Chivalry & Sorcery (C&S) is second only to Rolemaster for how long I've owned and played it. Despite it embodying, to those who know my tastes, literally everything I claim I dislike in role-playing games I have nonetheless stuck by it for four full editions, beginning with its second, and owned everything I could find for it back to its first edition.
To summarize why I shouldn't like it these days:
- It is a very complicated game. (I'm a dullard and prefer simple ones.)
- It tries to have a rule for everything. (I prefer simple and flexible core mechanisms that can be altered at need.)
- It is very strongly stuck in a very specific genre: medieval European fantasy¹. (I prefer systems that are more oriented toward kit-bashing.)
But, despite all this, I like it anyway. I have many fond memories of playing its second edition, remember some disappointment at its third, and exulted at most of that disappointment being fixed in its fourth.
This review is an attempt to explain why.
The convoluted history
While this review is for the fifth edition of the game, C&S is actually one of the oldest RPG lines still in active publication. Indeed I can only think of D&D as an older line in active publication, and even here C&S trumped AD&D in that it was published in 1977, the same year the Monster Manual for AD&D was published, but AD&D could not be called a complete game until the publication of the Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979 (or, if you're a real stickler, until the release of Deities and Demigods in 1980).
This is a white-hair game, is what I'm trying to get across.
Legend has it that C&S began its life as a “fixed-up” D&D game called Chevalier first made in 1976. It was, according to its own creators, Wilf Backhaus and Edward E. Simbalist, a copy of D&D fixed up to be more realistic and they were intent on selling it to TSR at the 1977 Gencon.
Wilf Backhaus and I went to GenCon in 1977 with our Chevalier RPG – admittedly a D&D clone in some respects but also containing all of the seeds that would soon spring forth as Chivalry & Sorcery, which I regard as a dramatic departure from the slash and hack approach to RPG that existed in those early days. Wilf and I were going to approach TSR to see if we could sell them Chevalier, but we had very bad vibes when we witnessed E. Gary Gygax chewing out some poor teen-aged convention volunteer who had managed to goof something up. So we just enjoyed the Con. Then we met Scott. He pointed out his Hyborean Age miniatures rules as something he'd written, and Wilf reached into his ubiquitous briefcase, remarking, “Well, we've written something, too.” Scott was no dummy and saw the potential of Chevalier. He wrote out a letter of intent on the spot, and Chivalry & Sorcery was the result.
—Edward E. Simbalist in interview
Between the “bad vibes” given off by E. Gary Gygax and Scott Bizar's business savvy, Chivalry & Sorcery, a far cry from being a D&D clone, was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977 in a single, very thick for the time book. And even the thickness of the book was challenged by the sheer volume of the content. The book had the usual fantasy RPG rules for character generation, combat, and magic, of course, but it also had a full-fledged miniatures wargame for doing mass combat. Focused as it was on mostly the 12th century of France in style it also had rules for courtly love, tournaments and jousting, fiefs, heraldry, and, as an absolute first (to my knowledge at least), a full system for social influence: characters weren't murder-hobos practically divorced from the setting, using it as a colourful backdrop. They were part of a society and had to navigate it as much as they had to navigate wildernesses and cave complexes.
This wasn't a dungeon-crawling game. This was a fantastical medieval simulation game.
And this all in one book, a feat that was accomplished by taking the hand-typewritten rules and photoreducing them to fit four typed pages per published page. A magnifying glass was almost mandatory for reading these rules and their organization, by virtue of a total lack of electronic editing facilities of the time, was slipshod.
Still, it found its community of ardent supporters and on the strength of that its second edition was published in 1983 as a boxed set with some simplified rules, some reorganizations, some clarifications, and a few more improvements (including broadening the period of history covered). Further the miniatures-based mass combat system was removed and relegated to a supplement (the Chivalry & Sorcery Companion) and a simpler, pencil-and-paper-based system was added in yet another supplement (the Chivalry & Sorcery Companion 2).
Somewhere in between the year of the last C&S2 supplement being published (1984) and 1996 there was a falling-out between FGU and the designing pair of Backhaus and Simbalist. Backhaus being a lawyer, however, was not caught out by the standard FGU contract that transferred ownership of 100% of the game IP—trademarks, rules, content, art, etc.—in perpetuity. Thus it was that a publisher called Highlander Games was selected to publish a third edition of the rules in that year. Highlander, a purpose-made publisher, put out the rules in 1996 and a sizable number of supplements in 1997 before realizing that it had perhaps made two mistakes:
- It misjudged how popular a very crunchy, old-school style game would be in the '90s.
