Campaign Toybox
The Story: In the late 17th century, the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War both ended, leaving Europe in relative peace for the next hundred or so years. During that time, a particular pilgrimage developed, where the wealthy and noble sons of northern Europe could, for the first time, travel south for the purpose not of pursuing trade deals or artistic patrons, but purely for aesthetic and educational reasons. It was known as the Grand Tour and it was much more than just an excuse for living the high life away from mater and pater or a job in parliament. The journey encompassed not just a first-hand education in the wonders of the Renaissance and the Dutch Masters but also a trip back in time through the ruins of Rome, Pompeii and Athens, so as to gain a glimpse of the very origins of such fundamental new ideas as civilization, humanism, democracy and cultural philosophy.
At the time, the Age of Enlightenment was sweeping over Europe, and with it came a short period of time when the ruling classes were not defined so much by money, strength or accident of birth but by culture and experience. To truly be a nobleman worthy of title and honours demanded a level of sophistication and discourse unrivalled before or arguably since. Now, players of D&D have long been familiar with a very literal interpretation of the idea that experience leads to ascension to a new level of being, even literal godhood. Not to mention titles, castles and henchmen.
So let’s make it literal. For each stage of the journey you complete, you gain new superpowers as you comprehend more of the universe, unraveling the true powers manipulated by the ancient Greeks and Romans. And obviously, since you have such powers, the King has decreed that all those who complete the Tour shall be granted immediate land and title and high position in the government (assuming they were gentlemen to begin with, of course, we’re not going crazy here).
Style and Structure: Adding a sacred quest element to power acquisition adds a level of awesome to any campaign, from fantasy to space. Of course, in many games it’s already there to some level – “adventuring” being a risky but quick way to fame and fortune and the hearts of princesses far beyond your lowly station. The twist is to make it a specific quest, and imbed it in a historical context and a European map. For the record, the general itinerary was something along the lines of London to Paris to Basel to Geneva, perhaps down to Spain for a bit, then through St Bernard’s Pass in the Alps to Turin or Milan. Then south through Italy: Florence, Padua, Bologna, Venice, Rome and Naples, then onto war-riven Greece for the very brave. Then back north to the Alps, then Vienna, Dresden, Berlin (perhaps Heidelberg or Munich) and into Holland and Flanders before home to London once more. That could easily make twenty levels, even if shift things around so the final level is in far-away Athens.
Besides the regalia of time and place, it’s almost scary how little work you have to do to use every D&D cliché there is. Consider, for example, that the leading guide to travelling in the Alps, published in 1708 by Johann Scheuchzer, contained a list of the many dragons that inhabited those mountains – a literal monstrous manual for wandering adventurers. Want dungeons with your dragons? Well, they also went spelunking in the same mountains, dropping down into ancient limestone caverns which must have seemed like the very centre of the earth. Then there’s the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, both of which were excavated primarily in the 18th century, with Grand Tourists often taking part, as they also did when they reached the ruins of Ancient Greece. So they were uncovering ancient temples which told them new truths about the lost origins of the world and a lot of the time, collecting all the treasure they could find and taking it back home as trophies. It’s almost as if Tolkein (and perhaps other fantasy writers) was – consciously or unconsciously – recalling the Grand Tour when he talked about wandering south and east across the Middle Earth, amongst remnants of ancient Numenor and the wondrous Elves, over hill and under hill…
PCs and NPCs: History has noted a few famous Grand Tourists: philosopher Thomas Paine, painter Joseph Turner, romantic poets Shelley and Byron; for the most part it is those in the liberal arts who are famed Tourists, perhaps because they were most likely to comment on their experience. That said, science was not neglected; the Grand Tour was the golden age of the geologist and the foundation of the archaeologist. And although you had to be almost exclusively a wealthy gentleman, a few ladies did make their mark on the Tour, hitching up their pannier-skirts in order to scale alpine peaks or wade in the Bosphorous. And let’s remember that along with every Tourist came his entourage – his Cicerone, or tutor, valets, coachmen and butlers, his porters with his luggage, his local guides, his translators, a master for his horse and hounds, perhaps a portrait painter to record the journey, and maybe a doctor to keep your in good health. Some even covered large sections of the journey on a sedan chair carried by stout-armed servants. So you can manage to include almost every class and background on a Grand Tour campaign.
