Posted on May 3, 2020
The Grand Campaign
Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition opened with an introduction to the concept of the Grand Campaign. There was no succinct single sentence definition which I can reproduce here, but rather a description of the Grand Campaign as encompassing an entire fantasy world and permitting play at any and all levels of detail within that world – as kings and commanders of armies, to individual characters of any social rank. This is fundamentally different from most modern roleplaying game campaigns, which are often described in terms of “stories” in which the player characters are protagonists. Rather, in the Grand Campaign as described by Simbalist and Backhaus in the 1st edition of Chivalry & Sorcery, it is really the history of a simulated fantasy world which is being “played out” rather than an individual story within that world. Individual players may control many different characters in that world, indeed, they may play powerful kings, chivalrous knights, or humble peasants, and anything between. The Grand Campaign encapsulates this idea of play happening (or at least, being able to happen) at multiple levels of play, with groups of players choosing to play at all the levels or just those which interest them.
Building and expanding on the Grand Campaign as described in Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition with my thoughts after some time spent with the 5th edition of that august gaming lineage, the levels of play in the Grand Campaign could be described as follows, listed in order, with “1” at the “highest” level of play and “4” at the “lowest” or most narrowly focussed-level:
- Grand Strategy – This level of play is primarily military and geopolitical in nature. It will focus on the struggles between baronies and kingdoms and on the clash of armies, and deal with questions of economics and resources.
- The Nobility – This level of play complements Grand Strategy by fleshing out the important political and military characters – princes, generals, knights. C&S 1e notes that “the military miniatures enthusiast will probably elect only to deal with Knights and Nobles”.
- The Fantasy Campaign – This level of play is probably the more typical fantasy roleplaying game’s fare (albeit with more C&S-style realism). It adds magicians to the mix, expanding the game beyond the knights and nobles of the historical ruling class.
- Village Life – This level of play includes ordinary life in the game world, down to the lowest serf. I have called this “Village Life” to emphasis the micro-nature of this level of play within the Grand Campaign, but it could just as easily focus on the day-to-day in towns or cities. This level of play is not typically a feature of fantasy roleplaying games – this sort of activity is generally performed by NPCs in the background of play.
Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition was intended as a single-volume rulebook to address the whole of the Grand Campaign (or at least levels 1 through 3 in my improvised hierarchy):
“The essential feature of Chivalry & Sorcery is the flexibility built into all of the campaign types. Players may choose the type of campaign that they desire and may ignore all elements that are not relevant to their needs and aims.”
Ed Simbalist & Wilf Backhaus (1977), Chivalry & Sorcery, 1st edition
My own Chivalry & Sorcery campaign is at level 3. Indeed, probably every fantasy roleplaying campaign I have ever run or played in has been at level 3. There is certainly nothing wrong with level 3, but there’s a lot of play which can happen at other levels which isn’t a feature of my own games or my own experience. The Grand Campaign would involve play at multiple levels, possibly with many more players and even multiple GMs, not necessarily all playing together at the same time, but all playing in the same world, with the potential to interact and affect each other.
This explains why, as previously discussed, the concept of time and a relationship between real world time and campaign time is also strangely (to modern eyes) so important in Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition. Indeed, C&S 1st edition is not alone in this – it seems to have been a feature of the Greyhawk and Blackmoor D&D campaigns as well. In this context, the infamous Gygax quote in the AD&D DMG that “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT” makes a lot more sense than it might from a purely “modern” (really, 1980s onwards) roleplaying game perspective. This sort of defined relationship between real-world and game time would have been essential for games which spanned levels 1 to 3 of the Grand Campaign.
I have been drafting and re-drafting my own rules-lite game which spans levels 1 to 3 of the Grand Campaign (with play focussed at level 2) for a year and a half. I am about to re-embark on yet another re-write. But since I am presently running (and enjoying) a level 3 “Fantasy Campaign” using Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition, and since Chivalry & Sorcery introduced the concept, I have started to think about the practicalities of using Chivalry & Sorcery‘s latest incarnation for the Grand Campaign.
The first thing I would note is that the wargaming clubs which predominated in the hobby in the 1970s are now, effectively, a separate world from the roleplaying game one. Campaigns as run by Arneson and Gygax, and indeed, Simbalist and Backhaus, with 20+ players drifting in and out between sessions are generally impractical – unless maybe you were playing Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (and even then, that would not be a very Critical Role-like experience so maybe not). I suspect but I am not sure about early C&S campaigns, but it was certainly a feature of early D&D campaigns that players had multiple characters, and would choose which of their characters to play at the start of each adventuring session, alternating between them over the course of many sessions. I think a similar approach would be necessary in the Grand Campaign in 2020, and this would also help facilitate running such an ambitious exercise with a more realistic-sized play group.
I believe the Grand Campaign calls for players to take more responsibility and direct control of many aspects of the game world, albeit underneath the Gamemaster’s supervision. The Player-Referee (as the GM is occasionally called in Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition) of course has the most characters at their disposal, but the game actually rails against the injustice of this somewhat, and explains how player characters may marshal armies and enlist the support of allies and vassals and how such characters are in effect, under their control rather than the Player-Referee. In the Grand Campaign, players can be expected to manage the resources and incomes available to their estates and feudal holdings at levels 1 and 2 of play.
A good way to invest the players in these additional responsibilities, and in play at level 1 especially, is to involve them in the world building process. Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition has a solid introduction to world building, starting with map making (just as 1st edition notes), description of feudal society, and a detailed system for building feudal holdings from the level of kingdom down. There is no reason why this work should only be done by the GM – and indeed, there will be more investment in a collaborative world building effort. After the initial preparation is complete, of course, world building will continue to be on-going during play in order to satisfy the demands of play, and the GM will need to do this “just in time” worldbuilding largely by themselves, but they will be building upon a shared foundation.
Unlike in 1st edition Chivalry & Sorcery, which started with miniature wargaming rules first and eventually moved onto character generation around the halfway mark, level 1 play is not entirely facilitated by the 5th edition core rulebook. The Kickstarter included the stretch goal to deliver the Ars Bellica supplement, a mass-combat system which can also serve as a miniature wargame in its own right. Subscribers to the Brittannia Game Designs Patreon can get access to the latest draft of this supplement. The current draft is certainly usable, and as an alternative to the full miniature rules most of the supplement describes, it also includes an “Art of Maths” option for mass combat to be resolved with some maths based on troops and resources and a few rolls. Either one of these should bridge the gap and satisfy the requirements of level 1 play nicely. The core rulebook does provide the economic details which would be necessary for Grand Strategy level play.
