rust

As for the game system, I think I will base it upon the modification of the Call of Cthulhu rules

from the German Call of Cthulhu supplement "Mittelalter" ("Middle Ages").

Some parts of these rules feel a bit ... clumsy, perhaps, and I will probably have to modify the

modifications somewhat and introduce some concepts from BRP, but all in all it should work.

I will of course not use the Cthulhu Mythos skill, it will be replaced by a new Knowledge (Thule)

skill that includes knowledge about the colony and the land as well as basic survival skill and be-

gins at 0 %, improving both through living on Thule (a certain percentage per year, up to a li-

mit of perhaps 75 % after some years on Thule) and through experience checks related to ex-

ploration and thelike.

"Mittelalter" has an interesting way to treat the science skills. It distinguishes between "Quadri-

vium" (the four traditional natural, mathematical sciences), "Trivium" (the three traditional lan-

guage sciences), "Law", "Medicine" and "Theology". I think I will use this unchanged, it has a

nice medieval feel to it.

Thank you very much for these ideas.

Please note that in the first half of the 13th Century the Teutonic Knights backed the Emperor against the Pope. Grand Master Hermann von Salza was witness in the agreement between Frederick II and the Sultan of Egypt that retook Jerusalem with diplomacy and not with arms - an agreement that the Pope really did not like.

This could be another one of the points where I will probably have to "Go Hollywood" with the

real world history, although it seems that I could use the situation after Hermann von Salza's

death in 1239 and make the Landmeister of Prussia instead of the Großmeister of the Order

my campaign's chief villain. Since the Papal Inquisition was established after 1230, this could

be at least somewhat pseudo-historical.

However, please consider one very important fact: all peasants of Prussia and Livonia are pagan at the time (they just pretend to be Christian). This means that the Knights are taking several witches in disguise with them among the peasants. And, as nature magic practitioners, these witches are really, really likely to be able to contact and appease the resident spirits of Thule. Maybe they can also summon the spirits of the dead from the late Viking colony of Greenland. Who could, in turn, tell them about a much, much richer land far to the West...

Hmmm ... I originally intended to use no magic in this setting, or at least only a very low magic,

but this is a very fascinating idea, another interesting challenge for the player characters - es-

pecially if one of the players decides to play a monk or priest, but also for the knightly leaders

of the colony.

I could at least have both sides, pagans and members of the order, believe that the pagan ma-

gic is real, and leave it open whether it really does work, with just enough strange events to

keep the players and their characters in doubt.

The knights will of course want to suppress the pagan faith, and especially the magic, but at the

same time they cannot afford any harsh measures, because they urgently need the peasants to

keep their colony going - and some of the pagan magic or traditional knowledge considered as

magic might turn out to be most useful (e.g. healing).

This would call for slow, prudent missionary work, "re-defining" pagan ideas as Christian ones

wherever possible, and so on - a good roleplaying opportunity.

Plus, it could create an internal conflict within the colony whenever I have the impression that

life has become too easy for the player characters and the threat of a peasant revolt would help

to bring the characters back into trouble ...

A campaign usually needs a powerful "villain" as the characters' opponent, and in this case the

Teutonic Order will have that role.

The Teutonic Order is behind the Papal Inquisition's "interest" in the Pruthenic Order, because

it wants to assimilate the smaller order. Of course, the Teutonic Order does not want a few

dozen more and potentially unruly knights, what it really wants is the Pruthenic Order's proper-

ty, especially the nine large and profitable holdings on the Amber Coast.

However, Grand Master Wenzel von Taube of the Pruthenic Order has other plans. He has al-

ready begun to sell some of his order's assets to finance his Thule plans, and the ship that will

bring the first settlers to Thule will also carry a significant part of the order's treasure to the

future colony.

And while the Grand Master cannot sell the order's holdings, because they are fiefs, he still can

bleed them dry, for example by offering freedom and land to all of the suitable serfs for joining

the Thule colony, thus removing the best and most skilled workers from the nine holdings.

When the Pope finally decides to dissolve the Pruthenic Order, there will be not much of its pro-

perty left on the Amber Coast. The Teutonic Order will not like this. Moreover, it will consider

the colony on Thule as part of its own rightful property, "stolen" by the Pruthenic Order.

