I was lucky enough to get a review copy of Alephtar Games and Cubicle 7’s Rome: the Life and Death of the Republic. This supplement is a licenced product for Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying, about which I know nothing. I warned Angus at Cubicle 7 that the best I could do would be a review of the flavour text. Since I got the review copy, it is apparent he agreed to that.

Thankfully he did so. I love this book.

Those of you who know me, or have followed the podcast—especially Collateral—know that I am a fan of Roman history. If you’re planning on doing a military campaign in ancient Rome, I’ve got you covered with episodes about the Republic and Carthage, the Civil Wars, and the Principate. Guess what? Rome: LDR covers two out of those three. Coincidence? You be the judge.

But now that I’m done pimping my own stuff, I’m going to pimp Rome:LDR.

Pros
There are a lot of these.

First is the very breadth of the book. It covers the Monarchy to the fall of the Republic. That’s a heck of a timeframe. It looks at Roman culture, society, religion, games and festivals, the military, and the city itself. It also looks at characters, and magic and superstition—using the Basic Roleplaying System. There is a lot of ground to cover, but this book has over 215 pages of content.

Second is the depth of the information. It just happens to be enough. There isn’t so much that it drowns you, but it isn’t too shallow that you can’t dive in. It gives the game master enough information to present these eras of Rome in a game environment. More likely won’t be necessary, but there’s a very nice bibliography in the back if you need a kick start researching any topic further.

Third is the writing itself. Pete Nash has done a great job. The prose is never heavy. It’s crisp and carries just enough weight. I don’t know whether Mr. Nash is just a very talented writer or if Lawrence Whitaker is an extremely aware editor. Perhaps both. The text is free of the glaring errors that have been so common recently in gaming texts, even from companies that should have the funds to pay for top-notch editing.

This does not read like a text book, even though it is giving us the kind of information one might usually find there. The text seems aware of its purpose, that this is a gaming supplement, that this is part of someone’s escape, someone’s entertainment. I actually think that the flavour portion of this supplement might  better serve kids in high school learning Roman history.

Even with the breadth and depth to which I’ve alluded, the book never loses its core, and that is the city of Rome. Much of this information could be applicable should one play a campaign in one of the provinces—if one is playing in an era with provinces, of course—but the book specifically and consciously aims to discuss the city of Rome (the expansive title aside). That central point provides a lens to help keep the topic focused.

I could continue to gush, and I do on Collateral 29, available from the Accidental Survivors. Leave me to say that this is a great text, one I enjoyed reading, and one that Pete Nash, Alephtar Games, and Cubicle 7 should be proud to have published.

However, nothing is perfect.

Cons
The only complaint I have is the plethora of quotes from primary sources. The vast majority of topics in the book includes quotes from contemporary writers such as Livy, Plutarch and Pliny. The book overflows with them. Now, being a student of history, I am as enamoured of primary sources as the next history grad, but I do think that like salt, they are useful for flavouring, but should not overwhelm the meal. I felt that here, we have a little too much of a good thing. I can understand a writer’s enthusiasm for sharing the words of the people who lived in Rome, but a few quotes on select topics could have done so. I just feel there was too much.

And that’s it. That’s the only con.

So, as you can imagine, I wholeheartedly endorse this product. However, because there is so much information in here, if the players are not as well informed as the GM, a game might come off too much like a lesson. There is nothing wrong with learning as long as it is secondary to the fun. One way of doing this that occurred to me is having the characters be outsiders—perhaps Gauls or Greeks, perhaps even Spaniards—so that as the players learn of the city, so do the characters.

In any case, if you wish to hear more, go listen to the aforementioned Collateral episode.

The cover price on this book is $34.99 USD. That isn’t particularly expensive for the page count, and this book is extremely high quality. Given that I am a cheap bastard, the price would likely make me flinch. I think, though, that if you regularly spend as much on gaming books, that this one certainly matches anything out there. You’re getting a lot of bang for the buck.

I give this one 4.75 gladii out of 5. Outstanding.

I’ve been listening to some lectures about the history of warfare, and—more particularly—the effect of warfare on history, or the lack there of. What is fascinating is that in the first urbanizations in the Old World (Uruk) and the new (Tenochtitlán), it seems that warfare, as such, was absent. There were no walls, no evidence of organizations of warriors, nothing that would indicate military activity. There was organized violence in the form of raiding, but not large-scale political violence. The theory is that originally, culture was transferred through trade.

