Flashing Blades

After the summer trails away in 1623, a gentleman and a foreign noble go to war...

I recently played a session of Flashing Blades, an RPG set in 17th century France, written in 1984 by Mark Pettigrew. Here are some thoughts and reactions I had to the game. We will continue (with additional players) on February the 11th and I hope to write here about the experience.

Read on for more...



From start to finish, character creation for two brand new players only took about half an hour. Granted, our GM skipped over a few things and expedited some stuff by making assumptions about certain obvious choices. I would say that is how all games should go--discuss the type of game so the GM and players can help eachother create characters and a world that's enjoyable.

We played through one campaign--the siege of a city in the south full of protestant rebels. During the campaign, we fought three major engagements, and both player characters came home with trophies--hostages, a war horse, money. I even managed to capture the French flag back from the rebels, warranting me a commendation.

There are rules for the entire campaign process, which I found to be quite fun, allowing a smooth time outside of classic RPG gameplay of "adventure and carousing." However, there were also good rules for the carousing, gambling, and adventuring, as well. I might say that, over all, the rules are a bit more complex or clunky than my preference, but with a good group you simply take what works and hand-wave the rest.

Once we finished our campaign, we returned to Paris, where we started to find some trouble by way of one character's bad gambling habit. We also heard of an opportunity to ingratiate ourselves with a local noble by collecting the bounty on a horse thief. I'm hoping that doing so will open up new adventure opportunities in later sessions.

This sessions was, really, more about learning the mechanics. We are adding two more players in the next session and I'm very excited to see what will happen next! The GM has a great handle on keeping gameplay fun and fast enough that we don't get bogged down. The story should unfold nicely, I think.