What I learned from The Three Musketeers (1973)

I recently watched The Devils Director's Cut (1971) and was instantly obsessed. It felt so moving and awesome to me. 

In The Devils, Oliver Reed is the most sexy man that's ever existed (followed by Yanni). Here is a picture of him in that film.

Oliver Reed as the priest Urbain Grandier

That's not what this blog post is about. It's just a setup to explain why I watched Three Musketeers (1973). 

Y'see, I wanted to watch more movies where Oliver Reed was sexy. So my partner and I chose a film that both had Oliver Reed and Christopher Lee (one of their big crushes). A win/win. 

(Funnily enough, both films were set in the same time period and featured Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu as characters.)

Friends, what I found wasn't just smoldering mustache machismo, but a fun (and funny!) romp. It felt really inspirational for RPGs, too. 

Because consuming art makes you a better artist, I think that watching Three Musketeers will make you a better RPG player/GM/writer/enthusiast. 

I'm going to give you a shot by shot breakdown of the film and talk about the ideas it gives me for games.

Fill scenes with life

Every scene you describe of a city, a countryside, a church, a tavern should have vignettes that show what the world is like. Flourishes and curiosities that make the space feel rich and lived in.

And look, the real world is so much weirder than any fantasy world you could invent wholecloth. 

As an illustration, look how interesting Musketeer HQ is. 

On the right side, some musketeers are dicing and arguing. Two men in dueling gear (a face mask and a cloth arm shield) come through, discussing something. A lady holding an orange looks bored. There's candelabras and and weapon racks. An old woman is cleaning. A dog, happy, jumping, excited, rousts around and leaps onto D'Artagnan (played by Michael York). 

In the same scene, we're first introduced to the titular three musketeers. Porthos (Frank Finlay) is posed on a fake horse to have his portrait sketched. Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) chats with him nearby, destroying perfectly good 1gp candles by cutting them in half, bored.

Nearby, other musketeers practice thrusting against a target painted on the wall. D'Artagnan must step past them, quickly, to see Boss Musketeer.

As D'Artagnan makes his way up the stairs, we see Athos (Oliver Reed, MY MAIN MAN). He's having a sword wound tended while swilling wine: a glass suction tube is drawing his blood out. The sawbone's chest is opened, displaying a variety of grisly surgeon's tools. A stone bust watches impassively. 

Sometimes, the cardinal's men should be bowling against cardboard cutouts of ladies. In the background, farmers load a donkey with like, a million garlic bulbs. Geese and chickens mill around.

Speaking of geese and chickens: Put more animals into your scenes. Humans have lived alongside animals for all of history. If your tavern doesn't have a dog in it, what are you even doing?

In the streets, a barber-surgeon pulls a woman's teeth. A tree, being transplanted, rolls by on a wagon.

Seconds later, a sedan chair is carried past by porters. A rat catcher walks his small but vicious dog past you on the streets. His rats-on-a-string touch you. It's gross!!! 

Contrast the low with the high. All of this gross stuff is happening in spaces with BEAUTIFUL architecture. If pictures are worth a thousand words, find pictures of cool European castles and churches and courtyards and show them to your players. Look at the statuary on the church! Look at the molding! Look at the decorative plasterwork! 

Exaggerate rich people shit. Play up the ridiculousness of it all. The king is playing chess with trained dogs. The dog-knight pieces are ridden by trained monkeys. What a spectacle! 

Don't forget the scale of this sort of enterprise! If you have a castle, you need literal scores of washing women to do all the laundry. "My lord, do you know any private place with as much privacy as this public one?" 

Similarly, castles don't have like, one blacksmith--they have an entire armoring workshop!

And when you learn about things like medieval washing techniques or armor, you can put them into your game and enrich the experience...assuming you don't get too deep into just pontificating about what you know to your players.

Moving on. What the fuck is going on here? Two almost naked, beret-wearing, greased up dudes on a see-sawing pole, each end over the fire, are trying to grasp the basket suspended above them? 

