You can drop $20 in a heartbeat for adventure gaming stuff these days and still leave the store without a whole lot to show for your cash. An adventure or two. A handful of miniatures. Heck, the latest must-have-it collection of D20-statted beasties will cost you more than that in hardcover.
So along comes Cumberland Games (www.cumberlandgames.com) and Lisa J. Steele to offer you something for your double-sawbuck that is not only more useful than any THREE cookie-cutter D20 tomes, but gives you tons of great info on REAL medieval life in well-organized fun-to-read form. You have to look at such with suspicion -- you see this sort of thing so rarely. But in fact, Fief by Lisa Steele is exactly what it appears to be; the rarest of all RPG items -- a real bargain.
Published by S. John Ross and Cumberland Games as part of the All-Systems Library, Fief is something along the lines of the Holy Grail of reference works for adventure games in the medieval setting. It sets down the way feudal society actually worked in language that today's reader can understand without an advanced degree in history. Though this work is likely to be a delight for casual scholars as well, the real beneficiaries of Steele and her efforts are game designers and gamemasters who wants their fictional pre-industrial societies to work in a logical and somewhat historically-realistic manner. In explaining how such a society really operated, Steele sets down for the reader in about a hundred pages more useful material than can be gleaned from a dozen role-playing manuals.
The tables of meticulously-organized data are worth the price of admission alone for the harried GM who is always dealing with players who ask inconvenient questions about how things work. What fees and taxes do vassals pay for the landholder's protection? What wages can a fighting man or craftsman command for skilled work? What does it cost to host a tournament, lay siege to a castle, or wage a war? What penalties will a local priest impose on parishioners who sin against the Church -- and what does it cost that priest to keep his little parish running? Steele provides all this and more in well-presented tables that are easily referenced for your own gaming. The timeline alone will trigger plenty of ideas for happenings big and small that you can adapt easily to keep your own fantasy/medieval game universe interesting. (When in doubt, steal from history. It is usually more outrageously entertaining than anything you could make upm out of whole cloth.)
Better still, Fief explains the who, what, when, where and how of medieval life from the point-of-view of those who lived it in a most entertaining fashion. There's nothing dry about this concise but comprehensive prose. Fief is not only accurate and useful, it's a good read besides. This may be the real reason why previous hard-to-find editions of this material have been so highly prized in gaming circles.
Fief is presented as an attractively-illustrated, professionally-presented electronic book in Acrobat/PDF format, readable on-screen or printable on your home printer as needed. At $20US for this interesting and useful download, you can't really go wrong. But you don't have to take my word for it. You can download a free preview of the contents of Fief (including a taste of several of those juicy tables, a sampler of the direct and readable prose style, and the complete Table of Contents and Index of the entire volume to show you what you are missing) from Cumberland Games right now. If you write, run, or play in medieval-style adventure game settings, or just want a quick look at the truth of how such societies worked, Fief is more than worth the money, and is highly recommended.
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