A Book Review and a Little More--Part Two: Christian Cameron's Tom Swan: A Game of Honor & Intrigue

As I attempted to show in Part One of this two-part series, The Tom Swan and the Head of St. George e-novellas are a very rich resource and eminently game-able in terms of setting and set-up. To save you having to go back to the first post, the link to the first story in the series on Amazon.com may be found at the end of this post.

As discussed previously, there are certain things to think about, and prep for, when considering running a historical setting. One of the major decisions that I only touched on in Part One is which game system to use.

I recommend the game Honor & Intrigue, by Basic Action Games to play out the sort of action and setting under discussion here and in the Tom Swan tales. If you want to check out something of a play report for Honor & Intrigue, I wrote one here: http://d-infinity.net/blog/clint-staples/new-years-eve-geekfest-role-playing-game-honor-intrigue-part-first, about a mini-campaign that I ran a few months back. My setting is different, Northeastern Spain in 1630, with infernal sorcery and demons and stuff, which are optional elements in the core H&I experience, but you get some insight into my mindset when I was prepping to run my first session of Honor & Intrigue, as well as some tips about what you can do to make running H&I easier, especially for first-timers. Maybe you’ll find some of it useful.

Honor & Intrigue aims to recreate the cinematic action of swashbuckling films and stories, and names as amongst its inspiration the great examples of the same on the silver screen alongside Captain Blood and the works of Sabatini in print. To these, we might readily add The Princess Bride or Pirates of the Caribbean. The game is its own, but owes its basic system to Barbarians of Lemuria, an RPG of heroic sword and sandal, or sword and sorcery, from Beyond Belief Games.

Although Honor & Intrigue is aimed at a later period than the one we are looking at for Tom Swan [roughly 1600 to 1800, as opposed to the 1450s of the Swan stories] it is well suited to the type of fighting seen in the Swan series, and could easily be adapted to an earlier period, especially if you are the type of GM who likes to do a little research and house-rule-writing. If you stuck with me through Part One, you probably are.

The H&I game mechanic is simple to grasp: 2d6 + relevant attribute + relevant skill vs. a difficulty of 9 modified by circumstances such as defense, cover, etc. but the other details of the game are what lend it to the present enterprise. Specifically, I am referring to the following four things: The Advantage system, The Fortune system, the Career system, and the Fighting Schools. Lets take a look at these, one at a time.

1. Advantage: In Honor & Intrigue, as in many another RPG, fights can be won by cutting down your opponent. They can also be won by establishing an advantage over your opponent and working to increase it to the point that both sides recognize who is likely to win, before the final cut is delivered. Essentially, every character starts most fights with three Advantage. Instead of taking a wound, it is possible to Yield Advantage as the wounded character avoids the damage but must place himself in a difficult situation to do so. So instead of taking the scimitar slash to the thigh, our hero Yields Advantage stumbles back, off balance, and is pursued by his enemy, who begins to scent blood in the water, if you know what I mean. The scimitar slash misses, but the hero who would have been wounded, is instead down 1 Advantage, which imposes ongoing penalties for him and can allow for bonuses for enemies with higher total Advantage. If the Advantage difference becomes too great [if you are at Zero Advantage, you are defeated] the disadvantaged fighter would be well advised to look for a way out before it is too late. There are ways to regain Advantage, both during and after a fight. Often, these are the sorts of fights we read about in the Swan stories, and they ring true with fights in film, even real life. They are also a lot of fun, because as a player, you have another decision to make in the thick of things: “Do I take the hit, or Yield Advantage.”

2. Fortune: Fate points or similar are not a new facet in RPGs. The Fortune system of H&I grants points which may be used in a number of ways, including the opportunity to mitigate damage in or after a fight, or to discover or create some new fact about the world, essentially allowing the person spending the Fortune a limited ‘edit’ of the game world (“Wow, these sewers connect to the cistern under the Bey’s daughter’s apartments!”). In the game, they give the little boosts of luck that we see Tom to have. They also encourage active play and derring-do in the swashbuckling Swan tradition, as Fortune points are awarded or replenished by the GM for acts of daring, cunning or great role-playing.

