Gawain rode on without a rest, his heart rejoicing at the glorious weather and at the sound of the birds, so clear and high: it was as if they were talking, telling each other of their love, as they warbled away in their high tongue.
Wauchier of Denain, Second Continuation of Perceval
Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?
Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the risin’ odds?
Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn and I dream of what I needBonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero
What does it matter whether they were individually noble or ignoble, renowned or unknown, praiseworthy or disreputable, exalted or cast down, wise or foolish? If any of them undertook some labour for the sake of praise and glory, when now no record of him survives any more than of his horse or his ass, why then did the wretch torment his spirit in vain? What did it avail them, who came to this?
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum
You are a thing too vaporous to be sharing
The carnal feast of life. You mow down men
Like elder-stems, and you leave women sighing
For one more sight of you; but they do wrong.
You are a man of mist, and have no shadow.
God save you, Lancelot. If I laugh at you,
I laugh in envy and in admiration.Edwin Arlington Robinson, Lancelot
You think to wrap yourself in another man’s glory, but it has become a shroud of infamy to you. Pendragon! May eternal shame devour you for your presumption. Yet, there was once a king worthy of that name. That king was Arthur.
Stephen Lawhead, Arthur
Perhaps the most obvious consideration in playing a game like Pendragon is that there is a metaplot. A big one.
Any game with this expansive a canon has to address the millennia+ worth of elephant in the room: what is the purpose of the metaplot?
Metaplots are often maligned because they can become just a shoebox of glup shitto’s to throw in as cameos and to say ooh, it’s that cool character, or place or big world event. And there’s an easy appeal to this1. Even though a lot of the legend is obscure, people who want to play this game probably have some idea that Lancelot is a big name, or Camelot, or maybe Merlin or a Gawaine or so. But this can’t be the only texture; just like overused brand mascots can start to feel… hollow as characters2, there has to be more.
Integrating the metaplot more than just some cameos often falls into either being an amusement park or a “what if?” scenario. Either it’s about using the lore to send them on the famous quests and make sure they get to see the cool parts of it, or it’s about the player’s agency to send that story off the rails and see what they would do instead.
I’ve seen a lot of advice for the Great Pendragon Campaign boiling down to these two directions - but I personally don’t find that very compelling. Not that I want to lock away all the cool stuff and make it so the players don’t change anything, but I think it’s compelling with a light touch.
Cantus Firmus3
I think the purpose of the metaplot is to give a baseline for how the world works - one that’s dynamic and layered and is very rich for exploration when players want more of that, but a note that can fade into the background when the local stories take over.
It’s important to have this background melody because it provides a shared set of tunes to riff off of. To do this we want the “big stuff” to be approachable but not suffocating - so the table can turn more towards it when they’re looking for more big events, but leave it behind when other things distract them. Camelot is nearby - you can easily have an excuse to go there for a weekend - but your day job doesn’t take you there.
Similarly, I think it needs to be touchable and changeable without incentivizing doing that. There’s a real appeal in, for example, killing Lancelot - just for the sake of making that change. It can be as appealing as similar plotlines with more inherent meaning to the characters and the players’ history. But while the reasons that the other plotline had to fight to get keep it interesting, there’s a steep drop off after Lancelot is dead. There’s some drama to be milked out of the next knight you face related to him… but it lacks the big glory of the big name4.
So there’s a little - but not too much - plot armor to hand out, and the Round Table isn’t that big, but may have some vacancies and there’s got to be engaging things to do at home that can resonate with the big events going on but be compelling even if no cameos show up.
Microhistory
Microhistory is a way of exploring history by “[asking] large questions in small places”.
History itself is a grand metaplot with a lot of sweeping storylines with seemingly unstoppable forces and legendary characters - and stories that focus on very small groups as they pass through the larger narratives can be extremely rich ways to talk about that.
I’d like for this game to feel like that approach taken to this mythological history - a small account of a specific region with human faces on it, but reflecting the big events.
Footnotes
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It may be a mocked stereotype of large shared worlds, in rpgs and out - but it’s mocked because it’s popular among audiences and writers alike. It may feel like junk food when it’s overdone, but they keep doing it because people love junk food. ↩
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Because the need for “the hits” steals from their time, and the easy reward of just existing weakens the need to justify their place in the story. ↩
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Latin for the “fixed song” - or existing melody - used by a motet to anchor its polyphonic variations. ↩
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This is not to say that there can’t be a case where Sir Bors’ vengeance for the death of Lancelot becomes just as intertwined with the characters’ lives and as rich and dramatic as any plotline ought to be - or even that the initial fight with Lancelot might not have had some reason that was compelling even if Lancelot didn’t have that name.
I just want to avoid making interacting with the big names and changing the big plot points so appealing that it’s a craving even when it doesn’t have substance behind it. ↩