GMBC ep38 - Adventures in Arthurian Dystopia: The Bright Sword with author, Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman
The Bright Sword
Speaker A
00:00:04.960 - 00:00:06.600
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club,.
Speaker B
00:00:06.600 - 00:00:27.280
Where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop roleplaying experience. Have you ever dreamed about becoming a knight of King Arthur's Roundtable? Colm has, but he's too late.
Arthur is dead, most of the great knights are gone, and the utopia of Camelot is shattered. He and the remaining knights attempt to rekindle the Round Table, but they face political, religious and magical forces that seek.
Speaker A
00:00:27.280 - 00:00:28.720
To undermine the realm.
Speaker B
00:00:29.040 - 00:01:41.350
Join author and gaming nerd Lev Grossman, his son Ross o', Donnell, and veteran game Masters Book Club GM Eric Drix.
As we discuss the Bright Sword, we discuss animated suits of armor as PCs, the advantages of setting your campaign in dystopian power vacuum, LGBTQ and neurodivergent knights of the Roundtable, and Lev's completely fictional plan to write the Bright Bard, an all bard D and D adventure. Let's get into the conversation. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Game Master's Book Book Club.
My name is Eric Jackson and we are going to be talking about the Bright Sword by Lev Grossman today, which is kind of convenient since one of our guest game masters is the man himself, Lev Grossman. We'll have him and our other game masters introduce themselves in just a second to talk about this book.
And they're also going to talk about how knights, which is the primary thing that is happening inside of the Bright Sword. We're going to have them talk about how knights have impacted their gaming as well as a little bit about their gaming experience.
We're starting with our veteran game master, Eric Drix. Eric, why don't you tell the folks a little bit about yourself and about how knights have factored into your tabletop role playing experience.
Speaker C
00:01:41.670 - 00:03:17.110
Thanks for having me here. My name is Eric Drix.
I am a longtime gamer back in the day, played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of different editions from the Philadelphia area. Yeah, excited to be here and to talk about this.
And knights have played a huge part, you know, growing up on reading different Arthurian tales and those heroics and movies like Excalibur and things that just brought it home. And I still remember in first edition Dungeons and Dragons they had a cavalier class and I just jumped into play it, not really recognizing.
They really hit the laws of chivalry really hard, which got my character killed. Unfortunately, there were certain mechanical rules that I was like, I'm going to do this. Wait, I can't retreat. But that thing's really powerful.
So I got myself killed that way on the GM side of it I actually ran a whole campaign centered around an evil cult that decided to in a land where Arthur was in power and all the knights were there, this evil cult decided to take over and create their own sword in the stone and had a puppet of theirs be the unlikely candidate that happened to draw it. And suddenly elevating.
Working behind the scenes to elevate their candidate to become the new king of this land and then evil cult running things through them.
Speaker B
00:03:17.430 - 00:03:22.150
Wow. All right, so tons of really great nightly adventures there for Eric.
Speaker C
00:03:22.230 - 00:03:22.950
Absolutely.
Speaker B
00:03:23.410 - 00:03:29.570
All right, we're going to move on to Ross. Ross, do you want to introduce yourselves to the folks and tell them about gaming and night?
Speaker D
00:03:29.650 - 00:03:34.530
Absolutely. Hello, my name is Ross o'. Donnell. I'm also notably Lev Grossman's oldest son.
Speaker B
00:03:34.610 - 00:03:35.330
Woo hoo.
Speaker D
00:03:35.570 - 00:04:37.460
So I've had some firsthand experience watching him put together a world of knights and magic. But for myself growing up, I had a pretty basic 5e module and the books which I would often be wrangling my friends and my little siblings into.
But I will say I actually I didn't get too hard into knighthood in my gaming life.
I think in part because I was a hardcore fencer in high school and through most of my childhood to the point that I think that I lent into more fantastical elements in my gaming. But I will say I only ever had one true knight character in any of my games I was very fond of.
His name was Harold with an E like heraldry and he was actually an animated suit of armor, one of those classic situations who had been brought to life by a wizard as a last ditch defense of a keep. But because he was a display piece of armor, he'd never actually been in battle and he was a pretty terrible knight for most of his round.
Speaker B
00:04:37.780 - 00:04:38.619
That's amazing.
Speaker D
00:04:38.619 - 00:04:39.460
Very fun to play.
Speaker C
00:04:39.780 - 00:04:40.580
That's awesome.
Speaker B
00:04:41.060 - 00:04:46.980
Oh, I have to. Okay. As a fellow fencer, I must ask Saber epee or foil?
Speaker D
00:04:47.460 - 00:04:48.660
Foil all the way.
Speaker B
00:04:48.740 - 00:05:17.760
Okay, that's allowed. As long as you're not one of those epic people. It's okay. It's fine. I'm a, I'm. I'm a saber fencer myself. But where the. The barbarians do you know, do.
Do still exist. Yes, it's true. Okay.
Anyway, onto our, our super duper guest and writer of the book we're going to be reviewing this time around for your gaming pleasure is Lev Grossman. Lev, you want to tell the folks about your gaming journey as well as what. I mean. Heck, you've said a lot about nights already in the book.
