"Renaissance Campaign Project" Topic

Let's hope the bug doesn't get this one.

Been wanting to do this for years. The Renaissance was the starting point for my degree studies, the French Revolution was the end. Am besotted with the period. As befits that the game I am going to design will be called "Chiaroscuro" (got to have he title first) and its going to be one where artists, humanists, reformers, and generals are more or less interchangeable. The Sources I am basing the work on are the classics. Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and Huizinga's "The Waning of the Middle Ages" and Hales "The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance."

Well we got it on the right board at last.

I look forward to hearing more about this as you develop it.

Michelangelo leading the defense of Florence? :-)
Leonardo designing war machines for Cesare Borgia?

What scope?
Italy? Western Europe? Europe?

What scale?
-Provinces, or hexes?
-Armies, bands or regiments?
How will the economy look?
How will ideological disputes (mainy, but not exclusively religous) come in?
How will a siege or battle look and/or be resolved?

Looking really forward to this :-)

No. I mean interchangeable as in attributes of power. It follows Burckhardt's thesis that the Renaissance was due to the rise of illegitimate power wishing to cloak itself in the attributes of traditional power. Legitimate power here being the traditional ideas of medieval political thought as transmission from God downward. Overlaying that is the mind set of the Late Mediaeval as delineated by Huizinga. That is, a world where the emphasis is on the personal and the emotional. Where even the words are different. For example, "virtu" means not goodness or a womans chastity, but a blend of machismo and brutality more likely seen on a Mafia don but at the same time intensely religious and able to enact the most over the top remorse and acts of piety.

War will be a small part of the game.

The scope is Italy from 1350 to 1550- sort of. There is no map This is the area of the Renaissance. Italy was the center of the World in this period and it is well to remember that the revenues of the Tyrant of Orvieto were larger than those of the King of France.

Scale is what you wish as far as minis go. There is no map, it is not required. The tactical table top rules are already written and playtested and work well.

The scope of the game posits the player as head of a powerful (but illegitimate in the Burckhardtean sense) family of Renaissance Italy. Your aim is to acquire that legitimacy that the traditional Kings and Rulers had. In our real world an example of this would be for example Blanca Maria Sforza to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor or Catherine De Medici with Francis II of France and the production of offspring thereby. The powers of France, The Holy Roman Emperor, Turks, and the Swiss are more or less forces of nature who like hurricaines from time to time blow into Italy and wreck everything. As heads of families you must navigate these storms (including those arising from the Papacy, your own little indigenous force of nature) and compete in the realms of trade, war, art, humanism and ideas, and religion. There is no economy. Money you got, it's power you're looking for. Besides economics did not work back then like it does now.

The methodology of disputes in the artistic, humanistic, religious, and trade is what I am working on. That's the key. This is NOT going to be reduced to a mere tokenism or die roll. Players will have to take some active part in the creation of these things. They will "come in" through the agency of the plaeyrs themselves. For example, a player may have an opportunity to commission a great work of art. The Conflict will be between him and the other players over artist, subject, title, story behind the artwork, secret etc. This will lead to in effectthe creation of art that probably never existed. For example "The parable of the talents by Carravagio." No such work exists (or at least that I know of and I know most of them)but it could in the game and your fame and renown and "virtu" thus enhanced.

Other things might be "A list of 95 thesis by an obscure German Monk comes into your possession." Where you post it, how received, for or against, answering it, dealing with it will also perhaps be a means of conflict between the players. No dice rolling will take part. They will ACTUALLY have to contribute IN THEIR PERSONS.

"Trade" will be a blend of money but more of exploration and "headline grabbing." For example like Antonio in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, who has so many argosies (trading ventures) upon the waves that if three of them are lost the return of the other will make up for all the rest and more, or a new one venturing to the Japans, etc.

Battles and sieges will be resolved as we normally do in this hobby. However when fighting things like the Turks,Swiss, Empire or France, the normal forces you have will be severely overmatched. Fighting the Swiss with even the best companies of Condottieri is pretty much like bare-knuckle boxing with a bush chipper.

Please remember this is designed to be my greatest effort in game design and I fully expect I to be highly unpopular and disliked. It's really only for people who LOVE the Renaissance, and by that I mean people like me who are besotted with the art, music, lore, writing, and strong personalities that inhabit it.

The name "Chiaroscuro" is an art term meaning light and dark, the use of progressively darker areas on a figure to make it three dimensional. Here is where Huizinga comes in with his diagnosis of the personality of the late middle Ages, blending and moving almost moment to moment from the most brutal and violent and dark emotions of man to in the next minute, the most beautiful, peaceful, and sublime.

