By the Sword

Question: Although they're not gods in any sense, what Legend level would King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table sit at? They do some pretty epic stuff, but I don't know if they ever get up to Demigod levels. Presumably, as they are from folklore, it is possible to connect some dots and say that some of them were Scions.

Arthurian lore is a secret passion of mine, so forgive me if I ramble a bit in here. It sometimes feels like we get questions about the legends of the Knights of the Round Table practically every other day around here, so I know they're a not-so-secret passion for a lot of you as well.

The legends of King Arthur and his associated knights don't quite fit into Scion's mold all the way, which makes handling them largely a matter of Storyteller and game preference. They are certainly one of the most powerfully enduring sets of myths in northern Europe; it would be totally inaccurate to say that they are not mythology and do not have a place in it, but at the same time they are not made of the same stuff as the stories of demigods and heroes in many other parts of the world. Some games ignore them, relegating them to mere human fantasies popularized by French writers; some consider them to have been Scions, though of whom is always a vague and hazy kind of idea, and others have even set them up as gods themselves.

There's no question in our minds that Arthur and his knights shouldn't be a pantheon of their own; they are not and never were gods, nor were they worshiped or treated as such as far as we know, and their literary origins barely go back to the ninth century, when the gods of the Celtic and British lands had already been sunk into the mass of Christianity themselves. There have occasionally been scholarly theories that one or another of them might have roots in pre-Christian deities, but either they're completely without source or they're links to other deities that are already present elsewhere in myth (the theory that Arthur and Lancelot are faraway Welsh echos of Nuada and Lugh, for example). Their stories are certainly enduring, exciting and the stuff of epic heroic legend, there's no doubt about that, but compared to the tales of deities aroud the world, they are on a small scale - the stories of heroes, not gods.

But they might be the stories of Scions! Like many cultures' beloved heroes, the Knights of the Round Table are a great place to decide on historical Scions. Their exploits are great examples of Hero and early Demigod adventures, and while how Legendary they are varies from knight to knight - Arthur and Galahad might be Legend 5 or 6, but dudes like Gaheris are probably still rocking Legend 3 or so. When deciding what Legend rating to place a given knight at, look at their stories and behavior, just as you would with any other mythological figure; most of them, I would say, are around Legend 4, but they might run anywhere from 3 to 5 depending on the specific knight. Incidentally, Merlin, who while not a knight is explicitly said in some of the romances to be half "demon", was almost certainly a perfect example of a Scion, and he could definitely be a Demigod, considering his higher range of powers and insight. Then, too, some Arthurian characters are demonstrably human - Guinevere is unlikely to have been a Scion, but she makes perfect sense as a Fatebound mortal (Lancelot's Lover, perhaps, or Arthur's Traitor, or both).

More interesting to me than what Legend rating the Scions of the Round Table would be are the questions that go along with the idea. Were all the Knights Scions? If not, how did humans fare trying to compete with those who were something more - which knights were their Fatebound mortal companions rather than Scions in their own right, and how did that change their stories? Who were the parents of these Scions? Some are easier to peg than others - as noted, scholars have drawn parallels between Arthur and Nuada, Lancelot and Lugh and even Gawain and Ogma, but these are sketchy at best, so how do you decide who parented whom? What about the Dodekatheon, who as the powers behind Rome might have more than a little influence over the possibly Roman figure of Arthur - might he be a Scion of Mars instead of Celtic, or should he be a representative of the Welsh pantheon (woefully underrepresented in Scion, which just lumps them together with the Tuatha)? Or perhaps, based on the linguistic connections between his name and that of Artio, the bear-goddess and a form of Andarta, he might be an example of a continental Gaulish Scion involved in the affairs of Britain (which would certainly explain his wildly enduring popularity among the French). And is Sir Kay, well-known to be a Saxon, therefore a Scion of the Aesir, a son of Odin walking among the British knights?

And then, too, as Scions, what parts of the landscape of Arthurian myth are still active and powerful now? Is Caerleon still somewhere, preserved and hidden from mortal eyes by whatever gods were the Knights' patrons, as some legends suggest? Is Avalon then a Terra Incognita Scions of the modern world might be able to find? And what gods created and maintain these things, and why? What was their purpose in the creation of the Knights, and how much of the politics of those stories - the bickering between kingdoms, the clash of French against British against Saxon - represent the clashing of divine forces, Gauls against Tuatha against Aesir? What is the Holy Grail - cauldron of the Dagda, cup of Bran, or purely Christian symbol?

And that's not even discussing the pervasive theme of Christianity that saturates much of Arthurian lore; if you consider them to have had pagan roots, then perhaps some of it can be ignored, but what does it represent and what ancient ideas did it overwrite? Depending on how you handle Christianity in your games, Aten may be involved somehow, or any number of other possibilities.

Even more interesting, these are just the possibilities in play if Arthur and his Knights are Scions - so what if they're not? If they're mere humans, they're clearly involved with magical powers beyond them, and they're clearly playing out Fatebound roles, so the question becomes who is involving them, why, and to whom their Fates are so inextricably tied. You could turn the tables entirely and set only one figure in the Arthurian universe as the Scion - Merlin or Morgana or even Uther, perhaps - and spin the web of Fate out from there.

And what if they are Legendary, but not Scions? Another avenue of exploration would be to set the Knights as lesser immortals themselves; the ties of the Arthurian tales to the fairy realm are already very strong, so it wouldn't be much of a leap to consider them fairies or related creatures rather than humans or demigods, the last vestiges of the British Isles' fae populations, maintaining the last crumbling fae kingdom on earth.

Arthurian legend is an entire minigame within Scion if you decide to really dive in and untangle it; for those interested in running games in which the Knights are major players, the resurrection of Arthur is a major plot point or even the entire game is set at Camelot in days of yore, these are all considerations that have to be taken into account. For everyone else, it's a very, very large amount of work for a Storyteller to take on, so while I would never discourage anyone from exploring it, because I certainly love to in my scraps of free time, it's an area that games that don't deal directly with it may not need to really plan for. If your story involves the Knights, you have a lot of decisions to make and world-building to do; if your PCs start asking about them, you may have the same. But if your game isn't going anywhere near the British Isles or isn't involving Arthur if it is, don't feel pressured to have an entire metaplot take on the situation. If it's not necessary for your game, leave it alone and focus on things that are.

But for those who go forth in search of the Questing Beast, I salute you; Arthurian legend, modernized, bowdlerized and Christianized as it is, is still one of the most vibrant and recognizable canons of myth in the western world, and Scion is more than up to the task of playing with it wholeheartedly. For those in search of a little inspiration when it comes to alternative ways of envisioning the Arthurian legends, there are almost unlimited resources out there - Godwin's Invitation to Camelot is one of my favorites, but there is boundless creativity to be found around these myths in myriad places. And for those who don't really have much luck or interest in meshing Arthurian romance with Scion but who do have an interest in the stories, there are entire roleplaying games, some critically acclaimed and also secretly published by White Wolf, that open up its entire universe separately.

And for those who already know how Arthur and his knights will feature in their games, be good knights and true, and may your arms never weary and your eyes never be clouded from glory.