AD&D 2nd Edition Campaign Sourcebook
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 The “historical reference” books.
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The Crusades is HR7, meaning that there were six other previous books in the historical reference series.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.
I'm on the fence as to whether the Historical Reference series was a direct outgrowth of D&D's origin in historical wargaming, or sort of an effort to compete with GURPS Vikings and other historical products from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.
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.
Admit it, if there was a Kingdom of Heaven Director's Cut Sourcebook, you'd at least peek through it.
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.
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.
"A fine example of mid-90s nerdery, in perfect condition aside from the Cheetos stains."
Introduction
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.
I just felt there should be some pictures of crusaders in this review.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Because when you talk about the Crusades, you think King Richard the Lionhearted...
"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.
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.HR7 wrote:The historical backdrop of the Crusades is an ideal setting for the AD&D® game.
I tried, but I couldn't let that comment go without a Lolwut pear.
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.
Chapter 1: Through the Crusader's Eyes
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.
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.”
Ah, Heavy Metal.
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.
Also, there were no uniforms so the spiffy red crosses came later.
Some of the things this book says are very strange. Like this:
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.HR7 wrote:The Crusades comprise eight major holy wars and countless lesser conflicts from the 9th to 11th centuries.
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).
These really never get old.
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.
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.
Or, you know, that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.