The campaign is deliberately set in the years after the time of King Arthur and his knights (near the end of the 6th century) and before the dawn of the historical period (near the beginning of the 9th century). Although by the 12th century King Arthur had become a legendary hero of Dark Age Britain, there is no mention of him at all in the works of his supposed contemporaries. Tales of the Round Table, the Sword in the Stone, and the Quest for the Grail simply do not exist.
What do exist are independent stories of places and people which are the basis of later legends. Thus characters may hear of the ancient capital of Camulodunum (Caer Camulod), seat of the High King of Britain before the coming of the Empire. Legends of Myrddin the Enchanter and his prophecies are told throughout the Cymbrian kingdoms. Aurelius Ambrosianus, the last of the Romans, is credited with a great victory over the Saxons at Caer Baddon (the location of which varies depending on the storyteller). Tales of the “proud tyrant” who gave lands to the Saxons Hengist and Horsa in return for military service are still told as warnings against allowing foreigners to establish footholds in the lands of the Britons.
On the Saxon side, there are other stories to be told. There is Sigeberht the monkish king, who came out of his monastery to fight but was killed when he refused to abandon his religious vows and take up arms and armor. Or there is the fierce pagan king Aethelfrith, who had more than a thousand monks from the Cymbrian monastery at Bangor put to the sword when they were seen to be praying for a Cymbrian victory, thus fulfilling the prophesy of doom against the Cymbrian Church for its dismissal of the missionaries from Rome.
Cymbrians and Saxons
The islands of Britain include such people as the Eruish (Irish), the Skotti, and the Picts. Other important people are the Franks and the Frisians (from near the peninsula of Denmark). But the two main races of men in Dark Age Britain are Cymbrians and Saxons.
The Cymbrians (who live in the region of Wales and Cornwall) see themselves as the defenders of Britain against the encroaching Saxons. Although they are ardent churchmen, they come from a background of warriors, bards, and druids. Family and status are of the utmost importance; a Cymbrian can recite his or her family history as far back as seven generations and determine his exact place in the family or clan hierarchy. In fact, the most important unit of power is family and clan.
The Saxons (a word indifferently applied to Angles and Saxons) are a newly arrived and newly converted warrior folk from the dark Teutonic forests east of the Frankish kingdoms. Although they are as zealous as any newly converted people, they are close enough to their pagan past to still fear it. The warrior’s life surrounds the hall, where there is feasting, ritualized boasting, and entertainment provided by scops (pronounced “shops”). Family is personally important but the relationship of retainer to lord is the most central to a warrior’s life. Saxons can be a morose people, brooding over the impermanence of life, the constant sense of which leads them to desperately heroic and often doom-shrouded actions.
The differences between Cymbrians and Saxons appears most dramatically in their different attitudes to the supernatural world. The Cymbrians, while governed by a healthy fear of the supernatural world and its denizens, nonetheless regard that world opportunistically for the magical power that it offers. Their myths are full of stories about raids on the otherworld or events in which the magical and the mundane interact and support each other. The Saxons, on the other hand, regard the supernatural with both fear and awe. They feel as though the gods of that world shape events in this one (the most widespread idea in Saxon society is that no man can escape his fate). So they try to stay under the otherworldly radar, as it were. Where Cymbrians see the possibility of interaction, rivalry, and exchange, Saxons see conflict or even outright hostility.
A good sense of Cymbrian society and culture can be found in the poem Y Gododdin which is attributed to the fabled 6th century bard Aneirin though the earliest manuscript is from the 13th century. The best representation of the pagan Saxon past is in the anonymous Beowulf, dated to the 8th-10th centuries. A sense of Cymbrian and Saxon religious perspectives can be seen in Gildas’s On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain and Bede’s Ecclesiastic History of the English People.
Campaigns can feature either Cymbrian or Saxon characters, but it is not recommended that they mix. Cymbrian characters in a Saxon campaign will always have a lower status than Saxon characters, and in this way their advancement will suffer. Likewise, Saxons in a Cymbrian setting would have to be either alltuds (foreigners dependent on a local uchelwr) or slaves. The same holds for Eruish, Skotti, or Pictish characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment