Donate to the Lead Adventure Forum to keep it alive!
Exactly. It's the same sort of phenomenon as telling a story and adding local geography to make it relevant to your audience. Or, if you're a king, tracing your lineage to Woden or whoever. You slot the stories into a familiar context - or slot familiar characters into the stories.
I'm biased, because I've played Pendragon and it continues to have a big influence on my weekly RPG's. So, in a manner, this kind of oldschool fantasy without the fantasy 'races' but with lots of mysticism and faerie is very much alive for me.But since we are on a miniatures forum, my question would be, how would you bring this aesthetic and especially the mental feeling on to a gaming table? Does it need a game & figures of its own, or has it got more to do with a certain state of mind, a willingness to play with that? Miniature battle games - and combat oriented RPG's too - usually focus on the combat. And things become practical and dark. And you start to think of game design and how you can fit in factions/races that fight differently and fight interestingly. For me, this kind of thinking always kills the Arthurian aesthetic, the magic of faerie.Then people keep mentioning WHFB 4/5th ed Bretonnia. Although it's in a battle game of Tolkienesque and darkening fantasy, people still read the figures and the rules as referring to the fantastic Arthurian. So the Arthurian definitely is there, if only you want it to be there?
I suspect each generation gets the "historical" King Arthur we expect (or deserve!)...
I think the sub-Roman period (in Britain and elsewhere) a thoroughly fascinating one. I wouldn't use them for a proper "Arthurian" setting. Somehow questing cataphracts don't really have the same appeal...