James Nicoll Reviews

Walter Jon Williams’ 1982/1983¹ Privateers and Gentlemen is an age-of sail tabletop roleplaying game. The game shares a name and setting with Williams’ Privateers and Gentlemen historical novels. The eye-catching cover is by Tom Freeman. Williams published as Jon Williams.

And what did the gamer find when they opened the box²?

If they are like me, they discovered that the box, while sturdy, should not have been stacked with other box games for almost half a century, as the box lid has bowed in.

So, contents: three saddle-stitched books (Heart of Oak, Promotions & Prizes, and Tradition of Victory), one game master’s screen, a blank character sheet, and a Fantasy Games Unlimited order form, which is the stuff of nostalgia. No dice. More than forty years on, all of the contents look brand new, which suggests to me that the game was printed on paper of decent quality. No self-digesting high-acid paper for FGU!

Thanks to the last item, we get P&G’s recommended price (at least if you purchased direct from FGU): $18.00, which in 2025 terms is about $60.00 USD³ or $85.00 CAD. On the one hand, the gamer is getting two games here, the miniatures game and the RPG. On the other hand, modern gamers may find the contents a bit lean by current standards. Heart of Oak is 39 pages (not counting the ad for WJW’s historical novels), Promotions & Prizes is 32 pages, as is Traditions of Victory. $60.00 for just over 100 pages of material seems a bit steep.

Unfortunately, while Williams has commented on his computer game misadventures, if Williams ever wrote about the genesis of this game, I missed it. I can make some educated guesses about P&G, the first of which is that FGU provided minimal editorial input. The second is that FGU would have provided only as much support for the game as the writers themselves provided. The third is less a guess and more a memory of a comment WJW left on one of my previous posts about this game: in 1982 or 1983, the TTRPG field was young enough that nobody was quite sure what the players wanted, and nobody suspected that there wouldn’t be much of a market for historical roleplaying games.

Heart of Oak is a perfectly functional miniatures game (which is to say, it uses small representations of ships, not that the game itself is small). The centre of the book is a set of sturdy cardboard inserts consisting of useful tables and ship counters. I am pretty sure that removing them would fatally damage the staples holding the book together.

Promotions and Prizes provides rules to create and run characters living in Heart of Oak’s world. As mentioned, the rules are short, which is good because there is no index. There is a detailed table of contents.

Characters have seven characteristics (Strength, Sense Acuity, Mass, Constitution, Dexterity, Intuition, and Charisma), each generated by rolling 3d6 dice and adding the result. Generally, higher is better, although the rules do point out that larger people are easier to hit. Various derivative stats are based on the base characteristics.

P&G is a skill-based game, not class-based. The system to determine what skills the player character has is detailed and somewhat convoluted (particularly when one considers how short the rules are). Characters may be Royal Navy, US Navy, or privateers; each class has advantages and drawbacks.

The organization is… idiosyncratic. No surprise, as FGU didn’t really have a house style or (as far as I can tell) much interest in managing the content of their various games⁴. Unified game mechanics weren’t quite a thing in 1983, so some checks are performed with a d20 and others with a percentile die.

If I had to guess, P&G’s ancestry includes both Traveller and Runequest, or at least some Basic Roleplaying Game. Like both of those, this is a system where combat can be deadly. Thanks to the poor levels of medicine and hygiene, characters might survive battle only to perish of infection.

I have to admit that there’s an aspect of P&G that has confused me for decades: the rules describe two systems for determining skill values (either characteristic-based or determined with a die-roll), but the character sheet lists some skills with (1), (3), and (4) appended (but not (2) as far as I can see) which suggests that there’s a third method I keep missing.

Traditions of Victory fleshes out the world of 1755 to 1815, to the extent possible when one only has 32 pages with which to work. Again, the result is a bit idiosyncratic, in part because of the focus on navies. The Seven Years War sections, for example, manage to omit the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, almost certainly because the naval element was negligible (as it so often is in land battles) and one might come away from the text believing that the perfidious Americans won the War of 1812, which as Canadians can tell you (at tedious length) was not the case⁵.

This seems like an appropriate moment to remind people that the cultural standards of 17^th and 18^th centuries were very different from those of today. For example, slavery was legal in 1800s America, while 2025 it’s still perfectly legal, but Americans pretend it isn’t⁶. An author can paper over the differences or even pretend they didn’t exist (waves at the Bridgerton TV show). It is pretty clear that Williams’ personal sensibilities are 20^th century, but he does not edit the past accordingly. If virulent sexism, classism, racism and such displease, don’t play a game set in a period that abounded in such things.

Or to put it another way, this is one of very few Reagan-era games whose rules explicitly acknowledge that a fair percentage of the PCs will be gay or bisexual. While Williams doesn’t have any problem with gay/bisexual people, the Royal Navy very definitely did and a host of unpleasant consequences happen if it is discovered that a sailor is gay/bisexual.

Gamemaster’s screen: these serve two functions. One is to provide in a convenient place for various commonly used tables. The other is to conceal from players certain information (such as the results of dice rolls). Interestingly, while most screens have art on the player-facing side, P&G crams both sides with information. Does this reflect a less adversarial relationship between players and game master?

While slender, P&G has its points of interest. The non-player-generation system, for example, is fast, elegant and most importantly, easily copied for other systems. Really, all the game needs is another edition to polish some rough edges and address the organizational issues.

Privateers and Gentlemen is available here (Fantasy Games Unlimited)

1: Heart of Oak indicates 1983 for the 2^nd edition, Promotions & Prizes and Traditions of Victory 1982.

2: Actually, before we get to the contents, reading the back cover is a good idea, as that will indicate the order in which the contents were intended to be read: the 2^nd edition Heart of Oak miniature rules first, the Promotions & Prizes roleplaying game rules next, and finally the Tradition of Victory world book last. The order reveals that the roleplaying elements were an add-on for the original 1978 game.

3: America delenda est.

4: I am reminded of Jim Baen’s views re editing. To quote page 195 of Camille Bacon-Smith’s Science Fiction Culture:

JIM BAEN: It's been my experience that editors of that sort do as much harm as good... It's also the most time-consuming thing we attempt to do. So in general, if someone were not sending a book I want to publish, I don't publish it. Occasionally [we will make suggestions but]... we take a fairly strong position, that "thou shalt not edit. The author gets to publish the book she wrote.

5: No use asking a British schoolkid, as they won’t have heard about the War of 1812. Apparently, there was some sort of continental conflict going on at the same time and it gets all the column-inches in British texts.

6: From the 13^th Amendment to the American Constitution:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

I suspect the ink hadn’t dried before the first freed slaves were convicted on trumped-up charges and re-enslaved.