Thursday 21 June 2012

Old Rules Rool?

Chivalry & Sorcery RPG Rulebooks
Having recently been looking for some inspiration for some random generated goings-on for my Rulership campaign recently, I remembered that I still had hidden away in the attic a lot of my RPGing days rule books etc and remembered that the Chivalry & Sorcery books I had, had an immense amount of tables for generating just about anything you could think of for a medieval milieu campaign.

So I promptly dug them out and have been putting them to good use since, saving me a lot of work and effort for generating some of the more mundane happenings for the Rulership Campaign.

As an RPG, C&S never really caught on though it has gone through various incarnations and resurrections through the years ( I bought the original rulebook when I was still at school, so that shows you how long they've been about).

The amount of depth that the rules allowed you to go into was mind boggling, and as I said, there's a table for anything from prospecting to the yeild in bushels that the average fief could produce in any particular month along with manpower tables and how many blacksmiths it takes to keep 10 men at arms supplied with horseshoes.

There were two main problems with the rules which prevented them catching on; the first one was that it took you hours and a calculator to throw a character and bieng quite difficult that character usually died in the first half hour of play, and the second problem was that the idea of the system was that you made up your own campaign from scratch and most people wanted (or want) a ready made backdrop to campaigns with all that entails. Just too much hard work.

A pity as there is a wealth of useful stuff hidden away in the rulebook and the various sourcebooks.

I would not recommend them to any one looking to play an RPG campaign (far too old skool now anyway) but if any one is looking for background info or random tables for just about anything you can think of for a solo or umpired wargames campaign for just about any period then if you can pick these up second hand they would be a couple of quid well spent.

3 comments:

  1. I've always wanted to play a campaign with this kind of level of depth, it must be damned hard work though?

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    Replies
    1. Your right Ray, you can get lost in all that kind of stuff which can be good too if your just pleasing yourself but difficult if a multi player campaign. I'm just using tables as and when I need something to generate a random result as and when to save some hard work making up campaign specific stuff you might only use once.

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  2. Old rools definately do rule in my rulebook at least!

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