[OSSR]The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook

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Ancient History
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[OSSR]The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook

Post by Ancient History »

OSSR: The Crusades
AD&D 2nd Edition Campaign Sourcebook

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FrankT:

So back in the day, there were PHBR books, which were pretty much “for players” and they were brown, like the PHB was sort of brownish. Not as brownish as the 3rd edition PHB was, but conceptually it was supposed to be brown. And there were the DMGR books that were “for dungeon masters,” and they were blue, like the DMG was supposed to be kind of bluish. But today we're going to be setting the wayback machine for 1994 and talking about something from the green series. The “historical reference” books.

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3rd edition was a lot more disciplined about these fucking book colors.

The Crusades is HR7, meaning that there were six other previous books in the historical reference series. You may not have heard about them, because frankly the idea of playing out realistic historical scenarios with the 2nd edition AD&D rules sounds kind of batshit fucking insane to me – and seemingly to a lot of other people as well. This book is about Christians and Muslims killing each other and has rules for miracles, so you know it's going to be stone cold awesome.

The entire book is 94 pages long and has a lot of art. It's split into 10 “chapters,” but many of them are very short. We'll try to do this quickly.
AncientH:

I'm on the fence as to whether the Historical Reference series was a direct outgrowth of D&D's origin in historical wargaming, or sort of an effort to compete with GURPS Vikings and other historical products from around the same period. In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter. The basic idea behind both is the same: lots of neckbeards who are into D&D, with its quasi-medieval setting, are also serious history nerds as well, the kind of people that fence and join the SCA and started the whole RenFaire craze with its turkey legs and wenches of endless cleavage. And I can dig that because I too am a history buff (in a small way), and the history buffs are often the nerds that agitate for realism in roleplaying games - or, if not realism considering there are elves and dwarves and wizards and gold-hoarding dragons and shit, then at least realistic technologies, economics, foods, weapons, etc.

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Taste the realism.

And while 1994 might seem a rather late date for this kind of product, it really isn't. Well into 3rd edition Dragon and Dungeon magazine where including low-fantasy "historical" D&D scenarios in articles in among the Forgotten Realms stuff and prestige classes. I also have a lingering suspicion that "historical" campaigns were more popular over in the UK, though I couldn't swear to that.

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Admit it, if there was a Kingdom of Heaven Director's Cut Sourcebook, you'd at least peek through it.
FrankT:


This book only has one author: Steve Kurtz. Before he quit RPG writing to go make a shit tonne more money designing joint replacements, Steve Kurtz was a reliable hack on AD&D's B-team. He has a lot of writing credits, and almost all of it is for stuff like Dungeon Magazine adventures, sourcebooks for obscure settings, and of course: experimentalist books from one of the XR series. Like this one we're talking about right now.

Steve Kurtz's most famous contribution is the Complete Necromancer's Handbook, which gets much better press than it deserves. But of course, the reason that book could happen at all was because they had B-team writers doing weird experimentalist crap. Remember: that's a book about PC rules kits that is explicitly not intended to be used to make PCs. It's really weird that such a book would even get greenlighted, which is probably why people have such fond memories of it.
AncientH:

It really was a streamlined production. This book's staff was all of five people: writer, editor, artist, map guy, and typographer. It's amazingly compact, and there's an actual annotated bibliography. When you consider what a production like this would look like today, that's tremendous - it would either be a bloated 230-page hardback shovelware shelfbreaker that took twenty people a month to churn out, or a thirty-page PDF on drive through somebody churned out in two months. As it is, I think this probably took Kurtz about three-four months for the writing, probably from the books he had at home and the college library.

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"A fine example of mid-90s nerdery, in perfect condition aside from the Cheetos stains."

Introduction
FrankT:

The introduction literally starts on the credits page. You think the book has one hell of a disclaimer at the beginning (which would have been no stretch for an ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® official product), but actually the whole credits section is crammed into a portion of the page and then it jumps right in with a fragment of an English translation of a French song from the 12th century. The whole introduction is a bit over a page worth of material, and it gets half a page shared with the credits and table of contents, and then three quarters of the next page.

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I just felt there should be some pictures of crusaders in this review.
AncientH:

I could quibble with Kurtz' summary of the Crusades in the introduction, but leave it out. Long story short, the Dark Ages are over and Feudalism is the name of the game, let's go kill some faraway people that have discovered algebra.

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This isn't Conan the Barbarian, this is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, a half-Norman, half-Gael crusader written by Robert E. Howard. So...Conan in the Crusades, basically.
FrankT:

The intro spends most of its time not talking about the crusades. It mentions the fucking protestant revolts of the Elizabethan era for fuck's sake. The basic idea is supposed to be that it's an important crossroads and transition in European history. In the sense, I guess, that it is demonstrably true that it is temporally situated between events and periods that happened earlier or later.

Our narrator seems to think that the later crusades are probably best ignored and really we just want to hear the hits. By which we mostly seem to mean the First Crusade. The Crusade where the crusaders couldn't pay for their boats, sacked a Christian city, and all got ex-communicated and the Crusade where children from all over Europe were put on a boat and then sold into slavery in North Africa rather than even try to reach the Holy Land are kind of waved off. All those hilarious shenanigans are umbrellaed under the explanation “later Crusades became increasingly misguided and disastrous.” Which is a fair assessment, but I think rather buries the lead.
AncientH:

Right. Because when you talk about the Crusades, you think King Richard the Lionhearted...

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"I schtop this wedding, unless I get to schtup the bride."

...not the Kingdomf of Jerusalem or the Hospitalers on Malta.

In a lot of fantasy and historical fiction and films, the action isn't even on the crusades themselves, but the period. Crusades gave you an excuse to leave home, meet and kill a lot of interesting people, bang some really exotic chicks, take their treasures, and maybe discover stuff like alchemy and algebra, all while getting paid/promise of not going to hell for killing Cousin Steve I swear it was an accident the fucker ran backwards into my lance.

(Why weren't indulgences emphasized? I don't know.)

So even though it doesn't say it outright, this is sort of set after the First Crusade, when the Franks had set up their kingdoms and the Knights of the Temple weren't yet the first international corporation.
FrankT:

HR7 wrote:The historical backdrop of the Crusades is an ideal setting for the AD&D® game.
This is perhaps the central premise of this introduction or even the entire book. And... I still can't agree. I genuinely don't understand where this is coming from and the introduction is not selling it to me.
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I tried, but I couldn't let that comment go without a Lolwut pear.
AncientH:

I like to think of it this way: the Crusades were a big adventure. You were traveling into half-legendary lands kitted out in full war gear with as many torchbearers and as many sex servants as you could bring from home, traveling into exotic lands where danger and wealth and maybe even salvation awaited. It really does sound like the basic setting that Dungeons & Dragons tries to set up, just without the orcs, dragons, and dungeons. Not that you can't have dungeons, if you wanted them. If you do some research, you could even get some really interesting story ideas for a band of Normans making their way down the pilgrimage route, facing the dangers of the road and maybe investigating an abandoned keep or fleeing from a band of Muslim camel archers or whatever.

But it does require a slightly different mindset, because outside of Detroit you do rare have armed bands of people just wandering around looking for work and/or killing things that need killing and taking everything that isn't laid down - well, except for brigands and pirates, and they still hung those guys in gibbets back then.

There is also - especially for Paladins - the sort of romance of an armored knight in full kit. But that has to be balanced against the wider socio-religious-political weirdness of the Crusades, because it really was a clash of cultures and there are still plenty of Muslims and Arabs today that probably tell stories about how great-great-great-great-great-great-granddad was cut down by some Norman bastard that ate sausages made from horses' assholes. So characterizing the enemy as evil is...thematically complicated.

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Chapter 1: Through the Crusader's Eyes
FrankT:

This chapter is four pages long and is asking you from the standpoint of a roleplayer to put your anthropologist hat on and look at things from the perspective of people living at the time. Rather than, for example, people living today – who tend to look on these Crusades as being a little bit genocidal and insane to be the kind of thing one can support.
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There are still unabashed Crusade supporters in the world today, but they are creepy and horrible people that no one likes.

Also, I think it important to point out that since I have a brand new computer and not a whole lot of search terms in it, that google ads has started attempting to get me to mail order “Best Arabian Ladies.”

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Ah, Heavy Metal.
AncientH:

The big hurdle, I guess, for people at the table to get their heads around is that they're fighting in early medieval Europe, which does not actually very much resemble early modern Europe, or contemporary Europe. Most of the people from the region we today think of as France, for example, did not speak what we think of as French. Most of the people in England didn't speak anything we'd quite recognize as English. What we think of as French and English today really started out as "Parisian" and "Londoner" dialects, and the same goes for every other major European Romance language. That's not addressed here, but it's one of the things that maybe should have been.

The second thing is, well, Christianity. It's on the decline these days, and America is dominated by various sects of Protestants, but back then it was pretty much broken into the Five Sees - Rome, Byzantium, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria - which basically broke down into Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodoxy, Armenian Christians, and Coptic Christians. That's a lot to cram into four pages, so Kurtz doesn't really try, but the long story short is that they pretty much assume you're going to be one of the Roman Catholics from Europe, not anybody of any other sect or heresy.

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Also, there were no uniforms so the spiffy red crosses came later.
FrankT:

Some of the things this book says are very strange. Like this:
HR7 wrote:The Crusades comprise eight major holy wars and countless lesser conflicts from the 9th to 11th centuries.
Obviously, this book was written by one dude in the days before wikipedia, but what the actual fuck? According to modern Wikipedia, the First Crusade starts in 1096, when the 11th century is almost over. And then the last Crusade ends in 1291, which is the 13th century. I really can't make hide nor hair of these dates.

Anyway, the author makes a lot of apologies for holy war, most of which boil down to “in a historical context, these sorts of behaviors made sense.” Which is fine and all, but we still aren't any closer to explaining how to tie all this shit together with the AD&D rules, which I remind you gave out Vancian Spellcasting like it was going out of style (which of course, it was).

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These really never get old.
AncientH:

The dates probably come because he's saying the Crusades cover a period from the end of the Dark Ages (around 900 AD, depending on whom you ask, not counting the assholes that say "There was no Dark Ages, shut up.") and trying not to count the later ones. Or he made a mistake.

So, you could be from almost anywhere in Europe (as long as you have your own horse), and go Crusading, so things like money, language, and whether you'll be declared a heretic if your hand-copied bible doesn't match everyone else's (and this was several centuries before printing). Those sound like important bits, but he doesn't really talk about them here, because the important thing is that you're going to War! For Jesus! Also, possibly, gold, dusky skinned ladies, and the cure for the that nasty genital rash you picked up in France.
FrankT:

Holy War is given an entire mini-section where it talks about how despite the basic fact that going out and murdering people with a sword is about as un-Christlike as you can get, the Catholic Church had an entire theological underpinning for why drawing the sword for the prince of peace made total sense. This would have been a pretty good place to actually explain what it was, but mostly we get the point talked around. I'd say it's just contextualization rather than explanation, but I can't even call it that. This book tries to tell me that unlike the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Roman Catholics had to deal with barbarians. Atilla would totally like a word in here.

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Or, you know, that.
AncientH:

It should be remembered that at this point, the Carolignian Empire had about had it. The Carolignians had paid off the Byzantines and made peace with the major Islamic states, but the fucking Nordics came down a-viking raiding everything and the indie Islamic Pirates fucked every pale white face in the Mediterranean - there was even an Emirate in Southern Italy for a bit. But eventually the Vikings got Christianity, the Normans were settled in at France and England (more or less), the Spanish were working to take back the Iberian Peninsula, and the breakdown of the empire left a large class of basically unemployed young knights who couldn't legally war against their also-Christian neighbors.
FrankT:

There is a section on the Legacy of Charlemagne. This is... it's just kind of weird is all. It's like we're having the Crusades explained to us by Charlie Sheen while he's hopped up on Tiger Blood. So sure, why not? Why not talk about some emperor who died in the 8th century, some 427 years before the story starts? After all, some of the people who were involved in the Crusades were Carolingians. That's a connection of sorts. It just... it just doesn't seem relevant enough. We could be talking about the mutual excommunications of 1054 or something.
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AncientH:

I think it's because when you talk about the Crusades, you get into the legends of chivalry and knighthood - and like bushido, this is all shit that people made up after the blood and guts phase to really justify and nobilize the whole fucking system. The first knights weren't Roman heavy cavalry or noble Samaritans or any of that crap, they were just assholes on horseback, the chief bullies of the biggest bastard around. So when they needed to clean up the whole Knighthood deal, they reached back to the legends of Charles the Great and his companions, particularly Roland. This was the era of El Cid, remember.

In D&D context, think of it this way: there are no Paladins. There are only fighters that specialize in cavalry, and they get very good for it, but they're not nice people, and when your grandkid tries to justify why he lives in a castle and the other guys are in lice-infested thatch houses, he wanted a slightly better image than a bloody-handed butcher that gave better than he got.
FrankT:

The “Milk and Honey” essay is about how the Catholic Church used a whole lot of sales pitches to drum up support (and volunteers) for the war in Jerusalem. The church of course went on all sorts of levels, alternately demanding, pleading, and bribing people to join the war effort. Modern states do much the same thing when it's time to throw down, but the analogy is never explicitly made. These essays really feel disjointed, and this one feels disjointed internally as a unit. It's like the author wrote a bunch of notes on things he wanted to say and then just handed that in as a draft.
AncientH:

Really, this chapter isn't supposed to give the-state-of-play-in-Europe-leading-to-war - it's more of a super-condensed "this is what led to some of the attitudes at play." It doesn't cover...lots. We're still in the period where living in Europe is not a great thing. It's a postage stamp, really, and if not the best one, it's at least a barebones setup. Medieval Europe. Holy War. Get your sword and go kill a bastard for Christ.

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Post by Blicero »

I remember hearing about these books at some point but never quite accepting that they existed. Did the series sell actually well enough to warrant being seven books long, do we know?
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Post by Desdan_Mervolam »

I doubt it. I only ever saw one of the books with my own eyes, and it wasn't this one. Curiously, as I recall, it was the one about Charlemagne. I also seem to recall that there was one about Robin Hood, but I don't know for sure.
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Post by Username17 »

The Historical Reference Series is:
  • HR1: Vikings It is about Vikings.
  • HR2: Charlemagne's Paladins It is about Charlemagne.
  • HR3: Celts Mostly about British Isles Celts as I recall. Not so much on the Central and Eastern European Celts.
  • HR4: A Mighty Fortress It's about the Elizabethan era. I don't actually understand what the Mighty Fortress tagline is about.
  • HR5: The Glory of Rome Attempts to discuss the entire Roman Empire for its entire duration. Back cover promises you "one thousand years of history," actual result is superficial even by 2nd edition AD&D standards.
  • HR6: Age of Heroes Covers Greek classical age demigods and Troy and such, but also the conquests of Alexander. Doesn't entirely seem to be aware that these events were eight hundred years apart and very definitely not in the same age.
  • HR7: The Crusades We're covering that one here
And... I think that's all of them. After HR7, I don't think they made any more HR series books.

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Post by tussock »

HR7 wrote:The Crusades comprise eight major holy wars and countless lesser conflicts from the 9th to 11th centuries.
Obviously, this book was written by one dude in the days before wikipedia, but what the actual fuck? According to modern Wikipedia, the First Crusade starts in 1096, when the 11th century is almost over. And then the last Crusade ends in 1291, which is the 13th century. I really can't make hide nor hair of these dates.
1096 is the 11th century because it's 1096, and the other 13th because 1291. The authors just did -1 instead of +1 to find which century that year was in, net two centuries early in proper terms.
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 2: The Saracens
AH Note: They actually mispelled this chapter "The Scaracens," but this was the days before spellcheck.

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And playing for team brown...
FrankT:

At seven pages (plus a pretty decent full page pen and ink illustration), this is the longest chapter in the book so far. That's kind of sad now that I say it out loud, but there it is. Subsections of this chapter are called “Islam,” “The Muslim World,” “A Mounting Jihad,” “Arab Culture,” and “The Assassins.” If that looks to you like maybe they took some fairly random essays that seemed sort of Muslimish and tossed it together into a “chapter” I think you got pretty sharp eyes. We'll go through this thing, but don't expect much of a narrative – or any hurry to tie any of this to Dungeons & Dragons for that matter.

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The small detail where absolutely none of this shit happened in this time period seems somewhat lost on this book.

If this chapter had any central point to make, it would be that “Saracens” is a completely made up word that Europeans used to refer to Islamic people of all tribes and persuasions. Thus, while Christian Europe was beset on all sides by “Saracens,” this was largely an artifact of the fact that Christians of the time period called all the foreigners “Saracens.” This is kind of an important and profound statement about the use of fear to fan the flames of war – but after it gets introduced at the end of the previous chapter and then repeated for emphasis at the beginning of this chapter, it's sort of lost.
AncientH:

It's also worth remembering that this book actually came out significantly (2 years) after Al-Qadim, the fantasy Arabian Adventures setting which eventually landed in the southern Forgotten Realms. There are even references to Al-Qadim in this book, so you know the author was aware of it, and you'd think that would handle the "fantasy Islam" angle fairly well and he could address the actual business of Real History. But he doesn't, really. Why? It's a mystery. I mean, I don't think I've seen a supplement quite this off-kilter about Islam until White Wolf published Veil of Night and Iberia by Night.

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FrankT:


The first essay about Islam is simply called “Islam.” It's about a page worth of “wikifacts” about Islam. Did you know that “Islam” literally means “Submission?” Well, if you read this essay, you certainly now do. But, did you also know that this is roughly as helpful for understanding that religion as the observation that “Christianity” literally means “Messianic Movement?” That's not an observation from this book, that's just me being cranky. Islam is a fucking proper noun, which means that it doesn't really mean anything. The religion could be named “Dave” or “Steve.” Or “Jesus” or “Mo” for that matter.

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Mohammed said the first sip of wine kills a man, he didn't say shit about beer.

Anyway, another thing that yanks my chain is the bizarre insistence that Judaism is one of the three great religions. Jews only outnumber Bahá'í by 2:1. If you want to get really technical about it, the third biggest monotheistic religion in the world is Sikhism, followed by Juche. That's the crazy North Korean thing where everyone has to pray to the ghost of the founder of the country, who is also the eternal president. Judaism is number five of the monotheistic religions (obviously Hinduism, Buddhism, and whatever the hell you want to call that thing they do in China are also bigger deals). It's just this weird Christianity blinders that people in the west have a lot of the time. Christianity got its start as a Judaic/Greek syncretic mystery cult, so everyone who follows Christianity is convinced that Judaism is otherwise important. But it isn't. And it never was. It's just the tribal faith of a minor tribe. If one of the other mystery cults of that period had taken over Europe, we'd have people claiming that some other tribe's spiritual practices constituted one of the great religions of the world. During the time period in question, there are more Zoroastrians than Jews. Judaism only gets to be counted in the top three if you limit your choices to “religions ultimately descended from Judaism,” and if you
include the various major schisms of Christianity and Islam, it doesn't even do that.

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The laws of Ahura Mazda were followed by more people than the laws of Moses in this time period. Not that the authors of this book apparently knew that.
AncientH:

The nice thing about this chapter is that it doesn't have to pussy foot around with any of that "fantasy religion vs. Christianity" bullshit.

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Fuck off, Aslan. We don't need any metaphors or stand-ins on this one.

On the other hand, it doesn't really address any of the misunderstandings, miscommunications, variants, and general bullshit that is the mess of Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion. It is an ongoing clusterfuck, and as much as they have a common history and related beliefs, there have been relatively few times over the last ten centuries where they even acknowledged that they all worshiped the same god.

The thing is, if you're into that sort of thing, this can be incredibly interesting provided you don't get your panties in a twist. Shit like the Knights Templar worshiping "Baphomet" and the Gospel of Barnabas, the Desposyni, and stuff like that provides great room for setting historical games with weird, interesting setups and motivations, with secret conversions and clerics trying to reconcile three religions and magicians mixing up all sorts of weird magic and demonology...and it's more historically authentic, as well, to present the fact that Europeans were in general extremely ignorant about the world beyond their immediate borders, and of the fundamentals of their own beliefs. What do you do when you go up to what was once a Jewish Synagogue that became a Christian Church and is now an Islamic Mosque (and before all that, was probably a pagan shrine)?

Which is kind of getting away from the point, but y'know, I kinda wish they emphasized the Crusader's view of things.
FrankT:

The section on The Muslim World is very confused. It attempts to explain the Sunni/Shia divide as a political, not religious distinction, and sort of talks about the fact that Fatimid Caliphate was based on some rather dubious genealogy. But, reading this section you'd be basically unaware that there were totally Shias and Sunnis stabbing each other in the face in the days of the fourth Caliph.

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And the Sunnis and Shia got along just fine ever since.