Speaker E
00:05:18.000 - 00:07:13.260
That's true. I've always got more to say. Well, I grew up, I'm incredibly old.
I started my gaming journey and in the late 1970s and the 80s I played a huge amount of Dungeons and dragons. This was first edition AD&D. I actually played a lot of game world, a lot of top secret game I don't hear much about anymore.
We played Champions, we played a lot of Traveler remains one of my favorite games of all time. But in D and D, which is what we did probably most often.
I can remember the first time I played D and D and I was very keen to play to be a magic user. And so I, you know, I rolled up some sort of half elf magic user.
I think it was like a D4 of hit dice and I had a dart as my sort of offensive weapon. And having discharged, duly discharged my magic missiles, I then died immediately.
And at that point I swore a mighty oath that I would never again play magic user. And I would only ever play a human fighter. And that is all that I have ever played since then.
And on the face of it, it sounds kind of dull just to be a generic human fighter. But it was interesting trying to find, you know, the various textures and flavors and motivations behind this otherwise very off the shelf character.
Especially when we were dealing with Palinins. They seem sort of mechanical in a way because they have this, you know, iron rule of chivalry that they have to abide by.
So figuring out the kind of personal relationship between the character and the code that they live by and when they feel like they are, they have to violate it. When they have these difficult decisions to make which don't seem to really. There doesn't need to be any right answer.
I found those, those predicaments very interesting and they all ended up feeding into the bright sword in one way or another.
I never had an animated suit of armor, but those display suits of armor, I see them all the time and you know, they really are not that convincing and it would suck to actually be an animated version of one.
Speaker B
00:07:15.030 - 00:07:21.390
I was figuring you were going to tell me you were like six possums inside of a suit of armor when you were talking about that, which also could have been really fun or six.
Speaker E
00:07:21.390 - 00:07:22.230
Could have been cool.
Speaker B
00:07:22.550 - 00:08:56.500
Yeah, yeah, there you go. Next time if you want to be a suit of armor, you've got it again.
I'm Eric Jackson and I am the host of the show and I have been playing since the Pleistocene, like lev, since the 1970s. And the very, very, very, very first character I made was a paladin. My absolute first character that I ever played with other people.
I played a couple different characters in the. The toughest dungeon in the world, which was a solo dungeon you could play. But that was really my. My first character was Xor, the paladin.
He was Xor because I thought Xor looked cool. And then someone told me that that spelled Zor and not Xor, so I added an E in front of it. So.
So for the longest time, I had a character sheet that had like this little E and this giant X or they're on there. So that was my. That was my character. But mostly as a. As a game master, I love having paladins in the party. I love having knights in the party.
They're very easy to. They're easy to predict, but also and easy to motivate. So it makes things really great for. As a game master.
And I'm a huge fan of including nightly orders at every possible opportunity, if nothing else, just so I can. Just so I can mess with them.
But we've got an entire book full of nights that we still need to talk about, so that means I'm going to pass it over to the author himself, because why have little O me review it when we can have the man, the myth, the legend himself talk about it? So go ahead, Lev, and. Go ahead, Lev, and tell us all about your book.
Speaker E
00:08:58.020 - 00:10:23.110
We should have had my agent on here. She's much better at talking about my book than I am. The Bright Sword is a book that I spent about.
About 10 years working on, and it was very much inspired by Malory and Once a Future King, it is. It's an Arthurian novel. I guess one of the things that makes it slightly distinctive is that much of it is set in the post Arthurian era.
It's about a young knight who comes to Camelot, discovers that he's arrived just a week or two after Arthur has died. And most of the Round Table has been killed in the Battle of Camelot. And it's just him and a couple of like, half a dozen sort of oddball knights.
The heroes, not Lancelot, not Galahad or any of those guys, because they're all gone. Except for Lancelot. Sorry, Lancelot's not dead. He's just. He's in a monastery somewhere because you could just. You can't kill that guy. The hero.
And these oddball knights, they have this challenge, which is to try to figure out how to rebuild Camelot and keep Arthur's legacy going when they don't have the big heroes on their side. And they don't appear to have God on their side either. God picked out Arthur and made it very clear who was meant to be king.
But when once Arthur died, there was no one to succeed him. So they are adrift in this empty landscape and have to figure out how to put, push everything back, to put everything back together.
And then a lot of the book also sort of looks back on Fall of Arthur and what led up to it and what ultimately caused it. Hopefully put a slightly distinctive spin on that old story.
Speaker B
00:10:23.680 - 00:10:28.640
Ross, is there anything that you feel your dad missed, everybody needs to know about from this book?
Speaker D
00:10:28.960 - 00:11:01.260
I wouldn't say missed, but there is. I will say it's not a small book and so if you were going to talk through, you might even talk longer than that.
But I think one of the wonderful things about it is to see all of the forces that are acting on that. Like post Arthurian Britain, it's post Arthur, but it's not an empty world at all.
There's the fairies and there are the rival kings and many other forces who you don't necessarily see in the spotlight in that kind of book who are present here. And it's very interesting to see how they interact with the remains of the table.
