1975: En Garde!

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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En Garde! is one of the first five roleplaying games to be published and it was the first to be published by Game Designer’s Workshop. It was not the first historical roleplaying game—that likely would have been Boot Hill from TSR, Inc., published like En Garde! in 1975—but subtitled, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”, it was definitely the first swashbuckling roleplaying game and the first to emphasis what a Player Character was doing socially and what a Player Character’s social status and standing was. Although it began life as a set of rules for handling duels, the expanded rules provided the scope for roleplaying as gentlemen attended their clubs and caroused and quaffed and gambled, spied pretty ladies and courted them as potential mistresses, joined a regiment and went off on campaign to fight either the Habsburgs, the Spanish, or the Protestants, aiming to win prestige, promotion, and position, all the whilst attempting to maintain sufficient monies to support themselves and their mistresses in the lifestyles they have become accustomed and want to become accustomed to! There is always the danger of death and penury, and insults flung, leading to a duel and its consequences.

Yet, En Garde! has always been overlooked as a roleplaying game and may not even be a roleplaying game in the traditional sense of even the Dungeons & Dragons of 1974. There are good reasons for this. The game play is rarely one of being sat round the table in the traditional sense because a player programs the actions of his character a month in advance. There is none of the immediacy of a traditional roleplaying game, no back and forth between the players and their characters, or indeed between the players, their characters, and the Game Master’s NPCs. Nor is there a real strong sense of place, since the Player Characters move between locations automatically, whether between their club and their barracks, between their mistress’ apartments and the duelling ground, and between Paris and wherever the French army is in campaign. Consequently, En Garde! abstracts France rather giving it any sense of place or geography.

Consequently, the baton of the swashbuckling genre and the period of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers would be taken up other roleplaying games, most notably Flashing Blades from Fantasy Games Unlimited. Yet En Garde! has had a long life of its own parallel to the roleplaying hobby. This is because its pre-programmed style of play lent itself very easily to what was then Play by Mail, turns and results being sent and received through the mail, and more recently Play by E-Mail. It thus found a home in fanzines devoted to postal games such as Chess and Diplomacy. The current owner of En Garde! began running postal games of En Garde!, and convention games of it, before becoming the publisher.

To be fair, just because the game is played in a procedural fashion, it does not mean that it is truly lacking roleplaying possibilities. En Garde! does have a definitive aim for every Player Characters and that is to acquire better social standing and status—and keep it. That desire to better oneself and maintain it drives a Player Character’s decisions and how he reacts to the outcomes of those decisions and those of the other Player Characters, and it is this space that En Garde! has scope for roleplaying? If a Player Character discovers another man has been courting his mistress, what should he do? If facing certain death on the field of battle, an act of poltroonery might save him, but should the act be exposed, should the Player Character challenge his accusers to a duel and protect his honour or confess and suffer the consequences? As a King’s Musketeer, what insults should he be taunting members of the Cardinal’s guard with? Answering them spurs a roleplaying response in character, even if only written down, and in being written down, unlike in most roleplaying games, you have a specific chronicle of the actions, reactions, and responses of all of the Player Characters.

A Player Character in En Garde! is simply defined. He has four stats, Strength, Expertise, Constitution, and Endurance. The first three are rolled on three six-sided dice, whilst Endurance is determined by multiplying Strength by Constitution. Strength is a Player Character’s ability to inflict damage, Expertise his skill with a sword, Constitution his health, and Endurance his ability to withstand punishment. His Social Level is determined by rolling on tables for his Birth, Sibling Rank, Father’s Position, and Father’s Title (if Noble). His Military Ability, used when he is on campaign, is rolled a single six-sided die.

Our sample Player Character, Cyrille Mageau, is of a very lowly origins, with barely a Louis d’or to his name. His lack of status means that his prospects are equally as low, but Cyril is ambitious and not without potential. Given his very high Military Ability, his best option is to enlist and prove himself on campaign. If he is successful there, he may improve his fortunes in Paris.

