Today the month long orgy of gamingness is about the latest game I got.
In my case, that means I'm talking about Keltia, with a slight diversion into mentioning Arthurian stuff in general.
Keltia is based on an iron age vision of Britain, where the Romans have withdrawn, the Norsemen and Saxons are pressing in but have not yet made great inroads into destabilising the Britons' rule of their own country. It presents a historically viable vision of a mythic territory, mixes in fantasy in the form of the Fae and the idea that magic comes from faerie more than anything else and set it out to allow for quests and such things in a Dark Age that is quite far away from the content of the Pendragon RPG. This is less Mort D'Arthur and more Mabinogion.
The game is based on the same system as Yggdrasil, a dice pool system similar to Legend of the Five Rings, and is from the same publisher as that Norse infused game. It takes the same approach, building a mundane setting and adding fantastic elements: history is as much a factor here as fantasy, but there's enough room to wobble between the two if you want to.
One of the things I like about it is that it shies away from 'in days of old, when knights were bold and women weren't invented'. While there's no push towards shield maidens or warrior women (as there is a little in Yggdrasil), there's also nothing to tie it to the Arthurian Cycle, there's no hint of courtly love or chivalry or the other values incorporated from the Twelth Century Renaissance, when the romances spread up from Moorish Spain and into France and Britain. It's also free of the assumptions and Plantagenet propaganda of those stories, which can only be a boon. As a result it feels oddly freer than the canon Arthur, it feels like there's a lot you can do with it, without treading on any metaphorical toes.
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