Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9741211" data-attributes="member: 6988941">Alright, well my northstar for what is Arthurian is the works of Chrétien de Troyes. The codification of this originally Celtic mythology into English national legend came by way of a mostly French language story cycle, the Matter of Britain, because the actual middle ages tend to work like that. And yes you could go back to the original Celtic mythology, but that would be a lot of work to get beyond Arthurian legend as it is generally recognizeable to people likely to be at your table (unless you are running a game for a folkloric studies department or something).So, looking at the literary Arthurian "Matter", some core tropes are:-Protagonists are knights, usually travelling on horseback. No surprise here, but people below the knightly class barely even exist in this literature, and usually only get spotlight time if there is a reason.-Questing in an episodic, random encounter filled way. This is probably the biggest thing ttrpgs and many of the modern fantasy works they draw on get from the medieval literature, and so there's not much to say about it, except to emphasize that if there is not an emphasis on overland travel, in a world kind of weirdly empty of human habitation, than a golden opportunity to have that rpg trope be 100% accurate to the source material has been missed.-Quests to rescue a damsel in distress. This literary matter is basically where this trope comes from, and while there are more twists and turns to it usually than our modern sense of the trope may give you (sometimes the hero helps put her in the predicament), if you are ever going to do this trope so incredibly "overdone" that people are now afraid to ever just do it (or do it straight), this is absolutely the time.-Villains are "Black Knights". The majority of human antagonists are evil knights, and the central antagonist is basically always an evil knight (lords are themselves knights). After all, defeating some mere bandit isn't very heroic, our protagonists need ostensibly equally matched opponents. Who's kidnapping those damsels? Black knights of course. Where is the treasure that needs to be recovered? A castle full of black knights. Often their evil has no stated purpose.-Chivalry often involves swearing weird oaths. We don't need to get into a whole thing about "chivalry", it's a big topic (I was the TA for a whole college course on the subject), but one way it comes up is that knights are always swearing oaths to do things, sometimes arbitrary or weird things, and they can never ever break them or they're not a true knight. Often such oaths are extracted from their lady fair as a proof of their devotion, other times they are sworn to complete a quest. But the more flavorful part is that, in addition to all the "Black Knights" your protagonists should face, they are also likely to encounter antagonism from some honorable knight who has simply sworn to never let anyone cross the bridge he defends or whatever unless they defeat him in combat. We probably never learn why he swore this strange, seemingly pointless oath, but damned if anyone is getting accross the bridge without playing his game.-Big tournaments. This literature emerged early in the heyday of tournaments and helped establish what they were. And they serve a narrative function of allowing our protagonist knights to prove their mettle against other knights without them needing to be Black Knights. When the protagonists get to or return to King Arthur's court there darned well better be a tournament.-Hidden Indenties. Protagonists, and people they meet, are often unwilling to divulge their name and identity until some key moment. Often this is so that they can prove their worth for acts of prowess before being lauded for their illustrious name, but it's also a whole trope beyond that.-Joyfully Anachronistic. This whole body of literature was founded on imputing knighthood, a concept only a few decades old, on much older figures of legend in long gone times. And generally the setting for all these early medieval characters was, in terms of material culture, the high middle ages when it was written rather than the older periods it took place in. The contemporary Matter of Rome did it one further and made characters from Roman history into medieval knights. The point is that in terms of avoiding anachronism, they don't even try, and while this was partly the limits of people's sense of periods other than their own at the time, it was also a bit of a tongue-in-cheek stylistic move to emphasize these were meant to be works more about contemporary ideals than historical events.</blockquote>

Verification