This fucking book.
It's not that it's bad. Quite the opposite, really. The Historical Reference series has had a pretty high level of quality, and The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook doesn't disappoint. It's just . . . It's a book about the Crusades, published by TSR in 1994.
It would be easier if the book were racist. I know how to handle a malevolent book. However, this particular one tries - and largely succeeds - at presenting a humane and balanced look at the time period. But it also has lines like -
"Although early Crusades were often marred by episodes of brutality and religious intolerance . . ."
Oh, were they?! Religious intolerance? In a Crusade?
I could pull quote after quote of this curious semi-naivete. One more -
"The few incidences of Frankish brutality greatly hindered the process of negotiating peace with their Muslim neighbors."
I mean, I'd quibble with the word "few" here, but the general sentiment is correct. The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook doesn't shy away from the awfulness of Crusades, but it also never quite gets away from the idea that we're supposed to find that surprising. That we will sympathize with and excuse the Europeans is simply taken for granted.
We're not supposed to. It's not a good impulse. The book goes out of its way to highlight the achievements of Islamic culture and urges us not to look at the Muslims as "evil pagans." Saladin is "the most glamorous figure of the Crusades" and the book has not a single bad word to say about him. But it also assumes we're going to be heavily invested in the successful prosecution of a Crusade.
It's weird as hell. I think the DMing chapter is as close as we ever get to a concrete expression of the book's point of view: "This sourcebook has not glossed over the injustices and petty hatreds that often (ed: "often"?!) dominated the Crusades, but a campaign should approach the era differently . . . When obsolete medieval attitudes (bigotry, xenophobia, casual cruelty) would keep players from fully enjoying the game, replace those attitudes with more modern beliefs."
I think we're supposed to view it like a team sport. The pope will call for a Crusade, the Fatimid Caliph will counter with a Jihad, and Jerusalem passes back and forth between sides like a football, but in the end, it's all in good fun. You get some outdoor exercise, maybe slay a few infidels in a rough and tumble manly sort of way, but there's no hard feelings.
And I don't know. Maybe 1100 CE is long enough ago that the wounds have healed. I'll admit, it doesn't always feel that way, but I think that may be because Islamophobia has gotten worse over the past 25 years.
Plus, I've played two different "Crusader Kings" games, and it would be pretty hypocritical of me to start demanding that the Crusades be treated with all the same sensitivity we expect for more recent atrocities.
Despite some Orientalist leanings - the two major Islamic states are described as corrupt and "ripe for conquest" and the Assassins are literally called "terrorists" (which I'm pretty sure was a racially-loaded term even in 1994, and is only forgivable because it's somewhat accurate and they are presented as being allied with the Franks) - I do feel compelled to recognize that TSR published a book about the Crusades, in 1994, that directly and unambiguously rebuked the fucking "Deus Vult" memes we're seeing today. That's not nothing.
Mechanically, this book is about as good as you can expect for AD&D second edition. Priests inexplicably keep their magic powers in "historical" games, but the rules for modifying those powers are better thought out than we've seen in the past. For more fantasy-oriented games, it suggests using the Sha'ir kit from Al Qadim to represent both Arabian sorcerers and European witches, which is an idea so good and so obvious that I'm ashamed I didn't think of it first.
The curation of spell lists is a little weird. There's a suggestion that you could replace mages with psionicists for fantasy-genre games (a good idea I did have), but when it trims the power list, it says that Control Flame is inappropriate, but somehow Disintegrate is fine. I'm not saying they picked powers at random to exclude, but I can think of no better explanation.
Overall, I'd say that The Crusades Campaign Sourcebook is better left as a historical curiosity. It's not nearly as bad as the worst of its contemporaries when it comes to presenting non-European cultures, but it does fill a niche - minimally cynical fantasy adventure against the backdrop of the Crusades - that simply doesn't need to be filled. Try using it today and your best case scenario is that your players are as confused as I am.
Ukss Contribution: One of the new kits was the "Pardoner" rogue. They're con artists who pose as priests and sell indulgences and relics. The fake relic trade is one of those historical oddities that I always found morbidly fascinating, and I could probably find a place for it on Ukss.
I share the fascination with pardoners.
