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Although this supplement came out in 1998 and is out of print, it's not exactly hard to find. In fact, every games shop I've been to in the last year has had one on its shelf or in its sale bin, just sitting there, gathering Game Shop Dust. Meanwhile, eBay usually has a few of them for sale (I did a search this morning and there were three right now) - I picked up mine off of eBay a couple months ago for pennies.
I've also never seen a review of this book, which is why I think it deserves a review - because it's really worth getting, particularly now when it's likely to be a bargain.
So what's it about, Wood?
It's a supplement for Mage: The Sorcerors Crusade, White Wolf's decent stab at an historical setting for Mage: The Ascension, which notwithstanding the annoying fact that it doesn't have the apostrophe on the front cover (pet hate of mine - I'm a bit of a grammar fascist), is a well-done and fun game. It's set in the high Renaissance, the world of Da Vinci and the Hundred Years' War, and most of the supplements have that flavour to them.
Castles and Covenants deals with the places where the various magickal societies of the setting make their homes, do their politicking, and generally hang out. It's always been a strength of Mage supplements that wizards' castles (variously, "covenants" and "chantries") are treated as places where people live and interact. Compared to Mage's horrendously dated and slightly dodgy Book of Chantries, this is a vast improvement.
Also - and this is an important point - one of the really cool things about this book is that it is completely devoid of rules and statistics. Not a single stat block in evidence. No numerical formulae for constructing chantries. No spell lists. Nothing.
The NPC write-ups - of which there are many - stick to what the characters are like, and in well-written descriptive paragraphs give you all the idea you need to make up the stats yourself to suit your game (none of this "only for characters of levels 7-10" mallarkey you get in other games). It also makes the concepts in the book easily portable to other systems and settings. Any idiot with a bit of experience can knock off a stat block in a few minutes, but the design of a good NPC is a much more difficult task. From the description, for example, you can tell that Templar Commander Northbridge is a stout fighter, whith good leadership skills, who uses low-level magicks; Alamantrah, on the other hand is an elderly don't mess-with-me archmage who wields the power of lightning and fire. It's not hard to figure that out.
I like the approach. I really, really do. However, I have the impression that I'm probably alone in this assessment, and I wouldn'ty be surprised if the book's total lack of stats turned out to be the reason why it's still sitting on those shelves, six years later...
Looks
The book's a decently-produced softback, with a pretty decent front cover illo and artwork which is mostly OK, apart from Jeff Laubenstein's offerings, which are really quite lovely, and which have something of Da Vinci and Holbein in them in some instances. None of the artwork makes me go "ugh", which is usually a good sign, since I can usually find something to hate in most RPG books.
Every character sketch gets a portrait, and most of the covenants described are accompanied by a picture of their home building. It's nice to have a book where every bit of the artwork refers to something on the same page spread.
Content
Apart from the bit of inevitable game fiction at the start (nothing special, frankly) and the first chapter, which gives a decent overview of what covenants are, how they come into being, and how they develop, the body of the book deals with the homes of wizards.
This could be dull - but it isn't. It really isn't.
Chapter Two deals with covenants belonging to the Order of Reason, a confederation of honest artisans, artists, freemasons and merchants, whose goal (in the 15th century, anyway) is to bring the light of reason to the Common Man. It's the best bit of the book. Although the White Tower, the home base of the Order, is a bit dull, the rest of the chapter is full of gems. You have Rowan Castle, where Templars and witch-hunters ride out to rid England of witches with fire and miracle, unaware of the traitors in their midst; Palazzo Thearini, home of a back-stabbing Venetian merchant family, whose magickal powers are so subtle, they don't even realise they're doing magick; The Brandenburg Krankenhaus, where anatomists and doctors tend the sick and delve into the mysteries of the human body, all the time with the threat of heresy hanging over their heads; and Portus Crucis,a mountaintop shipyard which builds flying galleons, which sail to other lands and other worlds. Hooks hang off every single page, and with this taking up 50 pages of the book, it's clearly the one the designers had the most fun with.
Chapter Three deals with the Order's opponents, the Traditions, the Hermetic wizards, the alchemists and witches and stuff. While Horizon, like the White Tower, gives the impression of being there because it's a vital part of the setting and has to be, the other two sections are quite nice. Doissetep Castle is packed full of arrogant wizards who are so busy stabbing each other in the back, they can't deal with the threat they face, while Lord Cabot's Grange is a small, fascinating description of an uneasy alliance between witches, necromancers, alchemists and faeries, its fate hanging in the balance. Again, lots of hooks for adventures without ever having to leave the castle.
Chapters Four and Five deal with covenants that don't fit in the other chapters, ranging from a hellish monastery containing mad monks with magickal powers they cannot control, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it description of a ship full of magi that sails the North Sea, a magickal assassin's guild eating itself from within, a magic island in the Aegean, and (my favourite) a caravan of travelling players. I get the impression that they were running out of space here - I would have liked, for example, the monastery to have had more space at the expence of Horizon, myself, but although most of these descriptions are brief, there's much to inspire.
A lot of the general ideas might seem a bit clichéd - but then, it's supposed to be a book of standard covenants, and that's unavoidable, I guess. I've always thought that an old idea done well is probably more useful in a role-playing game than a new idea done badly (this isn't literature, after all), and Castles and Covenants fulfils that admirably.
To sum up...
Given that you could pick this book up for only a few Pounds (or Dollars, for that matter) on eBay, it's fair to say that it's likely to be a bargain. Don't let the fact that it's for Mage put you off - its lack of specific game stats in favour of useful information means that it doesn't take much to adapt most of the material to any fantasy setting - in most cases, you might need do no more than change the names.
If you see it, pick it up. It'll be worth it.
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