Cocanha Playtest Campaign

I've obviously stolen the format from Chris Kutalik, but here are the notes for the setting I'll be using for my playtests of our medievalist game.

This map is a rough draft.

Cocanha
This campaign is centered around the Cocanha, a fictional island in the Mediterranean off the coast of France.  Much of the island is covered in a mix of farm and scrubland, though its southern portion is home to both a mountain range and a dense forest.  Cocanha is strongly tied to both Occitania and Catalonia, though it also possesses a Muslim past and a small tribe of Basque-like people known as the Yaones.  The people of Cocanha speak a dialect of Occitan known as Cocanhat.

PCs are likely to be members of the same knightly household.

Local Names
Medieval Nicknames

News
Bishop Uc has formed a militia known as the Brotherhood of God with the express purpose of enforcing the Peace of God and eliminating heresy.  He has asked both of the barons to join him, but neither seems interested in stopping their petty squabbles or rooting out Cathars.

Sangriu has been the site of a number of raids by Xabier the Snake in recent weeks.  Folquet is looking for mercenaries to help reinforce his own forces and for stout men willing to find Xabier’s camp.  The knight believes that the infamous bandit is testing the border for weaknesses.

A man claiming to be the bastard son of Baron Ramon has captured the village of Ervesa with the aid of a band of Yaon mercenaries.  It seems they have slaughtered the manor’s holder and captured the maiden Anor, daughter of Baron Bernatz.  The Wolf has offered a large purse and a small manor to anyone able to rescue his daughter.

Father Perrin, chaplin to Baron Bernatz, seeks pious men to investigate the death of his brother.  Many claim that the man was slain by God on High - or one of His saints - but the priest is convinced that his death is the work of the Devil.

Boamundus, a legendary giant said to live in the mountains on the southern side of the island, has been sighted again for the first time in one hundred years.  He has reportedly been stealing cattle from the villages closest to Castel de Calanha.  Several of the manor lords seek champions to win the cattle back.

NPCs
Baron Bernatz The Wolf is the lord of Ezorre.  It is well known that he has ambitions on the continent, and he has left the island at several points to fight on behalf of his liege lord, the count of Toulouse.  

Baron Ramon is the lord of Calanha.  He is the scion of a cadet branch of the Trencavel family, and like the Trencavels of the continent he is an ally of the King of Aragon.  Ramon fancies himself a troubadour of some skill.

Bishop Uc d’Alcazar is the head of the diocese of Cochana.  He is officious, petty, and fiercely anti-Cathar.

Xabier the Snake is the leader of a small group of Yaones that act as bandits operating out of the forests and mountains in the southern part of the island.

Sir Folquet of Sangriu is a banneret to Baron Bernatz and the man usually tasked with leading any of the baron’s forces left on the island while the Wolf is fighting his wars on the continent.

Father Perrin is Baron Bernatz’s chaplin and also serves as secular ruler of the barony while his lord is away.  

Saints of Cocanha
St. Cecilia
St. Foy
St. Martha
St. Sergius Paulus
St. Sebastian

Places

The Barony of Ezorre
Castel d’Ezorre
The seat of Baron Bernatz and the center of government for the entire barony, Castel d’Ezorre is a stone castle of modest sized on the northernmost tip of the island.  Ezorre was originally a timber castle built in the ruins of an old Roman fort, Bernatz’s father had it rebuilt and incorporate much of the Roman architecture into the new structure.

Banneret Manors
Sangriu
Andaro
Ervesa

The Barony of Calanha
Castel de Calanha
This keep acts as the center of the Barony of Calanha.  It is of fairly recent construction, having been built to protect against raids by Mediterranean pirates.

Banneret Manors
Fabero
Nabiras 







 


The Bishopric of Cocanha

Alcazar

Alcazar was the center of government on the island during its occupation by the Moors.  It still acts as both the commercial and religious center, and is the easiest place to find passage to the continent or to the island monastery of Lampisors.

Monasteries
Egleisia
Lampisors

Making Europe into Europa

I've been trying to write this post ever since I first came up with a Fistful of Denars.  You see, I have a problem.  I often desire to run a historical campaign, but I worry over issues of accuracy so much that I never get one off the ground.  This is partially a function of the very thing that makes me want to run the setting in the first place: history is what I have my degree in and, God willing, what I will soon have an advanced degree in.  This gives me a crippling desire to get things right, because I'm "supposed to know that stuff."

So I need something to make me think of the setting in a different way - something like Jeff's Wessex.  He distanced his setting from real world England by using a fictitious map with the names changed.  I kept trying to figure out how to do the same, but the only headway I ever made was by changing the Auvergne to Averoigne, but that comes with certain tonal implications and also the added baggage of trying to represent one of CAS's settings faithfully.

I hit a brick wall, but last night I remembered this:

click to embiggen

That is a map of what would have been the Known World to the Greeks and Romans. Note that Asia is at the top and Jerusalem is roughly in the center as in a Mappa Mundi.  This map contains the parts of the world I'm likely to run a campaign in (Western Europe and the Mediterranean) but is still fantastic enough that I can distance myself from worries about accuracy.

Here is a list of historical games I could see myself running at some point:

Rome c. 150 - 100 BCE

PCs are ex-soldiers or otherwise homeless people who seek to make their fortune in the Eternal City.

Rome c. 400 CE

PCs are a comitatus of Germanic raiders, Roman mercenaries, or whatever else they want to be trampling the Roman Empire under their sandaled feet.

Britain c. 450

PCs are the leaders in a Briton community facing an invasion by some slightly inhuman Anglo-Saxons, weird forest gods, and other British groups.

Ireland c. 850

PCs as Viking settlers in Ireland.  I actually ran this one session or two in college, but the group ended up not being able to meet due to schedule stuff.

Southern France c. 1050

This is a Cthulhu Dark Ages idea I've been kicking around.  PCs work for the bishop of a cathedral town investigating reports of miracles, monsters, and banditry.

Byzantium c. 1050

PCs as mercenaries - Latin, Viking, or otherwise - in Constantinople or a fictitious Byzantine city.  Become emperor or get blinded trying!

Southern France c. 1221

See the above link to the Fistful of Denars Post.

England c. 1215

Can you say "Robin Hood?"  This one is a bit more half-formed than some of the others, but it'd be pretty awesome to run a game about medieval outlaws.

The Holy Roman Empire c. 1390

Robbers, cut-throats, and adventurers in post-plague Germany.  Think Darklands but with maybe a tinsy-winsy bit more fantasy elements.

Looking at that list, I see that I'll need to clean up Northern Europe a bit to make room for Scandinavia so that those vikings can come from somewhere.  The general rule will be that if you're in Western or Northern Europe or the Mediterranean it'd look more or less the same but with monsters and magicians.  The further afield you go, the more it gets like something John Mandeville would write about.

I'd set up each of these campaigns in the following way:

1) History before the start date of the campaign went more or less as it did in the real world - excluding those areas that are cut off on the map.

2) The PCs' actions will constitute the basis of a new, alternate history.

3) Later campaigns set after the events of one that's already been played will make references to events in that campaign.  So if you make your guy Roman Emperor, he'll show up on a list of emperors you find in the HRE game and you'll probably find coins with his face on him.

4) All of them will have way more monsters and dungeons on them than historical Europe did (i.e. they will have some).  This one probably goes without saying, but my wife was quite worried there would be no dungeons when I pitched this to her.  She loves dungeons.

One final note: I'm not getting rid of the Dark Country or anything.  This was more of mental exercise to see how I would run a setting where Romans were Romans and Vikings were Vikings without being filled with crippling doubt.

Thoughts on Harn and Medieval Campaigns

Harn is a setting I have wanted to like for a very long time.  Longtime readers of this blog should know that I love medieval history, indeed I study it for a living, and I in fact came to gaming through medieval history rather than the other way around.  My early high school campaigns were clumsy attempts to more or less recreate the fall of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the various Gothic kingdoms in Western Europe.

I'm far more interested in early and -- especially -- high medieval settings than I am the late aesthetic that seems to hang over AD&D and its settings.  Perhaps it's the fact that I first became acquainted with medieval history when I saw Simon Schama's the History of Britain when I was twelve, and the episode that fascinated me the most was "Conquest!" which, if the title isn't enough of a give away, was about the Norman invasion of England.*  Whatever the reason, I've always been more attracted to hauberks than Gothic plate, and the feuds of petty castellans strike me as better game fodder than the maneuverings of great Houses.

The Dark Country is more an exercise in medievalism than the properly medieval.  It is constructed from a great morass of popular perceptions of the Middle Ages, Gothic literature, as well as actual medieval history.  Still, sometimes I want something with more grounding.  I mentioned in my discussion of the Albigensian Crusade as a setting that merely the idea that the campaign takes place in a more historical milieu allows me to picture it better.  Jeff Rients' melting chairs, cowardly rust monsters, and talking dogs are placed on top of a setting which at its heart feels real to me.  If one was to stand in Nightwick Village and look towards the menacing abbey it would appear as a matte painting on a Corman set:  Moody, terrifying, and beautifully twisted but clearly artificial.

For the most part, this does not bother me.  However, from time to time I want to set something in a world more like the period I study, but perhaps with some embellishments.  Certainly one need not look far for action and adventure in twelfth-century Europe.   Violence and more importantly violent men are common enough that the players should have no trouble finding someone to cross blades with, and the scheming of seneschals provide ample amounts of intrigue for those less interested in combat.

So on the surface, Harn looks perfect for my desires.  The world has often be touted as being one of the most, if not the most, medieval of medieval fantasy settings.  It even takes as its model twelfth-century England which, though it my preferences have now shifted across the channel to France, still appeals to that twelve-year-old boy who heard for the first time how the crown of England was seized, defended, and lost all within one fateful year.  In Harn, Norman helmets and hauberks are the order of the day, and that's just the way I like it.

Harn even has things going for it the actual middle ages lacks, for gaming purposes anyway.  First, the vastness of Harn is mostly a sprawling wilderness.  The Kingdoms of Kaldor and its fellow states are merely islands in the sea of forests, mountains and heaths.  Second, the fact that it is a fantasy setting allows it to be a bit fuzzier with time.  While Kaldor might have Norman-style knights and subinfeudate like William the Conqueror's kingdom, Orbaal is more in the vain of the Danelaw of over a hundred years prior.  Still, it does this without breaking believe ability, which brings me to my third point.

While a historical setting can never truly be accurate due to the limited knowledge we possess, Harn can at least be accurate within its own milieu.  While I'm not one to agonize over crop rotation, I may be more comfortable presenting Harn's towns and cities than I would be those of the Languedoc.  Why?  Because Harn is more definite. I understand that one should place issues of accuracy aside when dealing with D&D, but my historian's brain finds that very difficult in a historical milieu.  Harn somewhat circumvents this problem.

However, I have some problems with Harn.  Bet you didn't see that coming.  First, a quibble: the fantasy naming conventions irritate me to no end.  It both distances the setting from the medieval Europe I so love and  makes comprehension of the setting more difficult as one must work through a series of foreign words -- even though in many cases these words have equivalents that would make their meaning more readily apparent to the reader.  Second, and much more damning, Harn lacks the Church.  A medieval setting with no bishops isn't medieval.  Harn may say it has bishops, which it calls by some bizarre term that I can't be bothered to look up, they are really just D&D pagans with miters on their heads.  Without an organization to give power to their actions, a unified Church, these religions are given far less power than their Earthly equivalents had.

To me the Church is one of the more interesting things about the Middle Ages, and there are ways to include it without including Christianity itself.  One way to do this is the way I took with the Dark Country.  The Church of Law is a kind of crypto-fascist Catholicism with a theology which is similar too Christianity but distinct enough from it that I have wiggle room to make them the bad guys.  Granted, one could also make the organization that started the Crusades and the Inquisition the bad guys, but they are not here to defend themselves.

The other way still allows for elements of paganism.  The fourth Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion, had a more or less medieval Church.*  It had monasteries, abbeys, and cathedrals.  Its monks were tonsured and were benedictine habits.  However, it was still pagan.  All of the good gods had been brought under one Church, and each cathedral was dedicated to one or another in the same way a real world cathedral might be dedicated to the veneration of a saint.

