Where & When
The story is set in 1191 in and around the port city of Jaffa. It is based, albeit loosely, around a real historical event that occurred in autumn of that year. Since the details are changed, and the timeline greatly compressed, it’s difficult to narrow down an exact date, but we’re likely in either October or November. Shorter than the previous historicals, the story takes place over the course of just two days.
Setting
The conflict referred to in the title of the serial is the Third Crusade, which had started two years previously, in 1189. A hundred years before, the First Crusade had captured the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors, establishing four heavily fortified Christian nations in the area for its continued defence. In 1187, however, Saladin’s forces had recaptured Jerusalem and significant areas of the surrounding land. A multinational force, including the English, French, and Germans, backed by the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, and some minor religious orders of chivalry, had assembled to take it back again.
By the time of the story, the Crusaders have recently won a major victory at Arsuf in September (briefly mentioned by the Earl of Leicester in the story), forcing Saladin to retreat and allowing the Christians to retake Jaffa. Richard I is effectively the leader of the entire crusading force in the Holy Land by this point and is engaged in refortifying Jaffa and the surrounding area as his forces prepare for the main assault on Jerusalem.
Looking further afield for context, we find that present-day Germany and many other parts of central Europe still lie in the Holy Roman Empire, while the Byzantine Empire is a relatively powerful state in the Balkans and what is now coastal Turkey. Spain has yet to be unified, and both the (future) Spanish and the Portuguese are fighting their own battles against the ‘infidels’ in southern Iberia as part of the Reconquista. Over in Britain, England has yet to fully conquer either Wales or Ireland, but it does rule nearly half of present-day France.
A significant part of the story takes place in the city of Jaffa. This is now merely a district in Tel Aviv, but in 1191 it was one of the major ports in the Holy Land, and the headquarters for the Crusaders. Since Saladin had destroyed the local fortifications before he retreated from the area, the Crusaders are busy rebuilding them, including a major fortress in the city – the one we see in the story would actually have still been under construction, since it had only been a few weeks and these things take time to build.
So far as the Crusaders are concerned, Jaffa is a part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, theoretically ruled by Conrad I from his temporary capitol at Acre to the north but, in practice, it’s a military zone with Richard in charge. Other than the Crusaders, the inhabitants of the city at the time would have been a relatively even mix of Muslim civilians and Jews… we don’t definitively see any of the latter in the story, but they were hardly irrelevant.
The region has a Mediterranean climate, with average temperatures at this time of year varying from 15°C at night to 27°C in the day (59°F to 81°F) and rain on one or two days a week. The countryside around the city would have a mixture of light woodland and farmland, with the latter including citrus plantations (although the ‘Jaffa orange’ is a modern creation) alongside crops of cotton and barley. Wildlife included wild asses, deer, and even lions, leopards, and bears – the last three being extinct in the region today.
The second place that the story visits is Ramla, where Saladin has set up his encampment. This is about 12 miles (20 km) from Jaffa, on the main road towards Jerusalem – specifically where it crosses the north-south route connecting Cairo to Damascus. The land between the two is relatively easy going, all part of the flat plain occupying this part of the Holy Land. It was a wealthy city at the time, with dyed cloth and olive oil being key exports, so Luigi has good reason to be there.
In the story, the journey from Ramla to Lydda gives the impression of being arduous, and the reconstruction, at least, depicts it as a desert. In reality, it’s no less fertile than anywhere else in the region, and the two small cities are only a couple of miles apart (3.5 km). Lydda was much poorer than Ramla, which suggests that El-Akir is less important than he makes out but does fit with what we see of the place outside of his ‘palace’. He can’t have been here long, since the region had only been captured from the Crusaders four years previously.
As an additional point of verisimilitude, it may be worth noting that October 1191 was, in fact, Ramadan. The exact dates vary depending on the sighting of the moon, but it should have finished around the 26th.
The story features several real-world figures, including William des Preaux, who really was captured by Saladin around this time, and Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester and High Steward of England. Some of these are relatively obscure, and others are not critical to the story, but there are four that are more important.