Speaker B
00:11:02.300 - 00:11:04.860
Agreed. Eric, anything you want to add?
Speaker C
00:11:05.020 - 00:11:43.380
I will just say that growing up I snuck into my school library and found a book of Arthurian tales and that was really how I started delving in. And this brought me right back to those first moments because it is a.
Is a wonderful, fresh take on the Arthurian knights and you learn more about knights that again, had. Didn't get the spotlight as much.
So it just took me right back to being a kid again, really delving into the Arthurian tales, but updating them in a very fresh, modern, personal way. So I loved it.
Speaker E
00:11:44.020 - 00:11:44.580
Yep.
Speaker B
00:11:44.580 - 00:12:21.200
No, agreed. Fantastic writing led amazing job. The Mallory stuff can be a bit hard to get through as a modern reader.
And I agree also with you, Ross, that the overlapping worlds that are here going all the way back to the Saxons and that whole ancient, all the ancient magics and then fairy and then the church and then the, the dukes and the. Oh, it's just, yeah, very well crafted, very well crafted. So, yeah, we have this well crafted world.
Lev, would you be willing to talk to us about how you built such a complicated and layered world?
Speaker E
00:12:21.360 - 00:14:12.990
Sure.
I mean, one of the challenges of really working with an Arthurian story is that of course the world has been built and in many ways overbuilt already. People have Been telling and retelling the story of Arthur for more than a thousand years.
And so the difficulty really is sifting through what's there and figuring out what kind of resonates for you and resonates kind of in the world around you.
One of the things that I became aware of early on when writing the book was that Arthur's liberty was living in what we now call a post colonial world. Britain had been a possession of the Roman Empire for 350 years and then the Romans left in a big hurry because they were having problems with Goths.
And they left behind this very shattered nation, which Arthur was the one who sort of pulled it back together.
But he was reckoning with the kind of aftermath and the scars that the imperial occupation had left on Britain, which had a lot to do with his own father and really his own birth. And a lot of what the Romans did to Britain really broke it. And they came back to haunt Arthur and in some ways it doomed him.
And this sense of postcolonialism, this sense of a world with refugees, with populations moving around, also a very diverse world. One of the things I was able to do was write about a knight who's gay, a knight who's trans, knights who are maybe disabled or artif Urgent.
What you find yourself doing is looking for the stories that haven't been told. And the surprising thing with a world like Arthur's is that you always immediately find them, but you definitely have to go digging.
It's a big challenge not to tell the stories that have come before. So you are sort of not so much world building, it's.
You're sort of digging around in this world that has been massively built many, many times over and figuring out what is there, that it's interesting, what needs to be turned over so we can see the other side of it that has never been done before.
Speaker C
00:14:13.710 - 00:14:14.190
Nice.
Speaker B
00:14:14.750 - 00:14:43.960
I think that's part of what makes gaming really work well too.
I think the idea that you go into a world, even if you're going into a set world like Greyhawk or Faerun or tal' Dorei or any of those places, there's a story that's being told in the, in the book and then you're looking for the spaces that haven't really been told. So I do think this is a great primer for that, for how people can create characters and create really interesting characters from existing material.
So that's, that's very inspiring. Thank you.
Speaker C
00:14:44.200 - 00:15:04.240
Yeah, thank you. Knowing what to take, what to leave behind when crafting A world is sometimes challenging, sometimes you just want to include it all.
But I think you even said something, I think you said about taking the pieces that you need to create the story that you want to tell. And that resonates a lot.
Speaker B
00:15:05.200 - 00:15:40.480
Yep. It's a fine manual given the, given the huge backlog.
Like if you look at, if you look at Dungeons and Dragons and you see all the lore that's there, you have to know what you need to take and what you don't want to take. So I'm not comparing the, the 50 years of D and D to the thousand plus years of, of Arthur.
But speaking of D and D, we're going to go over to you, Ross.
We're going to start talking about mechanics and we're going to start talking about if we wanted to bring the world of the Bright Sword to the Tabletop universe, what system do you think would be the most effective for making that happen and why?
Speaker D
00:15:41.040 - 00:16:43.360
Well, my thought on that immediately, just for Mechanics is a system that I have gotten the pleasure to play in. Pretty brief. It's Mithras by the design Mechanism, it's a D100 system.
It's really more of like a set of tools to play with, like a set of rules to like build your character and to manage the world.
But it leaves a lot of flexibility in the world building that I think would be pretty useful for the game master to introduce their version of Arthur's Britain.
And the reason that I really think it would be a good fit is because its combat system, it's known for like this very flavored blow by blow combat that is like very satisfying. It really feels like you're in it and it's not like you're just hitting the other guy with your sword over and over again.
You've got proactive and reactive actions that you can use.
You can, you know, go for a gap in the armor and you can, you know, regain your footing and there's a lot closing or holding range or, you know, opening and closing the circle of the fight in a way that I think is really mirrored in the many very solid fight scenes in this book for the knights.
Speaker B
00:16:43.360 - 00:16:43.800
Nice.
Speaker D
00:16:44.040 - 00:16:46.440
And I think, yeah, I think it would be a good fit.
