Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) is one of the early D&D-like games that sought to “fix” D&D. For Edward Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus, fixing it meant leaning into simulating a realistic world. That meant more to them than assigning numerical values to the heft of a sword and other combat oriented nuances. They applied it to the game world, making it one of the first RPGs to pull play out of the dungeon.
It has a heavy set of rules (making it not really for me, so keep that in mind when I talk about it) both for combat and everything else. “Everything else” in this case is broad, encompassing a simulation of medieval life, its customs, its religious practice, its social responsibilities and so on. Having rules for all this stuff is a burden that gets in my way, but for other folks, particularly in the early days, it was a much-needed framework that helped bring the world to life. Instead of existing underground, killing monsters and finding loot, C&S gave players more to do, more things to own and gave the risks of adventure more weight and consequence. NPCs back home depend on you! You’re building a life! Is it worth it to fight that dragon? Life outside of adventure is important in C&S. Probably more so. And because so much of the world is expressed mechanically, it becomes one of the first RPGs where system and world feel inextricably linked (though it might be hard to recognize this in retrospect, considering how sophisticated those links become in the ensuing decades). Games like Bushido and Pendragon spring from and refine this idea, though Harn is the apotheosis of C&S’s brand of medieval realism.
The biggest problem for C&S was the fact that it was put out by Fantasy Games Unlimited, a company notorious for skimping on printing (each page of this rulebook has four manuscript pages on it, reduced to 25%, to shrink the page count, saving money but making the game extremely uncomfortable to read) and shirking support. Most FGU games vanished soon after publishing. C&S struggled, but carried on — the latest edition emerged in 2020!