- It stripped C&S's chief claim to fame: its historicity. C&S3 was very much a generic fantasy game in feel and in execution both.
That being said, the new game design was far more streamlined, using a single skills system (given the rather twee name of Skillskape™—yes, with the trademark notice littering every reference to it anywhere in the books!) for everything except social manoeuvring, which still used the old influence system modified slightly by factoring in skills using Skillskape™. While its presentation wasn't particularly nice, especially with the littering of trademark symbols all over, the system itself was passable, it had just stripped that which made C&S beloved by its fans without making something that appealed to a broader audience. Highlander Games died in 1999 and was purchased by Brittania Games, who themselves put out the next edition.
Chivalry & Sorcery: The Rebirth, as this next (fourth) edition was named, continued in 2000 the work begun with Highlander Games, keeping the Skillskape (this time dropping the omnipresent trademark notices except in the frontispiece) resolution system, but streamlining both it and its explanation, restoring the historical simulation aspects that had gone missing, and publishing it in a more eye-pleasing layout. They followed this up with more supplements (“Companions”) that added various races, as well as publishing setting material and adventures. After nearly 20 years of publication at a good enough rate to stay alive, Brittania Games launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a newer, more comprehensive edition, (the fifth for those still counting).
And this fifth edition, written by Stephen Turner, Francis Tiffany, Andy Staples, Colin D. Speirs, A.R.Cowley, and David Blewitt, published finally in 2020, is the topic of this review.
And at long last: the actual review!
Chivalry & Sorcery Fifth Edition is a behemoth of a book and as a necessity I will be glossing over details in favour of getting the flavour of the book across. In a review that's already too long just trying to get the history of the game across, being fully-detailed about this game is not something that can be accomplished without rivalling the book itself for size. For those who know the game, please forgive the necessary eliding.
Components
The book comes in two formats: a huge PDF file and a roughly 600 page hardcover rulebook. The PDF version tries (and often succeeds) to use the features of the PDF format instead of being merely a copy of the physical text. Where these features appear I will make note of them.
The book (hardcopy and PDF both) I am working from is labelled with a copyright date of 2019 and is also indicated as a first printing. The PDF weighs in at roughly 67MB while the book weighs in at about 10kg. (OK, so maybe it isn't that heavy, but wow this thing is a beast!) Every page is full-colour page with a background meant to seemingly evoke an ancient manuscript on vellum or parchment or the like. The layout is clean, the text stands out sufficiently from the background, even on pages that have sizable illustrations with text overlaying part of it. (Such images are faded out as they approach text so text can be printed over it.) The physical book uses good quality, glossy paper. The PDF has a set of tabs in the PDF labelled things like “Introduction” or “Combat” or “Medieval World” which when clicked on take you to that section of the book. This is very good because the book's organization leaves something to be desired (q.v. below) and being able to click around at need is vital. Sadly there is no equivalent in the physical book, so players will have to become familiar with the quirky organization.
The bookmarks in the PDF give us a taste of what's to come. The chapters are: Introduction, The Medieval World, Core Game Mechanics, Character Generation, Vocations, Skills, The Marketplace, Movement & Time, Combat, Magick (sic), Spells, Religion, Being A Gamemaster (sic), The Campaign World, Non-player Characters, The Bestiary, Glossary of Terms. Then follows a list of tables. Almost 320 of them. Get used to tables. You're going to see a lot of them.
Now while I may have a bit of a critical tone here with the tables comment, I can absolutely not fault their accessibility. Sure, C&S5 may even rival Powers & Perils for sheer insanity of tables, but the tables are well-placed in the text (generally right next to rules that use them) and there's no need to buy a separate product that gives you a list of tables. They're right in the document bookmarks. (Further, many of the tables are for specific skills and are basically structured identically, unlike the horrendously heterogenic tables of P&P.)
And one thing I can sing the praises of in this PDF is that the ToC and the Index—yes, this book has an index: seven pages of index, in fact, in very small type—are both linkable from the bottom of each page: ToC on even pages, Index on odd. And while it has a few questionable entries (“ALDRIC – Town City Guard”: a sample character), the index is actually a pretty useful one. This is a rare PDF where I'll take a crack at the index before using Ctrl+F.
C&S was the second published game (to my knowledge) with a detailed society implied (the first being the Tékumel books) and the first published game to have detailed rules about how one interacts in that society. This is a tradition that, outside of the short stumble in C&S3 (which cost the company its existence), has been carried on in this edition.