3. Careers: These are the previous experience of the character as well as the skill system for the game. Each character has a number of points at character creation to spend on Careers. The points reflect the time and experience in that career and are added to any rolls made when the career is deemed appropriate. Thus, The Man In Black from The Princess Bride, might have Farmboy 1, Pirate 2, Duelist 1. Farmboy would grant him +1 to rolls where that experience would aid him, for example, judging whether rain was in the offing. The Career System is inclusive, allowing players a certain leeway in including the Career bonus if they can demonstrate its relevance to the situation. Someone with Farmboy, or Highwayman would have a better idea of where to look for a wandering horse than would say a Pirate. But the Highwayman would know more about fighting from horseback. Just as the Pirate will know far more about sailing, navigation, ships, swinging from the rigging, etc, than either the Farmboy or the highwayman. The list of careers runs to 25, but is open ended, so the GM is encouraged to add more as required. Using the system, Tom Swan might have the following careers: Tavernboy 1 [this is not a listed career, but would combine some aspects of Servant and Merchant]; Don Juan 1 [Though not a practices seducer, Tom has a naïve charm and a way with the fairer sex. Worry not ladies, the Temptress is the flip-side of the Don Juan career]; Scoundrel 1 [Tom seems to have a certain gift for thievery, stealth and skullduggery]; Scholar 1 [raised for a time within the sphere of his noble father, Tom devoured the teachings of his clerical tutors, and learned a smattering of languages and lore].

Chris Cameron Says:

Once my party got used to the idea of servants and squires as characters, some people had a ball as 'senior' servants. Think of Petr in Ton Swan. He's actually higher level than Tom. But in the period, he can't wander about on his own. In my games, I allow people more starting skills/levels for lower social class; same trade with money.

Chris’ comment ties in nicely with the career system of H&I, and allows servants or other lower status PCs to shine alongside the nobles or knights. Chris mentions Petr, Tom’s retainer, and in some cases also a bit of a mentor. More experienced with actual fighting as well as the profession of soldiering, Petr is sometimes seen chastising his ‘boss’ after one or another of Tom’s more flamboyantly dangerous actions. We might give Petr a career like Mercenary 2 or 3 to reflect the action he has seen and survived. He has a smattering of languages from travelling over much of Europe, can march for hours, knows where to stand to avoid becoming the target of enemy archers, who to see to get sheaves of arrows, or new boots, and how to chivvy the supply train into handing them out, etc. Petr also does not hesitate to share his wisdom with the younger Swan, whether invited to do so or not. The H&I system handles groups of disparate social status ably, as every career has value in its place. it will be up to the GM as to how much you stress the strata of society in your games, of course - but you could do a lot worse than reading Tom Swan for tips on how it can be brought into play yet not impede the enjoyment of any of the players.

As far as magic and different character types are concerned, as mentioned in Part One, Honor & Intrigue has rules for such subtle magics as options for scholars, alchemists, astrologers, even priests. If you want to add magical healing, there are rules for it as an option for evil sorcerers in league with demons. You could easily adapt it to allow for magical healing for PCs. Just allow such careers to heal damage by spending Fortune Points.

4. Fighting Schools: These are the various fighting styles employed in the game. Since Cameron mentions one of the best of the renaissance fighting masters by name, Fiore de Liberi, and has Tom take instruction with a number of fighting masters in the course of things, Fighting Schools are well represented in the stories as well. As written in H&I, Fighting Schools primarily represent the styles of a later time [the Spanish, Italian and French Schools, along with several others]. Each school is made up of a set of favored maneuvers and a set of bonuses particular to the school when using them. This encourages characters to have different fighting styles that do different things, which is very handy when none of the character are mages or the magic-wielding varieties of bards or clerics, etc. In order to adapt H&I for the Europe of the 1450s, some retroversion of the fighting schools is useful but not required. Fortunately, the fighting masters, their schools, their weapons and techniques were as varied in the fifteenth Century as they were in later centuries. GMs who want to put in the time could invent the Schools of Fiore, Talhoffer, Dobringer, Meyer, Figueyredo and more. Those Game Masters of less rigorous mind could forgo the research, instead developing styles based on the various weapons. Sword, shield, mace, buckler, dagger, longsword, greatsword, polearm, and spear are all statted out in the H&I Rulebook, and are more appropriate to the time of Tom Swan than rapiers and smallswords. The Old School [for sword and buckler] and the Highland School [the greatsword variety of Claymore] are already written up, so some of your work is already done, or at least begun. You could extrapolate from these two to arrive at a mace and shield school and a Spanish montante [a smaller greatsword, but still more of a beast than a longsword] school, with just a couple of tweaks to each, for example. Finally, you could take a short cut here and just keep the schools as listed in the rulebook, possibly renaming them if you wish; they will work fine mechanically in the game. If you do decide to work out your own fighting schools, guidelines on the process are included in H&I to help you through it.

