My hero, Cardinal Richelieu, got some props in last year's One Page Dungeon Codex.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/410915/One-Page-Dungeon-Compendium-2022-Edition?term=one+page+dungeon++compendium
This is an oddball entry. It didn't win any awards, but it actually creates an excellent system agnostic historical
rpg out of a single sheet of paper that's playable over multiple sessions, and it plays pretty well.
It has kind of an uphill-climb in the world of roleplaying, where fantasy is first, science fiction second, and anything historical is in the far off hinterlands. That said, I've played it through with two friends (we crammed it over a three day weekend), and its pretty white knuckled gaming.
It also has the really neat twist of making the Cardinal's Guards into the
PCs, while the King's Musketeers are seen as "brave idiots who will get in your way as often as not."
The backdrop is France in the 17th Century (of course). The kingdom is being invaded by the Holy Roman Empire, Spaniards, English and Dutch. The queen mother has blown the treasury on ball-gowns or whatever, Louis XIII is a kid, and France must use sneaky espionage and political maneuvers (often assassinations, which your
PCs are evidently experts at) to even the score. Without the intervention of the
PCs, the armies of France will eventually grow, but fight a long-slow-losing campaign against the foreign invaders. Treasures don't include magic items (though there is some clever use of the fact that people in this century believe in magic) but mostly of deals and political murders that cause new French armies to pop out of nowhere, loyal(?) friends you can recruit to join you in your adventures, and the use of political pressure/blackmail to provide funds for the cause of La Belle France. There are even optional rules for journeying to America (watch out for pirates and grizzlies!), to gain great wealth, though it can be pretty dangerous to do so, even compared to the battlefields of Western Europe.
Field battles between armies are largely the mechanic that turns the game, though it is not a game of field battles. Their outcomes are handled by a roll of the dice, but the
PCs are expected to effect their outcomes by a series of "battlefield adventures", in which small but critical encounters on the field (rescuing a French marshal, capturing the enemy's colors, delivering a letter for a dying officer, etc.) can sometimes change the odds in favor of the French.
There is also a nice story telling mechanic in a system of random plot elements (anything from talking ravens to witch burnings to mysterious suicide notes) that the
PCs discover at random. They have to add them into the ongoing plot. If the
GM thinks they did a good job of this, he rewards them, or punishes them if he thinks they came up with something lame.
The downsides (and these are relatively few) seem to be that the author's knowledge of graphics is limited. The thing looks like a primitive 1980s hexagon and chit wargame, minus the chits (you have to provide your own pieces for the armies of the French and their enemies, he suggests 6mm dice) and that the campaign is
rpg-system agnostic, but that is a function of One Page Dungeon Codex rules. We played it with OSR D&D, and it did just fine. Finally, as is often the case with one page dungeons, the print is agonizingly small.
Btw, you can't kill the Cardinal. HE will occasionally try to kill YOU, of course (reasons of state, dontcha know), but, if you manage to avoid assassination attempts by the Comte
De'Rocheforte and Milady
De'Winter, as the rules say, His Eminence goes on to other concerns.
In all, though, it is a fun romp that lends itself to a lot of historical nerd type jokes, and is well worth a lost weekend.
