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Voord 99

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  1. Yes, 511 would be better than 501. If Meliodas is a famous knight by about 480 (as the Book of Uther implies) it’d mean that he was getting on a bit if one wanted to use the stuff from Palamedes. But who really cares that much about Meliodas? And a 511 birth of Tristan would suit a Meliodas who wasn’t famous in the reign of Uther but did have adventures when Tristan was a child, and the events described in Palamedes could be fitted into the GPC in the 510s.
  2. Oh, indeed — I’m assuming any necessary rewrite of how Cornwall appears in the GPC. The conceit here is that this is for players who’ve played through the GPC, and so it is positively good if something piques their interest by being different from what they know. As far as the specifics go, the Anarchy is almost completely open to being rewritten as the GM prefers, as very little of it comes from any of the Arthurian source material, and so, it is largely free of consequences from the point of view of the long-term plot. The most important thing that happens in the Anarchy is negative, that no-one succeeds in dominating Logres or becoming High King. So I think one can eliminate Mark freely from the Anarchy — the reason why he is there is to introduce the character, really, and if he comes in later, then you introduce him later. On the other hand, eliminating Mark’s invasion is a significant change if you’re sticking with the existing Grail GPC, as one needs to come up with something else for PKs to do. So “later Tristan” might be best if combined with an alternate Grail story (e.g. Percival-only — no need for PKs to have anything special to do if there isn’t a general Grail quest for all Round Table knights).
  3. It’s a tiny, niggly, point, but a Tristan who dies in his mid-fifties, as in the GPC, just feels wrong to me. Obviously, you can change that just by compressing the timescale — it wouldn’t break the GPC if Tristan were born later and died a little earlier. But what about a more radical alternative? How about a Tristan who has a relatively short career *after* Arthur is gone? Tristan’s story was originally independent of anything Arthurian, but became integrated with Arthurian romance due to the Prose Tristan. For me personally, Tristan as a Round Table knight doesn’t do any favors for Tristan’s own story, although it makes him an interesting counterpoint for Lancelot. There are plenty of treatments that omit any Arthurian reference and assume that Tristan is in his own setting, especially Gottfried of Strassburg’s. However, Thomas of Britain seems to have wanted his version to take place after Arthur (although how long after Arthur Tristan, Mark, Iseult and the rest are supposed to have lived is obscure), so there is some warrant in *a* medieval author for simply saying that Tristan’s story gets going after Arthur is gone. So stick a relatively short (decade plus) new period after Arthur falls, coinciding with Tristan’s adult years. The action of the campaign moves to Cornwall, Brittany, and Ireland. The politics are easy to work out if one worries about making them plausible, as it’s obvious why, with the vanishing of a dominant overall king of Britain, these other areas might become more important. This would work best with a compressed reign of Arthur, as Tizun Thane suggested in connection with moving the Roman War back to the end of Arthur’s reign. If one were to combine it with that move, then the parallelism between Mark-Iseult-Tristan and Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot would become less significant as well. This would allow one to emphasize romance as the main aspect of the “Tristan” period, as a compressed Arthur reign will probably stick to the “twelve years of peace” as the time of adventures and tend to collapse Romance and Tournament periods into one another without a lot of differentiation. This heightened emphasis on love would suit modeling Tristan’s career on the version in Gottfried, and one might take other things from Gottfried, such as the high degree of importance placed on expertise across many different areas. Also, without the need to differentiate Mark so extremely from Arthur, one could draw on the sources that have a less one-sidedly villainous version of Mark than the GPC tends to present. It might obviously be worthwhile to play through a very short Pendragon mini-campaign that was based exclusively around the Tristan material, with no Arthur at all. Same rules, different story, and, with fewer major characters, more room for PKs to be important. Removing Tristan from the Round Table also unclutters the Arthurian side a little. If Lancelot is the greatest, then Tristan has to be the next greatest — which isn’t a really a problem for the sources that integrate him, because Gawain being a bastard who’s Not All That is part of the agenda. But the GPC’s Gawain is something of a compromise — it’s really noticeable how much the GPC upgrades Gawain from 3e Gawain — , and the result is that one never quite gets the sense, reading the GPC, that “Tristram” is what he’s supposed to be in the sources on which the GPC mostly draws, which is clearly the greatest knight after Lancelot. Gawain obviously deserves his own Not the Great Pendragon Campaign thread, though. Anyone adapting anything to do with Tristan and Iseult obviously needs to make a decision about what to do with the fact that a driving motor of the plot is in our terms a horrific violation of consent, the love potion. A Tristan who is not literally having his career at the same time as Lancelot might be more suitable to just biting the bullet and having him and Iseult fall in love with one another with no potion, as there is less need for him to be different from Lancelot. (Brangaine I would like to keep around, as that relative rarety, a genuinely significant secondary female character, but perhaps she could be Iseult‘s confidant who persuades her to accept her feelings, rather than someone whose mistake causes Tristan and Iseult to drink the potion.)
