The Death of Arthur •

The Death of Arthur

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Welcome to the Grave

Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say: here in this world he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse:
Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus.1 Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur

This site is a development diary for my hack of a role playing system. I’m calling it The Death of Arthur, and it’s a reimagination of perhaps one of the most esteemed rpgs out there: King Arthur Pendragon.

What is this Game?

First off, it’s unpublishable.

King Arthur Pendragon and The Great Pendragon Campaign2 are giants - magnum opera and an impressive contribution even outside of its rpg merits3 to the experience of Arthurian literature.

I want to use The Death of Arthur to play The Great Pendragon Campaign more or less straight4. It wears its paternity on its sleeve.

Why not just use Pendragon? To start, simply because I had the time to tinker away on this - and the chance to design is satisfying in itself.

But why, some say, the moon? John F Kennedy, Address at Rice University

But I also want to see how a system could double down on some of the things I’m most fascinated by in the game, and streamline or reinvent other aspects - one that paints especially in the colors I want on the canvas. Everyone’s Pendragon will vary and so a bespoke implementation might just fit my variation - and maybe some other people’s - just a little bit better.

This is a complete reimagination - from the ground up it has completely different roots to the original. For overall mechanics it’s maybe most based off of The Wildsea or perhaps Blades in the Dark more generally (it’s… complicated). It is its own thing, but it’s not original and it’s even less finished. I don’t have a roadmap for when it will be.

For goals, what fascinates me are the themes of inner struggle and external societal expectations; of knights who are on one hand the paragons of courtly ideals and on the other hand are hardened murderers carrying out the bloody edge of elite violence. It’s how knights strive to an impossible standard often of their own making, and it’s how they can’t achieve it, and it’s how they sometimes do - and it’s how Arthur dies at the end of the story.

What is this Site?

My intent is to make a mix between a blog and a wiki5. In the long time I’ve tinkered on the game, I’ve mostly resisted making anything presentable about it - but I’ve found it very helpful to write out my thoughts and discuss6 them.

Meanwhile for you, I don’t credit it to be the best way, or to have any special insights into good or successful ways to write a game - but it’s good to have some examples of insane, middling and dissolute design too, as a control group.

In the posts, which you can see on the Latest Posts and can subscribe to as an RSS feed, I want to walk through some of my previous design decisions and what I’m currently working on.

The topical pages are meant to be read more as rabbit trails, starting from the beaten path of the posts or a few main categorical pages and tags, where they can help explain and consolidate my thoughts on common pillars, game mechanics, etc.

Technically speaking, it’s pretty barebones7; my goal is a workflow that’s simple enough for me while at least barely covering the two bases - blog and wiki.

Footnotes

  1. “Here lies Arthur, king that was once, king that will be.” ↩

  2. Which, while not technically a necessary part of playing Pendragon, is almost always uttered in the exact same breath. I think it is fair to say that while both can be played in different ways, the system and its megacampaign are effectively synonymous. ↩

  3. Which it has. I’m not saying it’s a bad game, mechanically or in the overall construction - nor even just an okay game. It’s good. ↩

  4. And notably not just the stuff that’s just general canon. I want to play with many of the specific choices and flourishes that Pendragon brought to the table. ↩

  5. Or more what might be called a “digital garden” - less a formal structured wiki and more an interlinked set of thoughts and notes. ↩

  6. …mostly by people who happen to know who I am by the time they stumbled across here (or at least, knew online identity of me), because there’s no comment feed here, or email list, or discord server. ↩

  7. If you want more specifics, see the Colophon. ↩