Speaker B
00:16:46.520 - 00:16:53.750
That's a great suggestion. Eric, do you want to drop in next and talk about what you think you'd be running in running this. Running the Brightsworded?
Speaker C
00:16:53.750 - 00:16:57.030
Sure. I'm going to jump right into Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker B
00:16:57.350 - 00:16:57.750
Great.
Speaker C
00:16:57.990 - 00:18:26.710
Throughout all the different editions, they were heavily influenced and a lot of information about Arthurian tales. And mythology that you can really leverage.
In first edition D and D you had the old Deities and Demigods book and that's a whole section on different Arthurian myths and what monsters were there. In the 3.5 version there was a supplement called Legends of Excalibur, Arthurian Adventures written by Charles Rice. They could leverage 5th edition.
Taking it up a step, there was the Arthurian Artifacts by Clairborne Studios. That talks more about the items and leaning into 5th edition as well. There's the classes themselves that they build.
So if you wanted to build a nightly party, you could build a use a war cleric, a Bard of Valor, a paladin, even a ranger that has maybe a little heavier armor, a blade singing wizard or a swashbuckler rogue could all fit into that noble knight sort of place. So you could have options of building a whole party of knightly type of characters.
The other is through the unit system and that's more of an open system to create and design your characters. And they have flavors like dungeons and zombies, which is a D and D esque unit system that might be a little bit different take on that.
Speaker B
00:18:26.790 - 00:20:40.480
I'm going to jump in with mine next and talk about because I know Eric was kind enough to let me talk about Pendragon, which has been around almost as long as D and D. It's in its sixth edition now. It's from the Chaosium group. And obviously Pendragon is based off of the Arthurian system, the Arthurian legend. It's a D20ish system.
Mostly it's about rolling low like back in the day when you had to roll under your or under the numbers for your save. So going way back to first edition there. One of the reasons why I like Pendragon is because of its opposed personality traits.
So you like, you know, bravery versus cowardice or intelligence versus stubbornness or something along those lines. There's a bunch of really interesting opposed personality traits that work either for or against your character.
And then they have this idea of passions which is that you can sort of activate your passion, that this is the thing that you are on quest for and if you activate it correctly, everything really good at it. And then other times if you fail to activate your passion, you get a massive negative which means you've. You've applied your passion incorrectly.
And I saw both of those things happen. Those kinds of situations happen in the Bright Sword where everything is kind of going your way.
And then other times it was just like, yep, nothing's working. I was like, yeah, we've got this here.
It also has a really interesting downtime mechanic which they call the Winter Phase, so that there's a couple of resting periods in the Bright Sword that I really like that this would match up with. And they've also got both large scale battle and skirmish mechanics. And there was that. There's a couple.
There's at least one large scale battle and you could have. You could. Obviously if you run a campaign you could have more. So all of those are really good.
As a runner up to that, I will also put in a note for the Burning Wheel, which has the life path system. It's a whole thing about making your like fulfilling your beliefs and that is mechanically tied to the game. So that's another possibility.
For coolest entry, I will recommend the Sword, the Crown and the Unspeakable Power, which is where we mix Arthurian knights with Cthulhu. I haven't played that last one, so your mileage may vary. But that does sound really interesting. That's by Wheel Tree Press.
Speaker C
00:20:41.440 - 00:20:42.480
Sounds terrifying.
Speaker B
00:20:43.120 - 00:20:51.200
It does. It absolutely does. Okay, Lev, do you want to talk to us about how D and D factors into your world?
Speaker E
00:20:51.520 - 00:23:35.650
Sure, sure. That's such a good idea to put the Cthulhu in in an Arthurian context. I wish I had had that idea when I was writing A Bright Sword.
I would totally have done it. D and D, it's my primary reference when I think about gaming. It's funny, in some ways it is well suited to Arthurian stories and in other ways not.
I mean one of the things that I got into when I was working on the Brightsword was Hema, which I'm sure some of you or some or all of you know as the historical European martial arts. And it was very interesting spending many hours watching people fight with longswords. Doing a little long sword training myself.
It's interesting the ways in which it does not fit into conventional Dungeons and Dragons style combat. Just in that there's so much grappling, there's so much punching and hitting.
It is so often the case that attacks happen simultaneously rather than a kind of a give and take structure.
I feel as though if I were to try to stage the Brightsword within the context of D and D, we'd have to do a little customizing of the swordplay interactions. And of course back in the day I don't think we had D and D had good mechanics for large scale shield wall type armies fighting each other.
And that does of course come out in the brine sword. And it probably Would have come up more often, except it's so difficult to write those scenes.
Spent a lot of time looking at Joe Abercrombie novels because he does that so well and trying to figure out how he did it. I will just throw in a shout out for Mythic Bastion Land, which is a gaming system that fascinates me.
Although I have never had the chance to actually play it, I think it does lean into the kind of some of the messiness of nightly combat because it's a gaming system that was set up to deal with Arthurian style combat. So it does have this sort of Gambit system where it's very fast paced, everything hits, and so you're not even rolling to see if you hit or not.
