Love and War

Cover of Love and War
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Love and War is a sourcebook of knights and chivalry.

I was asked to write this book on the grounds that I know a lot about the subject. I can’t think where people got that impression from.

Anyway, my goal here was to get away from “knight=fighter in shiny armour on horse”, and look into the psychology and ideals behind chivalry, so that “knight” could cover more than one of the character classes. I picked Valour, Loyalty, Love, and Piety as the four basic virtues of chivalry, and then discussed how they worked. This included providing rules to support them, including a complete system for courtly love, and suggestions for how to play them out in a game.

I think this was one of the first books where I really started concentrating on making everything useful in play. If something wasn’t immediately useful, I tried to come up with a different way to present it to make it so. Interesting background had to be tied down to things that players could do, or new bits of rules that they could use. This is something that I think is important in an RPG book; they are neither novels nor textbooks.

Several of the feats in this book were chosen for The Year’s Best d20, edited by Monte Cook, which was a nice bit of acknowledgement.