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[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8294582" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>With <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16916/HR4-A-Mighty-Fortress-Campaign-Sourcebook-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>HR4 A Mighty Fortress</em></a>, the first thing that jumped out at me, as I began re-reading it, was how we're back in France. Again.</p><p></p><p><em>HR1 Vikings</em> dealt with raiders along the northern coast of France. <em>HR2 Charlemagne's Paladins</em> was about the Carolingian Empire, based out of France. <em>HR3 Celts</em> included the Celtic people of Gaul, which is the old name for France. And now, we're focused on the "muskets and duels" Elizabethan era, with its focus on the likes of D'Artagnan, Richelieu, and the Man in the Iron Mask. So yeah, France again.</p><p></p><p>Now, obviously, I'm being rather unfair, here. Notwithstanding questions of just how much presence the Carolingians had in England, most of what I've just said could apply to the British Isles as much as it does Surrender Central. But that's kind of my point: as much as we're going through <em>time</em> with the various Historical Reference works, we're still sticking to an increasingly well-trodden part of the world.</p><p></p><p>The reason for that is self-evident, since the HR books have all focused on different <em>cultures</em> - though arguaby this book, covering the period between 1550 AD through 1650 AD (an oddly artificial delineation compared to most of the other HR releases) is more focused on social class/religion - but it still comes across as limited in scope. While I don't believe it has any moral duty to do so, I find myself once again wishing that the series had been willing to venture further abroad. Was aboriginal Australia or sub-Saharan Africa really too much to ask for?</p><p></p><p>Still, as far as stepping outside of the norm goes, I'll give credit to where it's due: this book, with its Renaissance-era focus (and, more importantly, its ubiquitous guns) goes far outside of D&D's typical comfort zone. I don't think it's a coincidence that after this, the closest we'd see Dungeons & Dragons come to revisiting this particular period would be the Ravenloft spinoff <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127234/Masque-of-the-Red-Death-and-Other-Tales-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales</em></a> and its supplements, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17518/A-Guide-to-Transylvania-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>A Guide to Transylvania</em></a> and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17513/The-Gothic-Earth-Gazetteer-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>The Gothic Earth Gazetteer</em></a> (which were all set several centuries later) and <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/54231/d20-Past-d20M?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>d20 Past</em></a>, which wasn't technically for D&D at all. Though, to be fair, the mainstream Ravenloft adventures <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17507/Hour-of-the-Knife-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Hour of the Knife</em></a> and <em><a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17508/Howls-in-the-Night-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Howls in the Night</a></em> also evoked an "early modern" feeling, even if (like MotRD) it was more Victorian than Elizabethan. But apart from aberrations like these, D&D was largely more at home in fantastical pastiches of earlier times.</p><p></p><p>So what about this book itself? Well, unfortunately the "mighty fortress" is in reference to a hymn from Martin Luther, where it's used to describe faith/God, rather than some sort of swashbuckling version of Metroplex. How cool would that have been, I ask you? To see this guy, if he'd been built by Leonardo da Vinci:</p><p></p><p>[MEDIA=youtube]HKmSdHWdxbo[/MEDIA]</p><p></p><p>But that's not what we got. Instead, we have a book that wants to evoke the sophisticated era when armor was on its way out, but guns hadn't entirely replaced swords yet. Where faith was as much a matter of politics as it was religion. Where pirates were villains in one nation and patriots in another. All while the noble classes struggled to hang on to power even as the merchant-fueled middle class continued to grow.</p><p></p><p>And to be honest, that does sound like a pretty cool <em>idea</em>. The problem, of course, is that HR4 doesn't really know how to put all of that into game-able material over the course of ninety-six pages.</p><p></p><p>It's most obvious impulse is to follow its predecessors by leaning hard into the history, and credit where credit is due: it did a decent job of making that interesting to read. The comparatively brief period of time covered makes for an engaging historical snapshot. The list of the rulers of various dynasties is useful. Even the overview of the staples of daily life managed to get things down to a few useful paragraphs on each topic, which worked well in terms of presenting the characteristics of the time period.