#medieval outlaws

[r-rook-studio]

The Sherwood Tour: Character Creation

Found out this morning that Sherwood has sold 72 copies over the three weeks it's been live on DTRPG and Itch. With physical copies arriving at Spear Witch this week, I figured this would be a good day for a Sherwood tour while also admiring Eric Swanson's work on these chapter headers. Today, we'll focus on character creation.

As I was winding down work on Enoch's Wake, I wanted to get a chance to reconsider and rethink how that attempt to do my own version of the core rules of Traveller. It seemed a good fit for my love of the Robin Hood legend, which I'd revisited during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. As omicron threw the world back into partial lockdown, it gave me an excuse to immerse myself in movies, novels, Middle English balladry, medieval and Victorian romances, and even a few scholarly works.

Sherwood keeps the lightweight Traveller-inspired 2d6 mechanics I'd used for EW, but adjusts the four attributes and works with them in new ways. Before we start with character creation, though, lets look at the principles:

Be an outlaw! Even if a sheriff never declared your character a wolf’s head, you do not need to worry about what a typical medieval villager or aristocrat would do or think. The forest is too grand a place to for polite society’s petty anxieties about sexuality, gender, and propriety. Make your character whomever you want them to be.

Fight for something! Struggle for justice, scheme for revenge, plot for personal gain. Set some goals for your outlaw and your band that are bigger, wilder, and more wonderful than your character’s former, respectable world allowed.

Dabble with magic! While the traditional Robin Hood ballads do not foreground the magical and mysterious, plenty of Robin Hood novels, movies, and television shows have, and many other medieval outlaws stories included curses, prophecies, spellcraft, fey spirits, and even dragons.

Ditch the ethnic conflicts! The Saxon-Norman conflict was tacked on to the Robin Hood legend and outlaw tradition in the 19th century.

Fuck the true king! Waiting for King Richard to return was a very late addition to the Robin Hood legend. In the original ballads, kings were occasionally useful tools if the outlaws could get their help against officials and aristocrats.

Embrace diversity! While bigots who know little of history will complain, avoid confining yourselves to the biased and discredited accounts of historians from well over a century ago. Go into the forest and find the range of people living free of white supremacy, religious bigotry, and cis-gender heterosexuality.

People laugh about dying in character creation now, but Traveller was the first time we saw character creation as a stand-alone mini-game with push-your-luck mechanics. If you died, you could try to make the same decisions again but weren't likely to get the same outcome. In EW, I'd toyed with an option I borrowed from several versions of Cepheus, a family of Traveller retroclones and near clones: if things went badly, you were thrown out of your chosen job.

In Sherwood, though, all lifepaths and careers you can choose from are heading to the same place: outlaw life in the Greenwood. The push-your-luck element here is how long you could stay in the wide world before scandal, misdemeanors, or being officially declared an outlaw (and thus having no legal existence).

Attributes

Like EW, Sherwood uses four attributes: Endurance, Luck, Willpower, and Wits. Like Traveller, they can take damage and like Traveller's psi attribute, can be spent down for various effects, but they aren't used to directly modify most rolls. (And be careful how you spend them: while Skill Checks are 2d6 aiming at the magic target 8, Saving Throws are 2d6 equal or under an attribute's current value.) They're rolled 2d6 straight down, though you also roll one wildcard. You can replace any attribute with the wildcard number (if you want to) and then swap any two attribute scores.

Background Abilities

As in EW, everyone gets two Background Abilities. They can increase your ability scores, give you a small collection of starting skills, designate your character an aristocrat, or give you access to sorcery and arcane talents.

Careers

Like Traveller, Enoch's Wake, Cepheus, and similar games, your character has a career. Sherwood gives you five choices that will ultimately lead to the woods:

Hermits might be Christians or just living in the hermitages for seclusion and study (until the hermitages were disbanded and integrated into traditional religious communities). If you didn't take arcane talents as Background Abilities, this is your one chance to learn them. Inspired by Friar Tuck, anyone can become a Hermit.

Traders require a quick test to join, and then decide whether they did their mercantile travels on land or sea (and if they made any secret studies while traveling). Inspired by the traders and merchants who work with the outlaws in the Hannah Weinstein-produced, CPUSA-funded, and Richard Greene-lead Adventures of Robin Hood TV series.

Performer, a background I keep coming back to for fantasy or medieval games, learn a bit from their time traveling, a bit from their time playing in inns across the land, and a bit from studying old stories. Obviously inspired by various versions of Alan-A-Dale, but also by some versions of Little John that had him living as a festival wrestling performer before joining Robin.

Laborer is a background anyone can take as long as they aren't aristocrats. They learn their skills from their farm and/or town trades as well as by spending their evenings in roadside taverns and inns. Inspired by Robin's peasant, yeoman, and commoner followers in numerous sources.

