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This video explains the Adal War farily well I thought, including a bit about the Portuguese role in it.
Makes me wish Civilization hadn’t gotten so messed up, it would be fun to play all this out. Civ 5 and Civ 6 are just not what the old game was though, and just don’t feel the same.
One of the things interesting about these is how many of them are wearing armor under their clothing, including iron caps under their hats.
Here is another one, complete scan online
Liber machinarum (Ingenieurs-Handschrift): “Anonymus der Hussitenkriege” – BSB Clm 197,I
Yes I have been looking closely at Portugal in the Pacific Rim, I have some Portuguese HEMA friends I’ve been talking to about it and I have a thread on here somewhere about it. Definitely considering that for a history book and then after, maybe some modules. It’s an insane mashup of cultures.
For that matter, Sinbad / 1001 nights could be really fun too…
I’m always interested in working with helpful collaborators like that.
I have been nudged toward a few things, but we have to look at whatever open license contract they have and how much work needs to be done. Did you have something in mind? Mythras?
Generally right now we are moving into the direction of making Codex it’s own thing, loosely based on OSR-ish OGL. I like the twenty sided dice for use with the roll-many / keep one system. I think it gives you a wide range of probability and is pretty easy to handle.
But that doesn’t mean other systems aren’t also interesting, I know many people have adapted Codex for many other systems.
Hahaha ok well yeah, I love them. The pirates and the privateers. Especially this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_St%C3%B6rtebeker
and this guy
Bohemia and Prague is another good option, and I have substantial data for that area, but I feel I still need to learn more (and pick up a few more words of Czech so I can painstakingly read some primary source documents) before I go there.
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.
That would be very interesting. Would love to hear about that on here too.
Hopefully one day we will get down toward the Byzantine area. There is a little scenario in Crimea that I found fascinating. A Jewish guy from Genoa who became allied with a remnant population of Goths who were living in an enclave down there. After the Turks took Caffa they had to try to figure out a way to get to safety, they wrote letters to the Grand Duke of Muscovy and the King of Poland. Apparently they all left but nobody is sure what happened to them, if they were killed by the Tartars or maybe made it to Russia, or possibly joined with the Crimean horde.
Some links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Goths
This is the family, I based one of the pre-generated characters in Road to Monsterberg on this (Ghisolfi) family
Another, similar Hofkleiderbuch also from Bavaria and also from the 16th Century. I think this one also includes heralds and bodyguards
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/11/duke-dress-and-heraldry.html
Hi Kosmaz!
This looks really interesting. Definitely fits with the Baltic setting, it’s just a bit to the South! It would kind of fit with some of our ‘Monsterberg’ series of modules which take place shortly after the fall of Constantinople.
This books looks great, I’m tempted to get it now…
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229016/Mythic-Constantinople–TDM230
Would love to learn more about your campaign.
I like these mechanics though this does get a bit deeper into demonology (potentially). However needless to say the same thing works with the celestial and ‘in between’ spirits too.
The visualization of the sigils is very Giordano Bruno / Raymond Lull …
It could certainly be a whole ‘nother type of magic. I think you could do 4 or 5 books the size of Superno on this kind of thing and many others, and I may end up going there (part of the way).
I cold collect spirit names, of course many of them are in Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and so forth. There are some other directions you could go into –
Norse (which continues into the Renaissance with books like the Liber Runarum)
Celtic Magic – as derived from the various late Iron Age sources, Fenian cycle et al
Cunning magic – which has rich traditions all over Europe but is sourced mainly from various 19th and 20th Century surveys, as they mostly didn’t write books, but there are some sources like the Merseberg incantations. And mythology like the Kalevala.
Greek / Classical magic – Natural Magic following Ptolemy etc. down to curse tablets et al
Neoplatonist magic – Both Classical and Renaissance version
Arab and Persian – Takwin, Jinn and Devs, Peri and Efrit
German / Folk – The German stuff sometimes makes it into period books
Soldiers magic – Bellifortis down to the various sword charms I have in the book, but it goes way beyond that
Hebrew / Kabbalah – Name and number magic, golems etc., angels (Mal’akh, Seraphim)
Renaissance Magic ala Agrippa, Ficino, Paracelsus etc.
Elizabethan Magic ala John DeeAnd of course, the type we are mostly referring to here, the Ars Goetia, Early Modern Demonic magic.
And that’s just for Europe! It gets wilder the further afield we go….