  4. I’d be tempted myself to say that all PKs can pick one stat (other than SIZ, maybe, given its disproportionate importance) to be their Family Stat for +3, and do it that way, running in families rather than cultures.
  5. It wouldn’t be too hard to base rules for inheriting some of a father’s skills off the rules for getting extra skills from Father’s Class. Instead of assuming that any father who has X position gets these skills, look at what the father was exceptionally good at, and go from there. I do something like this, but instead of the father, it’s the knight to whom the character was squired, on the assumption that if you serve an expert courtier, you pick up more in that area than if you served a different knight.
  6. So, sticking with the theme of asking what would happen if you made significant changes to the GPC to adopt things that Mr. Stafford didn’t use, what about the Grail? This is, honestly, an area of Arthuriana where I’m not all that well-read. (I’ve never read Perlesvaus, for instance, nor do I know the Post-Vulgate stuff at all.) So feel free to chime in with other Grail stories that deserve attention. But looking at the GPC, one thing that it strikes me is that it blends two different strands. Quite a lot of it is taken from what one can call the Percival strand, that starts with Chrétien’s unfinished poem that sparked various continuations and reworkings, of which the most important is Von Eschenbach’s Parzival (which I’m taking as my main point of reference in what follows, because I like it). Percival is the only Grail knight, he fails to ask the question, stuff happens, he asks it, story ends with him attaining his rightful position. From a modern perspective, this all works very well: Percival is an interesting and colorful character, with a very distinctive upbringing. He has an overall arc of character development. And, at least in Chrétien and Von Eschenbach (also Peredur) Percival works excellently as a figure against whom you can play off Gawain as the epitome of the great “normal” knight. Then there is what one can call the Galahad strand, from the Vulgate through Malory, where Galahad is the supreme Grail knight, with Percival and Bors as secondary figures, but inevitably, It’s All Really About Lancelot. Galahad is a rather colorless and entirely idealized figure, the perfectest virgin who ever virgin-ed, but that’s effective in context, because Galahad serves to illuminate his father. In the Galahad strand, Percival is showily downgraded to demonstrate how perfect Galahad is (esp. failing to draw the sword, but also things like almost sleeping with the devil). The GPC takes this Moral Worf Effect to extremes due to combining the two strands. In it, Percival still fails to ask the question, so this is still That Idiot Percival’s Fault. But he never gets to make good his mistake and emerge triumphant at the end, because the GPC substitutes the Galahad strand as the main basis for the resolution of the Grail story. (Not for PK’s, but as written it is so improbable that a PK will obtain the Grail that it hardly matters.) So what if we got rid of Galahad and stuck with Percival as the Grail knight, who has a close family relationship with the Grail king and is destined to be Grail king himself? After all, in Pendragon we don’t need the story to revolve around Lancelot — it revolves around the PKs in the actual game, even if the background story doesn’t. And the Percival of the Percival strand is arguably more interesting for the PKs to intersect with at different points on his journey from naive and clueless youth to Grail king. (And, obviously, the existing Percival material in the GPC can be kept — one just keeps going past where it loses interest.) Basically, the PKs replace Gawain as the main knights who counterpoint Percival’s story, but from the player perspective, Percival is counterpointing their story. The following are some quick thoughts: The Grail Castle as envisaged by Von Eschenbach is absurdly suitable for a role-playing game: an elite secret order of knights who have to conceal their identities when they are sent on missions by the king. Admittedly, in Parzival those missions are mostly becoming the lords of lordless lands, but the knights do other things, too. If the players do play Grail knights, you give up the generational aspect, as they are all forbidden to marry except for the king while they are still Grail knights — but on the other hand, the Grail prevents or at any rate slows aging, so the same character can play through as much time as one likes. There’s room to exploit the idea that the ladies of the castle can leave it openly, for a ladies’ campaign. You play ladies of the Grail, engaged in diplomacy and espionage (Von Eschenbach doesn’t say that ladies can’t conceal their identities, just that they don’t have to) for King Anfortas and in due course King Parzival. (Actually, this whole thing sounds like a good basis for