What a great concept, eh? War is no longer endemic to humanity, though it might be at a certain part of civilization. Maybe we’ll outgrow it? Unlikely, but there is hope.

Along with that interesting information/theory and the attendant thin ray of hope, the discussion of culture and trade at the time of Uruk made me wonder about gaming in a Mesopotamian (or Meso-American) milieu. Technology and accepted society would be very different. I mean, gaming in a Classical Greek (or even Mycenean) campaign is different, but a lot of the assumptions on which we base our characters and settings remain. Taking inspiration from Uruk, or even its successors—in which warfare was absolutely a part—would be very, very different. From Priest-Kings to the lack of iron, to the hierarchy of society, a Sumerian campaign would be pretty alien.

Just having a nice, quiet family Sunday morning and listening to the soundtrack from the Korean drama that made attempts at wuxia, Hong Gil Dong, the Hero (which I’ll refer to as HGD to differentiate the character from the series).

HGD starts out as a fun and promising series. Check out the opening on Youtube. That first 8 minutes totally sold me on the series, and the first few episodes repaid that buy-in. They were amusing with some fun fight scenes and nothing too serious. That’s not to say it was all laughs and silliness. Hong Gil Dong is the bastard son of a noble who both loves his son but knows that as a bastard, his horizons are limited. Gil Dong doesn’t accept those limitations, but he still loves his father. Their relationship was both poignant and sad.

This poignancy did not overshadow the fun of the series, but gave it a dramatic anchor. Unfortunately, the series crept more and more into melodrama. Melodrama is pretty ubiquitous on Korean TV, so this shouldn’t have surprised me. And it wasn’t bad, per se. I liked the characters, and there was still homour and the occasional fun fight scene, but the tears overwhelmed the laughs. I hung in there to the end because what they promised me in the first episode.

See, at the end of that awesome first fight scene, the tag line tells us that the story starts a few years earlier. Given this, I had expected the series to move forward until it reached the opening scene, and then continue on. Without giving spoilers, it does not do this. To me, that’s a total cheat. I loved that opening scene. I loved the mixture of modern with historical. I loved the fight scenes. Perhaps not up to movie standards, but for a TV series, the wire-work was more than acceptable.

But even before I realized that I wasn’t going to get to the payoff I had imagined, two of the characters in the series annoyed me. First, the exiled prince, Lee Chang Hwui, was just way too emo for me. I had no sympathy for him. I think it was a mixture of the character’s visual style and the writing. I don’t blame the actor, because I know that characters such as this are added to cater to Korean teenage girls. These are the kinds of characters they swoon over.

Second, the female protagonist, Heo Yi Nok, is referred to as an idiot and a fool all through the series. She may be naive, but she isn’t stupid. However, both Gil Dong and Chang Hwui, both of whom develop feelings for her, regularly comment on how stupid she is. She does so as well. It really annoyed me. I know this is still part of Korean culture. No matter what gains women have made, Korea remains strongly Confucianism and patriarchal.

The thing is, Yi Nok starts out as a pretty fair hand at martial arts. Not up to Gil Dong’s level (he is pretty much a one-man army at the beginning, being depicted as a human tornado in one great scene), but she handily kicks everyone’s @$$ until Gil Dong shows up. I think she could have been a great foil for both Gil Dong and Chang Hwui were she their equal in all things–martial arts and smarts. Let’s not go the other direction and make her the only intelligent one (because, as we know, all men are idiots), but make all three equals. She does act as Gil Dong’s compassion and revives his long buried empathy for the common people, but she remains a pathetic fool.

I would definitely recommend HGD to lovers of Korean TV. If you dig the regular dramas available in Korea, HGD is going to offer you something both comfortably familiar yet with enough difference to make it novel. If you don’t dig on melodrama, and lots of heat break and tears, check out the first few episodes. But trust me, once things start getting heavy, it doesn’t turn back.

I’d give Hong Gil Dong 4 quarterstaffs out of 5. For the first six or so episodes, I’d make it 4.5 out of 5.

