BRP - Crusaders of the Amber Coast.pdf

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rusaders
C
of the
A
mber
C
oast
• a
uthor
Paolo Guccione
• s
peCIaL
t
hanks
Agris Liepins for his reconstruction of the ancient
Latvian costumes and buildings.
The Christian Magic system for
Basic Roleplaying
has been co-
developed by Paolo Guccione, Pete Nash and Simon Phipp.
The spells of Luck, Speak with the Dead and Witch Flight have
been written by Byron Alexander.
• L
ayout
• C
over
Dario Corallo
art
Tiziano Baracchi
• I
nterIor art
• m
aps
Dario Corallo, Nicolai Nickson,
Miguel Santos, Nguyen Cao Viet
Colin Driver, Dario Corallo
Basic Roleplaying
® is the Registered Trademark of
Chaosium Inc., and is used under license.
Mythic Russia
is a Trademark of Firebird Productions.
Stupor Mundi – Roleplaying in the world of Frederick II
and
Merrie England – The Age of Eleanor
are Trademarks of
Alephtar Games.
• e
dItIng
and
p
roofreadIng
Charles Green, Pete Nash
• p
LaytestIng
Sergio Bonomo, Andrew Emery, Raffaele
Guarrasi, Chris Holden, Timothy Holden, Owen
Jonston, Manuele Verduci, Giovanna Zegarelli.
h t t p : / / w w w. a l e p h t a r g a m e s . c o m
1
G
OING BACk with my mind to the
moment when I started conceiving
the Amber Coast supplement,
almost ten years ago, I am amazed at how
many things have changed during that
time. Apart from my personal life, the game
for which Crusaders had been designed has
been changed a couple of times, and yet it
has remained the same, enjoying a second,
or maybe third or fourth, youth. How I
wish it was the same for all of its fans.
However, we are all young in spirit, are we
not?
But more than the game system, it is my
perception of the setting that has changed a
great deal. The first time I looked at the
Baltic epic I wanted just to find an alternate
setting, other than Sicily, for my game set in
the age of Emperor von Hohenstaufen, the
Stupor Mundi,
and I opted for the
adventures of Hermann von Salza and his
heroic knights in the pagan lands of
Lithuania. HeroQuest was still called Hero
Wars at that time, and the game information
about these settings contained in the
Mythic
Russia
game was not yet available, so I
made my own research. And what had
begun as a collection of notes about the
Teutonic knights in the North eventually
evolved into a voyage of the mind through
a part of European history that few knew,
although it is one of the most fascinating
tales of the Old World.
For one thing, I had to dig into the
subtleties of political intrigues between
bishops and warrior monks – and learned
that Hermann von Salza had rather little to
do with those events, whose real shapers
were rather king Mindaugas, the father of
Lithuania, and the first Bishop of Riga,
Albert von Buxhövden. And I learned the
sad story of the Sword Brotherhood, the real
conquerors of these cold but fertile lands.
And eventually entering the Cathedral built
by Albert, still standing there after eight
centuries, gave me the same emotion that
visiting the tomb of the
Stupor Mundi
still
gives me when I go back to my hometown.
On the other hand, I had to learn
something about the pagans that the
Teutonic knigths fought. And there came
the big surprise. There are a bit less than
one billion people of indo-european origin
in the European Union, but less than six
million still speak almost the same language
their fathers spoke two millennia before
Christ. Nevertheless, much of their ancient
culture was lost during the centuries after
the Crusades, and has been rediscovered
only recently.
You may not know this, but the Balts
really love their past. For non-trivial
historical reasons, like the Cold War,
roleplaying games have not been practised
a lot in the Baltic Republics until the last
two decades, so we Westerners have a
historical advantage over them in RPGs. But
while we Western old-schoolers, lazy old
people that we are, waste our time each
year playing our costumed games in the
remains of the splendid castles that we find,
already made, in the Rhine Valley, leftovers
of an Imperial Age that has nothing to do
with the tribal barbarians that we like to
impersonate, the Balts took the time to
rebuild the forts that their real ancestors -
not the Germanized or Russified Balts, the
real ones - inhabited. In real wood. And
roleplay wearing the trinkets of the old,
reconstructed from the leftovers of the
ancestral burial mounds, something that I
have had the privilege to wear even if I am
no Balt. And even those Balts who do not
roleplay, believe it or not, still love to gather
around bonfires during the nights of the
solstices, like their forefathers did four
millennia ago.
If one loves his past so much, there
must be some reason, don't you agree?
So, after nine years' elaboration and
more than two years' research, and having
had the opportunity to appreciate every
possible beauty of the Baltic countries, I am
pleased to share my discoveries with you,
in the most pleasant way one can have to
enjoy history – gaming. I now invite you to
don the armour of a Sword Brother, or pick
up the crooked staff of a Nattangian Griwe,
invoke the help of God, or Dievs, and enter
the most extraordinary epic that the Old
World has ever witnessed.
It shall remain a secret between us, but
it is a tale that has not yet ended.
Riga, New Year's Eve 2009
2
C
rusaders
of
the
a
mber
C
oast
I
ntroduCtIon
to the
a
mber
C
oast
t
he
b
aLtIC
C
rusades
and the
s
tupor
m
undI
Several years have passed since the
publication of our Hohenstaufen era
supplement
Stupor Mundi,
and people
continue to appreciate our other Medieval
Europe settings such as
Merrie England.
In
order to provide a wider range of
opportunities for an exciting roleplaying
experience that builds on history but
includes plenty of fantasy elements, we are
now introducing a setting that is closely
related to the original
Stupor Mundi,
but
focuses on an area that is definitely less
known, but happens to have hosted the
highest concentration of great heroes and
adventures of the first half of the 13th
I
ntroduCtIon
3

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