This has a unique combat system that does not compromise between realism and fast playability!

The Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic is still the definitive gazetteer-style resource for people interested in running historical or historically-adjacent games. The writing is extremely accessible, well-researched and organized in a 'desk reference' style that covers a very broad range of questions. Carefully-chosen art provides additional context; almost every page has images, and many have multiple, all with accompanying explanations. The bibliography is like a free reading list to help you find more granular information.

This volume has extensive coverage of law, religion and academia in the late medieval world, and provides ample material to fill in narrative gaps in campaign settings that are derived from the 15th century in Europe. I've used both books in the series as resources to get quick and effective answers to player's (or my own) questions on these topics, to great effect.

Like most Codex Integrum material, these books are an essential informational and system-agnostic supplement for people writing and playing fiction in the time between the Dark Ages and Renaissance. The 'medieval times' of your mind's eye is probably much closer to the 15th century (vice 13th, 12th, etc.) than you might believe - and at the same time, full of much more intrigue, drama and action than a cursory glance would tell you.

This is truly an incredible product. Not only does it provide super fun character options that expand tactical options in play, it also provides every detail you could want for creating a 15th/early 16th century town. If you are enjoying SSk and want to add some swashbuckling detail to your city adventures this is the product for you!

The best combat focussed Medievalism RPG. If you have played Kingdom Come Deliverance, and want to deliver a similar peasant in the mud -> Knight in shining armor progression in a German/Slavic setting, this baby is for you.

Loving this book! My only qualm is that it seems like this is a step back in terms of formatting. SSK has developed a really lovely formatting style, and this seems to go back to the CMs Microsoft Word style.

Also, is this considered SSKs magic supplement, or is there forthcoming one that goes deeper? Loving everythign you put out!

A Dark Night is an adventure module specifically designed for the Stara Szkola (“Old School”) version of the Codex Martialis system, i.e. an OSR take for those who want a bit of medieval authentic violence without the need to attend HEMA courses.

A Dark Night is set in and around Erfurt in Thuringia, somewhere the players might reach if they ever make it out of Silesia (the setting for the author’s previous Monsterberg trilogy). The package includes a guide to the city and the settlements and countryside nearby. Erfurt is very civilised but no one can hear you scream in the Thuringerwald. Just as in Silesia there is weird menace afoot in Thuringia. Any magic that might raise its ugly head is detailed in the book.

Being Stara Szkola the adventure is fully laid out for lightweights like me. Look, there’s SIX factions, think you can remember that? The town at the centre of the action has NINE districts, colour coded on the map. The players just have to say the district they want and go there. That’s not too difficult for you to track, is it? If they go into an important building, here’s the floor plan. Let’s lay out the adventure in linear form at the beginning: you can run it in that order, in another order of your choice, or just ignore it altogether. Can’t go wrong.

And its certainly not dumbed down: the factions in play have various members with different personalities and interests that might suddenly become intra-factional competition, rapidly increasing the number of cross-currents if a GM wants to stir the pot.

I won’t say much about the nature of the menace since this is a new adventure. However, the GM can, in any case, just use the setting details and personalities and run A Dark Night as a pure sandbox. It’s all laid out in nicely spaced type, so easily assimilable. All the names are Germanic: anyone who can manage WFRP will be fine here (indeed with a bit of work the adventure could be ported over to The Empire). The whole thing runs to one-hundred-and-four pages.

I’m very glad to have this one for my collection.

A good semi-sandbox location, with some plot suggestion. And as a bonus, you get some "historical spells", which are both weirder and more evocative than the usual fantasy fare!

This OSR-adjacent High Medieval historical RPG is a gem. It’s pretty much all combat system, but I’d call that a feature not a bug. Stara Szkola combat runs on a small pool of d20s, called the Martial Pool, that are earned as part of character generation and advancement through the various medieval professions that stand in as classes. Every turn you have tactical decisions to make about how much energy to put toward movement, attack, and defense, all balanced against the attributes of the weapons you wield and the armour you are wearing. For a small die pool system it manages to add a wealth of interesting decision points during combat while humming along with a quick, slick base mechanic.

The system can be used as-is in the implied medieval setting, but is also ready to hack into any other game that uses the six stat and hit point framework common to many old school RPGs. I’m busy hacking in to fit into a classic fantasy type framework and possibly also a medieval monster hunting type game. I’ll give any system two big thumbs up when it inspires me to write and play.

While the adventure contained herein is a splendid additional chapter to the Road to Monsterberg series, this is as much a complete sandbox setting book as it is a campaign. This is 200 pgs of factions, NPCs, plot hooks, detailed locales. There's also no assumed outcome and refs to how different PC faction alignment impacts plot. Reference/re-read/replay value is very high due to sheer volume of detail. I eagerly await the POD version and also recommend Codex consider a RtM dead-tree bundle.