a superhero or occult-espionage campaign set in the present day, or maybe in the 19th century, but that’d be a different forum.) One advantage of the Galahad strand is that multiple knights achieve the Grail, potentially including a PK. In the GPC as written, this is almost certainly not going to happen, but a GM who wanted might rejigger it to make it more possible. That’s something you’d have to give up. Although there is a possible radical solution that might not be to everyone’s taste: the backstory of the Grail in Von Eschenbach (stone associated with the time before Adam when Lucifer rebelled against God) does not exclude the possibility that the Grail might not be the only such sacred object. So there could be a second Grail, maybe called something else, and the PKs are by blood related to its guardians. Trevrizent in Parzival runs through a long series of fetch quests done by the Grail knights in which they get this and that magical healing herb or whatever in an attempt to heal the king. Obviously, the PKs could do one or more of these, even if they’re not Grail knights — one of those convenient “open” ladies of the Grail could recruit them. There’s a big tonal difference. In the GPC, the Grail Quest is elegiac and even a little depressing, especially with the emphasis on the idea that this ends the Enchantment of Britain and marks the point at which the adventures stop. The story in which the PK’s friend, or at least acquaintance, Percival ends up as Grail king is more triumphant and happy in tone. It might make more sense to have it mark the high point of the campaign, and coincide with whatever you decide is the apogee of Arthur’s reign.
  7. My French is in decent enough shape for reading purposes... Also, foregrounding Chrétien is very much to my personal tastes, and I’d be interested to hear some of the specifics there. My own biggest change so far is that I’m using Gawain’s origin from De ortu Walwanii.
  8. I think Sutcliff’s indirect influence on Pendragon is enormous, as the writer of the first significant postwar “historical” Arthur novel. It’s an interesting question how much direct influence she has had, though — Mr. Stafford, as far as I can tell, never mentions Sword at Sunset anywhere in an actual Pendragon publication, whereas he draws attention to Mary Stewart in all three editions. (Also Marion Zimmer Bradley, and I’d imagine that other Arthurian historical fantasy like Bradshaw’s Hawk of May might be in the mix.) 3e/4e also recommends (with a warning about historical accuracy) John Morris, who was essentially writing historical fiction (and judged from that standpoint was very successful :)). It seems to me that in an important way Pendragon as written is unsympathetic to Sutcliff. Her Artorius is very much a Roman Arthur cast in the mode of “last defender of Roman civilization against the barbarians,” and SaS is obviously a sequel of sorts to her Roman Britain children’s books, with their themes of Romans and Britons earning each other’s friendship and respect and intermarrying to produce a hybrid culture. Whereas Pendragon does not want a Roman Arthur, and casts Romans as somewhat dislikable alien presences in an essentially “Celtic” Britain, with a rigid divide between “Cymric” and “Roman” identities. I adored Sutcliff when I was a child, but I never read The Shining Company, or at least I don’t remember ever doing so. It’s occurred to me that if you wanted to extend the GPC, you could do worse than do a Hen Ogledd campaign that put Y Gododdin and the Battle of Catraeth at its center. But you’d need a narrative framework, and I think The Shining Company might be a good place to look for one. This is one where I think you need fairly radical mechanical changes to Pendragon to replicate the stories. In fact, I’m not sure that Pendragon is the ideal chassis to start with. Not saying you can’t do it — but if you were starting from scratch with the goal of doing a Welsh legend game, I think you might build the system a little differently, more in the direction of narrative mechanics. Pendragon arguably does not always do even the larger-than-life aspects of Arthurian romance well. (Not a problem for me, as I feel that Pendragon is not so much about exact genre emulation as about the conflict between medieval romance knighthood and a more historical view of medieval knighthood.) The thing about a Galfridian GPC is, I don’t think it would be best to do it as a GPC. It appears to be something of a cliché of modern Geoffrey studies that the Arthur section needs to be kept in perspective and seen in the context of the sweep of the whole thing, and that seems to me (as a layperson in the area) to be very sensible. Start with Brutus. Hell, start with De excidio Troiae, of which Geoffrey’s DGB (as the cool kids call it nowadays) is a continuation. Incidentally, the recent A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth is open-access, and well worth a look.