Play at levels 2, 3 and even 4 are all well-provided for by the Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition core rulebook. No other game in my collection so admirably and comprehensively caters to characters drawn from every class of feudal society. Non-human options are already dealt with in the core rulebook, but are greatly expanded upon by the previous edition’s Elves Companion and Dwarves Companion (which are still compatible with 5th edition), and by the recently released Nightwalkers supplement (that’s an affiliate link) which greatly expands on lycanthropes and vampires in Chivalry & Sorcery (remember: monsters are people too!). A supplement is on its way for Goblins, Orcs, and Trolls as well. The non-human races have their own societies, social classes, vocations, etc, sufficient to support play at levels 2, 3, and 4. As I discussed in my reviews of the Elves Companion and Dwarves Companion, it is a mistake to think of Chivalry & Sorcery‘s demihuman and monstrous races as “vanilla D&D” versions – but they could still be incorporated into a newly built world with just the geographic features adapted to your own setting (as indeed, these books do for Marakush).
I am not sure whether I ever will run the Grand Campaign, but I’d certainly like to try, and Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition is the first game in my collection I’d use for it. In the meantime, I will press on with my own Fantasy Campaign, level 3 game!
Posted on March 21, 2020
Chivalry & Sorcery on Roll20
I recently started a new Chivalry & Sorcery campaign, and COVID-19 comes to rain on our parade! So we moved our most recent session online, and that’s where the campaign will stay for the foreseeable future. Since I already have a Roll20 Pro subscription and since I am familiar with it from my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign (still going strong), I went to Roll20 as my default. Unfortunately Roll20 doesn’t have a character sheet built for Chivalry & Sorcery – I am pretty sure that none of the VTT platforms out there do! But that’s OK, I don’t need all of the VTT bells and whistles, since at this stage I am still assuming that the campaign will be able to move back to a face-to-face campaign in the medium term. There are some Roll20 features I can make good use of though.
Dice Macros
Chivalry & Sorcery has an elegant dice mechanic. Once you have calculated the Total Success Chance (TSC) for all your skills during character creation, in play, the dice mechanic is quick and easy to use. Face-to-face we roll 1d100 and 1d10 – the 1d100 is the roll to determine success or failure and the 1d10 is the “Crit die”. If the 1d100 result is equal to or below the TSC, the roll is a success, and the Crit die shows how successful the success was (a 10 = a critical success). If the 1d100 result is above the TSC, the roll is a failure, and the Crit die shows how much of a failure the failure was (a 10 = a critical failure).
There is nothing to stop you just rolling your dice in Roll20 the same way, or at least in two steps (/roll 1d100 then /roll 1d10) but we are not familiar enough as a group with the Crit die tables that all of us know how much of a success or failure a given Crit die roll is. Complicating this, the Crit die roll is modified by very high and very low TSCs. So I thought I would setup some simple macros to semi-automate the resolution mechanic.
Unfortunately, this was much more difficult than I anticipated, because the functions Roll20 exposes for dice mechanics are limited unless you can use APIs in your game (which requires a Pro subscription). I am going to keep refining these macros, but for now, this is what I have.
Percentile Pair Roll
Percentile Pair Roll is the simplest macro and is one which can be implemented without API support:
/roll 1d100<?{Total Success Chance|01}This macro rolls 1d100 and compares it to a number provided by the player called “Total Success Chance”. If we have an electronic character sheet, this could point at the sheet, but we don’t, so instead we need a pop-up box to ask the player to type in their TSC manually. This is OK for now as it helps the players learn the system.
Crit Die Macros
My Crit Die macros include a conditional statement and format results nicely, so I used the Power Card API. To use this API, I needed a Pro account (which I already had), and I needed to go into the Game Settings and add the API to the game.
Once Power Cards was added, the macros I use are coded like this:
!power {{
--name|Success with Crit Die
--Crit Die Roll:| [[ [$crit] 1d10 + ?{Crit Die Modifier (pp37-38)|0} ]]
--?? $crit.total <= 1 ?? Result:|Mediocre Success
--?? $crit.total >= 2 AND $crit.total <= 5 ?? Result:|Middling Success
--?? $crit.total >= 6 AND $crit.total <= 9 ?? Result:|Competent Success
--?? $crit.total >= 10 ?? Result:|Critical Success
}}The failure with Crit die code is very similar – just with the text after the “Result:|” on each line of the conditional statement changed to match the Failure Crit die table from Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition. When the player runs this macro, they are asked to enter any modifier for their Crit die in a pop-up box, like they were with their TSC for the Percentile Pair roll. Then the final result is displayed in the chat log.
Combat
Although in most face-to-face games I eschew the use of miniatures or tokens, in Roll20, it’s relatively easy to do combat on a battle mat. There’s no reason this has to be very elaborate – Roll20 admirably emulates a wet-erase gaming mat. C&S is battle mat agnostic – so you can use a square grid or a hex grid as you prefer. I’ve used a hex map for this demonstration. The scale which makes most sense for C&S for either squares or hexes is 5 feet. Naturally, each character has a token. Since I don’t have character sheets I am not going to link these tokens to a character sheet, but I will use the green bar for Body Points (BP) and the blue bar for Fatigue Points (FP).
As I mentioned in my review of the PDF, Chivalry & Sorcery features (by default) an action point-based combat system. As mentioned in that review there is also an alternative blows-based system provided, but I am not using that in my game so I’ll stick with the default for this discussion.
Each combat round, every combatant has a fresh, partially-randomly generated pool of action points. Combatants act in order of who has the most action points left to the least, using up to 10 action points (10 AP) for a single action phase. After a combatant’s action phase, the character with the next-most remaining action points acts, and so on, until everyone is out of action points or has decided to hold onto them for the next round. This means a character may take multiple actions in a single round, the sequence always determined by who has the most action points left. At a physical table, it can be quite complex to track this in a way where all the players can see what is going on – but using the “Turn Order” tracker in Roll20, everyone can easily see who has the most action points left and therefore who will act next.
In my example combat with 3 combatants:
- Aalis has 12 Base Action Points (BAP). She is wearing heavy armour (-3 AP/round), and is wielding a long sword.
- The Black Knight has 9 Base Action Points (BAP). He is wearing battle armour (-5 AP/round), and is wielding a two-handed Battle Axe.
- The Witch has 8 Base Action Points (BAP). She is wearing no armour (+3 AP/round).
