Truly Machiavelian Renaissance Games

Umpire Notes

By Otto Schmidt

The first thing I should tell you is that the victory conditions don’t mean a thing! I don’t even know if they add up to equality. All they are designed to do is to get the players to THINK in a certain way. The umpire must encourage this, and encourage them to continue to try and find other creative ways to get more points within the idea of their victory conditions. The actual points don’t matter and frankly I have no idea if they are even ATTAINABLE!

The REAL victory condition is not what happens in the battle, but how well you as the umpire judge the player is operating his forces and figure in the spirit of those conditions and his own character. Of course, you can’t let this out! You can equip yourself with suitable props for this, like a clipboard with a spread sheet with the various names etc, and make marks on it from time to time, but these marks are not victory points or ought not to be, but simply incidents that strike you as “very appropriate” for that side.

Remember, the aim to encourage player INTERACTION and INTER CONFLICT, and at the same time for each player to “portray” his character, make his reputation, and distinguish himself as a real Renaissance character would. At the same time you must keep the players on track and cannot allow them to do stupid things of things that could not be reasonably done in real war, and you must keep the game moving and remember that real-time in the battle is ticking and evaluate how long it would take this or that player to accomplish a special action or not.

The four try outs of the game yielded on the whole acceptable and pleasing results. The game at my house went off very well. The two games at the conventions were mixed. One was very good, as good as the one at my house or better. The other was less so because I had a number of younger gamers in the group who were not up to the demands of the subtleties of the roles. Two of them completely abandoned any role playing or trying to follow the victory conditions and two others simply lost their way and “wandered off into the weeds” and “over role-played.”

While this was not as successful it gave good experience and some cautionary development that the umpire must keep the players on track and structure the game. The fourth game at the other gamers house was superlative. Four of the players, two on each side, quickly caught on and in fact played their roles to the hilt and a riotous time was had by all, especially with the sniping and bantering that went on. One gamer, who played Benelux, somewhat dissatisfied with his role boundaries (like all good actors) went over-the-top and played a drunken Bene-Lux and carried out his turn making his moves etc while engaging in a rambling “under his breath” monologue about his relatives, brothers, and the actions of his troops, and their proclivity to date barnyard animals, or at best girls who looked like barnyard animals.

On the other side the player who had Lanolin put on not only a good version of a chivalrous loon but at one point shattered us all with, when asked by one player why he hated the peasants so “Because... they are trying to poison our precious bodily fluids.”

Problem

The one problem role in the game is finding someone who can get into playing the role of Sha-Na-Na. It is difficult to get a player who can work on really doing nothing and at the same time trying to drive his fellow players crazy and avoid getting slugged.

One other item of note. During the game with the very young gamers at Fall-In! One of the gamers disliked the role given to him on the Atholli side and he asked if he could substitute his own. I was originally loathe to do this, but he said that he had been a looker-on at Historicon earlier in the year and had gotten copies, after the battle of the Victory conditions for each player. He therefore knew what I was trying to pull off and suggested a completely different set for his own character. I let him try it. Unfortunately his ideas required a more active part on some of the other roles played by the younger people and it sort of fizzled, but he still had fun doing it.

This brings us to the final piece.

You must understand that all of this is really subversive of the overt principle of a normal wargame, which assumes continuity, cooperation, and coordination among the commanders of each side - which is perfectly correct when we are dealing with Marxist/Napoleonic sociopaths but not at all in the much more chaotic Renaissance where the individual idea of what constituted “victory” was up for grabs. War in this age had not been reduced to a mere functional tool of state. Battle was not viewed merely in its utility of victory. War and battle, in addition to these were occasions of aristocratic display, political statements, and personal aggrandizement. Thus if you go back and re- read each of the individual victory conditions you can see various strains of individual self- fashioning that mandated very different and often counter-productive behavior on the battlefield.

This for me is what makes the Renaissance so interesting and magical, and why I have dedicated my life and studies to it. But then I admit that I am somewhat out of the mainstream in wargaming. I feel that you can’t enjoy a Renaissance battle unless you can enjoy the rest of the Renaissance. For it is not bills and bows and pike and shot, but Azzaiolo’s “Chi passa per sta strada,” Marenzio’s “Madrigal”, the Anonymous “ Blame not My Lute,” “Lo Grillo” or tales about Caterina Sforza on her wall, the “The affair of the Chestnuts,” “and perfumed harem girls and Turkish mutes with silken cords”. It is “The Field of the Cloth of Gold,” “The Diet of Worms,” and “Il Sacco de Roma.” It is the “The Feast of the Levites,” “The Man of Sorrows” and Titians Women. That is, it is in the enactment and fashioning of the individual.

How far the Renaissance is from us can be illustrated by simply considering the meaning of the word “Virtue.” To us it is merely a women’s chastity. To the Renaissance it was the manly virtues of courage, strength, honor, and most of all action - a sort of machismo which was a combination of modern medal of honor winner and mafia don, and as alien as those images are to us, to the people of the Renaissance they were effortlessly compatible.

More Truly Machiavelian Renaissance Games Elvish Civil Wars

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