New on Desk #15 — Back from the Grail Quest

Two games again this week, Dragon’s Castle and Fables of Camelot. A routine week overall, sufficiently so that I did some extra writing again, though not enough to publish anything yet. The highlight of the week was the fact that our Fabelot campaign did a pretty successful rendition of the Grail Quest, one of the central parts of the Arthurian mythos. It’s an artistic ambition of mine that I hadn’t expected to realize for years, and didn’t actually fully recognize before we were done. I was like, “Oh shit, I just realized that I’ve wanted to do this for years, and now I accidentally threw it in there and we did it. Didn’t even have to play Pendragon.”

The Grail Quest in the Arthurian Mythos

The quest for the Holy Grail is one of the major stories of Arthurian myth, but it’s also one of the more difficult ones to appreciate for a modern audience due to its religious theming. Religious, specifically, rather than spiritual: a lot of the literary motivation in the original material seems to stem from a sort of borrowed glory, Christianity’s-greatest-hits thinking on the parts of the various authors. The Grail story is not very clearly about anything so much as it is a superficial carnival ride of religiousness; knights quest for a grail and that’s cool because it’s almost very nearly (not really) mentioned in the Bible. Why the Grail is quested for, and what finding it means, is never given much consideration in comparison to celebrating the empty (operatively meaningless, non-functional in the world) piousness of the questing knight. The Grail is the tramp stamp of pious chivalry, its importance first and foremost in enabling knights to compete in how pious they are; have you already quested for the Grail, little man? Do you even lift, bro?

Elusive as the story of the grail is in all of its various convoluted versions, we as users of myth bake up our own versions, picking up and discarding stuff. A multitude of modern authors have provided their own interpretations. I’ll particularly recommend Greg Stafford’s Pendragon Grand Campaign here for roleplayers, as the grail quest is indeed one of the in-depth topics Stafford delves into in a thought-provoking and authentic way.

For storytelling interest, here’s my own summary of the grail cycle, the parts I’ve found actually useful. Obviously you can take away a lot of different interpretations and emphasis from the material, so this is just the summary of what I find interesting and important in the Grail Cycle:

The Grail is transcendent brought into immanence: The significance of the Grail is that it is an exceptional item, the holiest of all relics; it is in fact a raw and unadulterated point of contact between the divine realm and the realm of man. Its special properties and the way it is to be handled stem from this unique nature, and much of the weirdness in the story of the grail is therefore justified. The story of the grail is a fantasy story, and this is the phantasmagoric conceit: what would it be like if an object of Heaven, unclothed in crass matter, were to come into possession by man? The mundane history of the Grail (catching the Christ’s blood in Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, etc.) exists to narrate, justify and mythologize the conceit, but for a modern audience the thing to understand is that this is a speculative fantasy. The Grail is like the One Ring, an item of extreme particular quality, which then drives an unique story.

The Grail Quest as a spiritual competition: The story begins with the Knights of the Round Table witnessing the vision of the Grail, or otherwise being inspired by the desire to find this most holy of McGuffins. This is the “Grail Quest”, the idea that the martial elite of the kingdom could and should abandon their duties to traverse the lands as adventuring knights, seeking spiritual merit. This is an inherently interesting idea once you realize that a) the kingdom suffers for the neglect as the knights quest for spiritual rewards, and b) for the knights this is a competitive treasure hunt, in itself contradictory with piousness, and c) there is no substantial reason for the quest, it’s all driven by psychological and sociological factors. Isn’t it interesting that the Grail Quest is sort of a societal panic state? Isn’t the implicit question of who and what even puts the events into motion interesting? Cui bono?

Castle Corbenic as the adventure location: I like that once you strip all the hoo-hah from the Grail story, there’s actually a solid core of an adventure in there. Check it out: there exists a secret holy order dedicated to the protection of the Grail, the absolutely unique relic. In my headcanon the purpose is pretty clear: the Grail is uniquely valuable and frail, so you’d want to safeguard it and perhaps keep its blessing to yourself, or at least preserve it for the day when it’s really needed, or maybe its mere existence has beneficial effects for Britain or the mankind in general. So the motivation part’s implicitly clear, we can understand what a secret society is for. The order keeps the Grail under lock and key in Castle Corbenic, in England (justified by historical myths about how the Grail found its way there; the myth about Joseph doesn’t even have to be true, the story works either way). The story of the Grail Quest is the story of why Corbenic is so difficult to reach.

