Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Jack Gassman, who runs Horseman of Eire with Alessia Pagani, which is an equestrian training school and medieval combat academy outside of Wexford in Ireland. Alessia specialises in natural horsemanship, and Jack takes care of the swords. I interviewed them both in Episode 124 of the show. Jack has now invented and published a game that is very on topic for us. So he’s coming back on the show to talk about it. The game is called Force of Virtue. And without further ado, Jack, welcome back.
Jack Gassman
Hi, thanks for having me again. It’s a pleasure to be back.
Guy Windsor
So I assume no major things have changed since the last time we talked in terms of, you know, you’re still in Wexford. Still horses and swords and whatnot. So why don’t we crack on with what exactly is this game?
Jack Gassman
Well, since I was fairly young, I’ve been into miniatures and stuff. I started with Airfix and stuff like that. And I’ve also been interested in miniature gaming and stuff. And it’s always fascinated me to the mechanics of it. When I was growing up in Kansas, we didn’t have like any real gaming close to us. So we’d just scour the internet for rule sets that were free, downloadable, and then ended up making our own and toying with stuff. So we started very early toying with rule sets. And I always found it a really interesting thing to sit down and think about how something works, why something works this way not that way, and how to abstract it into a system that works together. And valuing tradeoffs etc. So that was always like from early on, I think the first one I did when I was 8 I called the minivan convention. I thought it was very clever as a name. But then as I started doing more research into the context of HEMA and as I got more into HEMA and more active the miniature gaming kind of petered off.
Guy Windsor
So, just a quick interjection, what is miniature gaming?
Jack Gassman
Ah, okay, yeah, of course. So, when I say miniature gaming, if anybody’s familiar with Warhammer or anything like that, it’s similar. But on the most basic level, you build yourself almost like a railroad model train board. So it’s a small, scaled down battlefield,
Guy Windsor
So you build a model of a terrain or battlefield.
Jack Gassman
Battlefield or city or whatever. And then you get little miniatures. And usually, you’ll paint them. Because you’re an aesthete like that. And then you have rules on moving them around, them fighting each other, what happens if one interacts with another, all those kind of things. So it’s a bit like a version of Risk without moving things between countries.
Guy Windsor
And it goes into a lot more detail as to the actual movement of troops and whatnot.
Jack Gassman
Exactly. There’s usually rules on how fighting works, rules on how movement works, all those kinds of things. What is a victory, what is a loss, and there’s an entire kind of ecosystem on how these things can work. And there’s hundreds and hundreds of different rule sets on how this works. And each of them in their most core way, is a statement of how the game designer understands how the particular conflict or whatever their Wargaming works, whether it’s something as whimsical as you know, stuffed toys, fighting it out at night, to see who gets to have the best place on the shelf to very serious World War Two simulation games. There’s a whole genre from fantasy to sci fi on how these work, but all the games basically come down to an abstraction of a perceived reality and how the trade offs work in that. You also have to do it in a way that won’t overwhelm the player. There’s a lot of details about it. But as I started doing more research on the context of historical martial arts, I started to try and have to think okay, why? How did these things work together? How did they perceive reality? How do they perceive warfare working? Because just as important how it actually works is how did they perceive it working? Because their perception of how it works will dictate how they train, how they prepare, how they communicate about the things and when I say warfare, I’m being very, very broad. Everything from small informal brawls, to muggings, to feuds, to skirmishes and all that warfare to battlefield like how do these things work?
Guy Windsor
But also like the city of Siena attacking the city of Florence with armies in the field.
Jack Gassman
Yeah, there’s all these kinds of different levels. And when you start getting into the sources, they don’t really have this distinction at all. It kind of rolls together in a fluid continuum.
Guy Windsor
It’s kind of strange to us, reading some of these medieval sources, that skill as a swordsman was supposed to be somehow related to skill as a soldier. When really, that’s like saying skill as a pistol shot equates to skill as an infantryman. You can see there’s a relationship there. But there’s a whole bunch of stuff an infantryman has to be able to do that someone who’s just good at shooting pistols doesn’t, like march long distances, and then be able to fight at the end of it, for instance.
Jack Gassman
Exactly, if you can get there in at the right place at the right time with all your kit, then how good a shot you are kind of doesn’t matter. As I started doing all this research to try and understand that I kind of needed a way to index my research and create a working model to see how it would work. And if all these pieces that I’m seeing fit together in a logically coherent way, which, if you just write it down in a paper, finding the relationships between how these things work, and quantifying that is quite cumbersome and hard.
