Pike and Shot Fantasy

Outside of Berserk and Warhammer Fantasy, does this really exist as a genre? Stuff like the Hundred Years War, the invention of portable firearms and birth of modern fighting, the religious intrigue, rapidly advancing technology and society and the Age of Exploration slowly coming into existence seems ripe for fantasy but no one ever does it.

This was also the age of the Renaissance so stuff like Magic Colleges actually makes sense instead of being out of place in medieval fantasy. There is so much potential here and so many things to draw inspiration from in history yet no one ever does anything with it.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Götz_von_Berlichingen_(Goethe)
youtube.com/watch?v=kAfNQ_XiPjQ
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

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I believe that The Witcher is also a Pike and Shot fantasy if rather early (almost too early to be considered Pike and Shot).

Artesia definitely has pikes and lots of plate armor, don’t know about firearms, though.

I'm right there with you. My book is a fantasy setting with 30 years war era tech. I figured it would be more fun than your bog standard sword and shield fantasy. Made writing the story way more fun.

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Warcraft.

Nigga

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Man, the Pike and Shot era would make the perfect setting for a traditional DnD campaign considering all the old trappings of the Middle Ages are still there (knights, magic, kings and nobles) while all the modern stuff they shove into the settings were also around (urban centers, alchemy, gunpowder and let's not forget the professional army.)

Oh, that reminds me how Pike and Shot gave us the Absolute Monarchy, which is always a thing in DnD but only came about much later.

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>seems ripe for fantasy
Not really. At least not heroic fantasy, which is >90% of fantasy at the moment.

There's lots of institutions and a few political power players, but little room for personal heroics actually making a difference anywhere. Politics makes for poor RPGs, and it's rare that a writer is good enough to make political good stories.

For wargames most of the limelight is taken by the Napoleonic era, which is similar but thematically better for wargames (absolute commanders in chief, as opposed to the vestigial feudal-style command chain that was still around in the Pike and Shot era).

I agree it's under represented and I'd love to see it done more, but I can also see why it isn't.

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If you played something else than D&D, you wouldn't be asking retarded questions
Third of all games on the market cover early modern, you cretine.

>The Witcher
>Late Medieval: The Setting
>P-pike and shot, armarite
Jesus Christ...

>but little room for personal heroics actually making a difference anywhere

I don't know man, we know Conquistadors on a first-name basis.

>no room for personal heroics
That's where you're wrong. Look up guys like Gotz von Berlichingen and Federico da Montefeltro. Mercenaries were the hottest shit during that time period.

I run most my games in this period. Homebrew the settings though, ,can't really recommend anything but WHFB

Not enough money to buy antidepressants again?

Here comes the stupid, smelly, unlikable anti-DnD elitist. Not once is DnD mentioned before his stupid ass comes into the thread yet now the thread is probably going to forever be derailed from being anything interesting to yet another game system war thread. I hope you're happy with yourself.

>Gotz von Berlichingen
That guy who got iron hand and betrayed his followers?

Jan Zizka was a pretty cool dude.

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He asked for a hero and Gotz was widely celebrated as a hero when he was alive and long after he died.

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I still think it's a good counterexample. His adventures were a lot grittier and filled with setbacks than most RPGers find palatable.

All the mercenaries of the time lived and died dirty.

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Well in that case, the more romanticized play based on his life can be used as inspiration.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Götz_von_Berlichingen_(Goethe)

>tfw no low magic fantasy Italian Wars game to play in
I just want to play as a mercenary in these crazy ass league wars. Is that so much to ask?

That sounds like it would get CUHRAZY real fast

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>heroic fantasy
Nigga all you need for heroic fantasy is heroes and fantasy
It can be set in literally any era

Lamentations of the Flame Princess takes place in this time period.

For an oldschool D&D clone, it actually has some of the best rules for early firearms I've ever seen.

The combats are based on perform (act) to "convince" your paymaster that you are actually fighting.

>Federico da Montefeltro
That dude is unironically a real life hero.
youtube.com/watch?v=kAfNQ_XiPjQ

Renaissance D100 and it's expansion Clockwork & Chivalry fit the bill nicely. The latter covers an alternate English Civil War with Satanic Witches, Alchemists and Roundhead clockpunk warmachines alongside the P&S. Lots of information on the period and very flavorful mechanics.

GURPS is also an option of course, and works well enough.

I've not read All for One: Regime Diabolique which has the Musketeers as France's MiB but it's something I'd like to check out.

The 17thC has the ECW, Thirty Years War, Poland's Deluge and two of the most popular swashbuckler settings with the Golden Age of Piracy in the Carribean and the Three Musketeers. Add some period magic/monsters and you are set for everything from campy swashbuckling pirates to grimdark religous horror.