Cavaliers is a background anyone can try to get into (though those born as aristocrats are never refused). Inspired by the later ballads and novels in which Robin Hood and many of his followers were aristocrats, field sports, jousting, and time in various courts provide most of their skills.

There's two other backgrounds that always start as condemned outlaws who eventually join Robin's bands. The Young Outlaw starts the game as an 18 year old with few skills (a simple character creation option) and the Notorious Criminal who chooses their skills based on the criminal profession they once pursued. These were inspired by the ITV Robin of Sherwood versions of Much the Miller's Son and Will Scarlet as well as the versions of both characters in Jennifer Roberson's Marian novels, as well as other Medieval ballads such as Adam Bell.

Finally, once the career is fleshed out, there's

Equipment and the Band

While everyone has some personal equipment (like a weapon), most other items are held in common. Rather than keep an extensive inventory of what members of the band are carrying on an adventure, characters predetermine their encumbrance or load and roll against their group's two shared stats: Resources (to determine what they have) and Legend (to determine who they know and who'd want to help them). The clever group can figure out how to get what they want or need with either.

Next up: Rules and Arcana (coming sometime before Pax U next weekend).

[ladyelizabeths]

Elizabeth de Burgh + her wedding dress OUTLAW KING (2018) dir. David Mackenzie

[katabay]

THE SHERIFF AND GUY OF GISBORNE

uh. try to stay with me for a second. so incest motifs are a huge part of medieval lit. you see it in arthuriana cycles, you see it in romances, it's a whole thing.

Incest and the Medieval Imagination, Elizabeth Archibald

so robin hood. both adaptions and the text itself, tend to get interesting with guy of gisborne. and I will say that while I found the media being discussed in this text absolutely fucking insufferable to watch, the discussion on it was delicious, impeccable, show stopping

Mouvance, Greenwood, and Gender in The Adventures of Robin Hood and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Brian J Levy and Lesley Coote

and with regards to discussions on the origin text (which I love and adore forever)

Horseplay: Robin Hood, Guy of Gisborne, and the Neg(oti)ation of the Bestial, Stuart Kane

we're. getting to the point, I promise. guy of gisborne and the sheriff in my own "adaption" are not cousins, but brothers in law (fucked up brothers in law are my thing over on my other blog. brutus and cassius? I'm there. caligula and lepidus? all over that, baby!) because I'm aiming for an adjacent transgression.

on the topic of adjacent transgressions and guy's comment in this comic about cannibalism: there's an overlap in various genres of literature, predominantly in branches of horror and tragedy: between cannibalism and incest. (additionally! a lot of texts will take on christian subtexts and allusions, so there's a bonus homoerotic cannibalism discussion happening wrt communion that I'll get into in the future) it's about. chomping. the teeth, you know.

Managing Monsters, Marina Warner

Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid, Randall T. Ganiban

there's a 100% chance I will revise the sheriff's design at some point, but I wanted to draw the flowers exploding out of the spine so bad

AND FINALLY, the neck focus on guy is half due to his fate in his origin tale (beheaded) and half my own invention: I girl-with-a-green-ribboned him. a little narrative necromancy, if you will.

[medievalandfantasymelee]

THE HOT MEDIEVAL & FANTASY MEN MELEE

QUALIFYING ROUND: 35th Tilt

King Edward I Plantagenet, Outlaw King (2018) VS. Robert the Bruce, Outlaw King (2018)

Propaganda

King Edward I Plantagenet, Outlaw King (2018) Portrayed by: Stephen Dillane

“Ed one's speech in Outlaw King to the assembled noblemen]: ‘Get word to Valence, Robert de Bruce to be declared an outlaw; any man or woman who would give shelter to him or any of his ranks to be executed without trial.’ Ed one didn't mess about! Also evidenced by how he commissioned the ‘Warwolf’ is thought to be the largest trebuchet ever built.”

Robert the Bruce, Outlaw King (2018) Portrayed by: Chris Pine

“Easily Chris Pine’s career performance imo. It’s impossible not to admire his Robert the Bruce. Loving father. Adorably respectful husband. Do I even need to mention the glorious scenes? Lover. Fighter. King of the Scots!!!”

Additional Propaganda Under the Cut

Additional Propaganda

For King Edward I:

For Robert the Bruce:

[cimmerian-war-shrine]

[martuzzio]

"...Who are you guys?"

"Trust me, you don't want to know."

