All Who Take the Sword

“Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword”
– Matthew 26:52

I wrote this game in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. I could never bring myself to actually get people together to play it. I’m releasing it a year later, still not playtested. 

I think it works. I think it’s fun, maybe? 

I’d wanted to make a game like this for years – a game of Arthuriania that’s more about what King Arthur was a metaphor for than what the legends of him actually said. 

King Arthur, in the earliest stories – the ones that are from before the Saxons, maybe even before the Romans – is just a guy with a castle in the forest who fights supernatural threats.

Then the Romans came – bringing unity and Christianity. Then they left, 10+ generations later, leaving a hole where unity was – and allowing in the pagan Saxons. 

There are a number of stories from from this era of great warlords and battles – Ambrosius Aurelianius, and his victory at Baddon hill, being the most common. But it’s really not clear what happened in the British Isles between somewhere around 400 AD and somewhere around 800 AD. It was the end of a world. You have to understand what that meant – people, for the most part, stopped writing things down. We’re lucky to have one chronicler in a generation in these centuries of Britain. The Romano-British Christians had fewer and fewer resources to use to support a class of monks, scholars, chroniclers, court historians, etc.. The purpose of these things is always, whether we admit it or not, to impress the peasants and other nobles – and in these days, merely surviving and wielding a strong sword was itself an impressive feat. The pagan Saxons did not write in Latin letters, or perhaps much at all, till they’d converted – we have Bede and we have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and not a huge amount else. 

This era – from when the Saxons invaded the Britons, nearly till when the Saxons were invaded by the Danes in their own turn – is a lacunae, on which historians and aercheologists and geneticists still argue to this day. And, like all such lacunae, it becomes a fruitful space in which to place our own myths and speculations; a darkly blank space on which we may project all our fears, all our hopes, all our insecurities, all our petty prideful dreams of our own prophesied grandiosity. All King Arthur stories are nothing but this, and this game is no different. 

The big difference, I suppose, is that it's so historically influenced that -- while being Arthurian -- King Arthur isn't actually in this. There's a high king, and a random chance that he might be named Arthur, but this is more about all the leaders that got conflated into "King Arthur" than it is actual King Arthur. 

In it, you play people who see themselves as: 

• Britons – they’re speakers of a Brythonic Celtic language, as well as Latin, and they trace their descent back before Cesar or Christ came to this island; though, surely, their ancestors were also intermarried with the Roman colonists
• Knights – they are hereditary members of a land-owning military aristocracy, and serve the High King of the Britons in his quest to expel the Saxons from this island at all costs
• Citizens – they are Citizens of the Roman Empire, by hereditary right earned by the ancestors during the 10+ generations of Roman presence in these lands. Culturally, they are just as much the heirs of that distant and degraded city as any loyalist Latin speaker in Gaul, Hispania, Mauretania, Africa, or Dalmatia
• Romans – yes, Romans. They are descended from Roman colonists as well as Brythonic aristocrats, they are Roman Citizens, there is no sense in which they are not Romans

They are willing to kill and die to remove the Saxon threat from their ancient and ancestral homeland. 

Mechanically, the game features:

• a Hexmap that I borrowed from someone who hasn’t had an online presence in years. I think they might be dead. If it’s you and you’re alive and feel that my use of your IP violates your license for it (somewhat ambiguous whether this project is commercial or not) get in touch – I’ll work something out with you
• Ability Scores such as Hatred and Nobility 
• A dynamic Reputation system that tracks the degree to which anyone can tell the difference between the party and a pack of vile bandits no better than the Saxons themselves
• A system for easily tracking whether or not your soldiers are starving
• A system for quick mass battles and quick sieges that should take less than 5 minutes to run. This is not a wargame; it’s a TTRPG about a war. 
• Extremely high lethality. You don’t even get HP. You get to save or die. 
• Random events for Briton, the High King, and each PC – this is a zero-prep game. 
• Random tables of 
  • Wonderous Treasures
  • mystical Visions
  • NPC Romano-British Lords
  • encounters by terrain type and British/Saxon-occupation

This game is dedicated to all Israelis killed and kidnapped by Hamas, and all proceeds from it will be donated to the New Israel Fund