Action Heroes

Recently I introduced a discussion of the endgame in cape-and-sword roleplaying games, the point in a campaign at which the player characters become authority figures in the game-world, where conflicts transition from the physical to the political and power comes from one's position at least as often as from one's sword arm.

So far the discussion focused on resources the adventurers may bring to bear as they reach the endgame: social standing and influence, wealth, contacts and favors, clients, and strongholds. These are the tools the adventurers acquire or build as the campaign progresses toward the endgame. Now it's time to look at this from the referee's seat at the end of the table.

In 2003, Atlas Games published Dynasties and Demagogues, "The Sourcebook of Politcial Intrigue," for d20 roleplaying games. Here's what the book has to say about "what political adventures are like."

Political adventures have fewer combats and more attempts to influence other characters than other fantasy adventures. Investigation is often crucial, since it's hard to protect yourself against a rival's plans unless you know what those plans are.

In a political game, most challenges come from rivals and other non-player characters. Personal connections drive political games - the PCs must figure out what the other characters want and how to turn that information to their own advantage. They may be able to launch a counterplot that foils that rival's plans, or turn the rival into an ally by offering a mutually beneficial deal. Words accomplish a lot in political games.

As descriptions of the political milieu in a campaign, so far, so good. Then comes the qualifier.

That doesn't mean there's no action. Player characters often sneak into dangerous situations or fight their way out of them. Assassinations, duels, and other physical challenges settle many political disputes, so the PCs must be ready for anything.

Dynasties and Demagogues next offers a sample adventure, "Deception at Villa Zarios," intended to be read by both players and referees, to introduce some of the concepts which follow. Here's the adventure in outline form.

• The adventurers are invited to breakfast and asked to take over the stewardship of the villa on behalf of its owner, Dona Carlotta.
• The adventurers are ambushed by bandits. (Serio.)
• The adventurers investigate the goings on at the villa, while dealing with a staff hostile to the newcomers, and may discover that the major-domo is cooking the books.
• Don Miguel, Dona Carlotta's rival, offers to buy the villa at a below-market price, and if the adventurers refuse or can't convince Dona Carlotta, a druid comes and blights the vines.
• Don Miguel's lackeys drive an owlbear into the vineyard, to create chaos.
• Don Miguel attempts to burn the place down.
• Should the adventurers save the vines, the workers, and the villa itself, they may expose the major-domo as working for Don Miguel and receive rewards from Dona Carlotta and the Queen's Investigator.

As Dynasties and Demagogues itself goes on to note, "Deception at Villa Zarios" makes a point of including a lot of "running, jumping and hitting things," to underscore that political adventures need not preclude adventurers from doing adventurous things.

Swashbucklers may be many things, but few would dispute that 'men and women of action' is one of the few truly universal tropes in the genre. Consider the career of Aramis, a guardsman in The Three Musketeers who becomes a priest and abbé who is involved with the Frondeurs and goes to England to rescue King Charles I from his executioners Twenty Years Later, and finally plans a coup d’état against the king in The Man in the Iron Mask before escaping to Spain and becoming its ambassador to France. Aramis and the other Musketeers enjoy vigorous careers even as they grow in stature and rank over the course of the saga.

This is true of the historical figures of the period as well. Consider Cosme de Valbelle, who engineered the elections of consuls in Marseille - twice serving the one year term himself - for a score of years and who died at sea in battle with the Spanish, lashed to the mast of his own galley, defending his city to the last. Cardinal Louis III de Guise commanded royal troops against the Huguenots in 1621, a short time after being arrested for challenging the duc de Nevers - a foreign prince and peer to the king, no less - to a duel. Provincial governors and royal magistrates led troops against rebellious subjects, and even town burghers could be expected to deal with lawbreakers and miscreants directly, blade and pistol in hand, backed by their own lackeys.