After the weirdly apologetic Introduction (“At first glance C&S may seem very complex, but this is not so – there is actually really only one system mechanic, this is called Skillskape, all the reams of detail are merely that– added detail that can be simply ignored if desired.“), the chapter on The Medieval World begins on page 10 and ends on page 31. That's 22 pages of information on how the medieval world was structured, how societies viewed different matters, and the various roles of various organizations and social classes. It's very densely-written and a bit of a slog to read, but invaluable to inculcate in players the sheer alienness of thought of the times. (It also has a few ... let's be polite and call them “debatable” ... claims about finer points in history, but these are minor and fine for a fantasy pretendy-fun-time game.)
The information provided covers the entire feudal era, but because this is a vast period of time it's divided into four categories: Early Feudal, High Chivalric, Late Feudal, and Waning Feudal. Some tables already show up in the text here (Town Structure, Guild Presence in Town) and the specific era acts as a modifier in one of them. And this segues neatly into a problem I have with the book.
The organization and editing both are pretty bad. The two tables in this section are rules, not setting information. This would seem to be more accurately placed in the “Being A Gamemaster” or “The Campaign World” section of the book, not stuck in an isolated little island in the middle of the setting. Thankfully there's bookmarks in the PDF, but I'm sure the physical book will be very annoying to deal with. I will likely be making very frequent use of sticky flags.
Of note in this section is a few pages devoted to “Medieval Europe & Sub-Saharan Africa”. I can already hear the screams of “WOKE!!!” from the usual crowd of plug-ignorants scared at the notion that medieval Europe wasn't lily-white all the way. They provide pointers to documented history and make the unequivocal statment:
It is firm belief of everyone involved in Chivalry & Sorcery that Sub-Saharan Africans were present and belong even in the strictest historical campaigns.
It then goes on to point out that the existence of black people (and even black knights!) in medieval Europe does not say that the medieval era was tolerant. Indeed the closing page of the section ends on a downbeat note about the persecutions that were rife in this time frame against Jews, against women, against infidels, etc.
Game mechanics
This is one of the organizational problems of the game. I understand, I think, the reasoning that likely underlies the way they structured things, given that the authors seem to be academics rather than communicators. They are trying to define their terms, in effect, before using them. What this means in practice is that they do 13 pages of explanation of every little nitty-gritty detail of the Skillskape system followed by two pages of the experience system, followed by four pages of the influence system. That's 19 pages of context-free rules, written in a style that would put even an ardent reader of Heidegger to sleep.
At issue is that all of the forward references. For example the bulk of the rules (for Skillskape) frequently reference things like Attribute Bonus. But attributes haven't been described yet, so you're left with this mental blank spot that you just have to remember exists but don't really have any grounding for.
Only after all this is described are you finally given the information that lets you put it to good use: Character Generation. So that's where I'm going to start, describing skills after the bare minimum grounding is provided.
Character creation
Character creation in C&S5 is, as has always historically been the case, a complicated and detailed affair. Thankfully on page 51 there's a checklist of sorts that lets you know of the 19 steps coming up and gives you a good feel for how far along you are. Did I say detailed? Let's give a taste of how detailed with some examples:
- (3) Birth omens and initial PC points
- (5) PC background including social class, social status, and intragroup status
- (6) Sibling rank
- (12) Size
- (15) Lifting & carrying capacity
And so on and so on and so on.
There are three approaches to making character: Points Based, Random, and Lion Heart. In the first character points (with campaigns selected as “Historic”, “Heroic”, or “Mythical” for varying numbers available) are used to buy features with several points offering a choice to buy at a cost or roll on a table for free. In the second, all background tables are rolled on and all attributes are generated by rolling 3D10 and ignorning the lowest. +2 is added for Heroic and +5 for Mythical characters on each attribute. The final option is the same as random, but with 2d10 used and the same modifiers applied for campaign type.
Unique of the games of the era, C&S, in all editions, had birth omens as part of character generation, usually, given the European-based milieu, based on horoscopes. Your birth sign and your birth omens give bonuses to skills and attributes, give bonuses to experience (!), and can even limit choices of profession (not to mention modify subsequent background table rolls). Harping on the organization issues, the terms “Well Aspected”, etc., part of the birth omens, are defined after they're used in tables. Gender and race are selectable, but the default campaign is all-human PCs. There's a section on the position of women in the game that amounts to “it's up to you how much you want to emulate the role of women in feudal society” with some guidelines for what this could entail.
Have you noticed what's missing yet?
That's right! We're at step 4 (of 19) of character generation, we've done bizarre things like “birth omens”, we know how to roll or buy attributes ... but we don't know what they ARE yet! Organization!
