Another conceit is the idea that what people thought about how the world worked in the given time-period is correct. Many of my players have been caught off guard to learn that diseases are spread by "miasmas the penetrate the skin" rather than by flea-bites. There is nothing more satisfying than having the PCs try to save a village from a plague, only to learn that their attempts to force everyone to wash is the cause of the rapid spread of the contagion.
As my wife often says, the hygiene hypothesis is very convenient.
To whit: Hygiene kind of matters in medieval/renaissance fantasy games, but maybe not in the way you think. So let's talk about it. Much of the detail for this post come from Bill's Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
Skip to the end if you're just looking for something gameable.
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Bathing
Then in the Middle Ages the spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene and what they might do to modify their own susceptibility to outbreaks. Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapours to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years (until the mid 19th century) most people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it – and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everyone itched nearly all the time. Discomfort was constant, serious illness accepted with resignation.
Devastating diseases arose, killed millions and then, often, mysteriously vanished. The most notorious was plague, but there were many others. The English sweating sickness, a disease about which we still know almost nothing, had epidemics in 1485, 1508, 1517 and 1528, killing thousands as it went, before disappearing, never to return (or at least not yet). It was followed in the 1550s by another strange fever, "the new sickness", which "raged horribly throughout the realm and killed an exceeding great number of all sorts of men, but especially gentlemen and men of great wealth", as one contemporary noted. In between and sometimes alongside were outbreaks of ergotism, which came from a fungal infection of rye grain. People who ingested poisoned grain suffered delirium, seizures, fever, loss of consciousness and eventually, in many cases, death. A curious aspect of ergotism is that it came with a cough very like a dog’s bark, which is thought to be the source of the expression ‘barking mad’.
Clearly not all of these dreadful maladies were directly related to washing, but people didn’t necessarily know that or even care. Although everyone knew that syphilis was spread through sexual contact, which could of course take place anywhere, it became indelibly associated with bathhouses. Prostitutes generally were banned from coming within a hundred paces of a bathhouse and eventually Europe’s bathhouses were closed altogether. With the bathhouses gone, most people got out of the habit of washing – not that many of them were entirely in it to begin with. Washing wasn’t unknown, just a little selective. "Wash your hands often, your feet seldom, and your head never" was a common English proverb. Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no". In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually. Robert Hooke, the scientist, washed his feet often (because he found it soothing), but appears not to have spent much time damp above the ankles. Samuel Pepys mentions his wife’s bathing only once in the diary he kept for nine and a half years. In France, King Louis XIII went unbathed until almost his seventh birthday, in 1608.
By the time Europeans began to visit the New World in large numbers they had grown so habitually malodorous that the natives nearly always remarked at how bad they smelled. Nothing, however, bemused the Native Americans more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.
There is no doubt that some standards of cleanliness were expected. When an observer of the court of King James I noted that the king never went near water except to daub his fingertips with a moist napkin, he was writing in a tone of disgust. And it is notable that people who were really grubby were generally famous for it, among whom we might include the eleventh Duke of Norfolk, who was so violently opposed to soap and water that his servants had to wait till he was dead drunk to scrub him clean; Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer, whose surface was an uninterrupted accretion of dirt; and even the refined James Boswell, whose body odour was a wonder to many in an age when that was assuredly saying something. But even Boswell was left in awe by his contemporary the Marquis d’Argens, who wore the same undershirt for so many years that when at last he was persuaded to take it off, it had so fixed itself upon him ‘that pieces of his skin came away with it’. For some, however, filthiness became a kind of boast. The aristocratic Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was one of the first great female travellers, was so grubby that after shaking her hand a new acquaintance blurted out in amazement how dirty. ‘What would you say if you saw my feet?’ Lady Mary responded brightly. Many people grew so unused to being exposed to water in quantity that the very prospect of it left them genuinely fearful. When Henry Drinker, a prominent Philadelphian, installed a shower in his garden as late as 1798, his wife Elizabeth put off trying it out for over a year, "not having been wet all over at once, for 28 years past", she explained.
By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701 Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any number of maladies. His theory was that plunging a body into chilly water produced a sensation of ‘Terror and Surprize’ which invigorated dulled and jaded senses.