The Dolorous Blow and the Wasteland: There actually is an active, operative adventure/thriller plot in the grail story as expiated in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, it’s just that many tellings leave all this backstory really vague instead of explaining it properly. The conceit is that while the secret Grail society was happily puttering along, king Pellam, the leader of the order, was grievously injured by a heroic knight who breached the hospitality of Corbenic by attacking the host. Maybe they found out about the Grail and were covetous for it, or maybe it was something interpersonal. The important part is that Pellam’s injury causes a mystic reaction in the lands of Corbenic, twisting and turning and deadening the land until it becomes the Wasteland, a mythic nightmare dimension. This is the status quo when the story actually begins: king Pellam, the Fisher King, is piteously crippled and slowly dying in Corbenic, unable to use the Grail to heal himself, unable to die. Maybe divine grace sets off the Grail Quest precisely because Corbenic requires the outside interference of a pious knight to set things right. However, the knights discover that finding your way to Corbenic is non-trivial, as the Wasteland misleads and confounds those who would seek to find it.

The Wasteland as a spiritual simile: I’ll mention this explicitly because it’s an important part of how cool the story of the Grail actually is. The “Wasteland” is simultaneously a twisted nightmare realm and the state of humanity without divine grace. In the former sense the Wasteland is something that a knight seeking Castle Corbenic has to cross as a concrete difficulty, while in the latter sense the Wasteland is within the knight and surrounding the knight from the start. The phantasmagoric conceit of the Wasteland would not prove a difficulty for the pious knight who has grace within.

Percival the Fool: The history of Grail literature has featured several “grail knights”, knights who would actually manage to see the Grail, or interact with it in various ways. One of the cool things is that the first story of finding the Grail is also a story of failure: in Chrétien’s Perceval the protagonist, Sir Percival, reaches Corbenic by sheer coincidence and is hosted by the Fisher King. However, he fails to heal the king for lack of compassion (stilted as the narrative is) and is ejected from the castle. What’s cool about this episode for storytelling purposes is that Percival logically speaking becomes a witness to the story after his failure: his hapless adventure can provide hints to others who would try to do intentionally what Percival manages by accident.

Galahad is the Kwisatz Haderach: So here’s something that sounds very much like a modern fantasy epic storyline: king Pellam is grievously injured by the Dolorous Blow and stuck in this timeless realm of Grail magic, unable to move on and heal. He cannot use the Grail to heal himself because human selfishness is inherently contradictory to the nature of the Grail; he needs an outside element for his salvation. So what king Pellam does – and I find this to be hilariously modern as a plot – is that he sets in motion a convoluted breeding project to produce an artificial grail knight, somebody worthy enough to use the Grail and heal him. The plot involves having his daughter Elaine bed Lancelot under false pretenses to breed a son that she names Galahad, a name you might have heard. I really like the image this paints of king Pellam as a ruthlessly selfish operator. He’s the supervillain of the Grail story, while also being its primary victim, which is really interesting; perhaps the story should actually be told from his perspective all along.

The Grail is transient: Now the shape of the Grail story becomes evident as the story of how humankind attempts to preserve and use the pure divinity. Human imperfection that is the original sin causes the Wasteland, which is also the original sin, and the Grail, heretofore carefully preserved for centuries, is used to heal it once the questing knight manages to reach it. However, the Grail story always ends the same way: once used, the Grail ascends or disperses or disappears. I believe the reason to be in the inherent contradiction of the corporeal world and the divine world: to use the Grail is to lose it.

