Fief

Enjoy a trip to a world where powerful priests can charge sinners with the death penalty, and where knights gather for illegal combat sports ... where thieves can thumb their nose at the authorities from within the walls of a church, and where a foraging band of the king's own soldiers is more dangerous than a pack of brigand outlaws. In the midst of all this, ordinary people survived to work the land, weave the cloth, and pray for safety from famine and plague. The real Middle Ages were as brutish and wild as any fantasy world.

Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs is a sourcebook that examines the Middle Ages from the viewpoint of the ordinary farmer, priest, and landholder - the inhabitants of a feudal manor. It's a friendly primer on the basics of medieval life, and a treasury of hard-to-find details for the Game Master or enthusiast, from prices and wages to laws and penalties, from superstitions and beliefs to the rigors of ordinary life.

Fief is by Lisa J. Steele, author of Medieval France from White Rose Publishing, GURPS Cops and GURPS Mysteries from Steve Jackson Games, and Fief's best-selling companion volume: Town: A City-Dweller's Look at 13th to 15th Century Europe. Produced and indexed by S. John Ross, creator of the All-Systems Library and of works ranging from Risus to the Star Trek Narrator's Toolkit to GURPS Russia.

"Steele sets down for the reader in about a hundred pages more useful material than can be gleaned from a dozen role-playing manuals. The tables of meticulously-organized data are worth the price of admission alone ..."

— Guy McLimore

"Fief is an excellent quick and accurate reference for someone trying to run a historical RPG (such as Ars Magica, or a historical GURPS campaign) with something more than Hollywood-level historicity."

— Spike Y. Jones

Get to know this book at no charge: download the Fief Sampler, and explore! The sampler includes the book's complete Index and Table of Contents to gauge the scope of the work, along with sample pages from nearly every section of the full PDF. Print, browse, and understand why this book is sought after by medieval gamers, re-creationists, and armchair historians alike.