A Book Review and a Little More - Part One: Tom Swan, by Christian Cameron

Part One:

A week or two back, I began reading a series of e-novellas, known collectively as Tom Swan and the Head of St. George, by Christian Cameron. I have just finished Part Three of the nine available. Here is the link to the first in the series [if you, like me, are a canuck, you can get to the Canadian page from here too]:

http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Swan-Head-George-Part-ebook/dp/B008UXLK3K

When I approached Mr. Cameron about doing a review with emphasis on gaming in the spirit of Tom Swan, he was very encouraging. So I went ahead, wrote the piece (which became, as you will see, two pieces), offering to send it to him for a look before I posted it on my blog. Chris Cameron liked what was there, and gave me a bit more to run with, things that he has done in his own GMing to aid play while keeping the game pretty near to the historical setting. I have incorporated his points as  ‘Chris Cameron Says’. If this were a game book, you might see these as sidebar text. In the blog, you will just have to imagine that part.

The Tom Swan adventure series, set in the Europe of the 1450s, follows the adventures of the title character, illegitimate son of an English cardinal and nobleman on one side, and a tavern-keeper on the other. Raised in the worlds of both commoner and noble, but not fully accepted in either, Tom seeks his fortune in France after his father's death, only to wind up on the losing side in his first battle against the French. Through application of his considerable wiles, he is rescued from execution and falls into the retinue of a powerful, learned churchman. Thereafter, for the better part of nine novellas, chaos ensues, often at the protagonist's instigation.

Tom is an enjoyably flawed, young fellow, charming and quick-witted, and just as quick to fight if the situation calls for it, or even when it does not. The plotting is straightforward with the occasional nice surprise, which suits the style of the narrative well, and the characters are very lively. The author's level of research and familiarity with the Europe of the Fifteenth Century is apparent throughout, but does not intrude on the action. Rather it provides a rich environment that brightens an already rollicking story. I found myself often envisioning things in terms of a BBC-TV historical series of the better sort, like the Sharpe’s adventures or Ripper Street. This is in large part due to the accessible style of the prose, the emphasis on activity in the plotting, and attention paid to sensual details – the look and smell of a place or person provide good aids to reader visualization, the little historical details adding their own touches if the reader is aware of the period, but not intruding on the flow of the narrative. For example, if you know what an armet is [a form of close helm that grew in popularity over the course of the fifteenth century - if you want to know more, search for it on the internet thingy], you get a more detailed picture of what Tom is wearing at certain points in the stories. But you don’t need to know, and the reader is not punished with a detailed description, as is often the case with some historical fiction.

This is a review of sorts, but I hate it when you have to stop reading for fear of spoilers. So I won’t provide any. Way more fun can be had if you go read the stories instead. Each installment is a quick read, and you can get your feet wet for a small outlay of cash, because you are not paying for the whole series up front, or for an entire eight hundred page book. The stories were easily downloaded to my android phone by Amazon and displayed well on my reader. I also approve of the editing on the series, which is generally free of typos or similar annoyances.

But, since this is a blog on a game site, I thought I would point out some ways that the Tom Swan adventures could inspire a fun game or three, especially in a rather under-used genre for an RPG – a historical setting, such as is found in historical fiction like the Swan stories or others, rather than historical fantasy [where history forms the backdrop of the game, but the setting includes fantastical elements: elves, dwarves, wizards and magic, etc.], or historically inspired – to a greater or lesser degree – fantasy; every thing from Tolkien, to Deryni, to Game of Thrones [most fantasy RPGs fall into this category, so we really don’t need to say too much more about it right now].  

The Devil is in the Details:

If we are trying to replicate something that is historical fiction, a certain interest in history may be assumed on the part of the GM in question and, ideally, also on the part of the players. The person intending to run the game should familiarize himself or herself with the essentials of the period. Again, if you are interested in trying this sort of game, you probably won’t find this too much of a trial, and may already have a good grasp of the period in question. And maybe you already know a fair bit about fifteenth century Europe and that’s why you stayed with me this long. Good for you. Go read some more after this, it will come in handy too.

