Game Master's Remarks

Legal Disclaimer

This game uses the French third edition of Malefices, produced by Editions du Club Pythagore, itself a 1901 Association in the style of the fictional Pythagoras Club that features in this campaign.  All translations were done largely on the fly by me.

The adventure set in and around Serquigny-Le-Grand is largely based upon Multisim's long-since out of print adventure Les Veilleurs for the first edition of the RPG Nephilim.  Being set in a medieval village, the adventure's settings and NPCs are more or less unchanged except where I adapted the adventure so that it fit not a contemporary game in which the supernatural exists but a period game of politics and investigation where the paranormal might or might not exist.  I also modified a number of key NPCs so as to reflect the themes and social tensions of the period rather than those of the Nephilim game.  As a result a lot of the ideas are the property of whoever currently owns the rights to Les Veilleurs and Les Editions du Club Pythagore but seeing as Les Veilleurs is long out of print, I won't be losing any sleep about putting a campaign log up online.

All of the photos, maps and drawings in this wiki are stolen off of the internet.  Sorry about that internet but needs must.

Further Reading and Watching

The inspiration for this adventure came from one notable sourcel; the first half of Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and The Pity, a Fantastically long 1969 documentary about the way in which French attitudes to the English and the Jews made cooperation with the Nazis seem such an attractive option to so many Frenchmen during the Second World War.

A lot of my feel for local colour comes partly from the excellent research done in the Malefices rulebook and the incredibly French feel of Les Veilleurs but I also inspired myself from the series of TV adaptations of the Maigret novels starring Michael Gambon.  Not a great hour for Gambon, who sleepwalks through much of the proceedings, but it is clearly possible to see that the Maigret novels ultimately work because they are based upon realistic snapshots of French life.

I'd also like to draw attention to H G Koenigsberger's excellent Early Modern Europe 1500-1789.  A great work of social history, Koenigsberger looks at the social and political forces that sculpted modern France and Europe as a whole.  I read this book in preparation for another game using Te Deum Pour Un Massacre, a French RPG set during the French wars of religion of the 16th Century published by Les Editions Du Matagot.

Both Te Deum and Malefices are part of that rarest of phenomenon... RPG books that are not only intelligently written and well researched but also incredibly practical.  Both games contain huge amounts of historical detail and do an excellent job of driving home the alltogether too often forgotten fact about historical fiction; that it is not about the local colour, it is all about the politics and sociology.  I have yet to see an English language RPG publication that can hold even the faintest of candles to either of these books.