Revenants in the Renaissance

The year is 1348 and mankind is subject to a divine punishment for its sins. For the last two years, all of Europe has suffered the devastating Black Plague which seems to spread fire and kills almost everyone it touches. The symptoms are easy to spot, black spots on the skin and swollen lymph nodes called buboes. Yet there is a second symptom, one that remains secret, one that the Papacy fights in a hidden war, and one it is desperate to eradicate—the Revenant Plague. Victims of the Black Plague are known to rise and not only spread its symptoms, but also feed upon the flesh of the living. The Papacy instituted the Ordo Mortis, a military order dedicated to not only fighting the secret war against the Revenant Plague, but also to keeping knowledge of the war against the Revenant Plague a secret. Word of it cannot spread, for it would weaken faith in the Catholic Church. It means that not only do all of the symptoms of the Revenant Plague have to be eradicated, but do any signs of infection and all knowledge of it. The members of the Ordo Mortis will face holy challenges in cutting down the risen revenants and unholy challenges in keeping its duties a secret. This is the set-up for Píaga 1348, a storytelling game from NEED! Games, the Italian publisher best known for the Fabula Ultima TTJRPG.

As a supernatural horror roleplaying game, Píaga 1348—meaning ‘Plague 1348—requires some choices to be made in terms of its set-up. To that end it includes a discussion of safety tools, though surprisingly without a reference to the X-Card. It suggests three options in terms of tone—‘Dramatic’, ‘Sinister’, and ‘Grotesque’—pairing them with the film, The Name of the Rose, the computer game Bloodthorne, and the films, Army of Darkness and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, thus effectively doubling as a bibliography. The tone is going to affect both the game’s style of play and its atmosphere, going from Greek tragedy to splatter punk with streak of black humour with creepy and mysterious in between. Further choices need to be made as to the nature of the world. This includes the size of the Revenant outbreak, the character and name of the Pontifex, the size and motto of the Ordo Mortis, and the nature and size of the missions that its soldiers—the Player Characters—are to be sent on. Lastly, the player who will take the role of the Ludi Magister—as the Game Master is known in Píaga 1348—is decided. This is important as the players will take in turn to undertake this role from one mission to the next. The process for this set-up is shared between the players.

A soldier in the Ordo Mortis will likely look like and be equipped any other knight, though he need not be. A Soldier is simply defined by several traits. These are the ‘Motto of the Ordo’; ‘Name’, including both full name and nickname, if any; ‘Description’; ‘Weapon’, which can either be physical or metaphorical (metaphorical is the better of the options here as it tends to be more flexible); and ‘Armour’, which should ideally be figurate rather than physical. These are the five core traits, but he also has entries for ‘What I Want’, ‘What I Don’t Want’, and ‘Traumas’, the latter physical, psychological, and social wounds suffered when a conflict is lost. A player simply has to define these traits in order to create his Soldier, either creating them or picking them from the suggestions included in the rulebook.

Name: Gunther of Cologne

Motto of the Ordo: Holy is our mission, unholy is their end

Description: An arrogant ex-tax collector with an eye for opportunity

Weapon: Everyone has a weakness and I will exploit every last one

Armour: Faith will only get you so far, money will get you further

What I Want: The favour of his Holiness, a penny in his pocket

What I Don’t Want: To die penniless

Once a mission has been decided upon, the player to the left of the Ludi Magister becomes the ‘Soldier on Duty’ and the Ludi Magister asks him what he perceives and based on those answers, frames the scene for her players, primarily the ‘Soldier on Duty’ as he will be leading the action for the scene and his player the conversation with the Ludi Magister. The advice for the Ludi Magister is to twist the interpretation of the senses that the ‘Soldier on Duty’ to make it dramatic and set the tension high from the start to reflect a world in crisis—physically and spiritually. The scene proceeds as normal until the point where something occurs that the ‘Soldier on Duty’ does not want to happen, in which a conflict ensues. When a conflict ensues, the player of the ‘Soldier on Duty’ decides what his Soldier wants to do and builds a dice pool based on his five core traits. For each of them that the player can persuade the Ludi Magister to include, a six-sided die is added to the pool. Every result of five or six counts as a Success and only one Success is required for Soldier to achieve the objective outlined by the player. The Ludi Magister will narrate the outcome of the dice roll, though if a failure because no Successes are rolled, the Soldier on Duty will suffer a Trauma.