Guy Windsor
I’m imagining, for a normally informed listener, this is going to be very hard to follow, because it’s very abstract. Can you give us a concrete example of what you mean?
Jack Gassman
Okay, so for example, a very basic question, why would I take a halberd over a pike? The first thing is reach. A pike has more reach than a halberd. A halberd has less reach, but the cutting power involved in a halberd has the potential to create a lot more damage is one way of quantifying that and looking at it. Now there’s, of course, a lot of techniques, also that you could do with halberds that you might or might not be able to do with a pike. But there’s also techniques you can do with pikes, that you can’t really do as much with a halberd. So there are those kinds of interactions, the other things are like, what would be the advantage of spending more time trying to make your troops braver versus better fencers, for example? Why are they always in the sources talking basically, about bravery and confidence? Why are things like religious faith considered so important for military fighting people at the time? When you go into the different sources you find hints here and there, and you start to see how these things might fit together. For example, the question of religious faith in the fighting people. If you read, Niccolo Machiavelli’s On War. He has an interesting point on that, he considers if troops are more religiously devout, they have more faith in themselves and their commanders and prevailing and victory and therefore more easily lead and more confident in their actions and warfare. And whether or not that is actually true, it becomes an interesting data point in how they viewed warfare. Continuing with Machiavelli. One thing that’s integral to this this game is the concept of virtue or more in a Machiavellian sense virtu, which he considers them different. Virtu is just moral strength, and will to do things for Machiavelli, but for the rest of the world at the time, there was this the concept of virtue, and we have for example, also Fiore’s four virtues of a fencer. How much you have of those virtues defines what you are going to be better at as a fencer. And when you go down to descriptions of combat, or warfare in chronicles of the time, or going back throughout the medieval period, what you find that’s very interesting is they don’t really care about exact armaments, or dispositions or logistics in the same way that later accounts carry on about it, like Napoleonic stuff, they tend to talk a lot about where these troops were formed up and whose troops were where, exactly, and what groups were involved in the fight. And what the weather was exactly like and this and that. And then morale tends to become a kind of a distant consideration.
Guy Windsor
And this contrasts with the earliest sources in what way?
Jack Gassman
Which is they all start with the character and disposition, and the mindset of the troops takes center stage. They’ll always talk about so and so’s troops were stalwart in their defense, or they were audacious in the charge, or they did this thing because they were being overly prudent, or they did this thing because they were…
Guy Windsor
Not prudent enough, perhaps?
Jack Gassman
Exactly, or they were stoic, or they were too stoic and didn’t leave in time, etc. So, the mindset and the personalities of the commanders and the troops seems to take center stage. And the amount of bravery or morale or the lack of it takes a center stage. It’s much more focused on intangibles.
Guy Windsor
So how does this play out in your game?
Jack Gassman
In the game, it’s called for Force of Virtue because the core thing is you have your officers that we call Capos, they are the ones who command troops. You attach to them a certain amount of the Four Virtues. So, you have points of virtue for prudence, audacity, fortitude, and celerity, which we say speed just for ease of the reader. But as when you take order actions in the game, or you take actions like move, or shoot or fight, you spend virtue from that Capo in order to do it.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I see. So if I have lots of boldness, as a Capo, and I make an attack, that attack is going to cost me some of my boldness.
Jack Gassman
Right. So I have a pool of Virtue on my officer, right. And I can choose to use as many of those virtues as I want to do that action. So each for each virtue I choose to take, I roll a dice of that kind, and then I pick the result for what I want to do based off that, out of those virtues rolled.
Guy Windsor
Alright, so each player has multiple Capos. So why don’t you just take us through the overall elevator pitch for the game itself and how it’s played.
Jack Gassman
Okay, so the way that the game is basically your commanding a small war band of one to 15 men in the streets of Rome in 1492, as the Borgias are kind of taking over and ascendant because that was the easiest place to do it and most fun. Medieval Rome at that time was a crazy place, and you use cards to construct your warband, you choose how everything works, how many officers you have, how many troops, how much virtue, your officers have, what they’re armed with, etc. So you are doing the same thing as a medieval company leader at that time, choosing the details of training, equipment, morale, etc. and trying to figure out how that works in the new context of warfare at the period.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so how are those choices limited for the player? Because I mean, you can’t just say you can have as much of any virtue as you want and all the weapons you like, there has to be some kind of restrictions.
