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11:52, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour.

Posted by tibiotarsus
tibiotarsus
member, 267 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Sat 9 Jul 2022
at 20:49
  • msg #1

Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

Greetings all, I have unexpected mediaeval cravings but I am also a very tired beast.


I don't want to fight ravening hoardes of doomed non-humans in rabbles or random encounters, or chop up dehumanised Bad Guys being horrible to equally faceless victims, and noble politics for their own sake are so very boring to me. I just want to ride about on a big horse being shiny and have the capacity to competently disembowel someone but generally spend my time keeping my peasants from squabbling with anyone else's peasants and being elaborately nice to women. Golden Age of Languedoc/chivalric romance* kind of deal.

Not that I mind dying: horror is my native genre and I wouldn't mind being given a little mystery to solve (with friends?) that might end up with my knight slaughtered by a fabulous beast, possessed by the Abyss etc. if I messed up badly enough. Cathar-type splinter sects make good cultists. Just throwing this out there to see if anyone's doing or interested in roughly what I'm after, really. I don't need pure fluff or deeply artificial candyfloss, just...no more grimdark, I'm tired.


Not interested in Adult games unless I can either fix my consant tourney rival's deliberate losing to me by discovering his reasons and letting him know I'll cater to such desires with 100% less risk of caving his skull in (we can still fight, but fairly!) or something like the Questing Beast is a) an explicitly sapient manifestation type monster-thing unique enough not to read as 'animal' or 'human in suit' and sophisticated enough to communicate clearly and b) single (and fully adult for its type, of course). tl;dr you want me to endure low restrictons, you get me being a fruity freak.

The systems I'm most familiar with would probably be Savage Worlds & Call of Cthulhu, but I have passing familiarity with many more and am willing to learn. Can freeform like a champ, too.


*as in the mediaeval genre of stories not claiming to be history or allegory, not smooching. Showing off how gallant one can be would be the idea, not courting.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:59, Sun 24 July 2022.
tibiotarsus
member, 268 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Sat 23 Jul 2022
at 07:29
  • msg #2

Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour


just one tired boop for the ad.
Nisaom
member, 12 posts
Mon 25 Jul 2022
at 11:35
  • msg #3

Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

Hi!

I like the picture you're painting and I have some ideas. Let's just see if we can boil it down a little so I understand what you're after and if we're interested in the same things. So the premise would be roughly that of a game revolving around chivalric knighthood set in Languedoc during the albigensian crusade (or some similar place and time where there's some interesting conflict to draw material from). Real world but with some mystical elements (myths and superstitions might be true etc). Main themes are chivalry, good vs. evil, courage/heroism and maybe sacrifice?

The cathar heresy, especially in this place and time is an extremely rich backdrop but suggest themes you might not be interested in, like right vs. wrong, power and corruption, war etc. Thoughts about this?

Are you looking for something sandboxy or something plot-driven?

Solo, small group, large group?

I've been looking at different systems but the ones that seem the best fit are ones I don't know like BRP, Harnmaster, Mythras, Chtulu Dark Ages etc (with some serial numbers filed off). I don't mind learning a new system so that's not an issue, really. What I do like is a system that's quick and easy for the play by post format but still have some crunch and I think New World of Darkness with a medieval skill list might fit the bill? It's just one roll > adjudication, even in combat. Not the most realistic though if we want something more simulationist.
This message was undeleted by the user at 11:53, Mon 25 July 2022.
tibiotarsus
member, 269 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Mon 25 Jul 2022
at 18:06
  • msg #4

Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

Hello. ^_^

No wars, please - I did my undergrad dissertation on facets of the Albigensian Crusade and I'd really, really like to get at the weird, peaceful-anarchist-fostering social system of the pre-crusade Languedoc: the broad farming/ecclesiastical landscape where you have a little village and a teeny-tiny castle for a knight to live in on every other hilltop, where troubadours flourished doing nothing but paying song and poetry for wine and the old monks/nuns of the military orders were sent to doze out their days organising supply and finance and such. A warm, calm place as yet only distantly threatened by Bad King Philip and in truth only answering to the Compte de Foix.

You could bring the threat of war nearer, but I'd prefer something smaller in scale - something(/one?) in the twisty limestone caves keeps eating people, for instance, or my lord/lady is under a curse and I'm in conflict between my vows to keep my relative/fosterer's honour and my duty to not let them, say, become a rift to the Abyss that's going to pull down half the countryside. Or "is this a Cathar Perfect who genuinely wants to be tortured to death near the end of their natural life, or is there coercion going on, and given murder would be much easier, why? What eats that pain?/what happens if this person dies quietly?"

I'd also like to draw a line around the nuances I'm seeking by phrasing that theme "doing the Right Thing/doing wrong", rather than "good/evil" - the latter suggests something solid or material; a set of unrealistic black/white hats, and that lacks the depth that generates conflict in the story sense. The verb is the important bit, as that defines people. Could you expand on "power and corruption" a little?