When you “roll for initiative” in Roll20, you need to select your token, then send the result of a roll to the Turn Order tracker by appending &{tracker} to the end of your roll command. For example, in a system using 1d6 with no modifiers for initiative, you would select your token and type /roll 1d6&{tracker} into the chat window, then press enter, to send the result of the 1d6 roll to the Turn Order tracker. If you screw this up, the GM can always add a token for you and manually enter a number, but that should be a “fall back” position. So, the roll commands to randomly generate an Action Point pool for each combatant in our combat are:
- Aalis: /roll 1d10+12-3&{tracker} because she has 12 BAP, and -3 AP for heavy armour.
- The Black Knight: /roll 1d10+9-5&{tracker} because he has 9 BAP, and -5 AP for battle armour.
- Witch: /roll 1d10+8+3&{tracker} because she has 8 BAP and +3 AP for wearing no armour.
As you can see from the screenshot, the Turn Order tracker will add characters in the order the rolls come through. We need to change this to sort by AP remaining.
After sorting the Turn Order in descending order, it is now obvious to everyone that the Witch goes first. She casts a hex, which takes 2 actions and will cost her a total of 15 AP. Her first action takes 10 AP of this, so we have to adjust her AP in the counter.
Then you have to re-sort descending. In fact, we will need to do this same step again after every character’s action phase:
It is now Aalis’ turn. She moves 10 feet (2 AP) towards the Witch and attacks with her long sword (8 AP). Since she is in heavy armour, this also costs 1 Fatigue Point. Let’s assume she hits. To do damage, she rolls a Crit Die with +1 for using a longsword, +5 base damage, +8 for her Strength bonus, and +2 attacker’s bonus for being level 2 with a medium weapon. This can be rolled with /roll 1d10+1+5+8+2. Damage is applied first to Fatigue Points (blue bar) then to Body Points (green bar).
After re-sorting the Turn Order counter, The Black Knight moves next! He cannot both close with Aalis and attack in the same action phase (i.e. within the 10 AP limit), so he moves 15 feet (3 AP). This costs him 2 FP in the process for wearing battle armour so that is deducted from the blue bar.
Fortunately for The Black Knight, even after paying the 3 AP, his current action point pool is still the largest, so he takes the next action – attacking with his battle axe (8 AP). Let’s assume he also hits. To do damage, he rolls a Crit Die with +1 for using a Battle Axe, +8 base damage, +10 for his Strength bonus, +3 attacker’s bonus for being level 6 with a 2H weapon. The command to roll this is /roll 1d10+1+8+10+3.
Now we go back to the Witch’s turn to act… and so the round continues until all AP are spent or a combatant wishes to “bank” their remaining AP to the next round. Let’s say after the Witch has spent her 7 AP, Aalis wishes to bank her remaining 2 AP. When we re-roll her action point pool for the next round, we just add 2 to the same command we used before to generate the action point pool for Aalis: /roll 1d10+12-3+2&{tracker} Remember to select the correct token before rolling for the action point pool or the wrong character will get the pool added to the Turn Order window!
Regional Map
The regional map is a simple but really useful feature, especially since my campaign is set in a fictitious region. My region map is drawn using Hex Kit (affiliate link) and uploaded into Roll20 and then agonizingly resized until it fits the hex grid.
My map is setup with a scale of 1 hex = 2 miles. The ruler tool (highlighted in the sidebar in the screenshot above) is handy to measure the distance between arbitrary points. Useful for determining the range of scrying spells and many other functions!
Depending on how long the COVID-19 quarantine continues, I may expand on how much automation I build into Roll20 for Chivalry & Sorcery, and I may learn other tricks which are useful for using Roll20 for the game. For the time being, however, that’s about all I am doing for now with my temporarily online Chivalry & Sorcery game!
Posted on February 10, 2020
Campaign Time
Most old school players would remember the (in)famous Dungeon Masters Guide quote:
YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT
Gary Gygax, AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide 1e, p37
There are some other curiosities about game time and keeping track of it relative to real-world time which appear in contemporary game products. For example, the same section of the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide advances that “it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening”. First edition Chivalry & Sorcery is perhaps even more interesting:
The time frame of Chivalry & Sorcery as a game is different from other games of its general type, for the one day = one game day concept has been dropped in favour of a more telescoped time period…
The recommended time period for individual adventure campaigns is roughly on a one to four basis, with one real week equal to one Game Month.
Ed Simbalist & Wilf Backhaus, Chivalry & Sorcery 1e, p2
In fact, Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition goes further, noting that different seasons provide less adventure time (e.g. Winter) and therefore recommending a shorter real world time be allocated to their play. The table below is adapted from Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition:
| Season | Game World Months | Real World Duration |
| Spring | April and May | 2-3 real weeks |
| Summer | June to October | 8-10 real weeks |
| Fall | November and December | 2-3 real weeks |
| Winter | January to March | 1 real week |
Not quite the same but similar is King Arthur Pendragon‘s suggested campaign structure, where each session of play corresponds to one year of campaign time. Although I try to adhere to this fairly strictly, there are some years where this is impractical and the year has to be split between two game sessions.
It is rare that modern games make such links between real time and game time – even though rules for downtime abound. This is even true in modern OSR games which actively attempt to recreate old school playing styles from the 70s and 80s. This is commented on in Courtney Campbell’s excellent On Downtime and Demesnes (affiliate link for B/X and 5e):
Classic Dungeons & Dragons by Gygax used the Gregorian Calendar, and had one day pass in the game as one day passed in the real world. But Gygax and co. ran their games much like a tabletop massively multiplayer role-playing game. Modern players are much more likely to have weeks of downtime pass in a few minutes.
Courtney Campbell, On Downtime and Demesnes, p206
In my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign, I track each day of game time closely. There’s a little downtime, and quite a bit of journey time, especially when the party is travelling by ship, but our campaign is over two years old and we have only advanced one year of game time in that period. My sense is that this is typical of other campaigns even where strict records of time are kept. One of the reasons I backed the Kickstarter for On Downtime and Demesnes was to give interesting downtime options for players, in the hope that in my D&D games the players would start choosing to allow more game world time to pass. There’s an interesting difference, I think, between what my players seem to want out of game world time and what I want as a referee. In this campaign and in others I have played, players seem keen not to “waste” game world time on uninteresting downtime. As a referee, I would like for more game world time to pass during a campaign, to allow characters and the broader game world to credibly develop in significant ways, and for those developments to have time to “be felt”.