Jack Gassman
So each player plays the game to a certain number of cards. A 10 card game. So on each card is a different thing, say, three mercenaries, one knight, or you can pick another card that would give your mercenaries arquebuses or your knight a poleaxe. Cards also give your Capos virtue, so we can choose how much virtue they have. You can also give them special rules for the Swiss. The Swiss have lots of cards to make them better fighters. The condottieri have lots of sneaky cards like to poison an enemy officer so they’re less effective during the battle.
Guy Windsor
Are you suggesting the Italians are sneakier than the Swiss?
Jack Gassman
The view on warfare at the period was that condottieri were a lot more tricksy than Swiss.
Guy Windsor
Obviously I was being a little bit disingenuous. Yes, of course they were.
Jack Gassman
In the sources when they’re talking about Italians always seem to be worried about things not being as they seem. With the Swiss they were worried about having a whole bunch of face stompy Swiss show up on your doorstep a lot sooner than they were supposed to and just steamrolling you.
Guy Windsor
Because those fuckers can march.
Jack Gassman
Yeah exactly, and that’s actually one of the cards that you that is in the Swiss deck, “They are upon us” which expands this, the Swiss get to get to start closer than they normally would because they march so much faster.
Guy Windsor
And there’s good reason why the pope picks the Swiss guard to guard him in the Vatican. You do not want to mess with the Swiss guard.
Jack Gassman
No, exactly. So, that brings us to when you construct your force to a certain number of cards and you choose which decks you want to draw from. So for example, the Swiss deck, the condottieri deck, the landsknecht, the French, the Spanish, and they all have kind of different advantages and disadvantages depending on what I found in the sources about them.
Guy Windsor
I have a question. So your nation decks are condottieri, Swiss, French, Spanish and landsknecht. Swiss, French and Spanish are national identities but condottiero is like a job title in Italian. And landsknecht is a job title in German. Why do the Germans and Italians get job titles and the Swiss, French, and Spanish get nationalities?
Jack Gassman
The condottieri and landsknecht are private armies for hire, and are a little bit separate from how things worked. The Swiss how we wrote them in the decks, you could argue are kind of specialised around the more foreign Reisläufer but it we feel the Swiss deck really represents both kind of the foreign Reisläufer and the Swiss fighting at home decently. But for condottieri, we also we wanted to differentiate that from the Venetian Marines that we might be doing later on. And in Germany, we hope to do decks for German Free Cities, the kind of lower nobility and also the German peasants’ rebellions.
Guy Windsor
So you’re leaving yourself room for more Italian and more German decks. That makes sense.
Jack Gassman
For Spanish, we might do a specifically conquistador deck, we’ll see. French I don’t know. But for now, that’s kind of what we went with. In later editions we might rename them, who knows.
Guy Windsor
Now, tell me about the character decks. How do they work?
Jack Gassman
Yes. So when you’re building your force, you have access to the nation decks, which are, you know, for the nation, give the specific troops and everything like that. But you also have kind of subcultures that show up in warfare of the time so you have things like one character deck is Dogs of War, which is kind of your dastardly mercenary types. And you see a lot of accounts of mercenary bands that are just known for being both very veteran and also very brutal. And just fearsome and terrifying. If you add that character deck to your force, it kind of gives them that flavor. Or you have Fires of Faith, which is kind of your religious fanatics, whether it’s your papal guard or your Hussites, or your kind of religious peasant rebellions, you have the ability to kind of go into those. And then you also had a Bred to Battle, which is kind of like your peasant smashing knights. So you have a lot of these kind of like bayard, a lot of these very old style adherers to the kind of chivalric ideals who come from a very aristocratic background, and kind of profit from that in that way. And then you also have Renaissance Man, which is kind of like your modern humanists looking back towards Roman ways of warfare, and also incorporating modern scientific discoveries at the same time, so it allows you to kind of give the flavours.
Guy Windsor
By modern scientific discoveries, you mean modern for 1492?
Jack Gassman
Yeah, modern for 1490. So, like, improved gunpowder. Also, better education, ability to speak more languages, etc, which might come in handy accomplishing certain objectives.