This section really needs dates and maps. The Berber Kingdoms of the West really aren't that similar to the Turkish or Persian empires in the East. Egypt and Syria are different countries at these times who pay homage to different Caliphs and have different cultures and armies and religions and shit. The Sunni / Shia split is about as important as the Roman/Orthodox split among Christians, and the difference in cultures between the North Africans, the Middle Eastern Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians are considerably bigger than the cultural differences between French and Polish peoples.

The chapter spends a good deal of ink on the Turkish practice of new sultans having their siblings murdered, a practice which was started by the Ottoman dynasty in the 14th century, and not by the Seljuks, who are a different Turkish dynasty about whom this book is nominally supposed to be talking because they are the ones that actually were targeted by the first Crusade. The Seljuks actually just did gavelkind shit, where they divided the empire among the available sons, which caused a whole lot of bitter reuinifaction wars. It was the general undesirability of splitting up the empire which convinced the next dynasty to pull that crazy “there can be only one” crap that this book is talking about. But you know, centuries later.

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These guys have a fascinating and brutal history, but are very importantly not alive during the time period this book is set in.
AncientH:

Maps and time periods would be really good, but I still wish they'd talk about what the Crusaders actually know. I mean, I can forgive them for not mentioning the short-lived Emirate of Bari, but while that Muslim toehold in southern Italy was long gone at this point, the major nations of Europe had been raided by or selling slaves to the Muslims for the last couple of centuries, and that left a bit of an impact - above all else, the Europeans thought of the Islamic nations as rich, and the silver dirhams and even gold dinars were generally well-regarded for weight and purity in Europe and well-represented in recorded hoards...and the difference in coinage is the sort of thing you'd think would be important to talk about at some point.
FrankT:

I don't even know what the Mounting Jihad essay is supposed to be about. It starts of talking about how in the 12th century, relatively few people wanted to go on Jihad against the Franj. And it drops some weird anecdotes about how some dude or another was cruel, and it acts like everyone was scared of the invincible power of the Franks. All of this is kind of incoherent, and it's made more incoherent by having a diagram of the Dome of the Rock in here for no apparent reason.

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Dome of the Rock.

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Tofu.

The author is rather taken with examples of Islamic cruelty, and throws them into the book in weird places where they don't really fit.
AncientH:

I'm not sure how historically accurate this stuff is in detail; broad strokes it seems more or less accurate, but it's weird what he chooses to focus on. I mean, during the 8th crusade King Louis basically shat himself to death, and I might mention that as an example of the omnipresent danger of disease, and also because it would make 13 year old boys giggle, but no mention here. Saladin, arguably one of the most important and influential characters, is given scant mention. No mention of Muslim Malta or battle for the Mediterranean.

What I'm getting at, in that confused paragraph, is that the book really lacks a sense of scale. The Crusades were a huge, prolonged series of conflicts involving many different groups in many lands, and this snapshot history just zooms in on almost random points of supposed interest that mostly...aren't interesting. Do I care that Zengi was killed by his favorite eunuch Lulu? Fuck no!

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This is the kind of guy that would try to make himself understood in a foreign land by speaking slowly and loudly.
FrankT:

There is a section on “Arab Culture.” This is actually kind of weird, because most of the belligerents on the Islamic side were not actually Arabs. But sure, why not? Then this section literally suggests that you go read the Al-Qadim campaign setting, and I remember that is why not. This section doesn't have a lot to say, and is extremely vague about dates, regions, and social classes. The author seems to think it was normal for a man to have a harim guarded by eunuchs, but there has never been a time when that was normal. There have been times when people did that, but only seriously rich and powerful people, since it is demographically impossible for anything but a small minority of people to have four wives and a team of eunuchs.
AncientH:

The whole "possibly being married to more than one woman" thing seriously interested the Europeans for at least a couple centuries, because everybody likes to get laid, but it's not really mentioned here.

To expand on what Frank said, Islam spread tremendously far. There were Jews and Muslims in China before there were Christians; Islam competed with Buddhism in India and Southeast Asia, and competed with native religions down both coasts in Africa. That's a bit outside the scope of the Crusades proper, but the gist is that Islam incorporated much more than just ethnic Arabs, and the Crusaders met and killed (and were killed by) many of them.

I do want to highlight one paragraph:
Intellectually, Arab scientists of the 11th century far surpassed the erudition of western scholars. The Arabs translated the great works of the Greeks and built on this legendary body of knowledge. Arab mathematicians invented algebra, accurately measured the Earth’s diameter, and determined the exact length of the year long before Western Europe attempted these feats. Arab alchemists searched for the key to turning base metals into gold while Western witches mixed herbal medicines in cauldrons.
This...isn't accurate. I mean yes, the Arabs did translate and build on the Greek classics, but the Greeks already had a pretty decent idea of the diameter of the world, and Arab alchemists cared much less about turning lead into gold than they were with fortified wine and medicine. There's no mention of astronomy or astral magic which were some of Islam's greatest contribution to Western science and magic, and of course the whole "Western witches" thing is straight out of Margaret Murray. In other words, this is terribad.

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Omar Khayyám liked to get smashed and write poetry.
FrankT:

By far the longest of the articles in here is a rambling diatribe about the Assassins. They were a historical religious cult that also formed a warrior order that fought people they regarded as heretics or infidels. Crusader Kings 2 models them as a holy order that fights for Islamic nations in the same way as the Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights fight for team Catholic. It works pretty well.

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Being an Assassin gives you the super powers of Hypnotoad.

HR7 spends a lot of words on them, but I'm not sure what the point was supposed to be.

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That might have been it.
AncientH:

The thing about the assassins is that people forget they were part of a real sect of Shia Islam called the Isma'ilis, which have just one of the most bad-ass drawn names of all time:

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...and of course, things weren't quite Assassins Creed back during the actual Crusades, but you'd be hard pressed to know that reading this section. On a bright spot, though, at least the Hashishim aren't portrayed as black pajama-clad Middle Eastern ninjas.

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Will kill for weed.

Chapter 3: Characters

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Mostly a chapter about how you don't get to play these guys.
FrankT:

It's eighteen pages, but it has a lot of art and tables. This chapter is the longest in the entire book. In many ways, this is the meat of the entire book. It's the part where they break down and attempt to tell you how to play a 2nd edition AD&D character in a historical setting. They produce three levels of magic crazy to choose from, and have a little chart about whether a class is available or not. So we have “historical,” “legend,” and “fantasy” modes. Those are pretty much what you'd expect, save that you're allowed to play an AD&D priest in Historical mode. Because what isn't historical about turning undead and casting cure light wounds?

It just seems to shit on everything else that they are trying to do here to just stumble along with Priest Spheres and full spellcasting. The rest of the chapter is spent worrying about whether it's historically accurate to allow women to own property and how there weren't any Elves or Dwarves in 11th century Judea. And here they are handing out full spellcasting to anyone who wants it.

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AncientH:

Granted, there are some hoops to jump through. At the "Historical" level, you're reduced to a party made up of Fighters, Priests, Rogues, and a Ranger or Paladin if you suck Mister Cavern's cock (literally, DM permission required; given the stats required for Paladins, you'd better not forget to play with his balls too). "Legendary" level means you can suck Mister Cavern's cock to play a Mage or a bard, and at "Fantasy" you need to blow the MC to play a specialist wizard or psionicist ('cause fuck psionics!) Anybody inspired by, say, Dark Sun to play a druid in the desert is shit out of luck.

There's some later fuckery with magic and casting times, but let's just take it for granted that if you're playing this campaign the setting is probably at least on "Legendary," if only so Mister Cavern can have an NPC throw some proper ghuls at you.

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Man, I hope these infidels drop some sweet holy swords as loot, or we're proper fucked.
FrankT:

One sometimes forgets how batshit the 2nd Edition AD&D Kits were. Page after page of this chapter is devoted to various tweaks on kits and telling you which class kits from Al-Quadim are available to characters. But you gotta remember: players can apparently still can flame strike every day, so I have no idea why anyone is fucking bothering. Also, very few of these kits are sourced. Like, I kind of assume that Bandit, Spy, and Merchant are all Thief kits from the Complete Thief's Handbook, but I honestly don't know. Some of these might be from Dragon Magazine, or one of the PBHR race books or something. There's just an assumption that you have a complete knowledge of where all the options for characters in 2nd edition AD&D were located. I can fucking guaranty that you don't. In fact, I don't know if the author was even aware of some of the Forgotten Realms and Darksun crap. So if I find a desert warrior kit I want to use and it's not on these lists, am I supposed to be able to use it or not? This being 2nd edition AD&D, the answer is “ask your DM,” but the fact that I have to ask at all makes me wonder what the fucking point of all this is supposed to be.
AncientH:

Keep in mind, this was the period of time when there absolutely were different kits with different abilities with the same name, sometimes for the same class - and Gladiator was a class and a Fighter kit. Now, there is a table...this is AD&D 2nd edition, there is always a table...that actually lists the kits and which books they're from, but keeping in mind what I said about practicing your Oral Sex skill checks, most of these classes/kits aren't even fucking permitted in anything less than Legendary, and some of them are just...weird? Because they're divided by culture, but the only options given are Frank, Italian, Byzantine, Syrian-Christian, Armenian, Sunni, Shi'ite, and Turk. So if you want to be a Warrior Priest, you're a Frank by default. Want to be English? Fuck you, you're a Frank. Want to play an Archaeologist? Fuck you, period. Want to be a Psionicist pretending to be a wizard (shut up, that was an actual kit), fuck you no psionicist kits listed.
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Wait, I can play a Pardoner but not a Houri?
FrankT:

The section on money is pretty much insane. It starts by telling you that historical metal based currency was totally unlike the AD&D currency with its decipound lumps of gold and electrum pieces, and then it basically throws in the towel and says to just treat Dinars like GP. I think the author realized that if they went any farther with the realistic coinage thing they'd have to write up historically accurate price lists and that sounds like work.

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The equipment section just calls out some of the items from the PHB as being unavailable and calls it a day. So: no canoes, but I guess backpacks still cost a gold piece.
AncientH:

Not that it matters, because backpacks are also on the list of equipment you can't fucking buy.

Kind of amazingly, everything above scale mail is right the fuck out. I guess that's technically accurate, since people were mainly going into battle with full body suits of maille (what we septics call chain mail), although it sort of fucks with the idea of knights in full plate. Also weird: sling bullets, which were known and used for milleniums, right the fuck out. I guess they thought it was ahistorical for anybody to try and redo David and Goliath.

