I still wonder at the games that never made it to actual play. With more time on my hands I am looking to make that right, ad as i find it difficult to let any of them go, I might as well run them. Or so i thought…
Keltia sits in that group of ‘historical based’ Cubicle Seven presented games from the French company: Le 7ème Cercle. I have played Qin and Yggdrasil with great enjoyment. Keltia, their historical Arthurian game, shares mechanics with the Norse Yggdrasil, along with suggestions for a blend of the two. The games are still available in English, at least in PDF, though not all the lines were translated, leaving some gaps for the amateur book translator.
Keltia is a nice traditional skill based D10 dice pool system, Keeping the highest two and summing them to beat a difficulty number, with the D10 exploding on a 10. The Skill level is added to the result. The system has a heroic meta currency, a series of Gifts, Weaknesses and Combat Feats to spice things up. Perhaps not the most revolutionary engine out there, but it plays solidly for a heroic low fantasy game.
The setting is given a lot of book space, making it a trove whether you play out using the rules or not. The game focuses on the Arthur of Gwynedd, ad is well described. You’ve got more than enough here to give your game a distinct post-Roman flavour for the heroics to come. This is very much a historical grounded game with lashings of magic and old gods woven into the fabric.
Of course for me to run the game, it would either have to be a convention game, or put onto a VTT. At time of planning, Role had not returned with web cams, so I planned to put the game onto Foundry…
A nice evocative splash screen, to get the players ready for the mysteries and dangers ahead.
Foundry doesn’t have a working system for Keltia. I forged ahead to build something that would give a full play experience using the ‘Custom System Builder’ module, allowing even someone like me to get a functioning, if not that pretty, character sheet up and running. It records all details and manages dice rolls.
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| The Keltia game system on Foundry VTT |
It was time to get some adventure ideas thrown about to enable a game launch to happen, as all other ‘obstacles’ had been put to the legendary sword. Really, it was only then that I stopped and thought: “Why am I not using Age of Arthur?”. I mean, I’ve actually written a full Arthurian RPG with my partner in rhyme, Paul Mitchener. This wouldn’t get Keltia played, but it would return me to a veiled place in history that I love to explore.
Then I got to thinking about an Age of Arthur second edition, refreshing the setting text a little, but mostly uplifting the game engine from our ‘Disapora VSCA’ inspired Fate to the ‘Cosmic Fate’ recently released by Sarah Newton and Typhon Games. This would also afford us the opportunity to refresh the presentation of the book and bring it back to peoples attention.
So, rather than run Keltia (oh look, I still might…), I have started work to bring the Age of Arthur text into a ready to update state. That’s a fairly major project, with a lot of steps to go, and yet I reflect that there are many Arthurs, so maybe there is some room for Keltia too…