Guy Windsor
So how does the game actually play? What do you do?
Jack Gassman
So you choose your what we call a war band, out of the cards, and then you generate a mission to play. And usually there’s an objective you’re trying to achieve. Could be destroy a cannon while it’s disabled, or convince someone to open a door.
Guy Windsor
Hang on, convince someone to open a door?
Jack Gassman
For example, let’s say you’re trying to gain access to a town and you want to convince the mayor to open the door. Or you are trying to convince a servant to open the back door. So you can go in and ransack his master’s house.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so it operates at all sorts of scale. So you could be doing like house robbery, or you could be taking over the Castel San Angelo and putting the pope under pressure.
Jack Gassman
Yeah. So it’s all very small scale. So it’s all very kind of commando raidy, the small scale warfare that you do see a lot in sources of the time, small groups doing things. And it could be something very small and very silly, it could be an artist trying to recover an art piece that his patron hasn’t paid for yet. Which is one of the accounts that you do find. Or a cardinal trying to take an art piece that he doesn’t want to pay for, you find in Cilini’s autobiography. So it scales to a lot of these different kind of levels that you that you want to represent, which was important to me.
Guy Windsor
So the player will come up with these, scenarios, and then use your gaming mechanics to play through the scenario. Is that right?
Jack Gassman
Exactly. In the rulebook, there’s a little chart, there’s a little table with where you can roll up different objectives and different ways you might be deploying and where the objective might be. And then you come up with a narrative of it, or you come up with a scenario or an idea that you want to try and then you play it through.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so what you’re actually selling the customer is some cards and a book to tell you how to play them to basically create any kind of small unit adventure game play that you like, in that sort of period. Okay. So it’s extremely versatile. Just to be clear, my only experience of game design is being involved in creating Audatia where it’s not at all adaptable like that. It is you are this individual person, and you play this sword fight with this other individual person. And that’s it. The game is very constrained in that way. And okay, you can use it for all sorts of other things, like some people use it when they’re doing DND, for example. So rather than rolling dice to have a fight, they do a game of Audatia to have a fight, because it’s more fun. But in its fundamental structure it is a constrained set, whereas what you’re talking about is a much less constrained set.
Jack Gassman
Yes. So it’s actually it’s a little bit of a hybrid between something like DND, and what you might know as a traditional wargaming, because it’s very narrative, you can interact with objects or things around you.
Guy Windsor
Is there a games master? Is only one person running it?
Jack Gassman
No, it’s just you against an opponent, an opponent like chess. And the cards allow you to bring in that uncertainty and arbitrate things a bit more, which adds some issues for the designer, because you don’t have someone to arbitrate, you have to be a bit more careful in what you can and can’t do. Because you can’t allow for there to be conflicts or uncertainties. But yeah, so you’re playing through this mission and as you’re creating your war bands, usually you come up with some kind of fiction for your war band, you know, my war band are the brothel guards for a Borgia brothel and they’re off tying up loose ends to prevent scandals.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, okay.
Jack Gassman
However wacky you want, or it could be very hard nosed, we’re the chosen men of a condottieri company off to do commando raids and take out cannons and do this or that.
Guy Windsor
And you’re expecting the players to build themselves an arena and make and paint, do you provide the actual miniatures, or not?
Jack Gassman
The Perryman Brothers who used to do sculpting for companies like Games Workshop do excellent 15th century miniatures. And you can actually build the miniatures to have correct longsword guards and everything, and they’re all very well researched. Oh, they’re brilliant. So you can get a packet of them for like 25 quid, and that’s enough for make two or three warbands. Then you paint them and you build them. And that’s part of the fun in itself, you know, building your own miniature version of the streets of Rome, or you can just play it on a DND mat, however you want. But yeah, so you use those decks to kind of create the war band, if you want. You can combine the nation decks too. So maybe it’s a Swiss French combined force that’s of religious fanatics. Or Swiss Dogs of War and Fires of Faith. So they’re Swiss gritty experienced Papal guard who have found religion and gone nuts. You know, there’s a lot of flexibility in how you do things.
Guy Windsor
I know what I would do. I would take my band to Florence, and I would use them to rescue Botticelli’s artworks from the fires of Savonarolo.
