Just in case TonyLB thought Balbinus and I were kidding, I'm starting a new thread for him to tell us all about the awesomeness of Lace & Steel, the Australian RPG that features, as I have heard, centaur Musketeers and crunchy rules for witty repartee.

TonyLB, please clue us in!

Here is a Link to Lace & Steel.

Looks pretty good actually. Don't let Pundit see it though, we could have a magic deer event.

Oh, I hadn't noticed that you guys were eager for a review.  I guess I haven't been keeping up a proper "no sparrow shall fall" level of attention to the threads

Anyway, there's a lot to like about Lace and Steel.  It addresses several problems of trying to deal respectfully with at least a toy version of the social mores of the time.  I'm working from memory here, since my copy's in storage, but I think I remember enough snippets to give a general idea.

First:  There is, indeed, a social repartee duelling system, which is (interestingly enough) exactly the same as the sword duelling system.  Indeed, an exchange of veiled insults between two women of the court intentionally parallels the sword-duel that their male counterparts might have gotten into:  "I attempt a feint to the high line" means you get to make a baiting comment on an intellectual level, whereas "I riposte low" means a biting response of a more ... ahem ... earthy nature.

Of course, all of this goes along with social damage and its consequences (which are explicitly laid out ... you do not want to be socially killed).  The overall outcome is that there is a whole field of combat that female characters can not only engage in without egregiously violating any sense of rennaisance culture, but in which they can and do excel.  

My experience is that this gets players away from a No-Women vision of fantasy where all of the stories circle around the men.  Instead you see Musketeers trying to advance their fortunes by duelling, but also by associating with the right courtiers ... it makes for a whole different type of niche protection, and one that I (for one) find quite entertaining.

It's not for everyone, of course.  There are people who have no interest in, for instance, an adventure whose goal is to humiliate an arrogant swordsman for having sleighted the wrong corsetted vixen.  I'm down with that.  If you don't have any interest in, at least, spectating on that kind of thing then Lace and Steel probably isn't for you:  there's really got to be some of that sort of action going on in the game, in much the same way that D&D all-but-requires the occasional clash of the THAC0s.

Quote from: TonyLBOh, I hadn't noticed that you guys were eager for a review.  I guess I haven't been keeping up a proper "no sparrow shall fall" level of attention to the threads

Heh.  Thanks for the reply!

Races:  There are, indeed, centaurs ... famously, because of the treatment of how centaur clothes and sexuality would fit into a rennaisance culture.  Way too much veiled talk about horse-nookie for some (including me) and probably way too little for some other, less prudish folk.  Similarly, the discussion of satyrs is probably either too explicit or too squeamish, depending on what you want.

Overall, I thought that the races were the weakest part of the game:  they seemed in an uncomfortable middle ground ... like the authors wanted fantasy races, and wanted to have social impacts from their existence, but didn't want to go whole-hog with the radical changes that such a change would actually wreak:  Not very many inter-racial pogroms, for instance, which I found ... unlikely, given the real-world history.

Magic:  Man, I wish I could remember more of the magic system.  I remember it was cool ... with an ongoing hand of "gathered power" that the sorceror had to spend a fair amount of time managing.  That meant that magic-users could benefit from doing little, easy things with their power (rather than being hugely secretive about it), because they could flush weak cards from their hand in order to build up a stronger hand for later, critical, applications.


And ... hrm ... well, that's about all I can dredge out of organic memory right now.  If you want more than that, I'd have to go refresh my memory.

Quote from: TonyLBRaces:  There are, indeed, centaurs ... famously, because of the treatment of how centaur clothes and sexuality would fit into a rennaisance culture.

I... just got to ask: Where? Brisbane or Perth?

If you do a google search you can find Steffan O'Sullivan's adaptation of the social combat system for use with other games. (GURPS is the example, I think.) Worth a look.

(Parenthetically, when the game came out I was turned off by the Donna Barr illustrations, and the impression that somehow the game itself was connected to her style of fiction.)

I picked the game up when it was available on RPGnow (last time I looked it wasn't there anymore).  Frankly I was impressed with the whole set up.  I'm a sucker for rules that are written to mesh with the setting of a game, they pulled that off very well.

Never did get to run a game of it though.  Just couldn't pull enough people together who were interested.  Maybe someday though....