</p><p></p><p>But none of that helped me figure out how to set an adventure, let alone a campaign, in that era. The game rules suffered from a similar problem. Presenting ten new kits (which, I'll add, were sometimes unclear as to whether they were meant to be put on particular classes, or were applicable to any members of a particular class group, i.e. rogues - which are thieves and bards - instead of just thieves), with the caveat that all PCs must belong to one of those kits, would have been a nice way to enforce a particular feel. But most of the kits seem like they're reinventing the wheel; couldn't the vagabond kit have just been a modified thief? The forester warrior kit actually refers to itself as a ranger, at one point. The scholarly mage kit is the <em>only</em> mage kit available, and its special benefit is "you can cast spells (subject to the changes outlined later)," with its drawback being "you must be a specialist, but not in necromancy or alteration."</p><p></p><p>I need to take a moment to talk about the picaro kit, which is a rogue kit that basically makes you into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancho_Panza" target="_blank">Sancho Panza</a>. In addition to not being bound by the honor rules, this kit <em>requires</em> you to serve a master until you reach 9th level, and the book strongly encourages having that master be another PC. I can already see big red flags here, but we're just getting started.</p><p></p><p>Every time the picaro, bumbling goof that he is, either upstages or embarrasses his master, he gets bonus experience points. That is says "bonus" here struck me as significant, since it meant that a picaro can still gain XPs in the normal fashion; thank goodness for small favors. But that's not the half of it: these bonus XPs are <em>actually drained from the master!</em> Nor is this limited to just the master; while the rate of drain is reduced, this goes for anyone else in the party whom the picaro makes an idiot out of. The note at the end of this kit talks about how only someone committed to the role should play a picaro, but that really seems to miss the point, since I can't imagine anyone else in the party wanting to adventure in the company of a jester with what's basically a level-drain power and whose shtick is to embarrass them.</p><p></p><p>I mean, again, props for trying something different, I guess, but I predict that any picaro in the party will wind up dead in very short order.</p><p></p><p>Oddly, and in contrast to what I remember; there are no varying options for the use of magic. They're instead all regulated by the spellcasting kits available, of which there are only three (well, two really). The preacher kit allows for a few spells to be cast, but the list is eminently small. Defenders of the faith are essentially de-powered, spell-less paladins. And the aforementioned scholarly mage has restrictions all his own (e.g. all casting times are increased by one category: rounds become turns, turns become hours, etc.).</p><p></p><p>I'm honestly less concerned with any of those than I am with how this book very pointedly tiptoes around the most obvious point of religious inspiration where adventures are concerned: fighting the servants of Satan. This is the time period when <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/355301/Discovery-of-Witches?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Discovery of Witches</em></a> was written; suppose everything in it had been true? Shakespeare's <em>Macbeth</em> was written right around the middle of this book's time period; suppose the Three Witches were real? How is it that this book didn't hit upon the idea of your party taking on those who serve The Devil? Instead, we get a table outlining what religion you likely were depending on what province of what country you were born/raised in.</p><p></p><p>Obviously, TSR was still, even at the end of 1992, very concerned about angry mothers with pitchforks, and worried that even <em>mentioning</em> Lucifer - regardless of the context - would have validated their detractors. I'm not well-versed in all the nuances of the Satanic Panic, but I was under the impression that by the 90's it was largely in the rear-view mirror and getting fainter all the time. Either way, if I was going to run an Elizabethan campaign, it would definitely be a "holy roller"-style game.</p><p></p><p>Having said all that, it's firearms that I suspect really enticed everyone into picking this up; I vaguely recall that was what made me check it out, back in the day. "D&D with guns" is one of those ideas that everyone experiments with at one point or another, even if it's just a thought-experiment, and here's where we get to see what happens if you go beyond the arquebus. To summarize, guns let you ignore armor at short range (with decreasing penalties to the armor's effectiveness at longer ranges), and you can get exploding dice on certain damage rolls. There's a little more to it, such as jams on bad attack rolls, but those are the big ones. It's almost a disappointment, but I wonder now if I'm viewing that through the lens of having seen similar rules in, for instance, Pathfinder, along with similar RPGs. Maybe these were a bigger deal thirty years ago?