Jack Gassman
Yes, actually, considering it’s June, I’m considering releasing a free war band, with the build out of the cards for the confrontation between Savonarolo the homosexual society that brought him down because it was finally them who said enough was enough. So I thought that would be a great scenario to do.
Guy Windsor
For Pride Week, next year. This is how the homosexuals destroyed the bigoted son of a bitch who burned all the paintings.
Jack Gassman
Yeah. Because when they marched in, they probably didn’t do it without weapons.
Guy Windsor
Definitely not. Not in Florence in the late 15th century, you wouldn’t get very far without weapons.
Jack Gassman
Those are the kinds of scenarios that you can play that I wanted this game to be able to go through, you know, rescuing Botticelli’s artwork. That makes a great campaign in and of itself. Because also what you do with the games is the cards as you win objectives in game, you add cards to your warband so it gets stronger. So that’s one of the important things about it. In the game, you have the objective you’re there to do, which, if you win that you get a victory point. And for every victory point, you get a card to add to your warband. But you also get a victory point if at least 50% of your force survives the encounter. And then also, if you retreat before you lose 50% of your force, you still get that victory point.
Guy Windsor
Right. So, prudence is rewarded.
Jack Gassman
Yes. So if you need to make realistic decisions about when is the cost not worth the reward. Because that’s one thing that a lot of war games treat your troops running as kind of this nuisance. And in the game, if you run out of virtue, because in the game, as you take damage, as people get hurt, or people get killed, the Virtue on your officers gets what we call burnt, meaning it’s no longer available to you until you rally it back. So if you’re all out of virtue, your troops automatically run, but you can also choose to leave to preserve your troops. And that’s an important part of the mental mathematics of warfare at the time. It’s not a knock down, drag out fight until the last man, you need to stay capable of fighting for the next battle, if you lose all your men, that’s investment on a very, like hardnosed level. And also, nobody’s going to follow you if you always get people killed.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that’s true. Okay, when I created Audatia, the single most common comment I got was, oh, that’s so cool, which is nice. But the second most common comment I got was, oh, I had an idea for a sword fighting card game, too. And so my experience has been that lots and lots of people have the idea, and very few people actually execute. So how did you execute on this game? You had the idea, you were working on it as part of your historical martial arts research. How did you take it from an idea and some scribblings on paper to something people can actually buy?
Jack Gassman
Well, a long process with a lot of mistakes. I should also say that, you know, this was not a solo thing. This was me and my brother doing it. He’s currently in the military in some top secret location in the Swiss mountains. So he’s not available for comment. But we play tested it together for quite a while. I’ve been working on this since 2012. Just chipping away and adding stuff from my research. And we play tested, it got the basic stuff, started adding things. The virtue idea, adding the virtues actually came back on the way back from HEMA Florencio in 2014, I’d showed it to a few people and they’d all been like, yeah, you really should publish this. I was like, okay, but that’s a lot of work. And then over lockdown, I decided to do it. I’m like, why not? And then just started playtesting with a bunch more people over kind of online tabletop simulators like Roll 20, etc. And then we went okay, there really is something here. And we started iterating on it. I started writing the rulebook. Then we made the card layout in Google Docs, which was a bad idea, but we did it anyway. Google Docs drawings. We made it work. We are now going to have to redo more than 300 card files. When you look at them, you don’t really realize that they were made in Google Docs, which is for the best. On a visual level, it works. The problem is that each card is an individual file, and needs to be altered individually.
Guy Windsor
Are people buying physical cards or they buying things to print out at home?
Jack Gassman
They are physical cards, they’re printed cards. Long story short, we brought in my co instructor who’s a graphic designer to fix the dumb stuff that we did, bless his heart. But a lot of things went wrong, got fixed, did it differently. There’s a lot of rule tweaking that we did. We brought in James Hewitt, who is the designer on a couple of major Games Workshop games, to help review the rules and help with rewrites and stuff. So we brought in some professional help there as well. One of the playtesters was Jay Maxwell from Tempus Fugitives, and he asked us would you like us to publish it?
Guy Windsor
Is that a games company?
Jack Gassman
Tempus Fugitives is also known as Tempus Swords. It’s a HEMA gear manufacturer that also does books.
Guy Windsor
Oh, right, okay. I’m wondering why I haven’t heard of them.
