Maelstrom’s Domesday Generational Saga and Gothic New Era

In case you didn’t read my last article on the Maelstrom range, a quick summary: back in the early-to-mid 1980s, the Fighting Fantasy boom saw a clutch of mainstream publishers competing in the gamebook field, and in their rush to feed the fad some of them ended up dipping into tabletop RPGs. Corgi, not wanting to be left behind as Puffin raked in those sweet, sweet Fighting Fantasy profits, put out a version of Tunnels & Trolls in trade paperback, largely to support a run of UK editions of solo adventures for it, and also published Dragon Warriors. Not to be outdone, Puffin not only put out some Fighting Fantasy RPG materials to complement the gamebook line, in keeping with Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s original plan of using the gamebooks as a gateway drug to multi-player RPGs, and they also put out Maelstrom – an RPG designed by Alexander Scott, who was 16 when he started out on it.

The original gimmick of Maelstrom is that it unabashedly embraced a specific real-world historical period – the Tudor era, specifically – as the setting for the game at a time when, outside of Call of Cthulhu‘s use of the 1920s, this was uncommon. Between the richness of the Tudor setting and the emphasis on ordinary people and historical detail, the original game might have been a bit less flashy than typical and might have had some system wrinkles, but there was something memorable about it nonetheless – when Arcane magazine started running monthly features on overlooked games of yesteryear, Maelstrom was the first game to receive the treatment.

In the game’s discussion of the titular Maelstrom – the underlying metaphysic which provides the basis for how magic and the supernatural work in the game – it tossed in the idea that characters could fall into there and end up in other time periods. When, decades later, Graham Bottley of Arion Games took it upon himself to secure the rights to Maelstrom, reprint it, and produce a line of supplements for the game, the “other historical settings” concept prompted him to look at making a range of additional Maelstrom editions adapted to different eras – Maelstrom Domesday was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign and was set in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, and Maelstrom Rome was a fairly thick standalone book which was set in, naturally, the Roman Empire.

For this article, I’m going to be looking at the wave of products that emerged from the second Maelstrom Domesday Kickstarter – this one to produce a massive adventure book for the game along with some juicy supplemental material – along with the fourth game in the line.

The Domesday Campaign

As the title implies, this is an epic campaign for Maelstrom Domesday – so epic, in fact, that it’s published in two volumes. It seems to be highly influenced by The Great Pendragon Campaign, in that both provide to their respective games a massive resource for playing through an enormous campaign which unfolds over generations, with one adventure per year or thereabouts covering a century or so, the assumption being that the player characters you start out with will, should they survive, rear children who when they reach adulthood will become the next generation of player characters.

It’s understandable why Bottley would look to Pendragon for inspiration here, since both Pendragon and Maelstrom Domesday are medieval RPGs which take a step beyond merely looking to the medieval period for aesthetics and look for a deeper engagement with the era than that. However, there’s also fundamental differences between the two games – Pendragon embraces a certain amount of deliberate anachronism in the spirit of Malory or Geoffrey of Monmouth‘s seminal Arthurian texts (or, for that matter, T.H. White), whilst Maelstrom Domesday is specifically interested in real-world history (albeit with some additional supernatural bits woven in). Pendragon characters are all knights, doing knightly things; Maelstrom Domesday characters are typically investigating paranormal weirdness on behalf of a patron.

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The biggest thing that the Domesday Campaign borrows from Pendragon – other than the multi-decade, one-adventure-per-year structure – is the idea of giving the player characters a manor to look after, which can act as the bedrock of the campaign. In Pendragon, each player character must manage their own household and its lands in the Winter Phase, and this provides a regular source of complications and fun; here, the player characters are assigned the manor early on in the campaign and all live on the same manor, which makes sense in a game with a greater diversity of player character types but serves a similar function of providing downtime complications, as well as a home base which can be managed and built up over the course of the campaign. In both games, manors and be a constant which helps tie the campaign together – whilst player characters come and go, the land the player characters manage is still there, and can be a rich source of replacement PCs in a pinch.

The Domesday Campaign covers a span of years ranging from 1086, the publication of the original Domesday Book, all the way through 1189, the death of Henry II. This means that if you play through the whole thing your characters will witness the very last year of William the Conqueror’s reign, the full reigns of William II, Henry I, and Henry II, and in between those two Henries you get the civil war of the Anarchy, in which King Stephen and Empress Matilda squabble over the throne.