Medieval Mercenaries: the Business of War
William Urban
Greenhill Books, 2006

I have an interest in pre-industrial warfare. I think I have to blame Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V for that (but I digress, and so soon!). I also have an interest in mercenaries (which is absolutely the fault of the Wild Geese). When I saw the book Medieval Mercenaries: the Business of War, I was intrigued. Mercenaries are generally a phenomenon of pre- and post-feudal societies. Though there certainly were those whom we might consider mercenaries operating in feudal societies, these individuals tended to work within the feudal roles, and so are less noticeable and were certainly less organized than, for example, the Italian condottieri.

The best thing about this book is the introduction by Terry Jones (he of Monty Python fame). Mr. Jones has had some success on his own through TV and adapted literature in regards to his series on the Crusades. As such, he has some knowledge of the area, and provides an entertaining read.

Unfortunately, Medieval Mercenaries is much less about mercenaries than it is about warfare. Most of the book recounts a history of medieval warfare in a rather sporadic fashion, not exactly chronological and not exactly thematic. It provides no real insight in this portion of the book, rather it seems to rely on a rather informal style and attempts (some successful) at humour.

Later, getting into the Hundred Years War, there is some discussion of actual bodies of mercenaries, but these are the kind raised through feudal institutions. The author also looks at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s the White Company, but provides mostly a summary of the novel’s events with very little analysis or discussion.

In general, this book might be useful for an individual looking for a light review of the evolution of Medieval warfare (though if looking for a source with actual insight and considered opinion, one would do well to look at something along the lines of Contamine’s War in the Middle Ages or Devries’ Medieval Military Technology.

I still have not found a book to provide the kind of satisfactory exploration of mercenaries in the pre-Renaissance period that J. R. Hale’s War and Society in Renaissance Europe does.

I can’t say this book is useless, but it certainly fails to live up to its title. If one were to find it second-hand or on sale, it might be an acceptable expense. I wouldn’t pay more than $7 (Canadian) for the hardcover or $5 for the paperback.

So that it will not disappear, I bring you once again, the Rant.

Okay, we’ll get one thing out of the way before I start on my rant. I love movies and I love history. A lot of times, I love historical movies. However, I’m a little bit of a Scots History fanatic. Maybe not fanatic, maybe enthusiast. In any case, I have a real problem with a certain historical movie set in Scotland and relating what may be considered the most important period in Scots history. That’s right. I’m talking about Braveheart.

Now, I love the movie. I’ve seen it many times and I always enjoy it. However, as much as I enjoy it as entertainment, I hate it as history. Now, primarily, it is entertainment. Great. However, when you are relating something so pivotal to a country’s history as The Scots Wars of Independence, you really should try to be a bit more careful with the history. I mean, imagine a history of the American Revolution that shows George Washington as a simple farmer instead of a plantation owner, that showed Thomas Jefferson as a weak-willed, indecisive wimp who is ruled by an older relative who in real history was long since dead. Imagine this movie with George Washington wearing a trenchcoat, and having sexual relations with the woman who was to become Queen Victoria. Yeah, a little bit weird, eh?

Of course, most Americans (and most people in the world as a matter of fact) know less about the Scottish Wars of Independence than about the American Revolution. Still, the real story of Sir William Wallace and (more importantly) Robert Bruce is as exciting as any movie, and I don’t see why the industry felt it so necessary to take liberties. Entertainment, they might say. Fine then, why set it in Scotland with real historical figures? Why not set it during, say, the time of King Arthur, or just after the fall of Camelot? I mean, Boorman did Camelot with anachronistic armour and fortifications, not to mention ideas, and nobody cared because Arthur isn’t real, or at least the legendary Arthur isn’t real, and is so divorced from any historical Arthur as to make no difference.

Okay, the rant is going now.

There are a few minor historical inaccuracies that were easy to overlook. They were done mostly to simplify the events for the audience, or should we say ‘dumb it down?for the audience. Wallace (and most of the nobles) would have primarily spoken French. Kilts weren’t worn until more than a hundred years after the events in the movie. The English soldiers would not have worn a single uniform. It has been debated, but our best guess it that Wallace’s wife was killed in their home (since this is a debated point, there is no less validity in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s interpretation, though I would think burning down their home, or her home, would have been as visually exciting as the execution portrayed).