As you can see, the Grail story is not so ineffably incomprehensible after all. It’s just that the story is often not told clearly and in its entirety, so you’re left with this vague understanding of knights searching for a cup with little in the way of thematic purpose. There’s an interesting fantasy story hiding underneath once you scratch the surface a bit, though, speculating about what it would be like for the divine reality to be unveiled in the world. I like the central phantasmagoric theme in that regard, the idea that the divine connection is so very ephemeral that it is almost inconceivable for a human to be able to discover and interact with the Grail. The divine may be terrible and powerful, as demonstrated by the immanent Wasteland brought about by the interaction of divine magic and human sin, but it is also an ultimately fleeting experience that you cannot build a life upon: the knight has to return from the quest.

Friday: Fables of Camelot session #3

So anyway, we played Fables of Camelot on Friday, and I decided on a whim to offer the grail quest to the crew. I was pretty hesitant about doing this precisely because I feel that the story is a bit weird and convoluted, and not necessarily to everybody’s tastes. The players were interested, though, so a-grailing we went.

We had a couple of new knights, and a new player, too. The player characters continue to entertain me consistently, I rather like all of these colorful yet generally chivalric fellows. Perhaps my favourite this time around was a newly minted Knight of the Round Table, Ebert of Borsford: Ebert’s a practical and very physical, very concrete a thinker, which would of course comes to play a large part in the Grail Quest.

I took the opportunity of foreshadowing another classic chivalric adventure, Gawain and the Green Knight, at the beginning of the session as well. None of the player character knights felt like stepping into the obvious trap of the Green Knight, which meant that young Gawain got his chance to play the hero here. The actual adventure will presumably be the topic of the next session, as the Green Knight promised to return the favour to Gawain in a year and a day.

Meanwhile, though, the Grail Quest has reached fever pitch in Camelot: Sir Percival had returned from his travels and heard of the Grail Quest, revealing his close brush with the divine. Sir Galahad had become convinced that he had actually seen the Grail in his early childhood (for unknown to him, he was born in Castle Corbenic before his mother Elaine traveled to raise him in the lands of men). Sir Bors was pining for the ever-graceful Dame Aubry so cruelly cut down in the flower of her youth last session, which made for a tiny bit of a red herring insofar as this grail thing was concerned, but would perhaps come into play later on. (I’m juxtaposing Percival, Galahad and Bors here because they are the three Grail Knights of many stories.)

The player character knights in their turn decided to strike while the iron was hot: one of the knights is something of a scholar, so she pulled together the disparate sources and eyewitness accounts and was the first in Camelot to figure out that the Grail was hidden in the Castle Corbenic, and that the castle in turn was hidden in some place called the Wasteland. Armed with various knowledge the knights decided to try and steal the march on Percival, Galahad and Bors who were clearly gearing up to start their own (canonically successful) Grail Quest this very spring.

As part of their first-mover advantage the knights interrogated young Galahad about his mother Elaine; the idea was that while Galahad himself was clueless as to where Corbenic was, his mother would surely know. The young knight wasn’t difficult to fool into revealing the vital clue; Ebert even managed to initiate Galahad into the joys of gluttony during the weeks of lent, easily impressionable as Galahad was.

After learning about Elaine from Galahad the knights travelled to question Elaine, who in turn told them about the location of Castle Corbenic, straightforward enough. She also revealed in confidence that Galahad is Lancelot’s son which the knights wisely decided to keep to themselves.

Entering the Wastelands, the knights were tested morally at the Dark Castle of the Giant of Vice, with the classical test of the feast of the maidens. “Good Sirs, we will gladly show every kind of hospitality to valiant knights such as you. You might not wish to tarry for long, though, as our father will surely return by nightfall.” To my astonishment every single one of the knights passed the test rather than succumbing to the frivolous comforts of hospitality; I had this entire separate branch of the adventure planned out for the worldly knights who’d drop out at this stage, but apparently they’re pious knights every single one of them.

Moving on to the center of the Wasteland, the knights found Castle Corbenic stuck in its eternal summer day. They met Sir Bors the Elder riding out of the castle, and soon figured out that this was Sir Bors 20 years ago, the day he struck the Dolorous Blow and wounded the Fisher King. Sir Bors was quite upset and warned the knights against entering Corbenic, which he described as a “twisted place”. When queried further Bors described how king Pellam had made amorous advances upon him, which forced him to defend himself even at the breach of hospitality, wounding the king. “I was justified in defending myself”, said Sir Bors, refusing to acknowledge his crime.

