Re-imagined Arthurian Legends

[fdw3773]

I recently read Osprey Games' Romance in the Perilous Land that had interesting interpretations of characters from Arthurian romance. Inspired by the work, I developed four re-imagined characters from Arthurian legends. They are the following:

 

1) Queen Guinevere is a knight. In this incarnation, war has come to Camelot. Initially healing the injured, Guinevere takes a more active role and takes up arms as the casualties rise and the war is not going in Camelot's favor. She still has her secret affair with Sir Lancelot, so I added the disguise and concealment skills that she would likely use.

 

2) Elaine of Astolat is a knight. This version of Elaine takes up arms shortly after Sir Lancelot spurns her romantic advances after healing him where the villain knight Sir Turquine kills her father and attempts to ravage her. She wounds Sir Turquine enough to drive him away, and takes up arms to defend her home since he will return.

 

3) Sir Pelleas is a returning crusader. In the story I read Sir Pelleas is betrayed by Sir Gawain and spurned by his love interest Ettarre, who Gawain lies about killing him and seduces her for his own benefit. Pelleas finds them sleeping together and leaves his sword laying on top of them to show Ettarre that he's alive and his honor to Gawain by sparing his life despite the betrayal. From there, my idea is that he leaves Camelot to protects traders and pilgrims to the Holy Land, comparable to a knight templar and gaining valuable experience, skills, and knowledge along the way and now wields a powerful scimitar to replace the sword he left behind. When he learns of King Arthur losing the war in Camelot, he returns to serve his king one more time.

 

4) Sir Palamedes is a beast-hunter/cavalier from Arabia. I kept Palamedes a follower of the Islamic faith in this write-up and does not convert as depicted in the story I read. He's still in love with Iseult and wants to make her his third wife and is hunting the legendary Questing Beast. I loosely adapted him from the Ardeth Bey character depicted in Universal's Mummy and Mummy Returns films.

 

Enjoy! 🙂

 

Edited July 6, 2023 by fdw3773

[Michael Hopcroft]

I have not read the book in question, but I am assuming there is some sort of Merlin involved. He might well have been lured into the ice by now, or he might still be active. What sort of powers would he still have, though. Merlin has never been a Deus ex Machina on call to bail Arthur or Camelot out of trouble. He has always been playing his own game, with his own goals, and if they don't happen to coincide with Arthur's...

 

Lancelot would have a few powers based on his "holiness" -- about which he might well become arrogant. These powers desert him when he begins his illicit affair with Guenevere. What happens next depends on his psyche and whether there are active attempts to corrupt the once-pure hero. Arthur might well know of the affair and look the other way, deliberately, to keep up appearances and to maintain a strong relationship with them. (In sufficiently "adult" campaigns he might involve himself directly, or perhaps he is just as much in love with Lancelot as Guenevere is...)

 

There are also other entities in play. If you're going to do a grand campaign, you might want to include characters like Morgaine (Arthur's resentful sorceress half-sister) and the Green Knight. Perhaps the Green Knight is a humanization of the spirit of the forest itself, which is why he could survive decapitation -- you might have to kill every tree in England to get him to actually die. (Yes, I did see The Green Knight a few years back -- and I still can't make sense of any of it other than the vaguest notions of the nature of Gawain's quest and an appreciating of its visual beauty. I also watched Sword of the Valiant on home video years before -- it was clearly just another paycheck for Sean Connery, but he seemed determined to enjoy earning that check almost as much as he enjoyed cashing it.)

 

And, most of all -- What's up with that **** Grail?