Greg Stafford actually released two games about being a knight in the age of King Arthur. This is the lesser-known one!
Years ago, I met a lovely old gentleman who was selling his collections of the Prince Valiant newspaper strips. It's a fantastic saga that's been running since 1937 and is still going today. Valiant, Prince of Thule joins King Arthur's knights and travels all over the world in search of adventure. Hal Foster's art is jaw-droppingly good, and his script often unexpectedly hilarious.
The TTRPG, which came out in 1989, is designed to be an introductory game. Its basic game rules are only a single page long. Players build pools of coins to flip and count heads or tails to determine their success or failure. In the basic rules, all players are Knights; in the advanced rules, you can follow other careers, more non-Knightly skills are introduced, and a very basic personality system appears. More interestingly, in the advanced rules players gain the ability to take over as GM and run adventure episodes!
Character Creation: A Prince Valiant character sheet could probably fit on a business card. You have two statistics: Brawn and Presence, and split 7 points between them. You then allocate nine points between six skills, and you're ready to play. Below you'll see Sir Florence, remade for Prince Valiant.
Final Thoughts: I think Prince Valiant was ahead of its time. It's a shame that it's out of print, due to the license. There was a second edition back in 2019 through Kickstarter, also out of print. I really wouldn't be surprised if Chaosium strips the Prince Valiant setting from it and re-releases it in a generic format, like they did with HeroQuest / QuestWorlds. If they do, it'll be worth checking out.
My other final thoughts are that with this review, I am DONE! 31 characters in 31 days, done and dusted! I have one final entry to go, which is a retrospective of the whole project.
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