Here Be Monsters

At Thoul's Paradise, perdustin posted a copy of a beautiful map of Iceland c. 1590, which includes a bestiary of sea monsters believed to infest the waters of the North Atlantic.

Two things jump out at me. First, the map includes features such as ice and trees, the latter described as windthrow from Norway. I like encounter tables which include features like this, both for local color which brings life to the setting and to provide the players with a potential resource to tap for their own schemes.

Second, it's a reminder of how superstitious the late Renaissance and Early Modern world remains. This map is dated just 36 years before the present year of my campaign. We haven't yet reached the cusp of the Enlightenment, and monsters and witchcraft are still accepted as real by many in the game-world. Stories of mythical beasts, rumors of dark arts - these, too, bring the setting to life, particularly when myths and mysteries have a basis in fact which can appear as well, as with the giant squid in Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes.

More on En Garde!

If you haven't been following perdustin's series at Thoul's Paradise on the first cape-and-sword tabletop roleplaying game, GDW's En Garde! here's a chance to catch up.

The Other Little Brown Book
The Fine Art of Pretending to Fence
The Importance of Status
Clubs and Bawdyhouses
No Friends for the Cardinal's Guard
The Vagaries of War and Fortune

If you've never heard of En Garde! and its approach to roleplaying - which includes some significant differences from the model presented by D&D - or simply want to learn more about the early history of roleplaying games, I strongly recommend giving these a look.

Swashbuckling's Little Brown Book

On Thoul's Paradise, perdustin posted an introduction to "the other little brown book", En Garde! by Game Designers Workshop, the first cape-and-sword roleplaying game.

En Garde! started out as a set of rules for swashbuckling skirmishes, similar to Rapier and Dagger from FGU or Gloire from Rattrap Productions, but as a brief history of the game notes, "The players invented backgrounds to provide a reason for the duels. In short order they had individual characters in an ever more complex setting. The setting took over as the main focus of play . . . "

That setting was a Ruritania of the designers' invention, and not Musketeers-era France as perdustin suggests. That setting would strongly influence one of its successors, Flashing Blades, particularly the rules for soldier characters going on campaign and the existence of gentleman's clubs, an anachronism in the 17th century France setting of the FGU game.

I'm fascinated by the description of how the setting developed. Essentially the early players were as interested in the reasons why their characters were dueling, and they set about creating a milieu of carousing and courtship and soldiering around their characters to give them a motivation to cross swords. I've heard it suggested that En Garde! is more a skirmish game than a roleplaying game - the same criticism often leveled at Boot Hill - but I think that milieu proves otherwise. This was a social milieu rather than the more familiar dungeon/city/wilderness or subsector-full-of-star-systems settings adopted for other early roleplaying games.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of perdustin's posts on En Garde! which I feel I should mention is still in print.