For reference, and a basic reading list, the various Osprey Books on the era and locations you want to set your story are not a bad place to start, and usually contain bibliographies for those who want more. They will give you a general, mostly accurate, picture of the period, from a largely martial perspective of course, since they are ostensibly sourcebooks for war-gaming. If you are running a game with a good deal of adventure, swords and fighting, this works in your favor. These books also provide pretty good color illustrations of men at arms of the period and locale under discussion, with easily digestible blurbs on the illo, containing such things as the name of the troop type, its place in the structure of the army or society, and any ‘fun facts’ about it. These too work for you, as they can provide a nice shorthand for your players when you get to describing the folks they are squaring off against. After all, it does not help you in such a circumstance to know reams of information about sipahis. Far better to be able to give your players a brief description of a sipahis as a sort of Turkish knight, provided with land in something not too far from a feudal relationship with the Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, then show them a picture or attempt a description of what one looks like. Osprey has an extensive list of titles for this and other periods. The Wargames Research group publications, Armies of the Middle Ages, parts 1 and 2, also have illustrations [not in color, but more of them] and descriptions, as well as army and culture guides and some good details on battles and other things that are, again, aimed at war-gamers.

For more general reference, I am going to stick to on-line resources for brevity, ease of use and expense.

There is Wikipedia, of course, but the ORB [On-line Reference Book for medieval studies: http://the-orb.net/encyclo.html] is generally more reliable, and also provides information in smaller chunks than a full book on the subject. It is searchable, and divided into periods, locations, and subjects, so you can find what you are looking for pretty quickly. The Links page promises several intriguing sites, but seems to be largely out of date. You can, however, still find the stuff by Google-ing for the listed resource. The Digital Scriptorium [a database of searchable medieval and renaissance manuscripts digitally available for your perusal, for example is here: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digitalscriptorium/.

The on-line Encyclopedia Britannica contains a great deal of good general information. This link is for England in the Fifteenth Century: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/615557/United-Kingdom/44830/England-in-the-15th-century.

Finally, be sure to read the Tom Swan stories. In addition to being fun, as I have already mentioned, they have a lot of period ‘feel’ to them that can help you bring alive the setting for your players. Often they contain the right details to transport your group from the gaming table to renaissance Rome or Florence. You could do much worse than to cull pertinent quotes from Chris Cameron to help you set a scene:

Every street in Venice had ships at the end of it. The great thoroughfares ran to wharves and warehouses, and the smaller streets were canals. The very smallest alleys were paved. There were bridges, and you had to take a boat to get anywhere.’ [Tom Swan and the Head of St. George, Part Two: Venice].

Ideally, you should give yourself enough time for research so you get a good ‘feel’ for the region and period you want to describe. But you need to be aware of your players’ interests and ability to focus too. If you are a GM considering running a game in the style of the Tom Swan adventures, be aware of how historically-minded your group is. If you have already run a successful game following the actions of a band of sea-reavers working covertly for the Black Prince in the years leading up to the Battle of Crecy in 1346, then you will probably have an easier time selling them on a group of disparate ne’er-do-wells in the retinue of a flamboyant and ambitious nobleman in the service of the embattled Burgundian King, Charles the Bold. If you have a gang of players that are not used to historical fantasy or historical fiction, you will have more work cut out for you. And, if you are blessed with more players than a single group can hold, you may wish to cherry pick ones that will enjoy what you are attempting; far worse to try to shoehorn folks that have no interest in it, thus making everyone unhappy. Just make sure you run a different game for the non-historically minded players too, and they will not feel left out. Easy right? Hey, GMing is not an easy road.

Christian Cameron also sent me a link to a terrific resource for any GM who wants to use renaissance Venice as part of his setting, as he does for a portion of Tom Swan’s career:

http://learn.columbia.edu/venice/

This is a highly Zoom-able map of Venice circa 1500. You can move around, zoom in or out, control the action in a number of different ways. This is a valuable thing for a GM, for all the same reasons that a map is for any other GM. Some quick searches on my part, for this article, turned up maps of England during the War of the Roses, the Low Countries in the Late Fifteenth Century and France in 1453. Below is a link to one of the better historical maps sites you can access without paying a fee:

http://www.culturalresources.com/Maps.html

The Interwebs are amazing for this sort of thing. In a recent campaign that I ran, I found a painting of the city of Zaragosa [Northern Spain] that was dated to within 20 years of the time I was planning on running the game. In addition to being a very lovely painting, the view was from the opposite side of the Ebro River, and showed a great skyline, the river itself, and several of the more notable buildings of the time, which were, as one might expect, clustered close to the lifeblood of the city, the Ebro.