I'd prefer some plot, so that I could manage my time/commitment over the course of a story. Eh...solo if I'm stumbling about learning a thing, I think, small group if you go with Cthulhu: Dark Ages, which is easy to pick up, has nice, manageable crunch and I know there are folks about who'd like to play. I'd be very excited to play that.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:47, Fri 07 July 2023.
Nisaom
member, 13 posts
Tue 26 Jul 2022
at 17:37
  • msg #5

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

tibiotarsus:
I'd also like to draw a line around the nuances I'm seeking by phrasing that theme "doing the Right Thing/doing wrong", rather than "good/evil" - the latter suggests something solid or material; a set of unrealistic black/white hats, and that lacks the depth that generates conflict in the story sense. The verb is the important bit, as that defines people.

Agreed. I thought you might want something simple, black & white rather than deal with moral gray zones.

tibiotarsus:
Could you expand on "power and corruption" a little?

Well, when you're supposed to be honorable and chivalrous but the shortcuts to power and riches look sweet indeed kind of thing.

I'm mainly trying to narrow in on some main themes to build the game around. Do you have something to add that we haven't already touched upon?

tibiotarsus:
I'd prefer some plot, so that I could manage my time/commitment over the course of a story. Eh...solo if I'm stumbling about learning a thing, I think, small group if you go with Cthulhu: Dark Ages, which is easy to pick up, has nice, manageable crunch and I know there are folks about who'd like to play. I'd be very excited to play that.

Plot-based it is then (as opposed to sandbox/player-driven, I try to keep to "don't prep plots, prep situations"). We'll set the game in the period before the cathar crusade. Small group of players if we can find them.

I played a lot of BRP-based games in my youth but never Call of Chtulhu. From what I can tell it's a BRP-clone, right? Do you want to keep the game in the CoC mythos? If not I think there's more work to adapt it to a more straight-forward medieval game than to just use a simpler BRP-clone like OpenQuest or Mythras as I suggested before. Would that be all right?
tibiotarsus
member, 270 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Tue 26 Jul 2022
at 23:00
  • msg #6

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

I deinitely see you might get that idea from me being tired, but black and white worlds tend to result in dehumanisation, which is very much not my thing...horrible people are still people; if we deny that basic fact we forget that there is a possibility we can slide into the dark ourselves for lack of watchfulness. There's no genuine conflict - and rather nasty implications - without that.

Ehh...you'd have to make a very convincing bait for someone who already has enough peasants to live off/protect. Not having any urge to control people or amass wealth myself I should be upfront that those particular motivations aren't ones I understand or would be likely to RP well. A shortcut to helping someone, maybe, or Gawain's kind of failure of faith/smudged honour put between vows to host, lady, and destined death, those could work. As might the temptation to regain something lost.

Greed in others does make a worthy opponent, and that's certainly one way to make a witch - I've always been of the opinion that to make magic realistically fit in an alt/historical setting it should be devastatingly high-cost, like Machen's notion of witchcraft as "forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current": you may start off wanting one thing, but committing to gathering that many fingers or what have you to achieve it pushes you beyond the bounds of society and the sane, only once you're out that far and tasting power, you don't stop...that's the human root of a monster right there.

Themes...have we covered 'duty' so far? It's kind of folded in to the chivalric ideal, but still.

Sure, I don't need or expect a huge amount of structure (and would probably try to joust a train if I found any rails :D ), just a vague "here be shennanigans, have at" and knowing you're aware of a best ending and a worst ending, kind of thing.

It was indeed a species of BRP, though it's diverged here and there by now. I'll continue to meep a moment about Cthulhu: Dark Ages needing no work save maybe reskinning uncanny things if you ever show any, but I'm not married to the Mythos specifically (unless it asks me nicely) and won't climb onto a chair and hiss if placed down gently in a less horror-coded setting. I'll be a touch less confident to start and might need herding around if I get confused, is all. Additionally and leaving it to your judgement, you might want to throw out an interest check before going out to advertise, since you wouldn't get the automatic attention of the historical CoC player base. Other than those minor things I have no issues.
Nisaom
member, 14 posts
Wed 27 Jul 2022
at 19:39
  • msg #7

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

I think we agree on the basics, then. I looked a little deeper into CoC and I need to do a lot more reading compared to the alternatives so in the interest of getting started this year I think we'll give OpenQuest a try. It's a simple enough system and there's both a free quickstart and a SRD reference so no need to buy a lot of new books if you don't want to. We'll stumble forward together.

An interest check is sound advice, I'll put together a coherent premise statement and put it up in the IC forum.
Nisaom
member, 16 posts
Thu 28 Jul 2022
at 00:41
  • msg #8

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

tibiotarsus
member, 271 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Thu 28 Jul 2022
at 07:03
  • msg #9

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour

Great! I shall suppress my curiosity on what needs reading (given how little the average Investigator comes to learn about the Mythos, the entire works of Lovecraft certainly aren't necessary) and maybe drag the trad. vampire stats/gangrene rules over sometime if it looks like you might need them, just so you can go 'argh, what? No.'  ^_^

Thank you for being swift and keen and willing to cope with me tripping over little variations. Will go over and be officially interested presently.
tibiotarsus
member, 297 posts
Hopepunk with a shovel
Fri 7 Jul 2023
at 11:57
  • msg #10

Re: Let me be a knight in fairly shiny armour


^^ Please see first message in thread ^^

After recently reading a copy of El Cid I'm having these cravings again...willing to start afresh or at an earlier point in my Oc knight's timeline. Slight preference for solo play at present since I'm pretty busy, but only that.
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