It’s been quite a while since I DM’ed anything, but our 5e foray into Isle of Dread petered out and I decided that if wait until I’m “ready” to run the campaign I envisioned, it would take forever. So we went ahead with character generation and a short introductory adventure.
I’m running a modified version of AD&D 1e. The big idea is to set it in a relatively authentic, or at least somewhat verisimilitudinous, medieval Europe. More specifically, starting off in Wiltshire, England, A.D. 1275.
Rather than be strictly historical (in which case I ought to use GURPS probably?) I wanted to test out my idea from Burgs & Bailiffs Trinity about having as many of the tropes of AD&D as possible shoehorned into a a world that is mostly what folks in the middle ages thought it was. So: yes there is magic and miracles. But no Tolkien fantasy races. Could I justify including all the standard AD&D classes? Yeah, for the most part.
The campaign is meant to be partly for its own sake and partly to test out and refine B&B3, with an eye to second, revised and massively expanded edition.
To that end I removed a few things from AD&D (mostly just alignment and demi-humans) and added a few things. The additions were fairly significant.
Characters get a seventh attribute: Social Class (SC). SC is indexed against the medieval estates (“those who work, those who fight, and those who pray”) and honestly is mostly taken straight out of Fantasy Wargaming, since FW was basically following the hierarchies of medieval Europe. Also added is Piety, a number ranging from -3 to +3 representing one’s standing with God/and or the Church. I would argue (or really, flatly state without bothering to argue much) that SC and Piety are the really essential elements of a medieval worldview, and almost everything else I modified follows from these.
After spending a lot of the past year reading up on medieval history and sociology, and taking a Coursera class on magic in the Middle Ages, I made a few modifications to Magic-Users (essentially “kits” to give them period flavor), but no one actually wanted to play an MU in this campaign. I thought about how to make the other classes fit, and added the Palmer from B&B3, the Fool I posted earlier, and adopted the relic-based Cleric from B&B3 as well.
A substantial change was adding minimum/maximum SC for various classes, again indexed against estate, and using a version of the 2e reaction table for a little more flexibility so that when a PC attempts to use or steal a relic, the saint’s reaction can determine whether they are blessed, blasted, or ignored.
The vast majority of the revision remains added background information on the Church, guilds, feudalism, rules for resolving medieval medicine, justice, and similar. In some cases this involved revising my articles for B&B 1 and 2, but most of it is new.
I resisted the urge to change the magic system for Magic-Users and Illusionists. For one thing, many attempts at an historically based system have already been presented. I’m most impressed with the system in the otherwise lackluster Lion & Dragon RPG, though I would have wanted to indicate the areas of influence and favor/disfavor of the demons and spirits. But no one needs another re-presentation of stuff from the Lesser Key of Solomon, Picatrix, etc., which I started looking at and eventually abandoned — while AD&D’s cleric spells are almost 1:1 with miracles of legend, AD&D MU spells are more varied. Having magic-user and illusionist spells be the effects of invoking specific demons, Olympic spirits, or occult forces of nature adds very little to the game really, since only occultists would be familiar with the spirits. I spend most of the text on magic focusing on society and the Church’s views about magic, which changed a lot over time, and adding small tweaks which essentially represent 2e “kits” for the MU based on historical belief/precedent.
The first test was having the players roll up a party. This went pretty well.
In the end the party consists of:
- Big John, a sergeant loyal to a knight in Old Sarum (Fighter, SC 12)
- Thomas, peasant freeholder who dabbles in the old faith (Druid, SC 10)
- Marcus, a knight templar, still out to prove himself (Fighter, SC 14)
- An itinerant fool, from parts unknown, last abode in Salisbury (Fool, SC 8)
- Alfred of Mercia, a peasant on permanent pilgrimage (Palmer, SC ?)
They were all on the road west toward the village of Bishopstrow, some with errands further west, in Warminster or beyond, and some just seeking work; the palmer was on his way to a shrine in Bishopstrow. They met a troubadour and some sketchy-looking “entertainers” who gave them some local gossip about Baron Charles, who seems to be unable to produce an heir, and continued on their way.
