GM's Remarks

This game was set up using the French RPG Te Deum pour un Massacre.  The players answered the liepath questionnaire via email and created their characters without knowing the mechanical implications of the choices they made.  The result was that a number of the characters, as created, had no skill with a score greater than 1.  This is partly because the game itself has too many skills (creating a competent doctor is essentially impossible) and partly because the character creation system is not balanced in such a way as to favour the skill set of the final job the character picks.  So while the player might well want to play a knight and make decisions commensurate with this idea, his decision to be a knight rather than a judge really has no more importance than his decision to have had his character sent away to college rather than schooled by a private tutor.

This meant that I was forced to fold a number of skills into each other so as to create more competent characters.  This, combined with the combat system's unwieldyness means that for the second series of sessions, players will be re-rolling their characters using BRP but with their original characters in mind.

The inspirations for this game were Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle for the focus upon economics and administrative matters, the film La Reine Margot for mood and visuals and a number of historical works including Robin Briggs' Early Modern France 1560-1715.