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No word on mithril, adamantine, or Damascus steel.
FrankT:

Languages getting described are French, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Notably absent: Turkish. Which I remind you is closer related to Hungarian than it is to Arabic. There's also a page of names for Christians and Muslims. The Christians get more of the page than the Mulims do, but it's probably the best resource in this book.
AncientH:

After the names we get straight into the class/kit mucking about, and it's a bit tedious. Magic doesn't get address until chapter 5, although I have no fucking idea why not. These aren't bad, if a bit fiddly, and there are some great quotes in this section:
In the large noble families of Western Europe, the first son inherited the family domain, the second son usually became a cleric, and the third became an adventurer.
I want to start up a campaign called Third Sons where the extraneous children of the local nobility team up to kill people for money.

A lot of emphasis is put on pacifist priests and the no-shedding-of-blood deal that Christianity had. That could make for some interesting (and short-lived) PCs, so they suggest vows of nonviolence and associated kits by restricted to NPCs only. However, it is the reason why clerics in D&D use maces and other blunt weapons, at least nominally.

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That's a no-go.

The unique kit for this book is the Warrior Priest, which is as different from the War Priest as the Wanderer is from the Wandering Mystic is from the Mystic. And you thought prestige classes got silly! Warrior Priests are regular priests that accept some slight spellcasting restrictions and a vow of chastity & celibacy in exchange for some extra melee weapon proficiencies...oh, and they're intolerant assholes that can't stand Saracens, just in case you were thinking of a mixed party.
Like Monastic Warriors (see elsewhere)
This has to be my favorite broken pointer of all time.

The Monastic Warrior is basically a Knights Templar-type dude that belongs to one of the religious/knightly orders. Well, sortof. Without the banking and oaths of poverty and crap. Their basic advantage is some pieces of kit, like a riding horse at 1st level or a +1 sword at 5th level (!), and the disadvantage is having to donate all the money they don't spend on level-appropriate gear to the Order.
A warrior may never own more than four horses.
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In AD&D, real roleplaying settings like Dark Sun and the Crusades encouraged players to scrape and fight for decent weapons, armor, magic, medicine, clean water, healthy horses, and other necessities. You want a backpack? Fucking munchkin powergamer beardy piece of shit! You can't buy a backpack! And if you try to invent backpacks in this world, your mates will burn you as a witch!

For reasons I don't quite understand, the Assassins aren't members of the Assassins class, but Rogues of the Holy Slayer kit.
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Not sure if this is a legit party. Four bards and one of them is built like a dwarf?
The new Rogue kit is the Pardoner, who is a conman that shadows the crusaders, selling phony relics, "holy" water, forged indulgences, that sort of thing. I actually like the idea of playing a character class based on deceit and accumulating money, and also of Paladins screaming because the "holy" water they bought doesn't work against the mummy they stirred up. Their main advantage is a special thief ability called Elicit Donations which is capped at 95% (and I would so love to do a snarky modern take on this where Televangelists got that skill), and their disadvantage is that any priest of 4th level or higher can call them on their shit immediately. Also, they're neutral or evil.

Aside: kit-specific thief abilities like this one are part of what made AD&D a headache - because in, say, Dragon Kings they explain how you can swap out thief abilities so that your Pardoner could take Bribe or Use Scrolls at 1st level instead of Pick-Pocket or Climb Walls. But can a regular thief use the same rule to argue that they can swap out Move Silently for Elicit Donation? I have no idea, and don't want to argue it.

I'm also not entirely sure what the purpose of the Pardoner is in the Crusades campaign. Back home in Europe it makes sense, since they're pretending to be returned pilgrims hawking relics and eliciting donations for the next wave of armed men to go and retake the Holy Land and rebuild the Church that holds the Holy Prepuce or something, but are they really going to have a good time of it in the Holy Lands, amidst the Crusaders, many of whom have taken vows of poverty?

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Also, you could totally end up in a party with a Paladin, a Beggar, a Holy Slayer and a Pardoner. That'll make for interesting alignment talks.
FrankT:

No Wizard kits are allowed except for a few from Al-Qadim and only then if you're playing a Legendary or whatever campaign. Steve Kurtz did a bunch of writing for obscure Al-Qadim crap, so he shills for it constantly in this book. If you're playing a Historical campaign, you probably don't get any magic items. But remember: you can still play a fucking full caster if you're willing to write “Cleric” on your character sheet. So all this low magic shit is just for show.

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Low magic D&D settings are just there to make warriors cry.
AncientH:

The whole bit where Muslims are more tolerant of sorcery is a bit wonky today, considering Saudi Arabia still holds accused witches under the death penalty. But I digress. Anyway, as I said this isn't a bad chapter. I think if it was twice as long it might even be a rather good chapter, able to address the mechanics of a Crusades game in detail. As it is, most of the chapter is spent telling you how your severely limited selection of classes and kits can fit into a Crusades campaign, which is okay but hardly ideal. You want to tell players how their PCs can fit into the game, not why they can't. I mean, I want a Fighter kit called "Bastard" where you're the illegitimate son of one of the kings and get social bonuses and a discreet inheritance with the possibility of being recognized if the old man doesn't have any legitimate heirs.

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I...should never...have fucked...your mother...agh...
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Post by TheNotoriousAMP »

Kind of off topic, so putting this in spoilers, just wanted to point something out about Judaism.
Judaism is technically a tiny religion, but because of its interesting place as a channel through which communication between the Islamic and Christian world filtered through, I do think it earns a place as a major religion. In terms of actual world influence, be it through cultural impact, philosophy or other forms, Judaism and its members have really punched above their weight and historically speaking have been more important that Sikhs, for example, or Zoroastrians (though Zoroastrians are really cool and its fascinating, as a Catholic, to explore the roots of so much of Catholic dogma regarding saints, as it stems from Zoroastrians).

Numbers aren't everything. Hindu's were a huge population, but hinduism meant fuck all for ages because India and the Hindu population were rule by muslims, so the religion itself had minor impacts. Meanwhile, Jews were incredibly influential throughout the Muslim world for banking, alongside Armenians, well into the late 1800's. Not to mention, Jewish authors were also critical in the recovery of and dissemination of Greek texts and Jewish culture has had an enormous impact upon a ton of Eastern Europe. So I would be wary of dimissing it just because the religion is small in number. In actual power and influence it basically outstripped most of the more major faiths.
And, because I'm a North Korea nerd:
Juche is not a religion. In reality, its a sham philosophy which is used as a window dressing for outsiders. The actual ideology of North Korea is far closer to a Nazi ethnic state with a religious worship of the purity of the Korean bloodline and the Korean people itself. For example, the Kim dynasty are regarded as maternal, not paternal figures, in many ways, nurturing leaders for the innocent korean people. They are more regarded as mothers to everyone than actually worshipped as spirits. So its not really a monotheistic religion with Kim Il Sung as a god, but more a Nazi Germany esque worship of the Korean people with the Sung dynasty being regarded as the most Korean Koreans of all. You get a lot more of that stuff in English because its a way to disguise the regime's true ideology. In the actual korean texts and propaganda aimed at its citizens, its far more blunt and racial. The Purest Race is an excellent book that explores this, its cheap on kindle and should be mandatory reading for all interested in North Korea.
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Post by Voss »

That doesn't really hold water though. Between the material that is actively hidden from outsiders and the contempt outsiders have traditionally shown Jewish populations and their knowledge (particularly in Europe) the amount of communication and influence has, historically, been pretty minimal.
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Post by TheNotoriousAMP »

Voss wrote:That doesn't really hold water though. Between the material that is actively hidden from outsiders and the contempt outsiders have traditionally shown Jewish populations and their knowledge (particularly in Europe) the amount of communication and influence has, historically, been pretty minimal.
In theory people live in oposition and shit. In practice what historically happens is that people mingle a ton in between periodic outbreaks of violence or hatred. Sort of like Yugoslavia or Nigeria for example. Jews and Judaism to a lesser extent had a huge impact on the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, as well as Ottoman culture and the Hapsburg dynasty. They formed a crucial part of the intelligentsia in all three cases, for example. They just also happened to be the targets of porgroms and riots when shit really hit the fan and local leaders needed a target.
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Post by Nath »

HR7 wrote:The Crusades comprise eight major holy wars and countless lesser conflicts from the 9th to 11th centuries.
FrankTrollman wrote:Obviously, this book was written by one dude in the days before wikipedia, but what the actual fuck? According to modern Wikipedia, the First Crusade starts in 1096, when the 11th century is almost over. And then the last Crusade ends in 1291, which is the 13th century. I really can't make hide nor hair of these dates.
I guess you can find here and there historians who would consider the Spanish Reconquista hails the beginning of the "Crusades" era. That would be even earlier, in the 8th century. The Wikipedia article mentions it, and it seems popes retroactively labeled the Reconquista as a crusade.
FranKTrollman wrote:Egypt and Syria are different countries at these times who pay homage to different Caliphs and have different cultures and armies and religions and shit.
And that little, minor detail that while the Crusaders were resting in Antioch, the Seljuqs and Fatimids were fighting over Jerusalem. When the Crusader finally reached and seized Jerusalem in 1099, the city had changed hands.
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 4: The Military Orders and Crusading Warfare

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Where's my pimp cane?
FrankT:

This is 12 pages long, and initially about the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. It's important to note that the Knights Hospitaller started doing their thing well before the First Crusade took off, while the Knights Templar got their papal blessings in 1129. It's really the kind of thing that I think this chapter should note. Anyway, this chapter is divided into four sections, and only one of them is nominally about the military orders. The rest of the chapter is a rambling diatribe about how awesome Frankish military equipment was, followed by a discussion of fortresses. So the chapter title is nominally correct: it is about “The Military Orders” and (somewhat later) about “Crusading Warfare.” My guess is that the author wrote up a little piece on the two holy orders of knights and lacking anywhere else to put it, the editor stuck it into the section on crusading warfare.

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Knights Hospitaller also would like a pimp cane! With scarce donations, they have to lean jauntily on their shields.

The chapter, and indeed most of the book, takes an unabashedly pro-Crusader stance most of the time. So the fact that the Hospitallers and the Templars were total assholes to each other and constantly undermined each other in an attempt to divert donations and recruits from the other order to themselves is portrayed as disappointing, rather than being evidence that perhaps you shouldn't be rooting for these greedy assholes in the first place.
AncientH:

It does rather emphasize one of the fundamental flaws of this book, which is that while "legendary" and "fantasy" Crusades campaigns are deemed possible, they don't really give you either the resources or the inspiration for it. You'd think they'd at least work in some examples of diabolical sorcerers or something from the fiction of Robert E. Howard, who had weird fiction set during the Crusades, but it's all very much lacking. Indeed, the /focus/ and /purpose/ of a campaign is very much absent from what's supposed to be a "campaign sourcebook." Really, this is a book about the Crusades as a setting, not a book that tells you why a bunch of complete strangers would get together and go have an adventure...or, well, go on a Crusade together.

