I recently finished The Once and Future King by T.H. White.
A stitch up tome made out of four different novel, it has been my entry to the Arthurian Mythos. An unorthodox path, I'm sure. Not without its evident flaws, at least it has wet my appetite for more reading in this area.
D&D in general, and OSR enthusiasts in particular, really like to praise the infamous Appendix N. Myself included. Like Lord Dunsany, Lamb, and other works pre-dating the pulpy stories we all know and love, I found portions of The Once and Future King ripe for gaming ideas.
The first third of this 660 page tome is great. Merlin is a hoot, and sadly only present on that portion of the book (the rest of the book suffers for it). It is like a training camp on steroids for Wart (young Arthur). Ripe for ideas for your OSR games - read that part and steal them!
- Turning Wart into a fish by Poseidon, who is full of tattoos and reeks of cigars and the Seas.
- Meeting Robin Wood and his troops. Yes, the name is wrongly attributed in history.
- Queen Morgana le Fay being an overweight despicable witch, in her castle made of spoiled meats, lard, and general nasty foodstuff. Brilliant little twist.
- Wart turning into an owl by Archimedes: bieng fed a dead mouse by an owl, under the full moon (? that last bit is my addition)
- Turning into an ant: Wart lies flat between two ant nests
- Invisibility spell by one of the witches: cooking their black cat, and then trying out the resulting bones one by one by sticking them in the mouth. In front of a mirror. It is hard to know which bone is magical, and given their diminute size, the whole process takes a while.
The rest of the tome deals with a romance (between Lancelot and Guenever) which frankly I didn't care about. Many crucial and interesting events are told, not shown (battles and wars, the quest for the Grial, the war against Mordred, etc.). Surely there are many more interesting retellings of the Myth.
