As my running of the GPC approaches the mid-520s, I've been giving more thought to the appearance of the de Ganis knights and the eventual appearance of Lancelot.

As a sort of prelude before they start cropping up everywhere, I introduced the clan with a minor de Ganis knight of my own creation. On paper, he was a typical Aquitainian knight: chivalrous, valorous, courtly, suave. But in game play, I kept missing and fumbling his Valorous, Flirting, and Compose rolls. So over the course of the session he came off as a complete twit. This got me thinking.

I came to like the idea of portraying the de Ganis knights as completely overrated. In addition to playing against expectations, I like this direction because Lancelot and his ilk were, after all, French Mary Sues inserted into the original Celtic stories, right? So having the de Ganis knights actually come across as wildly incompetent would seem to suggest that they were the beneficiaries of a later propaganda campaign to rehabilitate their image, a twist that really appeals to me.

So I'm thinking of portraying the de Ganis knights as Upper Class Twits, a mix of cowards, sycophants, and useless dilettantes; the best among them get by on their looks and ways with the ladies, but on the battlefield they're fairly useless. Sort of the antithesis of the Old Knights they're effectively replacing. My only problem with all this is how Lancelot fits in to all of this. I've had a few ideas:

* The reluctant knight. He's the only competent knight in the de Ganis clan, but he'd rather be pursuing intellectual pursuits.
* The accidental knight. Lancelot's as incompetent as the other de Gales knights, but he has serendipitous luck--he's always in the right place at the right time, he kills a giant by accidentally knocking over a tree, that sort of thing. Lots of slapstick when he's around.
* The Hamlet/Elric-type. A variation on the Reluctant Knight idea above--he's the only competent knight in his clan, and he hates his kinfolk for it. Played very brooding, Gothic, emo.
* Something else?

I'm reluctant to totally throw Lancelot under the bus, since he's one of the three core characters in the overall saga. I mean, he can't be TOO much of twit or why would Guenever go for him, right?

Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc. would be most welcome!

I really like them, especially the first one.

Maybe Lancelot himself could be played kind of straight? He's the only thing holding the clan together, and so whenever one of his relatives gets captured in a losing fight, or chooses the wrong side in a power struggle, or has an angry husband ready to stick a sword in him, Lancelot's the one who has to clean up. In Steinbeck's version of the story, he has Lancelot taking his nephew Lionel with him to try and get him to stop being such a little twerp; maybe every so often Lancelot will "go on quest" with one of his stupid relatives, in order to keep him away from society until tempers cool, and also to keep him close to hand so Lancelot can protect his dumbass relative in case someone comes after him. Is Lancelot genuinely trying to reform his disinterested relatives, or is he just trying to keep up appearances? Actually, this is basically the same as your third idea, so never mind.

The second idea is also really interesting. Are you familiar with samurai movies? A lot of films about Musashi, allegedly the best swordsmen ever, portray him as someone who always knows how to stack the deck in his favor. He's good in a fight, but he also knows to cheat whenever he can. Maybe that could be exaggerated for Lancelot? Maybe he can't take on 10 knights at once, but he knows how to fight ten one-on-one fights in a row; maybe he can't fight Gawain in a fair fight, but he can beat him in an unfair fight. Make Lancelot even younger (playing up his youth as a draw for Guinevere, as opposed to any actual virtue he might have) and also give him more of an edge over older knights like Gawain.

You could look at Bernard Cornwells Arthur books. I haven't red them myself (life is too short for Bernard Cornwell), but I understand that he has a really twisted version of Lancelot, a cowardly, frag-stealing courtier, always there to claim the glory for what other has done.

One suggestion that might fit in with this for both Lancelot and the de Ganis clan (I leave it to you whether this is how they really are, or whether this is just the biased perception of the British knights who dislike them): they have no true loyalty to Arthur or Britain. They're in Britain because that's where all the adventures are, and the opportunity to make a name for themselves. They came to Camelot and joined the Round Table in order to provide themselves with a local base from which they can go riding about looking for robber-knights, dragons, and giants to fight and thereby win lots of Glory. If Britain ran out of adventures, and some land on the Continent got lots of them instead, they'd ride off there at once without even a formal farewell to Arthur and his court.

If I ever run a "Pendragon" campaign (I don't have a gaming group, so that's not likely to happen soon, I fear), I would have an "anti-de-Ganis" faction start up at court as soon as the aftermath of the Battle of Bedegraine Many of the British knights are likely to be annoyed at Ban and Bors' armies getting all the plunder, and even the Roman treasure Merlin uncovers in the forest won't mollify them much. And then, after the de Ganis clan moves into Britain permanently from 518 onwards, and under Lancelot, increasingly steals the spotlight, the resentment continues. Some of the members of the faction may go so far as to argue that Arthur's making the same mistake with the de Ganis clan that Vortigern made with Hengist and Horsa (though at least these outlanders are Christians rather than Woden-worshippers). (Note that, in Malory, Sir Palomides the Saracen and Sir Urre of Hungary both side with Lancelot in the civil war at the end of the reign; I suspect that the anti-:Lancelot faction may grow to a "Foreigners out!" attitude in general, rather than just "de Ganis clan out".)

Incidentally, I see this as the reason why Agravain, Mordred, and their cohorts are so eager to have Lancelot and Guinevere's love affair exposed. Modern versions often see the motive as the hope of starting a civil war between Arthur and Lancelot that Mordred can exploit to seize the throne, but that seems too much the kind of thing that TV Tropes calls a "Xanatos Roulette". (For example, only someone with Merlin's gift of foresight could have predicted that Lancelot would accidentally kill Gaheris and Gareth in the Battle at the Stake, and without that and Gawain's subsequent quest for revenge, the Pope's intervention would have stopped the war.) I think that Agravain and the other knights simply want Lancelot disgraced and banished, and his supporters with him, and an exposed adultery would give them the justification they need for that. I doubt that even Mordred had expected the results that arose from the conspiracy (though he probably didn't object).

I really like the xenophobic take on de Ganis relations, Merlyn! I'll definitely be incorporating that into my vision of the clan. And I think doorknobdeity's suggestion of making Lancelot quite a bit younger is a good one too. He's the potential salvation of his clan, but it's ultimately up to his own offspring to finally legitimize the foreign knights in the eyes of many (and the rest will just see Galahad as the ultimate Glory Hog--"Typical de Ganis!").

Everyone knows the real achiever of the Grail was Percival of Wales.

but it's ultimately up to his own offspring to finally legitimize the foreign knights in the eyes of many (and the rest will just see Galahad as the ultimate Glory Hog--"Typical de Ganis!").


And in fact, two of the three knights who achieve the Grail are from the de Ganis clan: Galahad and Bors. At least Percival, the third, is British. But Bors is the only one of the three to return to court and tell the story - which could lead to those knights who dislike the de Ganis clan wondering aloud how truthful Bors' testimony is.

Ooo, I like it--conspiracy theories, rumors of cover-ups... ;)