Hahah that sounds like a great campaign, I’m surprised the party dropped out. I have had some trouble with certain groups doing historical stuff. I thought this was mainly an American problem but maybe not. Once we had Jake Norwood (the inventor of Riddle of Steel) in town and I took him to visit some friends who had an active gaming group (I did not at the time) and they were pretty sour about having to contend with a few Polish and German names or words. I was amazed! I was telling them, “You are fine with “Drizzt Do’Urden” and “Qhorin Halfhand” and “Aragorn” etc. etc. but somehow “Leszek the Black” throws you for a loop?
My takeaway was you definitely need the right group for an historical game.
As for what is next? I have another one to do in the Monsterberg series which will focus on Western Silesia, Wroclaw / Breslau and the nearby ‘Giant Mountains’, and a large dungeon crawl in the Nibelungen lair.
After that I am not sure yet. At one point i was entertaining doing short adventures in all kinds of settings – from Neolithic to Classical to golden age of piracy etc. But the amount of research and work we had to do for the Scottish module (Reiver’s Lament) however gave me pause. It took much longer (like three times) than the Monsterberg ones. And I am also not sure how much people want to play a game with pre-gen characters.
So I may just stick to more in what I have a lot of available data for, i.e. Central and Northern Europe. And we also have character generation for that zone now. I am tempted by the Balkans, Byzantium, Black Sea etc. but I’d have to do more research for that. Similar to Italy. I’d love to go there but I need to learn more. Renaissance Italy is an immensely complicated context.
So for now, on the next adventure, I might do North Sea / Baltic pirates, maybe centered on Gotland. I might adapt my old Baltic / Prussia campaign (which had some long river boat rides and battles on the Vistula), I might do one in Livonia or Lithuania, or maybe down in Alsace near the Swiss border.
At the moment I’m working on a very short (~ 10 page) adventure set in Franconia, as a ‘first look” mini-module for Players Guide and the Quick Start. The next major book is going to be a ‘monster manual’ with historical characters, archetypal figures (lancer / handgunner etc.) and mythological monsters.
By the way I have Taltos in my character generation, in the computer program but I haven’t put it in the book yet. It is a sub-class / specialization for the Shaman.