Any excess Success go into the Morale Pool, which on subsequent turns, the ‘Soldier on Duty’ can draw from to increase the size of dice pool. Additional dice can come from the two sources. One is the other Soldiers, who can contribute dice based on their traits. The second is from a ‘Gamble’, in which the player adds a die of another colour to his dice pool. On a result of one, two, or three, nothing happens, but on a four, five, or six, the Soldier is ‘Exposed’. What this means that is a Soldier on Duty can still succeed—that is, roll a five or six—and still be ‘Exposed’. When ‘Exposed’, a roll is made on the ‘Gamble’s Outcome’ table. The result might be that a Soldier cannot use any further ‘Gamble’ attempts in the mission or that the Soldier is wounded and infected by a Revenant! Another way to gain more dice is for the Soldier to sacrifice himself, but will also result in his death. Whatever the result, the outcome is narrated by the player.

What is important here is there is an economy to a player’s use of his Soldier’s five core traits. If they can be used all in one go whilst a Soldier is the ‘Soldier on Duty’, then they can be refreshed to be used on subsequent turns. Whilst a Soldier can use them to help another Soldier who is the current ‘Soldier on Duty’, it will mean that he will have fewer to use when it is his turn to be ‘Soldier on Duty’. Running out of traits and having none to confront a situation when a ‘Soldier on Duty’ on Duty means that he will automatically fail. This forces a player to husband the use of those traits from scene to scene.

When a Soldier suffers a Trauma, it can be physical, psychological, or social, the nature of which is decided by the Ludi Magister. In general, the effect of a Trauma is more narrative in nature than mechanical, except under two circumstances. One is if a Soldier is either bitten, scratched, or wounded by a Revenant as a first or second Trauma, in which case the Soldier becomes a carrier of Revenant Plague. He can hide this, but if he dies, he will rise as a Revenant. The other is the effect of the third Trauma which will cause the Solder to exit the mission. How depends on the type of Trauma. A physical Trauma means he has died, a psychological Trauma pushes him into madness, and social Trauma makes him flee the Ordo Mortis all together. At this point, the Soldier can become a Tutelary, a dead soul watching and protecting the other Soldiers, or a Spectator, able to tell scenes from his former life that might give hints as to the current situation when it his turn to be the ‘Soldier on Duty’.

Play like this continues from round to round, with the Ludi Magister narrating another scene between them until the mission is over. At the end of a mission, the surviving Soldiers have a chance to reflect upon their actions and their successes—if any. At this point, the players have the opportunity to change various traits and even add another ‘What I Want’ or ‘What I Don’t Want’. After that, another mission, typically in another session, can be run by another player serving as the Ludi Magister.

Píaga 1348 provides a lot of support for the Ludi Magister. This includes several good examples of play, hints in terms of framing scenes and the narrative, motifs of the Ordo Mortis, and suggestions as the nature of Revenants and the world. There are several scenarios too. These are not scenarios in the traditional roleplaying sense, but more a themed set of prompts and rumours that the Ludi Magister—whose ever turn it is—can use to set up a mission. Píaga 1348 comes to a close with a quick-start and some designer notes, but also includes an excellent appendix of ‘Historical Essays’ which are these for everyone to read. Covering such subjects as the power of the pope—Boniface VIII, warfare in the period, famine, pestilence, and the nature of death, these are short pieces, but useful and informative.

Physically, Píaga 1348 is fantastically presented. The woodcut style artwork and the use of a Gothic fount very gives it a singular look and conveys a lot of atmosphere to the Ludi Magister.

Píaga 1348 can be seen as the answer to the question, “What would a zombie uprising look like in the Middle Ages?” Which is as terrifying, if not more so, than it would today since it follows awful deaths by the Black Plague and it would be regarded as the vindication of the danse macabre and the triumph of death over life. It also places the Soldiers of the Ordo Mortis on a mission from God himself to wipe out not only death itself, but all signs and knowledge of this triumph of death. That means they have to kill the living too, including the innocent. What this means is that Píaga 1348 is a simple and oppressively atmospheric storytelling game with a brutal edge.