</p><p></p><p>Now, that wasn't all that the book presented in terms of demonstrating how an Elizabethan campaign should feel different. It had, for instances, rules for social standing (which was basically a second Charisma score), but while it talked about honor being important (i.e. your characters are <em>gentlemen</em> adventurers), it didn't back that up mechanically (and I'll note that I snickered at how, with the celts having their <em>enech</em> rules, that seemed to suggest that they were more honorable than the Elizabethans).</p><p></p><p>Dueling is given decent mechanical coverage, as is being part of a military skirmish; the latter follows the usual route of giving abbreviated rules which, to my eye, were more succinct and more useful than the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16943/Battlesystem-Miniatures-Rules-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Battlesystem Miniatures Rules</em></a> it unsurprisingly refers you to if you want a more detailed resolution system. It's an amusing callback to how <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/28306/ODD-Dungeons--Dragons-Original-Edition-0e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Original D&D</em></a> gave you an "alternative" combat resolution metric if you didn't have <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17010/Chainmail-Rules-for-Medieval-Miniatures-0e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures</em></a> handy.</p><p></p><p>The book closes out with some coverage of the major wars of the period, and even an adventure outline, but nothing that seems worth mentioning, to my mind.</p><p></p><p>When I first got this book, I recall being intensely bored with it almost from the get-go. In hindsight, I was shortchanging it, but only somewhat. It presents a good backdrop of the period (mostly), and the mechanics are focused. But as I've noted before, this is the equivalent to giving you a pile of lumber and some tools, with no blueprints or instructions for how to actually build a house.</p><p></p><p>In looking at the previous book, I noted how I was becoming more convinced that the best use of the HR supplements was to mine them for mechanics and ideas, rather than using them as-is. To that end, I found it delightfully ironic that this book's introduction includes an explicit (albeit brief) acknowledgment of the utility in transplanting parts of this book into fantasy worlds. A mighty fortress HR4 might be, but if were ever to run AD&D 2nd Edition again, I suspect I'd find myself breaking it down for parts.</p><p></p><p><em>Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 8294582, member: 8461"] With [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16916/HR4-A-Mighty-Fortress-Campaign-Sourcebook-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]HR4 A Mighty Fortress[/I][/URL], the first thing that jumped out at me, as I began re-reading it, was how we're back in France. Again. [I]HR1 Vikings[/I] dealt with raiders along the northern coast of France. [I]HR2 Charlemagne's Paladins[/I] was about the Carolingian Empire, based out of France. [I]HR3 Celts[/I] included the Celtic people of Gaul, which is the old name for France. And now, we're focused on the "muskets and duels" Elizabethan era, with its focus on the likes of D'Artagnan, Richelieu, and the Man in the Iron Mask. So yeah, France again. Now, obviously, I'm being rather unfair, here. Notwithstanding questions of just how much presence the Carolingians had in England, most of what I've just said could apply to the British Isles as much as it does Surrender Central. But that's kind of my point: as much as we're going through [I]time[/I] with the various Historical Reference works, we're still sticking to an increasingly well-trodden part of the world. The reason for that is self-evident, since the HR books have all focused on different [I]cultures[/I] - though arguaby this book, covering the period between 1550 AD through 1650 AD (an oddly artificial delineation compared to most of the other HR releases) is more focused on social class/religion - but it still comes across as limited in scope. While I don't believe it has any moral duty to do so, I find myself once again wishing that the series had been willing to venture further abroad. Was aboriginal Australia or sub-Saharan Africa really too much to ask for? Still, as far as stepping outside of the norm goes, I'll give credit to where it's due: this book, with its Renaissance-era focus (and, more importantly, its ubiquitous guns) goes far outside of D&D's typical comfort zone. I don't think it's a coincidence that after this, the closest we'd see Dungeons & Dragons come to revisiting this particular period would be the Ravenloft spinoff [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127234/Masque-of-the-Red-Death-and-Other-Tales-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales[/I][/URL] and its supplements, [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17518/A-Guide-to-Transylvania-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]A