The Medieval-Authentic PC Party - What do they do?

RPGPundit · December 30, 2017, 04:15:01 AM

Quote from: Bren;1016392So the historical setting must include a constraint that the PCs cannot leave civilization,

Not in L&D. In fact, there's a whole appendix dedicated to helping set up adventuring in the borderlands.

RPGPundit · December 30, 2017, 04:37:02 AM

Quote from: Kingdaddy;1016553Couldn't the PCs be monster hunters, either for hire (a la the Witcher) or as part of a feudal obligation of protection? For example, the Church Militant gets a report about a revenant who's killing children in Bumbleshire. An experienced team investigates.

Yes. In fact, the Cults of Chaos sourcebook, which is essentially a supplement for Lion & Dragon even though it was published earlier, is all about being inquisitors, with the most detailed system we could come up with for generating sects of witches, heretics and cultists that have a strong Medieval-Authentic feel to them.

Larsdangly · December 31, 2017, 06:14:32 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit;1016914Yes. In fact, the Cults of Chaos sourcebook, which is essentially a supplement for Lion & Dragon even though it was published earlier, is all about being inquisitors, with the most detailed system we could come up with for generating sects of witches, heretics and cultists that have a strong Medieval-Authentic feel to them.

I can confirm that the CoT source book is an outstanding source of adventure hooks. You could play for years just using 'leads' provided by all the tables that define various sorts of cults, their members, goals, resources, etc.

RPGPundit · January 01, 2018, 04:22:02 AM

I certainly don't think I ever made a better random generator than Cults of Chaos, and maybe never will be able to equal it. You can literally run a whole campaign of it (as long as the campaign is mostly about investigating evil sects/cults/witches etc).
Plus it's where I first laid out just how Elves work in Albion.

Larsdangly · January 01, 2018, 11:41:00 AM

I think the best measure of a game book is how much of it is actively used at the table. Cults of Chaos ranks high in this regard.

PencilBoy99 · January 01, 2018, 04:43:30 PM

The Cults of Chaos sourcebook is great and could be used for lots of things beyond just Dark Albion.

RPGPundit · January 02, 2018, 02:30:06 AM

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1017262The Cults of Chaos sourcebook is great and could be used for lots of things beyond just Dark Albion.

Yes, that was a design goal.

S'mon · January 02, 2018, 09:38:43 AM

Apparently I am not playing proper D&D since my games don't have a professional adventurer class engaging in consequence free murder hoboism. I guess my Wilderlands and Nentir Vale games are acrually historical medieval in disguise.

Edit: This discussion though does have me wanting to run Yggsburgh again, this time with Cults of Chaos.

Larsdangly · January 02, 2018, 11:27:38 AM

Quote from: S'mon;1017361Apparently I am not playing proper D&D since my games don't have a professional adventurer class engaging in consequence free murder hoboism. I guess my Wilderlands and Nentir Vale games are acrually historical medieval in disguise.

Edit: This discussion though does have me wanting to run Yggsburgh again, this time with Cults of Chaos.

Cults of Chaos might be just what Yggsburgh could use! I really like that volume, particularly the map and location descriptions for the region surrounding the town. But the city itself is a bit too squeaky clean for my tastes - a twisted and demented chaos cult that reaches into the top ranks of the city's leadership could be just what it needs.

Bren · January 03, 2018, 04:29:37 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit;1016912Not in L&D. In fact, there's a whole appendix dedicated to helping set up adventuring in the borderlands.

To be clear, I don't agree with this as a criterion for any setting fantasy or otherwise. The criterion was set by Kruger.

Quote from: S'mon;1017361Apparently I am not playing proper D&D since my games don't have a professional adventurer class engaging in consequence free murder hoboism. I guess my Wilderlands and Nentir Vale games are acrually historical medieval in disguise.

You should be ashamed. Thirty lashes with a wet noodle.

soltakss · January 05, 2018, 04:09:16 PM

Quote from: CRKrueger;1013789The historians on this site have a little bit of a bad habit of telling everybody how there's tons of adventure in Medieval-Authentic campaigns, but it's not going to be D&D standard - without telling us exactly what it is going to be. Having played/run Harn I got my head around it eventually, but there might be people who don't really get the difference.

So tell us, what are PCs going to do? Being hired mercenaries/troubleshooters for some Patron is easy, that's available in any time, any place. Same with Vikings, we got that one.

Give us some examples from history of PCs. Obviously Lion and Dragon/Dark Albion era will be a focus for Pundit, but what about Reconquista-Era Spain, or the Hundred Years War, Gronan?

Dazzle us with cool PC concepts straight out of history. What's our party look like? What do we do over the course of a campaign? HOW is this different?

Back to the OP ...

It is a difficult question, in many ways.

Many of the things that adventurers do in a non-D&D campaign can easily be met with "Well, that can happen in D&D", so let's look at things that make up typical D&Ding (Apologies, I haven't played D&D for a long time, so my experiences may well be out of date):

Dungeoneering - A lot of D&D involves going into an underground dungeon in search of treasure
Wilderness - many D&D scenarios involve exploring an unmapped wilderness
Black and White - Alignment means that NPCs react in predictable ways, this means that the world can be often divided up into good and bad, so a Good party has no problem killing orcs, for example
Class Focussed - D&D Parties focus on those things that advance their PCs through their class
Experience - Traditionally, D&D was about getting treasure, specifically gold pieces, and killing things
Party makeup - A group of people drawn from a few classes

So, at a very basic level, anything that doesn't do that is not D&D-like.

A campaign that revolves around political intrigue is not very D&Dish, as advancement is not through killing things and gaining treasure, but rather through jockeying for political postion, espionage and character/physical assassination.
A campaign that involves religious duty is not very D&Dish, as D&D has traditionally had a very vanilla form of religion, AD&D had clerics where everyone had the same spells, althogh 3r changed this and I haven't a clue what later editions have done with religion. Something like pantheonic Romans and Celts meeting and and engaging in a clash of religions is not a D&Dish campaign. The struggle between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th Century is not a D&Dish campaign.
Campaigns that revolve around different groups of PCs, drawn from different professions isn't really D&Dish, even though replacing Profession with Class sounds like D&D. Here, a blacksmith, alchemist, scholar and thief searching for some long-lost alchemical scrolls is not a very D&Dish campaign. Templars searching for lost relics sounds like D&D Dungeoneering but can be done very differently.

Now, I am naturally biased, as my background was RQ first and then D&D, I stopped playing D&D when I moved away from home, but kept on playing RQ, as it felt as though it had a different style of adventuring. So, my examples tend to fall into the "RQ does it this way" camp.

RPGPundit · January 08, 2018, 06:30:54 AM

Quote from: S'mon;1017361Edit: This discussion though does have me wanting to run Yggsburgh again, this time with Cults of Chaos.

Good plan!