A Shadow From the Past

I got an email through the Hotlead website trying to contact "the author of Blood & Chivalry." They're planning a Hastings refight and think B&C would be the perfect rules for it. But they had questions.

Fortunately the questions were mostly "did we do this right?" to which my answer was uniformly yes. There was one bit of confusion caused by an unfortunate omission in a Morale results table.

One issue that basically boiled down to I was naive and assumed that everyone would do things that way. Of course I've learned a lot about rule writing since then.

Digging out my old copy to look up answers I found the first version published by my friend Don in 1992. I think the entire print run was done on DND office equipment. The layout was pretty basic.

1992 version of the rules

Interior of 1992 edition

Interior of 1992 edition. Don was pretty chuffed with his top down figure graphic

A little later I got a chance to redo it. New name, layout by a graphic artist, who did the drawings inside too. Distribution through his connection with Old Glory. A shiny and expensive 4/1 cover (outside cover full colour print, inside black and white). I insisted on the more expensive spiral binding because I think it's nicer for players to use that way. Should've gone with perfect or staple binding in hindsight.

Looking back at it though, I'm pretty pleased with the product. 

Interior 2001 

Lots of diagrams and pictures

A map! I should revisit the scenarios again.

I do like that the pages are white, instead of the soft taupe or fuzzy background graphics behind the text that is the current fashion, but which often make it a bugger to read.

Unfortunately a Quick Reference Sheet was forgotten. The inside covers are taken up by ads for the short lived La Gloire magazine (Old Glory's attempt to revive a US wargaming magazine and sell their miniatures like White Dwarf was doing) that my publisher also edited, and I helped with, and a Dark Ages Scenario and Army List book that never got published. Womp womp...

My correspondent would have really liked the Dark Age supplement. Fortunately for him I still had my long hand notes buried at the bottom of my filing cabinet.

I've sent him my files for Blood & Chivalry 2, which I recall was pretty much done, I just couldn't find anyone to do the layout and publish it. I suppose 15 years  further along I could probably fiind some layout software and post it on Wargames Vault or Drive Through RPG.