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 soulsEdwin 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
“Damsel,” sayeth the King, “I heard that at his beginning he did well beyond measure.”
“Well begun may be half ended. But what care anyone for his beginning when the end is bad?”Perlesvaus
Had I been made the partner of Eve
We’d be in Eden stillAlan 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 just the big vices and virtues1, but down to societal expectations of what it means to be “successful” or even what the right fashion currently is.
More importantly, all these things big and small are in conflict. Chivalry may expect you to fight while God expects you to forgive, or vice versa. Even if a knight is totally devoted to doing “what is right”, they will end up in places they can’t square that perfectly.
Part of the game is answering what this character does, when they cannot do anything else.
Agency in the Web of Obligations
When a man causes a wave in the sea of destiny, it spreads out endlessly across the water, sweeping up all those in its path into a swirling maelstrom. Whither the currents will take us, we know not.
Natsume Sōseki,Kairo-kō
The first step of this is to help the player remember the expectations on the character, whether they’re ones placed on by the player (an oath sworn, some weight on their heart or some specific burdens the character carries) or despite them from society.
This is the fundamental reason why there are Obligations (and Passions to a slightly lesser degree), especially for ones that may be less familiar to the players in their day to day lives like Matrimony or Fealty2. Similarly, keeping some degree of a character’s religiosity front and center with things like the Tutelary Patron are important, as something that can fade in the background.
Then we nudge the player to act in accordance to their duties. For this I think I have carrots rather than sticks, because it’s important for the player to self-police their own actions3. They can also have narrative reactions of course—in these cases, the written descriptions of society’s expectations can help the player feel more able to navigate these conditions without being caught blindsided4.
In both narrative and mechanical nudges, the point is not that the players follow “the rules”—but that deviation or obedience to these expectations are intentional and tell us things about the character. When a knight has to choose between their responsibilities to their liege and their loves, we don’t want any player at the table to miss the significance of it.
Voices in the Silence of God
The search for the Cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts, Indy, I’ve none to give you. At my age, I’m prepared to take a few things on faith.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
While some of the Arthurian stories certainly take a blatant approach to the metaphysics of right and wrong, many of the most interesting dilemmas are in the places where they don’t. Or at least where they don’t extend this clarity to the characters, who must make decisions lit by uncertainty.
In all this game’s conflicts of the soul, the characters have no better insight than we do—at least in the moment—over which demands on their actions (if any) are right or wrong, better or worse, greater or lesser.
With, perhaps, big chalice-shaped exceptions. But it is as the idiom goes, an exception to prove the rule.
To lean on uncertainty in the actual narratives we can engage in some euhemerism or ecumenical rationalization to handwave the miraculous or leave it up to interpretation. Some are pretty hard to hide, though. Sure, the Grail could be a new form of some pre-Christian “cauldron of wisdom” or good medicine, or a Romano-Celtic deity appearing in the flesh could be an angel or clever human, and those rationalizations might be good frames for characters to take… but at some point the world needs to be sincere about some things. There’s little reason for the Grail itself, if it can be glimpsed, to remain coy about what it is.
I’d say the best aim here would be roughly Indiana Jones. Able to be both cynical and sincere about whichever story is in focus without closing the door to other seemingly contradictory ones.
Flames in a World of Shadows
I come into a world of iron, to make a world of gold.
The Man of La Mancha
The struggle between different obligations pits as William Faulkner said, “the human heart in conflict with itself” and means different characters will have different answers to the moral questions they run into.
But this is still a game about heroes; or at least, not about villains. Ambiguity is not meant to make it a world of only dirty greys.
Right fights wrong uncertainly, blindly, and not always as “good guys” vs “bad guys” - but it fights.
And is it not very strange that there are those who prefer to do evil and lead vile lives and do vile deeds rather than good ones?
Geoffroi de Charny, A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry
Footnotes
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Though certainly not not about those. ↩
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And it’s not on the sheet at the moment because it hasn’t fit anywhere, but I’ve often tried to keep Hospitality laws there. ↩
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After all, isn’t that what having obligations feels like? ↩
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Not that they mean the player has no need for reminders; just that they hopefully need fewer and can feel more in control when they do get reminded. ↩