Knowledge portals on the two great English legend-cycles — and games built directly out of them, where the run’s ruleset is a period’s idea of what the story was for.
Play ROBINCRAWL → Play ARTHURCRAWL → Browse the portal Source on GitHubThere is no single Robin Hood and no single King Arthur. There are a dozen of them, each assembled by a period that needed a different one, and each contradicting the others. That is not a footnote to put in a codex — it is a game mechanic.
So the portal is organised by worldview rather than by chronology or character,
and each worldview carries a game_hooks field translating it into a playable ruleset.
The games read that data. Lore lives in one place and the games are readings of it.
A lens that changes the win condition but not the shape of play is a skin. — docs/RUN_ENGINES.md
Twelve days in Barnsdale as the earliest ballads actually have him: a yeoman, not an earl; devout to the Virgin; extremely dangerous. Nothing of yours depletes. Every act leaves evidence, evidence accretes, and the county gets better informed until it closes on you. You are caught, not killed.
No party, no combat, no health bar. You spend limited access to read witnesses on whether a war-leader named Arthur existed. They contradict each other, and some of them copy each other — a source agreeing with its own exemplar is not a second voice. Then you publish, and the record judges you. “Not proven” is a correct answer.
321 cards across worldviews, figures, documents, scholars, topics and a combined timeline running from Gildas to Ridley Scott. Every card records its source method, review status and confidence, and flags where scholars disagree.
| Cycle | Lens | Period | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur | Arthur of the Welsh | c. 600–1100 | A warband of named specialists; nested impossible tasks; disappearance rather than death |
| Arthur | Geoffrey’s Pseudohistory | c. 1136–1200 | Contradictory witnesses, limited access, and a record that judges what you publish (playable) |
| Arthur | Chrétien’s Courtly Romance | c. 1170–1191 | Two enforced acts: a false victory, then an interior flaw as the antagonist |
| Arthur | The Grail Made Christian | c. 1200–1240 | A hermit reprices your past after each floor; most builds are meant to fail |
| Arthur | Malory’s Fellowship | c. 1469–1485 | Loyalty bonds that must break; every bond built makes the ending worse |
| Arthur | Revival & Afterlife | 1816–now | Choose the narrating century; it rewrites the moral scoring of identical acts |
| Robin | The Ballad Outlaw | c. 1377–1500 | The hue and cry. Killing is cheap and legally ruinous (playable) |
| Robin | Robin of the May Games | c. 1420–1590 | You are a parish staging the legend to fund a church roof |
| Robin | Robert, Earl of Huntington | 1569–1601 | Accumulate legal title, not loot; the last room is a court |
| Robin | Ritson’s Radical | 1795–1883 | A countryside-poverty meter is the score; your own loot is worthless |
| Robin | The Technicolor Robin | 1922–1973 | An élan meter that any lethal blow resets to zero |
| Robin | Prince of Thieves & Heritage | 1991–now | Each finished run is commemorated, and the gift-shop version becomes canon |
“Rob from the rich” is not medieval. The Gest’s Robin lends money to a knight, extorts it back from a lying monk, and tells his men to spare husbandmen and yeomen while beating bishops. The first surviving statement of the slogan is John Major’s, in 1521; Joseph Ritson gave it a Jacobin politics and a biography in 1795, and Scott, Pyle and Hollywood carried it the rest of the way.
The pagan Robin was invented in 1984. Herne the Hunter has no connection to the legend before Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood. Within a decade it was widely assumed to be the oldest stratum. It is the newest.
Every plate in the game is public-domain medieval or Renaissance art, harvested with full
provenance from the Met’s Open Access
collection (CC0) and Wikimedia Commons —
Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows when they take you, Dirk Bouts’s
Justice of Otto III at the assize, the Crécy archers of the Froissart
manuscript for the killing. Sources are credited under each image and listed in
robincrawl/art/credits.json.