You don't know, in fact, except by osmosis through reading about what bonuses and penalties go on some attributes according to birth aspects, social class, father's profession, etc. until you reach step 11 (of *19!) that there are 12 attributes divided into four groups: Physical (Strength, Constitution, Dexterity), Intellectual (Intellect, Wisdom, Discipline), Communal (Bardic Voice, Appearance, Spirit), and Derived (Agility, Ferocity, Charisma).
It is the first nine of these which are purchased or rolled according to the method selected way back in step 1. The final three are calculated as averages of three of the attributes with an additional “innate aptitude” rolled on a d10 or purchased by PC Points. The final attributes give you an Attribute Roll (like a saving throw for times when the character lacks a skill) and ...
Let's forego further talk about these rolls until I get back to the actual game system I skipped over earlier.
At any rate, I think the point is getting across. It's a long and very detailed process, making a character, and this is rendered a bit worse by poor organization of the text. (On the plus side, there are examples at key points that clarify the often-confusing text.) Personally I wouldn't organize character generation this way, but what's here is serviceable, especially if a knowledgable GM helps players through it.
Vocations
But step 19 isn't the end. That just generates your character's background. You still have to select vocations (sort of like classes but not really) and skills. Characters get background skills from their social class and father's vocation. They get vocational (also “primary”) skills from their selected vocation. They can also get secondary skills from their vocation, but aren't as highly trained in them. In addition non-vocational “tertiary” skills can be taken to level 0 based on mental stats. Some vocational skills may be selected as mastered skills. Each of these skill classifications decides your starting level in them, and optionally provides bonuses. It's all very complicated, not particularly well-explained, but at least only happens once, at character generation.
Vocations are sometimes grouped into a larger group (like “Warrior”) and sometimes standalone. They're all very evocative of the setting, giving you vocations like “Serviens & Livered Horsemen” (sic), or “Foresters”, or “Beggars”, or “Herald”, etc. Then the mage section hits and it's even more convoluted and complicated as it interleaves some rules of magick (sic) with the information you need to generate characters. There are a lot of choices, which is good, but badly organized and explained, which is bad. The necessary information is all there, but it's ... ugh. A chore to read. (Were I not a fan of the game since 1983 I probably would have given up by now.)
And now we're about ready to talk about the core system the book dragged us through without context.
Skillscape
Skillscape is the first piece. And I'm going to introduce it backwards. Because at its core, in actual play, C&S is actually quite simple to play. The complexity is shoved into the liminal spaces between game play sessions: character generation, between-session downtime, etc. At its core, though, the game system is simple:
- Look up the “TSC” (Total Success Chance) of your skill. (We'll get into how this is generated later.)
- Apply any situational modifiers.
- Roll a d% paired with a single D10 (the latter being called the “Crit Die”).
- If the d% is less than or equal to the modified TSC from step 2, the character has succeeded. Otherwise the character has failed.
- The crit die shows the scale of success or failure: 1 reflects bare success/failure and 10 reflects overwhelming success/failure. Numbers in between are scaled accordingly.
The crit die takes some getting used to, but in the end works pretty much identically to assorted mechanisms like BRP's three levels of success (5% of target, 20% of target, and the rest) and two levels of failure (5% of target and the rest). Furthermore it does so without requiring special calculations on the fly (something that always bugged me in BRP's system). The d% is a straight binary choice: success or failure. The crit die says how much of a success or failure it is.
In the core game mechanics there is a generic crit die table provided that is used for most cases. But there are often cases where special crit die tables are provided for more focused and concrete results. Many skills, for example, provide a crit table. Agricultural skills, for example, have a system where the harvest results for a region are determined by the GM, but the crit die on the skill use can move an individual farmer's results up or down on the harvest table. These specific crit die tables don't need to be used, but they do add a lot of flavour.
So ... how does one get that aforementioned TSC? We're back to convolution.
Every skill has a “difficulty factor” (DF) ranging from 1 to 10, very simple to impossible. There is a “base chance of success” (BCS) for that skill when used without training (“unskilled BCS”). A DF 1 skill, for example, has an unskilled BCS of 50%; a DF 10, 0%. Getting some training in a skill (level 0) boosts you to the “skilled BCS” which ranges from 60% to 1% from DF 1 to DF 10. Innate talent also modifies in the form of attribute modifiers: bonuses or penalties based on levels of the attributes that govern the skills. Finally each level of skill past 0 adds (typically) 3%. So your “personal skill factor” (PSF%) comes from the attribute bonuses/penalties + skill level bonuses. This PSF% is added to the relevant BCS to come up with your TSC. Easy peasy!
