You Think This Is Something, But In Fact It’s Something Else

We break from tradition in this blog post to talk about someone else’s game.  Regular readers will have realised my fondness for stuff that pretend to be one thing, but then turn out to be something different.  The delight I get from having my preconceptions taken away, ripped into tiny pieces and handed back to me is a rare pleasure, but one to be savoured, and it certainly inspired Army Of Zero, even if Army Of Zero’s dual nature isn’t really a secret.

And so, I’d like to point you in the direction of a “role-playing game” called The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by James Wallis.  Players adopt the roles of (let’s say) eighteenth century European nobles and challenge one another to tell tall tales, viz: “Tell me Baron, the story of the time you ate the King of Norway’s horse in most curious circumstances”.  Or: “Tell me Baron, the story of why the keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew classified your moustache as a herb”.  And so forth.  Disputes are settled by duels to the death (but if you don’t want to cause a mess on the floor, the Baron gives you leave to replace the usual duelling with a round of Rock-Paper-Scissors).

And basically that’s it as far as the game is concerned.  Is it a good game to play?  I dunno.  I don’t expect I’ll ever play it, because I’m not clever enough, and it requires an ability for improv. comedy that I suspect would defeat many.

But how the game plays isn’t the point.  The point is that the rule book is very, very funny.  It’s written in the voice of the eponymous Baron and published in a style that I haven’t seen since I attended a minor English public school in the 1970’s, which by my calculations makes it a reasonable facsimile of a book from two centuries earlier - all engraved illustrations, effs where there should be esses, and, wow, catchwords!  I haven’t seen catchwords for decades.

Here’s a sample paragraph from the book:

Gather the company and count its members.   If it is late in the evening then ask a manservant or potboy to do it for you.   Make sure that each player has a purse of coins before them equal to the total number of players—do not ask a servant to do this,  servants being by nature a shifty and feckless lot who will as soon rob a man blind as help him out of a ditch,  and I have been robbed in enough ditches to know.   If your company  numbers less than five,  then give each one five coins.   If it numbers more than twenty then think not of playing the game :  instead I advise you to pool your purses,  hire some mercenaries and plan an invasion of Belgium.

And so on, in a similar vein.  It says it’s a role-playing game, actually I would file it under humour.

You can order The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen from Mongoose Publishing.  And you can download a sample of the first few pages as a PDF from Magnum Opus Press.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under other games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.