A Place That Never Was

Compared to fantasy and sci fi, historical roleplaying games are the poor relations of the tabletop hobby. A variety of reasons are trotted out to explain this disparity. The usual suspects include the indisputable fact that fantasy came first - regrettably, perhaps - and established a dominant niche among gamers. That the overwhelming majority of gamers want magic - and it's kissin' cousin, sufficiently advanced tech - seems inarguable; for example, the most commercially successful cape-and-sword roleplaying game published to date, 7th Sea, is billed as 'swashbuckling and sorcery.'

The idea of historical roleplaying itself tends to get knocked around in these discussions as well. Some simply find the idea of playing in our own past too dull, while others express concern about getting the history 'right,' often citing the prospect of a 'history expert' at the table sucking every last vestige of fun from the room by repeatedly telling everyone They're Doing It Wrong. A fictional game-world sidesteps this potential pitfall.

The possibility of using a fictional country set in the real world rarely seems to come up, which is a bit surprising considering how often this is used in the stories from which so many roleplaying games draw inspiration. A fictional region or country provides both the flexibility and originality of an imaginary game-world with the familiarity of the real one.

Anthony Hope set his famous swashbuckling saga - The Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau, and The Heart of Princess Osra - in the fictional kingdom of Ruritania, a German-speaking, Roman Catholic monarchy vaguely located in the vicinity of Saxony and Bohemia. The stories of Ruritania were so successful that Hope's tales would spawn a genre - Ruritanian romances - all its own. A number of later authors would set stories in Mr Hope's Ruritania or use it as the origin for characters in their own works.

Ruritania has worked its way into the fields of law and political science, as a stand-in for real countries in discussing hypothetical cases.

I chose to set my Flashing Blades campaign in 17th century France, but I blended in fictional characters and places from cape-and-sword stories and other tales. In my campaign, Ruritania is part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the adventurers are about to find themselves challenged to a duel initiated by the graf von Hentzau, an Imperial cavalry commander. I've also incorporated James Branch Cabell's Poictesme as well as the modern French creation Groland.

One of my future projects on this blog will be developing a Ruritania of my own, in conjunction with the OSR swashbuckling game Backswords and Bucklers.

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Cinematic: Scaramouche

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Off the Shelf: Chapbooks

Chapbooks are popular books printed on cheap paper, often a single sheet folded into a booklet of eight to twenty-four pages, and illustrated with woodcuts, typically reused from other publications. The subjects vary from religious texts to poetry to almanacs to chivalric romances. Many French chapbooks come from printers located in the city of Troyes, in the provice of Champagne, southeast of Paris.

Chapbooks are popular with all classes, but they are primarily written for peasants, tradesmen, and merchants. As such they may be found in many residences or carried, stuffed in pockets. Roll 1D6 for the number of chapbooks, then roll 1D20 for the individual titles. Duplicate rolls may be treated as additional copies of the same volume or re-rolled at the referee's discretion.

1. Le Roman du vaillant Chevalier Ogier le Danois gui fui un des douze pairs de France, lequel avec le secours du roy Charlemagne chassa les Païens hors de Rome et remit le Pape en son trône
2. Histoire des avantures heureuses et malheureuses de chevaliers, avec sa bourse et son chapeau. Enseignant comme un jeune homme se doit gouverner
3. Histoire de Jean de Paris, Roi de France
4. Histoire de Jean de Calais
5. La terrible et merveilleuse vie de Robert le Diable
6. Histoire de Richard sans Peur, Duc de Normandie, fils de Robert Le Diable, Qui par sa prudence fut Roi d’Angleterre, & fit de grandes conquêtes & vaillances
7. La vie du fameux Gargantuas, Le plus terrible geant qui ait jamais paru sur la terre
8. La vie joyeuse et recreative de Tiel-Ulespiegle
9. L’hystoire des deux nobles et très-vaillans chevaliers
10. L’opérateur des pauvres
11. Le grand calendrier et compost des bergers
12. La plaisante et triomphante histoire des hauts et cheualeureux faicts d’armes, du tres-puissant & tres-magnanime, & tres-victorieux Prince Meliadus, dit le Cheualier de la Croix, fils vnique de Maximian Empereur des Allemaignes
13. La complainte des argotiers
14. Prédictions et pronostications généralles
15. Les quinze effusions du sang de nostre sauveur
16. Le palais des curieux
17. Légende et vie chrestienne
18. La vie mort et passion et resurection de nostre sauveur Jésus-Christ
19. Recueil général des quaquets de l’accouchée
20. Predictions perpétuelles du nombre d’or ou cicle

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The Pernicious Influence of The Princess Bride

Mandy Patinkin called it "The Wizard of Oz of our generation." Conceived as a fairy tale by William Goldman, TPB is a love story, a comedy, a fable, and a swashbuckler by turns. Modestly successful during its theatrical run, the movie became an icon following its release on video, allowing it to reach a wider audience that now stretches across generations.

It's a brilliant, timeless movie which is preceived as representative of the cape-and-sword genre rather than the loving satire of that genre it was intended to be.

TPB reached a broad audience at a time when cape-and-sword movies were few and far between. The last significantly successful swashbucklers in the US, Richard Lester's Musketeers movies, were thirteen years earlier, in 1974, and Stephen Herek's The Three Musketeers wouldn't premiere for another five years, so for many viewers, particularly younger viewers, TPB was their introduction to the genre. With its relatively mild violence and the chaste relationship between Westley and Buttercup, TPB likely reached its audience at a younger age than the Musketeers movies as well.

And as a result, the caricature became the reality.

Inconceivable?

Lemme 'splain.