With the above to get you started, and some digital footwork, you can assemble a fair amount of information, pictorical and otherwise, to help you get a good feel for the time period you are going to game, whether it is the Europe of Tom Swan, or some other time or place. In addition, once you assimilate it all, you should be able to convey that feel to your players, which is key to any game, but especially so in a historical one. Now lets move on to a couple of things that make the Swan stories fun, dangerous and extremely good for gaming.

The Set-Up:

Tom Swan becomes one of the retainers for a powerful figure early in the first book.

Being part of the retinue of a rich and influential figure, like a noble, a churchman, or both, is a set-up that can work well in any RPG, but does yeoman service in one based on historical fiction; for a few reasons.

Remember, the ‘feel’ of the period and place I was talking about? That can be the hardest thing to convey to your players, especially if you are new to the setting yourself. With a home base, and someone else pulling a bunch of the strings, you can assemble a set of ‘bits’ that can help sell the setting, like the quote from TS: Part Two, above, or just a nice detail like overhearing the poor clerks in the tavern rubbing their eyes and complaining about the price of candles. Think about the adventure you have planned and set up a cheat sheet for yourself with eight or ten things like that, which suit some of the locations your players will be exploring.

Chris Cameron Says:

I tend to limit characters by Social ordo, not by character class--gentle, farmer/serf, priest clerk. They all have talents.

This point brings up another thing that ties into ‘feel’. In a lot of fantasy gaming, even, and maybe especially, fantasy that is based to some extent on medieval Europe: brigands, paladins, wizards and assassins can all adventure together in one big unhappy, codependent family. In a historical setting, social station mattered more. And you can play on that. A high-class brothel might admit the gentlefolk, but turn away the riffraff, even the handsome serf-turned-brigand. Just as easily, knights, even those ‘slumming it’ are unlikely to fool the locals at the place where all the servants go to drink. Lower class men-at-arms are unlikely to be allowed to wander through even their benefactor’s estate unaccompanied by someone of appropriate social class. But that doesn’t mean you must have a group made entire of young knights, or one composed only of rogues. Different life roles lead to different talents. Scholars, squires, archers, priests, all have useful skills and can be a lot of fun to play if the players can overthrow the mindset of being the top dog in the group in favor of being a servant. As GM, use this to sell the setting, and the players will get a kick out of it. Just make sure to give everybody a turn as both pariah and peer.

Having a powerful employer can level the playing field, as you can see in the Swan stories. Social status matters less if all of you are working for the same greater figure. The down-on-his-luck Milanese knight, the Burgundian crossbowman, the former-courtesan-now-deadly-swordswoman, and the Greek peasant-turned-mercenary, all in need of a ducat or three, can work together where they might otherwise pass in the street, or even fight.

Someone else pulling the strings is also a bonus, especially in the early stages, when you and the players are trying to get a feel for the setting and its major figures. As Chris Cameron says: goals.... the party needs goals. Historical games need historical goals.... Having a boss, encourages a mission-based framework, in which the character’s benefactor, directly or indirectly, sends the players characters after this or that, even providing resources they might not otherwise be able to access, such as medical aid, support in the way of other retainers, transport, etc. These ‘missions’ can be interspersed with party-initiated activities, to allow the players more control of their destiny once they are more at home. It also avoids giving them so much freedom that they flounder or wander without purpose as is so common of the ‘adventuring party’ in a lot of RPGs, who simply travel from town to town looking for trouble to fix, like the Scooby Gang with swords. Of course, the wizard benefactor of a standard adventuring party is not unknown either, and that is fine. If your players are a little unsure of themselves going in, this structure can help settle them in, and provide them with a core of activity to adventure through and around, adding their own plots and diversions as they arise.

There is no Magic, or Magical Healing.

OK, this is sort of self-evident in a historical fiction game, but it needs to be said for a couple of reasons.

