When Twenty Players Become Historians: Tabletop RPG as Public History Infrastructure

How a multi-table Forged in the Dark scenario about the 1507 Genoese revolt became an experiment in participatory historical knowledge-making — and why the game engine is the least interesting part of what we built.

The Problem with Historical Empathy

Public history has long grappled with a fundamental asymmetry: the distance between the archive and the audience. Traditional formats — museum exhibitions, documentary films, guided tours — are remarkably good at transmitting information about the past. They are less good at transmitting the texture of historical decision-making: the uncertainty, the competing loyalties, the choices made under incomplete information with asymmetric consequences.

We tend to reduce historical actors to their outcomes. Andrea Doria becomes the man who realigned Genoa with the Habsburgs in 1528, not the ambitious thirty-year-old naval commander who in 1507 was still calculating which side of history to stand on. The Grimaldi become the dynasty that governs Monaco today, not a family navigating sovereignty claims that could vanish overnight.

Tabletop role-playing games, specifically in the Forged in the Dark tradition, offer something that no exhibition panel can: they put participants inside the uncertainty.

Genoa 1507: Design as Historical Research

Genoa 1507: The Revolt Against France (available on Itch.io) is a multi-table one-shot scenario for 16–20 players, set during the real historical revolt that briefly freed the city from French occupation. The design process began — as all good public history projects should — not with the game mechanics, but with the historiography.

The revolt of 1507 occupies an interesting position in the historiography of Renaissance Italy. It sits at the intersection of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), the collapse of Sforza Milan, and the long arc of Genoese constitutional instability that had already produced three Visconti protectorates between 1353 and 1421. It is, in other words, a local crisis that is completely legible only against a continental backdrop.

This is precisely what makes it productive for public history purposes. The event is specific enough to be learnable in thirty minutes. It is complex enough that no single perspective captures it. And it has a documented outcome against which players can measure their fictional choices.

The design process required us to make historical interpretive decisions that any historian would recognize as such: How autonomous were the great Genoese families in their choices? To what extent was the Bank of Saint George a genuinely independent institutional actor? Did the Grimaldi family’s eventual retention of Monaco reflect a strategy pursued in 1507 or a more contingent outcome?

These questions do not have settled answers. The game forces players to embody positions within that interpretive space.

The Architecture of Participatory History

The scenario is structured around a shared 8-segment clock representing the momentum of the revolt — a mechanic that encodes a core historiographical argument: that the outcome was neither predetermined nor random, but the emergent result of actions taken by identifiable actors with identifiable interests.

Each of the four tables plays one of the great Genoese houses — Doria, Spinola, Fieschi, Grimaldi — as a collective crew in the FitD sense. Each house has distinct resources (naval power, financial networks, ecclesiastical authority, commercial routes), a House Heist that only they can execute, and a role in the Global Heist: the Night of the Genoese Vespers, the moment when the revolt either coalesces into a popular uprising or fragments into competing aristocratic interests.

The interference system — by which any table can spend one move per session to disrupt another house’s plans — encodes the genuine historical reality that the revolt’s failure in May 1507 was not purely a matter of French military superiority. It was also a consequence of the Genoese families’ inability to subordinate their competing interests to a common goal for long enough.

The twenty pre-generated characters each carry a secret that can create conflict within their own table. This is not a dramatic convenience. It reflects the documented historical pattern: Genoese political actors of this period routinely maintained multiple channels of communication with competing powers, hedging their positions in ways that complicated collective action. Ser Fulvio Doria feeding information to the Spinola while nominally serving the Admiral is not a fictional invention — it is a structural feature of Genoese elite politics in this period.

Public History Through Play: A Methodology

The scenario is designed with a specific three-part pedagogical structure that can be adapted to educational or museum contexts.

Pre-session framing (30 minutes): A brief presentation of the historical context, using the expanded historical chapter in the manual (covering 1099 to 1512). The goal is not comprehensive knowledge transfer but what cognitive scientists call “desirable difficulty” — enough context to make choices feel meaningful, not enough to make them feel predetermined. Players should enter the session knowing that the revolt happened, that it eventually failed, and that its failure was not inevitable.