Check out more Medieval 141 here

[befuddled-calico-whump]

practicing anatomy so of course there's gonna be blood

[moviesmoodboards]

Outlaw King 2018 dir.David Mackenzie

Requested by @visenyasdragon

[jasontodd-is-alive]

Before and after of a medieval/DND inspired Jason Todd design. I'm working on ones for Kori and Roy as well!!! Ahhhhh I love drawing my boy again

[i-love-books-because-reasons]

Feeding a Medieval Outlaw

[edensungilda]

New story on wattpad | Your Demise

Hey guys! Just published two chapters on a story I'm working on. I'm still practicing and writing on "FIREWEAVER" and will finish that first before I continue on "Your Demise" just wanted to get feedback on how the first two chapters are before I continue working on it. Would mean a lot if you take a look because I hope to self publish <3

-Description-

Lunaris Sernet, an outlaw who narrowly escapes her execution, finds herself entangled in the arms of one of the very rangers who could have her killed. Arson Chaucer, a ranger who risks it all for a girl he barely knows, chases phantoms and memories as he tries to unravel a decade old plot. Can the two learn to trust each other in this country filled with serpents and thieves, or will they be the others demise? Isarapho is a country in the fantastical world of Irevia, filled with brimming biomes of deserts and timber forests, a mountain with century old secrets, and a political conflict that threatens to explode into an all out war. For Lunaris Sernet, all she cares about is surviving the wildfire and hiding within the ashes. She's tired of running. And she'll do everything she can to leave the Wild West of Isarapho, even if it means leaving her heart behind. **SLOW UPDATES**

-PREVIEW-

Well this put being six feet under into a whole new perspective.

I lay in a coffin, staring blankly up at the wooden surface that kept my small space separate from the outside world. It was surreal, but my dreams had a funny way of tricking me like that.

I couldn't feel anything. Or maybe that's just what being dead feels like. I wasn't sure. Oddly, I was okay with either outcome. So long as I got out of this place one way or another.

I pressed my palms against the veil that kept my surroundings hidden, sliding the cover off with a bit of effort on my part.

Sunlight met my eyes and I winced, fluttering my lashes before adjusting to the light.

My breath caught in my throat. I was in front of my little cabin, surrounded by a beautiful field of poppies and tall stalks of grass.

Just as I was about to step out I felt myself pulled through the world, the poppies becoming smaller and smaller as the dream slipped through my fingers. I crashed into what felt like cold water, before my eyes flashed open, my lips inhaling a mixture of air and liquid.

I sputtered, coughing as a man clad in armor stood above my form, holding the bucket that had assaulted me.

I caught my breath after a moment and looked up at him with a vice. Not only had he interrupted what very well may be my last dream, but he was late.

'I thought an execution was supposed to be on time?'

I was ushered from the floor to stand in my humid hot cell, my hands quickly restrained behind my back. Heavy, muffled breathing of the guard who awakened me seemed to be the only noise that filled the silence.

I fidgeted, twitched, and tapped my foot in every known possible way to show my impatience. Yes, here I was, impatient for my own demise. All I did for five sennights was await this day, and now even my executioners seemed to take delight in drawing out my suspense.

The guard finished binding my hands, leading me out of the cell and into a dimly lit hallway. My eyes adjusted to the drastic change between my shrouded cell room to the oil lamps illuminating dark shadows against the walls.

I was guided to walk to the left- or more so poked and shoved forward as the chains around my wrists bit painfully into my skin. The clinking echoed down the hall as we walked, my legs aching with a numb sort of pain, like the kind of tingling when one sat too long in one spot, or like pin needles stabbing over and over.

My hands ached and I tried to readjust my wrists, earning myself a sharp jab between my shoulder blades. I stumbled ahead, gritting my teeth and regaining my balance.

I walked past a puddle on the floor, water dripping from a crack in the ceiling. I licked my chapped lips. I wonder if they would be so merciful to allow me a last drink and meal before my execution?

I seemed to walk down an infinite passage, counting the graving on the wall, each lamp and wooden beam to try and retain some sort of time frame to how long I was walking for.

Finally, I faced another wall as a corner came into view. I felt the guard's metallic grip tighten around my arm, moving me around into the passageway and facing a stair case.

The stone looked blankly back at me, stark grey and making my throat tighten as I looked up at its height. I hesitated. I hadn't walked in ages, my bare feet already sore from traversing the tile. It looked intimidating, and I wondered how many steps I'd survive before falling to my death. Maybe this was their way of killing ne.

I wasn't allowed much time to swallow my nerves though, the guard yanking me forward and beginning to climb the extensive flight of steps.

I could feel sparks fluttering to my fingertips as my heart rushed to my ears. It was finally sinking in, the uneasiness of knowing your fate lied just at the top. That in a quick short succession of being condemned and imprisoned, your life was just a fleeting moment away from being cut short.

And my crime, I wondered? I wasn't sure anymore. I had been running before most could even walk. Now it seemed I had finally found myself at the end of those tracks, unable to escape as I looked at the edge of a very high cliff, the world closing in and threatening to shove me off.

I counted the several balusters that emulated the timber trees up north, the framing etched with carvings surprisingly fancy for a staircase leading out of a dungeon. That explained why the rest of the place was in shambles.

