Types of Medieval Documents

[Opuk0]

I was kinda interested in expanding and fleshing out Linguistics a little, so I wanted to find out what kind of documents would've existed in medieval times for the purposes of forgery, etc

Off the top of my head, I can imagine merchant ledgers and proof of pedigree/nobility being two such documents

Anything else?

[J. S.]

Other ideas:
***Illuminations. (Many bibles/chronicles/histories were heavily illustrated.)
***Bibles. (Exp. Maciejowski Bible.)
***Chronicles. (Exp. Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle.)
***History of a kingdom--Often claiming that the rulers were descended from biblical figures. (Exp. The History of the Kings of Britain.)
***Religious/philosophical essays (Exp. works of Thomas Aquinas.)
***Greek and Roman texts copied by (sometimes illiterate) monks. (Exp. works of Archimedes, Aristotle, Plato, etc...)
***Treaties or legal agreements. (Exp. Magna Carta.)
***Notes about anything and everything involved in day to day life. (Exp. Notes on birch bark from Novgorod.)
***Myths and legends (often originally told orally.) (Exp. Beowulf, medieval poetry that inspired the Ring Cycle, tall tales like Baba Yaga...)

Not all of these would motivate someone to forge them, but hopefully that inspires a few ideas.

[Opuk0]

Not quite a forgery but now I have an amazing idea for a character who pens their own fake biography and tries to sell it off to everyone he comes across

[J. S.]

That sounds like a really fun idea. Repeat the biography enough times and everyone believes it... Could range from a serious character to camp like Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter.

[quibblemuch]

Travelogues also became very popular in the later middle ages. Some of them were fakes--that can be a great adventure seed, if you're looking for a double-reverse. "What do you MEAN there isn't a buried city of dwarven gold in this desert full of sand-krakens? The book says so!"

Hagiographies (lives of the saints) were extremely popular as well. I can see a cleric of an evil faith forging one of those with just enough subtle mis-information to lead someone down the road to darkness.

One of the most famous medieval forgeries was The Donation of Constantine. Its exposure as a fake is one of the many turning points between the medieval and early modern periods. Imagine if you could, say, forge a degree from Abrogail I of Cheliax saying that a particular island had been granted special status as an independent protectorate of Cheliax. If your forgery were epic enough, you might even fool the devils themselves--and who doesn't want a devil-guarded private island?

[Bwang]

Legal charters and permits are a few I have used or had to use on multiple occasions. Permission to cross borders, carry arms, raise a company of X, a sanction for an action or deed (dragon hunting permit), ledgers of accounts, military orders (we dodged a company of Hobgoblins by passing them orders to camp elsewhere), get out of jail documents, certification as a 'X', and letters of introduction are all I can remember using or inflicting on players.

Alchemy recipes, poems, minutes, judicial verdicts, announcements, posted laws, wanted posters and inventory pages have been in game of late.

[Tim Emrick]

In the medieval history course I took in college, two of the richest kinds of primary sources used in the books we read were tax and census rolls, and the records of the Inquisition. The latter often became the only surviving documentation of previously oral traditions in a given place--everything from agricultural practices to folk medicine to religious beliefs.

In a setting where any organization has a practice of recording legal depositions, a good forger can exploit the system by tampering with evidence, falsifying confessions, planting questionable texts in order to ruin reputations, and the like.

[Tinalles]

One interesting medieval anti-forgery technique:

The finished document is cut into several pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, and each person with a stake in it gets a piece. Mostly used with contracts. Reading the full contract requires the contractees to bring their pieces together, at which point the validity of the contract is demonstrated not only by the matching handwriting, but also by the matching shapes. It also makes it hard to forge, because you have to have all of the pieces in order to even know what the whole contract says.

In terms of PF stuff, you could make a mini-adventure where in order to alter the terms of an existing agreement, you have to steal multiple contract pieces, do the forgery, duplicate the exact size and shape of each piece, and finally return the new pieces to their original owners. To add extra complication, it has to be made of a rare material -- say, parchment made from wyvvern hide -- and when the pieces are brought together a wizard casts Mending to re-attach the pieces to one another, so you can't forge just the two bits you need, it has to be the entire document. And you could probably throw in some complications involving figuring out how to forge the signatory's Arcane Mark spells.

[Opuk0]

@Tinalles That is evil and I love it

[DeathQuaker]

I am going to the pedant who notes most fantasy adventure settings are more technologically advanced than medieval Europe, and moreover magic replaces technology in a number of ways. (Magic and supernatural elememts also keeps otherwise low tech stuff useful--full plate is cumbersome and ineffective against certain weapons so went out of use, but if we could make +1 mithral full plate it might have not gone out of fashion so quickly).

In a world where someone could design a "tome of instant writing" or an autopen or can use a magic spell to copy a page your have far greater opportunities for publishing than in the real world, let alone in the medieval ages.

So while it's cool to look at older trends in writing as a starting point, especially to jog creativity, what was available in the medieval ages shouldn't limit you either.

Golarion in particular presumes a far more literate population than medieval ones, which alone means printed material will be far more widely used and available and for a multitude of purposes.

[Weirdo]

Tinalles wrote:

In terms of PF stuff, you could make a mini-adventure where in order to alter the terms of an existing agreement, you have to steal multiple contract pieces, do the forgery, duplicate the exact size and shape of each piece, and finally return the new pieces to their original owners. To add extra complication, it has to be made of a rare material -- say, parchment made from wyvvern hide -- and when the pieces are brought together a wizard casts Mending to re-attach the pieces to one another, so you can't forge just the two bits you need, it has to be the entire document. And you could probably throw in some complications involving figuring out how to forge the signatory's Arcane Mark spells.

Stealing this idea for a future campaign.

[Lemartes]

What about printing press plates? Not the actual document but...

[quibblemuch]

I had a campaign that involved the theft of a printing press. The thief repurposed it to stamp out tiny golems made of purple fungus, which then expanded to Large sized purple fungolems upon being watered.

Gnomes, it needs barely be said, were involved.

[Lemartes]

Heheh...needless to say I'm loving this thread. :)

[bitter lily]

I would like to point out that Paizo's world, Golarion, is actually more 1700's tech & science. American colonial or revolutionary period; French extravagant monarchy and revolution. I discovered a stove in my AP mid-session, and had to sit back and re-imagine my world. Stoves require a LOT of metallurgy! And some industry.

That's Paizo's world, not Pathfinder, yes, but I think those assumptions leak into the game mechanics. And the minute you open the door to the printing press, the nature of forgery changes.

Contracts, letters, wills, and other "custom" docs are handwritten, however -- no typewriters, yet. And apparently, wizards' spellbooks must be, for obscure but arcane reasons.

So we do have those spellbooks...

And diplomatic docs like Letters of Marque, Letters of Credence (diplomatic credentials), and Letters Patent are still going to be hot.

For that matter, so will industrial patents or land patents.

And then we get to warrants...