Hey, hi, hello. About time I stopped lurking in the Discord PMs and actually put something publicly here. Everything on the page is tentative and not final. 

Okay, so, I originally was going to do something very different in Fellowship, based on a kid's book I wrote years ago called "Trent the Pragmatic Not-a-Knight; A Bedtime Story for Cynical Children", but that character interfered with what Thanquol wanted to do too much and I was more attached to their vision than my own. 

Since then, though, an anthropologist I admired a lot died so I've been going back over their work. One bit that influenced me a lot, and that I'm coming back to here, is the fact that the errant knight mythology is a post-hoc way to localize the Middle Eastern "merchant adventurer" storytelling tradition, from which we even derive the word 'adventurer'. What's weird is that the "merchant adventurer" was explicitly a non-combatant, though, a change which makes the end result end up really similar to the archetypal [i]ronin samurai[/i] story, and a lot of ronin stories could almost be considered errant knight stories told in reverse. 

They're weirdly compatible, frankly, in a way that's been a lot of fun to work through. Bushido and chivalry, knights and samurai both being feudal-warrior-landed-gentry, there's a lot of overlap. And while samurai [i]specifically[/i] are anachronistic to the Arthurian, they are contemporary to the time periods of their [i]mythos[/i] - they both start as products of the 11th and 12th centuries. 

Historically, as well, Roman coins from this time period were found in Japan, Korea and China. So, that's cool!

Then, in an uncharacteristic fit of better judgement, I thought a "ronin's" [i]heir[/i] would better fit the story, and a group, than their parent would. It also shaves off a lot of the sharper edges of the concept, especially since it means I can focus on the part that interests me the most - where the concepts overlap and synthesize. 

So. Hopefully this is actually a fun and interesting concept to play with. I know it sounds like it could be a bit of a joke, but I promise I don't intend to treat it as one.