Great emphasis for the Military Orders is placed on obedience, with 1st-level Monastic Warriors expected to lay down their lives if a 4th-level Monastic Warrior says so. This is incentive enough for most player characters with this kit to get up to 4th level as quickly as they can. Most of the interesting stuff where the Templars turned into a bank and the Hospitallers took over Malta isn't really mentioned.

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Also, the whole Baphomet thing.
FrankT:


The section on Medieval Combat is... well it's completely insane. It goes on a big rant about all the layers of armor that Frankish knights wore, but sort of forgets to mention how any of that shit translates into an AD&D armor class. It's extremely key information, and I don't think this book covers it anywhere. Then it tells various tall tales about how bad ass the Frankish knights were and how they totally kicked the ass of Egyptian armies many times their size, and gives examples of how Turkish bows lacked the power to bust through their heavy armor (not that there are any fucking rules for that). The big thing making my brain bleed about all this is that of course the Turkish forces were coming from modern day Iraq, while the Egyptian forces were, obviously, coming from Egypt. And those are really obviously not the same place.

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Of course, Fox News also thinks that Egypt and Iraq are the same place, so it's not like this book is alone in that particular misconception.

But really, the central premise is kind of hard to take. If Frankish knights were so fucking unstoppable, why was Saladin able to so conclusively route them in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin? The battle gets namechecked in this chapter (the book appears to think that defeat can be blamed on off-battlefield squabbling between the holy orders of Christian knights, rather than that the Crusaders were smoked out and devastated by archers). You'd think that this section would be about military command structures (how many footmen can a knight command?), or maybe the difference between Egyptian, Berber, Turkish, and Persian troops. But you don't get any of that. Instead you get a weird dateless informercial for Frankish military equipment. There's a rant about how crossbows are so awesome that they were banned by the Pope for being too awesome.
The actual decree came in 1139, and did ban crossbows, but also regular bows and slings and every other missile weapon from being deployed against Christians. And it was rescinded because that's fucking retarded and no one was going along with it anyway. In short, it has absolutely fuck all to do with how effective or not any particular pieces of Frankish military equipment was.

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Reading this chapter, you wouldn't know that not all the Islamic cavalry rode horses. Or that the Islamic side had cavalry at all.
AncientH:

Some of this equipment fappery goes into true hyperbole:
When terrain or circumstances prevented a charge, the Franks favored a heavy Norman longsword, which could cut a man in half.
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The really amazing tone-deafness about this section is that, according to the rules all characters have access to the exact same equipment, and shit like full plate armor and backpacks isn't on it. So the height of military technology is back to dipping your sword in latrines and hoping the Muslims haven't cured all your diseases yet with their superior alchemy and medicine.

I suppose I should spend a minute to remind people that battles were also relatively rare...not like, super rare during the Crusades, but during the Middle Ages generally you had lots more sieges than battles. The Crusaders laid a lot of sieges, they only fought battles when they had to. This is because in any given battle, individual troops are very likely to end up dead, so you're not going to fight one unless you a) have no choice, or b) think you have a shot at winning the thing. For a battle to happen both sides need to decide to fight it. Whereas with a siege, you just roll up, put together a couple catapults, dig a few trenches, and Bob's your uncle.

All of which is interesting from a military history point of view, but not terribly useful from a campaign perspective. Very few people are going to run a massive battle as part of a game, and if you do it's generally very significant and there's a high chance that PCs are going to die. Most of the time, battles are background events which occasionally impact the plot, or elements of character backstories.

"I almost got my knackers cut off at the Battle of Antioch. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you about it."
FrankT:

The subsection called “Military Tactics” in fact has no discussion of tactics at all. It's entirely about strategic concerns in the aftermath of the creation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. See, most of the holy warriors have gone home during this period, so the remaining Christians are chronically short of manpower and don't have any reserves. So they do everything they can to avoid casualties, even if that means giving up a lot of time. They would seriously rather maintain a siege on a Lebanese city for seven years and suffer few casualties than to storm the place and take it in seven days and take a bunch of unrecoverable losses. With time frames like that, I'm not sure the calculus actually works out, but with the certain knowledge the reinforcements aren't coming, I can certainly see where the Crusaders were coming from.

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But, and this is really important, none of that is particularly a discussion of “tactics.” The author is really proud of knowing that laying siege to a city in this time period was called “investing” and mentions this several times. But there's actually more discussion of military tactics in the rant about Frankish equipment. At least that section talked about how cool heavy cavalry charges were. This is just a list of dates and logistical concerns.
AncientH:

I should mention one of our favorite parts of this book is that when a Nobleman Priest hits 8th level, they're appointed to one of the newly created parishes or bishoprics in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

It's part of the oldthink of AD&D, where 9th level Fighters assume the title "Lord" and get a small keep and a handful of men-at-arms. It's the kind of thing parodied in Hackmaster, just the silliness of the medieval trappings with the level mechanics. The thing about AD&D is that "high level" for that game was like 8th or 9th. There was already lots of level inflation going on in the Forgotten Realms and Dark Sun and all that, but think about it: how powerful, in relative terms, are your 3e or 3.5e or 4e characters to the name-level NPCs in the setting? When you're 1st level, 8th level seems ten thousand orcs away, but when you are 8th level, you're not kinging it in a castle either, are you? It's just Dragonball power mechanics, is what it really is.

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FrankT:

The latest, longest, and probably most interesting section in this chapter is the thing on castles. It's called “Crusader Castles,” which is a little bit weird because they just spent a section ranting on how important it was for Crusaders to lay siege to Muslim owned fortresses. Indeed, a bunch of this section is about capturing castles that don't belong to the Crusaders. This section doesn't really follow any coherent narrative, but if you somewhat generously just think of the topic as “Castles,” it does mostly stay on topic. That might literally be a first for this book.

Anyway, one paragraph tells you a story about how adventurers snuck into a Muslim fortress in 1098 with the help of a disgruntled Muslim blacksmith, and the next paragraph is talking about the chronic manpower shortages of Frankish fortresses in the 12th century. So It's a little bit like watching an episode of drunk history, but the rants are more interesting than in most of the rest of the book, and there's a floorplan of a fort.
AncientH:

Crusader castles were really nothing special, they're just like castles built in Europe during the period.

Also, have you seen David Macaulay's Castle? If not, stop and go watch it. It's much better than the rest of this chapter.

I should also mention that the Crusader kingdoms were called Outremer, which means "across the sea." We ended up using the same term in Runner Havens for the new islands created across the bay in Seattle. I guess it seemed clever to me at the time.

Only one chapter today. Bobby tired.
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Post by TheNotoriousAMP »

In the author's defense, crossbows were kind of the shit back then, sort of a prototype musket. They were powerful as fuck, deadly even to armored men and you could basically give them to some schmuck off the street, tell them to point the pointy end in the right direction and you'd have at least a functional soldier that can do some damage. The Pope banned the crossbow for all of those reasons, while the rest of the weapons were mostly because "ranged weapons are bad and shit" the crossbow really did threaten the existing social order.

As for Frankish nights, same sort of thing. Man for man, they were kind of gods amongst men. They were often out thought and outnumbered, but if they ever got into close quarters with a reasonably sized enemy force, it almost never ended well for the opposition. Lance+heavily armored, big man (the genetic advantanges in size that North Europeans could have if properly fed did play a role during his age of melee combat)+big fucking horse is hard to beat without smart thinking.

The turkish bow comments were bullshit though, the recurve bow and its trained user were basically the reasons why the man for man superiority of the Franks couldn't show through.
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Post by RelentlessImp »

I'm not sure how historically accurate this stuff is in detail; broad strokes it seems more or less accurate, but it's weird what he chooses to focus on. I mean, during the 8th crusade King Louis basically shat himself to death, and I might mention that as an example of the omnipresent danger of disease, and also because it would make 13 year old boys giggle, but no mention here. Saladin, arguably one of the most important and influential characters, is given scant mention. No mention of Muslim Malta or battle for the Mediterranean.


What I'm getting at, in that confused paragraph, is that the book really lacks a sense of scale. The Crusades were a huge, prolonged series of conflicts involving many different groups in many lands, and this snapshot history just zooms in on almost random points of supposed interest that mostly...aren't interesting. Do I care that Zengi was killed by his favorite eunuch Lulu? Fuck no!
I think I get what they were trying to do here. They didn't really want you to go out and fight in the Crusades with this book; they wanted you to focus more on the small stories that made up the Crusades, the personal things involving a couple of people that might make a cool story over a beer one day, not "Big Picture". Because, if I remember correctly, several times the older editions mentioned phrases like "party-focused".

As mentioned later, though, this point could have been way better hammered home if they'd included a few examples of the kind of games you could play in each 'mythic level' setting. Throw in some fucking demon cultists at Legendary at the very damn least. You could probably toss out about a good quarter or more of this book and just fill it explanations of how things could change on the other two settings and adventure hooks.
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Post by Ancient History »

RelentlessImp wrote: I think I get what they were trying to do here. They didn't really want you to go out and fight in the Crusades with this book; they wanted you to focus more on the small stories that made up the Crusades, the personal things involving a couple of people that might make a cool story over a beer one day, not "Big Picture". Because, if I remember correctly, several times the older editions mentioned phrases like "party-focused".

As mentioned later, though, this point could have been way better hammered home if they'd included a few examples of the kind of games you could play in each 'mythic level' setting. Throw in some fucking demon cultists at Legendary at the very damn least. You could probably toss out about a good quarter or more of this book and just fill it explanations of how things could change on the other two settings and adventure hooks.
Well...no. The problem with this book is that right now there is no indication as to how such a campaign is supposed to work. You could be members of the First Crusade participating in mass battles in foreign lands, you could be a landless group of pilgrims going to Outremer and running into trouble, anything. There's no party focus, because there's no focus full stop. So far, all this book is about is the Crusades as a setting, and some character options therein.
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 5: Outremer

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This seems to be roughly the area most of this book is talking about.
FrankT:

As Ancient History mentioned at the end of the last chapter, Outremer is the French word for “overseas” and was used to describe a bunch of the Crusader states in the aftermath of the 1st Crusade. The author feels that using this word is more authentic than using words that are more precise, and so he talks about “Outremer” all over this book to the point where sometimes you literally don't know whether he's talking about Triploi, Lebanon or Tripoli, Libya. Scholarship isn't very good in this book, and discipline even less so – events are continuously conflated that were separated by thousands of miles or hundreds of years.

