Chivalry & Sorcery
3rd Edition

RPG

Reviewed by Max Bantleman


Highlander Designs
202pp £ 13.99

Chivalry & Sorcery (C&S) has been around for twenty years, it was one of the original 'big three', along with RuneQuest and D&D. The first edition was one of the most complete RPGs of its day, and held off competition for this title for many years. it's the only fantasy RPG I GM and I love it to bits....

As the role playing market developed, and games began to reflect this, C&S seemed to slip in to a coma, remaining unchanged in a world of RPG flux and chaos. Second edition C&S brought the game in to the 'skill based' arena, where 90% of the other RPGs where slugging it out for a share of the market. Unfortunately second edition C&S was neither one thing nor the other, losing its originality but adding nothing new in the form of skill based systems. With the third edition, Highlander seem to have addressed some of the earlier problems only to exaggerate others.

But I digress.

C&S 3rd edition is a soft bound book of some two hundred pages, the print quality is good and the layout adequate. Lack of artwork makes the system look a bit austere and the over-all impression is one of clinical presentation of rules with an almost complete lack of background or atmosphere. Highlander plan to release much source material (GM's book, etc.) which they say will redress this problem. We shall see.

The rules themselves hang around the Skillscape system, which forms the core rules for character generation and development. Generating a character is a laborious task, with much to-ing and froing through the rules. Several reads of the rules are necessary before you can be sure you have not missed some aspect of generation vital to your character. As skill based systems go it's not bad. But is it good enough?

Skillscape is trying to be all things to all players/GMs, obviously being Highlander's stepping stone in to other areas of role playing games, i.e. SF, Future-Noir, etc. And there lies the problem. Where is the 'chivalry & sorcery'?

The combat system is complex and saturated with emphasis on 'Action Points', which tend to slow things down a bit, making combat less dynamic than it used to be. The looking up of modifiers to hit, both environmental and skills, takes far too long.

But enough of such trivia! On with the real sacrilege. The changes to the magic system. Second edition made some minor changes, but generally left well alone (rightly so). Third edition drags the magic system in line with the Skillscape system, which leaves all flavour and character behind, presenting us with a very D&D-ish feel. It's not that D&D is bad, it's just that C&S was always SO much better. If there was to be one saving grace of C&S in a market salurated with RPGs it was to be the magic system. Now it's gone. The single most complete magic system in the RP field has been dismembered.

C&S seeks to set characters and campaigns in a semi-real, quasimedieval, high fantasy type of setting, with the emphasis on the world being, 'real' place which exists very much independently of the characters. To this end, the social aspects are highlighted giving prominence to those in the upper echelons of society, usually in a feudal setting.

Knights rule the battlefield wit their expertise and their war-horses, while magic is left to those brave enough to meddle with such dark powers. Whatever vocation your character follows, and there are over twenty to choose from, you will be adventuring ir world filled with social, political and magical intrigue, peopled by the three main races: Humans, Elves and Dwarve Hobbits have gone from the list, as have a few other'Tolkien' types, presumably due to ICE's hold on the Tolkien licenses.

Now I know reviews are supposed to concentrate on the 'realities' of a system (playability and such), but with something with as much history as C&S this is not enough. Why call it C&S if you intend to modify it beyond recognition? Third edition C&S is more of an attempt to move in to a market place with fixed precedents than it is a development of the original system. Nothing wrong with that. Except that C&S as nothing new to offer in this market place. So why buy it? Presumably this is why they kept the name, hoping the reputation would carry it forward, as much (if not more) than any advertising campaign.

Overall: C&S third edition will consign C&S to the "remember when" type of game. No longer better than other RPGs in its genre, lost any whiff of distinction or originality, and is doomed to wander in the quagmire of an already swamped market. C&S is dead. Long live first edition.

More Reviews

Back to Valkyrie 14 Table of Contents
Back to Valkyrie List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1997 by Partizan Press.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com