And while the Teutonic Order will hardly be angry enough to spend the resources for an expe-

dition to Thule to conquer the colony, the Teutonic Knights will otherwise do whatever they can

to make life miserable for the "fugitive thieves and heretics" on Thule ...

Beda and gildas granted, but the bardic tradition is heroic can we agree on that?

Of course.

My point was just that when looking for the "real Arthur" or the background of this legendary

personality it would be useful to take a look at writers like Beda and Gildas, whose works are

somewhat less "tainted" by an attempt to show off a hero and therefore are probably a little

closer to the real history behind the legend.

Simple fact the literature of the time period 450 -700 AD is heroic.

Yes and no. There are also the rather non-heroic accounts written by people like Beda and Gildas.

I think Arthur himself, whether he existed or not, is largely irrelevant. He's rarely a central figure in the early literature anyway.

I do not think so. According to the few existing sources, there was a very successful Celtic mi-

litary leader who managed to defeat the Saxons in a series of battles that stopped the Saxon

conquest of Britain for many years. Whatever the name of this military leader - probably a ca-

valry leader - might have been, Arthur / Artus or not, he doubtless was one of the most impor-

tant and influential personalities of that time, able to convince the various regional rulers to

support him and his force during the campaign against the Saxons.

Thank you very much for these informations, they solve one of my major remaining problems

with this setting.

I very much like this one, because it offers a nice opportunity for a different kind of adventure:

There would be no shortage of young women from the minor nobility who could be kidnapped and taken to Thule - after all, that way their families don't have to pay a dowry.

This would mean to sneak back to the Amber Coast, avoiding the Papal Inquisition and the Teu-

tonic Order, finding some suitable and hopefully at least somewhat willing "victims" and ship-

ping them off to Thule before anyone can decide to prevent this "kidnapping operation".

Plus, it includes the option for future "domestic problems" with women who come to the con-

clusion that this is not the life they hoped for, or who discover that they would very much have

preferred to become the wife of another one of the knights ...

rust sounds Awesome.... the Teutonic order and the Livonian Orders rough nasty and dark .... just the way I like it.

Thank you very much.

I am currently working on some ideas to make life challenging for the player characters.

The first one is the Papal Inquisition, which will try to frame the order because of its support for

the "heretic" Franciscans, with the aim to enforce a dissolution of the order and the transfer of

its property to the Teutonic Order.

There is no doubt that the Papal Inquisition and the Teutonic Order will finally succeed, and the

characters will have not much time to move as much as possible of the order's followers and

property to Thule before the inquisition's hammer falls - a desperate race against time, with on-

ly one ship that cannot sail the North Atlantic during the stormy winter months, and with the ad-

ditional problem that the colony on Thule will fail if the characters do not manage to move all

the required equipment to the island before the order is abolished.

The second one is more of a moral problem. The characters and the other knights of the order

have made the usual vow of chastity, and chastity is a very nasty disadvantage for people who

intend to found a colony - without children the order and its colony on Thule would be rather

short lived.

Moreover, even if the knights decide to start their version of the Reformation very early and to

marry and raise families, they still need women to do so, preferably noble women. It will not be

easy to convince a sufficient number of noble born maidens to join a colony of heretics on some

remote and uncivilized island, but without such women the colony is bound to fail.

Oh, by the way, the order's coat of arms:

I'm intrigued by your comment that GURPS handled Celtic legends "with a rather interesting result." I'm not overly familiar with GURPS. Can you say more?

I was thinking of the supplement GURPS Celtic Myth:

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/celtic/

While I do not know the subject well enough to comment on the content of this supplement,

it is written with the usual high quality of GURPS sourcebooks. If you do not know it, I think

it could well be worth the money for the PDF (I think the print edition is no longer available).

I liked the Marion Zimmer Bradley books.

Yep, these and another series of three books written by another female author (I do not re-

member the name), describing the Arthurian legend from the point of view of Gawain.

Edit.: Gillian Bradshaw is the author's name.

It seems that it would not be too difficult to turn the various Celtic legends into an RPG supple-

ment, GURPS did it with a rather interesting result. In my view the main problem would be to

research the real, historical background of such a setting, because both historians and archae-

ologists obviously still find it very difficult to agree on any comprehensive picture of the time.