The party found that the shrine-keeper had been murdered and the relic stolen. The locals mentioned some strangers who had ridden through town, and a band of clerks on their way to St Edmonds College in Salisbury confirmed the description. The party followed these leads to Warminster, where they eventually caught the perpetrators, killing two and capturing one. Baron Charles meted swift but somewhat lenient justice (the thief was to have his hand amputated and made an outlaw) but the Templar bribed the executioner to botch the job and kill the thief, ensuring harsher justice. The local priest hoped to keep the relic in Warminster, but the party intervened — the druid sent his trained raven to steal it from the altar in what many took to be an act of God or at least of St Aldhelm, whose relic it was. The relic re-enshrined in Bishopstrow, the party considered their next move. The Baron, impressed with their initiative and fighting skill, offered to send them on a mission up north. But the palmer knows of several more shrines he might visit to learn miracle-working, and the druid has heard that there is an old sacred site not far as well.
The idea for the adventure came mostly at off the cuff, as I picked a village in Wiltshire at random and found the Bishopstrow was named for a miracle: Bishop Aldhelm caused a few miracles including having his staff grow into a tree. The rest grew from there. 
It won’t be too much of a spoiler to give away that the relic-thieves meant to sell the relic to Baron Charles as a cure for his lack of heirs. Could he or his priest have been behind the theft? Will another attempt be made on the shrine?
The second session added one more player, who chose to make a Cleric. There were some changes to the class in B&B3 which I mostly kept. Notably, most clergy and priests are not Clerics — the Cleric class represents an usual and gifted miracle-worker. The Cleric was a relatively high SC (13) so he was in fact an ordained priest. We agreed he’d just been displaced from parish in Warminster and needed to go to Salisbury to see the bishop for a new assignment. He met part of the party (the fool and templar could not make this session) and they all left for parts east for their various reasons — the druid to eventually investigate Stonehenge; the sergeant to report back to his liege Sir Geoffrey at Old Sarum; the palmer to visit more relics on his itinerary; and the Cleric to see the bishop. Along the way they were attacked by some brigands who they party defeated. One was captured, and he threatened the party with the vengeance of his band and their leader, the “King of the Brigands.” The Cleric was injured in in the melee — once by a brigand and once by an arrow shot by the sergeant from the safety of a nearby hillock. Unfortunately he rolled a 02 and contracted a disease (the middle ages amiright?). The wound was infected, in this case by a parasite that caused his eyes to begin watering. Fortunately, in Salisbury they found a physician, who used a series of treatments (a salve that burned his face, blood-letting via a lamprey, and a clyster of hot spices) to cause another point of damage but also affecting a cure!
Further hijinks ensued as the Druid had his pet squirrel entertain some citizens, and then had his pet raven randomly accuse another of being a demon, getting the Druid kicked out of the tavern. The sergeant visited his liege who suggested stealing the relic from Bishopstrow and offering it to Baron Charles in exchange for some of his land, an idea the Fighter rebuffed. But later in another tavern he learned that the ruins of the cathedral in Old Sarum might hide some secret, because the bishop forbids anyone to visit it. Our Cleric meanwhile found that the bishop is unavailable for a week. The Palmer hung around until “closing” and attempted to open a tomb at the new cathedral in Salisbury, but only broke the tip of his sword, which he used as a prybar.
The sergeant gathered up the party to look into his rumor, but by then it was getting dark and Salisbury’s watch were announcing the curfew, so they called it a night.
***
Why Wiltshire? Honestly it was mostly chosen at random, but the propinquity to Stonehenge, Glastonbury Tor, and Old Sarum/New Salisbury gave me all kinds of adventure seeds. Stonehenge is well known; Glastonbury Tor might be familiar too. Interestingly, I learned that Old Sarum was a Roman fort that grew into a city with a cathedral, but in the early 13th century new cathedral was built a bit to the south, and Salisbury grew around it as a planned city to be seat of the diocese because the castle built from the Roman fort was too strong a seat of secular power. The old cathedral was mostly dismantled to build the new one, which is still one of the finest in England.
Invaluable as well have been the maps and histories at Wilcuma, a website devoted to the Anglo-Saxon era but with tons of information about the earlier and later periods.