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But now we have an entire chapter dedicated to “Outremer,” which could quite reasonably fill all of its thirteen pages with a stream of consciousness rant about how French people thought the world worked in regions from Fez to Baghdad, but it doesn't. Instead, this chapter is pretty much laser focused on the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the years 1098 to 1187. This is described as “almost two centuries,” which I think is somewhat generous. It is a bit short of one century. Math is not this book's strong suit is what I'm saying.

So anyway, this chapter comes out and tells you that “the primary setting for the Crusades campaign” is the Holy Land. And presumably the time period between 1098 and 1187, because that's the only place that gets a map or timeline. And that's a perfectly reasonable mission statement. I mean, I could quibble about where the interbellum period between the First Crusade and the Second Crusade really counts as a Crusades campaign – it certainly seems like you'd be on firm ground demanding that at least one Crusade be conducted during a campaign that is named after the Crusades. But it's an interesting time period and I can see the appeal. But... this book does not deliver on that. Sure, it has some wikifacts about the area and the period, and in this chapter it even puts some of those facts in chronological order. But there really isn't any information on actually running a campaign. Reading this chapter, or this entire book for that matter, will give you some snappy anecdotes to mention the next time you're in a party and the subject of Jerusalem in the 12th century comes up – but it doesn't discuss any of the nitty gritty details about how you'd actually work in a group of protagonist adventurers into a cooperative storytelling game in serial format.
AncientH:

Long story short, once the European nobility arrived they carved out a couple kingdoms, duchies, and what have you ruled by the conquering knights and dukes and shit. Most everyone else oohed and aahed at a couple shrines and churches, then fucked off back to Europe.

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Insert random conspiracy theory of your choice.

It's basically one of the great premises of pre-modern warfare: the ability to go and conquer a piece of land and set up with your own castle and peasants and shit. It's especially great if you're a third- or fourth-or-more son in Europe who has no chance of inheriting shit, and not being able to (legally) wage wars against Christians. Now, times were tough for the period that the Crusader Kingdoms lasted, and eventually it all went to hell and they died or went home, but for a period there you really could go and king it for a bit.

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Every Mighty Whitey's dream.

It's one of the motivations of the setting. Not the only one, but one of. However, it's never really presented as such. Which is sad.
FrankT:

There's a little bit about how women pulled off stunts in the Holy Land that they'd never be able to pull off in Europe. Basically, manpower was short everywhere, so if a woman inherited something – there weren't a bunch of male aristocrats waiting in the wings to take her shit. So to use an analogy much more interesting than what this book comes up with, in Outremer there was some Rosie the Riveter shenanigans, while back in France it was all Donna Reed.

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That came later.

The book talks about a concrete example where Princess Alice tried to go all Queen Elizabeth on this shit and the dudebros at the time weren't ready for that kind of uppity woman shenanigans. But the shortage of boots was bad enough that it almost worked. Really, even when this book is bending over backwards to portray the Crusaders in a positive light, they really come off as shitty people.

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AncientH:

One of the major problems facing the Franks is that they followed Roman Catholicism, and most of the local Christians...didn't. Also, they looked brownish, spoke a foreign language, and smelled funny. (No word on what the Syrian Christians thought of the Franks, but chances are they were on pretty much the same wavelength.) So there's plenty of room for political shenanigans and infighting which, again, would have been interesting as a different approach to the game then "meet monsters infidels and stab them in the face."

However, I might be too picky here, since this was still firmly in the AD&D mindset when talking games were pretty much the sole province of White Wolf. There weren't a lot of abilities that focused around diplomacy and social politics, especially if you were a fighter.
FrankT:

There's a lot of soap opera here, and the author takes sides to an incredible degree. We're about one step away from announcing that historical people had small penises. For example:
HR7 wrote:Baldwin's successor, the feebleminded King Guy,was noted for his tendency to believe the last person speaking to him.
Good thing Guy of Lusignan is dead, or the author would get his ass taken to court. There are indeed people who malign Guy for having lost the Holy Land to a vastly superior force led by a superior general, but considering that he went on to found a dynasty that would rule Cyprus for hundreds of years, the evidence that he was feebleminded is pretty fucking slim.
AncientH:

Life in the Middle East was comparatively sweet compared to Europe. There were plenty of books, if you learned how to read anything except your local dialect, lots of sun, plenty of glass, some foreign foods not made out of horse anus, cotton and silk, lots of stuff. Sure, you probably couldn't get a proper pint of scrumple or anything, but it was not bad.

...except for the poor bastards kinging it in Palestine, which had few natural resources and generally relied on merchant traffic. (Note to self: Why wasn't Palestine a major salt-producer? Even leaving aside the Dead Sea, the Mediterranean is brackish.)

One actually interesting bit is that while the original crusaders were militant xenophobes trained to believe all Muslims were evil pagans that must be exterminated, their kids that grew up there and lived side-by-side with them every day were more tolerant. Funny how that works. After that, the author goes into a year-by-year, blow-by-blow of certain major events during the Crusader kingdoms period.
FrankT:

The year by year stuff is hard to take. The historical scholarship is not terribly impressive, but I guess they didn't have wikipedia then. The timeline goes on for a long time and I'm not going to go point by point through the crazy.
AncientH:

Nor am I. I guess this sort of thing is important for a historical campaign, in that you know what the major events are and how your characters will understand what is happening, but remember this was back when news spread at the speed of horse (or, if you're very lucky, ship). So chances are you could be halfway into fighting the Caliphate in Egypt when you get word that the King of Jerusalem just abandoned kingdom and you're on your fucking own.

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Not quite the campaign I was imagining.

Chapter 6: Magic, Monsters, and the Supernatural

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At least we're out of the soap opera slandering.
FrankT:

The book gives itself 15 pages to explain how you're going to add any identifiable D&D elements to the game. It's a lofty goal.

Basically, this is all garbage. For the historical campaign, priest spells have increased casting times and durations. But you're still a full caster who can cast fifth level spells even if you are forced to trade having useless attack spells for having your buff spells supercharged with awesome. This being 2nd edition, there's long rambling diatribes about how the DM can nut punch you if he feels like it, and spells might not work or some shit. But at the end of the day, you're still a full caster and D&D full casters do shit that absolutely fucking never happened in any vaguely recognizable part of Earth history.

The author hasn't even considered for a moment that a person whose profession is “priest” might not have the character class of “priest.” And because of it, we're stuck with every bishop being able to cure the king's leprosy by praying for a few minutes. There is a minimal amount of conversion work you need to do to make any system fit any setting. The author hasn't even considered what that work might look like, let alone actually do it.
AncientH:

The basic problem is that, whatever your personal beliefs in the supernatural powers of clerics, most of them aren't the faithful prayer-minded types, especially not the lay priests or the bishops. It takes a lot of people to make church or monastery work, and the guys at the bottom and at the top are not the type to focus on blessings and exorcisms, they're the one managing vast estates or making sure the bells are greased and ring on time, or selling indulgences and hiring mercenaries, that sort of thing. And that's not even getting into the militant orders.

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But it was AD&D, and the whole idea of classes and kits back then is that they were What It Says On The Tin. This was something that even D&D3 struggled with, and it's a bit like theme decks in card games: logically, rationally, you want the names to mean something. But just as the Eunuch Warlock prestige class has nothing much to do with the Warlock base class, so does being a "priest" not have much to do with being a Priest.

If it makes you feel any better, Mages don't get off much better either. Frank and I talked about this, and the basic agreement we came to is that at least in low-level Sword & Sorcery, priests with magic should just be wizards by another name, like in Conan. It works well, it's true to the source material, and to be quite honest it's closer to what people actually believed back then too. All sorts of Christian priests were believed to be wizards, right up to the fucking popes, and many of the lower-level clerics dabbled as exorcists and sold and traded books on the occult right up through the Renaissance.

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Also, they had to institute specific laws about not fornicating right before you said mass, and a lot of nunneries were brothels. Hard working crusader discounts!
FrankT:

OK, Miracles.

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Actually... pretty much.

So the basic idea is that really powerful divine intervention only has a chance to go off. And what they mean in this case is that there's a baroque table of things that add and subtract percentages for a miracle to go off as intended. Miracles are defined as being particularly high level spells, with that level being dependent on whether you're historical or fantasy or whatever.

And you know what? That's all wrong. Like, top to bottom, completely wrong. Time and time again, people have tried to make low magic settings through the expedient of taking the high level spells away. And that's bullshit. It doesn't work. Settings aren't high magic because people can cast level spells, they are high magic because people can cast low level spells. If spells are part of your daily routine as a starting fucking character, you live in a world that is completely fucking incompatible with anything any human being who has ever lived would even potentially recognize.

Things don't stop being low magic because some asshole somewhere is such a badass that he can make mountains explode. In the real history, a majority of people believed that they did in fact live in such a world. Magic being rare and powerful is completely consistent with a low magic experience. Magic that is common and weak is the stuff of high fantasy. And having to prep your big spells and cast them with no effect a couple times for every time they go off is annoying, but it in no way undoes the fact that 1st level priests get to cast 1st levels spells every god damned day.

The other related issue is that of course all the other crazy of level accumulation is still on like Donkey Kong. So a high level Fighter can still beat an elephant to death with a teddy bear on a stick. So worrying that things might get a little crazy when the casters get high level is rather missing the point. Things are definitely going to be crazy. The only question is the manner in which they are crazy, and I do not see any point at which giving high level spells a spell failure chance addresses the insanity in any way.

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AncientH:

Wizards basically take it in the eye socket worse than priests in some respects. A large swathe of specialists and spells are labeled "verboten," including some really basic and setting-appropriate ones like find familiar, and you have to read the spell you memorized from your spellbook as you cast it (they get the same longer caster times/longer duration bit as priests).

The real boner is, of course, the fluff. Basically, the book assumes that all learned magicians are going to be Islamic ripped-from-the-Arabian-Nights types, and doesn't really give any other ins for Westerners, basically completely ignoring the magician archetypes of Western Europe and the Middle East, along with the fascinating interplay of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and older magical traditions.

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You can technically summon a djinn, but I wouldn't recommend it.

On the other foot are "witches," which are assumed to be pagan spellcasters...from Europe...represented by the sha'ir class from Al-Qadim. This makes so little sense I have no idea what they were smoking. I mean, if they wanted to go all Margaret Murray witch-cult about it I could see that, or if they wanted to go the pact-with-Satan witch I could see that. But in either case, why not use the Witch class or kit which already existed? I don't know. It's a mystery.

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Lose the cat. No familiars in this game!

They suggest that technically, you can replace sorcery with psionics. Then they rape psionics in the skull. That'll teach you for wanting something.
FrankT:

Much space is squandered on lists of spells that Wizards shouldn't have in various levels of fantasticness. But, like the lack of backpacks, sling bullets, and canoes, I don't actually see the point.

