One of my professors believed that every generation needed to retell the story of Julius Caesar. In her mind, the story functioned as a sort of cultural tonic. Tyrant or hero, victim or opportunist — Caesar was a lens through which generations current and future might better witness themselves.

In playing Fred Serval’s A Gest of Robin Rood, the second installment in the Irregular Conflicts Series, itself a spinoff of the long-running COIN Series, the same could be said of everybody’s favorite forest fox. Is he a vagabond, robbing the rich for no other reason than because their wealth is there for the taking? Is he a lower-class hero, uplifting the poor? Has he been coopted by the gentlefolk, elevated to a lordling deprived of his privileges? Is he a crusader? A jokester? A kingsman? Does he venerate the Virgin Mary or has Maid Marian been invented to take her place? Eventually he’ll move into his gritty teenage years and relitigate the Battle of Normandy. Shhh. He gets embarrassed when we talk about that.

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