A Daughter of Gascony – John Boehner Ruined My Musketeer Game

My New Year’s resolution this year was to make no public resolutions or promises on this blog.  Changes at work and the delicate balance of writing about gaming versus actually gaming dramatically cut down on the time I could spend writing on the blog as 2012 progressed and a lot of promises I made went unfulfilled.  I decided I would simply write what I could with no promise of more and make peace with my reduced output.

(In fact, I promised myself I wouldn’t even reveal this resolution, so I’m already breaking promises.)

I should have kept this all in mind before I posted about the start of “A Daughter of Gascony” – my attempt at playing an almost-authentic 17^th Century musketeer campaign – because it crashed and burned quick.  There are a lot of reasons it didn’t work – delays between sessions early own that stole its momentum, differing expectations between myself and Robin on what behavior was expected, etc – but what really killed it is that I quickly realized a central part of musketeering is toadying to the aristocracy.

I loathe the aristocracy.

My usual choice of swashbuckling era is actually the 18^th Century – the time of the Golden Age of Piracy, home of the great fakes and swindlers (Casanova, Cagliostro, and D’Eon), and era of democratic revolution and conspiracy (the Illuminati were the good guys, dammit).  I never consciously understood just how much I hate the entitled rich until I tried to play a game about bickering royal couples and noblemen who don’t pay taxes.  Robin doesn’t like playing ambitious scoundrels like Aramis so that nixed the only way to keep true to the setting and get back at the entitled jackassses in charge, and the idea of staging an early French Revolution just undermined the whole point of playing a pseudo-historical setting in the first place.  With certain events in American politics reminding me uncannily of the socioeconomic mess of the the 17^th Century, it just seemed better to quit.

(I must admit that if I used the actual All For One: Regime Diabolique setting with its demons, monsters, and anachronistic conspiracies, this wouldn’t be a problem.  I might return to that in the future when the stain of this failure is washed away by time.)