Scots in Pendragon

[RexHiemis]

Shouldn't Scots be in the game as well, according to the timeline of the story? I'm using 5.2 and nowhere in the books or in the supplements I can find Scots. 

[Morien]

1 hour ago, RexHiemis said:

Shouldn't Scots be in the game as well, according to the timeline of the story? I'm using 5.2 and nowhere in the books or in the supplements I can find Scots. 

Scotti are the Dal Riada Irish, on the coasts and Islands of Western Scotland and Northern Ireland (KAP 5.2, p. 21). They are mentioned in GPC, and further explored in Beyond the Wall and Pagan Shore. They are also in 4th edition as well as in the Book of Knights & Ladies, along with all the other non-Salisbury, non-Cymric options.

Edited March 6, 2021 by Morien

[Voord 99]

To add a bit, at the time when the game is (ostensibly) set, the fifth and sixth centuries, “Scot” (Scotus) meant “Irish,” and there was no concept corresponding to “Scotland” — the area that is modern Scotland would not have been seen as a single entity.

By the time when the game is mostly modelled on (11th-15th centuries), that had changed: Scotus meant “Scottish,” there was a Kingdom of Scotland, and Scottish identity had come into being (which is not to say that medieval ethnic identities worked the same way as modern ones).  So Scotland appears quite a bit in the actual Arthurian sources, which — to the extent that they have clear geography at all — tend to project the geography of their own day onto the imagined past.  Geoffrey of Monmouth has a fictional origin myth for Scotland (Albania) that pushes it back until four generations after the Trojan War.  One amusing thing is that Scottish writers in (IIRC) the 15th-16th centuries latched onto the version of Gawain’s origins in which he is the illegitimate son of Uther’s daughter Anna and claimed that Lot had been legitimately married to Anna — and that therefore Gawain, not Arthur, had been the rightful king and that Arthur was a usurper (and also not anything like as all that as the English said). 

It’s one of the cases where the conflict between history and legend in the game is fairly strong, and a game that kept closer to the sources could certainly get away with having a Scotland (which one might call Albany — Albany in King Lear is an echo of Geoffrey).

Edited March 6, 2021 by Voord 99