Cyrille Mageau
Social Level: 1
Class: Commoner
Sibling Rank: Bastard
Father’s Position: Peasant
Strength 09 Expertise 13 Constitution 13 Endurance 117
Military Ability: 6
Initial Funds: 9 Allowance: 0 Inheritance: 0

Mechanically, En Garde! does not really offer much in the way that looks like a roleplaying game. It starts by offering the mechanics out of which the rest of the game grew. These are the duelling rules, with participants programming manoeuvres such as Close, Cut, Slash, Lunge, Throw, and more. This is written out in a sequence of letters as a routine, for example, ‘-X-L-X-’ for a Lunge, ‘-CL-K-X-X-X-’ for Kick, ‘-P-(R)-’ for Parry and possible Riposte, and so on, with the ‘X’ standing for Rest or Guard. These sequences are then compared step-by-step and the results determined, with duellist’s Strength, manoeuvre, and weapon type. The latter includes rapier, dagger, foil, sabre, cutlass, and even two-handed sword! A duellist who has a lower Swordsmanship—later called Expertise—will be slower against a duellist who has a higher Swordsmanship, and this is represented by the player having to be put in more ‘X’s. Duels are played out until one participant either surrenders or is killed. Winners will gain Status Points and Social Levels in general, depending upon the Status Points and Social Levels of the participants.

The actual play structure is based on four weeks per month, three months per season, and four seasons per year. A player will program his character’s activities four weeks at a time. These could be to a club with a friend, practice with a weapon, carouse at a bawdyhouse, and court a mistress. A Player Character can also join clubs, gamble, take out loans, join a regiment, and so on. The aim throughout is for the Player Character to maintain his Social Level at the very least, but really the aim is to increase his Social Level. To do this he needs to acquire Status Points. If at the end of a month, the Player Character has acquired Status Points equal to his current Social Level, he maintains it, but he acquires Status Points three times the next Social Level, he can increase it. Just as a Player Character can rise in Social Level, he can also fall, but he will also be seeking out actions that will gain him Status Points. Being a member of a club, carousing, toadying to someone of higher Social Level, successfully gambling, winning duels—especially against members of rival regiments, and belonging to a regiment. Actions such as losing when gambling, losing duels, and not spending enough money to maintain his Social Level will lose a Player Character Status Points and his Social Level. Most of these actions will cost a Player Character money. Most Player Characters have some income, but can gain more from gambling, taking out a loan, making successful investments, receiving an inheritance, being in the military and returning from a campaign with plunder. Conversely, loss of money and income will lead to bankruptcy and a Player Character enlisting in a lowly frontier regiment in the hope of restoring his name and fortune.

Once per year, members of a regiment will have to go on campaign for a complete season. There is a chance of a Player Character being killed in battle, but he could try to be heroic and make a name for himself, get mentioned in dispatches, get promoted, and take some battlefield plunder. Being mentioned in dispatches gains a Player Character national recognition and ongoing Status Points. In the long term, a Player Character can apply for various positions in both the military and the government. For example, being appointed regimental adjutant, Army Quartermaster-General, or Inspector-General of the Infantry, or Commissioner of Public Safety, Minster of War, or Minister Without Portfolio. Titles can also be won. Once a Player Character achieves a high position, he gains some Influence that can be used to help others.

Of course, En Garde! is a profoundly masculine game. As the subtitle says, it is, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”. Women are not really characters at all, merely dalliances there to prove a Player Character’s masculinity and bolster his social standing. It is difficult to get around this, since the role of women both at the time when En Garde! is set and in the fiction it draws upon, is not as protagonists, but even as in some cases in both, as antagonists.

En Garde! is not a roleplaying game that looks beyond achieving high rank, position, or social status. So, there is a limit to how much play potential there is beyond this. Certainly, in a typical group of players, this would be the case. In a larger group, there is greater room for manoeuvring and jostling for status and rivalry with players being members of rival regiments, competing for the same positions, even for the same mistresses, and so on. This lends itself to play at a club if it has plenty of members or simply playing with a more dispersed group of players by mail—electronic or otherwise.

One way in which En Garde! is not a roleplaying game is in how little scope there is for the players to roleplay and affect the world around the characters through roleplaying. Perhaps through delivering an insult to a member of a rival from another regiment? Further, players will find themselves playing at odds with each other when they join rival regiments or compete for the same mistress or position. In some ways, to get the most out of En Garde! it is best for the players to play characters who are rivals and so it is adversarial to one degree or another.

However, within its scope—and as a roleplaying game—En Garde! is innovative. Not as the first historical roleplaying game, since Boot Hill was published the same year, but certainly the first roleplaying game that focused on society and social activities. It is all about a potential musketeer’s progress in society and the activities that he has to undertake to order to climb the social ladder and at each rung, maintain that position. Compare that to the dungeon-focused play of three of the other roleplaying games—Dungeons & Dragons, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Tunnels & Trolls—then available in 1975.

Physically, En Garde! is surprisingly well presented and written. Illustrated with a mix of period pieces, the only real downside is that it starts talking about duels rather than characters and what they do and who interact with each other beyond duels. This organisation lends itself to the idea that the rest of the rules grew out of wanting more to the game and more reasons to duel.