King Richard is 34 at the time of the story and has been reigning for two years. In games that don’t simply have universal translators or the like, it may be worth noting that his native language would have been French, not English. Indeed, he probably didn’t even speak English, since he only spent six months of his adult life in the country, and the court at the time, still being Norman, used French for all its business save legal and religious matters – both of which used Latin. English was the language of the commoners; there would have been little point in him learning it if he barely even visited the place.
Some historians argue that he may have been gay, although, eight hundred years after the fact, it’s hard to be sure. Certainly, he is said to have had at least one illegitimate child and apparently some brief mistresses, but strictly speaking, that isn’t hard proof either. At the time of the story, he has recently married the 26-year-old Spanish princess Berengaria of Navarre; she doesn’t appear in the serial, but was in Jaffa when it takes place and so could in a game.
Joan, referred to as Joanna in the story, is the same age as Berengaria and is accompanying her brother largely because he has just rescued her from house arrest in Palermo. She had previously been Queen of Sicily (which at the time, ruled nearly half of present-day Italy), but her husband had died in 1189, leading to the unpleasantness with the arrest. She then had a series of adventures, including being stranded by a storm in Cyprus before having to be rescued a second time. The plot in the story about Richard planning to marry her to Saphadin as a peace offering is accurate and, since she wouldn’t have had much say in the matter, only failed when the Church objected.
Saladin was Kurdish, rather than Arabic, having been born in what is now Iraq but sent to Egypt at an early age. There, he rose through the ranks of the military and eventually overthrew the existing government to become Sultan, establishing a new dynasty in the process. By the time of the story, he is aged about 54 and widowed with numerous sons, the oldest still in their early 20s. He is portrayed as an honourable, if strict, man in the story, which is probably fairly accurate – he is known to have been on good terms with at least some Christians who weren’t trying to conquer Jerusalem. (Luigi being a possible example here).
Saphadin was eight years younger than his brother. Although this was the name given to him by the Crusaders, it was derived from one of his titles, and his fellow Saracens would have referred to him by his personal name of Al-Adil. He was a capable administrator and general, and he, too is known to have had several sons (and presumably daughters who are less known to history). After Saladin’s death in 1193 and the failure of his children to create a secure government, Saphadin took over as Sultan of Egypt himself in 1200.
 |
| The Crusader states |
Nonetheless, harems did exist, areas of the household where the only adult man permitted was the master of the house. El-Akir appears to be unmarried, but if he were, his wife would live alongside the concubines. Legally, sex with concubines was supposed to be consensual, and forcibly enslaving free Muslims wasn’t the done thing, but that isn’t to say it didn’t happen, especially with someone at all as El-Akir is portrayed.
Concubines were not the only slaves used in Arabic society at the time, with labourers, domestic servants, and even slave soldiers all being in evidence. They reached the Levant by two main routes. Some were transported by Christian traders in the Balkans, who enslaved pagan women from the northern frontier and the daughters of heretics closer to home. Fatima might fit this description, although, if so, that isn’t her birth name. The second slave route came from the south, via Sudan; Hafsa is the obvious candidate here.
Scenario
To begin with, we should at least address the elephant in the room: the Crusades can be a touchy subject. Indeed, even without the Crusades themselves, the area that the story takes place in is one with modern political baggage. For instance, if we want to move El-Akir’s base to somewhere further away from Ramla to make that part of the story more of a journey, the best candidates are probably Bethlehem and Ramallah. Leaving aside the fact that one of these has a confusingly similar name to Ramla, these are not places that lack connotations today.
Some GMs might therefore decide to give this one a pass. On the other hand, even in the televised story, Saladin is portrayed positively, arguably more so than Richard. Saphadin is perhaps a different matter, but he’s no worse than Leicester. True, the main villain is Muslim, but that’s not the reason he’s a villain – it’s not as if he even mentions the fact – and his main NPC antagonist is Haroun, not any of the Christian characters. Still, we might want to be careful how we do things.