You're just rolling for damage. Things move very quickly.
It's got built in these opportunities to do sort of feats like pulling somebody off a horse or breaking their shield and things like that. The messy stuff that so often nightly Combat turns on. It's also a very light rule set. It's very minimal.
And I often find that lends itself well to kind of Arthurian storytelling. Arthurian stories tend to be very messy in terms of the world building.
It's not Tolkien where they've worked out everything, every last little detail. It's more like CS Lewis. You're throwing in fairies and angels and God and all kinds of things, and it doesn't necessarily fit together that well.
I feel like Mythic Bastion Land, it accommodates the messiness of Arthurian storytelling in interesting ways.
Speaker B
00:23:36.770 - 00:24:03.070
All right, fantastic.
Okay, folks, if we've talked about systems, then the next thing, of course, is that if you're running a game or you're planning on running a game in the future, you're obviously going to be taking stuff out of the bright sword and putting it into your campaign. And if that's the case, Eric, do you want to talk to folks about what is.
If you had to pluck something out of this and port it over to your campaign, what would you take from the Brightsword and why?
Speaker C
00:24:03.310 - 00:25:55.100
One of the reasons that the characters that don't get a lot of that previously didn't get a lot of time to shine was you had these bigger characters that were there.
So first thing I would sort of take is this great opportunity where you create a kingdom or a superhero game where the main superhero group gets destroyed.
But either way, what you're looking at is there's a vacuum and where good has sacrificed itself to destroy evil, but now those great exemplars of good are no longer there. So it creates an opportunity for players to really jump in and take over those roles of being a hero and try to really live up to that.
So I love that. Creating that vacuum for the players to really shine.
A lot of times in games, they're running off to go find someone more powerful to help them, or they're saying, like, well, why don't these people do something? They're so powerful and they live in this world, but now this is a situation where Arthur's not around.
They can't just run off and find these other knights, some of that, but they can't do that. I love that sort of power vacuum background setting.
The other is sort of this notion of, as we learned about the different knights, they have their own secrets, they have their own private desires.
And I really like that idea of, in character creation, sort of going to your characters and saying, okay, you've given us this character, but what is a secret of your character? Whether it's a desire, something that they feel guilty about, something they want. Maybe they're not really.
They're presenting themselves off as someone they're not just saying, but what is that character secret, I think, is another key takeaway that I love to play off of.
Speaker B
00:25:55.100 - 00:25:59.260
Ross, do you want to talk a little bit about what you'd like to take if you're going to put into a game?
Speaker D
00:26:00.060 - 00:27:02.730
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I've narrowed it down to two things.
The first is one that I think kind of betrays the fact that I have mostly played D and D with sort of classic parties where all of the characters are their own class and very distinct.
But the idea to me, of running a game where everybody is sort of a knight class was interesting to me when I was thinking about this and the way that all of the knight characters who are all knights of the same table, are still built in very distinct ways.
And one of the ways that we see that, which I really love that we get details on, is their unique fighting styles that really show you where they come from and who they are where, you know, Sir Dinadan has a fairy fighting style, and Sir Bedivere has learned to fight with only one hand. And there's, you know, someone with a Roman.
He's got a Roman fighting style, and they all, you know, come together and fight on the same team in very unique and interesting ways.
And I'd like give players a way to distinguish characters that are maybe on the outside pretty similar in what they can do and distinguish them by how they do it, by having Them develop their own fighting style.
Speaker B
00:27:03.230 - 00:27:50.020
Great. I've done something similar, not with knights though, for a couple of years at Total Con, which is a convention we have here in Massachusetts.
I've run a couple of All Bard campaigns. We had a who's Got Talent episode one year where we had everyone sort of show off their various bards talents.
And that was the one which was in two parts where I had one group of bards. I had one group of bards who came in and stole the prize before for the show. And then the. I started the second version with an.
With the good bards and they were in the middle of the show. And then at the end of the show, they realized that things had been stolen and they all got together and decided to go stop the other bards.
So the guys who were the player characters in the first one, their characters became the NPCs in the second one.
Speaker D
00:27:50.660 - 00:27:53.060
Oh, that sounds spectacular. An all Bard campaign.
Speaker B
00:27:53.460 - 00:27:54.500
All Bard is great.
Speaker E
00:27:55.720 - 00:28:05.240
One of the things I love about these conversations is there's such good ideas for novels in here and just look for the bright loot coming in, you know, the bright loot.
Speaker B
00:28:06.120 - 00:28:06.920
Fantastic.
Speaker E
00:28:08.200 - 00:28:10.360
I love it. Bard on bard, you know.
Speaker B
00:28:10.440 - 00:28:31.490
Yeah. The whole thing is just. And I agree with.
I definitely agree with Ross that one of the things that's really great about that is that all bards are the charming face of the party. And that's their job. In a traditional. And for a night, your job is to stand there and take hits.
But when you're all knights, it's much more shades of nuance. Or if you're all bards, it's much more shades of nuance. And I think you can really get into that.
Speaker C
00:28:31.810 - 00:28:42.050
One of my friends wanted me to run a D and D campaign where they were playing three bards and they really wanted it to be like a medieval style K pop demon hunters.