Benjamin Franklin tried another tack. During his years in London, he developed the custom of taking "air baths", basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can’t have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbours something to talk about. Also strangely popular was "dry washing" – rubbing oneself with a brush to open the pores and possibly dislodge lice. Many people believed that linen had special qualities that absorbed dirt from the skin. As Katherine Ashenburg has put it, "they 'washed' by changing their shirts". Most, however, fought dirt and odour by either covering it with cosmetics and perfumes or just ignoring it. Where everyone stinks no one stinks.
What really got the Victorians to turn to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing. The Victorians had a kind of instinct for self-torment, and water became a perfect way to make that manifest. Many diaries record how people had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to ablute in the morning, and the Reverend Francis Kilvert noted with pleasure how jagged ice clung to the side of his bath and pricked his skin as he merrily bathed on Christmas morning in 1870. Showers, too, offered great scope for punishment, and were often designed to be as powerful as possible. One early type of shower was so ferocious that users had to don protective headgear before stepping in lest they be beaten senseless by their own plumbing.
Assuming that most fantasy games are set in the equivalent of the Pre-Victorian era (since Victorian is usually associated with "Steam Punk"), it should be assumed that standards of cleanliness similar to those above were followed. Asking for a "Hot Bath" to be drawn when staying at an inn should be a completely alien concept to most characters (indeed very few homes, let alone an inn should have anything resembling bathing facilities). PCs that insist on dousing or submerging themselves in water on a regular basis are likely viewed as insane by their neighbors and should be treated as such.
Toilets
The English for a long time were particularly noted for their unconcern about lavatorial privacy. Giacomo Casanova, the Italian adventurer, remarked on a visit to London how frequently he saw someone "ease his sluices" in full public view along roadsides or against buildings. Pepys notes in his diary how his wife squatted in the road "to do her business".
The term ‘Water closet’ dates from 1755 and originally signified the place where royal enemas were administered. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson installed three indoor privies, probably the first in America. which incorporated air vents to take the odour away. By Jeffersonian standards (or actually any standards) they weren’t technologically advanced: the waste simply fell into a collecting pot, which was emptied by slaves. However, at the White House Jefferson in 1801 in stalled three of the first flushing toilets in the world. They were powered by rain-water cisterns installed in the attic.
Most people continued to use chamber pots which they kept in a cupboard in their bedrooms or closet, and which were known (for entirely obscure reasons) as "jordans". Foreign visitors were frequently appalled by the English habit of keeping chamber pots in cupboards or sideboards in the dining room, which the men would pull out and use as soon as the women had withdrawn. Some rooms came supplied with a "necessary chair" in the corner as well. A French visitor to Philadelphia, Moreau de Saint-Méry, noted with astonishment how one man removed the flowers from a vase and peed in it. Another French visitor at about the same time reported asking for a chamber pot for his bedroom and being told "just to go out the window like everyone else". When he insisted upon being provided with something in which to do his business, his bemused host brought him a kettle, but firmly reminded him that she would need it back in the morning in time for breakfast.
The most notable feature about anecdotes involving toilet practices is that they always involve people from one country being appalled by the habits of those from another. There were as many complaints about the lavatorial customs of the French as the French made of others. One that had been around for centuries was that in France there was "much pissing in chimnies" there. The French were also commonly accused of relieving themselves on staircases, ‘a practice which was still to be found at Versailles in the eighteenth century’, writes Mark Girouard in Life in the French Country House. It was the boast of Versailles that it had one hundred bathrooms and three hundred commodes, but they were oddly underused, and in 1715 an edict reassured residents and visitors that henceforth the corridors would be cleared of faeces weekly.
Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected and the contents often seeped into neighbouring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: "Going down into my cellar...I put my foot into a great heap of turds...by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me."
The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man, the most junior, was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and the third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 related the case of one nightsoil man who went into a privy vault in a London tavern and was overcome almost at once by the foul air. "He call’d out for help, and immediately fell down on his face," one witness reported. A colleague who rushed to the man’s aid was similarly overcome. Two more men went to the vault, but could not get in because of the foul air, though they did manage to open the door a little, releasing the worst of the gases. By the time rescuers were able to haul the two men out, one was dead and the other was beyond help.