As I finally reached the top, I let out a sigh of relief to finally see sunlight. The hallway's left wall was covered with tall glass pane windows, suffusing my surroundings with warm yellow. I didn't bother to familiarize myself with the rest, I didn't want to have my prison be the last thing I remembered.

Instead I found myself thinking of the fields the sun must be basking right now, filled with poppies and tall stalks of grass that tilted in the wind like rolling waves.

I wondered if they'd spare me the favor of burying me there. It was a silly dream, why would they ever do that for an outlaw such as I? And how were they planning to kill me anyway? I speculated it must be something of equal punishment for an individual like me.

For thieves, their hands were cut off before being hung. For murderers, they usually were sent to the guillotine. Blasphemers had their tongue cut out and burned at the stake.

Liars and betrayers, hung by their legs upside down, waterboarded til they asphyxiated.

But for my crime, oh the council would not be so merciful. They were very meticulous, treating every execution like artistry. Everything had to symbolize something. Had to be a punishment equal to the crime, balancing the weights lady Justice held.

I snapped out of my thoughts as we entered a large courtyard. Sand filled it with an open view of the sky above, the only coverings overhanging on either wall with marble pillars etched with the same illustrations of timber trees, except this time including the imagery of huge birds, their talons claiming the shoulders of their victims and lifting them into the sky.

I looked to the middle of the clearing, a wooden platform with a rosetted trim. Two armored sentinels awaited me. A tall wooden pole stood in the middle of the platform, rope woven into a noose meeting my eyes.

A dull way to die. Quick and easy. Not a gaudy execution or showy display. I see why the council had chosen it. They were trying to tell me that my life was too insignificant for the effort. Which also played in part the lack of audience.

I closed my eyes, willing myself to move.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

[ladyelizabeths]

Florence Pugh as Elizabeth de Burgh in Outlaw King (2018)

[nyx-and-nox]

Currently traveling, so I don't have anything to post (though I'm going to try something with some photos I took). Anyways, this us an OC redesign from a few weeks ago. I haven't completely figured her out yet, but this is Manaia!

[medievalandfantasymelee]

THE HOT MEDIEVAL & FANTASY MEN MELEE

QUALIFYING ROUND: 116th Tilt

James Douglas, Outlaw King (2018) VS. King Richard IV Plantagenet, The Black Adder (1982)

Propaganda

James Douglas, Outlaw King (2018) Portrayed by: Aaron Taylor-Johnson

*Cracks knuckles* *Rolls shoulders* *SCREAMS LIKE A MANIAC* just getting into the spirit of the character. "Mair fell than wes ony devill in hell." That is how poet John Barbour described James, “The Blak Dowglas” as he came to be known to the English. And Aaron Taylor-Johnson matched that energy 200% in this movie. This man is BAT CRAP LOONY TUNES. He’s feral. Berserkers wish they were as berserk as this crazy Scotsman. I personally find using a mail coif as a weapon to be very sexy. He’ll try to seduce your daughter and when you threaten to cut his balls of, he’ll kiss you full on the mouth and then go and flirt with your OTHER daughter. He just wants his family’s lands back, and by God he will get them, and he will be screaming DOUGLAS!!!!!!! all the way home. (Cont. below the cut)

King Richard IV, The Black Adder (1982) Portrayed by: Brian Blessed

"His voice. Omg his voice. It makes me think I could be attracted to men."

Additional Propaganda Under the Cut

Additional Propaganda

For James Douglas:

"I submit also these choice quotes from this Pajiba article, because Roxana Hadidi put it better than I can. [“In Appreciation of Aaron Taylor Johnson Going Full Beastmode in Outlaw King”]:

… it’s Taylor-Johnson’s feral qualities that add verve to these action scenes; he’s the character the film relies on to clue us into the English’s cruelty. While the rest of the Scottish camp is eating and socializing, he’s practicing sword moves in the woods, preparing himself for whatever threat is coming their way. While Pine has to be the believable kingly figure, Taylor-Johnson is over here attacking dudes with their own chainmail and slitting throats in church on Palm Sunday (it’s so bloody and over the top and great). He takes back his family castle, throws the invading English soldiers down a well, and then invites the castle staff to eat the feast they had been forced to prepare for the invaders—and then he encourages them all to join him in supporting Robert the Bruce before burning his own castle down so the English can’t come back and claim it. […] [He] is the live wire the movie needs, not only to demonstrate how [Robert] sets himself apart while performing his royal role but also because the action scenes are so essential to telling this story effectively, to demonstrating the brutality and the bloodiness of this time.’

For Richard IV:

[cimmerian-war-shrine]

[nightwingcouldyounot]

Again what is it with the Medieval style clothing? 

The Amazons (and adjacent) have always been based on 'Ancient’ cultures style clothing. 

(Red Hood Outlaw 042)