For example, in my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign set in Civil War England, the Civil War is still in its infancy, and both aliens and monsters have been loosed on 17th Century England. More game world time progressing would allow both the Civil War itself to progress (which would itself drive the characters forward since they wish to affect the outcome of that conflict), and would allow a game world which predates mass communication to slowly become aware of the alien civilisations now at large on the planet’s surface, and to react accordingly. At the moment, most Londoners still scoff when they hear that a giant coral castle on the back of a dead giant turtle is slowly rotting in a field in Lincolnshire. As a referee, I am perhaps more engaged in the development of the game world itself than are my players. The players, for their part, are urgently carrying out their purposes with an efficiency more typical of the 21st Century military than the rank amateurs of both the King and Parliament’s armies in the Civil War’s opening months. I can’t fault them – they are right to do so. Up until now neither the game rules nor I have provided them with any interesting options for downtime rather than leaping into the next adventure.
I am about to start a Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition campaign. We had our character generation session last weekend, and the first actual play sessions should be in a week or two. Just as it always have been in Chivalry & Sorcery, downtime is especially important for magick users, and several magick user characters were created at last weekend’s session. It takes anywhere from 2 to 130 days for a mage to reduce the magick resistance of materials in order to allow them to be enchanted, for example. It takes between 7 and 21 days to learn a spell. Magick users need downtime. Nor is downtime a waste for other characters – all characters can gain experience points during downtime, although magi, priests, and scholars gain more experience points than other character types by spending their time studying, researching, meditating and so on. Characters of all types also need downtime to learn new skills – with most skills taking approximately one month of game time to learn depending on a character’s Discipline attribute, whether they have a teacher, and on the difficulty factor of the skill (learning how to count is a lot easier than learning how to cast magick, for example). So not only does Chivalry & Sorcery benefit from downtime in the ways I think my other games could benefit, it actually needs downtime as a core game mechanic, and this will require keeping track of time (and downtime plans) rather more closely than some campaigns do, even, despite Gygax’s admonition, some of my own.
One final piece of wisdom from Chivalry & Sorcery 1st edition which I will apply in my just starting Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition game:
KEEPING A CALENDAR
The important thing to establish is the relation of real time to game time, so that all of the players know what the game date is in a particular week of play. Once general agreement is reached among the players, everyone knows how much time is passing. This fixing of a definite calendar for the game is especially vital for Magick Users, who operate on a very strict time scale when learning spells or doing enchantments.
Ed Simbalist & Wilf Backhaus, Chivalry & Sorcery 1e, p2
Wisdom which I think equally applies to the Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition game we are now starting! To facilitate this, I will give every player a calendar with which to track the game world date and record/plan their own downtime activities. Hopefully, that will prove to be detail they enjoy, rather than resist.
Time will tell…
Posted on February 3, 2020
Womb Cult
Over a year ago, my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign encountered a cult of alien hybrids of my own devising, whose cults and rituals were dedicated to the perpetuation of their reproductive cycle. I developed quite a bit of detail about that cult, and eventually the idea struck me that it might make a reasonable module to publish. I am pleased to say that I finally made the adventure available to the public earlier this week: Womb Cult, available on DriveThruRPG in PDF, and print (soft cover and hard cover)!
Preparing an adventure for your home campaign is different from preparing one with the intention to publish it for a broader audience. I am still not sure I have entirely succeeded – maybe somebody will review Womb Cult and I will find out. I thought I’d write anyway about the approach I took and why, in case that is useful to anybody. That way, at least if you get Womb Cult and decide it is bad, you will know what not to do!
Setting
My campaign is set in England during the early years of the English Civil War, so when I ran Womb Cult in my regular campaign, it was set in rural England. Most of the official Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventures have a defined setting, although it is rarely difficult to modify them to place the adventure somewhere else. Sometimes modifying them is more difficult. I have quite a few adventures which I have yet to use in my own campaign because they are not easily integrated into Civil War England. This is not a problem unique to Lamentations of the Flame Princess of course, but I feel less able to easily muck around with an historical real-world setting (albeit with weird fantasy overlays) to make an adventure fit than I would in a purely fantasy setting. This could well be an issue other referees do not have, but it informed my choices as I prepared Womb Cult for other people’s games.
I wanted Womb Cult to be usable for the “generic setting” of Lamentations of the Flame Princess – namely, Early Modern Europe. I didn’t want to tie it to a particular country or region, though. So instead of a defined region with named towns and villages with the location of all the cultists precisely mapped out, I developed the module as a “tool kit” to infest any region area in your campaign with an alien-hybrid womb cult. This would make the module usable in any rural area of Early Modern Europe. At the same time, I know that many referees buy published modules to reduce preparation time, so I still provided maps with the locations of hybrid households and the like mapped out – but these were “generic villages” without names, so the referee can use the maps as they like, assigning them names appropriate for their campaigns. I was assisted in fully realising this objective by the other half of Grimm Aramil Publishing, credited in the book as the killer of my darlings, Adam, who made sure I stripped out the English Civil War-specific timeline showing how the cult integrated itself into the events of my own campaign.
There are some traces of the original setting left in the module – the pagan gods honoured by the cult are based adapted and morphed from a base of the ancient paganism of the British Isles, and I do give an English name for the cult’s leader. I don’t think the gods should be a problem and names are easily localisable.
Investigation
Done well, investigations are great tabletop fodder, especially with a horror/weird fantasy vibe – the success of Call of Cthulhu is testament enough to that I think. Before the player characters are likely to find the cult’s lair in Womb Cult, they need to investigate the cult and its goings on. It’s easy to fall into a trap with investigation scenarios. Even among published modules railroads abound which drag the “investigators” from scene to scene, stopping them until they find whatever clue is necessary to progress them to the next scene, all the way until the inevitable confrontation with the bad guy. I wanted to avoid that. I was also aware that given I deliberately designed the publication version of Womb Cult as “setting neutral” (within the broader assumed Early Modern Europe setting), the adventure as presented could use more hooks to encourage the player characters to be involved.
I tried to combine random events caused by the cult’s actions (some of which might directly involve or even target the PCs) with random clues and stories for NPCs to give to the players when they were interrogated. After all, there’s no forensic science in the Early Modern Era – if you want to know what’s going on you’re going to need a witness, or a carefully chosen magic spell, or both. The party should build up both real clues and red herrings as their investigation proceeds – or they may even have a relatively early confrontation with alien hybrids which, if they are triumphant, presents them an opportunity to force the most important details out of their captives.