  9. https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/ You can do illustrations, at least sort of, for scenes from the GPC. Here’s a version of the giant from Sword Lake:
  10. I should probably have been clearer that the point of the thread is indeed to explore a massive change to the GPC, and the idea is to discuss things that one might do with a group that had played through it and was interested in seeing what else you could do that would still be based in the sources, especially places where maybe an alternative version might speak to us in a different (not necessarily better) way in 2021. - I think you can minor Lancelot rather than remove him — after all, he is a character in the alliterative Morte Arthure, and this started with me wondering what would happen if you undid Malory’s decision to keep the plot from that poem but adopt the Vulgate’s chronology. But one might actually want to remove him. This is a change that would go well with restoring Gawain to Top Knight position, and while you don’t need to remove Lancelot to do that, it obviously helps. - The Grail deserves its own Not the Great Pendragon Campaign thread, I think — I was thinking of proposing a series of these for discussion here, if people are agreeable. Confining this strictly to the Roman War change, I don’t know that it’s a serious problem if one has a version of it happen immediately before. The Grail story is sort of in its own box. -Agreed on the rest (not that the above points were disagreement, but I had actual thoughts there). Shortening the reign of Arthur is arguably a good thing from a playing-through-the-whole-campaign standpoint.
  11. Found an 1862* edition of William of Rennes’ Gesta Regum Britanniae and skimmed the Arthur section to get a sense of exactly what his take is. A couple of interesting points: 1) Arthur’s decision to conquer outside the British Isles is explicitly attributed to him realizing that other kings are terrified of him, which does look rather like it might be meant to suggest growing pride. (Not explicit, though.) The Norwegian campaign is then given careful justification, but the attack on Gaul (a much more developed narrative) isn’t. 2) The Roman War is definitely not a good thing, and William in fact attributes it to the devil, who causes such things by inspiring human beings with sin. The relevant sin here ends up being pride (superbia), not that this stops William from going on at some length about the other ones. He blames the Britons and the Romans both at the start, but when he sums up, he focuses more on Roman pride as being responsible for starting the war. 3) As in other chronicle treatments, news of Mordred’s usurpation comes after the Roman War is won. In this version, Arthur is about to conquer more, and William says that God was opposed to these ambitions of Arthur (lit. Arthur’s vota, “vows”). Although Mordred is presumably therefore God’s instrument, he is not at all a good person, largely because he allies himself with pagans. So overall, it’s an interestingly complicated take on Arthur, where he does seem to be at fault for going too far beyond the just war, but this is not a matter of him being straightforwardly the main person in the wrong. William was a distinguished expert in canon law, I believe, so I imagine there’s quite a lot of this where an educated person at the time would be going, “Aha! So that action would mean...” *Siân Echard’s translation on her webpage linked above corresponds to lines at two different places in the text I looked at. Since she’s one of the world’s leading experts on medieval Latin treatments of Arthur and I am, umm, not at all that, I suspect that there are significant variant versions, and she’s translating a better text than I have available to me.
  12. Even in Geoffrey, it’s the fact that Arthur is away from Britain that gives Mordred his opportunity (although Geoffrey certainly sees the Roman War itself as God’s vengeance upon the Romans), reflecting a standard medieval worry about the way in which a ruler’s power was closely related to his physical proximity to his subjects. But I am thinking more of the tradition that comes out of Geoffrey, specifically the alliterative Morte Arthure, where there is a definite case to be made that Arthur is presented as someone who takes the Roman War beyond the point at which it is just and so brings about his own downfall. (People argue about the interpretation, but I believe it’s still considered a viable way to read the poem. Not a Middle English specialist, and happy to be corrected.) EDIT: This is useful: https://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/344wars.htm See esp. the William of Rennes passage near the end, explicitly about the idea that Arthur should have been content to stay within his British kingdom.