Assuming that’s not an issue, what about the story? The basis of it is that, almost immediately after they arrive, the TARDIS crew are caught up in a skirmish in which Barbara is captured. They then play on the help they provided in the fight to get assistance from Richard so that they can rescue her. While the Doctor and Vicki become involved in some minor court intrigue and have fun playing dress-up, Ian heads off to Saladin’s base at Ramla.
Barbara, meanwhile, is involved in a capture-escape-recapture story, in which she is kidnapped twice, escapes twice, and is recaptured twice, encountering Haroun along the way for an exposition dump about the main villain. Eventually, Ian and Haroun rescue her, and everyone flees before Leicester can execute them all for witchcraft.
This raises a common issue with plots in this era, when adapted for games, rather than TV. It relies on one of the PCs being captured, and at the right point in the story, and on splitting the party from then on almost until the conclusion. A way around this is to have it be an NPC that’s captured and to give the PCs some reason to care about that. This, in turn, may relate to why exactly the PCs are there in the first place.
If they’re just randomly travelling through time, as in the original, it could be that the crusaders they meet in the skirmish are themselves trying to rescue someone but become too injured to carry on; this should be easy enough to arrange if the PCs arrive after the crusaders have already been defeated. They then beg the PCs for help. If the PCs aren’t the kind to respond to such calls but have a reason to want to meet up with Richard, he could assign them the rescue mission – perhaps of the daughter or young son of one of his vassals. Or he sends them on the diplomatic mission (maybe as guards) and Saladin asks them to rescue someone from El-Akir, feeling that, as outsiders, they give him plausible deniability.
These also work in a time travel game where the players are sent on missions by a time agency. The rescue itself is unlikely to be the mission, or they wouldn’t start them off on the Christian side of the battle lines. But maybe they are there to protect some additional NPC on the diplomatic mission, or (less palatably) to keep history on track by ensuring that it fails. Perhaps better, however, is to have them there to protect someone, and find that they have arrived slightly too late, and she’s already been captured – possibly because of intervention by rival time travellers. Or, changing things a little, instead of a person, it could be a piece of anachronistic technology.
If the story is a non-SF one with the PCs being native to the time period, having the person captured be someone important to them is even easier to arrange. For instance, taking the theme of ‘item’ rather than person, the PCs could instead be after a captured holy relic. Or a supposed holy relic that’s actually a piece of anachronistic technology…
None of this prevents us from using or adapting the courtly section of the plot, since it can happen sequentially with the rescue mission, rather than concurrently as it does in the serial. In most of the above examples, the subplot about stealing clothes isn’t required, but there are plenty of other obstacles we can put in the way. Leicester is something of an antagonist anyway, and we can have him try to undermine the PCs or suspect them of witchcraft. Perhaps there’s a spy to be ferreted out, or a side-plot with Christian knights mistreating the locals that acts as a mirror for what El-Akir is up to.
The downside of all of this is that we cut out the scenes where only the core member of the cast present is Barbara – these are now happening to an NPC. The first of these scenes is her meeting with Saladin, which doesn’t achieve a lot apart from her being kidnapped the second time. We can easily expand the scene where Ian meets the Sultan to include the full party and possibly add some additional events in Ramla.
If the PCs look to be Christian, they will be treated with suspicion and, especially if they are not official envoys, getting to see Saladin may not prove straightforward. We could even make Luigi a Balkan slave trader instead of a cloth merchant, thus immediately placing a “villain” tag on him so that the PCs will want to thwart his wider business. Even if not, he may still be trying to undermine the PCs or steal something valuable from them.
As noted above, there’s good reason to want to move El-Akir’s base away from Lydda, since a two-mile journey passing mostly through farmland and orchards doesn’t leave much opportunity for anything interesting to happen… but it’s harder to pick somewhere suitable. Since the Crusaders control much of the coast, except for what is now the Gaza Strip, we’re looking inland, and that largely means the current West Bank. We could, of course, simply invent somewhere, especially since El-Akir isn’t a historical character. Otherwise, if we want to avoid the modern Palestinian Territories, the best candidates are probably Afula to the north or Beersheba to the south. Both are about 80 km (50 miles) from Jaffa, giving some opportunity for side adventures such as bandit attacks, encounters with lions, and so forth. Beersheba also has the advantage of being in a region of semi-desert, much closer to what we see in the reconstructed TV story. It’s called Bi’r as-Sab in Arabic and was in steep decline at the time of the story, which also fits.