It's a game! The PCs can bet on it. 

They could play games too! They can bet on themselves or their friends. Each game can be a little minigame. Little interactable scenes, everywhere.

Or let them rest as background details. A man with smoking headgear prophecies in the street. A child points. A woman sells fruit.

Let scenes provoke the characters, poking at their beliefs. It's raining. A man sits in the rain, drunk. He invites you to toast to the cardinal. You ask him to also toast the king. He won't. Fight him! Your friends watch from the covered gateway.

The place that you are in was beautiful once, but now it's run down and ill kept. The well house roof has holes in it. The walls are patched. Vines creep up the stones.

More details. In the background, Indians visiting England. Every scene is layered with information.

Make fights more interesting

No, even MORE interesting than that.

Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of rule systems (even ones I like) capture the types of fight scenes in the movie. I mean, I don't think a lot of rule systems could even begin model the fight scenes in the movie. It's just not what RPG combat looks like.

(And I swear to GOD if somebody comes into the comments to recommend something like 7th Sea, I will lose it. I am not asking for recommendations for games, I am giving advice on making combat feel interesting in an OSR-type game.) 

OK, here's one thing: breaking a sword is easy and should happen all the time.

You can break a sword in Three Musketeers with nothing. Hit it with a stick? Broken. Done with combat? Break it over your knee to celebrate the end of the engagement. You should be breaking swords and getting new swords all the time. You drop your sword and pick up your enemy's sword. They're totally interchangeable. Swords are lying everyone around on the ground and if you don't see one on the ground, have an NPC show up and offer the character a sword "to put an extra inch between your enemies and you." 

Everywhere! Devices! Machines! If a character leaps out a window, they should unexpectedly find an elevator powered by a wheel turned by two guys raising Romanesque marble statues up to to the window they just left.

Fill your scenes with cool set pieces. Patrick Stuart (and others) have talked about how environments should be filled with potential energy that can become kinetic energy. Set pieces that can be used by players and NPCs to do stuff. 

Here's an example of that. A courtyard for a duel. At the center, a well. It is being used by nuns to hang laundry. When the fight breaks out, the nuns can watch, disapprovingly, from the balcony.

When you fight with interesting set pieces, the GM should be letting people get away with shenanigans all the time. Throw your hat over the sheet and then stab through it. +4 to hit! Flip around the clothesline! +1d6 damage! 

Maneuvers (tackling, disarming) should not be worse than attacks. They should not be penalized. They should not be at a negative. They should not be slower.

In Lore, the homebrew system I made for my Middle-earth Hexcrawl project, doing a maneuver like "tackling somebody" is a Fast Action instead of a Fell Action. That means you can do this maneuver before the enemy's attack. If you tackle someone, they can't stab you. The musketeers do this. All. The. Time. 

And if you're disarmed? Your friend should be able to throw you another one. Again, swords should just be littering the ground at all times. 

Nobody should fight to the death. Much praise has justly been sung of the retroclone's Morale check. But more than that, nobody should be trying to kill each other. Even though the musketeers and the cardinal's men just dueled with swords, nobody is coup de gracing each other. All the people in this screenshot are alive. They just need their blood suctioned and they'll be okay. Break your sword over your knee! You'll fight again later!

Hats must be destroyed. The damned cardinal's men destroyed my nice hat! I spent 5 gp on that! Well, steal their purse and take 5 gp back. No, take 10 gp. No, take 20 gp, as penalty for slashing up my hat in the first place. Then, all the four musketeers get 5 gp. Everyone gets to go and buy more hats. Raiment should be important????

And here we have another fight scene. Let's look at all the interactable elements.

There's torches. 

There's height differences. Jump down on your foes!

There are wet rags.

There are poles, pulled free from the environment.

There's a basket full of...stones? OK.

There's trapezes for hanging laundry. Swing on them!

But look out! The NPCs can trapeze, too! 

