less prominent space in it and the wombats themselves became more like Stone Age people. They now had tools and crude weapons.
It still didn't work, for me. The second iteration was a more pronounced Temple, with an incidental warren on the temple grounds. The story had already changed once and now did so again. The wombats used the temple grounds, surrounded by high walls, to farm the earth. That's not very dungeon-like, so the idea I had was that the wombats found the temple and took up religion based on the illustrations and paintings found inside the temple. The temple itself was a prison, think Magneto's prison in the X-Men movies and you're not far off, for the demon. The demon now had a way to influence the real world, through the wombat people. I'm introducing corruption, as both a moral and a visual, theme. Not only is the temple falling apart, but an innocent animal is corrupted (becoming more human-like, I wonder what that says about my view on humanity?). I had an idea of fragile stone floors and crumbling walls. With the demon being a less physical presence in the upper level, still mocking the players, but at times collapsing the floor under them and at other times caressing them, physically, softly.

The temple and its religion were too vague, and so I threw together a basic religion: the Sun erases sin, keeps shadow away, and keeps the forces of evil weak. The god imprisoned the demon in its temple, where the constant glow of the midday sun keeps it weak. But with time, gods disappear and their magic grows weak.
The third iteration had much clearer faction play. The wombats now use the temple and the underground halls for their own reasons. In the Sunrise Hall, beneath the temple building, they grow their crops in the soft glow of a magical sun. They stay away from the Midday Hall, where a harsh midday sun shines down on a golden cage, and they've not breached the doors to the Twilight Hall yet. (There is also a Midnight Hall, where the heretical texts and the tongues that spoke them are kept, but that is locked behind powerful magic and secret passages.) The demon is now its own faction, spreading Decay Spores that infect creatures (much like Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus) to do its bidding. Where do these creatures come from? That answer is still missing, at this stage. Another faction, the Ant People, have breached into the underground part of the temple too, and are exploring it as well.

I still kind of like this iteration; there is some promise here, but I need to rework it to a larger location. I'm still working on a very small scale; I want to make it explorable in a single session. I think that limit, self-imposed as it is, ruined my effort.
In the last iteration (fourth, if you're keeping track) I removed the demon (in hindsight a mistake) and made the Sun Religion take on a larger role. The underground farms are no more. Instead, there's a huge fruit tree in the Sunrise Hall, where the wombats perform weird rituals that fire in various ways. I remove the god, in its place is a Sun Construct, sitting on a throne where the prison once was; in its chest a miniature sun.
This is what I ran for a small group at Grottröj. The pitch, unfortunate as it is, was basically this: an anthropologist lived with the Wombat People for many years and has now returned to civilization. His essays and lectures are popular and everyone who's someone wants Wombat People things. The anthropologist himself wants the religious texts that he knows are in the temple (he was never allowed inside).
In the next post, I'll detail what the group did. I will also give you a rundown of what mistakes I made, and what issues there are with the fourth iteration.

Troika, Let there Be Blood, B/X and what else?

Here's a great idea by Archon's Court

Troika has a great initiative system (or so I thought, but the real thing is too fiddly for me. But read on).

B/X is simple enough.

I'm gonna mash them all together for a test drive this coming Saturday. Here's what's gonna happen:

Initiative is done through a Troika-ish system. Instead of initiative values (PCs having double tokens, monsters having Initiative values) each PC gets 1 token, each hench gets 1 token, and each monster gets 1 token, and the extra End Round token is added, too.

So at the start of the combat round, tokens are pulled one by one until the end round token comes up. Maybe some didn't get to act, that's how combat is.

However, on a PC token, any player character can "activate." PCs can still only activate once.

AC disappears. All attacks automatically hit. -1 roll, that is nice.

Each weapon has both an attack and a damage reduction value. Ranged weapons do not have a defense value, but added Piercing Damage instead.

Armor gives DR according to the following: Leather 1, Chain 2, Plate 3. The same goes for monsters.

Spellcasting is declared at the start of the round and the spell goes off at the spellcaster's activation.

Monster damage is upped by 1 die across the board because 1d3 and 1d4 will rarely touch PCs. So in Hole in the Oak, for instance, a monster doing 1d3 + paralyze will be consistently useless against a plate-wearing PC.

I'm also going to be using a Death & Dismemberment table for downed characters. If a healer gets to the PC before the scrap is over, there's a larger chance the PC survives.

Alright, so the idea is to give the players meaningful choices. To summarize Archon's Court's post, when it's your turn you roll 2d6 for your weapon and assign 1 die to the Attack column and the other to the Defense column. That's a choice the player gets to make. Maybe it will slow down combat, but it's a lot more interesting than "roll 1d20, yeah you hit, roll damage" (I usually roll my d20 together with the damage to speed things up, but it's still bad), at least on paper.

