This is a Game About the Soul

Do you believe evil itself to be so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them. Against these even a flaming sword cannot prevail, but only that portion of good in all men’s hearts whose flame can never be quenched. Lloyd Alexander, The High King

You are a strong man, Gawaine, and your strength
Goes ill where foes are. You may cleave their limbs
And heads off, but you cannot damn their souls Edwin Arlington Robinson, Mordred

You judge a craftsman by his works – and that’s how in the end you know a true heart from a false! The false heart deceives with words and looks, but reveals its nature with its deeds. It dissembles with its gilded mask, its golden surface, but underneath it’s dark and foul: when the gilding’s stripped away its rottenness is seen in action. Gerbert of Monteuil, Gerbert’s Continuation of Perceval

And worldling of the world am I, and know
The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour
Woos his own end; we are not angels here
Nor shall be— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Last Tournament

Had I been made the partner of Eve
We’d be in Eden still Alan Jay Lerner, Camelot

Knights are creatures of obligation and expectation.

They live in a world full of worldviews telling them what they should and shouldn’t do. Not even just the big things, but societal expectations of what success looks like, or even what the current fashion is.

But also definitely the big things. And those big things are in conflict. Chivalry may expect you to fight while piety expects you to forgive, or vice versa. And for that conflict, they have no more insight¹ than we do into which, if any, are right or wrong, better or worse, more important or less.

But it’s still a game where right battles wrong, even if blindly. This is a game where characters are broadly heroic (or at least not villainous). We are most interested in the “the human heart in conflict with itself”, not just good guys fighting bad guys, but we are interested in good fighting evil in there.

What does this mean for the game?

The initial thoughts I’ll put here is that we care about players seeing the internal struggles of their characters - reminders about society’s weights on them, a little bit of game pressure to reinforce the feeling, a way to flag where their character’s been standing and struggling in that.

And we want internal strife to drive characters - causing interesting things to happen the same way external strife changes things.

Footnotes

1. With maybe one big chalice shaped exception. There’s a way to mix euhemerizing some legends that would seem to put their thumb on the scale, and taking a bit of an “maybe all myths are real” approach to others. I’d say the aim is roughly Indiana Jones in its ability to be both cynical and sincere and to embrace the gravity of one story without closing the door to other seemingly contradictory ones.

   But I don’t think you can take this path all the time and still tell a full version of some stories. The Holy Grail is exceedingly Christian (not to say there wouldn’t be ways for other characters to rationalize it in their own beliefs - but there’s no reason for the Grail itself, if it can be glimpsed, to play coy) and the story is not fully told if it’s not also ambiguously and mysteriously, but also viscerally and impossibly true. The world has to be sincere about a few things. That doesn’t mean that the individuals in it will be so - Indiana Jones navigated that stance, after all - but it is a little different from how we might experience the world. ↩