Your main goal as a GM is to gather players and make sure they have a good time. If you are going to succeed at this, then it’s important to neither offend nor trigger them.
There is no getting around that a Medieval European-like setting is full of exclusivity, especially when it’s about gender, race, and religion. To be fair, most historical periods and places are full of these inequalities, including our own world today. So, if you are aiming for a true, medieval assimilationist approach to gamemastering, you probably will end up driving away or ostracizing your gaming group.
Role-playing games are meant to be fun, and when players are not well-represented by the game, or campaign world they might feel left out, and maybe even snubbed. That’s no good, and at cross purposes to why we play role-playing games. Remember, role-playing games are for entertainment, and just because history was one way, or another is no reason to turn players away.
Gender
Medieval women didn’t have the rights and opportunities that men possessed. Yes, there were exceptional women that broke free of the strictures placed on them. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, and Marie de Pisan are all great because they broke new ground. But, what if a woman wants to become a knight, physician, apothecary, attorney, or whatever? My advice is to let them. Let them be among those exceptional women of old.
Race
Medieval people were not biassed by skin color as much as they were by nationality. Africans, Arabs, Jews, and others were present in many parts of Europe. St. Maurice, a black Egyptian, is a widely celebrated saint in Europe, just as Sir Moriens of the Arthurian legend was black. Intermarriage and travel in Medieval Europe was much more common than you might think, what with pilgrimages, wars, and merchants, and intermarriage common. So, if you want a character who was born elsewhere, or has mixed race features, go for it.
Religion
Religion in medieval Europe was less heterogeneous than you might think. Even in the Arthurian literature, as an example, Sir Palamedes the Saracen from Arthurian literature was Muslim. The Christian world held Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) in high regard for his supposed chivalry, and Averroes (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd) was an Islamic scholar whose work was widely absorbed wholesale into Western academia. In medieval Europe, communities of Jews, Gypsies, and Arabs were dotted throughout an otherwise Christian setting. In Andalusia, in southern Spain, for example, all three Abrahamic religions worked in peaceful concert. Roman Catholicism eventually became the dominant sect of Christianity, but there were also Arian and Eastern Rite churches, and the Gnostic variations arose again and again, as did other groups deemed “heretical” by the majority religion. There were still pockets of Pagan religion dotted throughout Aorlis, usually as simple folk tradition survivals. If you kept your religious views to yourself, you could probably get by, but the trouble begins when you try to convert others to your faith, or publish books with non-conformist (heretical) views, or teach non-conformist views at university.
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