>all you need for heroic fantasy is heroes and fantasy
Not really. Heroic fantasy implies, at least somewhat, that your character won't be hindered in their doings by common and annoying problems like incurable disease, staph infections, tetanus, or just regular maiming.
Your character is expected to partake in hundreds of deadly battles or skirmishes over their adventuring career, when in the real world, surviving 10 battles where you actively participated in hand-to-hand combat while killing one or more enemies was considered astounding.

I want to play an Orc landsknecht now

What part of the words Heroic and Hero didn't you understand?
That shit is implied, all you need is larger than life figures and fantastical elements and you end up with Heroic Fantasy

What did he mean by this?

I think the important distinction is to be made between a medieval fantasy hero and a pike and shot era hero. If you write medieval life large and exciting there's lots of exploration and discovery and one person tipping the scales of fortune. Renaissance life writ large is court intrigues and campaign logistics and lying like a dog so other people are impressed by you.

I'm not saying the latter wouldn't work, but it's far easier to get some nerds together to roll dice to do the former.

Guts wouldn't work in a party, he's a loner. You'd call someone trying to play Guts in an RPG an edgelord that guy.

Can confirm, even street level parties tend to engage in intruige in Pike and Shot campaigns.

You mean like this?

>Guts wouldn't work in a party, he's a loner. You'd call someone trying to play Guts in an RPG an edgelord that guy.
You have literally never read Berserk.

Or maybe like this? Point that I'm making is that with some liberties taken, you can turn pike and shot into heroic fantasy.

Shit the picture didn't go through

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RPG parties don't have main characters, my dudes. Many characters that work in other media don't translate well to tabletop.

Guts can easily work in a tabletop game if the player is competent and actually understands the character.

you sound like a really uncreative person.

Eh, mate they are awfully close to Bohemian, and id argue they were proto pike and shot, only more... Pike and shot and crossbow and wagon and more wagon.

Is he pike and shot though? He's a little early is all.

>considering suddenly EVERYBODY who had hands to hold arms tried to behave like ye noble knighte who's too good to shovel dirt or carry his own luggage and european armies reached the height of feeding themselves on plunder.
>in fact, plundering reached such nutty heights that they carried off everything, including the occasional forest.

fixed.

It's the age of the murderhobo where the printing press spread charms and hexes far and wide too. I dunno what the natural sciences did, but the humors basically constituted a chemical theory of magic at that point and geometry and mathematics were in high demand as well. Fencing theories based on geometrics were a thing at that point but the Wunderkammern still wanted to be fed, so trading in exotica was profitable too.

I am currently running a game where Tilean baron in warhammer wants to reunite Tilea. My players are enjoyin it a lot. We already played 3 sessions so far, our band is 45 people right now.

>Be Venice
>The Papacy organizes an alliance against you (including France)
>Convince the Papacy that France is too dangerous to be left unchecked
>Expand the alliance with loads of powerful and daunting allies
>Teleport behind France
>"Nothin' personnel... kid!"
>Watch France steamroll your former alliance and reap the rewards
Venetian perfidy knows no bounds.

A game that uses the Witcher concept of the Conjunction of the Spheres but the setting is literally Pike and Shot era Europe would be interesting as hell.
>you will never massacre a snobbish elf army with your fellow human mercenary bros and rape and pillage your way through their city once you defeat them with your superior technology
Feels bad brehs

I actually want to run a early-musket based campaign. Know any good rules on gunpowder guns for pathfinder and 5e? I think the touch attack is bullshit and I know for a fact that plate armor can even spot musket pistol balls in real life.

There’s Maria the Virgin Witch too, it has exactly this with pretty painstakingly detailed historical accuracy for a land where angels come to mess with people directly and witches can summon colossal monsters. I know there are others too. Hell, it’s literally set in the Hundred Years’ War.

All pike and shot changes is the historical accuracy of a setting emulating the late medieval period compared to the generic standard. The names actually implies like and gun should be heroic fantasy just like sword and sorcery, but set in a more specific and realistic time.

>Politics makes for poor RPGs
way to oust yourself as a tasteless retard

I think part of it is that so many nerds have this weird idea that 'Guns are magic death rays, so any game with guns needs a million special rules for them'. Which either results in 'Guns forever, never ever anything else' or 'Guns are so slow and damn fiddly that you'll never ever use them'. Neither of which fit the time period.