Womb Cult‘s approach is an attempt to address an investigation with an OSR style of play and a generic setting. It has worked for me when I have run the module – I hope it works for other people too. Maybe I screwed it up completely – constructive criticism welcome!
Art
I’m not an artist but I have been privileged to collaborate with a very talented one on Womb Cult, who has brought the alien hybrids and their life cycle to life in the artwork throughout the book. From the “birth ritual” depicted on the cover, to the three full-page black and white interior pieces depicting hybrids and hosts, to the illustration of the womb parasite which manages to look vicious and malignant despite its slug-like size and shape, I am really pleased with the artwork. The cover has so far attracted quite a few positive comments so hopefully whatever audience Womb Cult finds enjoys the art too.
More work than it looks like
The main thing I discovered producing Womb Cult is that preparing an adventure for publication is a lot more work than it looks like. I have a full-time job and I worked on other projects between, but I have been working on Womb Cult in bits and pieces since 2017, when I first started preparing it for my Lamentations campaign. I started and stopped and wrote and re-wrote and abandoned it and picked it up again several times over 2018 before finally settling on the “setting neutral” approach for my final rewrite in 2019. After some constructive criticism, fat trimming, and more play testing, it was finally ready in late 2019, but didn’t go live on DriveThruRPG until January 2020 because I had to wait for proofs to arrive over the busy Christmas period. The whole process gave me a new found respect for published adventure modules, even the ones which I don’t think are very good. I sincerely hope Womb Cult doesn’t fall into that latter category, but getting it into print was a huge learning process in any event, and holding the printed product at the end – especially the A5-sized hardcover (which fits in so well with other Lamentations books) – ultimately immensely satisfying.
Posted on December 29, 2019
Review: Dwarves Companion for Chivalry & Sorcery
The Dwarves Companion for Chivalry & Sorcery was originally published in 2000, intended for use with Chivalry & Sorcery 3rd Edition. I am reviewing it with a view to its use with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition. It is available for purchase as a PDF from DriveThruRPG (affiliate link).
Like the Elves Companion, this PDF is a scan of the printed book. It is a clean and legible scan the equal of many of the TSR-era D&D products available for sale on DriveThruRPG, but OCR has not been employed to make the text searchable, so you get a “flat” PDF. The layout and presentation is comparable to 3rd and 4th edition Chivalry & Sorcery products – serviceable black and white, typical of the way RPGs were presented prior to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Although not as visually exciting as a full-colour interior and not hyper-functional like the Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition PDF, it is at least easy to print!
The Dwarves Companion is primarily a sourcebook for dwarves, one of the classic fantasy roleplaying races, which embeds them in the mythology of our own world. The default setting for Chivalry & Sorcery is medieval Europe, albeit a fantasy version where magick and miracles are as ubiquitous as medieval people believed them to be. Incorporating the classic fantasy roleplaying races into this setting is challenging as I discussed in my review of the Elves Companion, but is once again achieved skillfully in the Dwarves Companion by weaving a “concrete” origin and racial description out of Norse mythology, Earth worship, and just a dash of Tolkien tribute (Durin is one of the three forefathers of the dwarves, and Thorin appears as a jarl who defends his clan against the goblins). (EDIT: The Extraordinary Mr Speirs has pointed out to me that the names Durin and Thorin are derived from the Voluspá so this is not so much a Tolkien tribute as reference to the same primary source as the Professor) Along the way, dwarves take the place of the “Ancient Aliens” endlessly talked about on the History Channel, arriving in Ancient Egypt in time to teach the Egyptians how to build the pyramids, for example, and they also prove to be the origin story of leprechauns of Irish folklore. This is all done in a way which feels organic and which sows the seeds for campaign “secrets” a Gamemaster may wish to further develop for their players to stumble upon.
Despite being written for 3rd edition, the rules components of the Dwarves Companion seem to be compatible with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition too, much as with the rules in the Elves Companion. This is encouraging, frankly, because I have quite a few sourcebooks and adventures for previous editions which should, if these two race sourcebooks are anything to go by, be largely compatible with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition. The character creation chapter of the Dwarves Companion features the same tables as appear in the 5th edition PDF, simply with more source material to accompany them. A handful of new weapons have stats which are entirely compatible with 5th edition, although I believe that the costs probably need to be refactored since 5th edition seems to use lower prices on the whole than previous editions.
The Dwarves Companion features new rules for Dwarven Magick. Dwarves can cast Earth magick or Rune magick, both of which are covered in section 8 of the Dwarves Companion. With the disclaimer that I haven’t tried to use them in play, on paper they are presented the same way as magick appears to be presented in Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition so I feel confident these would slot into a 5th edition game easily enough. Next follows a section on Dwarven Metals, Ores, and Stones, many of which have special properties granting modifiers to various rolls. I didn’t notice any skill or roll specifically mentioned in this section which I didn’t see in 5th edition so I assume there has either been no change here or the changes have been so superficial that I missed them entirely. Likewise, the new Vocations in Appendix A are presented in the same format as vocations in 5th edition so I think this will fit into a 5th edition game just as easily as they fit into 3rd edition games when this book was first published.
Also in an appendix (Appendix B), there are some rules for dwarves in Chivalry & Sorcery Light, as was the case for elves in the Elven Companion, which take up a page. I didn’t pay them close heed although I do have Chivalry & Sorcery Light – I am just reading this product with a view to using it in Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition first and foremost.
The remaining appendices consist of a very brief 2 page introduction to dwarves in Marakush, and some NPCs for Chivalry & Sorcery 3rd Edition which I think would be fine for use in 5th edition too. Evidently the dwarves in Marakush are similar to the dwarves in the “default” real-world setting of Chivalry & Sorcery as the primary differences mentioned here appear to be based on their geography. I will have to read more in Dragon Reaches of Marakush – which I also have and intend to review in case you think I will be finished with old C&S products with this post!
Like the Elves Companion, the Dwarves Companion is a sourcebook for a well-established fantasy roleplaying race, which nevertheless gives us a different take on the dwarves which is both derivative from the same mythology as inspired Tolkien and yet fresh in its presentation grounding the dwarves in our real world, its history and legend. The presentation of the dwarves in the Dwarves Companion is probably a little bit closer to the way most players coming to C&S from D&D and its derivatives will envision dwarves than was true of the elves in the Elves Companion. Perhaps this is why I feel that the Dwarves Companion helps make it easier to envision how dwarven characters in a Chivalry & Sorcery campaign set in medieval Europe will interact with historical human societies as compared to how I felt about elves after reading the Elves Companion. Perhaps if I had read them in the other order I would feel the reverse was true.