Of course that TSC, as mentioned above is adjusted by situation, but here an added wrinkle comes in. Each skill DF has a “MIN” and “MAX” rating. These are the lowest and highest respectively that your TSC can be adjusted to. So if you have a TSC of 72% in a DF 6 (“difficult”) skill, and you get a bonus of 20%, the resulting 92% is adjusted downward to 90%, the upper limit for a difficult skill. If, on the other hand, you got reduced to anything under 2%, you still have a 2% chance to succeed.
This sounds complicated (and is), but as mentioned before you only calculate this in the RP liminal spaces. In play you only look at your TSC, the MIN, and the MAX, and go to town. The rest of the nonsense is used only during character generation or character advancement between sessions. (And you just know that the skill difficulty factor makes harder skills more expensive in experience points...)
There are a few smaller wrinkles I've glossed over here, and I'm not going to get into the two methods (“quick play” vs. “detailed play”) of doing resisted skill rolls. None of this is hard in actual play; it's just hard to understand the explanation because of all the BSCs getting up into the face of the PSF%s and the DFs and ... it's just so badly explained, taking so many pages to explain a skill system that's actually pretty simple and elegant.
Experience
The experience system, on the other hand, is not so simple. (It's still not bad elegance-wise.) Despite vocations not being classes in the D&D-ish sense (nor even really in the Rolemaster-ish sense), characters have levels and gather experience points. At the core there are three numbers related to experience characters need to track: Total experience, accumulated experience, and experience level. As experience is awarded (and C&S was the first game to my knowledge that specifically awarded experience to characters for doing things that a given character type would do, instead of for being murder hobos), it is added to total experience and accumulated experience. Total experience determines your experience level which puts caps on skill levels before you start to pay inflated prices for skills. Skills are newly-purchased or improved with experience points and are taken from the accumulated experience total. (Think of the accumulated experience as the bank account from which you take points to pay for character advancement.) Learning skills can be done in a variety of ways which can cost money, time, or both and is generally done in “downtime”.
Influence
And this brings us to the third major game mechanism of C&S (and the one it is most famous for): influence. It is hard to get across how revolutionary C&S was in its day. Where D&D and the sheer number of knock-offs being made at the time were all about murder hobos delving through tunnels (though Empire of the Petal Throne gave interesting reasons for this), C&S was all about society. Any kind of society has a social structure, and the influence mechanisms of C&S deal with this.
It sounds a little quirky to have game rules for society, since you could have a society without game rules governing things. (This was, indeed, quite often used as a criticism of the game practically from its inception.) But… Can you? Really?
Raise your hands here those who are experts in medieval social structures and behaviour? One of the many problems that occasionally make me cringe HARD in fantasy literature, games, etc. is the way people blithely assume that modern thought is the way people always thought. That modern behaviour is universal (when it's not even universal in modern times!). The influence rules are used to help cement just how the alien world of medieval times actually worked (within the limits of what can be represented in a game played by modern people at least).
Influence is used specifically in the case of PCs trying to get NPCs to do things, and it involves three steps:
- Figure out who to approach and what you specifically wish them to do.
- Find out if you can even approach the person in question.
- Decide if the approached person will grant the request.
Step #2 actually has potential to lead to a fun sub-game of its own. Unless you happen to run into the person you're trying to influence, setting up an audience for said person to make a decision is a chore in and of itself and may require chains of influence as you try to even get an audience. A peasant, after all, is unlikely to just happen to run into a king and ask for an audience. The peasant may have to influence a village head who knows an influential guild head who has the ear of the king's vizier who … you get the drift. Can all this be played out without rules? Yes. Does it in most games? Not in my experience.
The root stat for influence is the Base Influence Factor (BIF). BIF is composed of the character's charisma paired with their social status and a fraction of their honour. Gifts can be used to positively influence the BIF (with gifts matching the target's tastes getting increased effect) and situational modifiers apply. The resulting Effective Influence is then compared to the target's BIF to come up with a modifier to a skill roll. The skill usually used is Diplomacy, but by circumstance it could be other skills. If the persuasion attempt fails, multiple tries can be made, but at a mounting penalty to each attempt. The crit die determines how much is granted in cases of success, or how badly the target reacts in cases of failure.
The system is not rigidly mechanical. If a request is reasonable and/or doesn't really cost the target anything it may, at GM's discretion, automatically succeed without a die roll. Similarly if the request brings distinct advantage to the target it could also automatically succeed. Obviously unreasonable requests may also flat-out fail without a die roll.
There's a bit more to the system than this, but it's all minor variations on the theme.