Cape-and-sword books are often darker and grittier than movie swashbucklers. The Three Musketeers, in its English-language versions, was often sanitized for its audience. For example, to avoid impuning the Catholic Church, the comte de Rochefort, not the Cardinal, becomes the instigator of the plot against the Queen in Rowland Lee's 1935 movie, whereas Richelieu is a duke, not a prelate, in George Sidney's 1948 film - that's the one starirng Gene Kelly. D'Artagnan's escapades with Constance Bonacieux and Milady were whitewashed as well - even the Richard Lester movie, the most faithful to the book of any of the films in English, omits d'Artagnan disguising himself as the comte de Wardes to seduce Milady, though it does include the Gascon's seductions of the married Mme Bonacieux and Milady's maid, Kitty, as well as Milady herself.

Swashbuckling movies generally focus on fast-moving action and frequently slapstick humor and this was no less true of the many cape-and-sword films through the first half of the twentieth century. The action in TPB is an homage to the era of Errol Flynn. What was different is that the era of swashbukling movies wasn't so far removed from the time when cape-and-sword stories were more common on bookshelves as well. Swashbucklers fell out of style at the same time cinema became more frank in its depictions of both violence and sexuality, so the darker side of cape-and-sword stories familiar to an audience which read the books was lost on those whose primary exposure was through the movies.

By the time we reach TPB in 1987, neither cape-and-sword books nor movies are as ingrained in popular culture, and the exploits of Westley, Inigo Montoya, Fezzik and the rest shape the perceptions of what a swashbuckling tale should be for a generation with little exposure to the depth and breadth of the tales which the movie so affectionately satirizes.

Personally I find it impossible to imagine Prince Humperdink disguising himself as Westley to seduce Buttercup, or a drunken Inigo picking a fight with a villager just to watch him die, or Vizzini strangling Buttercup with a string of rosary beads, or Fezzik crushed under a castle portcullis.

But those are part of cape-and-sword tales, too, alongside the witty one-liners and flashy stunts. In swashbuckling stories, the heroes may die, insults may go unavenged, and the girl can end up dead on the floor of a convent.

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The Three Musketeers: The Animated Series

In 1968, Hanna-Barbera produced a Three Musketeers animated short series which aired as part of The Banana Splits show, along with an Arabian Nights cartoon and the live-action serial Danger Island.

Thanks to the miracle of the Intewebs, The Three Musketeers cartoons can be found online, in their entirety, at The Big Cartoon Database. Each runs about eight-and-a-half minutes and features the four Musketeers plus a young wannabe named Tooly in a variety of adventures.

They are surprisingly well-written, and I gleaned a number of ideas for my Flashing Blades campaign.

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Taking the Reins

Al at Beyond the Black Gate recently blogged about the player driven campaign.

The best groups I've played with or DM'd have not just been the games that were run the best, or offered the best adventures or settings, they were the games wherein the players were just as interested in developing the game as the DM. . . . It seems like having a way to briefly describe the players' role in the development of the best campaigns would be a good thing - just as important as providing a good setting, good adventures, and the best suited ruleset.

My best experiences with roleplaying games include players contributing to the development of the campaign as well, and thinking back on those campaigns, here's what stands out for me.

Setting and managing expectations: Proactive players rarely just happen. Many players expect a campaign to be prix fixe, and if you're serving à la carte, it's important to put it in their heads from the giddyup so they don't go hungry. Players should be encouraged to see themselves as more than mere consumers of a campaign, and in my experience this begins before character generation takes place.

Harness the rules: Some games make this very explicit - World Burning in Burning Empires comes to mind. The players are active participants in the process of creating the setting and the conflicts which arise from it, so at least some measure of campaign development is hard-coded into the rules. More traditional roleplaying games proceed from the assumption that the referee is responsible for creating the setting in which the game takes place and the conflicts which drive the action; in some systems, some player development of the campaign may take place through their characters, often through rules like GURPS' Advantages and Disadvantages or even through the 'stronghold-building' aspect of name-level 1e AD&D characters

In Flashing Blades, characters have Advantages and Secrets, some of which introduce conflict through established relationships, such as Sworn Enemy, Secret Loyalty, or Favor, while others create connections to institutions in the game-world, such as Member of an Order.

I should note that while I believe using the rules to establish initial connections to the setting may help, they are not a substitute for developing those connections through actual play.

Reinforce the genre: The game genre offers clues to what characters in the campaign are expected to do. For example, cape-and-sword suggests roguish characters who spend time carousing, wenching, gambling, and dueling. It also includes romance, intrigue, a struggle for honor, and advancing one's station in society.

In my experience, the memes conveyed by genre encourage the players' freedom to improvise by handing them a lever with which to move the setting in actual play.

Dangle carrots: The game's rewards system drives player choices.

Let me say that again.

The game's rewards system drives player choices. If a player wants her character to get better at swinging a sword, and the way to get better at swinging a sword is to engage in duels, then the player is more likely to pick fights.

If the game rewards in-character behaviors which serve to develop the campaign, then the players are more likely to pursue them. In Flashing Blades, for example, the career rules offer the adventurers the chance to improve their Social Rank, whereby they gain access to wealth and influence. As the campaign progresses, increased Social Ranks puts them in a position to exert meaningful changes to the setting in actual play.

Provide a dynamic world: In my experience, the more the game-world feels like a living place, the more the players and their characters will feel like they can effect change. The classic example of this is 'clearing the dungeon' - if the adventurers return to town after defeating the cultists in the ruined moat house and discover that there's no room at the inn because merchants are passing through again, and there's new construction to accomodate families moving to the area thanks to its safe reputation, then the players will feel the effects of change even if they didn't set out to cause those changes directly.

So that's how I do that.

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