Role Playing the Dark Ages

Freedom and Inspiration
Whether the setting is historic or fictional, a Dark Ages theme lends itself readily to creative imagining and highly atmospheric role playing.  The very nature of a "dark age" is that much is not known. Facts are few and even historians struggle to fill in the missing information with archeology and speculation. And that's history. If we are creating a fantasy "dark age" then basically anything goes. Characteristic of dark ages is that most people know very little about their world. Few people travel or have access to written accounts or maps. The world and it's inhabitants remain largely a mystery. Fear and superstition pervade, violence is generally a way of life. Institutions are often oppressive, but seldom have a long reach.
It is just such a setting that is used in Chaosium's Cthulhu Dark Ages. Set on Earth in Europe around the year 950 A.D. the story begins with a translation of one of the darkest volumes ever compiled, The Necronomicon (a fictional prop used in Cthulhu mythos and games). As the story goes several copies of this dangerous book are made and for a time circulate among the secret enclaves of forbidden knowledge and threaten the existence of man and even the planet. The game Call of Cthulhu has long used alternative explanations of historic events as fodder for the role playing mill and here among the dimly recorded dark ages there is ample opportunity to invent away.
One of the potential pitfalls of refereeing a setting based on history or a published setting is contradicting historic factor canon through either ignorance or playing fast with facts. It certainly breaks the mood and immersion of the players to have someone interrupt play with "It didn't really happen that way", or "That's not true". The lack of factual knowledge of a dark ages period minimizes this problem. First, there isn't as much history to grasp and second, what is published is often speculative and open to interpretation.

Authors of historical fiction, and to some extent fantasy and science fiction, have log recognized the freedom of a dark age setting or alternative history scenario. Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light Of The Sun is set in a dark age world closely resembling 9th century Europe, with the names all changed. In this way Mr. Kay is able to use history as inspiration, but is free to invent additional events, creatures, even include a role for magic in his story and because it is very close in places to what we know as "reality" it is all more believable. In this novel there is a familiarity which helps establish verisimilitude, but it doesn't run the danger of contradicting history or canon. Mr. Kay does an excellent job in The Last Light of the Sun of portraying the dark age feeling and atmosphere and is an inspiration for running a dark age setting in an RPG.
One of the delights of our hobby is the ability to take almost any setting from any source, literature, history, TV or other media, and turn that setting into a game milieu. The more adaptable rules, those including White Box and d100, lend themselves readily to such adaptation. A central theme in Mr. Kay's The Last Light of the Sun is the tension between superstition and piety. A mechanic such can be designed for gaming in this setting where the two beliefs are opposite and as one increases due to in-game activity the other decreases. Consequences can be linked to this change both for the individual PC and for the campaign. For example, as the PC has more encounters with the "half world" of faerie, superstition increases, making piety more difficult for the PC and distancing the PC from their god. Also, the more superstitious the PC becomes, the greater strength magic and the "half world" has in the game. Eventually the campaign can end up with a shift in the world toward either superstition or piety as a result of PC actions.