Having confessed to the events Bors demanded an oath of secrecy of the knights, something that most of them were happy to grant to protect the honor of those involved in this nasty event. The scene was rather interesting, I thought; Sir Bors was pretty clearly homophobic (and not the best possible narrator for his altercation with king Pellam) and generally a conservative curmudgeon, e.g. taunting the female knights of the party and so on. This makes perfect sense when we remember that this was Sir Bors 20 years ago, before the rise of Arthur and his Golden Vision: Fables of Camelot has as one of its two unique conceits (the other being the animal heraldry thing) this idea that Arthur’s chivalrous realm is something of a liberal utopia, so it was quite interesting to meet a knight who would in time become a staunch supporter, from a time before he’d ever heard of Arthur’s ideals of chivalry. Something of an unique twist in the grail myth there.

After threatening the knights into keeping their silence Sir Bors continued on to his own time while the PC knights went to other way. The knights met the Fisher King, fishing as one does when it’s the only pastime left to a crippled man. They were granted hospitality of the castle. The original grail story material has this elaborate feast scene ritual thing, but here the knights (Lilly in particular, being the lodestone of virtue for the entire party) were overcome by their compassion for the Wounded King and decided to brook no delay in demanding to use the Grail to heal him.

Lilly asked king Pellam for the Grail for the dual purpose of healing the king and then transporting the Grail back to Camelot so king Arthur could use it to heal the realm. (This conceit that the Grail could heal the hidden flaw of Arthur’s Golden Vision and therefore save Camelot from its foretold doom was a big motivating factor in our version of the grail quest.) Pellam was overjoyed to grant the request, but warned that while the first part of Lilly’s motivation was pure, the second would prove the undoing of the Grail, for it could not brook the ambition of Man. King Pellam knew that the Grail was transient and only to be used most carefully, but in his gratefulness to the grail knights he was willing to let them take the Grail and try the impossible.

Sir Ebert deserves a special mention here, as we found out that he is at his heart a true pagan: as per Stafford, Ebert perceived the immanent divine not as the Supreme Eucharist as the Christian knights did, but rather as the Cauldron of Don, the cauldron of plenty of Briton myth. The difference was interesting and potentially significant, for although the divine substance was the same, the particular rules of how mankind is to use the Grail vs. the Cauldron were different. Perhaps, had there been more pagans involved, the story might have ended differently.

The last leg of the adventure concerned the journey back. It was really bittersweet as it was established early on by dice rolls that the frailness of the Grail could not withstand the ambitions of the knights; every day they traveled towards Camelot the Grail trailed stardust, turning more transparent and ephemeral as it was buffeted by the fleeting daydreams of glory: the knights knew that bringing the Grail would make them the famed heroes of Camelot, after all, so it was difficult for them to maintain an appropriate piety (read: inhuman robot nature) in handling the affair.

The knights sent word ahead to Camelot to hasten the king to meet them halfway before the Grail would disappear altogether, and the entire court of Camelot did indeed take to the road in a grand entourage, all eager to witness the Grail. The last scene of the adventure was epic as the Grail-bearers hurried along in their white robes, with the eager host of the realm’s nobility coming from the other direction, only for the Grail to translucently float away like a dream even as the two groups crashed and milled about in confusion right there on the crossroads of Alderley. “Where did it go, did you see it? Yes, yes, I saw it, but did it fall to the ground? Stop stomping around, I want to see the Grail! Don’t break it! No, I saw it, it floated to the sky!”