But, not only that, by hacking the Troika initiative slightly we're giving the group meaningful choices as well: when a PC token comes up, who goes first? Is it the spell caster, in order for the spell to fire? Is it the frontline fighter, so that they can boost their DR? What about the ranged PCs, they can pack a punch. Maybe the healer/support guys need to move in and drag the downed fighter away?

Maybe it'll turn out that it's all bad. But maybe it won't. I think there might be slightly slower combat than the slogfest that is B/X combat, but I think there will be more activity, or maybe the word I'm looking for is more focus within that combat.

Let's get on with the modified weapons:

Sample Weapons

Melee

Shortsword

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	2	0
2	2	0
3	3	0
4	3	1
5	4	1
6	4	1

Axe - Swingy Attack, Low Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	0
2	1	0
3	1	0
4	4	0
5	6	0
6	7	1

Spear - Swingy Attack, High Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	0
2	1	0
3	2	1
4	2	2
5	5	2
6	5	3

Shield - Low Attack, High Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	1	1
2	1	1
3	1	1
4	2	2
5	2	2
6	2	3

Dagger - Low Attack, Swingy Defense

Roll	Attack	Defense
1	2	0
2	2	0
3	2	0
4	3	1
5	3	2
6	4	2

Ranged

Shortbow - Low Attack, Decent Pierce

Roll	Attack	Pierce
1	2	2
2	2	2
3	2	1
4	3	1
5	3	0
6	4	0

Crossbow - Swingy Attack,  Good Pierce

Roll	Attack	Pierce
1	1	3
2	2	3
3	2	2
4	2	1
5	6	0
6	6	0

I am not completely sold on the Shortbow, to be honest, but this is a starting point. I also think the tables need to be reworked. I want to keep the Damage Reduction on the lower side, but that also means that there's not much choice between a roll of 3, 4 on the Shortsword table -- you'll always put the 4 on Defense in that case, since 3 has the same damage but no defense.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history

Robert Rauschenberg.

I love trawling museums for inspiration. Here's a collection of free books from The Met

From Attila to Charlemagne: Arts of the Early Medieval Period in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 26 in-depth studies of arts representing the cultures and peoples that created early Europe. Of particular interest are the essays titled The Niederbreisig Collection, and From Attila to Charlemagne.

Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis detail the life of, well, the abbot of the French abbey of Saint-Denis. He had a hand in almost everything, from inventing Gothic architecture to politics. He was a patron of the arts, and literature, and the church.

I'll be honest with you: I've not read this yet. I have heard good things about it, though, and I've set aside some time to read The Stained Glass and Metalwork part.
German Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350-1600. A very narrow scope; but then again it's a catalogue. There is a total of 72 paintings in The Met, and they are all detailed here. Also, this is a selling point:

Taking us back to the turbulent times of the Reformation, it discusses the spiritual, educational, and propagandistic aims of such key personalities as Martin Luther, Erasmus, and Albrecht of Brandenburg. In its many portraits, it reflects the increased awareness of the individual in the age of humanism.

The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated discusses how the book influenced Japanese culture, design, and aesthetics. It also details how the tale's transmission and reception have changed over the centuries. The book is not the actual The Tale of Genji, but that is also something that you could read.

I recommend Learning the "Women's Hand" in Heian Japan: Kana Calligraphy and The Tale of Genji.

RPG takes: In Learning the "Women's Hand"..., what immediately comes to mind for me is how people express negative things about others. Murasaki writes that Sei Shōnagon's writing of Chinese characters (which women weren't allowed to learn) "left a great deal to be desired." Not only is Murasaki a woman, so was Sei Shōnagon. We then learn that "when female characters in Genji are described as being associated with Chinese writings or customs, they are often presented in a negative light." How do we convey items like this in our own worlds?

(Above: example of hanachi-gaki, unconnected characters; it includes a single waka).

Likewise, we also see how "general knowledge" is something we need to consider. Genji says that his heart is no "shallow spring", alluding to a poem in the Man'yōshū, Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves.

Though the poem is not quoted in full, any reader of the time would have immediately understood why Genji is citing it, for it too has a connection to calligraphic education.

These are things we need to consider when players ask things. What is the knowledge that the PCs should have, but that the players aren't asking about?

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

Here's a very informative lecture, by Eric Cline, on how (possibly) the LBA civilizations collapsed. Keep this in mind for RPGs -- nations are often more intertwined than we might think. They're not single entities that stand and fall alone.

Also, it's just a really good lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4