A Daughter of Gascony -- Musketeer Mashup

She's back (and this time it's the right century)!

The Sengoku Jidai/Kaiju Eiga duet campaign came to an abrupt halt when our heroine (O-Kami, Empress of Japan) blew up the occupying Mongol army with her giant monsters and there was nothing left to do except live happily ever after.

So we’ve finally started an honest-to-goodness musketeer campaign.

“Finally?” you might ask.  Yes, I have never actually run a game set in seventeenth century France.  Most of my swashbuckling has been in the eighteenth century and concentrated more on the English-speaking world or been set in the Forgotten Realms.  Even though I borrowed images from "Revenge of the Musketeers" to illustrate “Le Vin Et La Vie,” the game was officially set in the mid-eighteenth century and reflected more of those concerns (revolution, alchemy, Casanova).  This is the first time we’re doing a straightforward D’Artagnan romances knockoff.

Well, maybe “straightforward” isn’t quite the right word.

The game system is Honor + Intrigue, core conceits of the campaign world are taken from All for One: Regime Diabolique, and the adventures are yoinked from Flashing Blades.  As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been itching to run Honor + Intrigue for a bit and this finally gives me the chance to do so without adding a bunch of house rules or cooking up a lot a setting material (as a chanbara campaign would require).  This is still one of my duet campaigns with Robin, so some modification to the misogyny of history is required; the concept of the Queen’s Musketeers from All for One neatly hurdles that problem.  (I’m not sure yet whether there will actually be any supernatural element to this campaign, however, so I might not be using All for One’s actual central conceit.)  Finally, Chris Rutkowsky used the Flashing Blades adventures in order to playtest Honor + Intrigue so I figure I’m safe doing the same.

You have no idea how thrilled I am to be able to use published adventures.  One of the quirks of duet play is that you really have to tailor the game to the character – at least, you have to do that if you play the kind of romance-infused games we play – and this means conventional dungeon crawls and adventure paths often don’t fit.  Flashing Blades is based on very different presumptions than a fantasy dungeon crawl, so scenarios for it naturally segue into our kind of duet role-playing.  They’re also so bare-bones that it’s easy to improvise through them.

I don't often write campaign summaries about my duet games with my wife, but the experimental nature of this game (and, frankly, a very good feeling about it) means I'll be doing that this time.  Expect to hear more about Genevieve Dubois, a daughter of Gascony.