So, if one only wants a BRP supplement dealing with the legendary side of the period, a pure

"Celtic Heroic Fantasy" supplement, it should not be too difficult to write one, while an at least

partially historically accurate one could well take several years of research - especially if the

Anglo-Saxons and the people of Cornwall and Brittany should also be covered. And then there

are those Picts, with lots of theories and almost no sources ...

No Problem rust .... If you are interested I have an extensive list of literature and wargaming references I can give you.

Thank you for the offer, but this is not one of my favourite historical periods. In fact, I am more

of a science fiction guy, with occasional excursions into the times between the late middle ages

and today.

Thank you.

Welcome, Bleddyn.

Y Gododdin looks Welsh, but I have no idea what it is and where to put it ?

Please note that there actually was a historical "Pruthenic Order" assimilated by the Teutonic Knights - the Knights of Dobrzyn, founded by the Bishop of Prussia. Maybe they were not thoroughly assimilated in your world...

Yes, they are the model for my Pruthenic Order. I thought that it would be too implausible that

all members of an order would accept their Grand Master's plan to relocate to some far away

land, so only the "heretic" minority of the knights will go to Thule, while the majority will decide

to join the Teutonic Order.

However, I had to change history quite a bit for this setting idea, combining events that in our

real world took place in different centuries, for example the Portuguese exploration of the North

Atlantic, the end of the Norse settlements on Greenland (the model for my Thule) and the con-

flict between the Franciscan Spirituals and the church require some "historical handwaving" to

bring them together - with this setting I am closer to "Hollywood History" than usual, and I see

it more as low fantasy than as historical.

This will become even more obvious later in the campaign, because I intend to borrow heavily

from Puck's supplement The Green for the natives of the "Forest Coast" (my equivalent for La-

brador), where the settlers on Thule will have to go to aquire the wood that does not grow on

Thule and would be too expensive to import from Norway or the British Isles. While I could try

to research the Innu who actually inhabited Labrador at the time, there are only extremely few

reliable informations on them, so I think I can just as well use some of Puck's well designed

fantasy tribes, minus their magic (almost no magic in this setting).

Well, and the roles Denmark and Norway and the Hanse will have in my setting will also be ra-

ther unhistorical, I think. I doubt that the Danes and / or Norwegians would have allowed some-

one else to settle on Thule / Greenland, and the Hanse would probably not have agreed to es-

tablish a trade route from Bergen to Thule / Greenland (something the characters could achieve

with some clever trading and diplomacy, if the players think of it).

Thank you for the link.

It depends a lot on how advantages and disadvantages are handled by the system, they do not

automatically lead to min/maxing or - worst case - munchkinism.

One example could be Hollow Earth Expedition, where each character can choose one advanta-

ge, one disadvantage and one resource. This helps to make characters different, to give them

some individuality, but since a character can (normally) only have one of each kind, and they

have no point values or thelike, there is a strict limit for min/maxing.

Even with systems like GURPS with its fat catalogue of advantages and disadvantages it basical-

ly depends on the players (I am tempted to write "their maturity" ...) whether the system is a

way to create exactly the plausible, unique character of a player's character concept or some

monster based solely on an opportunistic use of the game mechanics.

In the end advantages, disadvantages, feats and all that are just tools, and like all tools they

can be misused - but this misuse is not a problem of the tools, only of the users.

I think the best way to go would be to contact Chaosium and ask them whether they would

have any problem with your project.

Over the last few months I have been working on a series of "alternate earth island settings",

experimenting with different approaches to the same basic idea, but without the result I was

hoping for. Last week we fled to Crete for a few days to get out of the rain (we had the worst

May in recorded history, and we have a lot of recorded history here ...), and there I described

my problem with the settings to my lady, and also mentioned Crusaders of the Amber Coast as

a fine alternative to my own settings. Somehow the settings got mixed up, and at the end we

had outlined yet another one of those island settings ...