  13. I think you’d have to tell your players up front that this will be a different Arthur that deliberately draws on things that aren’t the familiar version, but were at one time normal. (Go with Scottish writers’ argument that Arthur was a usurper and Gawain was the rightful king all along! ) It is interesting how persistent the “doomed by adultery” element is in the modern imagination. “Historical Arthur” fiction that purports to imagine a post-Roman Arthur repeatedly includes it, going back at least to Rosemary Sutcliff — even though this is one element that (if you’re a believer in the historical Arthur) you can be absolutely certain was added many centuries later. Arthur’s incest with his sister is also very often retained in that sort of novel. As you point out, though, the modern take on the adultery element is a bit different from the medieval one: I think that’s a very sharp comment: Malory moves away from the characterization of the Vulgate Arthur (who is a bit of a [expletive deleted], obviously) in favor of a more positive English portrayal , but on the level of focus and interest he replicates the French take: it’s still basically a story about Lancelot. To some extent, I think that’s more generally true of a lot of the material: Arthur is often more of a setting element, the king whose court contains all these amazing knights, or at most a secondary character. It’s really in modernity that people come so strongly to fuse Arthur as the great king, on the one hand, and the adultery/incest elements, on the other, into one composite story about a perfect king brought down by these two illicit sexual acts. Both sides are there in the medieval sources, but they’re focused on in different parts of the tradition, and even Malory doesn’t assemble them in quite the way that we do.
  14. Since Morien mentioned it, and, as it happens, I’ve been thinking of throwing it out for discussion: what if one put the Conquest era at the end of the campaign, or at least put the Roman War there? Which is, obviously, where it originally was, and where it stayed through quite a lot of the tradition. The idea that Arthur’s reign ends in tragedy because of Lancelot and Guinevere is a comparatively late one that developed on the continent. Prior to that, it was because he overreached by engaging in wars too far from home, and, if I’m remembering correctly, that remains the case in English treatments that aren’t Malory. Even in the Vulgate, although the Roman War is early, the Romans and Saxons crop up again at the end in a sort of ghost of the previous versions. Arguably, from a modern perspective, the older idea might be worth exploring with a group who’ve gone through the GPC already and might find something that departs from Malory an interesting change. An Arthur who falls because of imperial arrogance might possess certain modern resonances that might speak to people in ways in which an Arthur who falls because of his wife’s extramarital affair does not. Thoughts? You’d obviously have to restructure the GPC , and if you didn’t want to eliminate Lancelot entirely, you might want to reduce him to his dimensions in Chrétien, so that he’s the knight who loves the queen, not the absolutely best knight ever.
  15. There’s also the consideration that in the GPC Gorlois has missed “every muster,” and it would be another detail for the GM to remember to change if one didn’t rewrite it. Also, there’d be a case for injecting Merlin at this point to prepare the PKs for Sword Lake in two years time. I didn’t change it back to Geoffrey’s version out of pure antiquarianism. It emerged from how the game had developed, and there were a couple of things that pointed in that direction. 1) For some reason, my players really latched onto the Cornwall narrative during the Book of Sires, and we decided on Cornish in-laws during the course of creating the family histories. They’ve ended up arranging a Cornish marriage, rescuing Igraine, witnessing Morgan’s birth, acquiring a manor in Cornwall, etc. If in doubt, they want to come up with a reason to go to Cornwall. So unsurprisingly Gorlois is a major character that they’ve met twice in play, plus they were at Salisbury in 480 when he saved the day. 2) I moved a version of Sword Lake to the invasion of Somerset, which I had happen in 483. So (a) they’ve just met Merlin in the previous session, and there’s no need to introduce him, and (b) having him help Uther now would raise the whole question of why he hasn’t given him the sword yet. That being said, it’s not actually that radical a change. Gorlois arrived after the battle of York, so Uther still blames him for turning up late, and resents him for the fact that Gorlois is perceived as having saved the day. When one uses the Book of Sires, which makes Ambrosius a real presence in the players’ minds, it’s not hard to suggest plausibly that, fundamentally, the source of tension here is that Gorlois was Ambrosius’ close friend and supporter, and that Uther is always going to be the younger brother and lesser successor of a much more impressive king. So I think I’ll be able to get away with using Excalibur’s Peace. I’m not 100% sure that I will, but it’s mostly because I might want to save the heartwrenching moment of having to fight Gorlois for later, rather than have a false start. Although the relief of having to do so and then not having to do so after all might be good set-up in its own way. EDIT: Was looking at 485 in the GPC to prep for next year, and happened to notice that it’s a plot point there that Merlin helped at Mount Damen, as it explains why he’s not around court. Probably not the main reason to have replace Gorlois, but it’s sensible, as players are likely to ask about him, and one might want to make sure that he’s kept back for the big reveal in 486. Plus it suggests a motivation for Merlin getting Excalibur when he does: he helps Uther in what would otherwise be a catastrophic defeat for Britain and then has to spend a year recovering, during which he can’t do anything to stop the Saxons invading Essex. Naturally, the first thing Merlin does when he’s recovered is get something to help Uther unite Britain against the Saxons.
