Letters to Isabel, Redux

Marcello recounts a game played by the adventurers in his latest missive to his dear Isabel.

I love this, integrating another game played by the players into the context of their characters and the game-world, in this case the board game The Resistance. It's one of those things I've done for many years, and it never ceases to make for a fun game-day.

Added bonus: The campaign now has an Obsidian Portal wiki going for it.

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Musketeers in Black

MIB 1625: "Swashbuckling investigators of the paranormal battle aliens, conspiracies, and the Cardinal's Guards in Paris, circa 1625."

This manages to make 7th Sea's metaplot look reasonable.

I followed the link to "Rondak's Portal," hoping to find an actual play log or something, but no joy. Too bad.

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Letters to Isabel, Redux

The title of the post says it all: courtly intrigue.

I'm often left at more than a little bit of a loss when referees complain that all their players want to do is hack-and-slash. I mean, I get it, but it also leaves me a little sad, because this right here is a very big part of what makes roleplaying games fun for me. Manipulating friends and outwitting and outmanoeuvering enemies is something I fall into naturally at the game table, which is why it was no surprise to be at all to find out my Bartle test profile was Socializer.

It's also why one of my favorite skills in a roleplaying game is Bribery.

I know this is one of the reasons the cape-and-sword genre appeals to me so much for gaming. My predilection to turn everything I run into a spy caper and my passion for the endgame are both perfectly at home in swashbucklers.

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Letters to Isabel, Continued

The latest installment of Jededian's 7th Sea actual play reports find Marcello confronted with his comrades' discomfiture over being too good a scoundrel.

Marcello continues to be a character after my own heart.

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Letters to Isabel, Redux

"Dear Isabel,
You may find parts of what you are about to read sickening and I apologise for that. But I'm not in the habit of lying to you and you know yourself fully well what a dark place this world can be, so I am not going to sugarcoat what has happened."

The stakes of Marcello's game rise precipitously in Jedediah's ongoing 7th Sea campaign.

Addendum (11/4/12): Part 2 of Marcello and friends' adventures include a dangerous duel.

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Letters to Isabel, Redux

FIGHT!

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Letters to Isabel, Redux

Marcello's impersonation takes a seductive turn in the latest actual play log of Jedediah's 7th Sea campaign.

I hope we're not heading down a path toward Fifty Shades of Don Gabriel.

And I get the feeling we'll be hearing more about the dangerous M. du Doré.

I appreciated the behind-baseball commentary, but I really like seeing the campaign through Marcello's eyes, at least as much of it as he's willing to share with Isabel.

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Letters to Isabel, Reprise

The plot thickens in Jedediah's latest 7th Sea update.

I really like Marcello's decision to impersonate Don Gabriel - very clever.

More importantly, I like that the characters have a plan more involved that, Come in hard, rapiers blazing. Intrigue is, to me, just as fundamental to cape-and-sword tales as dueling.

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Letters to Isabel

Jedediah at Book Scorpion's Lair has another post on his 7th Sea campaign up, and that Marcello is a nasty piece of work.

This is a campaign after my own heart.

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Phoning It In Phriday

Yeah, I've just been absolutely hammered this week with contractors and insurance adjusters and baseball camp and dance recitals and science fair project data collection, and tomorrow our Flashing Blades campaign resumes after a three-month hiatus, so nothing new here 'til next week.

Have a great weekend!

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The Cat Out of the Bag

Jedediah at Book Scorpion's Lair has another actual play log from his 7th Sea campaign, in which the intrepid adventurers learn something interesting about El Gato.

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L is for Lighthouse

7th Sea? Yeah, it's like that.

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The Nevers Thrust

"You know my first attack. My second makes you invincible. Attack me. Parry in septime, riposte, envelop in quatre, beat forearm! Take blade as you change arm - disarm. To the forehead!"

"You can't pierce the forehead."

"You can. Right here."

Many cape-and-sword roleplaying games offer players the opportunity to utilize special abilities or combat maneuvers as their characters gain experience. In 7th Sea, for example, Swordsmen characters study different schools of fencing which give access to Skills and Knacks as well as Techniques which are specific to Mastery of a particular school. Honor + Intrigue characters learn Dueling Styles, each of which includes a Final Secret. Combat skills in Swashbuckler - the roleplaying game by Jim Dietz, not the Yaquinto Publishing board game - build on one another, with Slash progressing to Backhand Slash to Two-Handed Slash and Jab to Thrust to Lunge, for example.

