After being delayed repeatedly due to the ongoing global pandemic, The Green Knight, a mythical Arthurian fantasy epic by filmmaker David Lowery, is finally set to premiere in American theaters on July 30th. In the meantime, tabletop gamers interested in learning more about this film's mood and theme should check out the movie's official RPG adaptation called The Green Knight: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game. This tabletop RPG's core plot arc and focus on honor vs. dishonor hints at a thematic question likely central to The Green Knight film – whether maintaining honor and praised in story and song is worth laying down your life.
The story of The Green Knight movie is drawn directly from a 14th Arthurian romance written by an unknown poet about Sir Gawain, a peerless knight of King Arthur's Round Table. During a Christmas feast at Camelot, an axe-bearing green-clad knight, faerie-like in nature, rides into the feasting hall and proposes a wager of courage: the Green Knight will let one of the knights strike him with a single blow, if that knight swears to receive the same blow from him in a year's time. Gawain accepts the wager and cuts the Green Knight's head clean off, only for the knight to stand, retrieve their own severed head, and ride off. Sir Gawain is now honor-bound to search both England and the mystical Otherworld for the Green Knight's Chapel, then to kneel and submit his neck to the Green Knight's axe.
Unlike other movies that try to make the legend of King Arthur historical, gritty, and grimy, the trailer footage for David Lowery's adaptation of The Green Knight is full of dream-like, explicitly fantastical imagery; a Green Knight with a face of wood and bark, massive giants walking through mist, talking foxes, and magical treasures. Snippets of dialogue from these trailers establish Sir Gawain as young and eager to prove himself, a knight desperately yearning for a heroic tale of himself to tell. Every trailer also explicitly brings up the notion of honor, a quality central to the entire purpose of a knight – and its this quality the The Green Knight: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game is designed to explore.
The player kit for The Green Knight: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game is packaged in the style of a vintage Dungeons & Dragons starter box, with pre-printed character sheets (embodying archetypes such as the Hunter, The Sorcerer, The Bard, The Knight, and The Noble), a map, a slender rulebook, and a twenty-sided die. According to Polygon, the gameplay of The Green Knight: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a rough blend of narrative RPGs like Apocalypse World and classic D&D, where players roll a D20 and consult their sheet's skills to see how well their character tackles the challenges they face on their way to the Green Knight's chapel.
Rather than losing health, players who roll poorly or make poor choices accrue a quality called "Dishonor," and player characters who gain too much Dishonor are removed from play until the game session's next scene or until they find an in-character way to atone. Each story encounter in The Green Knight rulebook – a run-in with a gang of bandits, an encounter with a talking fox and a starving family, treasure at the bottom of the lake – is designed to test a player character's ability to make the "honorable" decision. This "dishonor as damage" RPG mechanic may well be a commentary of sorts on the "Christian morality tale" nature of many medieval Arthurian Romances: a hero who fails to maintain their honor is unlikely to have their tale immortalized in song.
Gritty and dark medieval dramas such as Game of Thrones tend to portray feudal aristocrats as Machiavellian, cynical, peasant-kicking tyrants who despise book-learning and mouth empty platitudes about honor to exploit and manipulate their underlings. To be sure, by modern standards, medieval knights and nobles could be alarmingly war-hungry, ruthless, and cavalier about the casualties of the the peasants levies they led into battle. Maintaining one's reputation for honor, however, was a very real and practical concern for the gentry of the Middle Ages, as described in this blog post by North Carolina State University history professor Bret C. Devereaux; a medieval aristocrat who visibly broke faith with their fellows and failed to keep their word risked being abandoned by their subordinate, condemned by their rulers and ostracized by their peers... and this is the sort of world The Green Knight movie and its RPG adaptation take place in.
While playing a session of the The Green Knight tabletop RPG, player, despite their best efforts, will inevitably gain at least some points of "Dishonor," particularly towards the end-game as the deadline to reach the Green Knight's Chapel looms. People familiar with the original Green Knight poem will also know that Gawain, though he does keep his appointment with the Green Knight, doesn't leave the Chapel with his honor completely untarnished. In poem, movie, and roleplaying game, it is seemingly impossible for a knight (or anyone else) to be perfectly honorable in their conduct.
But it is possible to for a knight to be more honorable than the foes they face, or more honorable than they were yesterday. This, it would seem, is the core theme of The Green Knight: A Fantasy Roleplaying Game, and by extension, the upcoming movie it's based on. Sir Gawain, the protagonist movie-goers identify with and tabletop gamers try to emulate, goes on a difficult, perilous, and trying quest into order to prove himself as a heroic knight. As a fallible human being, it's impossible for him (and humanity in general) to be perfectly honorable in conduct, but it is only through testing himself and his honor against a seemingly impossible challenge that Gawain can become more courageous and honest than he is.
The Green Knight will be out in American Theaters on July 30th, 2021.
Sources: A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Polygon
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