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It appears that En Garde! was never reviewed in the roleplaying hobby press, though it was covered by magazines and publications devoted to games. The designer and publisher, Charles Vasey reviewed it in Games & Puzzles Issue 55 (December 1976) saying that GDW has, “…[P]icked a really splendid period for the new duelling game.” He was critical though, saying, “Despite its complexity, the system does not play as well as one might think. Often duels end very swiftly.” and “It is complex and convoluted, and it feels like real life. Players will soon find they have natural enemies and rivals who must be crushed directly or by a hired blade. One must seek to be in the best set, but beware bankruptcy or it’s the frontier regiment and disgrace until you pay off your debts.”

Similarly, games designer Greg Costikyan reviewed En Garde! in ‘Games fen will Play’ in Fantastic Science Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 10. (July 1980). He was very positive, calling En Garde! “[T]he the first well-written set of role-playing rules.... En Garde! was the first role-playing game by a major company and by established designers; and, as one might expect, it set new standards for role-playing rules — standards to which few subsequent games have risen.”

Perhaps the oddest vehicle for a review was The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games (Playboy Press, 1979). Author John Jackson said that, “There is a minimum of player interaction; play is geared toward individual deeds rather than group action.”, but that, “Although lacking neither color nor detail, the rules to En Garde! are clear and comprehensible.” He concluded that, “If it lacks the scope of true fantasy role-playing games, it’s not as time-consuming, either, and it appears to be a pleasant diversion.”

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En Garde! is not a roleplaying game per se. There is more of a simulation to it, a means of modelling the life of an officer and gentlemen in the early seventeenth century as he makes his way in life and attempt to better himself. Yet like any simulation, the result of dice rolls on the roleplaying game’s various tables sets up interesting, intriguing, and involving results that draw you in and make you want to explore how to resolve them and how to respond to them. This is where the roleplaying potential lies in En Garde!, even if it is not written to support roleplaying and all but ignores it. Ultimately, it has been shown again and again, in multiple games, all this is best handled and roleplayed away from the table and at distance, whether by mail or email.

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The current version of En Garde! is available here.

Lost & Found: Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1

Three decades after the release of the last supplement for MegaTraveller in 1992, a lost book comes to print, and it is fitting that it should come from Digest Group Publications. Published in 1987, it was in effect the second edition of Traveller, updating Games Designers Workshop’s classic Science Fiction roleplaying game with both a streamlined cohesive set of mechanics and an updated background. This updated background would begin with the assassination of Emperor Strephon and over the course numerous supplements see open rebellion and civil war break out across the Third Imperium, which would ultimately lead to a long decline in terms of trade and technology known as the Hard Times. Worse was to follow. Digest Group Publications designed MegaTraveller, but Games Designers Workshop published it, a relationship which would continue for five years. When Digest Group Publications closed its doors in 1993, it left behind it a legacy of some highly regarded and subsequently, much in demand, supplements and sourcebooks that have not since been reprinted. It also left behind a number of books which never print and are so regarded as having been lost. Notable amongst them would have been Digest Group Publications own roleplaying game, A.I. However, there were supplements for MegaTraveller too, and Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is one of these. 

Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 was originally projected for publication in 1990, but is now available for the first time, more than three decades on, thanks to some digital archaeology which was able to rescue the original files. It is an adventure module set in the years 1119 and 1120 prior to the Hard Times which concerns the adventures of the crew of the Robin Ascendant, a Type J Class Seeker. The crew is seeking the location of the Victory Belt, a legendary asteroid belt said to contain enough Onnesium-118—a highly efficient metaconductor—to give a man enough wealth to last not one lifetime, but several. This quest will begin on Trin, the capital of Trin’s Veil Subsector in the Spinward Marches and take them trailing through the Corridor Sector and into the Restored Ziru Sirka. Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 consists of two adventures—‘Cometfall’ and ‘Fharnas’—which take place at the beginning and end of the journey outlined in the supplement. In between there is plenty of scope and distance (over one hundred parsecs) for the Game Master to insert her own adventures and encounters and the supplement includes several detailed ideas for ‘transitional’ adventures which can be worked into the journey.

