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Errantry

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Errantry is a storygame of medieval quests. It is fantasy as the medievals knew it. You encounter wise hermits, dark knights, perilous sorceresses and terrifying beasts as you valourously strive to complete your quest. It can be played by one or more players.

“The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability… “ - Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 33.

Characters

You play a Knight, a Lady, a Troubadour, an Enchanter, an Ecclesiastic, or a combination of these. Characters have three Pools: Valour, Courtesie and Artes. These represent their inner resources of physical power, social power and spiritual or magical power. They also possess Abilities (things they can do), Secrets (special, unusual abilities) and Keys (things that matter to them).

Creating a Character

Your Quest

You choose your quest object and its difficulty at the beginning of the game. During the game, you accumulate “boons,” resources which will enable you to win the object of your quest.

Choosing and Planning a Quest

Episodes

The quest takes place in episodes, self-contained encounters which advance, delay or divert you on your quest.

In each episode, you encounter a challenge which you must address using your resources (your pools, abilities, secrets and keys). As a result, you may:

  • Gain an obligation to someone.
  • Discharge an obligation previously gained.
  • Gain a boon.
  • Modify your pools, abilities, secrets or keys.
  • Gain “experience” which can later be used to modify your pools, abilities, secrets or keys.
  • Refresh your pools, restoring the points you have to spend on future actions.

Playing Out an Episode

Setting the Magic Dial

Errantry can be played at three different levels of magic: Low (everything is just a little beyond what we would expect in the real world), Medium (there are enchanters and so forth, but you won’t meet all that many of them) and High (you run into magic everywhere, animals frequently talk, and supernatural creatures abound). You should set the “magic dial” at the beginning of your game by agreement among your group; it will affect what encounters you have and what secrets are available. You can also change the setting during the game as your characters move from place to place.

Setting Other Dials

By default, Errantry is not realistic, gritty, ironic, humourous or historical. It bears about as much relation to the realities of being a medieval knight as, say, a John Wayne war movie bears to the realities of World War II. In this it follows its source material, which was highly stylized in its depiction of a noble ideal. Good and evil were sharply delineated and simply defined; good characters observed the heroic code all the time, evil characters breached it.

Your gaming group may get more enjoyment out of approaching it in a different way - more modern, more gritty, more humourous, more ironic. Just be aware that there is no built-in support for doing so.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the denizens of the Story-Games forum (http://www.story-games.com/forums) for assistance, encouragement, and inspiration.

Special thanks to Clinton R. Nixon (http://www.anvilwerks.com(approve sites)) for releasing his Solar System under a Creative Commons license, which meant I could use it as the basis for my system for Errantry.

Thanks also to Tony Lower-Basch (http://www.museoffire.com/Games/(approve sites)) for the name “Errantry”, Stefan Koch for the pool name “Artes”, and Thom Foster for the term “boon” for what I originally, and unoriginally, called “quest tokens”.

Jasper McChesney’s “City of Birds” game (http://www.primevalpress.com/games/birds(approve sites)) inspired the roles of Venan, Tenan and Marshal of the Lists (which are similar to, but not identical with, his Bird, Snake and Tiger).

Joshua BishopRoby (http://kallistipress.com(approve sites)) was of great help with the character sheets, and they are much simpler as a result of his insightful questions.

Sources

The most immediate source of inspiration for Errantry was William Morris’s novel The Well at the World’s End, which despite being written in the 19th century has the feel and structure of a medieval quest. Other sources which both Morris and I drew on were the Breton lays written in Middle English and Medieval French by Marie de France and many anonymous writers; the anonymous Nicolette and Aucassin (French) and Gawain and the Green Knight (English); and Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, which despite the French title was written in English. Modern translations of all of these are widely available; try Project Gutenberg.

Errantry copyright 2006 by Mike Reeves-McMillan. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License(approve sites).

These are notes for a work in progress. Don’t expect everything to be consistent or make sense.