Magick
And now we come to the thing that is probably the secret sauce explaining why C&S is sufficiently beloved of its fans that it keeps getting published: the magick (sic) system. C&S has always had a complicated magick system that pushes the limits of playability. The first edition was a massive exercise in die rolling. The second edition elevated the “simplified” system used to make higher-level NPCs into the system used by PCs in general. The third and onward systems use Skillskape, but in ways that are a bit brain-twisting to work out. What follows here is a summary overview that is not going to be 100% accurate and glosses over, of necessity, many of the details.
The first thing that a magick-wielding character must select is their “Mode” (which is a skill). This is effectively their “profession” and informs the way they approach magic. Modes include things like “Divination” or “Enchantment” or “Thaumaturgy” or the like. (There are also mage/priest modes like “Druid” or “Witch”.) Each mode describes the main approach used by the mage in effecting magick, provides a table of modifiers for various “Methods” (for which q.v. below), and gives details on the “focus” they use to channel their magick.
The next piece of the magick-using puzzle is the “Method” of magick (again a skill). These are things like “Basic Magick – Air” or “Command” or “Transcendental”. Spells are categorized into these methods such that “Scorpion's Strike” falls under “Basic Magick – Earth” while “Cloak of Shadows” falls under “Arcane”.
The third piece of the magick-using puzzle is the “Personal Magick Factor” (PMF), which is calculated from the PSF% and the “aspect bonus” (from character generation) which is then used to figure out the “Magick Level” (ML).
And then things get difficult.
Spells are not skills. They are things you either know or you don't. They can be learned from a master, researched from books, or creating it from scratch. (New spells not in the book can be made using this latter approach.) A quirk of the game, however, has always been that learning spells uses the same mechanism as enchanting of materials: each spell has, just like materials, a “Magick Resistance” (MR)—in this case explained as learning the nuances and meter of the spell, and the physical patterns which must be flawlessly executed—that must be reduced to zero before the spell is learned.
Back in the C&S2 days this was done for every spell, including starting spells, and led to people generating huge amounts of paperwork when they wound up with an 11th level starting character whose spells had to be worked out. Thankfully in this edition they have simplified the issue of starting spells into counting a number of “spell points” which are expended in a 1 spell point for 1 spell MR basis. 10 spell points can be expended to have a simple focus (which is STRONGLY recommended!).
Using learned spells is a matter of:
- Casting it (automatic if fully learned).
- Paying Fatigue costs (which may be modified by extras that the mage wishes to employ).
- Targeting the spell to ensure it manifests on the desired target in the desired way.
- Overcoming any defences (including attempts to resist) the target may have.
In a theme that you have heard already many times, the systems are complicated when calculating everything, but in actual play it's actually quite simple. The complexity is pushed off into character generation and other forms of game down time. The actual play-time mechanisms boil down to a roll against the Method of magic for the spell. Despite the reputation, the game is fully playable. It's just presented in a way that makes it seem overwhelmingly complex and fiddly in play, to its detriment.
Enchantment
All magick-users in every edition of C&S are able to make “Magickal Items of Power”. These are classified for simplicity into simple devices (1 spell, limited charges), lesser devices (multiple spells, limited charges), greater devices (multiple spells, self-charging), as well as simple/lesser/greater focuses (aid in spell-casting with greater aid as the focus style advances). To make a device, required materials (specified for each kind of device) are enchanted to an MR of 0 before being assembled into the item (which may require the assistance of a master craftsman). The desired spells are then inserted into the item with rolls of the relevant Method. The crit die in this case can result in extra charges on success or rather bad outcomes on failure. (It is suggested that the GM roll the crit die separately and make note of the results without the player's knowledge.)
That's the mechanical side. On the RP side, the creation of greater devices and focuses in particular can lead to adventures in their own right. Consider this quote from the creation of a lesser focus, for example:
The 7 base materials relate to the structure of the Focus, the remaining 6 materials must have been obtained by the Mage and not simply purchased.
Given some of the things which are required as materials, any GM worth their salt could come up with whole adventures around just having a magick-user gathering the materials for their enchantments.
Religion
C&S1 had “Alignment” as a stat. (No, really!) C&S2 had “Piety” (though in some sloppily-edited later supplements it referenced “Alignment” instead). This edition has “Spirit”.
Where magick in C&S is about coaxing or commanding the spirits and magickal essences of the world into doing what the mage desires, religious workers (outside of the Mage/Priest modes) work “Miracles”.
Miracles are what happens when one's Spirit in one's faith (mixed with some Willpower) causes a deity to effect some form of change. The Faith skill is the conduit of such miracle mongering. (It is treated as a skill mechanically, but the in-character view is that this is a “gift” which can be cultivated. Daoists would approve.) Faith is a core “skill” that all characters have, but ordained priests of a game's faith get bonuses in using it (specifically can select it for “mastery” giving in effect a 20% bonus) while having access to some acts of faith that laity don't get access to.
