Having covered the Vikings, we now move on to
HR2 Charlemagne's Paladins, showing us the Carolingian dynasty that was the natural enemy of Vikings everywhere...and I'm already lost.
The DriveThruRPG sales page, both for this book and the previous volume, talks about how HR1 and HR2 were meant to be a complementary pair in that they were set in roughly the same time period, with two groups who were natural enemies. Now, maybe I'm just a poor student of history (actually, scratch the "maybe"; I know I'm no history buff), but I really don't recall anything to that effect. While I'm sure that Viking raids along the northern coast of the Frankish Empire were a thing, I was under the impression that Charlemagne's military prowess was largely directed towards the Moors and Saracens. I mean, isn't that where the classical idea of the paladin comes from?
To be fair, this book does mention the whole "threat of the Norsemen" angle a few times, but it's not exactly a major theme, which I think was the right way to go. Instead, it tries to stand on its own rather than being half of a greater whole. Of course, how well it succeeds is something else altogether.
If that sounds like I didn't care for what's here, well...I didn't. For one thing, this was where the Historical Reference books started trying to have their cake and eat it too by splicing different modes for their campaign presentations depending on how realistic or fantastical you wanted them to be. By itself that's not necessarily a bad thing, but the books would have been stronger overall if they'd used a uniform presentation in this regard. Spoiler alert: they didn't. I know I said I'd try to focus on each book individually rather than critiquing the series as a whole, but this really bugged me. HR1 presented a single campaign style, where Norse-themed magic and monsters went hand-in-hand with history. Here, we have three different presentations: historical, legendary, and fantasy. Other books will have just two options instead of three. It's a lack of consistency that still irks me to this day.
Moreover, those options aren't even aptly named. The "historical" campaign, for instance, limits your class options to fighters, thieves, and clerics...the latter of which can still cast spells. Not very many, to be sure - the availability of magic is, along with class restrictions, the major difference between those campaign styles - but they're still there, which strikes me as being rather at odds with a "historical" campaign, even with the necessities of game-play. Fun fact: at the other end of the spectrum, there are some classes that are still too fantastic for even the "fantastic" campaign, those being druids, generalist mages, and psionicists.
For all my complaining, I
do like the overall picture painted by the restrictions on magic in the "historical" campaign option. While the "fantastic" campaign (and its west-central European locale) makes for a play experience that's pretty close to bog-standard AD&D (save, perhaps, for the absence of demihumans, or at least not presenting them as just being humans in metaphorical funny hats), there's some really good guidelines here for running a low-magic campaign, especially on the clerical side of things. For instance, beyond the swaths of spells that are flat-out disallowed, there's a note that magical healing can't raise your hit points above 50% of their maximum, that certain spells will only work in consecrated areas (i.e. holy ground), and that certain disallowed spells can still be used, but only by as miracles, which are something you petition for rather than something you cast. Shear away the historical part, and this could be the low-fantasy world that a lot of people wished D&D could be.
Having said all that, shearing away the historical aspect of the book would mean cutting out a
lot. I don't know if this book spends more pages going over the history, setting, and beliefs/practices of Carolingian France than the Vikings book did for the Vikings, but it certainly
seems that way. It's not necessarily all flavor text, as there's an interesting set of stat guidelines for pagan spirits, but that's the exception rather than the rule. (Though I found it amusing that it referenced the Saxon pantheon, saying that it was basically a variation on the Norse gods; we'd see the Saxon pantheon given full
Faiths & Avatars write-ups in
Dragon #263 "Hearth & Sword: Deities of the Dark Ages.")
Also, pet peeve here: if you're going to spotlight particular characters,
give them stats! Seriously, how does this book devote an entire chapter to
discount King Arthur Charlemagne and his peers and not give them any stats?! Not even suggestions! Don't even give me that tired old excuse of "they're not supposed to be fought"; it's my game, so my players and I will decide what's
supposed to be done, thank you very much! If I don't need stats, I can always not use them, but if I'm paying for what's essentially half of a history book, the other half darn well better bend over backwards to make the first half game-able, and that means stats! Less is not more, in that regard:
more is more!
To the book's credit, it does close out with some adventures, though these are necessarily more abridged than your typical adventure presentation. Still, it's probably the best way to present the tone that this is going for, so I'll acknowledge that it was a wise decision to include them here.
Overall, HR2 was a book whose weaknesses eclipsed its strengths, but in doing so spotlighted how its strengths could be put to very good use elsewhere. Re-reading this, I couldn't stop thinking about how interesting the low-magic rules could have been if you separated them from the historical setting. It's like there was another game hidden inside here, a low-fantasy that D&D often hinted at but never truly offered. Whether or not that's enough to make this book worthwhile, however, is a question I'm still trying to answer.
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