  16. Anno CDLXXXIV: Uterpendragon rex Loegriae, videns quod Octa, filius Hengisti, atque Eosa, cognatus suus, aquilonaria regna invadebant, perrexit cum exercitu ad illas partes Britanniae. Quod cum Saxones percepissent, Britannos insidiaverunt et in fugam propulerunt. Uterpendragon cum militibus superstitibus ad montem Damen cessit ibique iunxit se ad Gorlois ducem, qui nuper supervenerat. Gorlois hortante, Uterpendragon castra Saxonum petivit et in ipsos irruit. Britanni, victores existentes, paganos ad milia interfecerunt. In his proeliis ambobus, Gerontius atque Godefridus milites ambo quoque viriliter pugnaverunt; nam cum Uterpendragon rex cum Octa Eosaque primum proeliaretur, fuerunt inter illos, a quibus via vi facta est ut Rodericus comes effugeret. Deinde, cum Britanni iterum cum Saxonibus certarent, Gerontius Godefridusque acriter intenderunt et nonnullos equites hostium fugarunt. “The entry in AS for 484 marks the first appearance of a curious stylistic change towards greater elaboration in what is generally agreed to be the oldest component of the text, the record of events in Logres with a particular focus, in this section, on the doings of the king. These more elaborate passages of the first strand of material (as distinct from the second and more “literary” strand) are intermittently present in AS thereafter.(1) There has been much debate about whether this represents occasional interventions into the older sections by the same person or persons (presumably associated in some way, real or fictitious, with the knights of Salisbury whose activities dominate the added material) who were responsible for the expansion of the AS, or whether we must postulate a third intervention into the text at some point. The evidence does not seem to allow for firm conclusions, although the Latinity of these elaborated sections of Logres material still seems at least somewhat different from the more affected and classicizing Latin of the Salisbury strand.” As usual, the first paragraph consists of the canon material from the Book of Uther, and could be used in any campaign that was following that version, with one exception. There is a fairly significant departure from the BoU here: following Geoffrey, I had Gorlois, not Merlin, urge Uther to attack and take the Saxons by surprise after the disastrous Battle of York. To make the section BoU canon (with a little extra revision for style), the third and fourth sentences should read, Britanni superstites ad montem Damen cesserunt. Merlino hortante, Uterpendragon castra Saxonum petivit et in ipsos irruit. (1) I.e, I could steal stuff from Geoffrey here, and I was not going to pass up that opportunity.
  17. Oh, I absolutely can’t be bothered with medieval orthography when doing these. I’m making a conscious effort to try to incorporate medieval grammar, and I check the vocabulary to make sure that it has actual parallels in medieval texts. But that’s as far as I’m going to go. Even then, I cheat a little with my conceit that the stuff about my PKs is a later addition to the text by a later-medieval author who was decently read in classical texts and was consciously trying to be a bit classicizing. Because it’s one thing to have kings running around and getting into battles — I can adapt that from actual medieval annals. It’s quite another to have to worry about how the kind of text that a medieval annal is would express all the crazy things that player characters get up to. Quicker to write CL with medieval vocabulary and maybe the odd bit of ML grammar here and there when it occurs to me.