Either way, I recommend the Dwarves Companion to those who want to run a Chivalry & Sorcery campaign in the default, medieval Europe setting, and to those who want to build their own worlds and want to understand what they may wish to reverse and alter about Chivalry & Sorcery dwarves to suit their world. At $4 for 58 pages, I think it is good value, despite the drawbacks of the scanned PDF format. Pick it up here from DriveThruRPG via my affiliate link.
Posted on December 28, 2019
Review: Elves Companion for Chivalry & Sorcery
The Elves Companion (affiliate link) for Chivalry & Sorcery was originally published for Chivalry & Sorcery 3rd Edition in 2000. Note that I am reviewing it with a view for its use with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition.
The Elves Companion is available from DriveThruRPG as a scanned PDF from the printed original. Although the scan is very clear and the book is easily readable, it has not been OCR’d. This means you can’t keyword search the PDF nor copy and paste from it nor use other text manipulation tools. That said, the 58-page PDF is only $4, less than scans of old D&D modules (which are, generally, OCR’d). So this is far from a modern, hyper-functional PDF like the C&S 5th Edition PDF (previously reviewed here). As you’d expect given its age, the interior is all black and white, laid out much like Chivalry & Sorcery: The Rebirth was laid out – which was very much how most non-WoD RPGs looked before Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. It does print out nicely and with much less ink than the lavish 5th Edition PDF though!
If you can get past these cosmetic and format issues, though, the content is rather worth it. These elves are not your typical D&D elves. The Elves Companion combines Celtic mythology with a sprinkling of other sources, and grounds the Elven Nation in the sort of concrete terms you expect to find in a roleplaying game sourcebook. The “assumed setting” of the Elves Companion is the same assumed setting as Chivalry & Sorcery itself – our own world during the medieval period. Marakush-specific material is also included – but as an appendix (and a sidebar on page 20). Elven society is presumed to exist on the fringes of human society in the medieval world – generally confined to deep forests, where the elves may actually be the source of legends like Robin Hood. Elves deal more easily with pagan human societies than with the humans of the Abrahamic religions. It can be challenging, at times, to imagine how elves could dwell even in the forests of medieval Western Europe, but I think this is caused by our modern perspective on the world as intrinsically observable and thus knowable. In the medieval world, “civilisation” was not ubiquitous – it was bounded by city walls, erected against a wild and hostile world, and the deep, dark forests were impenetrable and alien. If the peasants tell stories of elves in the forest, perhaps their tales are true?
The elves themselves are related to the faeries of Celtic mythology, but they are doomed by the Blight, a product of human progress at the expense of the Earth. Their bloodlines have become impure, leaving only a handful of increasingly inbred “True Elves” as their ultimate ruling class, who sit on top of a hierarchical society, rarely if ever seen by the the “Half Blood” (as distinct from half-elven) majority, the great unwashed of the Elven Nation. The Half Blood proletariat are supervised by the Noble Elves, who serve as the gentry and bourgeoisie of the Elven Nation, underneath the Pure Blood True Elves. Even the Half Bloods are higher than the Lost Bloods, the contemptible excommunicates who have committed such unthinkable crimes as breeding with humans (creating half-elves), or working for humans. This hierarchical elven society is profoundly different from the societies of the increasingly generic elves of modern D&D, and most other fantasy roleplaying games. Unlike the elves of many modern “high fantasy” settings, the elves of the Elves Companion feel genuinely non-human.
Although largely a sourcebook, and written for another edition at that, the rules in the Elves Companion seem generally compatible with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition. Many of the character creation modifications in the Elves Companion, and elf-specific tables for social class, build, father’s vocation etc appear in the 5th edition book itself. The expanded rules and tables for elven longbows appear to be 5th edition compatible too. It is a little unclear to me whether the rules point for half-elves (p31) which appear in the Elves Companion still apply in 5th edition though – it seems that creating a half-elf in 5th edition is more or less the same as creating a human character, but the player selects the “Fey Blood” special ability/talent. The other “rules points” which appear throughout the Elves Companion seem largely 5th edition compatible. Most significantly, the Elves Companion adds the Wardens Mage Mode and Elven Mage Mode, which are referred to in the 5th edition PDF for elven characters but do not appear there. Appendix A contains new vocations, and unless I have overlooked a skill or two which has been revamped, these appear to be completely compatible with 5th edition. Appendix B contains a bestiary of creatures associated with the elves, and though the stats for these creatures are presented differently from the Bestiary chapter in the 5th edition PDF, the necessary stats seem present and I am fairly confident these creatures could easily be used in a 5th edition game. This concludes the “new rules” for 5th edition content in this sourcebook, although there is also Appendix C which adds rules for creating elven characters in Chivalry & Sorcery Light.
The Elves Companion concludes with two scenarios, one set in Marakush, and the other set in medieval Europe (in northern Scotland specifically). These are both brief scenarios (1.5 pages long each), intended for elven player characters, which makes sense given the book they appear in. Both present a hook in the form of a mission bestowed upon the party by a noble, and then barebones details of the journey and adventure which follows. Both seem serviceable and potential good starts for a longer elven campaign. In the scenario set in Scotland, I could see the potential to have human (or even dwarf) player characters join the elven party during the course of the adventure, although I am not sure I really see “mixed” parties working in the historical setting as well as they might in Marakush or other fantasy worlds.
In fact, after reading the Elves Companion, and seeing how “alien” elven characters are from a human perspective, I do wonder how well they would fit into a predominantly human adventuring party. Modern D&D simply assumes a mix of player character races is normal in an adventuring party, and if we are honesty we must concede that modern D&D doesn’t trouble itself terribly with helping us suspend disbelief as to how an extremely heterogeneous adventuring party could be formed or function. Most adventuring parties are hardly forged in response to apocalyptic circumstances like the Fellowship of the Ring in D&D – most typically, the characters are presumed to know each other beforehand and/or meet in a tavern. This hardly seems satisfying or consistent with the verisimilitude Chivalry & Sorcery strives for. Having read the source material in the Elves Companion, I find it difficult to believe that most elves would mix with humans to any considerable extent – only the Lost Bloods would seem to me to make an appropriate member of an adventuring party in the D&D mould. This isn’t a drawback or a problem from my perspective – frankly, one of the main appeals to me of Chivalry & Sorcery is a more grounded, believable fantasy world, and insofar as “adventuring parties” should even exist in such a world, they would be largely culturally and socially homogeneous. However, I know that many of my gaming friends have a strong aversion to homogeneity amongst player characters – they want to play a variety of different races in particular, and I am still not sure how I will facilitate that as a Chivalry & Sorcery Gamemaster.