The cape-and-sword endgame doesn't preclude the adventurers from taking an active hand - and sword - in their affairs even after they enter into the political sphere of the game-world. In fact, the precedent is well established in both the literature and history of the period.

That said, "Deception at Villa Zarios" remains a disappointment as an introduction to political intrigue in roleplaying campaigns, not because of the emphasis on action, but rather because the politics and intrigue are wholly external to the players' characters. The adventurers are put upon by the political machinations of others but have no opportunity to engage in their own maneuvering, outside of some fairly standard mystery investigation. I'd like to say this is because "Deception at Villa Zarios" is intended as an introductory adventure, but this is true of all of the adventures outlined in the book, and of many other adventures and supplements as well - For the Love of Justice for Swashbuckler! shares this same problem - so this shouldn't be taken as a slight against Dynasties and Demagogues at all, but rather a common failing in which political intrigue is reduced to the familiar rescue/capture/steal the MacGuffin scenarios common to most other roleplaying games.

The endgame of the cape-and-sword campaign can - and, considering both genre tropes and historical examples, should - include 'sneaking in and fighting out again,' but the situations and events which motivate the adventurers should feature more subtle, more complex challenges than fight off the owlbear and put out the fire. I'll describe an approach to doing that next, beginning with the web of factions and actors in my campaign.

Unfortunately I probably won't have another installment completed until next week, as my wife and I are heading to Vegas - Vegas, baby! Vegas! - through the end of the week. While I am taking my laptop - yes, I know I'm a nerd, so please, spare me your derision - I don't expect to post much besides a couple of short posts already written, so I beg your pardon and your patience.

Honor + Intrigue Coming to Your FLGS?

Chris 'BASHMAN' Rutkowski confirmed at rpg.net that Honor + Intrigue will be appearing on the shelves of friendly local gaming stores in the future.

"The books are first going out to pre-orders while the bulk print run continues. When all the books are done, they're shipping them to the IPR Warehouse. IPR does distribute books to FLGS in the US, Canada, UK, and a number of other countries, so it ought to be available in stores at that point. However, that shipment has not gone out yet."

With dedicated cape-and-sword roleplaying games like H+I and All for One: Régime Diabolique and tabletop minis games like Gloire actively supported by their publishers, classics like Flashing Blades and En Garde! still in print, and other games like Savage Worlds' Solomon Kane and Pirates of the Spanish Main and 7th Sea plus freebies like PDQ Sharp available in .pdf, it's a great time to pretend to be a swashbuckler.

U is for Unbuilt

For the July 2000 issue of Dragon magazine, Robin Laws wrote an article entitled "Swashbuckling Essentials," containing, ". . . twelve tips for the prospective swashbuckler," aimed at referees and players of Dungeons and Dragons specifically, and other games generally. Mr Laws' tips include such nuggets as "Panache Your Middle Name," "Chivalry to the Point of Idiocy," "Gentlemen Prefer Rapiers," and, "Armor is for the Weak."

Mr Laws then advises how to integrate these tips into the rules of the game. Here's a sample.

So when you're in a tight spot, when the bloodthirsty pirates have you cornered in the colonial governor's kitchen, look around for items that are waiting to help you. In swashbuckler mode, a found item almost always makes as effective a weapon as the cutlass in your scabbard or the dagger in your boot. Expect your [dungeon master] to assign you a big bonus for flinging a handy meat cleaver at the lead pirate. Expect an even bigger one for lifting a roasting boar from its spit and hurling it at him.

And another.

Wit is crucial component of your Charisma-based arsenal. It is not enough to defeat an opponent - you must prove yourself his master in the fine art of the cutting remark. Swashbuckling villains stand united in their reslolute lack of a sense of humor, especially regarding their own faults. Your DM should reward you for wittiness above and beyond the call of duty. For example, each time you successfully infuriate a foe with a cutting remark, your DM might reward you [experience points] equal to 10% of amount you'd get for defeating him outright.

