The Three Estates

History & RPG
I don't back a lot of Kickstarters, but occasionally something comes to my attention that I think is

"must have". I recently kicked in on the new edition of Chivalry & Sorcery and am starting to receive the first fruits of that expenditure. Chivalry & Sorcery is a game that has been on my favored list from the first moment I discovered its existence. As a devotee of feudal history, I am drawn to all things that model that particular interesting and alien time period. While many fantasy games borrow the trappings of medieval western Europe, very few attempt to model its society. C&S was perhaps the first exception.
Obviously, we live in a world much different from that of the middle ages - "a world lit only by fire", as it was termed. Our understanding of the world, and our societal values, even our assumptions of what is true and just, differ quite significantly from that of medieval Europeans. Realism in gaming is to some extent a fool's errand, but for those of us who enjoy playing in an alien environment and exploring what it might be like to exist in a different time and place, the historic feudal times is as exotically different as any fantastic imagining.
Historians have described the organization of medieval European society as "The Three Estates", the nobility, the church and the peasantry, in other words, the people of war, people of faith and people of labor. Society paid strict attention to one's station in life and it was your station rather than your deeds that defined who you were, what privileges you enjoyed and how you would be treated. For the most part there was no social mobility. The station your parents existed in determined your position in society, for life. Only by joining the church could one hope to change their station in society, but the church practiced its own strict internal hierarchy. Money bought you little in terms of status and its accumulation was looked upon with suspicion and sometimes, contempt.
Role-playing is a unique kind of game. It encourages the player to adopt the point-of-view of a character in an imagined setting, for fun and entertainment. It allows us to explore what a life quite different from our own might "feel" like. It is a shared form of mental escape or make-believe with game rules and parameters. Part of the fun of role-playing is experiencing novel and heroic (or slightly scary!) thoughts and collectively making up stories about the lives of imaginary characters - all from a safe distance, of course.
Tabletop role-playing comes in many flavors. You can play virtually any kind of sentient being you like and be from any setting that could possibly be imagined - or you can play a human physically much like us in many ways, except they are from a past time and place such as medieval Europe, Africa or Asia. This type of role-play requires a bit of effort in terms of research and "getting into character" by trying to think like a person from that time might have thought. Part of the reward of this type of role-play comes from the satisfaction of "doing it well" by self-limiting our play to that which is consistent with our understanding of the behaviors and beliefs of the historic period - that is by staying "in character".