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The banned spell lists for priests and wizards are so fucking long, that I have no idea what's left. You'd think that it would make more sense to write in what spells were available rather than the other way around. Honestly, I am not going to comb through the PHB, the Tome of Magic, and the various books of the Al Qadim setting and compare all that shit to the banned list to figure out what is fucking left. That's a stupid way to do things and I'm actually offended.
AncientH:

To preserve game balance (and keep the number of spellcasters or psionicists to a bare minimum), allow either wizards or psionicists in the fantasy campaign--never both. For instance, the legendary Merlin--the advisor to King Arthur--can be interpreted as either a wizard or a psionicist, depending on the source.
I have no idea how talk of psionics during the Crusades led to an example including fucking Merling of King Arthur's court, but the punchline is that a bunch of psionic powers are forbidden too.
FrankT:

The monster list is one place where the book's insistence on making long lists of banned shit would actually potentially be helpful. But even this author wasn't about the go through the monstrous compendium and highlight all the things that don't apply. So instead you get about a page of explaining that you should probably only use monsters that feel like they might be from the Arabian Nights.
AncientH:

Magic items should be rare blah blah blah. They give you an alternative magic items table, and outright bans shit like mattock of the titans and girdle of femininity/masculinity and all magical tridents.

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Nope!

There's also a page given over to holy relics, which sums up as "casts a cleric spell 1/day (1st-3rd level), 1/week (4-5th level), or 1/month (6-7th level or Quest spells)."

Anyway, that's...probably about what you've come to expect at this point. The problem is that while D&D always had a low-fantasy mentality, it never really had a low-magic vibe going, for reasons like those that Frank illustrates. Telling people that magical swords are supposed to be superrare and that you need to save the holy relic's power for the climax of the game just works counter to most people's thinking. D&D is just very rarely about husbanding scarce magical resources, it's all about stretching out what you have to live through the current encounter.

Anyway, next chapter is "Tales of the Crusaders."
Last edited by Ancient History on Mon Jul 21, 2014 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 7: Tales of the Crusades

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Nope.

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Yeah. Pretty much that.
FrankT:

At 16 pages, this is the second longest chapter in the book. Since it doesn't call time for tables and shit and is mostly filled with paragraph after paragraph of text, I'm pretty sure it has more words than other chapters. The chapter breathlessly rambles about various cool shit that happened during the first three crusades. While it has a lot of text for a chapter in this book, it still leaves out a lot of details and is pretty much incomprehensible if you aren't familiar with the events. Since there are no AD&D rules or attempts to tie these events to cooperative storytelling or integrate self-insert characters, I have no idea what this chapter is even for.

The editorializing remains very ham handed. The Second Crusade is described as a “doomed” venture even though it picked up some territory (I guess conquering Lisbon doesn't count for anything?), the Third Crusade is the “last successful” Crusade. All the hilarity of the Fourth Crusade, where they go sack Constantinople (a Christian city!) in order to pay back loans to Venetian ship builders and never reach the Holy Land at all is relegated to a little thing at the end.

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Thank you, Tolstoy.
AncientH:

In this chapter, we examine the goals, highlights, and major accomplishments of the early Crusades to Palestine.
Today, we would replace this chapter with a permanent link to a History Channel documentary on the Crusades, probably hosted on YouTube. There's not really any point to this from a game perspective, it's just a condensed history lesson, like Kurtz was practicing writing a middle-school textbook or something.
FrankT:

Really, there isn't much to say about this chapter, which is a bit odd considering that it literally says more than any of the others. This chapter does a bad idea of explaining what the Crusades were about, or what happened in them, or why you should care. This chapter does an even worse job of describing how you could fit a campaign of D&D into these events or vice versa.

Reading this book feels like you're looking at the synopsis of a series that you are expected to be invested in already. Like, it describes Bohemund of Taranto as an “infamous” Norman knight. Infamous for what? Now, history mostly has decided to name him “Bohemond,” but that's just splitting hairs. The bottom line is that this book introduces Robert ducisfilius by a nick name and pronounces him to be “infamous” but gives no further details as to what the fuck is being talked about.
AncientH:

I suppose this is as good a time as any to discuss the major problem with historical games, which is history is already written. All the major events are already there, and so the question is: how does that impact the game? Can player characters, if they find themselves in a pivotal moment, change the course of history? Or are they just silent actors whose actions escape the chroniclers? What is the actual point of the game, if they know that in a scant few years or centuries their gains will be rolled back, and they will be forced to give up the land they fought and bled for?

This isn't limited to "real life" historical games by any means; pretty much every single iteration of Middle Earth roleplaying is set with the conclusion "It happened just like in the books." pretty much fucking assumed. So given that the beginning and ends are set and (probably) immutable, what's left?

Well, there is the joy of reenactment. You may know that the Vikings are doomed, but that doesn't mean you can have fun pretending to be one and swinging an axe around and quaffing for a bit. You may want to go out and explore the world you've only read about, to experience, if only at a remove, what it is to be a courtly knight in a foreign land, with only your sword and your horse and your wits to win you fame and fortune or dishonorable death.

There is also the chance of just making a change, be it into an entire alternate universe where you assassinate Saladin to a small one where you establish a line of baronets with a crusading ancestor. In this case, the written history is just the beginning, not the inevitability; it's like a time travel movie where you have a chance to influence and effect events which will echo down the centuries.

Or it could just be a low-fantasy romp where fighters can get a proper hack in without worrying about massive dragons and fireballs, a visceral sort of roleplay where the moment matters more than the distant tomorrows. All three are good possible approaches.
FrankT:

Do we really have to go through all three Crusades as explained in this book? It would literally be more helpful to just link people to wikipedia. Here: First Crusade, Second Crusade, Third Crusade. You now have access to way more information on this subject than this fucking chapter covers, and it's laid out in a more sensible and accessible manner. Fuck.
AncientH:

I'm not sure why they needed this chapter and a bibliography. Either or would surely do.

Chapter 8: Adventuring Ideas

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Good questions.
FrankT:

This chapter shits itself in the first sentence. Here, I'll quote it in full:
HR7 wrote:This chapter (for the Dungeon Master only!) gives advise on running a Crusades campaign, then outlines an introductory campaign, suitable for starting adventurers.
I highlighted the relevant parenthetical so you wouldn't think I was going all Grammar Nazi on the difference between “advice” and “advise.” See, probably the central problem with this book so far is that it hasn't actually bothered to explain how one might go about playing a group of adventurers in the setting. Even basic shit like “can you change history?” or “WTF happens if you kill Baldwin or cure the king's leprosy?” are so far unaddressed. So to not be a prodigious waste of space, this book would really have to bring it home in this chapter that is nominally about actually putting all this shit into an actual game. It does not. It doesn't even try. Right from the gate, the book throws in the towel and says that most of the people at the table shouldn't even attempt to read the chapter and instead stand there with a slack jaw.

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That's good, but could you glaze your eyes a bit more?

So far, this entire book could have been better served by handing the players either a history book about the time period or an Al-Quadim book and telling them to figure it the fuck out for themselves. And this chapter brings it home that that's still totally going to be the case.
AncientH:

I guess we should highlight that for all its wordcount, this is a very light crunch book. The only things new are a couple tables a three class kits. So right away, this isn't a book that you dip into to borrow things from. It doesn't have stats for Excalibur or the True Cross or the Ark of the Covenant or the Skull of John the Baptist or the Holy Grail; it doesn't really cover Muslim or Jewish holy relics; there's no new crusades-only equipment or horsetrading rules or anything like that. In 3e terms, this is the equivalent of a 220-page book for a minor setting like Dragonlance with two shitty prestige classes in it.
FrankT:

Despite having spent most of the book glossing over Christian atrocities, the chapter assures you that it hasn't glossed over Christian atrocities.
HR7 wrote:This sourcebook has not glossed over the injustices and petty hatreds that often dominated the Crusades
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I am also dubious.

Anyway, the point of all that is that the book suggests that the DM should gloss over all the atrocities and dickishness in order to give the players a chance to play heroes. This is problematic on a number of levels, as the book hastens to point out that the central premise of the Crusades: to go fight the evil pagans in the Holy Land, is false. The Saracens are neither evil nor pagan. And so what exactly you're supposed to do about being uncomplicated heroes when the central premise is that they have been sent to fight a massive war in a far away land on false pretenses is rather up in the air. The author doesn't have a lot of good ideas here.

The other point is that of course papering over all the wickedness of the time period only even makes sense if everyone is on board with it. You can't drop that idea in right after telling five sixths of the people at the table to stop reading.
AncientH:

So instead of giving Mister Cavern some ideas as to how a group of player characters are supposed to get together and work in this campaign, or to adjudicate the small minefield that is magic in the Crusader period, Kurtz decides to give a minicampaign roadmap called "A Count's Ransom." It's supposed to take place in the intercrusade period between the 1st and 2nd crusades. It basically assumes that you've all gotten to the Crusader states and know each other, but it doesn't involve meeting in a tavern.
FrankT:

There is exactly one adventure arc discussed in this chapter. The chapter is only 6 pages long and obviously it's going to have to cut corners. So many corners have been cut that we're basically looking at a tiny sphere. The adventure is basically the ransom of Count Baldwin of Edessa. Lots of weird historical details are wrong (the PCs are expected to pay fifty thousand dinars rather than the historical sixty thousand dinars, for example), and the actual plot is pretty much left up to the DM to wing. There is a list of potential plot twists, and that's where most of the plot would come from, but these are a list of incompatible suggestions rather than any real plot. It's also a “historical” game where you're working for a 7th level female wizard. Why she wants specifically the characters to work for her, why the characters are willing to do so, and why the characters are working with each other is left unexplained. It's not that there isn't space for groups of adventurers in this time and place, it's that the book still hasn't presented a vision on how to fit them in – even once it's skipping ahead to the step of actually sending them on missions.

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See, in Shadowrun, you're assumed to be Shadowrunners who get missions from Johnsons. You can do other things, but that is the assumption. In Earthdawn, you're assumed to be a band of Adepts out to make a legend of themselves. In D&D, you're assumed to be an adventuring party. In the Crusades period, that assumption is kind of broken a bit – and the author hasn't thrown the reader a fucking bone as far as replacing it with something.
AncientH:

The problems with the minicampaign are the problems of the whole book in a microcosm. Why do the players give a fuck? What's in it for them? How do they get involved? What's the point of the whole thing? I suppose if you had enough mindcaulk you could fill all this stuff in, but at least if this were proper AD&D you could look forward to maybe a dragon behind it or something.