Advice like Mr Laws' is pretty common for cape-and-sword roleplaying games, reflecting perhaps the most widely held perceptions of what swashbuckling adventure is all about. There's a lot to like here, particularly about the importance of romance and honor.

But "Swashbuckling Essentials" also falls into the familiar trap of failing to understand its sources, and as a result it ends up defining the genre as parody. He also gets some things flat wrong; for example, Mr Laws writes, "If your campaign draws inspiration from The Three Musketeers, don't expect to find treasure all over the place. . . . They get their equipment from the king's armory, their horses from his livery, and so on," whereas M. Dumas devotes whole chapters in his tale to the Musketeers figuring out how to pay for their equipment before going on campaign.

TV Tropes, that inestimable trove of "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations," includes a page on swashbuckling. Among the "devices and conventions" associated with the cape-and-sword genre is the Unbuilt Trope.

The Unbuilt Trope "is a work that seems like a Deconstruction but is actually the Trope Maker itself. This is often because later appearances of the trope have decayed compared to the original, defining appearance." As TV Tropes explains, this can happen for a number of reasons, from conscious choice to lack of understanding to just plain hackery by later writers. In fact, TV Tropes specifically calls out Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda as examples of the Unbuilt Trope in swashbuckling.

In the case of the cape-and-sword genre, I expect that the tropes decayed with the transition of swashbuckling stories to the medium of film. Many fans of the various movie versions of The Three Musketeers might be quite surprised by M Dumas' concise treatment of d'Artagnan's duels in his books. The Alatriste novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, written at the tail-end of the twentieth century, are in fact much closer in feel to the works by M Dumas and Mr Hope than they are Rafael Sabatini or Johnston McCulley.

Overemphasizing comically light-hearted action, as I feel Mr Laws does in "Swashbuckling Essentials," limits the range of experiences available through cape-and-sword roleplaying. Showering a player with bonuses that make using improvised weapons better than the sword is one way to encourage swashbuckling action; another is to make fights desperate enough that there is a pressing need for creative solutions, such that using an cleaver unbalanced for throwing to slow down a rush of attackers is preferable to relying on the sword alone, even if it entails a penalty to perform successfully.

When I set out to develop my own cape-and-sword campaign, Le Ballet de l'Acier, I knew I wanted the action in actual play to feel more like the Musketeers and Alatriste novels. I hadn't heard of the Unbuilt Trope at the time; I just knew that I wanted a game that felt more like the Richard Lester Musketeers movies and less like The Crimson Pirate. Swashbuckling can be a dirty business as well as a funny one, and focusing on the latter at the expense of the former, as "Swashbuckling Essentials" does, would result in a much shallower roleplaying experience.

H is for Honor

Swashbucklers may be may be daredevil duelists and dashing romantics. They may be hard-bitten men and troubled souls. They may be wizened veterans or callow youths. They may be all of these things in the course of their lifetimes, and more.

But perhaps the most important characteristic common to swashbucklers is a personal code of honor.

‘Never submit quietly to the slightest indignity, except it proceed from the cardinal or the king. It is by his courage — mark this well — it is by his courage alone, that a gentleman makes his way nowadays. Whoever hesitates one moment, lets perhaps that chance escape him, which fortune, for that moment alone, has offered him.’
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

He took his place without a word. I read in his drawn white face that he had made his mind up to the worst, and his courage so won my admiration that I would gladfully and thankfully have set one of the lookers-on — any of the lookers-on — in his place; but that could not be. So I thought of Zaton’s closed to me, of Pombal’s insult, of the sneers and slights I had long kept at sword point; and, pressing him suddenly in a heat of affected anger, I thrust strongly over his guard, which had grown feeble, and ran him through the chest.
— Stanley Weyman, Under the Red Robe

Alatriste shook his head thoughtfully, then looked at his sword and his dagger. “We are what we are,” he thought. “My reputation is all, and I have no other.”
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

To the swashbuckler it is better to risk death than dishonor. One’s reputation is, in the end, all one truly possesses — power and fortunes come and go, but honor can only be given away, never taken.