I was a play tester, being taken through the Devil's Pass sandbox, alongside a group I regularly play a variety of games with - predominantly Call of Cthulhu. Compared to what we usually play there was a much geater emphasis on combat, and the nuances within that, but we still got to roleplay and investigate which played to our strengths as a cautious party.

Character creation was a little more in depth than I'm used to, normally random dice rolls, in this system you choose a path as you level and this dictates available skills and the price of abilities etc.. You will learn that your life path ties in to everything, and having a varied group with differing strengths was a real win for us. First time character creation was a bit slow, I had to look back and forth through the book a few times. By my second and third character I was far more confident, and had a much better grasp of how to optimise my spending. That's another aspect you will need to take to heart, you are supposed to optimise, to try and gain every advantage, and ALL the bonus dice.

The combat feels brutal, with elements of player skill and the luck of battle coming into play. Quality of armour and your weapons play a big role, so does preparation and teamwork, the use of cover and propping of ranged weapons all matter. In one fight, I grappled a guy down so that another player could finish him, one of my teammates disarmed a crossbowman and promptly shot him with his own weapon, another used a trained horse to distract a thief. Be flexible with your thinking and you will be rewarded, but maybe that's down to a good GM.

Overall, it took 9 sessions, probably totalling over 20 hours of lunatic slaughtering, and by the very skin of our teeth we survived. We definitely got to a place where the combat felt very fluid, without losing the sitauational precariousness. Having experience, and knowing your character better, things like deciding to weapon swap rather than reload the arbalest when you're short on time, will help you a great deal. I did very little damage with my normal gear as I was a poor hunter, but improvisation made up for that - apologies to those on my own team I wounded. As an archer I was constantly falling back, and when I was in melee I took an absolute beating. I scrounged better gear, spent more MP moving, and let the more "tanky" members take the brunt of the attack.

Definitely worth running with some reliable friends, with an advisory of caution - you aren't the unkillable hero, survival takes effort and a little luck.

A great system for lovers of tactical combat and historical gaming, though it could be easily implemented into any setting. The rules are very clear and readable (even for new players). The skill system will be very familiar to players of more modern-style games, though this could be handwaved for a more oldschool style of skill system. My only complaint is that there are a few issues converting other OSR monsters for use in this system and no guide to help.

EDIT: I had missed a small section of typing that answered some of my questions. On another note, the version I had downloaded and really enjoyed is no longer available (at the moment) with a much more designy (fancy fonts and lots more art) version in it's place. I personally prefer the older, cleaner looking version and would like if they put that back up as an option.

A great system for those who want to explore combat with more depth than just rolling to hit and subtracting health until one side reaches zero. Very excited to try out the new system by these folks, Stara Szkola :)

Very short review.

4/5 stars, as it is a very good historical resource.

I would say that this generally lacks in "gameability", which may be a positive or negative depending on the viewpoint of the individual.

I'll consider this product in two parts:

The Adventure: It's an excellent adventure either as a sandbox or as part of the series. The adventure introduces players to a gritty/historical setting through the narrative and I found this to be effective. I've tried and failed to run historical settings for players, and part of my failure was front-loading too much setting detail. Here they do a good job of introducing the differences from standard FRPG tropes by introducing some fairly low-stakes social situations, and how they could go really wrong. The adventure itself is episodic and broken into digestable chunks. The episodes also progressively introduce more setting/cultural elements which helps with world building and bringing the players along. The adventure IS and CAN BE lethal, and a balanced party with urban, rural, social and combat skills will be essential. That said, the need for a balanced, resourceful party is a strength. You can't get through this adventure unless the party is flexible.

The Utility of the product as a standalone/reference: The book is full of maps, tables and NPCs that can be endlessly mined. You could easily use this as the basis for a quasi-historic hex-crawl. Additionally, while the adventure is designed with a D20 OGL in mind, much of the material here is system-agnostic and what isn't can readily be adapted into whatever else you're playing.

As others have already pointed out, this is a very detailed and well researched work. There are plenty of martial feats to showcase the differences between fighting styles. Although I find it somewhat out of place that there are 2 feats with japanese names, for example Nukitsuke could have been translated as Fast Draw, or something like that, and Niten Ichi, I guess, is a fancy way of saying Two-Weapon Fighting. Thenagain those english terms are probably part of the original OGL... Also the infamous Mordhau technique is sadly missing from the list ;) The skill list is very thorough, almost to the point of being exhaustive. All in all I find this a very useful resource to plunder for my own games, and there's even an appendix that gives us guidelines for adapting the system to other OGL games.