Image credit, Dark Albion: The Rose War by RPG Pundit
2/26/2025
I ran this campaign for about 10 sessions. I’d say I used maybe 8 pages of this book. And that’s stretching it. It is over 275 pages long.
It was one of the best campaigns I’ve ever run. But how much of that had to do with the book, Dark Albion: The Rose War, and how much of that had to do with me being a history nerd?
Plot: “Who’s this guy again?”
Dark Albion: The Rose War by RPG Pundit is a gamification of the real-world War of the Roses in high medieval Angland (England) and is part of his “medieval authentic” series of works. So, as one can assume, it’s plot is based off the War of the Roses.
I feel very confident in saying that this is a setting book with a campaign tacked on, which I think is a shame.
The setting is fine. It’s medieval Angland. There’s a 10-page segment over medieval law which is always relevant in RPGs (players getting on the wrong side of the law is a given). I’ll go into it more in the content segment.
The campaign, is incredibly lackluster. Many events are dated to a specific year, but not a month or day (useful information for births, deaths, and battles). Some years have little to no events in them, or events only in specific parts of the country the players may have no interest in. And even then, very few of them deal with the supernatural.
There’s no periodization to help the reader (who may know little of the war) keep track of where they are in the war’s progression. And oh my gosh the names. I honestly felt like I was taking a test the amount of studying and note taking I had to do to keep everything together.
Was the plot of the campaign interesting? Yes. There was a lot of drama, a lot of politics, a lot of twists and turns. However, it takes place over the course of THIRTY YEARS. Which is do-able in games like King Arthur Pendragon because you’re only expected to go on one quest per year, but there’s enough content here to last a lifetime!
Some may say this is a good thing, for example mega-dungeons are this way. But I can chop up mega-dungeons and treat any one layer as a dungeon of its own.
This mega-campaign is unwieldy, difficult to navigate, and due to its incredible length, is not likely to have the players see it to its end grizzly and satisfying conclusion. But if notes are kept, it can be fun in the meantime.
For this reason it is docked some serious plot points. It seems, there can be too much of a good thing.
Content: “In the year 1454, the Archbishop of Canterbury dies of wasting disease, how unfortunate.”
To say this game lacks content would be a lie. There’s a LOT of content in there. However, the problem is a lot of it isn’t useful. It’s painted in too broad of strokes.
And I don’t blame the author. He had to encapsulate 30 years of English medieval society into this book during a time a civil war when massive upheavals were happening in every sector of life.
Not to mention the entire island is detailed here, from Angland to Scots Land and a bit of the Eyrieland (Ireland). And for some reason a bunch of the Continent? Which we will probably never visit. To be honest, if he’d made each of them blurbs on a two page spread it may have helped me understand them MORE because I would have been able to at least see them all at once.
The core issue lies in the fact that the book is a mile wide and an inch deep.
So little of what matters is mentioned because so much of what doesn’t matter is covered. This isn’t because he tried to thin the word count, me genoito! May it never be!
It’s because in D&D, you’re not in all of Angland, you’re in one area of Angland for like, 2-5 sessions straight, then you might leave, but maybe not because you’re also kind of invested in the politics therein. In those times, I don’t need the history of Scots’ Land, I need more of Herefordshire, and that’s just not there.
Art: “I knew a degree in art history would pay off some day!”
The art is on point. 10 out of 10. It’s almost entirely public domain art, and so I didn’t immediately want to give it a 10 out of 10, but the cartography and border design done by Dominique Crouzet is incredible.
I’m seeing so many of these public domain images for the first time, even though I witness the ole’ “OSR special” weekly. They just really sell the vibe of the era. It feels medieval. It feels authentic. I like it more and more every time I see it.
Great job.
Usability: “15 bookmarks, 8 dog-ears, and a few dried-out highlighters later I think I’m ready for chapter 2”
When I first started using this 40 point system to calculating review scores, I originally wondered what would warrant a 0 on each scale:
- 0 Plot: monsters just exist in rooms of a dungeon without reason and there’s no hooks provided for why the players should be there
- 0 Content: There is nothing gameable in the text at all. Just some ideas.
- 0 Art: Zero art AND zero effort in the layout. A featureless word document or text file.
- 0 Usability: Extreme usability problems AND page references actively screw you up more than help you.
Mr. Pundit, your page references (though few) did not make things worse. For this, I award you a single usability point.
Here’s an itemized list of grievances (incomplete, but very accurate):
- Ideas roll across pages and spreads with reckless abandon.
- The text is dense.
- Few, if any, page references.
- No periodization, if I wanted to start playing in the middle of the Rose War I would need to read and understand everything that came before and take notes (I know this from experience).
- Names, endless names, without page references, and the name list is listed alphabetically not by order of appearance in the story with an alphabetical index at the back.
- The list of Knights of the Star is an outright attack on my sanity, I will not stand for it.
When I read this book I feel lost at sea in the worst possible way.
Conclusion: “I ran a campaign with this book and, as unlikely as it sounds, I did have fun.”
Our first adventure was the final battle of the 100 Years War. After the Anglish defeat they retreated back to Angland and earned a plot of land because of their valor in battle. Crowns, the system we were playing, has downtime actions that take weeks. We just bumped those up to months. Then we bumped it to seasons because it was still taking too long to play out.
We ran the Pale Lady adventure from Lamentations of the Flame Princess as an encounter with a fey maiden in the woods. We ran Tomb of the Serpent Kings but made them Elf Kings. There was much politicking, and my players got invested in the different NPCs the book provided.
Most of the fun I had with this book had nothing to do with this book. I had to google the NPCs to get anywhere near enough information to run them. However, it enabled me to have a complex political setting and backdrop for our dungeon delving.
For that reason I’d say there’s some redeemable qualities here. If you’re looking for a massive setting you can build on, maybe this is it. I don’t think it will be for me anymore, but I had fun while it lasted.
Thank you for reading!
Until we meet again,
GOOD LUCK ON YOUR ADVENTURES
Ward Against Evil 
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