Now I speak to you who will be living in the third millennium, around the 135th year.1 Consider us, who at the moment seem to be renowned, because, miserable creatures, we think highly of ourselves. Reflect, I say, on what has become of us. Tell me, I pray, what gain has it been to us to have been great or famous?
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum
So the exhausted aristocracy laughs at its own ideal. Having dressed and painted their passionate dreams of a beautiful life with all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and molded it into a plastic form, they pondered and realized that life was really not so beautiful—and then laughed.
”It was only a vain illusion, that knightly glory, only style and ceremony, a beautiful and insincere play!”Johan Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages
Oh, king eh? Very nice. And how’d you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there’s ever gonna be any progress…
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
Richard de Bury, Philobiblion
Have I been sick long? It must be so; it seems months to me. And such dreams! such strange and awful dreams, Sandy!… I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! between me and my home and my friends! between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living!
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Not only is this game about time but it is about a specific time - though a rather broad one. The Middle Ages stretch a thousand years from somewhere around the 6th century to sometime in the 16th where the so called “Early Modern” arises2.
The Arthurian stories paint across this entire millennial canvas. The “historical” Arthur dates to the very start. That’s what all the surrounding historical events and kingdoms and characters are from. But many stories were written in and increasingly blended this into all of the rest of the era. Many Arthurian stories are recognizably “High Medieval” (c 1000 - 1300) or even later, in their trappings and themes and even historical references.
The trick the Great Pendragon Campaign employs, as do we, is to have the campaign also run the gamut. We start in the 6th century, but introduce more and more anachronisms as the time advances, so it is like the world passes by at an advanced rate3.
What does this mean for the game?
The biggest point to me is that while this is a whirlwind tour and by necessity a bricolage of lived experiences and imagined ones - it’s a world based on the lived experiences or imaginations of real people.
This game isn’t a college history lesson, and there’s not a particular viewpoint I’m trying to privilege above the others (not even necessarily subordinating our modern medievalism- there’s a place for the way we see the Middle Ages now and in modern adaptions, as distorted as it may be4), but there’s some respect to be given to the past to understand it and not to oversimplify it.
And with the great gulf of time in between us, it can be hard to put ourselves in those people’s shoes. As they say:
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
So how can the game guide the players? Much of that is just up to the players and content - adventures, descriptions, etc. - but the game can have some tools.
Focus on Texture
I think one of the most useful ways to the player’s imagination is through their stomach.
I don’t mean to make historically inspired meals during the session - I’m not that kind of GM/host, though it’s no doubt useful. I’m just talking about describing it.
We can all imagine foods, including really foreign ones. And players love imagining food from my experience5.
Beyond food, reminding players of tangible textures they can relate to - sounds, smells, colors, their clothing, the horizon, what it feels like after a day traveling - I think can help avoid a dissociation between the story and the player’s interaction with it.
Gamify the Pressures
A lot of the game is in the heart and soul which don’t necessarily have the same textures - or is certainly hard to describe.
A tool to be used in moderation is making the player feel a similar pressure to the one that the character might feel. If we want them to remember that the character wants to get married, it’s best to help them remember why - the social advantages, pressures, reputations, etc. It’s second best to put a big empty spot on the sheet that makes them feel similarly6
Targeted Anachronisms
In the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, as knights prepare to joust in a tournament, the crowds clap along to the soundtrack of We Will Rock You by Queen, a 1977 pop rock song.
This is an anachronism, as nobody in the Middle Ages would have known this song.
But it’s a very intentional one, meant to convey the spirit of the event instead of its reality7. A generically “medieval” score might signal “this is medieval” to the audience more, and some period song might be the truly authentic experience - but both would prime the audience to feel the experiences they associate with that music: watching a movie and a historical documentary.
There’s no even vaguely satellite-style maps from the time period - the ancient general poring over a battle map is an anachronism - but it’s the way a modern player recognizes the feeling of understanding an area; so I still want my players poring over a big map. Players are going to read modern discourse and experiences with gender norms into societal classes in ways that aren’t how the medieval knight would view it… but which still give an insight into similar emotional frames the characters might be in. Targeted anachronisms I think are a tool to be used carefully (and/or when inevitable), but not begrudgingly.
Footnotes
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To save you the calculation, that is the year 2135 - as Henry is writing from about 1135 and writes the section above after this reflection on the year 135, which included his exhortation to his contemporaries:
↩Let our present kings and leaders, tyrants and princes, prelates and consuls, tribunes and governors, magistrates and sheriffs, warlike and strong men - let them tell me: who were in command and office at that time? And you, admirable Bishop Alexander, to whom I have dedicated our history, tell me what you know of the bishops of that time. I ask myself: tell me, Henry, author of this History, tell me who were the archdeacons of that time?
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An arbitrary division, like all eras are, but one way I think about it from the perspective of a worldbuilder is that the modern world can be recognized as vaguely similar to ours now, plus or minus an increasing number of things.
Okay, they didn’t have phones. They did have kings. They had only a little news of the outside world, and limited knowledge of worlds across the seas from them… but once you adjust all those points, it’s mostly recognizably modern.
This gets strained by the early modern period, and the Middle Ages are almost more useful to construct from scratch, like an alien world. ↩
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Roughly 13 years for each actual year. So 476 seems mostly like what would actually be technologically and culturally around in 476, but when Arthur is crowned in 508 (32 years) the world might look more like 892 (32 x 13 years); even if the rulers and realms are still those who would be around in 508 (plus or minus the fictional ones). When 560 swings around, we’re looking at 1490.
Some events conveniently rhyme. Stories of the end of Arthur’s reign mention a pestilence, which can line up to the Plague of Justinian in 541 but also to the Black Death in 1346 - so as we show what happens with the events as credited to the historical plague, we can also see those subtle changes in culture (clothing, art, new technology and new social laws) seamlessly appearing in our sped up vibes timeline. ↩
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That said, some distortions can be explored and pierced through, especially when they make the history shallower and less human. ↩
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This is also why it’s so prominent in Pentiment, I’d assume. ↩
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That is, no character would feel like “wow, my character sheet feels like there’s a big hole here”, but they might actually feel like “my life’s story has a hole here” even if they wouldn’t say that directly. ↩
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Another example of this strategy would be the 2013 adaption of The Great Gatsby that mixed in modern hip-hop hits to tell the story of the 1925 novel. In discussing the theme, Baz Luhrmann (the director) explained it as “While we acknowledge, as Fitzgerald phrased it, ‘the Jazz Age,’ and this is the period represented on screen, we — our audience — are living in ‘the Hip-Hop Age’ and want our viewers to feel the impact of modern-day music the way Fitzgerald did for the readers of his novel at the time of its publication.” ↩