This one starts with a small fictional knightly order, the Pruthenic Order, somewhere on the Bal-

tic Coast. The order is in serious trouble, under pressure both from the much bigger and po-

werful Teutonic Order, which wants to take over the order's few holdings, and from the church,

because the order has connections to the Franciscan Spirituals, recently condemned as heretics

by the Pope and now hunted by the inquisition. It seems highly unlikely that the order will be

able to survive the next few years on the Amber Coast.

Grand Master Wenzel von Taube, now a desperate man, therefore developed a desperate plan:

The Pruthenic Order needs a sanctuary, its own land as far and as safe from the hostile powers

as possible, and it has to be possible to aquire and hold this land with the order's very limited

manpower and financial means. After some research, Wenzel von Taube has come to the con-

clusion that the best place to relocate the order to would be Thule in the far north.

Thule is a big island in the far west, beyond Iceland. It once was settled by Norsemen from Nor-

way, but their settlements failed for unknown reasons, and the land is now uninhabited again

(except for some natives, of course ...). A Portuguese ship visited the coast of Thule and the

abandoned settlements a few decades ago, and the Grand Master managed to buy a copy of

the rutter of that ship's pilot.

The Grand Master now plans to send the order's only seagoing ship, the cog "Wolf von Tukums"

under the command of Captain Gottfried von Ascheberg and a Portuguese pilot hired for this vo-

yage to help with the Portuguese rutter, via Bergen and Iceland to Thule to explore the sea rou-

te and to find out whether the old Norse settlements really are abandoned and whether it would

be possible to found a colony of the order there.

If so, Wenzel von Taube intends to send some knights of the order, a Franciscan priest, some

craftsmen and a few dozen commoners from the order's Baltic holdings to Thule during the fol-

lowing year, with the task to establish a base that can serve as the core of the order's future

sanctuary colony. The order would then send more of its members, the Franciscan Spirituals

and the commoners of its holdings to Thule each year.

This campaign would have three "locations", the order's lands on the Amber Coast, the new co-

lony on the west coast of Thule, and the sea route via Bergen and Iceland in between. The Am-

ber Coast would be perfect for politics and intrigue (Teutonic Order, Papal Inquisition ...), the

Thule colony for exploration and thelike (think natives and polar bears ...), and the sea route for

adventures like combat against pirates, sea trade and thelike.

The characters would be knights of the order. They would take part in the first sea voyage to

Thule to protect the ship, explore the coast of Thule and report to the Grand Master, and they

would then be sent to Thule the next year to help to establish and organize the first settlement.

The system for this campaign would be my usual "BRP-enriched Call of Cthulhu", with some ad-

ditional material (especially seafaring rules, price lists, etc.) from Harnmaster and probably Ru-

nequest II Empires as "metagame rules" for the development of the colony on Thule.

Well, that's it for the moment ...

I have to admit that I am very surprised.

On the other hand, this is of course ... ;t)

Alephtar Games has a tendency to make my roleplaying life more and more complicated, be-

cause first Rome and now the Crusaders of the Amber Coast are so good that I have to write

settings using that excellent material ...

In several books there are adaptation for bats, the Chiropti from Manhunter, imagine bats evolving all sorts of things. There is a cool book out there, iirc, done by the Guy that done the TTA that had a giant bat attacking a female human savage as she protects a wounded astronaut. What I guess I am trying to say is that evolution, especially fantasy evolution could fill all sorts of gaps.

A good idea, but for this setting it would be "overkill" to introduce more than one or two such

species, the island is simply too small to keep this plausible.

The disclaimer I always use for any movie set in any even *remotely* historic period is:

"Loosely based on events on the planet Earth."

In this case it would be an extremely polite description.

The plot starts with a Persian king adopting a street urchin and making him his heir in order to

prevent his two sons from fighting each other over the right to become king, and from then on

it becomes more and more implausible, with daggers enabling people to travel back in time, ma-

gical sandstorms that can destroy the world and similar stuff.

Is there anything even remotely historically accurate in the film, or is it just the adaptation of the video game?

I do not know the video game, but the film has nothing at all to do with the real world history.

With all this talk of BRP musicals I'd be remiss if I didn't mention A Shoggoth on the Roof.

Just to make sure that people know what you mean ...

Considering rust's signature line, I banking that he'll prefer using "Number One Ship".

"Son number one only travels on ship number one, only number he can count to and remember."