This is an interesting purchase I made on Amazon lately. It’s available on there as a POD title.
It’s a late 70s/early 80s Age of Sail RPG/wargame.
Basically a Hornblower RPG, but the author of the game wrote a few books in abou
It has been in lists about this kind of genre for decades, mostly because nobody else published a game for the same setting/time period.
It’s structured as a wargame (the naval wargame Heart of Oak) and two other books with information on the RPG system and campaigning. Originally this seems to have been a boxed set published in 1982, and the blurp on Amazon still talks about three books and a box.
I find this game fascinating because it is so… limited. You have the choice of playing both sides: you can be a white, male Royal Navy officer, or you can be a white, male American Navy officer. If you feel fancy you also could play a privateer from any other nation (but the navies of those nations are not worked out).
To be fair, it does at least talk about playing other genders and races, but goes into detail of how difficult that would be.
The whole game is focused on being a Naval officer in a way that almost seems odd. The world outside of at most a port city might as well not exist. It does give you the option to buy a rotten borough though and become a member of the house of Lords, so there’s that.
There is an encounter table for portside encounters that includes eligible ladies (25% widowed) in case one wanted to dally or marry one. Shipboard doctors always are drunk and you can only determine how much when you need one.
The actual character creation rules are spurious, but unlike DnD they forego alignment for party affiliation. It’s all… laser-focused on playing a very specific kind of character. Way more than even DnD ever was.
What it does not though is information on how to run this game. I know, I mentioned campaign rules, but that’s just it. They are campaign rules. There is nothing like a scenario, or play examples, or an overview of the world outside of ships here. This is literally a game like White Box DnD, which basically just was an extension of a wargame on an individual level. And I guess like oDnD you would need someone who already played to even get into the game. I assume this was done via conventions or similar ways, or people just hunkered down and tried to make sense of the game on their own.
This game never was really that successful from what I have seen. There are three supplements/modules for it, all available on drivethrurpg, but the game has been in publication since the 1980s from what I have seen. That is, the company still exists and at one point might have dusted off the books and scanned them in.
Will I play it? Most likely not. I don’t think it’s worth it, especially as I am not really a fan of the genre. But it is a rather interesting artifact of TTRPG history.