>'Guns are so slow and damn fiddly that you'll never ever use them'.
Well, for a 4 man party crawling through dungeons facing up against a dozen or so enemies max at a time they are strictly inferior to a crossbow, even though they're superior in a battlefield situation. At best I can see pistols functioning in such a context as a way to give melee characters some way to do damage while closing the distance.

>don't have main characters
in some cases, sure. in others, they do. Play rogue trader where a player actually controls the rogue trader. Godlike where a character holds command over the others? It depends on the actual people playing, but it can and does work.

That might just be unique to my group though, idk.

The best time to set a game in would probably be in the 1st half of the 16th century, when people figured out that pikes are the shit and that they work really well combined with skirmishers wielding crossbows or arquebuses, but they haven't figured out all the details yet and there are still plenty of other troops running around, either to try and exploit some weakness in pike and shot formations such as rodeleros, or because the are still around and the kings and nobles won't turn down troops, like the spanish amolgovars.

I've been working on a campaign set in that era for riddle of steel or song of swords (which we'll probably never play, but oh well) with the players as part of mercenary company which form the close combat troops of an army. These are the guys with swords and bucklers or zweihanders (or whatever else they bring) that try to flank the enemy pikemen once they engage in the push of pike, or scale the enemy walls during the siege, or any other shit job that the pikemen or the arquebusiers either can't do or are too valuable to do. It's fun and varied enough to make a campaign out of, while playing a pikeman yourself would get really boring really quick.

In PF, you can dodge bullets, but armor is useless against it.
Yeah, it's shit. Plate armor can stop bullets from early firearms. The thing was, as firearms became better, you needed more armor to stop them. Until it became impractical, so armor was dropped. That's around the time, when pike and shot evolved to line formations.

It took us hundreds of years until armor became valid against (small calibre) firearms again. But in PF logic, it's still better to dodge a 9mm than to wear kevlar.

None of you niggas has mentioned Solomon Kane?

Shameful.

this is all objectively correct. Roundargers, Greatswords, Halberds, to a lesser extent armoured Reiters and financially unviable but still roflstomping knights, that's the bread and butter of a party based heroic campaign.

Early 1500s, that's where you can have your cake (pike and shot) and eat it too (fuck around with a cast of heroes)

5e guns are fine, they’re just more powerful weapons.

You do realize OP that colleges existed in the medieval times, right?

I dream oneday of a good fantasy-16th century rpg where the Catholic elves make war with the prodestant orcs

Just to add, you can do all this in weird foreign lands full of danger and treasure. Indias, America, Japan etc etc. Just sign up into a portuguese royal armada.

Zweihander does some of this

Try not playing DnD

Yeah, Portugese conquest of Malacca was cool as hell. Streetfights between armored pikemen, war elephants and archers in the biggest trading city of South-Eastern Asia.

While it's pretty much alternate history and dimension jumping, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen's setting, Aryan-Transpacific, Styphon House Subsector makes a pretty good low fantasy world.

There even was a wargame back in the day. Not a modern beer & pretzel game like most modern wargames are, if the reviews I've found are accurate.

And here is the main theater of the story, which in our timeline is known as Pennsylvania.

>little room for personal heroics

Commanders were still fighting on the front line in this period, groups of soldiers were recruited by their immediate superior in a kind of recruiting pyramid scheme, and it was the low-level commanders who would be trying to hold back the men from the ol' raping and pillaging (or encouraging it). Pike and shot is full of personal heroics.

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>REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
I almost heard your high-pitched scream, David.

Only that Witcherverse explicitly invokes Polish Late Medieval all over the place (gee, I wonder why), especially when it comes to warfare descriptions. By the final book it's literally 1410 and the war against Teutonic Order with handful of WW2 jokes thrown in.
Which is then completely lost in translation and one of the chief reason everyone will tell you the series is horrible to read in English.

The clown shoes really bother me for some reason.

Damn straight they were. Even the father of "modern warfare" still did that; Gustavus Adolphus fought alongside his troops and died leading a cavalry charge in 1632. Era's ripe for heroics if you ask me, assuming you want to make heroics out of wars of that sort.

>hundred years war
>pike and shot era
I think the Hundred Years War ended a little before the pike and shot era got started. Yes, they had some gonnes in the HYW but they weren't used all that much, and pikes really didn't play much part either, especially not in the way they did later on.

bump

I did a nation-builder that lasted about three months with 15+ players that turned into pike and shot fantasy. At the begining, only four nations used pikes and only two used gunpoweder, but by the end of it most of them realized how good pikes and guns are if you don't have top tier magic. It was complete crazyland, but a ton of fun. I met a lot of fine roleplayers and some good worldbuilders with that campaign. I'm currently trying to adapt the nations to a skirmish wargame system I made a while back.