The Slings and Arrows of  . . . Never Mind:

I hinted above that Fortune points could be spent during or after a fight to mitigate the damage done. This is another nice mechanic that helps replicate the desperation that is often seen in the Swan stories, but still allows play to continue, and characters to not die. A player may, immediately after their character is struck, spend one fortune point to reduce damage taken from the attack by 2 Lifeblood [the term H&I uses for hit points], the reasoning being that the character shifted somewhat, reducing the damage but could not avoid the hit completely. A player may also spend one or more Fortune points after a fight, to regain 1 Lifeblood per point spent. Here the idea is that the wound was not as severe as first thought. With sufficient Fortune, it would be possible to negate a wound entirely after the fight, but the fight must be survived first, so the sense of desperation remains. Does spending Fortune this way work kind-of like magical healing? Yes, and no.

Yes: It allows play to continue after a tough fight – possibly; which is a good thing. You want the game to be able to move forward, at least some of the time, after some characters are wounded. This works for the GM and for the players in keeping things going. It is up to the GM to make sure that Fortune points are a renewable resource, but not so plentiful as to allow characters to keep fighting despite repeated devastating wounds.

No: Fortune points are not really transferable, so one character is generally pretty limited in what he or she can do to ‘heal’ another [although there is the career: Physician, which can do so]. Fortune is also a resource outside of the players control, so they cannot decide to ‘make camp’, sleep eight hours, and get their spells, err, Fortune Points back. As stated under ‘yes’ above, the GM is the arbiter of this resource, and needs to dispense it according to the needs of the game. Sometimes you might be more stingy or generous, according to what is coming up and the pacing you are trying to maintain. The players will know when they are down to little or no Fortune, and so could their characters, who would feel stressed out, battered, and running out of options.

Drawbacks to H&I, as used in the current enterprise:

There are some parts of Honor & Intrigue that are not ideal for the adventures of Tom Swan, partly because of the difference in historical period, partly due to the grittier nature of Tom’s world. These specifically are the rules for Armor, and the rules for Pawns.

Armor [and Weapons]:

In the later centuries represented by the game as written, armor became less common and, at least arguably, less useful. Certainly this was the case in the movies claimed by H&I as its inspiration. To reflect this, H&I only details a couple of categories of armor and imposes significant penalties to those who wear it at all. This is partly done in the name of accuracy, but also, I think, to enforce the swashbuckling genre of the Three Musketeers and Jack Sparrow, where, generally, the heroes spurn the use of armor. Overall, in the rules as written, the benefits of armor are probably slightly less than the benefits of the heroes going without.

In the World of Tom Swan, armor is a very big deal, and almost always useful. It is also all the other things that armor is in the real world: Hot in hot weather, cold in cold, heavy, stifling, and often uncomfortable or badly fitted. Having trained and fought in real armor [in simulated conditions, of course], I can tell you that more armor is nearly always better when you get to the fighting parts of things [fantasy rogues wearing leathers notwithstanding]. It is the not-fighting time when armor is the most annoying: marching, standing guard in the hot sun, etc. But in a fight it is pretty much ALWAYS useful, especially against ranged attacks. You can see this in the Swan stories too. Chris Cameron mentions that he has worn the kit, shot the bows, and swung the weapons, and it shows.