Speaker B
00:28:42.210 - 00:28:43.970
Nice. Fantastic.
Speaker E
00:28:44.930 - 00:29:00.440
One of the big inspirations for Bright Sword was the Lloyd Alexander book Chronicles of Pride and. And all respect to Taran and the other major characters, but I was really only interested in fluter flam.
And you know, if there had been like five fluter flams, that would have just been even better.
Speaker B
00:29:00.840 - 00:29:33.690
Oh my goodness. Oh God. Sorry.
This happened the other day too when Ross mentioned the book and he will hopefully mention it again, but I will just completely fanboy over. I came to the Prydain series very late. I came to it in my. In my early 20s. That was the first time I read Taryn.
And when I got to Taryn Wanderer, it like Broke me philosophically and I absolutely adore that series. Sorry. Okay.
Anyway, Lev, I know it's your book and obviously you could take anything you want out of it, but if you were going to run a campaign, what would you take out of your own book and put into your D and D campaign?
Speaker E
00:29:34.170 - 00:31:08.780
I do feel morally free to steal anything I like from my own book.
The thing that comes to mind is when I was writing the book, I had to choose initially whether or not what kind of role Christianity was going to play in the story. Because, of course, Arthur was a very Christian king and I wanted to treat that sort of Christian mythology in this very respectful way.
And ended up becoming a very central part of the book.
And one of the big conflicts in this book, also in Mists of Avalon and a lot of Arthurian stories, is this conflict between, on the one hand, the monotheistic Christian world and the kind of magical pagan world. And I really liked the idea that there were these two magic systems running side by side in the Arthurian world. And not just side by side sign.
But they were sort of incompatible when they met, bad things happened. They couldn't really tolerate each other. Usually in Arthurian stories, you only kind of get one at a time.
You have the angels come down and God gets involved and they do their thing and they leave. And then you get a story about Morgan le Fay and you get the enchanters and the fairies and things like that.
One of the things I wanted to do in the Brightsword was to crash those two magic systems together and have them kind of go head to head. It was a major goal of mine to have an angel fight a bunch of fairies in the book.
And I really like the idea that rather than having sort of magic users and clerics just be fighting alongside each other, this idea that they can't stand each other. And in fact, in order for the adventure to be finished and everything to be good, only one can be left standing.
I think it would be interesting to play that out in a campaign setting.
Speaker B
00:31:09.580 - 00:31:21.340
My suggestion for other game masters out there, that you should totally go in and just take all of Lev's characters. You just should. You should take them all. Every single one of the knights makes a fantastic npc.
Speaker E
00:31:21.420 - 00:31:21.970
I've done it.
Speaker C
00:31:22.680 - 00:31:23.040
That's it.
Speaker B
00:31:23.040 - 00:31:49.800
Yeah, they're out there, but you should. Every single one of them makes a fantastic npc. They're all incredibly enveloped. You can grab hold of it. And each one of them has an amazing story.
We've already mentioned everybody's got their own thing that's happening. And each one of them, it just has a really fantastic voice that I think is worth putting into your campaign.
So if you read this book, just start taking notes and filling out character sheets as you go, because it's absolutely worth it for. It's absolutely worth it to you.
Speaker E
00:31:49.800 - 00:31:50.080
It's.
Speaker B
00:31:50.310 - 00:32:25.040
It's. They are all fantastically well developed.
That is our portable section, which means it is time to talk a little bit about media and other types of media that are like Lev's book.
Obviously, the Magicians was written by Leb and the fantastic series that it is, but we are looking for things that are a bit more Arthurian coded or at least feel like or have the vibes of this book.
Ross, we're going to start with you, and if you want to talk about anything you think feels like your dad's book that you would recommend to other game masters.
Speaker D
00:32:25.040 - 00:32:34.840
Yeah. So one thing that absolutely came to mind when I was reading the book is a series that I grew up with, but that is actually from the 80s.
Tim Ora Pierce's the Song of the Lioness.
Speaker B
00:32:34.840 - 00:32:35.320
Yes.
Speaker D
00:32:35.400 - 00:33:53.660
Yes. Well, well loved. It's. No, not an Arthurian exactly world, but a world of knights and magic. And it follows two twin siblings, a boy and a girl.
And the girl, Alanna, desperately wants to be a knight, while the boy wants to study magic. They are forbidden from this due to, like, the social roles of their genders.
So when the time comes for them to go off and pursue their callings, they make an agreement to switch clothes, switch names, and go and take each other's place. So Alanna gets to go pursue knight training disguised as a boy the entire time. And it's like, it's very well written.
You get to explore her journey as a knight, sort of what becomes of her as she faces challenges and she grows up.
And one thing that is important to me is that Tamora Pierce has gone back now and said that if she didn't have the language at the time, but if she were to talk about it now, that Alanna would certainly be like a gender fluid person. And, you know, really sincerely have been exploring gender during the course of those events, as well as exploring knighthood.
And this was very important for me to read Growing up as a transgender man. And it is also, I think, also comparable to Sir Dinadan's story in the novel as a transgender knight.