The exact benefit of specials and maneuvers in these games varies; for example, Mastery of the Lucani style in 7th Sea allows a character to make a combination attack using both a broadsword and a fist, while the Final Secret of H+I's Spanish Style is allows a free Parry on the expenditure of a Fortune Point. Learning different schools and styles allows access to different abilities with experience, which can then be used in combination during a fight.

Swashbuckler takes a slightly different tack. The rules posit two "very generalized" fighting styles, the jack of all trades and the specialist. The former is built by taking a wide variety of combat skills while the latter is focused on full progression through a few skills instead.

Inspired more by pure fencing simulation rules like Rapier and Dagger, Flashing Blades takes a somewhat different approach. FB includes various martial skills, including five dueling styles; the dueling styles confer skill in the weapons associated with that style and may offer a bonus to a particular type of martial attack or defense; for example, Italian Style dueling allows a character to use the longsword, rapier, and foil and confers a + 1 bonus to hit on a thrust or lunge and a + 1 parry bonus using an off-hand weapons like a dagger, main-gauche, baton, or buckler. FB also contains a variety of special attacks, such as entangling an opponent in a cloak, disarming, striking to subdue, or making an attack or parry while drawing a sword, as well as a variety of "dirty tricks," including tripping a lunging swordsman, throwing sand in his eyes, or kicking him in the junk! With the exception of Entangle, these special attacks or dirty tricks aren't tied to a particular style, however - they are open to any character to attempt.

This is one of the reasons that I opted for Flashing Blades when I decided to run a cape-and-sword campaign. I don't like roleplaying games which require an inordinate investment of character resources to perform fundamental tasks - the aforementioned Jab to Thrust to Lunge skill progression in Swashbuckler is a glaring example of this - and I strongly prefer rules that are intuitive, where the abstractions are couched in common sense language - 7th Sea's Raises make sense in the context of the rules but are too abstract, pulling me out of the action. Flashing Blades offers me both of these.

What it doesn't offer me is the Nevers thrust.

La botte de Nevers comes from Paul Féval's Le Bossu (The Hunchback), perhaps the second-most popular cape-and-sword novel in France after the Musketeers saga. The description of the Nevers thrust above comes from Phillipe de Broca's brilliant 1997 adaptation of the famous story, taught by Vincent Perez's duc de Nevers to Daniel Auteil's Lagardère. Lagardère pursues Nevers for the purpose of learning the attack which bears the duke's family name, and once in possession of it the swordsman declares he is now, "Immortal!"

I can actually get pretty close to replicating the Nevers thrust using the combat rules as written for Flashing Blades. The attack consists of a parry of a thrust, a strike to subdue on the sword arm as a counter, a disarm, and a thrust to the head. But that's only pretty close - per the rules as written, a disarm is a counter, not an attack, and can only be made following a successful parry, so the opponent must thrust not once but twice in succession.

The higher hurdle is the thrust to the head. Hit location in FB is chosen at the time of the attack, and resolved by 1D20 rolled twice on the hit location table - the result closest to the target is the result. As a result, it's possible to aim for the head and hit the left leg instead, though a more likely result is a wound on the right arm or chest if the head is missed.

In order to make the Nevers thrust work as described by monsieur le duc, then, I could allow a disarm as an attack rather than a counter and eliminate the roll for hit location, automatically allowing the thrust to find the head. That's not at all unreasonable, if the steps are executed successfully in sequence: parry a thrust, counter, disarm, thrust.

And voilà! My campaign has the Nevers thrust.

This also opens up an interesting house rule possibility for the players, to develop their own special maneuvers for their characters. As a ground rule, let's say this requires that the character is a Master or Master Superior to develop a special maneuver. The special maneuver is a sequence requiring a minimum of two combat rounds composed of some combination of fencing and brawling attacks, footwork, parries, special attacks, or dirty tricks, which must be performed in order successfully. If the special maneuver is performed successfully, then the character gets an additional die to roll for hit location per round required to complete the sequence; if any action in the sequence is not performed successfully - an attack is parried, for example - then they are simply resolved normally per the rules as written. A special maneuver is 'paid for' with an earned Expertise point, and at least two checkmarks for the Expertise point must come from actual duels, not sparring in the salle d'armes.

Let's see how this might look in practice. Vulmea's Surgical Strike consists of parrying an opponent's slash and countering with a vicious kick in the first round, followed by a handful of sand thrown in the eyes and a slash to the head in the second. (Of course it's not gentlemanly. Pirate, remember?) If the sequence of parry, brawling attack, dirty trick, and fencing attack is executed successfully, I get to roll four dice instead of two for hit location, improving my odds of splattering brains on the deck.