At $4, the Elves Companion is an outstanding value purchase, even though it is a “flat” PDF constructed from a scan. If you are planning on running a Chivalry & Sorcery game in medieval Europe or Marakush, the Elves Companion is an essential purchase. If you are building your own world for Chivalry & Sorcery with your own “bespoke” elves, then it is still worth reading the chapters about character creation from the Elves Companion so that you can better understand the elven character generation rules in the main book, which will help you better understand how to customise them to achieve your design objectives. It has certainly given me a lot to think about in terms of my own world-building.
Posted on December 23, 2019
Review: Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition (PDF)
Chivalry & Sorcery was one of the earliest fantasy roleplaying games, created by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus. Apparently the game evolved out of the desire by their playing groups to play what their characters did “between dungeons”, so to speak. These questions and many more were answered by Chivalry & Sorcery, which developed a reputation for complexity when it was first published in 1977, perhaps because it attempted to provide gameable rules and material for virtually every aspect of “medieval fantasy” life, not just adventuring. The reputation for complexity was probably assisted by the first edition making use of photo reduction to fit four pages of text onto each of its 128 physical pages – an extraordinarily dense rule book even today!
Completionist, not Complicated
A Kickstarter for Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition launched 5 months ago, and at the time of writing, the complete PDF has been publicly released for sale and the book is with the physical printers. If you didn’t back the Kickstarter, then the PDF edition of C&S 5th edition carries a respectable price tag of $29.99. I think it’s worth it for this simple reason: Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition is the most complete, playable medieval fantasy roleplaying game you can buy today. The rules mechanics are not complicated (more on this below) but the rulebook is extremely large because the game is so complete.
Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition weighs in at 602 full-colour pages, in a single volume. This single volume is a rules tome and sourcebook in one. Although I backed for a printed copy and look forward to receiving it, based on the sheer size of this game I can see that the PDF is virtually a necessity. Fortunately, all the PDF bells and whistles have been used to best exploit the format – there is a complete electronic table of contents, extensive hyperlinks, and a quick access list of tables amongst other things so that you can quickly navigate the electronic book. The game’s 602 pages are divided thus:
- 7 pages of front matter, including a 5 page table of contents!
- 2 pages of introduction
- 21 pages about the medieval setting
- 19 pages of core game mechanics
- 68 pages of character generation
- 30 pages of vocations
- 83 pages of skills (covering every sort of medieval fantasy activity from the mundane to magick)
- 33 pages about the marketplace
- 3 pages of movement, travel, and time rules
- 20 pages of combat rules
- 109 pages of magick rules and spells
- 63 pages of religion rules (covering miracles, the equivalent of clerical magic from D&D although the term “equivalent” is really misrepresentative here) and source material on medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and miracles
- 16 pages of gamemaster rules and advice
- 15 pages about NPCs
- 40 pages of bestiary (I still haven’t compared this to my 3rd edition Bestiary yet)
- 10 pages of glossary/index
- 2 pages of Kickstarter backers
- 6 pages of character sheet
So with that much material, the question asks itself – is this game overly complicated? I’d say rather that it is complete. There are certainly a lot of rules, and in general they aim for a realistic feel rather than simplicity for simplicity’s sake. There are certainly not “more rules” than Pathfinder, though. Further, whereas Pathfinder features/suffers (depending on your taste) emergent complexity from the interaction of different rules in ways which are hard to envision before encountered in play, I don’t think that “emergent complexity” will be a major factor in play in Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition. Major disclaimer: I have not actually played C&S 5th edition yet, and this sort of complicated interaction of rules in unforeseen ways in play is, by its very nature, hard to detect just by reading through a PDF. I will have to update my review once I have played the game for a while.
Most importantly though, after reading this PDF, I do want to play this game. I want to adapt some of my favourite historical novels into a campaign concept for this game. I want to redesign a world for C&S which I built for D&D/Pathfinder years ago but abandoned when I decided I couldn’t make it work with the high fantasy superpower play style of modern versions of those game. As previously documented on this blog I want to run Westeros in C&S (although, less and less the more time I have to digest the end of the show – nothing to do with the rules). I want to explore Marakush and Anderia, published campaign settings for past editions of the game, and run some of the published adventures for previous editions as well. Who knows how many of these games I will actually get to run/play, but I certainly want to run/play them with Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition.
As mentioned elsewhere, I am also a fan of King Arthur Pendragon!, which I’ve used to run several campaigns over the last 17 years, including one of my current regular fortnightly games (for over two years and still going strong). I am of the opinion that Pendragon does what it sets out to do better than any other game – and that is to let you play as a knight from Malory’s version of the Arthurian saga. You can push this to other traditional interpretations of the same mythology too, but the further you move from that style of medieval mythic literature, the less ideally suited is Pendragon. But in Pendragon, players play knights. That’s (almost) it. 4th edition added magic users like Morgan le Fey, and it didn’t quite work. That’s not my opinion incidentally – that’s the opinion of the late, great Greg Stafford. In our own campaign, we had fun for a while focussed on courtly intrigues with the players taking the roles of the widows of their previous player knights, and that worked quite well for a while, but ultimately the format of the game (with its one session = one year and procedural Winter Phase) doesn’t lend itself as well to anything else as it lends itself to playing knights. Which is entirely as Mr. Stafford intended.
I use Pendragon as an example deliberately and not just because of my own familiarity with it. It is a popular medieval fantasy game. If you want to play Arthurian knights inspired by the works of Sir Thomas Malory, you should go buy Pendragon and the Great Pendragon Campaign and possibly the other sourcebooks if you like and run it. But if you want more options, if you want a more… complete… medieval fantasy experience, then Chivalry & Sorcery provides. In fact, you don’t even need to play an adventurer character type for Chivalry & Sorcery to have you covered. It wouldn’t be to my personal taste, but you could run a C&S game as a medieval fantasy town simulator if you wanted. Every strata of medieval society is playable.