Guide to Transylvania[/I][/URL] and [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17513/The-Gothic-Earth-Gazetteer-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]The Gothic Earth Gazetteer[/I][/URL] (which were all set several centuries later) and [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/54231/d20-Past-d20M?affiliate_id=820'][I]d20 Past[/I][/URL], which wasn't technically for D&D at all. Though, to be fair, the mainstream Ravenloft adventures [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17507/Hour-of-the-Knife-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Hour of the Knife[/I][/URL] and [I][URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17508/Howls-in-the-Night-2e?affiliate_id=820']Howls in the Night[/URL][/I] also evoked an "early modern" feeling, even if (like MotRD) it was more Victorian than Elizabethan. But apart from aberrations like these, D&D was largely more at home in fantastical pastiches of earlier times. So what about this book itself? Well, unfortunately the "mighty fortress" is in reference to a hymn from Martin Luther, where it's used to describe faith/God, rather than some sort of swashbuckling version of Metroplex. How cool would that have been, I ask you? To see this guy, if he'd been built by Leonardo da Vinci: [MEDIA=youtube]HKmSdHWdxbo[/MEDIA] But that's not what we got. Instead, we have a book that wants to evoke the sophisticated era when armor was on its way out, but guns hadn't entirely replaced swords yet. Where faith was as much a matter of politics as it was religion. Where pirates were villains in one nation and patriots in another. All while the noble classes struggled to hang on to power even as the merchant-fueled middle class continued to grow. And to be honest, that does sound like a pretty cool [I]idea[/I]. The problem, of course, is that HR4 doesn't really know how to put all of that into game-able material over the course of ninety-six pages. It's most obvious impulse is to follow its predecessors by leaning hard into the history, and credit where credit is due: it did a decent job of making that interesting to read. The comparatively brief period of time covered makes for an engaging historical snapshot. The list of the rulers of various dynasties is useful. Even the overview of the staples of daily life managed to get things down to a few useful paragraphs on each topic, which worked well in terms of presenting the characteristics of the time period. But none of that helped me figure out how to set an adventure, let alone a campaign, in that era. The game rules suffered from a similar problem. Presenting ten new kits (which, I'll add, were sometimes unclear as to whether they were meant to be put on particular classes, or were applicable to any members of a particular class group, i.e. rogues - which are thieves and bards - instead of just thieves), with the caveat that all PCs must belong to one of those kits, would have been a nice way to enforce a particular feel. But most of the kits seem like they're reinventing the wheel; couldn't the vagabond kit have just been a modified thief? The forester warrior kit actually refers to itself as a ranger, at one point. The scholarly mage kit is the [I]only[/I] mage kit available, and its special benefit is "you can cast spells (subject to the changes outlined later)," with its drawback being "you must be a specialist, but not in necromancy or alteration." I need to take a moment to talk about the picaro kit, which is a rogue kit that basically makes you into [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sancho_Panza']Sancho Panza[/URL]. In addition to not being bound by the honor rules, this kit [I]requires[/I] you to serve a master until you reach 9th level, and the book strongly encourages having that master be another PC. I can already see big red flags here, but we're just getting started. Every time the picaro, bumbling goof that he is, either upstages or embarrasses his master, he gets bonus experience points. That is says "bonus" here struck me as significant, since it meant that a picaro can still gain XPs in the normal fashion; thank goodness for small favors. But that's not the half of it: these bonus XPs are [I]actually drained from the master![/I] Nor is this limited to just the master; while the rate of drain is reduced, this goes for anyone else in the party whom the picaro makes an idiot out of. The note at the end of this kit talks about how only someone committed to the role should play a picaro, but that really seems to miss the point, since I can't imagine anyone else in the party wanting to adventure in the company of a jester with what's basically a level-drain power and whose shtick is to embarrass them. I mean, again, props for trying something different, I guess, but I predict that any picaro in the party will wind up dead in very short order. Oddly, and in contrast to what I remember; there are no varying options for the use of magic. They're instead all regulated by the spellcasting kits available, of which there are only three (well, two really). The preacher kit allows for a few spells to be cast, but