So, those are a taste of the minor historical inaccuracies. A rather larger mistake has Wallace and the future English queen meeting and becoming intimate. Isabella, the French princess portrayed by Sophie Marceau, who becomes the wife of Edward II, did not arrive in England until 1303. The battle at Falkirk, which in the movie Isabella warns Wallace about–which leads to their private time–occurred in 1298. I think somebody was stretching things to try to make Wallace the father of Edward III of England. Edward II was murdered by his wife and son in order to allow that son, Edward III, to ascend the throne. The in-joke of the movie seems to be that the son that murders Ed II and goes on to become one of the more successful English kings was in fact Wallace’s son. Gives a whole new spin to the Wars of the Roses, eh? Of course, Edward III was born almost ten years after Wallace died. Now that’s a long pregnancy.

Also, the whole Falkirk fiasco gets blamed on the nobles. It wasn’t the nobles but the simple fact that Wallace was out of his league when faced with Edward I. The Battle of Stirling Bridge (another thing about the movie I’d like to point out is the highly inaccurate representations of the battles. Where was the bridge at the Battle of Stirling Bridge?) was won by superior strategy but also by the stupidity of the English commander (when the enemy holds one end of a bridge, even if they promise to let you cross, do not send anyone across!) There was no defection by the Irish to the Scots side at Falkirk. There was no fiery inferno on the field. And the English had not bought off the nobles. Wallace got toasted because the schiltron formation (like a turtle with spears pointing out, also known as the tortoise–testudo in Latin–by the Romans) could not withstand the arrow barrage sent up by Edward’s archers. Once the schiltrons were broken, heavy cavalry mopped up pretty easy.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with Braveheart; their depiction of Robert the Bruce. Now, this movie was written by Randall Wallace, who claims some kind of kinship to William Wallace, so it’s obvious the slant of the screenplay. The one thing that the movie fails to represent is that Wallace was fighting for King John Balliol, who held the crown that Robert Bruce felt he was entitled to. Why the heck should the Bruce help Wallace who is helping his enemy?

The actions of Robert the Bruce seem weak and wavering to modern eyes. Let’s put it into modern terms. If you are working for a huge Multi-National Conglomerate, and the promotion goes to someone else who is obviously less qualified, and you are offered another position with the competing company, you’d take it. Patriotism is a relatively modern concept, really born only around the times of the American and French Revolutions. There were limited and sporadic outbursts of it previous, but there really weren’t national identities until recently. In fact, even at the time of Robert the Bruce (who was the third of that name to claim the crown), the king was the King of the Scots, not the King of Scotland.

It was only after the Bruce began his own struggle for the crown that the battle with the English became a truly national phenomenon. This may be attributed to the fact that the Bruce weeded out opposition among the Scots nobles before he took the fight to the English. And, unlike Wallace, his influence was not eradicated with defeat. He had a charisma and a determination that could not be denied. He had setbacks, but he fought through them. He started as a guerrilla fighter and ended with the Battle of Bannockburn.

There’s another thing you need to get straight. The Bruce was not at the Bannockburn to pay homage to Edward II, who led the English army. The Bruce was there because his naive and chivalry-loving brother, oddly enough, also an Edward (Edward Bruce of course), had made a deal with the constable of Stirling Castle that if the English didn’t get within a certain distance by a certain day, the castle would surrender. If King Robert (and he was king by that time) wanted to take Stirling Castle (which guarded the main approach into the Scots heartlands from England) he had to stop Edward II’s army from reaching the castle. He also didn’t need to call on the memory of William Wallace to induce his army to fight for him. They came for him.

Robert the Bruce was the man who succeeded in gaining Scotland its freedom. The words the screenwriter put into William Wallace’s mouth seem to come directly from the Declaration of Arbroath, a document sent by King Robert’s adherents to the Pope attempting to sway the Church (which the English had already bought, which excommunicated almost the entire nation of Scotland, and which refused to address Robert the Bruce as King, though he would accept no letter from the Vatican that was addressed to any other than King Robert).

And those who point to the Declaration of Arbroath as a statement of patriotism, need to consider it as a product of the time and a piece of propaganda. That’s what it was. It did not lead to a free and democratic country, rather a return of a Scots king.

The bottom line is that Mel deserved the Oscar for making such an enjoyable, exciting movie with great, vivid characters and a moving storyline. Braveheart is not even close to history though. When you watch the movie, think of it in the same vein as Boorman’s Excalibur or any other fantasy movie set in a real locale. Enjoy the movie, but if you want the real story, read some of the amazing books available on the Scots Wars of Independence.

Here endeth the rant. Thanks for hanging on for the ride.