So I'm left with mixed feelings about Harn.  On the one hand it seems better suited for fantasy roleplaying than the Middle Ages.  On the other it lacks one of the core elements that make the Middle Ages interesting and the name recognition places like Northumbria or Gascony have.  I haven't abandoned my Occitania project, but it is already showing some holes that will need to be patched or that ship will have to be abandoned.  While a setting with a silver standard, petty barons, and robber knights might not be up everyone's alley, there are days when its exactly what I want.  Those days have been coming more frequently and consistently in the past few months.

A Fistful of Denars...

...or if you prefer, Once Upon a Time in the Lauragais.

I recently played in Zzarchov's Neoclassical Geek Revival game on G+.  It takes place in a highly fictionalized version of medieval Europe -- the party was currently in Ireland -- and oddly enough that meant Philip the Black of Luxembourg merely had to get on a boat and cross over from Wessex.  After playing in both of those games I noticed something odd: the historical background allowed me to picture the setting more easily even though they both included fantastical elements.  This is even more remarkable in Jeff's Wessex game since I'm still able to picture the physicality of the setting despite football-helmeted goblins and what I can only assume are travelers from Carcosa.

These two campaigns have inspired me to think about how I would use a historical milieu for D&D.  I'd already been thinking about setting a campaign in Southern France, and so I decided to shift the focus away from the Hell-Caverns and towards the Wilderness that surrounds it.  Occitania, a region that contains much of Southern France, will be the broad canvas on which I will paint my milieu.  During the middle ages -- and to a lesser extent today -- Occitania was separated from the Ile-de-France by language and custom.

The time period I would most want to highlight is the Albigensian Crusade.  Depending on which scholar you believe, the crusade was either an attempt to dismantle the various heretical movements in southern France, an act of genocide, an attempt by the northern French to gain territory at the expense of their southern neighbors, or some combination of the three.  This period provides a macro-level event that I can use to give the events in the campaign context.  It also provides the violence necessary for an action-adventure game like D&D without either falling into the trap of being too chaotic or of having the sides remain too stable.  Players, assuming they want to become involved, can either through their lot in whole hog with one side or the other or they can play both sides against the middle a la Yojimbo.

It also provides niches for NPCs.  Fighters and Specialists (since I'll likely be using LotFP) are mercenaries, brigands, and war profiteers who have come to the Lauragais to make their fortunes.  Clerics can be inquisitors, mendicants, or possibly even heretics trying to win support for their side.  Magic Users I'm especially happy with.  This period also marks the emergence of nigromantici (black magicians) in medieval literature, and in a story related by Caesarius of Heisterbach we see a necromancer summon the devil to help root out heresy.*  Some will possibly point out that these characters can be put in any setting if I'm willing to make it fantastic, but it's nice to have "historical precedents."

I want to give the setting a bit of a Spaghetti Western flavor, only with dungeons.  Luckily, parts of southern France are scrubby enough to look like a Fistful of Dollars.  They may not have looked this way at the time, but mood is just as important here as history.  This brings me to a potential problem:  I need some way to divorce the setting from actual history in order to make the way I interpret facts for the game separate from history.  This is necessary in order to add in the fantasy that comes along with D&D and also to avoid offending anyone who has strong feelings about the Cathars -- you'd be surprised how many people that is.  Jeff Rients did this by a fictionalized version of south western England invented by a Victorian novelist.  Sadly, I don't know of anything like that for Occitania.

Or do I?  Take a look at this map:

Those with a knowledge of French geography or the  fiction of Clark Ashton Smith will note that Averoigne has replaced Auvergne.  If wikipedia is correct, CAS actually based Averoigne off of Auvergne.  While Auvergne is not where one thinks of when one thinks of the Albigensian Crusade, it might make an interesting frontier area.  Simon de Montfort or one of his emissaries could use Vyones as a staging point for campaigns further south and Gaspard de Nord could be impressed into hunting heretics in Toulouse or Carcassonne.  This would obviously allow me to add in more fantastic elements since they are already present in the setting.

I may not use Averoigne, since it would be away from most of the actual action of the war, but it is a thought. I would like to have Toulouse, Carcassonne, and Narbonne be on the campaign map, but I think Vyones might deserve a place as well.  I wouldn't be surprised if you see more posts on this idea soon.

EDIT: had to change the link to the Danzig interview I have up there because I had accidentally used a "humorously" edited one that actually completely undermined the humor of the thing.