Brian, that’s an excellent review. I respect your differences with my design; it’s a big world. I will address a few of the points you bring up.
On the frequency of rape in the storyworld: rape is mentioned in 4 out of 350 encounters and inferred in one more. Historically, conflict was primary manifested through raids rather than conventional battles, and in these raids, the general behavior was to kill the men, rape and kill the women, take anything valuable (especially cattle), and burn the rest. The purpose of these raids was to drive the enemy back, permitting your own people more land to settle in. In the one case where a Briton assaults a Saxon woman, she bites it off and the nicest option Arthur has is to tell him that he got what he deserved.
On historical accuracy: I have been researching that time period for 30 years, and I have assembled a pretty good library. Unfortunately, what we actually know about that period could fit into a single small book. Most of the what we think we know about that period is really extrapolation from earlier and later times. About a third of the material I present is based on solid evidence; another third is reasonable extrapolation; and the last third is “informed speculation” on my part. For example, I have the kids playing a form of football. We have absolutely no evidence of any such behavior, but we do know that Roman children played football. Of course, they didn’t have rubber or inflatable balls; their balls were stitched together from bits of leather.
There are two elements that are outright violations of the historical record. The first is the use of stirrups by Arthur’s men. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong; stirrups didn’t become common in Europe for another 500 years. At first I justified this falsehood with a long story about a wandering Hunnic warrior who ended up at Camelot and taught Arthur’s men to use stirrups. I edited that out because the storyworld was too lengthy – as you noticed. Instead, I justified their use by referencing an elite group of horsemen in Constantinople, who were called “cataphracts”. The transfer of this information to Camelot mangled “cataphracts” into “katerfaks” (and by the way, that’s pretty standard erosion of pronunciation).
The second falsehood was the “black-and-whiting” of the situation regarding the use of cavalry. In Le Morte D’Arthur, all the Britons fight as cavalry, and all the Saxons fight as infantry. As you might imagine, this is a gross oversimplification, but I felt it necessary to justify the fact that Arthur was able to counter the Saxon advance for some decades despite being badly outnumbered.
Another small point: there are actually THREE endings, but the third ending is available only to players who perform well in the socratic dialogues.
Lastly, I just posted a short video on YouTube (7 minutes) that presents an overview of the design and explains some of the design oddities. You can view it at Le Morte DArthur - YouTube