“Don’t kill me,” said the knight. “I yield. I yield. You can’t kill a man at mercy.”
Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight
Made reckless by love, he rode to the edge of the castle moat and plunged in, and Fortune, who tends to favour the brave, saw him safe to the other side.
Perceforest
And God’s whole gift of summer given in vain
For one who could feel coming in her heart
A longer winter than any Breton sun
Should ever warm awayEdwin Arlington Robinson, Tristram
My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult; how to their full joy, but to their sorrow also, they loved each other
J. Bédier, The Romance of Tristan & Iseult
You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Knights are tempestuous creatures.
There’s certainly some degree of natural ability to their talents1 and some trained and learned skills. There’s also a menagerie of cool swords, magical shields, fancy titles and other powers they gain - but crucially they are equally as likely to lose these gifts as to gain them, and prone to engage in feats and follies that have no promise of material reward.
Material rewards and progression just aren’t a big part of the knightly adventure - rather what a knight feels or cares for, and what others feel and care about them bends the arc of their stories more than the quality of their sword or suit of armor.
Knights are not stoic heroes either. They cry a lot. They weep, tear out their hair and leap out of windows in madness, they plunge literally headfirst into danger for love and ignore all kinds of injury with a smile on their face. Their emotions are writ large in their bodies and on the world.
And the feelings other people have to them - their Fama2 - is similarly strong. Bonds with other characters are full of dramatic hatreds and friendships, and reputations that can lead to fighting on sight or cheering an entire town with just the rumor of your presence. This even extends to the mundane objects in the story; a sword may have weight because of its owner’s great fame and reputation, or the intent in its making, which are shared and passed on with its new wielder. The material world again takes a second place to a world of reputations and stories.
What does this mean for the game?
An initial thought is that there’s a balance to be had between making sure these feelings do things mechanically - so that they are always in the forefront of play, and you can feel the tensions and passions - and making sure they don’t do things - so they don’t become mere tools, just like a physical item to wield.
This is why Pendragon cedes some control of a character’s heart with Traits and Passions - allowing the stats to steer actions that most games would leave to the player’s discretion. Strong decisions and emotions can have a kind of character inertia that makes them feel more impactful. I think we’re going to do that a little too, though there are other ways to influence this.
This ties closely to the focus on the soul, as the pressure on the heart helps make sure reputations are always in play.
This is why I picked The Wildsea’s Resources - usually themed as very physical things - as something to hold Motifs, a much more vaporous focus on reputation (even if it is of a physical thing). The goal is to make the motifs almost act like real physical things would act in an rpg… again, trying to thread the needle on the feeling. I’ll.. probably have more thoughts when I think over that system more.