In a parallel to the PMF of mages, there is a PFF (Personal Faith Factor) based on the character's Spirit and Faith. This PFF determines what level of effect can be accomplished as an act of faith.
Acts of Faith are … a bit of a mess really, and unlike the skill rules or magick rules, these impact actual play. Some are core skills. Some are skills that are part of the vocation of a priest (or monastic order or fighting order). Some require Faith or Spirit rolls. Some don't. Some cost fatigue. Others don't. Some impact everybody. Some only impact fellow believers. Some employ the crit die. Some don't. Some use it, but in entirely different ways than is normal. This is all a bit of a mess that is hand-waved away by a designer's note but I don't find this persuasive. Playing any kind of a priest (as opposed to a Mage/Priest) in this game would be a bit of a pain.
Which is, if you think about it, pretty much on point for religion.
One weakness of the religious system is that it is very much focused on a medieval Christian worldview. Indeed there's a whole section added on the relationship of Jews to the Christian world (complete with lists of pogroms and forced conversions and the like) and rules for Jewish characters as well as a similar section for Muslims. There is also not a lot of guidance given to how to modify these things for other religions (real-world or fantasy). That it can be done is obvious¹ given the existence of Land of the Rising Sun, but having a section on Judaism/Islam that explicitly follows through from its relationship to Christianity is not really good guidance. (This is doubly so when you consider that some acts of faith can only be done by ordained priests, but Muslims don't have ordained clergy.) When combined with the hodge-podge nature of many of the acts of faith you get a section of the rules that are pretty weak in my opinion.
Movement & Combat
This being an old-school design (of the oldest school conceivable) C&S has detailed rules for movement and combat. The movement rules cover downtime, journey time, and combat mode. Rules exist for sea travel, flight, forced marches, terrain, etc. and are all pretty much standard fare for this genre of game.
Combat is based on 15-second rounds and uses an action point system. Unusually the action points are based on a base score (calculated in character generation) and then modified by a 1d10 roll. Armour worn adjusts action points and also provides fatigue costs for heavier armours. Actions are performed in order of highest action point pool remaining to lowest with action point costs being paid and the action determined. (There is an option that declares from lowest to highest then resolves from highest to lowest.) Many actions will take more than one round to complete (e.g. lighting a fire with flint and steel); action points can be carried forward one round to the next to effect these.
Combat actions cost action points based on how skilled the character is at the relevant skill. Attack rolls are skill rolls but there are two ways to deal with defence. In the basic mode half the target's PSF% is subtracted from the attacker's if active or a quarter of it if passive. In the advanced system there are separate attack and defence rolls and the interaction of these can be a little hairy.
There are rules for multiple weapons, switching weapons, ranged combat, mounted combat, bashing of various sorts, parrying, desperate defence, critical hits, etc. etc. etc., many of which are optional. Armour absorbs damage.
It's all in all pretty much a stock old-school game in this way.
Except.
Those who played the original versions of C&S have an alternative system that would feel more comfortable based on “blows”. This uses a 30-second combat round and one expends “blows” to effect actions. This may seem like a thin papering-over of an action point system (because it is) but some of the old version die-hards prefer the language of blows over the language of action points it seems.
But what about mass combat?
One of the unique features of the original edition was that it contained a mass combat system (a miniatures wargame) in the core rules. The second edition relegated that to a “Sourcebook” and added a pencil-and-paper mass combat resolution system into a second such sourcebook. For some reason, despite wars being a nigh-constant in medieval times, this was not carried forward into later editions. This sadly includes this edition as well. Despite its hefty weight of rules and information, this doesn't extend to warfare.
Gamemaster Advice
Older editions of C&S did not have a lot of advice for GMing in the rules proper. You usually had to go to outside sources to figure out how to run C&S properly, which in pre-Internet days was difficult. This edition corrects that with 17 pages of advice on GMing that covers different styles of GMing, how best to approach learning the rules (in parallel with making a game world), how to award experience, etc. Experience is particularly interesting because, again, C&S was the first game to my knowledge that awarded experience for characters doing things that they should be doing in-character instead of being murder hobos.
The advice continues with detailed rules for building a feudal kingdom, with good coverage of how feudal European society was structured, how various elements interacted, and even provides a list of modes of address for various ranks of various professions or social orders. This is all very interesting reading and doesn't involve any actual rules except some minor things about incomes and inheritance.