Ebert in his part realized the true fate of the Cauldron: to his eyes it never was particularly “frail” or “translucent”, for the Cauldron of Plenty is of the pig-iron, black iron tried and true. He did not understand why the others would jealously guard the Broth (the Blood of Christ, limited divine potency of the Grail), nor why they had to hurry. But what he did understand was when he saw the Cauldron tip over and fall from its pedestal in the confusion, and he did understand the glimpse he had of the Thief: it is the case that humanity cannot have the Cauldron because if ever one has it, they will not share, preferring to hoard and secret it away. Ebert would now carry the knowledge that he could have been the one to possess the Cauldron (and even share it with the world, in his dreams of pagan virtue) had he acted more decisively and not put his faith into Lilly and the rest of those silly ponies.

All in all very nice, I was quite happy with this unique Fables of Camelot interpretation of the grail quest. Surprisingly punchy considering how convoluted the original material is. We admittedly didn’t get to have a single variant fight in the session, but that’s strictly because the players chose and succeeded in avoiding both the Giant of Vice and Sir Bors the Elder (who was totally prepared to ensure their silence with violence) in that regard; played differently, we could have had some mortal danger here.

Monday: Dragon’s Castle Session #4

We also had a session of my Mountain Witch Castlevania hack, the Dragon’s Castle, earlier in the week. In the interest of brevity (and maintenance of the feature focus of the newsletter) I won’t describe it in length, but it was also quite fun! I like how life-like the heroic crew of monster hunters have become, and it is entertaining to describe various perils for them.

The first half of the session was again spent doing character drama and exposition, which I expect to slow down in the future, as we’ve by now gotten a pretty good handle on who the characters are. We’ve also moved into Act II of the game, which means that the players are preparing to reveal their Dark Fates. To some players’ enjoyment and others’ annoyance the party decided to take Marie Renard, the brave-yet-ridiculous teenage vampire slayer, with them on their journey to Castlevania. It’s a bit of a GM PC situation, but I’m confident that we can handle it without Marie becoming too much of a spotlight hog.

The substantial adventure material of the session involved a ruined lighthouse and a Water Dragon aggravated by light. (Guess why the lighthouse is in ruins.) In hindsight I should probably have given the players some obvious reason to explore the lighthouse island before having a big boss fight with the Water Dragon, but there’s merit in freedom, too, so why not. This was our second boss fight of the campaign, and it did go much more fluently than before, although there is still room for improvement. I’ve been fine-tuning the rules as wel go, but ultimately the boss fight concept I have for the game is somewhat radical, so I don’t know if it’s really possible to make it entirely intuitive for everybody.

Now that the heroes have chosen a clear direction (sailing over The Still, the estuary of the Danube river), and beaten the primary guardian of the Castle’s watery environs, there’s nothing much preventing them from sailing right to the castle itself. Odds are that we’ll soon get to move the adventure in-doors.

Club Hannilus Minutes

While the RPG Club Hannilus mostly concentrates on practical play, we’ve recently had some discussions about theoretical topics as well. Partly it’s because we’ve been inviting more prospective players and other interested parties to join the talks. Let’s look at the high points:

• The rules I run for Fables of Camelot are slightly different from the published rules text (not a case of hacking, strictly speaking, but rather parallel development, as the differences precede the publication), with the rules for character death the most dramatic difference. As dear Aubry would not have died under the rulebook rules in last week’s Fabelot session, we were certainly inspired to discuss character death in general, as a sort of a follow-up to the Agora discussions earlier on. The sacrament of death was mulled over from a few different perspectives, interestingly including the notion of playing a high lethality military scifi campaign with the Astraterra rules. (Astraterra is this sweet all-ages beginner-friendly scifi rpg with trad rules but no by-the-book character death.)
• I initiated a philosophical investigation of dramatic adventure GMing myself in an effort to discover new angles on the best practices. Specifically, our on-going online campaigns of Dragon’s Castle and Fabelot have, while enjoyable, also had some minor pacing issues – specifically the issue of how the talking heads concent (drama scenes) should be chairmanned and paced in relation to action scenes. The main conclusion was that it’s a tricky question and that “free play” often taken for granted despite it being one of the likelier sources of slow-down in a rpg when the players get lost in meandering dialogue scenes.

State of the Productive Facilities

I did a bit of writing this week, but not quite to the extent of publishing the stuff yet. Next week probably.