1. As gamers, many, if not most of us, assume that the world includes magic as well as ready healing, itself of a miraculously magical nature. The guy in your group who ALWAYS plays wizards might be quite out of place unless he can adjust. And the players of fighters who rely on the clerics to keep them standing and dishing it out, might also notice a little something missing from their usual style - like a leg - if they play in the same old way.
2. Secondly, the lack of magic and easy healing suggests that some game systems might be better or worse for the purpose of replicating what we are attempting. Both of these aspects of fantasy are core concepts in games like Dungeons & Dragons, or Pathfinder. Party balance in such games often assumes magical characters, or magical healing, or both. If all you do is strip them away and start working out first level characters, a large part of the game is gone, and the built-in game balance might be trailing out the door behind it. If your characters flounder and get cut up bad in an encounter because there is no fireball support, but have access to a cleric, they can be good to go again in a few minutes. Without the sorcerer, they made it, though in worse shape that they would otherwise. Without the healing, some might be dead, fighting would need to be avoided for days, until they heal the hard way. You would be removing both the sorcerer and cleric from the examples above. Since the game assumes the existence of both, it will probably be pretty unforgiving of someone just tearing them out.

Another point to consider is the range of character types available. Without the wider character choices afforded by magic users in games that include them, all the more martial types might blend together in how they fight, what they can do, etc; making it hard for individuals to get their moments of glory because they are all too similar, especially since there will be no elves or dwarves to aid in differentiation. When it comes to choosing a game system to play with, something that is designed with these factors in mind might be a better fit, rather than pulling chunks out of one that is built with all the fantasy bells and whistles.

Something that you can do, if you really want to bring in some magic, or the supernatural, or both, is to allow subtle magics - not fireballs or acid arrows - of the sort appropriate to a scholar, astrologer, alchemist or sorcerer of the period. Stick around for Part Two of this article, which explores this point, among others.

As Chris Cameron Says:

Carefully researched magic might work well in an historical setting--I did it twice in games I've run. Astrology, for example -- predicting the future: Very popular in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. I also allowed (in a Late Medieval game) scholars to wield some direct power. Mostly I made them lore masters, but they had a few tricks that they had to hide or be burned at the stake--they could make fire, and transmute gold, and stuff. Basically, things that people in 1350 thought scholars might be able to do; healing can fall into this.

Chris’ suggestion here is a great way to do a few things:

1. It allows non-fight-y types a chance to do some cool stuff, and be careful about it or be put on trial or burnt at the stake. OK, maybe they won’t get to the burning at the stake part of things, but this is definitely something that sells the setting and that most wizards in a typical D&D setting DO NOT have to worry about. And if the scholar gets taken up by the constables for sorcery, the time before the trial, the political maneuvering and freeing, or rescuing of the prisoner, could make for very interesting gaming.
2. It reinforces the genre you are aiming for. If Gandalf is striding along next to your gloomy archer, you are Aragorn in Middle Earth. If Doctor Matricule, the bespectacled scholar/student/anatomist is there instead, you could be Owain Archer, who was released from the service of his master, Sir Thomas Malory, who fought and schemed for York, then Lancaster, in the War of the Roses.
3. If you want to include magical healing, or just access to good first aid, you can add either or both as scholarly skills or abilities. Make sure that at least some physicians, especially, the NPC ones, however, are more a danger than a boon, just to keep your players guessing.

That is about it for Part One of this article, going over some to the stumbling blocks you might run into with a historical fiction-based game and how you can smooth things out. Hopefully you found the above intriguing enough to check out Christian Cameron’s fine work. At this point I am going to give you a bit of a hint about where I am going with Part Two of this article.

I cannot recommend Basic Action Games’ Honor & Intrigue RPG, highly enough. Next time, I will be talking about how it works, how it would work for a set of adventures the like of the Tom Swan stories and what you might need to tweak to run them. You can find links to several options for purchasing the book here:

 http://www.bashrpg.com/HonorIntrigue.html.

Now that I have mentioned H&I, referring back to the historical background for your game [as discussed above], you could use the significant historical chapter provide by Honor & Intrigue as your default history for the world. If you are planning on gaming in the world of Tom Swan, this involves turning a blind eye to a century or more of European history, but can make do if time is against you. Better, though, to read this chapter, then research to find out how things were different in the fifteenth century. If you and your players are not the types to sweat the details, this could work for you, and save you a lot of time.

So go buy Honor & Intrigue, AND Tom Swan: Part One [I doubt if I will need to plug the rest of the Swan series once you devour part one], give them both a read, and join me next week for Part Two.

If you would like to check out Chris Cameron’s Author page on Facebook, where you can keep abreast of what he is doing, learn cool new things and follow his ongoing research into reenactment and interpretation of the past, go here:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Christian-G-Camerons-Author-Page/155003731211134