Bottley, however, ends up in a difficult creative spot here. Perhaps sensibly, he at least bills the campaign as being a low-key affair which does not place the characters right in the midst of the most dramatic historical events of the era, but instead existing in the margins, so that a) the player should not expect to be able to change the course of history by their characters’ actions and b) knowledge of the real-world history won’t spoiler the events of the campaign itself.

That’s well and good, with the issues around spoilers being especially sensitive for a game based on investigative play. Everyone playing Pendragon probably has a rough idea of how the Arthurian saga goes, and Pendragon works best when the players collectively buy into that overarching narrative structure rather than trying to stab Arthur before he draws the sword from the stone or something like that. In investigative games, however, a good chunk of the fun comes from the players not knowing which direction the action of the game is going to go in – because part of the gameplay involves trying to figure that out.

The upshot of this is that Bottley must not only offer some hundred investigative scenarios over the course of the campaign, he by and large has to come up with them mostly from whole cloth, because every time he dips into the most interesting and exciting historical incidents of the era further dilutes the self-declared brief of “low-key story taking place in the margins of history”. It’s a tall order, and in order to get the book done it’s evident that Bottley had to make some compromises here and there.

For one thing, that “low-key/not about being at the heart of major events” angle doesn’t hold for that long at all. One of the scenarios places the players on the fateful hunt which sees William of II slain and kicks off Henry I’s desperate ride to secure the royal treasury and the crown of England, but unable to prevent the death of William – exactly the sort of frustrating situation which is meant to be avoided by avoiding putting the PCs at the heart of history. One suspects that Bottley resorted to this scenario due to lack of inspiration for a more marginal scenario.

For another, the big emphasis here is on investigative scenarios – and those tend not to be the sort of thing which benefits from a terse, truncated treatment. Pendragon is not an investigative game, in general – it focuses more on jousts, tourneys, battles, and high adventure, the sort of thing which can be handled procedurally to an extent thanks to the game’s systems. Conversely, investigative scenarios thrive on detail – and there just isn’t the scope here to offer much in the way of detail in any of the investigations.

As a result, the Domesday Campaign ends up a deep repository of ideas and NPC stats for Maelstrom Domesday, but would perhaps be fairly onerous to play through as written. Part of the charm of the Great Pendragon Campaign is the rapid development of the setting as it progresses, from the Dark Ages to the High Middle Ages to the late Medieval period to ruination on the space of a hundred years or so. That’s useful for keeping the aesthetic and the types of scenario varied. Here, one decade can end up being much like another.

Domesday Manor Book

Early on in the Domesday Campaign, the player characters are given responsibility for a feudal manor; the Domesday Manor Book is a supplement designed to provide mechanical support for the ongoing management of such a manor, either in the context of the Domesday Campaign, or if such a situation arises in your homebrewed Maelstrom Domesday scenarios, or you wish to run a campaign based around the general “running a manor” concept (either with the players as the movers and shakers of a single manor or each player having a PC who’s the lord of their own manor, with the game focusing on the political and social competition between the characters).

This is hardly the first time an RPG has turned its hand to this sort of thing; Pendragon shows at least some interest in the fortunes of a PC’s lands, and has put out supplements fleshing out the estate management game further, though the context there is to encourage an attitude in which conspicuous consumption and lavish improvements to one’s estate is one more avenue by which a knight may win Glory (and also a money sink providing motivation for adventure). An even crunchier take is offered in the HârnManor supplement in Columbia Games’ HârnMaster line, which tries to simulate the subject in fine detail.

The approach Bottley takes with the Manor Book is somewhere between these extremes. Something approaching historical verisimilitude is desired, but Bottley wisely decides that managing manors right down to the last penny, which HârnManor tends towards, is overkill for Maelstrom Domesday purposes. Instead, what is provided here is a system which provides a rough outline of how your manor’s doing in downtime between adventures, lets your manor act as a flavourful source of outcome, prompts little events which both provide a random factor in your manor’s affairs and may offer the seed of subsequent gameplay, and is generally focused on historical realities whilst leaving the door open a crack for the supernatural aspects of Maelstrom. (For instance, Breaches are a little more likely if your manor is the site of an ancient battlefield, due to all the unquiet spirits.)

As well as providing a means of randomly generating a manor (and enough of a system to put together the stats for one by eyeballing it if you have a clear idea as a referee what a particular manor’s traits should be like), the book also cleverly provides guidance for translating entries in the Domesday Book itself into Maelstrom Domesday manor statlines. After all, what was the Domesday Book itself but a big book of manor statistics? Obviously, some aspects here like local oddities and cultural traits weren’t recorded – but the book did include details on population and that sort of thing, and did so in a systematic enough way to allow for this sort of thing. It’s a great example of Maelstrom‘s long-standing willingness to go deep on the history, and makes the Domesday Book itself an even deeper source of potential inspiration than it already is.

The Three Dales

This is mostly taken up with writeups of the various manors in the titular region, the fulcrum of The Domesday Campaign, in the style of the Domesday Manor Book, and is therefore a useful (if brief) adjunct to that if you are using it, not especially enlightening if you don’t, though it does at least offer a little colour to each of them. I’d certainly be more interested in using this and the Manor Book to run a sandbox Maelstrom game than run the Domesday Campaign as-written.

Maelstrom Gothic

As with Maelstrom Domesday and Maelstrom Rome, this is essentially another “reskin the system for a new time period” job. The assumed time period is the 1850s, and characters are folk of conceivably any social class who have had some manner of supernatural experience which has prompted them to investigate the world of the uncanny – it’s basically lending itself to your classic M.R. James/Arthur Machen kind of setup, with the conceit of Maelstrom breaches providing a handy-dandy way to conceptualise all manner of supernatural incidents appropriate to the titular gothic tone.

By and large, the adaptation works well, though it finds itself brushing against some thorny areas. Part of the whole appeal of Maelstrom is its interest in real-world history, and the closer you get to real-world history, the more real-world prejudice potentially rears its head. This is true in all historical eras, but can be a particular problem from the Victorian period and beyond – because the era is close enough to our present time that not only are more or less all of our present-day bigotries present, but they are also expressed in fairly similar terms to those they manifest in these days. (This period was the dawn of scientific racism, after all.)

Rather than advocating running the game in a tweaked version of the history removing the difficult bits, the game finds artful ways to nod in their direction, but in a way which doesn’t hardwire them into the system and so can be easily dialled back by groups who don’t want to think too hard about it or dialled up by those who specifically want that theme in their games. For instance, it is suggested that female characters in professions not generally open to women in Britain in 1850 could either hail from a more liberal country (in effect trading in gender prejudice for national prejudice) or simply disguise themselves. This is not perfect and will not be satisfying to people who simply don’t want to encounter gender barriers in their RPGs at all – but such people will simply ignore it anyway, and the game will still work fine for them.

Likewise, the point is made that regional prejudice is very strong in this era – so anyone, regardless of racial background, could end up subject to such prejudice if they’re undertaking an investigation away from their homeland. Again, an imperfect solution, and many would simply wish to ignore racism and regionalism altogether – but there’s merit to the suggestion suggestion that if you’re going to work prejudice based on personal background into the game, every character ought to run into it from time to time, so you don’t have the situation where White British player characters never experience regional/racial prejudice but everyone else does.

As for the rest of the history, the book offers reasonable levels of detail on life in Britain in 1850, guidance to how things are different earlier or later in the 19th Century, and even a reskinning of the herbalism appendix from the original Maelstrom as a guide to 19th Century medicines – less St. John’s Wort, more opium. It’s all reasonable enough, though it’s perhaps a little light – though the period will be familiar enough to most people that perhaps extensive depth isn’t needed.

Perhaps the biggest issue the game has is that we’re not really short on RPGs set in Victorian England and which can be turned to spooky investigative scenarios; Cthulhu By Gaslight staked out the territory long ago, various World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness games have had Victorian settings put out for them, the Victorian era was one of the options set out in Cthulhu Dark, even Dungeons & Dragons had that Masque of the Red Death variant setting for Ravenloft. I suppose the advantage of Maelstrom Gothic is that it sets up a new port of call that can be used in the time-hopping concept in the original Maelstrom, but how many people actually use that?

One potential use I can see is for the next step beyond a generation-spanning campaign – an era-hopping campaign. Kick off a campaign somewhere in Roman Britain, then jump forward generations and see how the area has changed (along with the peril) in the Norman, Tudor, and Victorian eras – that’s a fun wheeze, isn’t it? Maelstrom Gothic might not be all that thematically groundbreaking, but I’m kind of glad it exists anyway.