And for anybody who really loved Sir Dinadan's arc, I think. And you know what? Anybody who didn't, because I do think that everybody should read these Books.
Speaker B
00:33:54.860 - 00:33:55.900
Everyone should just love it.
Speaker D
00:33:56.780 - 00:34:00.220
Anyone interested in that kind of world should go and check out the Song of the Lioness.
Speaker B
00:34:00.780 - 00:34:02.060
Eric, do you want to go next?
Speaker C
00:34:02.140 - 00:35:01.119
Sure. So I was looking and thinking about it a lot and I went with the Greatcoats series by Sebastian de Castell.
Not because it's Arthurian, but the themes of it. The first book in the series, Traitor's Blade, starts with these three quote unquote greatcoats.
And they are sort of protectors and judges of the people.
They had a king who was very driven and had his dreams of what an empire could be, and he gets killed, the empire's fallen, and these Greatcoats are just trying to find a way to keep their deceased king's dream alive and revive the Greatcoat Order. So. And there's awesome sword fighting in there. There's sort of ceremonial and sort of different types of magic that plays out there.
So in some ways there's. It reminded me a lot of that in terms of comic book, graphic novel. I leaned right into Camelot 3000 with Mike Barr and Brian Boland.
Speaker E
00:35:02.319 - 00:35:05.039
I'm so glad you said it. So I just have to thank you.
Speaker C
00:35:05.919 - 00:35:33.800
Which is just a fun take on it. And as well as back in that day, as the knights get reincarnated, you have the love story again that starts to play out between Tristan and Isolde.
Tristan didn't come back as a guy, so it's a little bit of a. They're trying to find their way and come to terms with who they are and their sexuality. And then of course, the movie Excalibur, which.
Well, it's Excalibur.
Speaker B
00:35:35.100 - 00:35:39.420
Yeah. For people of a certain age, it is quite our authority in text.
Speaker E
00:35:39.500 - 00:35:46.780
I feel many people of my generation were traumatized by having been taken to the Excalibur at too tender an age, which is what happened to me.
Speaker B
00:35:46.780 - 00:36:10.320
But also agreed, there are some things in there that are. Yeah. Yes. For those of you with children, do not take them to the Excalibur, no matter how much you remember how cool it was. Yeah.
Lev, would you be so kind as to tell us about books that you think are kind are like your book and that would. That other people might vibe to in the same way.
Speaker E
00:36:10.400 - 00:39:03.310
Sure. I'd never like to be shy about books that have influenced me because I steal from them so relentlessly.
I've mentioned Joe Abercrombie first of all series. I don't know that anybody writes hand to hand combat more skillfully, but also it's funnier does point of view in this incredible way.
I revere him so much. You'll see, I'm sure, a lot of songwriting. Fire in the Bright Sword, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.
I don't know how many people have read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it's an incredible deep dive into kind of this fictional history of British magic and where it comes from. AAA fairies. Just a plus fairies. It's so eerie and supernatural. I draw in it all the time.
It's quite clear that I've seen Monty Python and Holy Grail many times. There is an epigraph from that movie in the book. It's such a smart movie.
And they're so good at zeroing in on what is absurd about the Arthurian story. I really. I wanted the Brightsword to have moments of humor. I find Arthur can be a little bit humorless.
And so everybody had to kind of joke around a little bit to keep things moving.
I got a little obsessed with the Last of Us while I was working on Brightsword, which has that powerful post apocalyptic vibe which I tried to put some of into the Bright Sword. Arthur's death is an apocalypse and leaves behind this kind of broken dead world which it's desperate to be brought back to life.
And that's sort of the same story they're telling in the Last of Us. These two people traversing a broken world, hoping to bring it back to life and encountering a lot of problems with that along the way.
So that was something that just mood wise, vibes wise. I was very conscious of the last thing I'll say. I'm not a big poetry guy. My father was a poet, but I myself am not a big poetry guy.
But there's a poem by a writer named John M. Broad who was a big deal in his lifetime and is, I feel like, not very much talked about today. But he wrote this poem called Winter Solstice, Camelot Station.
And it is a reimagining of the Arthurian world set in a train station that serves Camelot.
And it's Christmas time and all the knights are coming home for Christmas and each one comes home on their own steam train, which is kind of personalized, sort of tailor made to their own kind of nightly personality.
And it's cold and there's steam everywhere and they're getting off and they're sort of coming home from their adventures and hoping to be kind of renewed and brought back to life. And Arthur is there and Lancelot, and you can tell that everybody is doomed in their own particular way. It's about a page long.
It's the most Arthurian thing that was ever written in the 20th century, I swear to God. And I used to look at it all the time. It's hard to put your finger sometimes on what that Arthurian feeling is, but it is in every word of that poem.
And I recommend that everybody Google it because you can find it on the Internet.
Speaker D
00:39:03.310 - 00:39:03.710
Thank you.
Speaker B
00:39:03.710 - 00:40:02.460
I'll throw in a couple of things. One, I'll throw in Elizabeth Moon's Paksenarian series, which is my favorite night story of all time. So just to put that out there.