We’ve covered academics and rangers, but there’s more. If we allow for the dragons to be real, a sensible gentleman would not trust solely to his own swordarm or even that of his friend, and would likely bring along some trained soldiers or musketeers to keep things under control. A faithful man might also take his confessor or other local priest (if his academic friends were not already of the cloth). As for character types, you can get a lot of splat mileage from race. Although the Italians didn’t have far to travel, it wasn’t just the English who went on the Tour, and a big part of the experience was learning to deal with the strangeness of other races. Jean Gailhard's Compleat Gentleman (1678) observes of the Tour: "French courteous. Spanish lordly. Italian amorous. German clownish.”
Plots and Villains: Unless you’re a fiend for alternative history superhero settings and have a great affection for the 18th century, don’t get too hung up on rewriting the Age of Enlightenment around the emergence of a new class of ubermenschen. For the most part, that’s too much work. Instead focus on the journey, not the destination, and simply reskin all your D&D adventures and clichés for the 18th century. You’ve got dungeons, dragons, ancient ruins to explore, treasure to find, reputations to build and powers to accumulate, so just go for it. It stands to reason that the Alps are filled with dwarfs, trolls and kobolds as the folk tales say, and if you need war and strife, there was plenty of that building in the Hapsburg states.
What you can add to all this is a kind of “Wacky Races” mentality. To wit: if there is one and only one quest that lets you level up then it becomes of interest who gets to the end first, or at all. The PCs’ rivals will do whatever they can to slow, hinder or scupper the heroes’ Tour, and enterprising PCs will look for chances to do the same in return. You may need a reason why truly enterprising PCs don’t simply kill all their rivals; if not, lots of rivals makes a good alternative – imagine a mass chase like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad. Mad World, where there can only be one who wins the prize in Athens…
Sources: Period sources like the work of Scheuchzer and Gailhard are awesome but hard to come by. Try the internet and the encyclopaedia instead. Television is also a haven: there are at least three excellent British documentaries on the Tour, hosted by such luminaries as Kevin McCloud and Sister Wendy. Dickens discusses the Grand Tour in detail in his novel Little Dorrit. You can also read up about the life of Lord Byron who was very much a player-character type, and threw himself so far into the life-changing nature of the Tour he was never the same afterwards. For learning about the period, you’ll want 18th century films and they abound: the action-packed Brotherhood of the Wolf, the fantastic Plunkett and Maclean, the brilliant Rob Roy, Ridley Scott’s The Duellist, Johnny Depp’s The Libertine, Heath Ledger’s Casanova, Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen, the historic The Dreyfus Affair, the literary Quills, the insane Amadeus. The Musketeers and the Man in the Iron Mask are a bit too early and the revolution of Les Miserables and the Scarlett Pimpernel is a bit too late but in between everything French will help you out, by which I mean French-made and French-set, from Depardieu’s fantastic Cyrano de Bergerac, to the many versions of Dangerous Liasions, to Kirsten Dunst’s wacky Marie Antoinette.
RPGs: Interestingly, there’s a bit of a gap in historical RPGs when it comes to the 18th century. We have plenty that go right up to the Thirty Years War (Warhammer) and the Restoration (7th Sea, Witch Hunter: The Invisible World), then there’s a big gap until Napoleon (GURPS Napoleon, Dragons: In Harm’s Way, Beat to Quarters) and the Prince Regent (Wit and Wilfullness, GURPS: Goblins) show up more than a century later. Unless, of course, you’re a pirate (Skull and Crossbones, Freeport, Poison’d). Maybe it’s time we fixed that.
