Sir Nimble and Sir Ungainly are assaulting the hilltop fortress of Dread Lord Redblade.  Their quest?  To discover a digital document format that allows hyperlinking within itself. They’ve looked at HTML, and they don’t like having to use a web-browser interface. They like .pdf, but their sovereign can’t seem to make Acrobat Professional 7.0 do this.

They need your help.  This is their most desperate hour.  You are their only hope.

The (ongoing) War of the Roses playtest of Black Cadillacs has validated a lot of rules changes that came out of GenCon 2009. One of those new rules is the prep instructions and setting creation procedures.

Here, you can see a game set up with a Great War (WWI) play-kit.  The kit includes:

- a custom play mat (central)
- a map of the area (right)
- a photo collage that distills key points of the prep research (lower)

The first two items are cool, but they’re not critical. The collage is much more exciting; sessions of the game are so much more vivid when you have a visual reference for the tone of the game. They help to influence so many aspects of play, including the campaign prep.

I’ve got other items to dish about, all of them related to prep. I know that others have ranted at me for the lack of prep in the game. Rest assured, you’ve been heard, and yeah, you were right.

The cracks appear!

This sort of emergent contradiction is exactly what I love about Black Cadillacs.  This is exactly the sort of stuff I experienced with Dad’s war stories.

Also, Andrew is such a dick.  Oh, he’s an asshole.

“The Hessian, he was nowhere to be seen once Warwick’s men crossed the walls. He must have run off. That’s what you get from foreigners.”

“Robert, Sir Andrew’s father, died valiantly chasing down traitorous peasants.”

Kinda speaks for itself.  I can hear this one running the court circuit.

“Those bastards Fletcher and Andrew are the ones who sold us out.”

Oh, this one’s a goodie, and not just because it’s mine.

This is the first of the Stories to come out of our game (the previous four are all Rumours).  So, the swank bit about Stories is that they’re accounts of actual in-game events, but they’re not entirely true.  Here’s how that works:

• you choose a moment from the game to Story-fy.
• you re-tell it, but you don’t regurgitate it.  Change it.
• the magnitude and the nature of the change are in your hands.
• you write it down.

“the earl of norwich has joined the yorkists, and approaches with cannons”

So, cannons in the 16c. weren’t really a threat on the battlefield.  They were primitive, cumbersome and slow (a rate of fire of 10 shots/hour was exemplary).

They were, however, just the tool for turning a walled town to a rubbled town.

I like to think of the doom and gloom versions of this rumour that would be bouncing around the Lancastrian ranks.

“Warwick has a new ally who will break the seige”

Our characters are all in the Earl of Warwick’s retinue.  The historical detail about the Wars of the Roses that makes this especially cool is that it was commonplace for individual nobles (and their retinues) to switch sides mid-battle.

Mid-battle!

“Some of the guys went whoring last night, and the locals don’t have any love for the local lord.”

“Thanks to incredible defensive positions within her very walls, St. Alban has never fallen to siege.”

Two foreign mercenaries and a landless knight crouch in the woods outside of St. Albans.  York will wrest the throne from Lancastrian hands.

I’m knee-deep in a playtest of Black Cadillacs, set in the Wars of the Roses.  I’m jazzed about the stories and rumours that are coming out of the game, so I’ve decided to share them.