That sense of honor should not be confused with behaving honorably. A swashbuckler need not be a paragon of virtue — in fact they may be quite the opposite. Diego Alatriste is a hired assassin. Percy Blakeney accepts money to kindnap a burgher’s daughter, then swindles the burgher into paying Blakeney to ‘rescue’ her. D’Artagnan date-rapes Milady de Winter by posing as the comte de Wardes and sneaking into her bedroom under cover of darkness. To satisfy a bet, the marquis de Bardelys assumes the identity of a dead man in order to trick the daughter of the vicomte de Lavedan into marrying him. A swashbuckler’s deeds may define him as hero or villain, but his honor demands that he accept his due no matter what, without equivocation.

Maintaining one’s reputation and preserving one’s honor may lead a swashbuckler down several paths. For example, some may choose to fight anyone and everyone who offers them cause, however slight; this is the classic duelist. Others may emphasize courtesy and etiquette to avoid giving or taking offense, minimizing slights and reserving the sword as the final recourse for the most grave slanders.

Players in cape-and-sword roleplaying game campaigns may choose to give some thought to how their characters express their honor before the campaign begins, but even if they don't, how the player characters conduct themselves in actual play will reflect a de facto personal code by which others may take the character's measure.

A Swashbuckler's Sandbox, Part 3

After a quick detour to cover a bit about how a sandbox setting works during actual play in part 2, now I want to get into how I run a sandbox cape-and-sword campaign.

First, compile an Appendix N for your sandbox which lays out the genre influences for the campaign.

Roleplaying games are traditionally composed from a farrago of sources and influences, and so are their settings, both explicit and implied. A discrete list of books, comic books, movies, artwork, and other media provides a focus for preparing elements of the sandbox which fit the genre. A sandbox which reflects its genre influences may provide the players an immediate familiarity with and an intuitive feel for the game-world.

The less familiar and more remote the genre influences, on the other hand, the more the players must learn about the sandbox before being confidant in acting on their understanding of the game-world. This is why clichés and archetypes abound in roleplaying games and other media - they paint a vivid picture in the imagination which short circuits the need for lengthy exposition. Increasing the ease with which players can choose a reasonable course of action for their characters helps facilitate sandbox play.

The significance of a sandbox's genre influences also holds for genre-mashups; if the mashup involves two immediately accessible genres - swashbucklers versus Cthulhoid horrors in Revolutionary France! - then the players may gain the same benefits of familiarity as a single genre. On the other hand, a burgeoning excess of hetergeneity may result in incongruity, an invidious sense of mission creep - I still hear players complain about the big setting reveal in 7th Sea, for example.

Now cape-and-sword genre tropes are far from universal - a subject I will get into at length in future posts - so choosing the sandbox's Appendix N helps narrow the field a bit. A setting appropriate to The Princess Bride may be may look very different from one appropriate to Captain Alatriste. The specific genre influences particular to a given sandbox help to give it a shape more readily recognizible to the players.

The Appendix N for my Flashing Blades campaign lists my main sources of inspiration. The story which first prompted me to run Flashing Blades was Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow of the Vulture," set at the 1529 siege of Vienna; I subsequently drew from - naturally - REH's pirate stories, "Swords of the Red Brotherhood" and "Black Vulmea's Vengeance," as well. The other sources that make up my Appendix N build on this.

Melodramas like The Prisoner of Zenda and Swordspoint are absent from my sandbox's Appendix N, though I really like both stories and their sequels. Comic movies like Swashbuckler and the unintentionally funny The Musketeer are missing as well, as most of the humor in the campaign is found, not deliberate or satirical.