I like this. It engages the rules as written, preserving both the crunch and the flavor that led me to choose Flashing Blades in the first place, and it puts the players in charge of developing special maneuvers as simple or as complex as they want them to be like Swashbuckler, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach like 7th Sea's schools or H+I's styles.

But what about Bonetti's Defense? Can the same thing be done for defensive maneuvers as well? Sure - use a combination of parries, blocks, and footwork, and gain extra dice to roll for parries.

Can a special maneuver be taught? Sure, why not - what's a Master without students, after all? Let's say that a student must have an Expertise of at least 18 - Expert - in order to perform the maneuver and earns one less die than the Master who created the maneuver in the first place, so if anyone else successfully performs my Surgical Strike, they roll three dice for hit location, not four. This provides an additional incentive to develop one's own maneuvers.

I think Lagardère would be pleased.

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Revisiting a Place That Never Was

Last week I wrote about creating a fictional country set in the real world as campaign settings for cape-and-sword games. This would allow a referee to take advantage of the players' familiarity with the real world while not being bound to any particular historical country, giving the referee creative freedom and removing the fear of getting the history of a real place 'wrong.'

I then proceeded to make a rookie blogger mistake: I left one of the main ideas out of my post.

Rather than creating a new country from whole cloth or using an existing fictional setting, a referee could instead take advantage of a published fictional rpg setting and adapt that instead.

For example, the nations of Théah from 7th Sea are analogs to the real world countries of Restoration-era Europe. Vodacce, for example, is Théah's Italy. A referee could take one of the principalities of Vodacce and place it on the 16th or 17th century Italian peninsula as a setting for a swashbuckling game. Adapting one of the kingdoms of Eisen to the Holy Roman Empire, similar to Anthony Hope's Ruritania, is another option.

The nation guides for Théah provide details on locations, customs, politics, and so on, removing a creative burden from the referee. Campaign guides written for roleplaying games typically focus on information immediately relevant to the referee and the players, reducing the workload of adapting a fictional setting drawn from literature.

In fact, I like this idea enough to want to add a bit of 7th Sea to my Flashing Blades campaign. I've got a little reading to do.

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Major Players

One of the oft-recurring elements in cape-and-sword stories is the relationship of the main characters to power and powerful individuals, often historical figures, in the setting. In The Three Musketeers romances, d'Artagnan is involved in the affair between the Queen-Consort and the Duke of Buckingham, then serves the Queen-Regent and her first minister, Cardinal Mazarin, during the Fronde, and finally is Captain of the Musketeers under Louis XIV. Gil de Berault is known to Cardinal Richelieu and tasked with acting as the Cardinal's spy against a Huguenot rebel in Under the Red Robe. Captain Alatriste, through his relationship with two courtiers of King Felipe IV, performs a variety of missions on behalf of the Spanish crown; he is also known to the Geneose general, Ambrogio Spinola, under whom Alatriste served on a number of campaigns. The Anglo-Dutch mercenary Percy Blake - ancestor of his namesake concealed behind the mask of the Scarlet Pimpernel - thwarts a plot to kill the Stadtholder, Maurice of Nassau, in The Laughing Cavalier.

The relationship of swashbucklers to persons of note carries into fictional settings as well, as in the relationship between distant cousins Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf V Elphburg of Ruritania.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Introducing this element in cape-and-sword roleplaying games can be pretty easy for the referee and the players. For example, it can addressed through character generation in some systems. In Flashing Blades, player characters make take Advantages and Secrets such as Contact, Favor, or Secret Loyalty, establishing a relationship between the adventurer and a notable figure from the beginning of the adventure or campaign. 7th Sea offers similar Advantages to the adventurers, such as Connections, Patron, and Membership, selected during character creation.

Relationships between the adventurers and powerful non-player characters can also develop in actual play, of course. In more linear, plot-driven adventures, these influential figures may engage the adventurers to perform a service, possibly through the relationships established in their Advantages, or more directly, such as a secret summons or perhaps to escape punishment for an offense like dueling in defiance of royal edicts or courting the wrong man's mistress. In a more player-driven, sandbox campaign, rumors may offer leads to powerful figures in the setting, or the players may attempt to build a connection, such as seeking an introduction, presenting gifts or bribes, and offering service in exchange for patronage.

In my Flashing Blades sandbox campaign, I've populated different random encounter lists with named non-player characters, to give the adventurers an opportunity to spontaneously meet and occasionally serve some of the most influential figures in early 17th century France. The adventurers, for example, rescued the duchesse de Chevreuse and her lover, Lord Holland, from an attack by bravos in a Parisian alley, they danced with the ladies-in-waiting of Cristina Maria, the princess of Piedmont, and one of them is about to be decorated by the duke of Savoy for his service on military campaign.

