As I prepare for the first draft of Duty & Honour‘s revised edition, I have been smothering myself in appropriate literature. It’s my modus operandi when I’m writing and well, it’s no hardship. Those that follow me on Facebook will know that I have been reading Iain Gale’s Jack Steel series and comparing it to Sharpe - so it was in trepidation that I started Gale’s newest book ‘Keane’s Company’ - a series set this time in the Peninsular. The concept – an English officer recruits a company of rogues to complete covert, intelligence and exploring missions – seemed sound, but it could easily be just another Cornwell carbon copy.
I was stunned to discover that not only is it not Sharpe by another name but it feels very much like a book written from a game of Duty & Honour! The company has the smell of a bunch of PCs – the Irish rogue Captain, his martially competent Artilleryman Lieutenant, an old washed up Sergeant, a thief, an impersonator with a thing for languages, a sharpshooter, a pugilist and a local soldier. All of the boxes are ticked in terms of interesting character types except a company ‘medic’. Moreover, the structure of the book is all about the missions and the various things the company have to do to get them done. Sound familiar? Again, these aren’t resolved by fighting along. There is one Mission where Wellington asks them to bring the local guerillas on-side and it is resolved through a combination of diplomacy and gambling! Very Duty & Honour! Hell, even the sort of easy ‘it’s just a scratch, sir!’ healing is in there.
There is one dropped ball however and that comes in the form of Gabriella, the wife of one of the men who Keane buys out of a brothel but takes along with the group. She acts as a diversion once and is then confined to the baggage only to appear with a tip-off that Keane’s romantic target is in the area. So much more could have been done with her and I hope she gets a better showing in the sequel as I desperately need more strong female archetypes from the fiction other than Theresa.
It’s not classic literature – I’m not sure I quite gel with Gale’s writing style – but it does give a completely different take on the Peninsular campaign and offers a wonderful campaign framework for D&H. Consider this now essential reading!
A long time ago, in a forum far far away, someone on the internet was wrong. Almost certainly, they were trying to convince someone that a set of role-playing game rules were written in such a way that you could not … no, worse … were not allowed to, do something or other. It wasn’t that the rules made something difficult – it was that somehow, at your own gaming table, the publishing company would intervene and stop your fun. As these agents of the company (inevitably it would be Wizards of the Coast … it always is!) had never been seen, we assumed they must be ninjas!