I'll probably be the only person who ever plays it.

It sounds like, in essence, rather than being a wargame specifically, it is more of a roleplaying game wherein your "character" is the family.

Dear Punkrabgbitt and Hatshepsuut

If that's the way you perceive it. It's not that bipolar though. Of course then you have to get into the definition of "war game."

Otto

>more or less forces of nature
Do not forget the Hungarians that Corvinus sent on their voyage to glory through Italy.

>Fighting the Swiss with even the best companies of Condottieri
Then they got lucky at the battle of Arbedo, 1419. This battle, on the other hand, might have triggered the next step in Swiss warfare style…

>There is no economy.
>Besides economics did not work back then like it does now.
I am not sure on this one. That era created the great banking houses (or inherited it from other organizations). The reason why all went for Italy is the wealth there, coming from trade and industry, just as in Germany and Bohemia (forming the wealth of eg. the Fuggers that bought the Crown for Charles more then the troops of Sickingen) or the industry of Flanders. Wise rulership made industrious subjects – at the cost of more unruly minds. Just musing…

Intrigued. Please keep us informed here :-)

Dear Puster

Remember the entry point of the players. In all the games I design they reference the level the player enters at. In my 18th Century -Nappy rules you enter as the commander in chief or one of the wing commanders of an army (left right, center). As such the rules don't consider such foolishness as limbering/unlimbering, mounting/dismounting, or even formations. It assumes all these are done by the more than competent officers you have put in charge of these things at the regiment and battalion level. All you do is make the decisions that a general at your pay grade would do. That is, can a unit still function as an active part of your plan, or has it now become a liability.

Likewise in this game. All players enter the game as the head of a Renaissance Family. This means you are already filthy rich and money is no object. Further, to you, as to your prototype contemporaries, the interruption of "the barbarians (Swiss, French, Empire, etc., IS a force of nature , completely uncontrollable except that they are looking for money, which you got. So it's not a question of if you can afford the Swiss, you can. It's a question of you getting the political opportunity to hire them, (or the French or the Empire or even the Turks. The problem with them is that it's like buyong off John Dillinger. Eventually he will want more. More is not a problem for you. It's the wreckage and havoc he causes when he's around.

As to "economics" what you say is true, industry and trade got the families to prominence, but it was never going to get them beyond it. The Mediici, the Bardi, the Peruzzi, all of the great wealthy families of Italy made their reall BIG money in State Finance. That is funding Kings, Popes, and Emperors. Remember their trade was in loaning ready cash to these soveriengs to fund their designs. However these banks (the Fuggers too) had absolutely no illusions that these sovereigns were EVER going to pay one cent back, and they never did. (Indeed whenever they tried to collect the Kings, Popes, and Sovereigns simply threw their agents into prison. The monarchs of the time rather gave over the collection of taxes to these firms which then went out and squeezed the bauer or Paisan for every pfennig and cent they could. No amount of money from Cosimo's dye houses or Genoese argosies was going to provide the cash needed to fund the wars of the Renaissance. The idea of a sustaining war economy like anything we have in the modern period was unknown and impossible in the Renaissance. In addition to that the Monarchs offered something even more valuable. They offered the strong arm to the banking houses to drive out their rival merchants or award them favorable judgements to the lesser fry who borrowed from them. So if the Duke of This and That had a loan with the Medicis and he wasn't going to pay, the King of France guaranteed a favorable verdict in his courts which fleeced the profligate Duke for every centime he had, and gave over his estate lock stock and barrel to his creditors who then sold it at an enormous profit. Preferential treatment to their financial agents and being the muscle behind the Italian Loan Sharks did the rest.

Of course it was in fact a pyramid scheme and in the end all the major Italian banks, (and the fuggers too) went bust on funding these wars.

Thank you for your interest. Its encouraging to know someone is interested.

The hardest problem in this game, or any game is not the chrome like the Swiss or Imperialists or trade or the other things but the nuts and bolts of control of the game, record keeping, and options as delineated. That is getting players to participate in a way that mimics the real life actions of the persons at the time. All too often a game is designed which does not take account of this view and players are allowed more or less to participate as "moderns" with modern sensibilities and values which of course do not work and certainly do not produce historical results. Thus behavior of historical persons may seem wrong-headed and even idiotic to us, but nevertheless that was how they thought and acted, and it is no stretch of the imagination to see that that is the behavior to be rewarded in game terms, not behavior that we know in retrospect might be better.

I am just intrigued by the approach to play an Italian family. It reminds me of a boardgame where you play a senatorial family through the history of republican Rome.

