…but wherefore now
Do these your lords stir up the heat of war,
Some calling Arthur born of Gorlois,
Others of Anton? Tell me, ye yourselves,
Hold ye this Arthur for King Uther’s son?Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Coming of Arthur
What is this game’s mother?1 I’m truly uncertain where to categorize this, at the point where categories are useful.
Many of the core systems and their general balance aligns with the Told By Wild Words family of The Wildsea, and that’s still currently my primary designation I’m going with.
There’s also definitely chunks taken from Forged in the Dark games, like Blades in the Dark and Slugblaster, and one major mechanic grabbed from Trophy Dark and thus the Rooted in Trophy family of games.
The connection to Cortex Prime2 or further back to Alien and the Year Zero Engine is more tenuous - and while it’s connected to the Basic Roleplaying system from its Pendragon roots, it’s not really mechanically descended from those roots3
As a whimsy, I first came up with the name Buried with Arthur imagining what a similar family of games would be for this system. I think it’s a great name for that - but I also don’t think this is its own new direction4. I think it is still a child of something else and more useful in that category than trying to define its own when other people are considering it. It’s just… which one?
Footnotes
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If its father is King Arthur Pendragon of course. From the setting itself to mechanics like passions, there’s a lot of lineage there - just not its core mechanics (or even its dice) ↩
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Which would be called Primed by Cortex if the licensing of that wasn’t in limbo. ↩
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It’s not entirely absent. ↩
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Not that having such a title makes a game completely new and independent. All of these games descended from others. ↩