Combat
By default, combat in Chivalry & Sorcery is broken into 15 second rounds, during which time each character spends action points to take actions in action phases. Action points are gained each round and depend on a combination of your attribute scores and random chance. A character doesn’t take all their actions at once and then wait until the next round as in D&D, instead, they take one action (spending action points to do so) and then the next character takes an action, and so on. An optional rule “reorders” the action sequence after each action phase based on the action points remaining. This is certainly an option which I prefer on paper for the same reason as I prefer to re-roll initiative every round when playing OSR games – it makes combat feel more dynamic and chaotic. There is also an alternative combat system based on blows (or potential blows), which looks similar to the combat system in Chivalry & Sorcery Essence (although blows are calculated on a more detailed basis than in that game). In either system, there are a good variety of combat options available both for attack and defence which provide a “tactical” feel to combat. Armour and shields absorb damage rather than make you easier to hit, and injuries are suffered to specific body areas and can be permanently disabling. I would describe the combat as detailed, realistic, gritty, and deadly.
Influence
I am not an historian of our beloved hobby, but if Chivalry & Sorcery wasn’t the first game to have a social influence mechanic, it had to be among the first. These mechanics make a big return in Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition, with detailed rules for obtaining an audience, possibly through intermediaries, courtly love, and so on. I am itching to use these in play, but on paper (well, PDF) it reads straight-forward and logical.
Magick
Yes, that is the official spelling in Chivalry & Sorcery.
That aside, the magick system probably does more to establish the “flavour” of the fantasy elements in the game than any other rules sub-system. Magick is based on skills, so a magician (a magus, in C&S) selects a mode of magick, and is resisted by reality. A magus will improve their magickal skills only by practising magick, and continually learning and improving their craft will clearly be a major focus for a magus player character in play. Creating magick items will also be a bigger focus of the C&S magus than the D&D magic-user, partly because magick is physically draining in C&S rather than D&D so-called Vancian magic system. There are a variety of casting types (cantrip, ritual, hex, sorcery) depending on the spell, and some are more suited for casting “under pressure” than others.
Most particularly, magick has methods and modes. A magick user’s ability to cast different spells will be most impacted by their choice of mode and method. The different elements, arcane magick, command, divination, illusion, plants, summoning, transcendental, transmutation and wards are the magick methods – all spells belong to one of these, saving a handful of common spells. Conjuration, divination, enchantment, hex master, necromantic, power word, thaumaturgy, and elementalists are the modes of the magick user themselves. There are also “mage priest” modes: druidic, shamanic, and witchcraft. The spells are all of what most gamers would call the “low fantasy” type (I am not sure that the gaming community uses these terms “low” and “high” fantasy consistently with how they are used to describe fantasy literature but that’s a topic for another day).
Religious magic is different again – prayers can grant blessings and lead to miracles, all of which are consistent with the sorts of miracles one reads about in the lives of medieval saints. Priests can perform the Church’s sacraments and these are codified in game terms as well – the Holy Eucharist gives the faithful a 24 hour blessing, Matrimony gives the faithful couple a 7 day blessing. That should get them through the honeymoon. An organised religion like the medieval Catholic Church is assumed in the game mechanics here – as indeed, it would be in any truly “medieval” fantasy game, so central was the Catholic Church to medieval society. There are even optional rules for creating saints or demigods (the latter clearly intended for use in your own medieval fantasy worlds).
The rules for both magick and religion make Chivalry & Sorcery profoundly different to Dungeons & Dragons or other fantasy roleplaying games I have encountered.
A Model Kickstarter
Although not strictly about the product itself, as a backer I think it is worth saying that Brittannia Game Designs has run a model Kickstarter for Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition. In just a few months we have a final PDF, with the print book under production – and along the way we had plenty of drafts and lots of communication as well. It is obvious that far more than 5 months of work has gone into 5th edition C&S – in fact, it is obvious that far more than 5 years of work has gone into this game. It has clearly been a labour of love for a very long time. It must have been pretty close to finished when Brittannia Game Designs launched the Kickstarter, because a complete draft PDF came out at the end of October, and now we have the final PDF before Christmas. I appreciate Kickstarters which make such fast and obvious progress towards final delivery!
Final Thoughts (for now)
Chivalry & Sorcery 5th edition is a massive PDF, and the most “complete” medieval fantasy roleplaying game in my DriveThruRPG digital library. I am looking forward to receiving the hardcover book, and looking forward to running the game. When each of those things happens, I will post supplements to this review, and let you know if my views have changed or evolved.
Until then, however, this is a huge, immensely useful PDF of the latest reincarnation of a classic roleplaying game. It captures the flavour of medieval fantasy which I most enjoy in fantasy literature and which I want to run at my game table. It is a $29.99 PDF, but at over 600 pages that’s still excellent value.
Posted on December 18, 2019
Old-School Essentials
Late last month the Old-School Essentials Kickstarter came through and I received my goodies. I backed for both the Rules Tome and the boxed set, along with the Advanced Fantasy expansion books, and I am really pleased I did. These are really gorgeous physical books:
Obviously, I was already familiar with Gavin Norman’s outstanding work with B/X Essentials and so in many ways this was a “sure bet” Kickstarter. B/X Essentials was already a really nicely done retroclone, with a modular design which makes it unique among “Basic D&D” retroclones. I knew Old-School Essentials would be at least that good – really I backed the Kickstarter to see how much of an improvement an offset print-run could be as compared to the B/X Essentials print-on-demand books.
The answer is: a huge improvement. These books are physically beautiful. They’re sturdy and attractive, and are so well-presented that they could be placed on the same shelf as the latest books from WotC and Paizo and look as if they deserved to be there, despite the fact that their presentation is of an entirely different style to the “big colour hardback book”. This is an OSR product which is truly worthy of mainstream distribution, and if we are honest, there are only a few OSR games which we can say that about, in terms of their physical presentation.
I hope Old-School Essentials finds that mainstream distribution and enjoys mainstream success as a result, beyond the usual OSR audience which is familiar with the online distribution channels. It’s modular nature also lends itself to a line of supplements – genre rules for different fantasy genres, alternate classes and races, and so on. While I think experienced players don’t mind tinkering with the rules from an all-in-one book like the Rules Tome, the smaller, modular books in the boxed set invite newer players to see the system as consisting of pieces which can be swapped in and swapped out. I don’t think I appreciated how clever this was when Gavin first did it with B/X Essentials but I certainly see it now.
As fond as I am of Labyrinth Lord, with this printing I think Old-School Essentials has superseded it and now stands as the superior “reference retroclone” for Basic D&D. I think its succinct, modern presentation makes it an easier sell to younger players familiar with 5e or Pathfinder, as well as a superior reference text for Grognards.