The real gem of this section, however, lies in the “Generating a Feudal Kingdom” portion in which tools are provided to create the land holdings of various levels of nobility complete with subinfeudation and the nature of their castles. In five simple pages (two simple tables) everything you need to quickly build up any kind of feudal holding is given, complete with descriptions of the castles or manors involved. This is then put together with a real world example of the Baron of Dudley in Worcestershire to show how it can be put together usefully in a game.
Personally I think this part of the book alone is worth the purchase price even if you never use any other part of it.
And the rest
Again as is standard for this variety of game there are detailed pages (oh so many pages!) of items to buy and beasts to encounter. There's also a section on making NPCs (essentially a shortcut through character generation so that you don't have to spend multiple hours between each session to introduce a single NPC).
Personally I find the section on NPCs a bit hard to follow. Every time I crack open that section I find myself confused until I carefully re-read the opening page to it. Non-human races are covered in this section, but rules are provided for PCs of that type as well should the GM desire it in their games. This is an interesting approach that I quite like. It means that by default games are based on human PCs only unless the GM otherwise assents. This reduces the rules-lawyer arguments of players who think that because elves are given rules in the character generation section that it's appropriate for them to play an elf, no matter what the actual setting.
(It should be noted that this section also references presumably-upcoming supplements for more detailed handling.)
There is also a useful glossary of the game's TLAs and FLAWs² that you'll likely want to keep on speed-dial while learning the rules. It's not as bad as, say, Powers & Perils but it's still pretty bad; you'll want to use this.
Conclusion
And this, despite the huge gaping holes in coverage (because this is one beast of a book!) marks the end of the review. I think I've given enough information to get the flavour of the game across and expressed an opinion or two about the contents here or there. This is where I now return to my usual three Goethe-inspired questions:
- What was this game trying to accomplish?
- Did it accomplish this aim?
- Was this aim worth accomplishing?
What was this game trying to accomplish?
C&S has always been, minus the mis-step of the third edition, a game that was about faithfully recreating a society in a role-playing game, not merely dungeon-crawling and wilderness-exploring. While it can easily be used for these, that is not what it is intended for and would likely be overkill. Historically it has also tried to be a game that provides such recreation in a single set of rules or in readily-available supplements.
An additional aim, implied more than outright stated, is that it intends to accomplish this with a handful of relatively simple and consistent mechanisms.
Did it accomplish this aim?
It stumbles a bit in this. One oversight in particular is the absence of any way of resolving large scale conflicts. No Magyar invasions of the marches. No grudge battles between ancient rivals. No upstart dukes. No version of the game after the second edition supports this in any form, wargame or quick resolution, and this is to its detriment.
There are, however, other oversights that bug me, especially as it relates to religions. Many real world religions cannot be modelled using the rules provided and there is little to no guidance given.
As for having a set of simple and consistent mechanisms, it actually mostly manages to accomplish this with the exception of acts of faith. A person playing some kind of priestly character will have a lot of work to do keeping track of their abilities and their status, while a GM running a game involving them will have that on top of the usual GMing burden.
Was this aim worth accomplishing?
This is a harder one that usual for me to answer. As late as the mid-1990s I would have said it was an unequivocal “yes”. Even more than a decade after being introduced to C&S I still loved the game and played it when I had the chance.
Today I'm of two minds, as the opening of this review should hint at.
If you're interested in a (mostly) well-executed old school, crunchy game design Chivalry & Sorcery 5th Edition is well worth checking out. Even if you don't use it as a game, there is lots of valuable information in it for running games in realistic feudal social environments (and the five pages on generating a feudal kingdom are worth the purchase price all by themselves!). The influence rules could be adapted to many other games with varying degrees of effort as well.
If, on the other hand, you, like me, tend to prefer simpler systems and making your own Frankensteined worlds from a pastiche of other cultural and fictitious influences, or you don't need rule guidance for making plausible non-modern societies, and unlike me you're not laden with reminiscence, you probably would want to give Chivalry & Sorcery a pass.
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¹ But c.f. Land of the Rising Sun for a counter-argument.
² Three Letter Acronyms and Four Letter Acronymic Words respectively.
Continuing my little experiment in reviewing little-known RPGs, past and present, I'd like to go in a direction directly opposite of my last review. In that I introduced a game that was in all ways completely different from most RPGs that people in the hobby are familiar with. Instead it is, as I put it in a comment, “RPG meets collaborative fiction with a dash of improv”.
This is an experiment. I'd like to start reviewing little-known RPGs, past and present, as a way of introducing concepts and ideas that are not known at all in the mainstream of our hobby and are often barely known even among the more … shall we say “obsessive”? … elements.