Jack Gassman
Yeah, they do a lot of really good stuff. And excellent gorgets and stuff like that. But yeah, they publish a lot of HEMA books and Jay’s a very good fencer, does Bolognese and stuff like that. But anyway, so yeah, he offered to publish it. So we finished it up, we did a bit of a launch in March at a small castle here in Ireland, we did an event for the major people who had helped play test it. That was our kind of last little tweaks. And then we launched at Salutes, which is a big games con in England, end of April.
Guy Windsor
Cool. Okay. Excellent. So basically, you hired some professional help to tweak the rules. And you got someone who knows about graphic design to do your card graphics, and then this company Tempus Swords actually did the publishing for you. That’s very sensible. I mean, that would have saved us an awful lot of work if we’d done that with Audatia. But there wasn’t really anyone offering to publish it for us. So we went and did it ourselves. And yeah, it was an absolute nightmare.
Jack Gassman
I can imagine. There were still a lot of issues, and there were a lot of teething issues. But that’s one reason why we didn’t go with a Kickstarter. We might do a Kickstarter in future. In fact, the next decks that we are doing are probably fencing master decks, which I might be doing a Kickstarter on so we’re probably doing at least Fiore, Liechtenauer, and the Bolognese Dardi school as character decks that you can add to your Warband to kind of show that they been trained under those schools.
Guy Windsor
Do you expect that to create a situation in which, for example, your opponent has a Liechtenauer person and you have a Fiore person, and then they interact in a way that actually represents those systems? Or is it more that it represents the spirit and style of those systems?
Jack Gassman
I mean, that is the design goal, that they interact in ways that is consistent with their traditions. If they don’t, then I’ve done a bad design job.
Guy Windsor
But, if you’re not actually prescribing individual sword strikes, how do you make that work?
Jack Gassman
I guess I’ll go into how combat works in the game. You have as the basic concept of the game, that you have actions, which is how many actions a model can do in a round and basically the game works in rounds. So over a round, you take an action with troops and I take an action and then you take an action and then I take an action, until both of us have done as many actions as we can. And then both of us pass, and the new round begins. Actions is how many times that specific model can take an action over a round. Faith is how many virtue dice it can use over a round. So it could, say, do one movement action with four dice. Or it could do, say, if it has a faith of four it can do one movement action with four dice. Or it could do two movement actions, both with two virtue dice. So you have to decide how you divvy up your dice.
Guy Windsor
But what does this got to do with the differences between Fiorean longsword and Liechtenauerean longsword? Just to take two examples.
Jack Gassman
Well, because how each system focuses on improving how much virtue, the bravery, the ability to do specific things, or clever ways to multitask and split your attention, because in the combat you decide to either put dice into attack, or dice into defense. So as you’re fencing, you’re always dividing attention between offense and defense.
Guy Windsor
Okay, right. So how do you distinguish between, because Fiore does that and Liechtenauer does that, so how are those different between those systems?
Jack Gassman
No, no, no, that’s core. That’s how you divvy up between giving attention between attack and defense is how combat works in this game, wherever. Because that’s a universal of combat. How you deal with that, and where you lay your strengths and weaknesses is how a system works. Both decks are currently still in development, they’re not really finished yet. But currently, the way Liechtenauer is shaping up at the moment is it’s much more focused on creating people who are good specifically at using longswords in and out of armor and doing single actions that are very strong, but can also go very wrong. But there’s not as much of a focus on improving the overall stats, it’s just very complex, technical things that are kind of fragile. In the deck, each deck has a fencing master card or two, and a student card. The Liechtenauer card currently has at the moment an initiate whereas, the Fiore deck has knights that are studying under the Fiore master, so you can bring knights with you. The Fiore deck has a lot more different options as far as hidden techniques that might come out for example, because it has to be in there, his pepper spray poleaxe. His extendable polaxe.
Guy Windsor
With the rope tail thing?
Jack Gassman
Yeah. The mixed, longsword poleaxe is also in there. He has enhanced abilities to get through armor with abrazare. He has different ways to use specific virtues in zogho largo. Zogho stretto you can use that card to basically instead of just generating one hit that your opponent has to roll an armour save on you can generate two hits. Because one thing that Fiore often does in zogho stretto, is he both disarms and stabs you. He always creates a two pronged threat, right? So it’s about generating more threats, more things that can go wrong. Zogho largo is a little bit more tricky but keeping you safe at the same time.