I would not underestimate the power of the bankers – the Fuggers made and shaped the reign of Maximilian and later at last made Charles, though he abandoned them – but what if… eg the Welser colony and their expedition to find El Dorado would have succeeded. The Medici managed to gain the Papacy twice, and later the title of Duke, and before that were closing to unfiying Italy under their condottiere Giovanni (yeah, different branches all over, but the name counts – and his heir took over the title). On an afterthought, the whole reformation has economical roots – the commercialization of indulgences under Leo X (a Medici, unsurprising) was just economic measure to finance building projects (and luxury lifestiles), and the injustice of the system was what upset many and led to the demand of reformations.

The transition from banker to mecen to philosopher to warlord to principe is fluent – though it seems that artists were rarely of noble or patrician blood, and often on the move finding new mecens.

So to the "nuts and bolts" – what will be the actions that your families can make, the assets available and competing for, what will be the possible interactions with other players and fate? How will their estate and the environment interact
What is in the background and the goal? The strife for cultural, ecclesiarical or political dominance (as in arts, papal influence and support from Hapsburg, Valois, Ottomans, Swiss Cantons?)? How will these be represnted. Will you be able to define your reign (being feared or loved as principe)?

Just thinking about creating a mould for that makes me slightly dizzy :-)

You might be the only one playing that game, but not the only one interested in it. So when you have something to show, or want to debate design decisions, you can expect some open feedback.

We in the modern world operate under a great delusion That is that money is power. It is not power. Power is Power. Power here being sanction. That is getting the other person to do what you and to actually do what is completely against his own interest and not pay him one red cent and thank you and lick our boots for making him do it. Money, when faced with power always loses. It has to pay to get the power to use it (as the French, Swiss, and Imperialists when they descended on Italy) which means it's wealth decreases. The next time they had to pay for the use of power, it always cost more and was less effective in a series of diminishing returns. But this is all in the"chrome" stage of the game.

What I mean by "nuts and bolts" of the game are the structures or sub-structures which are most important. Namely, what record keeping will be required? How will records be kept? How will the materials of the game aid in the feel of the game? What will be the "meter" of the game. In the last one, meter, will players be in orderly turns? Will they all turn in turns at once and the umpire adjudicate? Will they be on a calendar and if they don't turn in turns by a due date will they get one? How will resources or "means" (the chrome) come into the game and how will it be used and recorded. Will the game have a "book of strategies" that define what a player may do and he may not do anything outside of it or is he able to develop his own strategies? Means? Even Victory conditions? What control procedures will the umpire or GM have available to him? How are means brought into the game and turned out. For example, assume you had all twelve players sitting around a table. The means could easily be distributed by draws from a deck of cards. This card might give you the mercenary company of Pippo Spano, that might give you the patronage of Erasmus, and so forth. One could just as easily make a virtual deck for when players will not be sitting around a table where these resources come into their control. How long they can hold on to them is a question is it a use it or lose it? What cards can be "held" for contingencies? Who'se actions are enacted first and what is the pre-emptive quality of them.

While I do not intend using a map, similar questions impinge. For example, suppose you have a map which uses provinces or area movement. Assume three provinces in a line, A, B, and C. Player Z has an army in A, Player Y has an army in B. If player A orders his army to move to C and B orders his army to move to C, what is the "stickiness" of the moves. Does X's army in A moving to B, hold Y's Army in B there, or does B escape? If X has an army in A and Y an army in C, and both order their armies to move to B who gets there firest? As I said I am not using maps, but the above is an example of the "nuts and bolts" questions that have to be determined first.

One of the most basic questions is motivation. For example if Pete Zaria who is the gamer running the Assabucco family hires Massacio to create a work of art, is he doing it because he wishes to gain game points or Victory points, (in which case the game is more or less false)or is he doing it because that is what Renaissance princes did (Ala Burckhardt) or is he doing it because his imagination is fired up by wondering what "The Parable of the Tax Money" by Carravagio would look like? Does he want to do this simply to get a victory pip, or does he want to compose a renaissance pamphlet or at least dream up a synopsis? In another sense is the game a "game" or a story?