Having a firm grasp of the genre and associated tropes gives me a framework on which to build the setting elements of my swashbuckling sandbox. The pulp tales and related sources which inspire my campaign contain rough, flawed anti-heroes and cruel, complex antagonists, and the non-player characters populating my sandbox reflect this - rock-jawed champions and mustache-twirling villains need not apply - as do their agendas, which mostly revolve around the pursuit of fortune and glory and the power that comes with both.

Random encounters play a very important role in my sandboxes. They represent the living setting, a nexus between the travels and actions of the adventurers and in media res events which in some instances follow from the agendas of significant non-player characters in the campaign. Many of my random encounters feature named npcs for this reason; they provide an opportunity for the adventurers to meet and interact with these characters, to build a relationship - for better or worse - with the movers and shakers of the setting. From my Appendix N sources, I can draw ideas for the kinds of encounters representing the genre tropes in those stories. For example, the adventurers in my sandbox aren't likely to hear of a merchant looking to hire caravan guards, but they may be approached by a gambler or a moneylender looking for swordsmen to help recover a debt.

Now that gambler or moneylender will rarely exist in isolation, and in part 4 - part 4?! - I'll get into social relationships as a setting map in my swashbuckler's sandbox.

A Swashbuckler's Sandbox, Part 2

In part 1, I laid the groundwork for what I consider to be a sandbox playstyle. I'd planned on getting into how to work cape-and-sword tropes into a sandbox, but as I started writing it, I found I was introducing all sorts of other baggage regarding how sandboxes work in actual play, so I want play porter for a moment and clear those bags out of the way first.

There are a number of features common to sandbox settings, and, judging from the many discussions in which I've participated on various gaming forums over the years, it seems that every one of them comes with some misunderstandings attached.

First, a sandbox game-world is not tailored, to use the 3e D&D DMG parlance, to the adventurers. In the game-world, there are hazards and challenges that will be easy for the adventurers to handle, some that carry a measure of risk to the adventurers, and some which the adventurers are unlikely to overcome unless they are extremely clever and insanely lucky. Sandboxes include a wide range of degrees of difficulty in challenges, hazards, and encounters, and the adventurers may face them at any time, with or without warning - in fact, one of the important elements of game-play is gathering intelligence on the nature of hazards which exist in the game-world, to reduce the risk of an unexpected, overwhelming encounter.

Second, a sandbox typically contains a number of adventure sites - a ruined castle, a creepy abbey, a dark forest, a maze of caverns, a keep on the borderlands, and so on. Scattered throughout the game-world are clues - rumors picked up from travellers in taverns, books found in dusty libraries, a map found in a dead bandit's pocket, a murak painted on the wall of a monk's cell, et cetera - which point the adventurers in the direction of these locations. These locations typically receive more attention than other places in the game-world during the referee's prep, and are often intended to have an element of replayability about them - each supports multiple visits by the adventurers. Clues are enticements to the adventurers, tempting them with the means to achieve their goals, or even satisfying a goal itself.

Third, a sandbox offers the opportunity for the adventurers to explore at their own pace and in a direction of their choosing. Hexcrawls - exploration hex by hex across a map - are strongly associated with this, appearing early in the hobby in published settings like Blackmoor, the Wilderlands, and the Spinward Marches. This sometimes implies that sandboxes need to be extensive, but that isn't necessarily the case (qv, Keep on the Borderlands).

Fourth and last, a sandbox should be a dynamic game-world. The 3e D&D DMG associates the term "status quo" with sandbox adventuring, implying a sort of stasis state which is only broken by the presence of the adventurers. A sandbox, however, usually contains non-player characters with agendas they pursue independently of the adventurers, unless or until the adventurers choose to become involved or are swept up as a consequence of an npc agenda coming to fruition. In a well-run sandbox, there are also large-scale events which occur in the setting, such as wars, plagues, and so forth, which again exist independently of the adventurers.

Okay, with those trunks and valises stowed, now I can move on to the swashbuckling in part 3.