In ‘Cometfall’, the crew of the Robin Ascendant track down an elderly Vargr scientist who is conducting research into comets from a highly advanced base built into the rock of a comet! The crew hopes that the scientist knows of the location of the Victory Belt, and although he is welcoming, he seems to be prevaricating when it comes to actually telling the crewmembers what they want to know. Eventually, he will tell them what he does know, but not before they join him on an exploration of the comet’s surface—an incredibly dangerous environment, the base being attacked by pirates, and their managing a desperate escape. This information consists primarily of a destination, a Scout Service base on the world of Fharnas in the Kasear Subsector of the Vland Sector, the location for the second scenario, ‘Fharnas’. Here on and in another hostile environment—hostile because the world has ammonia oceans and an ammonia-tainted atmosphere and hostile because the Restored Ziru Sirka does not welcome speakers of Galanglic, the language of the Third Imperium and the Solomani, as opposed to the Vilani of the Ziru Sirka—the crewmembers find themselves conducting a ‘raid’ on an Imperial Interstellar Scout Service to obtain some information in return for the information that they want. With this information, they are ready for travel further trailward to the world of Antares in the Julian Protectorate. The adventures were to be the subject of the next supplement, Antares Down: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 2 and then concluded with Beyond the Seventh Moon: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 3.

Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is designed to be played with the four pre-generated Player Characters, crewmembers of the Robin Ascendant. These consist of Fencil Tufo, a driven Belter and owner of the Robin Ascendant; Shalya Lyric, an ex-Navy engineer who simply wants to travel and see the universe; David Janier, a religious ex-Merchant; and ‘Mak’, a translation robot who owned by Janier. In this it follows the same format as seen in the campaign which ran through the pages of the Traveller’s Digest magazine—also published by Digest Group Publications. Suggestions are given on how to use the scenarios with different Player Characters and a different starship, but the default is the Robin Ascendant and its crew (or at least another vessel with Jump capability of Jump-2). As well as the stats and background of the crew, which also come with illustrations, the supplement includes deck plans for the Robin Ascendant and a passenger submersible, floor plans for both the comet base and the Scout Service archives (the latter having a weird maze-like layout designed to confuse), and the stats and details of various other vehicles. These are of course designed for use with MegaTraveller, but an appendix provides conversions for both Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller and Game Designers’ Workshop’s own Traveller 5.

In terms of background, Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 includes information on Onnesium and the Victory Belt, as well as details of Trin’s Veil Subsector and Trin itself and Fharnas and the Kasear Subsector. This background is well written and presented for what would have been the first time back in 1990, which includes a detailed description of the Kur’Apaa. These are the ammonia ocean dwelling sophonts native to Fharnas, a lobster-like species which was the first to be encountered by the Vilani when they began their first steps into space. Again, this was the first they were presented as Traveller canon. Some of this, of course, has been superseded by later supplements—as outlined in the supplement’s fourth appendix, ‘Wonderful Things’—and some of that later information has been incorporated into the setting background for Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1.

Rounding out Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is a quartet of appendices. These detail the Player Characters and their ship, the latter complete with deck plans, provide conversions for the most recent rules used for Traveller, and in ‘Wonderful Things’ provides some historical background to the relationship between Digest Group Publications and Game Designers’ Workshop, the origins and intent of Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1, and how it was finally brought to availability and print. This provides it with some welcome context and is a particularly good read.

In terms of story structure, Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is a quest and involves a long journey of more than a year across the remnants of the Third Imperium. This does mean that it is linear in nature and ‘Visual Nugget’ format of presenting the plot and various scenes does contribute towards this. However, the format neatly organises the plot and its various scenes for the Referee, as potential alternative scenes as well. The Referee will also need to do more than just prepare the two scenarios at either end of the journey if she wants to run Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 as a fuller campaign. One suggestion given is have the pirates which appear in ‘Cometfall’ chase the Robin Ascendant and its crew across the Third Imperium, and that is a good idea, since it adds an element of continuity between the two scenarios, which could be strengthened by the pirates’ patron also chasing the Player Characters as well.

The obvious issue with Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is that it takes place in a timeline which is not currently supported. Suggested sourcebooks such as the Rebellion Sourcebook from Game Designers’ Workshop and The MegaTraveller Alien: Vilani and Vargr from Digest Group Publishing are long out of print, although the Rebellion Sourcebook is available as a PDF. So, anyone not steeped in the lore of Traveller is going to have a harder time preparing this supplement than those who are.

Physically, Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is cleanly laid in the style of a Traveller book of thirty years ago. Entirely done in black and white, the artwork is straightforward and has an understandably technical feel to much of it. The deck plans are all excellent, but the writing is dry in places.

Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 is a piece of history, but not an unwelcome one. Its two scenarios are still playable, with some development upon the part of the Game Master, the space and time between them can be used to begin an entertaining space quest. Fans of Traveller will very much appreciate having Manhunt: The Onnesium Quest Vol. 1 available at last—especially if they are fans of MegaTraveller—whilst anyone new to it will appreciate it as a snapshot of Science Fiction roleplaying from another future.