Paladin: The Werewolf, the Witch, the Baby and the King of Nutons

We had another episode of our ongoing Paladin game. Alas, one player was unable to join but we still had three of our four sibling knights facing supernatural adventures!

At the end of last episode, our grandmother—now widowed, retired from her own days of knighthood, and abbess of a nunnery—had revealed that she was cursed by witches to turn into a werewolf AND had abandoned a baby at birth, triplet to our father and evil uncle Guillaume, because she could only care for two infants.

We had then discovered that a group of local Redcaps had found the baby in the forest and kept him. They handed it back to us, unaged! But the mere sight of the baby cause grandmother to turn into a wolf creature and attack.

So we started this episode in the middle of the Ardennes forest at night, facing a werewolf of supernatural strength which we did not want to harm but who kept trying to attack the baby. Hildegund’s page Bernard, son of Ogier the Dane, was tossed like a puppet and dashed against an oak (earning him a good concussion but nothing worse than a scratch otherwise.) We tried to restrain the wolf but in vain [largely because the system is that of Pendragon, where you should not expect your characters to be competent…] so Theodelina [my character] vaulted on her horse, snatched the baby and fled with him to keep baby-uncle from being eaten by wolf-grandma. Hildegund drew her rosary and called up the love of God [with a critical success], sending the werewolf fleeing directly away.

We regrouped and tracked grandmother wolf, finding her in human form once the sun rose. We secured her and resumed our search for the witch who had cast the curse—or at least for a village where we could get the baby fed.

We eventually found the witch’s hut in the depths of the forest. She recognized us, let us in and even gave us milk for the baby but wanted our entire lineage to suffer under the curse: long ago, our grandmother the Lady Knight Giselda had slain the witch Liutgarde’s sisters, as ordered by then-King Pepin.

We tried to convince the witch to relent, but she would not give up her vengeance. When we said that the (now-dead) king was the one she should take exception with, she demanded to be heard by “our king” but we soon realized she meant Carloman; she refused to recognize Charlemagne, even though we were in the lands given to him by Pepin when the old king split his kingdom between his two sons.

Meanwhile, our grandmother kept urging us to kill her and the witch both, and wanted nothing to do with the baby.

I finally got the notion to ask the witch if she would agree to the judgment of the king of Nutons instead since I was his knight and champion. She agreed, so we all trooped out to seek the Nutons. (It was the first such visit for my twin brother Adalfried, who finally believed the stories.)

The King of Nutons agreed to hear both sides, then rendered his judgement: his curse would fall on the king instead but would have to be witnessed by us young knights. Our grandmother would be freed from lycanthropy, at least for for now. Presumably, if we failed in the task the deal would be off. And the King of Nutons refused to name which king we should take the curse to…

We took our leave, returned grandmother to the abbey, and took the baby to Adalfried’s impoverished manor in spite of the rumours this would spark. We asked our steward Radegunde to find him a wet nurse, then prepared to visit Carloman—because to make things even more tense, our liege Duke Thierry asked us to attend Carloman’s winter court!

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The Pendragon system is, to be frank (haha), an antiquated disaster. We all use it cheerfully, no one is lobbying for a conversion to another system because we love the setting (writer Ruben in ’t Groen did a great job with the Paladin material) and we love playing as a group, but we’re constantly mocking its ridiculous whiff factor, its unnecessary random tables, and its laborious logic. Yet we have such great stories together!

Paladin!

Today’s episode of Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne was like Call the Midwife meets Brother Cadfael by way of Brotherhood of the Wolf. The group is wonderful and the story was great.

Our four knights (Hildegund, Gottfried, Adelfried, and Theodelina) went to see our widowed grandmother, recently elevated to abbess of Our Lady of Pain and found the abbey under lockdown: three nuns had been torn to piece during a night of vigil in the chapel. We ended on a cliffhanger when we finally came face-to-face with a werewolf in an entirely unexpected way.

Oh, and the weird name for the abbey was due to my bad translation for “Notre Dame des Douleurs” (Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens, or Mater Dolorosa): this facet in the Virgin Mary’s veneration, I found out after the game, is actually known in English as “Our Lady of Sorrows.” But I did find A.C. Swinburne’s 1866 poem that does shed an odd light on the topic!