  18. Gaudeo, quia sit qui meas nugas legat! More seriously, your comment got me wondering if eugepae was used in medieval Latin, and I can say that it doesn’t seem to appear in Anglo-Latin, but euge does, and one author, forgivably unaware of the Greek, seems to have decided that there existed a word euge, (-is[?]), n. — “approval.” Now that I know about it, I have to throw that in, as I’m working on doing a better job of including medievalisms.
  19. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe mentions a couple of details about women at feasts that might be fun to throw in from time to time to vary things: - on the continent, women are sometimes shown in feasts depicted in art as separated from men at their own table or at the lower end of the table. - women left the feast before the heavy drinking started. These are from the preview on Google Books — due to my local university library being closed, I can’t easily consult the whole section to see what else it might say, or pursue those items to the primary sources. The second item seems especially tempting to try to reflect by modifying the Book of Feasts (certain cards cannot come up early or late). But I’d like to have a better sense of what the sources are and how they indicate that it worked. For one thing, I’d like to know where women went. It’s comparable to the way in which women in similar situations were expected to behave in other periods of European history, obviously, so it is not all that surprising in itself. Female knights will necessarily involve modifying it.
  20. Anno CDLXXXIII: Cadorio rege Somersetensium pertinaciter argentum suppeditare recusante, Uterpendragon rex Somersetiam invasit et eam vastavit. tunc Cadorius rex emollitus est et pacem inter Somersetenses et alios Britones confirmavit. Eo anno, cum ver iniret, Gerontius Godefridusque milites Rodericum comitem ad aulam regis comitabantur, atque pro domino suo, cui multi homines per dolum inimici eius insidiati erant, fortissime pugnaverunt; in qua pugna cecidit Ithel miles gregarius, qui patruus Gerontii fuit. Quae cum accidissent, Gerontius atque Godefridus ad Cambriam iter fecit ut epistulam daret Tatheo, qui vir sanctissimus doctissimusque apud Ventam ecclesiam fundaverat. Dum in eo loco adsunt, Machuta, puella sanctissima, martyrizata est. Deinde in exercitu Uterpendragon regis ad Somersetiam perrexit, ubi hoc mirabile eis accidit. Cum prope paludes Avallonis equitabant, a Merlino pellecti sunt ut gigantem aggrederentur. Quo occiso, Merlinus eos iussit pugnare cum milite quodam, cui forma erat caerulea. Itaque contra hunc militem Gerontius Godefridusque certabant, donec ille Merlinum sineret ensem mirificum auferre. Eo anno matrimonium Roderici comitis Sarisburiae et Helenae, quae filia Gwylon baronis erat, cum honore et reverentia celebratum est. As I mentioned last time, I switched the order of the Invasion of Summerland (here Somerset) and Passionate Prince adventures (and inserted a version of Sword Lake during the Invasion of Summerland). If someone wants to inflict this on their players, the first paragraph here would be be canon for 482 according to the Book of Uther — although this version is framed from a pro-Uther perspective that ignores what PKs who make their Intrigue rolls notice. The last sentence is also canon, from The Marriage of Count Roderick for 483.
  21. I think if it’s a gradual development over about 170 years, then it’s plausible enough to work with. Although I think you probably need to retroject quite a lot of it back to Constantine, or at least to the 4th century. It’s true that comes and dux are the Latin words that became the titles of “count” and “duke,” but what comes* and dux meant in the Later Roman Empire doesn’t have much in common with their later use, which derives from medieval rulers appointing people to positions with these names. I think you need to do what the above narrative fudges, and have aspects of actual feudalism appear way back when. The above narrative sort of seems to imply without actually saying that when Constantine appointed someone as comes, that was a long-term thing for that person, who could expect to stay in that geographical location for the rest of their life (and so it could evolve into a position where a son could inherit it). If one rewrites the history of the 4th century Roman Empire like that, you can make it work. Personally (purely personally), at that point I think you’ve so radically fictionalized something where (unlike 5th century Britain) the historical actuality of it is so well known to us that I think I would prefer not to bother and instead say that the game is set in a past as it was imagined from the later perspective of the High Middle Ages, and so not worry about rationalizing it at all. One big benefit of that, for me, is that you can say that the Matter of Rome and Matter of Troy are the actual past of the setting, because things have always worked in the normal (=later medieval) way. One thing I’m hoping to do in my current game is have an adventure where the PKs are listening to a story about Troy, identify strongly with the characters, and we play a game about knights in the Trojan War as it appears in medieval literature. This is in the game as it exists, of course, with Brutus being real, and Alexander being a knight, but I personally would prefer to lean into it much harder than the game does. *Comes (“companion” [of the emperor]) was used for a lot of different positions, military and civilian, in the provinces and in the imperial court bureaucracy, not just the comites rei militaris to which I think Mr. Stafford was referring.