The session (approximately 3 hours): Standard play, with the Coordinator GM tracking the shared clock and managing the Global Heist activation at the midpoint. The session functions as what historians call a counterfactual laboratory: players explore the outcome space that the historical record collapsed into a single trajectory.

Post-session debrief (45 minutes): This is the methodologically crucial phase, and the one most often underestimated in game-based learning contexts. The debrief has two distinct movements. First, each table narrates its own epilogue — what happened to their house, what choices they made, what they sacrificed. Second, the facilitator reveals the documented historical outcome: Louis XII’s return in May 1507, the selective reprisals, the partial amnesty, and — crucially — what happened to each of the four families in the following decades.

The Fieschi, whose house in the game controls the bells of San Lorenzo, mounted a coup attempt against Andrea Doria in 1547 that failed when Gian Luigi Fieschi drowned falling from a gangplank in the dark. The Spinola, whose game strategy centers on financial leverage and diplomatic flexibility, survived every regime change and maintained European significance into the eighteenth century. The Grimaldi’s double-game strategy, which the game encodes as a viable (if risky) path to autonomous victory, did in fact work — their descendants govern Monaco today.

This confrontation between fictional outcome and historical record is where the genuine historical learning occurs. Players who chose to betray the Global Heist for personal gain discover that this pattern had real historical correlates and real historical consequences. Players who sacrificed their house’s interests for collective action discover that this too had historical precedents — and that it was not always rewarded.

The OpenHistoryMap Layer: Making Knowledge Machine-Readable

The scenario is accompanied by a structured data layer for OpenHistoryMap, built using RDF/Turtle triples with a dual namespace: ohm: for geographic and temporal entities, and fitd: for game-mechanical annotations via rpg-schema.org and the specific Forged in the Dark ruleset description at fitd.rpg-schema.org.

The OHM layer covers sixteen geographic entities (the six sestieri, key buildings, the harbour, Monaco, and the castle of Montoggio), thirty-two historical actors and institutions (from the Bank of Saint George to the individual houses), and a timeline of twenty-three events spanning 1099 to 1512.

This is not a cosmetic addition. It reflects a methodological commitment: the knowledge produced through public history events should be reusable in formats that extend beyond the event itself. A session of Genoa 1507 run at a museum produces participants who have engaged with a specific set of historical actors, places, and events. If those entities are mapped to a shared semantic layer, that engagement can be connected to other resources — to archival materials, to scholarly literature, to other public history projects covering the same period.

The rpg-schema.org annotations serve a complementary purpose: they make the game’s knowledge structure legible to systems that reason about role-playing game ontologies, enabling future work on AI-assisted scenario generation, cross-scenario character relationship mapping, and game-system-agnostic scenario porting.

Both layers are released under CC-BY 4.0 and available for import via the OHM dataset endpoint.

A Note on the Limits of Play

It would be dishonest to end without acknowledging what tabletop role-playing games cannot do as public history instruments.

They are not substitutes for primary source engagement. A three-hour session does not produce the same epistemic relationship with the past as sustained archival work. Players leave with a felt sense of historical contingency and an emotional stake in the period — but not with historiographical method.

They are also not neutral. Every design choice in a scenario encodes an interpretation. The decision to make the Grimaldi’s double-game strategy mechanically viable is an interpretive claim about Genoese elite pragmatism. The decision to give the Fieschi the highest Influence rating encodes a claim about the relative weight of ecclesiastical networks in fifteenth-century Ligurian politics. These choices should be made explicitly and defended, not concealed behind the neutrality of “game balance.”

What public history through play does well — perhaps uniquely well — is make the past feel like something that was once the present: open-ended, uncertain, inhabited by people who did not know how it would end. That is not a small thing. It is, in many ways, the foundational act of historical imagination.

Genoa 1507: The Revolt Against France is available at sirmmo.itch.io/genova_1507 (bilingual Italian/English).

Game ontology annotations use the rpg-schema vocabulary at rpg-schema.org and https://fitd.rpg-schema.org.

This post was written for the OpenHistoryMap publication on Medium. The scenario was designed as part of ongoing research into semantic web applications in public history and digital humanities.