Who has known all the evil before us,
Or the tyrannous secrets of time?
Though we match not the dead men that bore us
At a song, at a kiss, at a crime —
Though the heathen outface and outlive us,
And our lives and our longings are twain —
Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,
Our Lady of Pain.

Kickstarter arrivals

I’ve had a couple of Kickstarter campaign deliveries in the last couple of weeks. First, the Zine Quest entry by Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross (Hedgemage Press), Girl Underground, a game Powered by the Apocalypse:

Contents: The game is really interesting and I definitely want to run or play this soon. I particularly like that although the Girl playbook is narratively central to the game, the Companion playbooks all feel interesting and exciting to play, not mere sidekicks. Other favourite feature: GM support for adventure-building includes an array of fantastical locations with prompts, NPCs, plot hooks, and guidance for scene-setting.

Even though I already have two games booked at Big Bad Con, I’m now considering running this at Games on Demand in October, or maybe running it online for friends this summer.

Format: It makes a better ebook than print zine because the text ends up so small I can barely read it even in good light. That said, the layout is elegant and the art lovely.

Second arrival: Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne by Ruben in ’t Groen (Nocturnal Media/Gallant Knight Games/Chaosium), a game based on the rules from Pendragon:

Contents: The book is massive, with over 450 pages, and excellent. The Pendragon v5.2 rules are carefully adjusted to reflect the Frankish empire, and the rich setting section is well written. It’s exciting for me to read a game based on these tales, which were as present or more in my youth’s reading lists as Arthurian legends. Edmund is planning to run a campaign starting very soon.

Format: The text is small but not as tiny as Girl Underground‘s. The book binding, end pages, gilt page edges, bookmark ribbons, covers, and section headings are beautiful. The pleasing layout is similar to that of Pendragon, but in addition the red headings (rather than blue) make it easier to navigate quickly.

The illustrations… Well, the first backers-only PDF version had raised a hue and cry with the poor quality of some illustrations. In response, Nocturnal Media and partners commissioned new art to replace the most egregious pieces. The art is now technically competent but often flavourless. Unlike the famous pieces from the public domain, most notably those by Gustave Doré, few of the commissioned illustrations evoke the Carolingian setting and not just some generic European medieval fantasy.

And this gem still made it as the chapterhead illustration for Chapter 17: Foreign Cultures. RLY? I can’t decide which this least evokes at first glance, Charlemagne’s paladins or foreign cultures. Except the cis het white dudebro culture, which is foreign to me.

Still, the book is overall a good purchase and I think we’ll have good gaming with it.

More Medieval Than Thou

I just got my PDF copy of King Arthur Pendragon 5.2 a few weeks ago. I started browsing it — and I do not understand its problem with women.

Yes, yes, Greg Stafford makes efforts to open up character creation a bit for female characters. Look, I’ve been playing Pendragon for thirty years and I have made female characters under every rule set. Incremental change, yeah, that’s great, but still missing the point.

Arthurian romance and the roman courtois genre largely became popular in its time because women read the stories, or had the stories read to them. Fan favourite Thomas Malory came in on the tail end (no pun intended) in the mid-15th century with Le Morte d’Arthur but the really interesting materials were written long before, and among the authors were women. Marie de France was writing Tristan and Iseult stories in the 12th century, Christine de Pisan wrote Le Livre des Faits d’armes et de chevalerie just before Thomas Malory was born.

Ever since its original 1985 edition, King Arthur Pendragon classifies women characters from Arthurian romance into three tiers. Non-player characters include “ordinary women” and “important women.”

Ordinary women:

“fulfill all non-epic functions without complications. Their anonymous existence is implied or accepted through the feudal world. They remain faceless and nameless. Such women have no individual character sheets; they are all Gamemaster characters. These generally include the unplayed wives of player-knights.”

Important women:

“have some individuality. They usually have names, or are at least known as the daughters of their fathers. [They] are often widows, mothers of vengeful men, heiresses, or healers of note. They are commonly accused of or found to be using minor magic. They are often among the major Gamemaster characters that will interact directly with the player-knights on a regular basis. They generally do not have complete character sheets.”

Extraordinary women can be player or Gamemaster charaters.