Because nightsoil men charged hefty fees, cesspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed, not surprisingly given the pressures put on the average inner-city cesspit. Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In 1851 in St Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries, 54,000 people were crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, further east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The house had nine beds, one for every seven occupants.
I kindof want to run a campaign where the PC's first "adventure" involves working as nightsoil men.
Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste, far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting two houses in St Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of three feet. Outside, the inspector continued, the yard was six inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping stones to let the occupants cross the yard.
At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were "floating with sewage"; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for fifteen years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in. And of course human waste was only a small part of the enormous heaps of filth that were generated in the crowded and rapidly industrializing cities. In London, the Thames absorbed anything that wasn’t wanted: condemned meat, offal, dead cats and dogs, food waste, industrial waste, human faeces and much more. Animals were marched daily to Smithfield Market to be turned into beefsteaks and mutton chops; they deposited 40,000 tons of dung en route in a typical year. That was, of course, on top of all the waste of dogs, horses, geese, ducks, chickens and rutting pigs that were kept domestically. Gluemakers, tanners, dyers, tallow chandlers, chemical enterprises of all sorts, all added their by-products to the sea of daily sludge. Much of this rotting detritus ultimately found its way into the Thames, where the hope was that the tide would carry it out to sea. But of course tides run in both directions, and the tide that carried waste out towards the sea brought a good deal of it back when it turned. The river was a perpetual "flood of liquid manure", as one observer put it. Smollett said that "human excrement is the least offensive part", for the river also contained "all the drugs, minerals and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers". The Thames grew so noxious that when a tunnel being dug at Rotherhithe sprang a leak the first matter through the breach was not river water but concentrated gases, which were ignited by the miners’ lamps, putting them in the absurdly desperate position of trying to outrun incoming waters and clouds of burning air.
Into this morass came something that proved, unexpectedly, to be a disaster: the flush toilet. Flush toilets of a type had been around for some time. Early toilets often didn’t work well. Sometimes they backfired, filling the room with even more of what the horrified owner had very much hoped to be rid of. Until the development of the U-bend (in 1880) and water trap every toilet bowl acted as a conduit to the smells of cesspit and sewer. The backwaft of odours, particularly in hot weather, could be unbearable.The bigger problem was that London’s sewers were designed only to drain off rainwater and couldn’t cope with a steady deluge of solid waste. The sewers filled up with a dense, gloopy sludge that wouldn’t wash away. Eventually resulting in the so-called Great Stink. People known as "flushermen" were employed to find blockages and clear them. Other sewery professions included "toshers" and "mudlarks" who delved through muck, in sewers and along fetid riverbanks, for lost jewellery or the odd silver spoon. Toshers made a good living, all things considered, but it was dangerous. The air in the sewers could be lethal. Since the sewer network was vast and unrecorded, there were many reports of toshers getting lost and failing to find their way out. Many were at least rumoured to have been attacked and devoured by rats.
Keep in mind that most of the documented cases above (including ones of people shitting on the floor of their own homes) are from the 18th century or later...it took a long time for people to start caring about disposing of waste. Even in a "Steampunk" game (perhaps especially in such settings), a general sense of horrifically poor hygiene should be conveyed (see above statements about "floods of liquid manure" in 19th century London).__________________________________________________________________
Oath of the Humble (A Paladin Archetype for 5th edition D&D)
Tenets of the HumbleNot all Paladins are shining cavaliers or horned fey champions, some, instead, come from the most humble of backgrounds and remember their roots. These peasant heroes, champions of the unwashed masses, strive to live lives of piety, eschewing the worldly trappings of wealth and power, and seek justice for the least fortunate. Many who swear this oath are indistinguishable from common peasants or ascetic monks: they wear simple robes and castoff armor, carry whatever weapons they can find, and care nothing for the cleanliness or themselves or their gear.
Though the exact words and strictures of the Oath of the Humble vary between faiths, all Paladins of this oath share these tenants:
- Conversion of life: The paladin will engage in arduous combat against vice and pursuit of ascetic virtue. He pursues poverty, chastity, and abstinence from all vice.
- Defend the downtrodden: The paladin will always act to aid those in positions of physical, financial, or political weakness, particularly when they are threatened by the forces of evil.
- Abstain from ostentation: The paladin will carry and use only those tools that are necessary. He does not dress for show and may seek to hide items of quality that he owns. He will cover his nakedness, sharpen his sword, and bang out dents in his armor, but takes no other efforts in his appearance.