Let me give you another example. We are all familiar with Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and he Capulets has been going on for a while and the town in which this is taking place is pretty tired of it. In fact, as it turns out, both the Montagues and Capulets are pretty tired of it too! Only their retainers are not tired of it because it gives them prominence and something to do on Saturday night. Assume in the game the families of the Assabuco's and the Paisano's have been just as bitter enemies, but they decide to sponsor the match as a means of making peace. Please note though as Huizinga shows us about the view of life by people in the Renaissance this change was in an absolute sense, not a quantified sense. I will use German terms for effect here, but it was the same above or below the alps. In a feud (fehde) your enemy was Feinde, which is an absolute enemy, and the root of the word is exactly the same as Feind, or "THE ENEMY." That is, the devel. When you had a "friend" freunde, it was not a pleasant relationship but one of deep love where you loved them as your mother, brother, self. The terms are so close (fehde,freunde, fiende) and it is emblematic of how swiftly these things could change, and the degree of emotional intensity, and their wide swings that we see in the Renaissance. In another Shakespeare Play, Henry VI part two we see the Earl of Warwick at the court of the French King who suddenly is confronted by Margaret of Anjou and her son Edward, his arch enemies, and because his Soveriegn Edward has married the Rivers heiress instead of Lady Bona of France, which Warwick is there to arrange, in a fit of high dudgeon Warwick switches sides, embraces Margaret (who has engineered the doing to death of many of his friends and relations including his sovereigns son, the Earl of Rutland and offers his daughter to Margaret's Edward. Shakespeare could have just as well written a hypothetical version where the Montagues and Capulets push for the marriage of Romeo and Juliet, but their families and retainers, not at all willing to give up the feud both go into a civil war ending in the destruction of both families and houses.

For me the task is what forms, structures and procedures will encourage (force?) that attitude in players. What MIGHT do it would be something like that virtual deck of cards where everyone in the game gets assigned a new "draw" from the Resources deck. This card might for one player be "The Empire" which means for some reason (make up your own) the Emperor descends into Italy on his "Romerfahrt" and is your ally and you can use it to smash up another player. However you don't get to keep it. It goes away at the end of the turn, so the urgency of "use it or lose it" (and the lack of any other cards) might force players to act in similar ways.

Dear Otto, I hope the 'author's notes' aren't going to be three quarters of your the rules. Players will play the game as they see fit, which might not be as you expect. C'est la Guerre.

It's why simply rules generally work and complex ones don't.

Of course, if you are writing these for yourself then all power to your elbow, and I'll, for one, be intrigued by what you come up with. However, on the military front, the Italian Wars were a war like any other. The politics of the time were no different to politics now. Write a set for wars today with an Italian Wars bent and you'll not go far wrong, human nature and the politics that derive from it haven't changed much.

Please don't get too bogged down in the background, most of us just want battles that link, with tactical problems, in meaningful way. Politics are a side issue best resolved 'off table' / 'off the grid'.

Dear Olicana

If there are plenty of rules focusing only on "Italian Wars" then one of them should do you fine.

The whole point of the rules is as I have delineated above.

All my rules must live under the 12/12 mandates. 12 point Times Roman Bold, 12 pages 3/4" margins, both sides. All rules, examples, illustrations, and designer drivel must fit in those 12 pages otherwise I get out the red pen and start cutting. My Renaissance Tactical rules already fit that bill completely. The campaign rules will do the same.

Olicana produced a justly acclaimed set of Italian Wars rules called Hell Broke Loose. He probably uses them so do I.

Any how Otto best of luck with it all.

Not using a map will however avoid many situations that did pop up. When France wanted to grab Naples, they had to cross through Italy, thus upsetting the whole balance, from Milano through Florence and Rome – with different reactions, and burning and raping some of the smaller cities that decided to resist. On the return way the Italian factions came together to offer battle. None of that would happen if he could have gone there without crossing half of Italy.

Naturally using a historical map would create repetetive scenarios, while a generic "Italy" with families competing for cultural, military or political dominance would create a more fluid environment. For wargamers the main purpose of such a game would be to create scenarios with sieges and battles that MEAN something.

So, let the designs begin :-)

That is true Puster. The use of a map would only detract from the game by FIXATING on the territorial in a Napoleonic complex to make territorial adjustments which were the least notable feature of this period. Regardless of all the love and enchantment I have for the Warfare of the Renaissance in Italy, one has to admit that the wars were essentially sterile affairs which produced almost no lasting effects save as little chocolate chips in cookie, which might be delicious in their own right, but which impart almost no flavor of their own to the cookie. The large decisions of the Renaissance are entirely PERSONAL, and POLITICAL and which are resolved on their own. The idea of the map directly leads to a mind set of a Napoleonic Diktat, which the personalities of the age were completely incapable of either imposing on their enemies, or living with themselves.

The Duke of Milan could NEVER be the Duke of Florence at the same time, and even if he was able to insert a complete cabal of his sycophants in the Palace of the Signioriia, the worms would quickly turn.