the list is eminently small. Defenders of the faith are essentially de-powered, spell-less paladins. And the aforementioned scholarly mage has restrictions all his own (e.g. all casting times are increased by one category: rounds become turns, turns become hours, etc.). I'm honestly less concerned with any of those than I am with how this book very pointedly tiptoes around the most obvious point of religious inspiration where adventures are concerned: fighting the servants of Satan. This is the time period when [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/355301/Discovery-of-Witches?affiliate_id=820'][I]Discovery of Witches[/I][/URL] was written; suppose everything in it had been true? Shakespeare's [I]Macbeth[/I] was written right around the middle of this book's time period; suppose the Three Witches were real? How is it that this book didn't hit upon the idea of your party taking on those who serve The Devil? Instead, we get a table outlining what religion you likely were depending on what province of what country you were born/raised in. Obviously, TSR was still, even at the end of 1992, very concerned about angry mothers with pitchforks, and worried that even [I]mentioning[/I] Lucifer - regardless of the context - would have validated their detractors. I'm not well-versed in all the nuances of the Satanic Panic, but I was under the impression that by the 90's it was largely in the rear-view mirror and getting fainter all the time. Either way, if I was going to run an Elizabethan campaign, it would definitely be a "holy roller"-style game. Having said all that, it's firearms that I suspect really enticed everyone into picking this up; I vaguely recall that was what made me check it out, back in the day. "D&D with guns" is one of those ideas that everyone experiments with at one point or another, even if it's just a thought-experiment, and here's where we get to see what happens if you go beyond the arquebus. To summarize, guns let you ignore armor at short range (with decreasing penalties to the armor's effectiveness at longer ranges), and you can get exploding dice on certain damage rolls. There's a little more to it, such as jams on bad attack rolls, but those are the big ones. It's almost a disappointment, but I wonder now if I'm viewing that through the lens of having seen similar rules in, for instance, Pathfinder, along with similar RPGs. Maybe these were a bigger deal thirty years ago? Now, that wasn't all that the book presented in terms of demonstrating how an Elizabethan campaign should feel different. It had, for instances, rules for social standing (which was basically a second Charisma score), but while it talked about honor being important (i.e. your characters are [I]gentlemen[/I] adventurers), it didn't back that up mechanically (and I'll note that I snickered at how, with the celts having their [I]enech[/I] rules, that seemed to suggest that they were more honorable than the Elizabethans). Dueling is given decent mechanical coverage, as is being part of a military skirmish; the latter follows the usual route of giving abbreviated rules which, to my eye, were more succinct and more useful than the [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16943/Battlesystem-Miniatures-Rules-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Battlesystem Miniatures Rules[/I][/URL] it unsurprisingly refers you to if you want a more detailed resolution system. It's an amusing callback to how [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/28306/ODD-Dungeons--Dragons-Original-Edition-0e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Original D&D[/I][/URL] gave you an "alternative" combat resolution metric if you didn't have [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17010/Chainmail-Rules-for-Medieval-Miniatures-0e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures[/I][/URL] handy. The book closes out with some coverage of the major wars of the period, and even an adventure outline, but nothing that seems worth mentioning, to my mind. When I first got this book, I recall being intensely bored with it almost from the get-go. In hindsight, I was shortchanging it, but only somewhat. It presents a good backdrop of the period (mostly), and the mechanics are focused. But as I've noted before, this is the equivalent to giving you a pile of lumber and some tools, with no blueprints or instructions for how to actually build a house. In looking at the previous book, I noted how I was becoming more convinced that the best use of the HR supplements was to mine them for mechanics and ideas, rather than using them as-is. To that end, I found it delightfully ironic that this book's introduction includes an explicit (albeit brief) acknowledgment of the utility in transplanting parts of this book into fantasy worlds. A mighty fortress HR4 might be, but if were ever to run AD&D 2nd Edition again, I suspect I'd find myself breaking it down for parts. [I]Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.[/I] [/QUOTE]
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[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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