Once in whichever town or city it may be, assuming the PCs don’t launch an immediate attack on the ‘palace’, there is plenty of opportunity to have them meet Haroun and hear his tale of woe. Aside from adding to the evidence of El-Akir’s villainy, this also gives them the mission of rescuing Maimuna from the harem, even if that isn’t where their main target is. We will, however, want to make Haroun less competent as a fighter, since it should be up to the PCs to defeat the main villain; in the game, for instance, he could be a doddering old grandfather with Maimuna’s father having died along with her mother.
There may also be an interesting question here that doesn’t arise in the original: how, if at all, are the PCs going to help the other concubines once they have defeated El-Akir? They don’t have any nearby relatives and they’re still legally slaves – depending on what’s happened they may have no particular reason to dislike Fatima, either. One possibility here is to introduce a subplot where one of El-Akir’s employees is secretly in love with Hafsa, and willing to betray his master by letting the PCs into the palace, with the eventual aim of freeing and marrying her. This, of course, still leaves all the others…
There is no reason why the story couldn’t also be adapted for a fantasy setting. Here, it’s worth noting the existence of the 5E sourcebook Historica Arcanum: Era of the Crusades, which is specifically set during, and in the run-up to, the Third Crusade but which adds magic and fantasy creatures into the mix. We could, however, divorce ourselves further from real-world history, losing some of the flavour of the setting but keeping some of the underlying themes.
A full-blown fantasy world could, after all, still have crusades. The target could be a genuine force for evil, a civilisation or religious movement that literally worships demons. In many worlds, the idea of a crusade against orcs or hobgoblins could also make a lot of sense. It could, on the other hand, be more ambiguous than that, with neither side being obviously ‘in the wrong’ – something that moves the setting away from a ‘high fantasy’ concept but that fits better with the story here. For that matter, the background conflict doesn’t need to be a crusade as such for the story to work more or less as written; it just requires two sides that don’t trust one another skirmishing along their mutual border.
Rules
As a typical, partly European, medieval setting, there are few issues here that require any addition to what a generic RPG will provide, or even most of those focussed on SF. The tech level is 1 in Traveller, 2 in Doctors & Daleks, and 3 in GURPS.
One point worth noting however is that, in the 12th century, articulated plate, or even mixed plate-mail, had yet to be invented, despite being a popular option in many fantasy settings.
Even the wealthiest and best-equipped knights are wearing a suit of full-body chainmail armour over a padded jerkin, and an open helmet with a central piece coming down over the nose. Those not quite so wealthy would have worn padded leggings instead of mail ones, but otherwise, there isn’t much distinction. They would have typically carried a one-handed broadsword, a lance for mounted combat, a dagger as a backup weapon, and a large kite shield. Lowly foot troops had no more than leather armour.
The opposing side had more variable armour. The heaviest cavalry would be wearing what D&D describes as splint armour, while others would have worn leather, and the lowliest infantrymen had padded armour at best. A typical Saracen warrior, however, would have had a mail shirt, perhaps with leather greaves and a fully open helmet or mail coif covered by a turban. Armament generally consisted of a scimitar or broadsword, a lance, a dagger, and a medium shield.
We should also take a brief look at the scene where Ian is threatened with ants. Depending on what sort of ants these are, their bites could be quite painful, but they might just be uncomfortable and none of the ants in this part of the world are deadly. At worst, the victim would suffer a few points of damage and the equivalent of a level of fatigue to reflect the pain but it’s not the sort of thing that’s likely to scare many PCs – although the discomfort might affect real humans in a way that games don’t usually reflect.
Mind you, being staked out in the hot sun without water certainly is a plausible threat, ants notwithstanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment