I live in India, in other words, my access to gaming materials (roleplaying or otherwise) is almost non-existant. I don't say that it is non-existant due to the Internet. In any case, buying games from here is not an option due to the costs with p&p and to import taxes. That's why I was so happy with my annual vacation in Europe last May: I was going to Portugal, my home country (and a place where the direct access to gaming materials is only a step above India), and I also planned to spend a week in France. In both cases, meeting people and shopping for games were required items in my vacation plan. The present column is thus a break in the regular flow of Rough Quests columns in order to narrate what things went in the Sergio meets gaming front.

Meeting People

Since I was going to France I decided to meet in person people I'd been in contact through the net, especially through RPGnet. For a start, I lunched in Paris with Ben (Sammael99 for the RPGnet crowd) and Alex (a British resident in France, F for gender). Folks, I really enjoyed the lunch. The most memorable insight was provided by Ben: successfuul rpgs in France have a normal print run of around 3,000 copies, similar to a successful American rpg from a small publisher (in other worlds, anyone other than WotC, WW, Paladium and the other handful of big names). Quite good for France.

I've been in contact with Olivier Legrand for a long time and we have been exchanging emails about RPG design in a very fruitful interaction. Olivier is a great designer and I love his games of which I reviewed Mazes & Minotaurs and started translating/adapting Gnomes. (I'll have to finish it some day.) He wrote the best Middle Earth RPG I know of, L'Age des Héros.

Since I was going to France, I decided to visit him at his place in Caen, some 200km from Paris. He and his wife Sofie offered me accomodation and a very warm stay for the last leg of my trip to France. We spent most of the time exchanging ideas about RPG design. We have a lot of common perspectives, even if we translate the same into very different outputs. Our conversations on what shapes an hero, how to translate non-RPG sources (books, movies, etc.) into games, or the key components of gaming will surface in future Rough Quests columns. I loved to visit Caen and it was great to meet you in person, Olivier and Sofie. It was not the last time.

Shopping for Games

I have several RPG books at home in Portugal, books that I was not able to bring to India due to the limitations that travelling by air imposes on bagage (most of them are game books that I buy on the net and that afterwards stay in Lisbon waiting for my vacation visits). Shopping for roleplaying books is mostly useless there. All I can find in a couple of places is some D&D/d20 or WW stuff. Since neither are in my shopping list, there's nothing to look for in my home country. On the other hand, today I can find a limited selection of boardgames, much better than half-a-decade ago.

Shopping in Paris, France, was a delight. Not that there are that many shops, mind you, some six in total. Four of these are located in the Quartier Latin for the very good reason that it is the universitary quarter of Paris and thus it is crowded with potential buyers. Of course, for each game shop there are five computer game shops and another five comics / graphic novels shops (filled with excellent stuff that I didn’t have to courage to look at). My experience at the game shops was wonderful. They have lots and lots of stuff – rpgs, boardgames, minis, you name it – and the staff are helpful and knowledgeable. Salut les copains for your recommendations.

After spending time shopping in Paris and Lisbon I could not leave empty handed. There were plenty of options but I had to make my choices. Here go the highlights:

Roleplaying Games

I bought Nightprowler 2nd ed., Pavillon Noir, Guildes: El Dorado 2nd Ed., Te Deum Pour un Massacre, and Le Magicien d’Oz . No, I didn't buy Qin. Even if I'm more interested in systems than settings, my choice of games is from among those that fall into genres and settings I'm interested in and Ancient China is not part of it.

Two interesting things about French RPGs, the first of which is their consistently high production standards. Their games are usually very good looking, if not gorgeous. Maybe it's because the graphic novel industry in France and Belgium is so strong so there must plenty of talented artists and book designers that will work for almost nothing. I think that companies like WW, SJG, Chaosium, etc. would do a service to themselves if they outsourced the graphic design of their books to France.

The other interesting thing is how common it is to find French RPGs coloured by the Renaissance or Early Modern Age. For instance, the first four games mentionned above share this influence and it can be found in other games such as Agone. I suppose it may have to do with the fact that this is a key period in French history, a period that must be shaping their views of the past.

I had no time to read the five game books I bought and I had to decide which I would bring to India and which I would leave in Lisbon. After perusing the lot I decided to leave in Portugal three of them.

Nightprowler did not impress me, neither in terms of setting (criminals in a Renaissance-inspired world) nor in terms of rules. I especially disliked the cat people (not because they are cat people – I love cats, by the way – but I didn't like the way they are handled; it's miles away from Skyrealms of Jorune, for instance).

Pavillon Noir is a Pirates of the Caribbean game. The setting itself would not make me buy the game if it wasn't for my sleeping Mendes Pinto project (I want to be able to compare it with games more or less set at those times), despite the fact that I was a big fans of pirates when I was a child. The system just didn't catch my attention.

Guildes: El Dorado is a fantasy game set in a fictional world heavily inspired by the European expansion to America of the XVI and XVII centuries (thus I bought it for the same reason as Pavillon Noir). The setting is actually nice but it has a "meta plot" that completely destroyed it for me. System-wise I found nothing that would force me to put the book in my bag. (Word of caution: These comments are based in a very superficial reading of these gamebooks, don't take them for granted.)

Le Magicien d'Oz made it to my bag. It's the second in a line of games for children and, as you may have guessed, it's based on the Wizard of Oz novel. Not only that, it is directly based on a French comics rendition of the tale. The intention is that the children read the comics before playing the main characters so that they have a good grasp of the setting from start up. The concept is very nice and the delivery is also good, even if the system is unispiring, but then a game for children is not exactly the place where you would look for breakthroughs in RPG design. I bought it because I'm looking for games to play with my children and I am sure that I will use this gamebook since they already know the tale of the Wizard of Oz. I will have to use another mechanics, though. Maybe Olivier Legrand’s Gnomes mechanics. (I really love this game and I have to finish my translation/adaptation to English one of these days.) In any case, Le Magicien d'Oz was a good buy.

Yet, the jewel of the lot is Te Deum Pour Un Massacre. What a great game! And what a dude it may turn up in the market place ... Te Deum is an historical game set in the French Wars of Religion of the XVI century (of the movie La Reine Margot fame). The rendition is simply superb. The game comes in an open box that is filled with four paperback books designed in such a way that they have the feel of old tomes (in terms of quality of paper, fonts used, page design and illustrations). Two of the books are all about history: One provides data on France at the time and the lives of her people, the other details the wars of religion in France. The third book is for the system and the last one is for scenarios. All in all it's a complete set that you can literally play out of the box. What about the system? Well, it has the best life-path character creation mechanics I've ever seen, excellent and best by a great margin. The amount of historical knowledge the game creators were able to squeeze into it is just amazing. More important, it just throws out ideas for roleplaying from each sentence and, gasp, it gives similar coverage to male and female characters. Yes, it is also very detailed and time consuming but you are not supposed to use Te Deum for oneoffs neither are you supposed to change characters every odd game session. Te Deum's character creation is a one of the true works of art in the realm of RPGs.

The resolution mechanics are also good, at least on what it concerns their basics. For instance, it uses a dicing system that is one of my soft spots (even if I never used it myself in my design attempts): The d4-d6-d8-d10-d12-d20 scale, used in Te Deum for the values of the attributes. In any case, the system delivers.

If I have to find something that I would go without – at least at this moment, I'm still reading the system - it's the insistence on using qualitative labels attached to the values of the attributes when in game terms only the dice are of significance (the only game I know that uses qualitative labels in a way that is meaningful in game terms is Skyrealms of Jorune, by the way). In any case, Te Deum is really a great game both in terms of setting and system, and it effortlessly enters my top 10.

When I reached Lisbon I was particularly interested in The Riddle of Steel. When TRoS came out it got a lot of attention at RPGnet, a very divided attention in fact: It looked like either people loved it or hated it. I had ordered it through the net and it was waiting for me in Portugal. Now I would have the chance to make up my mind. And boy, my mind did I made in fact. All that hype one or two years ago? Hype it was, the game just does not live to the expectations. A convoluted system, an unmanageable dice-pool core, plus a lot of undelivered simulationist pretentions, there you have a recipe for failure. The game fails miserably in its avowed purpose, to simulate Renaissance fighting. Don't believe me? Just go to ARMA, dowload the wealth of historical resources it contains and compare that stuff to a game of TRoS. The guys at ARMA may know a lot about Renaissance fighting, I am sure they know nothing about RPGs and I doubt they tried TRoS or they would not endorse it. Add to this a magic system that has nothing to do with the rest of the game and there you have a game to be kept in the shelf labeled "Failed Games: Learn From It".

Board Games

I wanted to get some more boardgames to play with my wife since recently we started playing together. This is one of those fields where the staff in the gameshops were really helpful. I was looking at games that are enjoyable if played by two people and they helped in the selection (in the words of one of them, it is hard to get a multiplayer game that is also good when played by two).

I first looked at extensions to Carcassonne since this is a game she likes a lot. I ended buying Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers. Shannon is right on the mark, it really expands on the original Carcassone and moves it into something else. We are still adjusting to those changes. Great game, indeed.

Scarab Lords came next. It's a two player game that seems to be very interesting. I still didn't play it, though. Neither did I play Dungeon Twister but I look forward to it. Alhambra was my next acquisition. At first sight not that different from Carcassonne but I'm sure I'm wrong on this one, at least based on the counsel of the shop attendent. Runebound I bought in Lisbon, not in Paris. Sadly I had to leave it there (I had to opt for one fantasy themed boardgame). I really look forward to bring it in my next trip to Portugal.

I left plenty of games in the shops, though. The most stunning was Cleopatre. It was on display in all shops and I just could say "wow" when I saw it. Unfortunately it had just come out of factory, no-one had played it so I could not get advice on this one. As fate would have it, that same week Shannon came out with his review of Cleopatre and gave it a '3' for content. That settled things, I would not buy it, even if it is the most stunning and beautiful gaming hardware I have seen.

By the way, did anyone find that Wiz Wars box I placed on my luggage to India a couple of years ago, the one that got lost somewhere? If you did, please send me an email about it. I just love this game and would be very, very pleased to get it back.

Other

I intentionaly avoided looking too close at the thousands of minis on display in the different shops. I love minis, yet I’m not very much into wargames (other than as an extention of roleplaying or boardgames). Still, I like to check skirmish wargame rules because they provide ideas for combat in rpgs (as someone noticed some 33 years ago). I ended buying a slim skirmish ruleset of French manking that I left in Lisbon. It just didn’t correspond to my own ideas about how to tackle skirmish combat.

Finally, there were the mags. I love game mags and the French ones are usually quite good. For a start, there’s a new Jeux & Stratégie. I mentionned this before, it was J&S that introduced me to rpgs through its first special number on our hobby (interestingly the same happened with Olivier). It was a great mag on all types of games, rpgs, wargames, boardgames, puzzles, logical games, traditional games, you name it. Unfortunately it was terminated more than one decade ago ("it's the economics, stupid", so they say). The new edition by a completely different publisher and, I suppose, other people altogether follows in the steps of that great magazine of years past but it’s a dwarf living on the shadow of deceased giant (once more, "it's the economics, stupid"). Still, a worthy attempt.

I was happy to see Casus Belli back in print after being plugged-off for one year. If J&S introduced me to RPGs, CB turned RPGs into my hobby. It was always a great mag, filled with information on new games from around the world. It already died once and it would be sad to see it die again. I hope it does not happen.

Ravage is another interesting French mag. Its focus is fantasy gaming and entertainment, so it is not specifically about rpgs. In this sense it is an interesting gauge of what’s changing in the fantasy world. I have an ancient number published some years ago and it was all about CCGs. The number I baught last May has almost dropped the ball on CCGs. Collectible minis are the rage of the moment. Rpgs keep their low profile but enduring presence.

That's it for my visit to gaming world. Next column we will be back to our regular track of rpg design.