Guy Windsor
What I’m getting from this is your sort of impression of the systems is what’s creating the differences in the deck, rather than specific technical differences between the systems?
Jack Gassman
No, no, you can’t go into specific strikes as much.
Guy Windsor
I’ve had a brilliant idea. We should do a collab, right? Because I’ve got Liechtenauer decks for my Audatia game, so if people want to do that they can play this game. And then when they get to the point where they’re having a sword fight, if you’ve got a Fiore deck, you get Galeazzo for example, if you’ve got a Liechtenauer deck, you’ve got Nicodemus and you can settle it that way.
Jack Gassman
Yeah, you can start you could start the game with a duel between the two masters. And then all the war bands pile in after it. That would definitely be fun, or a judicial duel, and then the judicial duel spills over. So yes, it’s a little bit more abstracted and impressionistic which you have to kind of do a little bit at this level, because you’re dealing with multiple people. And if it was a straight role playing game, I might go into individual strikes. But honestly, at the level, it is, it’s not practical. And you also don’t have the information that which attack you choose specifically or which technique you specifically choose, is questions of momentum, angle, timing, relative distance, there’s information that you’d be asked to be making decisions about, that you just don’t have at that level of abstraction. Even in a computer game, so much of what you choose has much more to do with sensory feedback on momentum or force than it does about just your visual feedback. So if there’s two static little statues on a table that are an inch tall, you have none of that. You can’t generate that. That’s why the combat is abstracted to the level of how much focus are you putting on defense versus offense? Because that’s a question of, you know, the angle of your attack, the timing, the distance you’re launching from, all those different things are questions of offense versus defense. How you hold that sword even is a question of optimising for offense or defense.
Guy Windsor
Okay, we’re talking on 12th of June 2023. The game has been out since April. So how are the players responding to it?
Jack Gassman
Very good. It’s a fairly small niche. So when we get someone, we tend to catch them. We’ve gotten a lot of critical response. At the moment the smaller decks have come out, the decks themselves have come out, but we’re also shipping a starter box, and a lot of people have bought the starter box. But we’ve been having to wait for a couple of tokens and few things to arrive to ship the starter box. So those could be shipping out next week. And that’s where a majority of the players have put things but we’ve also had a lot of interest from different YouTube channels that might be doing stuff on us. Various kind of industry magazines, there’s been a lot of interest in it. It’s just one of those things that takes a little bit of time to develop. Also, just by the fact that if someone’s starting to collect, they start painting up their miniatures and doing all that, so that takes a bit of time to do. So we’re watching now as people kind of build up their war bands and stuff like that. We just actually this weekend got invited to do demo games at a con in Rome that one of our players went and presented the game at. There was a great response from the people there because of course this edition is set in Renaissance Rome. We will branch out. Hopefully after this we’ll branch out to War of the Roses, the free cities in Germany, the larger Italian wars, rather than just skirmishes in Rome itself. But yeah, so far, there’s been a lot of response, a slow kind of build up, which is usually how these things work.
Guy Windsor
I don’t do miniature skirmish gaming, I’ve never done it. So the lead time of people buying the miniatures and painting them to become ready to play the game, that seems like an awful lot of investment for someone to make. But I’m guessing that if they get those period characters from that place, you said, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. And they’ve painted them, they can use those same miniatures to play lots of different kinds of games, if they’re set in the same period.
Jack Gassman
Of course, of course. The painting and building terrain, everybody has their own different approach to the hobby, you know, some people are fine with playing with pennies on the floor and stacks of books. Other people really enjoy painting up the miniatures in detail and creating the landscapes and stuff. So it really depends how people want to do it and for a lot of people, the painting is just as much part of the hobby as the gaming.
Guy Windsor
So yeah, I have a friend who lives round the corner from here, and I’m currently helping him because I used to be a cabinet maker, basically, he’s converting his garage into a place with these special tables where he can create these scenario places for this sort of gaming. So my level of involvement is basically well, I’ve helped build tables to put these things on.
Jack Gassman
It’s its own thing. I had almost almost kind of bowed out of the hobby a little bit for a long time before this, doing this has dragged me back into it. Painting miniatures I always enjoy, there’s always a little bit of a time for me to switch off and get away from things.
