Crusades of Valour
Crusades of Valour is the second major installment in Mongoose's Travellers' Tales series of books for the d20 system aimed at new types of campaigns for your d20 system game. The first, Seas of Blood, was aimed at seafaring campaigns. Crusades of Valour is focused around the concept of holy wars in d20 system fantasy games.
A First Look
Crusades of Valour is 96 page perfect bound softcover book priced at $17.95. This is a touch smaller than Mongoose's Seas of Blood, but the pricing is correspondingly lower. The typeface and leader space is about average, though the paragraph spacing wide and the header fonts are large, as with most Mongoose products.
The cover of Crusades of Valour has a wrap-around picture of a marching army accompanied by some sort of winged celestial being.
The interior is black-and-white. The inside front cover has a full page illustration, and there is art throughout by a variety of mongoose regulars including familiar talents such as Danilo Moretti, Eric Lofgren, Marcio Fiorito, Reynaldo Batista, Renato Guedes, Rick Otey, and Nathan Webb. As in many Mongoose books, there are nude depictions that have little to do with the content of the book.
A Deeper Look
Crusades of Valour is aimed at bringing holy wars such as the Crusades in Europe to life in a fantasy game. To a certain extent I feel like this is already a topic that exists in many fantasy games as it is: many games build their light-and-dark struggles around the conflicts between powers of Good and Evil.
The book begins with a bit of exposition and an overview of the concept of crusades in a fantasy game. Some of the text seems to imply that if this book hadn't come along, you would still be stumbling along in a dungeon, something I don't think is at all accurate. The introductory text sort of skirts around the issue of whether there should be a Good or Evil participant in such a war, but still addresses some issues associated with religious conflicts in fantasy settings, such the polytheistic nature of most such settings.
After the introductory text, the section entitled Heroes of the Crusade provides a few paragraphs how characters of each class might get involved. There are a few ideas in here, but much of it seems fairly straightforward. Telling me things like rogues make good intelligence operatives or that arcane spellcasters are less likely to get involved in a religious conflict but you'd be a fool to do without them seem like a waste of words to me.
The third section is entitled the Knight introduces two new classes: the knight and the janissary. The knight prestige class is a divine warrior type and a member of an order of knighthood described later in the book. The knight receives bonus feats from the fighter list, retainers and possessions, abilities to command in battle, and some divine abilities. However, the knight's possessions are strictly regulated by its order. The restrictions on possessions is in some ways is reminiscent of the item restrictions levied on paladins in prior editions of the D&D game.
The janissary is a short (5 level) NPC-caliber class and is based on the historical janissary, a captured slave trained to fight in battle. The restrictions on the janissary are, for obvious reasons, even more severe than those of the knight. The class abilities of the janissary are few. At 3rd level you receive the services of a lesser janissary, and at 5th level you are actually given enough accord that you can start taking levels in the knight class. There are really no non-roleplaying reasons to take this class over the fighter class. It seems to me that this class is more appropriate as a role for a fighter or warrior character than a class in its own right.
The Feats and Magic section introduces new options for d20 system fantasy games. The feats are all of a new category of feats: crusade feats. The distinction of crusade feats is that they can only be selected by clerics, paladins, or knights, or by individuals that are part of a crusade.
The feats center on leading troops in battle and confronting members of other faiths. Some of these are worded a bit arbitrarily. For example, the command feat simply states that you can command 10 people of your alignment to do your bidding. There is no concern for whether they follow the same religion or believe in your crusade (and if both of those are true, why do you need a feat?) I could see two churches of the same alignment warring with each other, but this feat ignores that.
The spells described in the chapter are called crusade spells. There are 9 crusade spells, one for each level from 1-9. As you might guess, this has something to do with the clerical domain spells. These spells may be used in place of a clerics domain spells while on a crusade. Spells include to likes of release soul (which kills a dying character and makes it so they cannot be raised short of a wish or miracle spell), bless army, and wrath of god (an attack spell that ignores your allies.) I found the concept of the in nomine spell troubling; it is supposedly cast "immediately after another divine spell" to cause fear in all who see you cast it, but it has a casting time of one minute, so one would question in a heated battle if anyone noticed you casting the first spell in the first place.
The Crusader Orders section probably has the most mine-able ideas in the book. It presents a variety of knightly orders that you could potentially use in any fantasy campaign. The orders run the gamut from those very close to the knightly archetype such as the Solar Order, to more esoteric fantastic order such as the dark elf Arachnid Sisterhood and the wizardly Arcane Order. Though the knighthoods run the gamut, some of the adaptation is less than perfect. For example, the Arcane Order states that all its members are arcane spellcasters, yet on the battlefield they behave like any other armored mounted knights. I am a little confused at why that would be.
The Running A Crusade Campaign section contains ideas for running a campaign against the backdrop of a holy war, including ideas for the event or events that sparked the war and the reaction of the followers. Points are discussed such as activities and events during the war and how to end it. The section includes some references to a "zeal" statistic, which is provided for various religions later in the book; rules in this section provide a random method for determining the outcome of such a holy war by using random rolls with modifiers from each sides' zeal.
The following Player Characters and Crusades section discussed the scope of the involvement of PCs and idea for activities they would be involved in.
The book introduces a Cinematic Battle System that can be used to resolve large-scale battles in a crusade campaign. As with the systems in AEG's War, the system is very abstract and doesn't factor in many considerations such as level or race of the soldiers, though there is a morale factor listed for the orders. Effects of PC actions are mentioned as possible, but no clear system exists for translating PC actions into effects on the outcome of the battle.
The last section is entitled Gods and their Followers. It breaks deities out by domains, and includes zeal for followers of deities with the given domain (which is used in the Running a Crusades Campaign section.)
Conclusion
I found only a few things in this book that inspirational, fewer still that I wanted to use as written. There are some ideas for holy war campaigns that you could strip out, but it is mixed up with some wargame-like systems that are really too incomplete to be used without GM support, yet don't really help the GM run the campaign all that much.
The game material that is there seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. It seems like some of the material (like the prestige classes) tries to create a whole different sort of gaming experience than the typical d20 system fantasy game. This is fine in and of itself. However later on it seems like it tries to embrace the existing d20 system fantasy tropes, which makes the early efforts to make crusades type knights come of a little weak.
If the idea of a holy war really compels you, this book might be worth picking up, if only for the mine a few ideas.
-Alan D. Kohler