So establishing relationships to power isn't necessarily difficult. Managing them as the campaign goes on requires some care, however.

First, the adventurers may be tempted to treat the non-player character as at their beck-and-call. In my experience, this is often by no means deliberate; it can actually arise from smart play and it's often perfectly fitting for the adventurers to seek assistance. Following a duel-gone-bad involving the Cardinal's Guards in our campaign, the players quickly ran down the list of non-player characters their characters knew in order to get access to the King before the Cardinal did. However, access to power should ideally come at a cost. In the case of relationships created through Advantages during chargen, the rules of the game may provide reasonable limites on the kinds of assistance which can be expected from a powerful non-player character. For example, the Advantage Contact in Flashing Blades indicates that the Contact will, "aid the character in times of need," but adds the caveat that a Contact, "will help less often the higher their [social] rank." A character with the Favor Advantage runs the risk of retaliation if the favor asked is "too great." In these cases, the rules provide a check-and-balance on the benefit provided by the Advantage.

With respect to adjudicating relationships between influential npcs and the adventurers which arise from actual play, it's important to remember that powerful non-player characters are powerful within the setting for a reason. They may hold important positions, command clients and servants, and control considerable wealth. The most basic guideline for roleplaying this relationship is quid pro quo - what are the adventurers prepared to give up in exchange for power exerted on their behalf? Imbalances in power relationships tend to drive the action in my games - put simply, if the adventurers are winning, then someone somewhere is losing, creating a dynamic balancing of assistance and influence. The adventurers should rarely get something for nothing in their interactions with the elite figures of the campaign. This doesn't mean that non-player characters should not act generously toward the adventurers, but such generosity should carry at least some expectation of reciprocity.

Second, the rules for social interactions in the game need to be considered carefully. It's not difficult to see how a player who optimizes a 'Face' character might be tempted to reduce an important figure in the game to a lapdog through incautious refereeing. Referees must be familiar with the ins-and-outs of how these skills work in their games, and what the characters can actually expect to accomplish from their use. For example, in d20 games there are limitations on when and how the Diplomacy skill can be used, such as requiring at least a full minute to make a pitch and allowing opposed rolls in negotiations and pleadings. I use opposed rolls, for example, when an adventurer is attempting to persuade an underling to perform an act on the adventurer's behalf, such as convincing a guard or a clerk to ignore their master's orders - the opposed roll is between the more powerful non-player character's skill and the adventurer's, rather than against a static DC.

In my Flashing Blades campaign, I use the difference in Social Rank betweeen player and non-player characters as a modifier to skill checks involving Etiquette, Oratory, or Captaincy, as well as opposed rolls with a patron's Social Rank and skill standing in for that of a client or créature like a lackey.

Game with magic make this particularly dicey - pun intended - and the referee should carefully consider what defensive magics a powerful and influential figure in the setting is likely to routinely employ to ward against enchantment magic.

None of this should be taken as a recommendation to swing the nerf-hammer at the first sign of the adventurers gaining an upper hand. Few things suck harder as a player than discovering that using the skills and abilities you developed over the course of the game are constantly blunted by the referee. Rather, it's another reminder that powerful npcs should be treated as powerful, not push-overs. Consider the results of successful skill checks in light of the quid pro quo outlined above - how can a non-player character who loses an opposed skill check give the players the reaction they've earned in actual play while gaining something for themselves in the exchange?

Third, the referee needs to be prepared to answer the question, what happens if the adventurers off an important, powerful non-player character? Some referees may choose to give influential, particularly historical, non-player characters some sort of story immunity to insure that historical or setting continuity is maintained. A 7th Sea game master, for example, could rule that the Empereur cannot be killed by the adventurers, though he may be inconvenienced; should the adventurers succeed in an attack on that curled and perfumed royal head, they could discover that they only defeated a look-alike standing in for his imperial majesty.

Others - myself included - prefer to let the dice fall where they may. For my campaign, I've considered what happens should Cardinal Richelieu, for example, or King Louis XIII die unexpectedly in the course of actual play. Part of my campaign preparation involves the possibility of spinning off into alt.history, particularly given that the career rules of Flashing Blades give the adventurers the opportunity to rise to positions of great power and responsibility themselves in the course of a campaign, potentially supplanting Mazarin or Turenne or Colbert.

In my experience, creating and building these relationships between the player characters and important non-player characters is fundamental to emulating the cape-and-sword genre. Players who enjoy swashbuckling tales are likely to find even a passing encounter with a famous character memorable, but the relationships they build and exploit with powerful non-player characters are the stuff that may drive an entire campaign.

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