As a point in its favor, however, I will say that at least nominally this minicampaign is appropriate for characters of many different levels, or even a mixed-level party. You could totally have a 1st level Pardoner hanging around listening in on conversations and bribing people and shit while the 5th level Nobleman Warrior sits on his ass and looks suitably badass for the bluebloods or vice versa. There's not a lot of action in this one, so you can actually do that. Of course, they never address that in the text in any way, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
FrankT:

There are five of these adventure seeds. They are like quests or plot hooks or something. But honestly, I still don't understand why the players would get involved. Or what the characters are supposed to do or want.
AncientH:

I think maybe it's a good thing we didn't compare this book to GURPS Crusades (although if anybody wants a challenge, go ahead and do an OSSR of G:C and compare it to this book), because I have a feeling the GURPS people would have demolished Kurtz. Everything that this book falls down on - the historical details, the attractive mechanical options, the ideas for different levels and types of play and campaign - are all where GURPS excels. I mean, that was the joy of GURPS, being able to pull out two random books like GURPS Crusades and Hellboy the Roleplaying Game and deciding to do a historical game set in the Hellboy universe and the PCs are part of the Order of the Knights of Saint Hagan, fighting warlocks and weird shit. That's a cool campaign. But you can't do that with AD&D; hell, you can't really combine this book with any of the other Historical Reference series, not unless you suck Mister Cavern's cock very well indeed.

Glossary
FrankT:

It doesn't get a chapter heading, but it's obviously not part of the DM's only chapter that it is not divided from either. It's a glossary of terms. It's a short list of Arabic, French, Turkish, and Greek words that it thinks you should sprinkle into your descriptions in order to make things sound historical and worldly. I don't think this is terrible advice (not advise). After a few stupid wars in the Islamic world, a lot of these terms are now familiar, but also a lot of them are not. It's a bit over a page and a half, and while it isn't amazingly well written, it's probably the second best resource in this book for actually playing a game set during the Crusades (after, of course, the name chart).
AncientH:

I think it would have been more appropriate if more of these terms were actually used in the book itself, but I like actual real-world vocabulary glossaries more than made-up in-game term glossaries, so I have no complaints.

Annotated Bibliography
FrankT:

It's a page long, but that's because there is an inscrutable annotation on each one. There are fifteen sources, some of them are relevant, some are slightly relevant, and some are just bugfuck insane. Apparently the reason that the author seems to have gotten all his information about European witches from Margaret Murray's witch cult ideas is that he literally was reading Margaret Murray's 1930s ruminations on witchcraft.

So there's a bit of garbage in, garbage out going on here. But even within that context, I can't say that this book does a particularly good job of condensing information from these various sources, nor does it spend much effort into translating any of this shit into game terms.

All in all, even in the days before wikipedia, you'd probably be better off reading some historical dramas and translating it to D&D terms your own damn self.
AncientH:

I'm not sure how many of these the author actually read, but I sure as fuck know that many of them weren't actually used or consulted for this book. To expand on what Frank said, Kurtz cites Margaret Murray's The God of the Witches, which is actually her second bugfuck insane book; I don't think he actually read it, though, because otherwise there'd be more in there about the Horned God and shit. If you read far enough it gets to Alamut by Judith Tarr and the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz (no relation that I know of), and I'd lay dollars to pesos that's the real impetus for this book right there.

And aside from a couple of full-color maps...that's it. But let's look at the back cover for a minute.
The Crusades presents the land of Outremer as a powerful AD&D setting, with historical background, maps, new character kits, details on strange magic and fantastic beasts, and adventures. It is a violent and dangerous world, but one of promise and hope as well. Only the brave need come.
Basically none of that stuff that was promised is in here. The historical background is flawed, there are a grand total of three new kits, there's no new magic, the beasts are all "go steal some from Al-Qadim," and there's only one abbreviated adventure and a handful of adventure seeds. The only thing I'll agree with is that this book contains maps. TSR, you lied to me.

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Post by Username17 »

Coming to this book, I was expecting more. I was expecting grown-worthy racist attitudes about brown people and the kinds of gonzo rules minutiae that AD&D specialized in. Instead I basically got a couple of undergraduate term papers and a book report.

There's not even that much to laugh at, because it doesn't go deeply enough into anything in order to make mistakes that are funny.

With the magic of wikipedia, I can catch errors in historicism in seconds that would have taken me minutes to confirm even with physical historical references on hand back when this was written. So I try to hold myself off from getting too harsh on Mr. Kurtz when he gets a date wrong or transposes Shias and Sunnis or Egyptians and Turks. But the scholarship really honestly isn't that good, and that only leaves the game mechanics - which are almost non-existent.

This whole book reads like a pitch for why the period is cool enough that someone should write a book to use the Crusades as an AD&D adventuring backdrop - not as something that was actually finished and published to attempt to fill that niche.

I feel that our OSSR was not up to standards, and for that I apologize. I'm just... very disappointed with this book.

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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

That's fine, Frank and AH. Those Heavy Metal covers with half-naked armored women in them were hot and brought me much joy.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Yeah, I was trying to spice it up a little. It really is incredible how little there is in some of these books...I mean, even if you compare this to Eurosource, which is contemporary...this is the kinda crap which passed for RPG books back then. This is the reason why AD&D was a lumbering fucking dinosaur compared to White Wolf and FASA. There's just no way that this book succeeds on pretty much any level. There's no bits you could really port to other games, it's useless on its own, and if you did have all the Al-Qadim supplements to draw on...you'd be better off building your own campaign with those and a history book.
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Post by Voss »

I remember the Celt and Norse books being a bit better, at the very least they provided some thought on actually playing D&D in vaguely Nordic/Celtic spaces, whether they were real world or not. There were even norse trolls as a player race and various bobbins on runesticks and whatnot. Though obviously the Norse one stuck in my head a bit more than the Celtic one.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Where can I find out more about the nunnery brothels.

Also what's a good source for the kind of weapons and equipment Saladin's forces would've been using at this time, the Osprey books? I always hear about how their arrows couldn't hurt the crusader's mighty chain armor.

What would the primary weapon of melee combatants be at this time?
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

This looks like a fairly good source with citations:
Army Composition

Medieval sources often wildly exaggerate the size of armies, while armies tended to be raised for specific campaigns, lacking standard peacetime numbers. The English and French crusaders of Richard, the remaining crusaders of Phillip, the German stragglers of Barbarossa, and the forces of Guy, along with the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, in all likelihood numbered roughly 20,000-30,000 men. The army would have been infantry heavy, only a few thousand men being knights, along with Turcopole light cavalry, in all a cavalry force not likely to exceed 4-5,000 men.

The knights of the late 1100s were covered head to toe in chainmail armor, a surcoat, to protect against the heat and signal the knight's allegiance, worn outside of the chain, padded cloth worn underneath. Knights mostly wore conical helms or kettle helms with plate visors, precursors to the great helm. Their warhorses were barded with cloth or leather to protect against arrows, though this was a fairly recent practice. The larger kite shield was giving way to the smaller and more triangular heater shield, while offensive armament consisted of longsword, lance, mace, and axe, of which Richard himself was quite fond.

The infantry were protected by larger kite shaped shields, and wore what chainmail they could acquire, leather being a more common substitute. Their arms consisted mainly of spear and crossbow, the spearmen providing the crossbowmen with a base of fire, and also providing a base and follow up charge for the cavalry.

In addition to the knights and spear/crossbow infantry, Richard supplemented his army with siege engineers, Turcopole light cavalry, fighting in Turkish fashion, and a fleet serving in a logistic role.

Saladin had an army even more mixed in composition than his opponent's. In all Saladin most likely fielded an army roughly the same size as Richard's, 20,-30,000 men, divided more evenly between infantry and cavalry.

The Ayyubid cavalry fell into three categories, Arab horse, Turkish horse-archers, and Mameluk slave horse. The Arab horse, recruited mainly from Bedouin tribes, was lightly armed and armored, wearing little to no armor and perhaps carrying a circular shield. They were armed primarily with lance and longsword, and while popular in earlier Fatimid armies they were being supplanted in the newer Ayyubid military. Turkish horse-archers were recruited from the vast pool of Turkish nomads and tribes that had entered the Middle East in the 1000s, and were renowned for their ability as skirmishers, raiders, and harassers. Their armor consisted of leather or iron or leather lamellar. Offensively their main weapon was the Turkish shortbow, which they could shoot at full speed while on horseback, along with the lance, saber, and mace, the latter two weapons the Turks introduced into Middle Eastern warfare. The Mameluks, slave warriors of mainly Turkish descent, were more heavily armored, though less so than the knights, with chainmail and lamellar, along with fluted helm and a circular shield. They too were armed with saber, mace, and lance, though their primary weapon was the shortbow, which they could use not only in Turkish harassment tactics, but also in disciplined lines, based on their Persian and Byzantine predecessors.

The infantry of Saladin was noticeably more mixed than the cavalry, the Ayyubids having inherited the Fatimid infantry heavy system. Saladin's infantry included everything from Armenian mercenary spearmen and archers, to Nubian archers and javelinmen, to Arab militia, skilled in siege warfare. The arms and armor of the infantry varied widely, according to their background, but most were very lightly armored, often having nothing more than a shield, while arms were primarily bows, spears, and javelins.
Last edited by deaddmwalking on Wed Jul 23, 2014 2:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:Coming to this book, I was expecting more. I was expecting grown-worthy racist attitudes about brown people and the kinds of gonzo rules minutiae that AD&D specialized in. Instead I basically got a couple of undergraduate term papers and a book report.
I've been reading through B1: In Search of the Unknown. In it, there's a lot of talk about two people from a long time ago that fought "barbarians" to become famous. And then in a lot of the artwork in the dungeon they's pictures of people fighting barbarians. It never talks about what a barbarian even looks like until you get to the second dungeon level halfway through things, and it says that barbarians use "curved swords". Which makes the whole thing suddenly a little bit racist, because that's probably either an Arab or Japanese design they're talking about. Or, since the barbarians also have "chiefs", perhaps the Mongols. There's that at least.
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Post by Night Goat »

You're trying too hard to find things to be offended about. Sometimes a curved sword is just a curved sword.
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Post by Username17 »

A forward curving sword could be a kopis (Greek), falcata (Spanish), or kukri (Nepalese). A sword with a curved portion in the middle could be a kopesh (Egyptian). A sword with wavy curves along the length could be a flamberge (French), Flammenschwert (German, and capitalized because it's a German noun), or kris (Indonesian).

Without any more specific markers, a curved sword is just a curved sword.

-Username17
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