- Abstain from action without purpose: The paladin never bothers with daily activities that are not necessary for his survival or the fulfillment of his duties. Trifles such as bathing, grooming, music, courtship, or the niceties of etiquette are beneath his notice.
You gain oath spells at the paladin levels listed:
Level Spells 3rd Goodberry, Sanctuary 5th Animal Messenger, Invisibility 9th Mass Healing Word, Stinking Cloud 13th Freedom of Movement, Giant Insect 17th Greater Restoration, Insect Plague
Channel Divinity
When you take this oath at 3rd level, you can the following two Channel Divinity options.
Beginning at 15th level, your hatred of economic injustice can affect the tangible world around you, bringing ruin to those who place their faith in material goods. As an action, you can cause all coins, gems, and works of art within 30 feet of you to become debased (coins become less pure, gems become flawed, artworks wear and fade). All such items are reduced to one tenth of their current value (thus a gold piece would be reduced to the value of a silver piece). If the item is currently held by a creature, the item's owner is allowed a Charisma save to negate the effect, but only for those items in his possession.
When you take this oath at 3rd level, you can the following two Channel Divinity options.
- Chastise the Mighty: As an action, you present your holy symbol and speak a prayer of denunciation, using your Channel Divinity. Each creature of a larger size category than you within 30 feet that can see or hear you must make a Charisma saving throw, unless it is immune to being frightened. On a failed save, the creature is frightened for 1 minute, or until it takes any damage. On a successful save, the creature suffers disadvantage on all attack rolls for 1 minute, or until it takes any damage.
- Lay Low the Haughty: As an action, you present your holy symbol and and rebuke a creature for its pride, using your Channel Divinity. Choose one creature within 60 feet that you can see. The creature must make a saving throw using its lowest ability score. If the save fails, the creature is overcome with self-doubt and suffers disadvantage on all ability checks made using its highest ability score. The creature may attempt a new saving throw at the end of each of its turns. On a success, the effect ends.
Aura of Freedom
Restriction of movement is a common tactic of repression and you will not stand for it. Beginning at 7th level, you and friendly creatures within 10 feet of you cannot be restrained while you are conscious.
At 18th level, the range of this aura increases to 30 feet.
Impoverished Spirit
Beginning at 15th level, your hatred of economic injustice can affect the tangible world around you, bringing ruin to those who place their faith in material goods. As an action, you can cause all coins, gems, and works of art within 30 feet of you to become debased (coins become less pure, gems become flawed, artworks wear and fade). All such items are reduced to one tenth of their current value (thus a gold piece would be reduced to the value of a silver piece). If the item is currently held by a creature, the item's owner is allowed a Charisma save to negate the effect, but only for those items in his possession.
Alternatively, you may target this ability at a single magic item within 30 feet. The owner of the item is allowed a Charisma save. On a failed save, items of common or uncommon quality (see DMG pg. 153) are completely destroyed, those of rare quality cease functioning until the owner takes a long rest, and items of very rare or legendary quality cease their functioning for 1 minute.
Once you have used this ability you cannot use it again until you have completed a long or short rest.
Unwashed Champion
At 20th level, you become a true champion of the unwashed masses. As an action, you can emanate an aura of piety (and overwhelming stench) for 1 minute. Any enemy that begins its turn within 30 feet of you takes 10 points of poison damage and must make a Constitution save or be poisoned until the start of its next turn.
In addition, for the duration, you have resistance to poison and necrotic damage, but suffer disadvantage on all Charisma (Performance) and Charisma (Persuasion) skill checks.
Once you have used this feature, you cannot use it again until you have completed a long rest.
Unwashed Champion
At 20th level, you become a true champion of the unwashed masses. As an action, you can emanate an aura of piety (and overwhelming stench) for 1 minute. Any enemy that begins its turn within 30 feet of you takes 10 points of poison damage and must make a Constitution save or be poisoned until the start of its next turn.
In addition, for the duration, you have resistance to poison and necrotic damage, but suffer disadvantage on all Charisma (Performance) and Charisma (Persuasion) skill checks.
Once you have used this feature, you cannot use it again until you have completed a long rest.
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