Also, the 2001 film A Knight's Tale was in my head a lot when we were talking about these, like, young impostery kind of knights who were out there trying to figure out how to get to Camelot and to be a knight. Also Hannah Templar's Cosmo Knights graphic novels, very knightly, but sci fi. And also has a lot of that gender exploration involved in it as well.
And then the King of Elfilin's Daughter by Lord Dunsney, otherwise known as Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Duncan, one of the most prolific and successful American, you know, British expat American writers of all time. Pre Tolkien fantasy guy. Just really the King. The King of Belfin's Daughter and the Charwoman Shadow are my, like the two books that.
Those are just impossibly amazing.
Speaker E
00:40:02.460 - 00:40:04.260
Those are some. Those are some deep cuts.
Speaker B
00:40:04.260 - 00:40:29.670
Yeah, 1920, 1930s stuff. And believe it or not, we've come to the end. We're here at the end. We've talked about.
We've talked about mechanics, we've talked about stuff we wanted to. Stuff we wanted to. That was portable into our campaigns. And we've talked about media, which means it's time to talk about you guys.
Ross, I understand you have an announcement for the group that this will be coming out in the spring. So I think. Congratulations. Is that correct?
Speaker D
00:40:30.790 - 00:40:35.110
That is correct. The. The event in question is my college graduation.
Speaker B
00:40:36.310 - 00:40:36.870
Yay.
Speaker D
00:40:37.110 - 00:40:43.430
I'm currently a senior at UW Madison and I will be graduating this spring. Likely before this episode comes out.
Speaker B
00:40:43.670 - 00:40:44.870
Oh, almost certainly.
Speaker D
00:40:44.870 - 00:40:47.190
But that is my big life event upcoming.
Speaker B
00:40:47.430 - 00:40:54.550
Fantastic. Lev, do you have stuff you want to plug or recommend for the time period that this will be episode will be arriving?
Speaker E
00:40:54.550 - 00:41:37.440
Oh, I sure do. Somewhat to my own surprise, I wrote a picture book for children called the God of Sleep that will be coming out around the time that this show airs.
And I urge anybody with small children to get it and. And read this book for them. Who knows what will happen.
I'll be teaching at Aspen in June for a week and I encourage anybody who hears this to apply to come and join the class. It should be interesting. Probably by the time this show airs the fact will have leaked that that Netflix is developing a Bright Sword series.
I know, so that's very exciting for me. Doubt that we will not be done by the time the show comes down, but that will be ongoing.
In fact, we talked a lot about the Knight's Tale which is going to be probably a big reference for that project.
Speaker C
00:41:38.080 - 00:41:39.120
Absolutely great.
Speaker B
00:41:39.120 - 00:41:40.000
Congratulations.
Speaker E
00:41:40.960 - 00:41:42.080
Exciting. Should be fun.
Speaker B
00:41:42.160 - 00:41:43.440
Eric, you have a plug.
Speaker C
00:41:43.680 - 00:42:27.580
I do have a plug. So the Brightsword is such a great inclusive book.
It puts people of all different types of front and center as different heroes and I absolutely love that. And with two kids that are both on the spectrum and trans felt I wanted to really celebrate a great organization called Tabletop Gamers.
G A Y M E R S. It's a non profit org that is mission is about supporting diversity, equity, inclusion by supporting the LGBT community, QIA community through Tabletop Gaming. So find them online, get involved, donate whatever you want to do.
Speaker B
00:42:27.740 - 00:42:45.790
We have a local chapter that comes to our spring con every year. The Rising Phoenix Game Con. That's in Massachusetts. And the Boston gamers are always there.
Both they're fantastic game masters and they're fantastic people to have at the con. So if you, if you're going to that con, know that there's representation there.
Speaker E
00:42:46.750 - 00:42:48.510
That is a great point. You're here.
Speaker B
00:42:49.150 - 00:43:09.790
I will definitely just say thank you. Thank everybody so much. I mean thank you Eric who's been on the show before. I really appreciate it.
And Ross and Leb, thank you so much for being on a show that has literally tens of people who listen to it. So thank you so much. I appreciate you taking time out of your schedules and and doing this with us. It was a blast. This was so good.
Speaker E
00:43:10.030 - 00:43:11.670
Thank you for having us. It's super, super fun.
Speaker D
00:43:11.670 - 00:43:12.670
Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker B
00:43:13.860 - 00:43:30.900
And that was the Bright Sword by Lev Grossman with Lev Grossman as well as Ross o' Donnell and Eric Drex. What an amazing conversation folks.
You should go back and listen to it again right now just to be sure you got all the ideas out of this chock full episode. Thanks Lev, Ross and Eric for making it so spectacular.
Speaker A
00:43:31.620 - 00:43:35.460
Join us in two weeks when Jason Keeley, Rob Chimarco and Karen form fly.
Speaker B
00:43:35.460 - 00:43:41.500
In on their aeroship to discuss Solas by Gale Carrick. The first book in the Parasol Protectorate series.
Speaker A
00:43:42.060 - 00:44:34.240
You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion, as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-squareproductions.com GMBC.
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Later, gamers, and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.