(originally posted last year back in September on the now defunct Fantastic Odysseys Patreon)
I’ve just returned from my summer family holiday—or Jolliday, as I call it—on the North Norfolk coast. I stayed not far from the seaside town of Hunstanton and the old port of King’s Lynn (formerly Bishops Lynn until Henry VIII renamed it ). The whole area drips history, both as a region and in a personal sense, since my Father’s side comes from there, and I’ve been visiting since I was a child.
A clear example of this is when we went to Burnham Market, famous for being Admiral Lord Nelson’s (hero of the Battle of Trafalgar) birthplace. As we walked from the car park, a “history path” noted various historical events throughout English History, right back to the Stone Age.
First up for a visit was the open day held at the former RAF Bircham and Newton airbase. This was one of the first airbases during WWI and was part of a plan to bomb Berlin that was shelved because the war ended. It was Fleet Air Command’s HQ during WW2 and became a training centre after the war. The base briefly saw testing of the new Harrier jump jets towards its end of life in the 1960s on its grass runways.
The Fleet Air Arm stuff during WW2 was particularly interesting. Norfolk had many RAF bases during the war. It’s why my Grandfather, originally from the South of England, came to the region to fix Lancaster Bombers. This is another personal connection since I now live down the road from where they built them in Avro’s factory in Chadderton. There, he met my Grandma at some dance or another. Last Norfolk holiday, two years ago, we visited the Langham Dome, where they trained anti-aircraft gunners on one of the first simulators projected on the inside. The farm next door still has the runways and some of the hangers of RAF Langham (which was a base for the Fleet Air Arm). And further north, near the coast, Muckleburgh Barracks ,where the same trainees would get to practice on actual guns with live ammunition firing out over the sea.
Castle Rising, one of my favourite castles, was up next. It has been a royal hunting lodge, an open prison for Edward II’s treacherous wife, Queen Isabella, a police station, and, at one point, an insane asylum for one inmate!
Castle Acre Priory down the road was also visited. The ruins are truly epic, and you get a good sense of how big the place was. When the majority of the Priory was destroyed during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, they kept the “priory house” intact so that the new landowners could use it as a residence. The whole site is part of Norman planned town, which also includes a motte and bailey castle, which unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit, and whole grid street design is still visible in the layout of the modern town. I could easily write a medieval adventure set in it since it shows clearly how the three classes, “them that work” (peasants), “them that pray” (the monks at the priory) and “them that fight and rule” (knights and nobility) lived.
I’ve had this sense of history growing up and going around places on my holidays. As well as Norfolk, the Cotswolds is particularly huge in this regard. In my roleplaying career, it is probably why I’ve gravitated to games that have settings with a well-defined sense of history, like RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu, and been less than impressed with some of the loosely defined but otherwise fanciful D&D settings. But I’ve never been brave enough to do any directly Historic games. Publishing Paul Mitchener’s Hunters of Alexandria was as close as I’ve got – and that is but the briefest of touch. I guess my main reason why is the balancing act between providing genuinely exciting game material that is deep enough to engage the interest of the audience without being overly challenged by self-acknowledged experts. I guess I’m a bit lazy and cowardly in that regard. Although, as a one-man publishing outfit I defend my right to do so. Instead, I use my historical imaginings to inform my fantasy games. So don’t be surprised if you see a planned town like Castle Acre in a future OpenQuest Gatan adventure. Castle Rising has already been featured as the fictional Castle Uprising in my ongoing OQ campaign.