  22. I think it depends what you mean by “works.” I fairly strongly don’t agree that entire cultures and thought-worlds turn on a dime like this. Pendragon portrays a later-medieval mentality in which all that is accepted as the inevitable and natural order of things. Frankly, I don’t think that even the half-centuryish from Constantin is enough. Ideological systems like that are undergirded by a sense that they are traditional and they have an entire apparatus of custom, myths, and so on associated with them. None of which can pop into existence quickly. Basically, I think such developments needs to take place on a timescale that puts them beyond communicative memory to be historically plausible. Even in modern states, where things like mass media come into play, they don’t happen this quickly — in premodern societies they really didn’t. And in reality the feudal system wasn’t created by the fiat of powerful central monarchs, not least because if powerful central monarchs had the power to do that, then there never would have been a feudal system (to the extent that it was a “system”). And in any case, we don’t have a Pendragon world that’s a “feudalized” version of post-Roman Britain. We have a fairly exact simulation of medieval English law and custom from the 11th-15th centuries, much of which would not work the same way outside England at that time. (One thing that amuses me is that Romans get “Law” as a cultural skill, when English law, i.e. the law that Pendragon portrays, is distinguished precisely by the fact that it’s not heavily influenced by Roman law.) You really can’t bring that into existence on a short timescale and regard it as something that could remotely happen in reality. It’s unlikely, for instance, that people who expected to inherit jointly with their siblings* would lightly and immediately give up the rights that correspond to the way things always have been in favor of universal primogeniture. If in reality you tried to bring that in overnight, it would have been contested, probably with violence. In reality, though — it doesn’t have to matter for the game, any more than it’s worth trying to make the accelerated technological timescale historically plausible. So it absolutely can “work “ for the game. But cultural things are a bit trickier than technology, because players will draw on them to inform their sense of who their character is. Arguably, it’s a minor difference between this being “your” character’s family history and this being, as Morien suggests, something that “your” character plays through, but I think for some players it might affect the way that they looked at it if it wasn’t in “the past.” *Radically oversimplifying the position in Roman law - inheritance law is hellishly complicated -, but the key point is that there was no concept of primogeniture as a principle. It’s simply not part of the conceptual vocabulary for Romans, and Pendragon depends on it being a default norm that everyone accepts as morally right. Things do not easily become unquestionable default norms if people can remember them being otherwise.
  23. I think this could be a lot of fun. I’ve been thinking about offering a Book of Sires (only) game as PbP, and this might be a great way to spice that up. I think there are a couple of potential pitfalls if you did this as a prequel to a conventional Pendragon game. One is pretty obvious: you may need final PKs born by a certain date, so giving players/Flirting control over childbirth could be awkward, especially if people start dying before they have children because they’re waiting for that perfect wife. The other is very dependent on the particular group, but this is giving players a more intimate experience with how the sausage is made. The whole narrative of the Book of Sires is a bit of a Rube Goldberg contraption, in which counties, vassalage, and generally the whole culture and expectations of the later Middle Ages pop into existence in a really short period of time, but everyone is expected to behave by 479/484 as if those things have been there as long as anyone can remember. There’s a possibility that some players may find it hard to suspend disbelief if “they” have an experience of playing a character who identified with their tribe and had no concept of homage and fealty and then those elements get imposed by royal fiat at specific moments. I can see a player going with this history and saying that they want a character who entirely rejects the newfangled innovations. (Which is doable, obviously, but is going to require a certain amount of surgery on the game.) Admittedly, you could just do what I did when using BoS the normal way, which was ignore that and say that the grandfather was a knight who was loyal to the Earl of Salisbury and there never were any tribes etc., and adjust the narrative of events appropriately. Which works for me and my players, but might not for everyone.
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