As written, armor affects how a character is able to Yield Advantage. The heavier the armor, the more Advantage you lose the first time you Yield it. On the face of things, this is nice, since it encourages armor-wearing combatants to take the hit and rely on their protection instead of yielding advantage to avoid it. But the Swan stories are rife with instances where armor is a big advantage [note the lack of capitalization there]. It feels right to grant a starting Advantage bonus to the person who is better armored in an exchange. So if two fresh combatants [at 3 Advantage each] square off, and one is wearing only a padded arming coat and an archer’s sallet, while the other has a breastplate, cuisses, arm-harness and close-helm, the heavier armored would immediately go to 4 Advantage. Rules for armor familiarity already exist in the game, but more categories of actual armor than light and heavy, including fitted armor [that which is custom-fitted to the individual] might be a good idea to reflect the world of Tom Swan. For a good part of the early books, Tom has a half harness of VERY nice Milanese plate, but it was not fitted for him. Thus he does not wear it as well as one might otherwise. It gaps in a place or two, chafes more than necessary, and, as anyone who has worn plate armor that does not fit perfectly knows, it pinches. As written, light armor stops 1d3 damage and heavy stops 1d6. Depending on the types of weapons used most, it might be worth bumping these to make armor worthwhile, thus encouraging people, and PCs, to wear it. 1d4 for light, 2d4 for heavy perhaps. Rules for called shots already exist, which would allow one to negate some of armor’s protective value.

The weapons used in the fifteenth century were not the rapiers and smallswords of later times. As noted above, broadswords, longswords [the two hander, not the longsword of D&D], pole-axes, daggers, spears, maces, and hammers, were more the rule. Rapiers and smallswords should be removed from the allowed list of weapons. Of course, the firearms of H&I should also be struck off. There were handgonnes and cannons on the battlefields of fifteenth century Europe, but no one carried a pair of horse pistols stuck in the belt in 1450. Even the matchlock as written, the most primitive of the firearm listed in H&I, is decades too advanced for the mid-fifteenth century. Bows and crossbows were the order of the day.

It should also be mentioned that good armor and weapons are expensive, and Tom goes through a number of each as time goes by. If you want to reflect this, make sure that finding good examples of either is rare and costly. Then damage them when appropriate. If a breastplate intercepts five crossbow bolts, chances are it is in need of expensive repair or replacement. You get the idea.

Pawns:

The antagonists of the player characters in H&I are divided into categories of competence. Villains are full non-player characters, often as powerful, or more powerful, than the heroes. These reflect the main foil in a scenario, such as the Comte de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers, or Hector Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean. Retainers are lesser individuals, who are still significant threats, some of the cursed pirates who get more screen time in the Pirates of the Caribbean, or Gibbs, Sparrow’s right hand man, or the lieutenant of the Cardinal’s Guard in the three Musketeers. They are capable of fighting, and hurting or defeating a player character, but the odds would be with the PC. Retainers come in several ranks of ability, but all are distinct, and far more of a threat than Pawns, who are at the bottom of the scale of ability.

Pawns are intended to reflect the normal foot soldiers, the rabble, or the common pirates that, in swashbuckling films such as those listed above, really only pose a threat to the player characters in large numbers. This happens very rarely in the Swan stories, and generally then the rabble is made dangerous as a gestalt entity. A huge mob of citizens armed with whatever they can find is to be circumvented, not fought. It is a different beast than the quartet of guardsmen that accompany the Cardinal’s lieutenant. In the Tom Swan tales, there is not really any such thing as Pawns in the sense of H&I. Every fight is more desperate than that, even the ones that turn out more funny that deadly. To reflect this, I would advocate doing away with pawns entirely and making all non villain-rank adversaries various levels of retainer. This will require more care in running combats, and mean that inequality of numbers will be more telling. But it is more accurate to the source material certainly, and will make for a more, edge-of-your-seat, nail-biter of an encounter.

There are some other things to consider for a historical game, like commerce and monetary systems, the roles available to women, the rolls available to minorities, and more – most come down to how closely you want to adhere to strict historical evidence, and to which evidence you want to give credence. In these circumstances, I heartily advise following the example of Honor & Intrigue – if being a stickler for historical accuracy, which is a very slipper slope, let me tell you, impedes the fun, then don’t do it. Go for the fun.

Tom Swan does.

Now, go out and give some of this a try. Historical RPGs can be a load of fun, especially with the right group, system and source material. I hope I have given you a few ideas on how to manage it, and a recommendation of which books to use in this specific case. If you do give it an attempt, I would love to hear how you think it went. Feel free to post in the comments with your experiences.

Thanks for your time.

I would also like to thank Christian Cameron, who has been enthusiastic, informative and supportive of this review from the time that I, completely unknown to him then, emailed him about doing it.

Links:

Places to purchase Honor & Intrigue:

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

The first of the Tom Swan stories through Amazon.com:

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

Christian Cameron’s Facebook Author Page:

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