Extraordinary women in Malory include Queen Guenever, the beautiful wife of King Arthur and head of the Courts of Love; Queen Margawse, widow of King Lot, a dabbler in witchcraft and the mother of Sir Gawaine and his brothers; Queen Morgan le Fay, the mistress of Faerie, an enchantress supreme who has a passion for Sir Lancelot, hates Guenever, and plots trouble for her brother, King Arthur; Lady Viviane of the Lake, who gives Arthur his sword, Excalibur, and is killed by Sir Balin; and Lady Nimue of the Lake, guardian of the High King’s court against wicked enchantment, once Merlin is gone.

It’s telling that we read this discussion for women’s characters but not men. It illustrates the fundamental thinking: characters are male by default, women are variants. After all, wouldn’t the three tiers — ordinary, important, and extraordinary — apply to male characters?

Moreover, the examples of extraordinary women provided in this discussion are restricted by the filter. The tales that Malory mined also offer Enide from Erec et Enide (Chrétien de Troyes) / Gereint ac Enid (Welsh romances); Iseult/Isolde the Fair, she of Tristan’s longings; Dandrane, Percival’s sister and herself a quester (Perlesvaus); Queen Ygerne/Igraine, Arthur’s mother; Laudine the Lady of the Fountain, and her clever maid Lunete; Olwen, daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden Pencawr; etc. — none of which get airtime in KAP 5.2.

(By the way, the original romances also include a few persons of colour, men and women.)

Finally, we have substantial numbers of women among scholars of the Arthurian cycle (e.g., Fanni Bogdanow, Jill M. Roberts, Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz) and among modern-day novelists who based new tales on the legendary characters (e.g., Marion Zimmer Bradley, Kim Iverson Headlee, Patricia Kennealy, Debra Kemp, Gillian Bradshaw.)

My point is, women were a key audience for the source material, were represented among the earliest writers we know of, were present as active characters in the tales, and have since spent a lot of time, effort, talent, study, and ink over these stories. Why is it so hard for a game writer who has been at it for over thirty years himself to notice all these women? To notice that women want to write, read, GM, and play Arthurian romances, not as quest objects or rewards, or as eternal support characters, but as protagonists?

Yes, I know an effort was made. I can’t but notice it since I am graciously told:

Generate a female knight exactly the same way you would a male knight. In the real world, women are statistically smaller and weaker than men by about 15%, but female knights should be allowed to use the same Attributes for men to generate female characters. […]

Oh, thank you, Good Sir! I will be allowed to play my 6th century knight in 15th century armour à la Malory and not be hosed by the game rules for playing a woman? Thank you, thank you!

And then the section goes on to inform us that female knights should be called “Sir”, not “Lady” or “Dame” because that’s something entirely different. Really! I assume that Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, at whose court author Marie de France sat, was called “sir” when she rode in armour with the Second Crusade?

[See also examples in http://www.tor.com/2017/02/23/five-amazing-women-warriors-of-the-middle-ages/]

Pendragon 5.2 does not in fact prevent you from playing a woman knight, nor add stat penalties. It’s just sanctimonious in a “We really should penalize you, but we’re so nice,” begrudging kind of way; and erases important female characters and authors from its discussion.

Greg Stafford answers a straw(wo)man version of the issue in his short essay “This is a Sexist Setting.” However, he phrases it as if the setting had an objective external existence and he was its defender. It’s important here to be clear on what “the setting” is. Are we talking about:

• The fictional setting of the entire body of writing that is classified as Arthurian romance, from Taliesin to Sir Thomas Malory?
• The historical context the stories are purportedly set in, around a late 5th century/early 6th century warlord?
• The historical setting at the time the stories were told and written, primarily from the 10th through 15th centuries?
• The fictional setting strictly as represented by Malory — who wrote at the end of the Arthurian romance period of peak popularity and furthest from the era it covers?
• The fictional setting as presented in the various editions of the King Arthur Pendragon role-playing game, from 1985 through 2016?

My complaint is that showing women as full and empowered characters in Arthurian romance should not be an afterthought, but a key piece.

I’m tired, exhausted of the backhanded gifts, the grudging concessions, the caveats, the faux “realism,” the obliviousness to the existing, long-standing participation and contribution of women. Why are you trying to open the door as little as possible rather than throwing them wide open? Why do you not see the ample precedent you have in and around the source material to justify erring on the side of openness?