Guy Windsor
Okay, a question just occurred to me, you’ve put in a huge amount of research, huge amount of work. You now have the game, it’s is actually there, and it’s playable. And you can actually play it with the proper stuff. I know from experience that is extremely satisfying. I’m curious, though, what is your sort of overarching goal for this project and what will success look like?
Jack Gassman
For me, I would love to see this be self-sustaining enough to go into a lot of different areas of the medieval, Renaissance Europe at this time and kind of create a little bit of a bank, so we can hopefully get to things like doing the piracy in the Mediterranean, etc. So there’s that side of it, where I get to just explore and it kind of feeds and funds the research for doing more stuff and indexing more things and adding it to the pile. There’s also just the aspect of seeing if some of my theories on how things work in medieval warfare, if that matches the sources as people play it more, if that’s really what those things mean. And if maybe I get more insights from watching what people come up with, based on the theories that I’ve put into the game. And then there’s also just the fact that I’d love to see this become a way for people who maybe aren’t normally interested in the context of HEMA fencers who maybe find it hard to get into the idea of context and understand it to kind of get more into the context.
Guy Windsor
Like a gateway drug for reading the history. And it just occurred to me that once you have your game mechanics, then there’s nothing stopping you setting the game in, for example, Warring States period Japan, or China, or Africa or India or wherever else. So people who are into, for example, Japanese martial arts might take these mechanics and create a Japanese version of the game.
Jack Gassman
Yeah, I mean, that would be great. I’ve thought of that before. I would want to talk to someone who actually understands Warring States Japan a little bit better. Not because I don’t think that the mechanics would be able to represent it well. But because the mechanics are just so much based on a medieval understanding of how the world works, that’s a very medieval European concept.
Guy Windsor
Which may not translate.
Jack Gassman
I would much rather see a game take up that space that was an equally interesting analysis of how Warring States Japan understood warfare to work.
Guy Windsor
Right. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you could just stick it in Japan and change the names and stuff and sort of make it work. But what you’d be more interested in is someone who really understands the mindset behind the warriors of the period and how they would think about it, and then basically rebuild the game from that perspective.
Jack Gassman
Yeah. Because although we used the Four Virtues of Fiore, they’re much more in a way a stand in for the four humours. Because I mean, the four humours are a bit odd when you say them, they don’t make as much sense as prudence, audacity, fortitude, you know.
Guy Windsor
Although, a very choleric or a very phlegmatic general, will have very different effects on the disposition of their troops.
Jack Gassman
Exactly. But it’s much easier for players to wrap their heads around, I’m using prudence to move which means if I have a crit success, I will get a cover save, or, and if I make have a crit fail, I’ll move away. It’s much easier to say that than, you know phlegmatic. It is much easier to for them to grasp those than, okay, if I move with audacity, and I crit fail, my troops will run straight forward. Or if I crit succeed, they might have a chance of scaring the opponent. Those kinds of things are easier to grasp. And yeah, that’s the idea that depending on what points of those virtues that officer has, his troops will be completely very different and do very different things well. They can all do the same thing. But what they excel at, and the kind of mistakes they will make will depend on the personality.
Guy Windsor
Right. Okay. So I guess the really critical, important question that I should have asked you earlier on is, where do people go to buy the game?
Jack Gassman
Go to masterstrokegames.com. And you can find more information. You can find a free tutorial campaign that you can play out and just print out and play to get a handle on the game if you want to. And then there’s links on that website to tempusswords/forceofvirtue, where you can buy the decks themselves. But at masterstroke games you can find information and free things to try out. And also, you can also buy a PDF of the rulebook and then print out some free kind of card forces to try things out with.
Guy Windsor
Before you commit to buying the whole thing, yeah, that’s a good way to do it.
Jack Gassman
As far as War Games go, it doesn’t take much to get into it. If you want to be cheap about it, you can get one nation deck and the PDF of the rules for under 25 quid. Or if you want to dive in for two play, we have a two player starter set with all the tokens, special dice, five decks, because you also have the scenario deck which allows you to do things like oh, that building is actually a crumbling ruin, and it’s raining so your guns are less effective. Add those kinds of things in. So the starter box has the scenario deck, two nation decks and two character decks in it with all the kind of tokens etc on top of that for 100. So you split that with a friend, it’s 50 each and then you have all the kind of deluxe options in it.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. All righty. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. Jack. It’s been nice talking to you again.
Jack Gassman
Thank you. Thank you very much.
