The Death of Arthur •

The Death of Arthur

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Blood & Honor

A world of dew
and within every dewdrop
a world of struggle Haiku by Issa, quoted in World of Dew

Blood and Honor by John Wick, and World of Dew by Ben Woerner (and John Wick’s previous Houses of the Blooded which originated several of the systems and ideas in a more Western-romance setting, but I don’t know enough to comment on that) are roleplaying games focused on Samurai, the Japanese equivalent of the knight; propertied, passionate, always at the edge of a sword.

It has a lovely dice system of its own1, influenced by the Fate RPG, built on invoking aspects of a character and their clan. The clan23 is also an important aspect of the world, similar to the kind of gameplay in Pendragon that we’re emulating, with a seasonal gameplay loop4.

Other inspirations (and this one played a surprisingly large role, across iterations of The Death of Arthur) are its very poetic description of its aspects (an inspiration for my Skills), attempt to focus on the heroic aspects to the culture in question (similar to our goals), some fun ways it develops rumors and truths about the local land5, and even the way each virtue you can pick for clans and characters ends with “This is the truest and most high virtue of bushido.” as they each argue their own primacy in the moral order of things - something you’ll notice I stole for Reputations.

Footnotes

  1. In short, you roll a dice pool of d6 dice, similar to ours. You add all dice up, hoping to get 10+ as your total. Winning this or beating an opposed roll means you have privilege to narrate what happens, but you can withhold dice before rolling to declare additional truths on what happens afterwards. This pre-roll wagering of dice is a fun system, though for the purposes of stealing for The Death of Arthur I don’t know if it feels on theme (but I could see some way of tying it into Passions and their gambling nature) and the system is a bit more narrative-control than the rest of what I’ve aimed for (but good in its own right!). ↩

  2. And city, for World of Dew. ↩

  3. Which may be shared or separate. ↩

  4. A somewhat open-to-modification gameplay loop that advises singular adventures in each season, interspersed with its downtime systems. ↩

  5. Also similar to that in Good Society, where I also draw that inspiration from. ↩