ReplyDelete-PAS
I suppose Pardoners could make sense in an OD&D kind of ouvre, where there are "real" priests who don't yet have access to thermodynamics-defying miracles.
ReplyDeleteIn many fantasy games, including later D&Ds, that gets really questionable, because it's just hard for me to see how any con artist could keep up with the brazen supernatural displays of even low-level magic.
Well, it's weird because priest magic is available even in "historical" games, but if you did do a martial-only game, the Pardoners would fit right in.
DeleteIn a normal fantasy game, maybe they're the divine-magic equivalent of snake oil salesman. Efficacious spells do exist, but these guys just sell stuff that will get you super high.
Sure, but snake oil works because real-life medicine is subtle, complicated, and slow.
DeleteIt would take a heck of a drug to convince someone they'd been Cure Light Wounds'd. Or to trick zombies into acting turned.
(And, yes, it makes sense in historical settings - religion-based scams happen all the time in real life. I was musing upon what it implies about priestly powers in UKSS.)
I know right, can you imagine if they had published an HR8 Historical Guide for the US Confederate South? But honestly, history is *complicated* and maybe its best we not model a fantasy game off brutal periods.
ReplyDeleteAlso--Bravo this was an excellent writeup, and I really appreciated reading your thoughts.
DeleteAre tou completely ignorant of the horrid things that were done on both sides, or is your head so far up your ass with ignorant hatred of Christians that you refuse to acknowledge the atrocities? Did you skip over the mass murder of coptic Christians, or is that fine in your book? Are you unaware of the sack of Constantinople and the slaughter of the orthodox church? The purges in Syria? I'm not even christian and I can acknowledge that both sides did some pretty horrendous stuff so wtf is wrong with you?
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry. I think you may have posted this comment on the wrong blog by mistake. What you said has absolutely nothing to do with anything I wrote.
DeleteHowever, because you seem to be taking an interest in literary criticism, I'll help you out by explaining a bit of the behind the scenes process of writing these posts. See, every work of art comes with a certain cultural context. It does not exist in a vacuum but rather it is made at a particular time, by particular people, in a particular place, for a particular audience, and with particular methods. You may recognize this list as the famous "5 Ws" (or, at least 4 of the 5 Ws and the H): What, Who, Where, When, and How. And that list of questions inevitably informs the last, most fundamental question: "Why?"
So, when you consider a book like TSR's Crusades Campaign Sourcebook, you have to think about the media environment it's entering into. The existing ideas about the crusades that it's playing off of, challenging, or simply repeating uncritically. And in the early 90s roleplaying scene, especially among the sort of people who were likely to be interested in a sourcebook about the Crusades, there's a very pro-Christian bias. Even among those who would not identify as Christian, they would be more receptive to a media narrative that framed the conflict as a clash of civilizations - the pious West versus the heathen East. And being aware of the potential for that bias, when reviewing a book, one should take care to examine and address it.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that the best way to review an American roleplaying book from 1994 is to consider the whole history of violence in Southwest Asia and then carefully sort the atrocities by religious identification, to thereby condemn or excuse particular campaigns based on what contemporary people claimed as the proximate inciting incident, thereby finding Muslims proportionately guilty and absolving Christian aggression, at least partially.
Unfortunately, you have correctly identified my lack of detailed knowledge about the history of the Crusades, though perhaps you have not fully contemplated my complete lack of interest in relitigating thousand-year-old religious conflicts.
What I will tell you is that, in my view of what I do as a critic, I like to think of myself as intellectually honest and fair-minded, and so, if there is some rpg text out there that's like "The Jihad Campaign Sourcebook," casting medieval Muslims as relatively blameless and taking for granted that things like the sack of Constantinople were both justifiable and forgivable, then I should hope that if I ever read this book, I should be as critical of Muslim apologism as I am of Christian apologism here.
Of course, the only way these convictions are ever proven is by being put to the test, so I will rise to the challenge - do you know of such a book? Can you post a link? Or at least tell me a title? If you can name an example, I will seek it out, read it, and review it. And then we can all see for ourselves whether your accusations of anti-Christian bias are accurate or whether this is just a misunderstanding based on our all being stuck in a particular context.