No repetition! Bonuses for improvisation are never given twice! The first time you do something, you get a +4 bonus. The second time, nothing! 

And there are hazards! 

Get dyed, idiot!

There are slippery slides. You have to roll 11+ to not fall on them. Oh you fell? The enemy has a free attack against you.

NPCs watching passively, staying out of the way but just staring, is fun. 

If you roll a 20, a pretty washing girl falls in love with you. If you roll a 1, the wretched CRONE falls in love with you!!! AHHH!

And as is often said, fights should have goals that aren't "Beat the other guy up." 

In a mock fight in the tavern, the musketeers are trying to steal as much food for lunch as possible. Each stunt lands another loaf of bread, roast chicken, and bag of wine into the waiting cloak of Oliver Reed (I wish I was there, too!). 

Let hazards go both ways. Sometimes a mill inconveniences an enemy, who has to avoid the spokes of the wheel or the donkey as it placidly moves in its tread, unimpressed by the fighting bravos. Sometimes the water wheel picks you up by the cloak and drags you into the air. If a character's dice roll is ever an odd number, the hazard activates. Rain falls on the just and unjust alike.

Some combats should have special rules. In the forest at night, both combatants have lanterns. If your lantern is hooded, you have -5 to hit. If your lantern is hooded, you have +5 AC. Turn the lanterns off and on as you play hide and seek, striking and fading into the shadows.

Miscellaneous observances

At some point, D'Artagnan needs to get a henchman. Recruiting NPCs must be frustrating and expensive, so he goes to a tavern and chooses from the lineup. Nearby, some men are playing...air hockey?

The hireling role of Planchet (Roy Kinnear) is played for pure comedic relief, which is great, because he's basically their slave. And you gotta...keep that funny, I guess. But in general, this is what I imagine a henchman does:

He calls in your homies when you're having a solo fight in a big washing room: giving the other players an opportunity to join in the scene!

He pulls the sheets off of hiding NPCs, prepared to bonk them. But they're not an enemy! The NPC bonks HIM instead. Ohhhh, servant! You can't do anything right!

He should discretely advance the party's goals here and there. When the party has a faux fight to steal food from the tavern, he should fill a bellows with wine and help out!

He lifts an entire tree up with his freak servant strength and runs around the forest, blindly trying to help in a combat. After 5 rounds, he triggers and makes a single attack. It might come at exactly the right time to save your hide!

He is treated as a non-person.

"The pass is only for one person."

"I am only one person! That is servant."

He distracts your opponents while dressed up for the costume ball, letting you do whatever Main Plot you're up to.

And at the end of every scene, he's always near at hand, crouching, waiting to be helpful again.

Colors! Put colors in your game. 

It's been said, and I think rightly, that the past is much more colorful than modern Hollywood allows it to be. Roman statues weren't white, they were all painted! 

Give your factions identifiable colors. Let the King and Queen's Court be white. Let the Musketeers be black. Let the cardinal and his men all be red! Let the duke be blue! Let them serve as motifs that let players know from a glance (a word) who an NPC is aligned with!

What does a thief's Climb Sheer Surfaces ability look like? 

Fuck, I don't know. PARKOUR? Maybe it's parkour. 

This film is unexpectedly funny. In a row of crow cages, one prisoner is still alive.

As Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) passes, the prisoner almost cheerfully says "Mornin', your grace!" 

Secret doors! Secret doors should be everywhere all the time. 

The portrait of the king, next to the ornamental suit of armor and the candelabra, is actually a door. 

Turn the tap on the wine barrel and reveal a secret cache of coin!

The duke has a ring that turns into a secret key!

The secret key opens a panel of the wall! 

In conclusion, I think The Three Musketeers was a visual feast. It had stuff I would not have come up with at the game table...except now I can! I can just pluck these details from my memory and barf them forth to my players. 

This is why I said at the top that consuming art made us better artists. Watch films to get inspiration for weird stuff!