Anyone Else Tired of The Tyranny of Novelty?

[pemerton]

Yeah, I HAD to make my wife watch it, she's never seen any US or British/European movies made before the early 90's. She had a pretty hard time following the plot, since she's got no background with Arthur stories, but she thought it was pretty exciting. She really liked Merlin too, which is of course quite far from the story line of L'Morte, but she just liked the dragon a lot. That one really had some good writing though. The plot was fun.

I think it has some terrific sequences: the ride across the mist to the castle; Arthur being knighted in the moat; the breaking and re-making of Excalibur; the whole of Perceval's Grail quest; Lancelot's return to the final battle; and the final resolution of Excalibur with Wagner playing in the background.

I always have this film in mind when GMing Prince Valiant, and when playing my holy knight in Burning Wheel.

 

[cmad1977]

Excalibur is great!
The director commentary is really interesting regarding use of color/the kings connection to the land etc. neat stuff.

Also: apparently(if I’m remembering right) Igraine is the directors daughter. So… THAT must have been an…. interesting(?) scene to film.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it has some terrific sequences: the ride across the mist to the castle; Arthur being knighted in the moat; the breaking and re-making of Excalibur; the whole of Perceval's Grail quest; Lancelot's return to the final battle; and the final resolution of Excalibur with Wagner playing in the background.

I always have this film in mind when GMing Prince Valiant, and when playing my holy knight in Burning Wheel.

Yeah, it has some of the most over the top, and successful atmospherics of any movie in the fantasy genre, and pretty high up their for movies in general. Of course, if you were to pull that back and look at the plot, and simply take it on face value (IE you never heard of Mallory etc.) then it is a bit of a confusing muddle. The brilliance of it all was that Boorman knew how to play on the myth and used that license well to let him skip a lot of the less exciting 'glue' bits of the story. Each character appears and we just understand their role after the briefest introduction, etc.

And of course that is the advantage of a well-known story. The path is well-trodden and familiar to the audience, so the creator of a work is much more free to dwell on their own contributions and let the bones to people to just fill in themselves. It helps of course that all the really enduring classic tales follow mythic story patterns, as Graves liked to point out.

When you come back to RPGs of course it is all a bit trickier, though perhaps I can imagine something like a PbtA that might reproduce "You are the Legend" or something. I don't know exactly how it would work though!

 

[Marc_C]

Up to a certain point, but yeah. You can do a lot with that story, but change too much and it gets weird. Also, when novelty becomes the motivation, you get really weird Robins Hood, wherein Robin isn’t even actually Locksley, or whatever other dumb twists.

And gods above I’d love to see a good Arthur movie or show. Last good one was what, BBC Merlin? Before that…Sam Neil Merlin movie? Before that…does Excalibur even hold up?

Excalibur holds up very well. It changed the way I wanted to play D&D. More realism, less high fantasy.

 

[pemerton]

When you come back to RPGs of course it is all a bit trickier, though perhaps I can imagine something like a PbtA that might reproduce "You are the Legend" or something. I don't know exactly how it would work though!

Well, I think it would work like Prince Valiant! We haven't had a Grail quest (yet), but as well as plenty of jousting have had supernatural phenomena, including a miraculous conversion of a (formerly) pagan "wise woman", and the redemption of a now-undead once-was-a-lord in Dacia: the PCs placed his bones, and those of his retainers, into their reliquary of martyrs of their order that they carry with them.

There's also The Green Knight RPG.

 

[Aldarc]

Excalibur holds up very well. It changed the way I wanted to play D&D. More realism, less high fantasy.

Maybe you should try playing either Prince Valiant or Pendragon.

 

[Marc_C]

Maybe you should try playing either Prince Valiant or Pendragon.

I have Paladin (Charlemagne) by Chaosium.

 

[pemerton]

Maybe you should try playing either Prince Valiant or Pendragon.

I have Paladin (Charlemagne) by Chaosium.

Time for my obligatory (unpaid) plug: I know that Greg Stafford regarded Pendragon as his masterpiece, but I think that Prince Valiant is actually the better game. It's not perfect - the mass combat system, which is the most complicated subsystem in the game (and is maybe as complicated as a 1st level 4e D&D combat), works but can sometimes be a bit hard to operationalise in play.

But overall its an amazing system that really works for generating the feel of Arthurian or similar (faux-)mediaeval romance.