Pendragon (role-playing game)
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| Pendragon | |
|---|---|
| Designer(s) | Greg Stafford |
| Publisher(s) | Chaosium, Green Knight Publishing, White Wolf, Inc. (since 2004) |
| Publication date | 1985 |
| Genre(s) | Historical |
| System | Basic Role-Playing variant |
Pendragon, or King Arthur Pendragon, is a role-playing game in which players take the role of knights performing chivalric deeds in the tradition of Arthurian legend. It was originally written by Greg Stafford and published by Chaosium, then was acquired by Green Knight Publishing, who in turn passed on the rights to White Wolf, Inc. in 2004. In 1991, Pendragon won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1990.
[edit] Setting
Like several other RPGs from Chaosium (most notably Call of Cthulhu), Pendragon has a literary basis, in this case the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur, and it studiously avoids fantasy RPG cliches in favor of its source material. This has caused it to become something of a cult game, even within the narrow confines of the RPG market.
Adventures are often political, military, or spiritual in nature, rather than dungeon crawls, and are often presented as taking place congruently with events from Arthurian legend. An important part of the game is the time between adventures, during which player characters manage their estates, get married, age, and have children. Typically, the characters will have one adventure per year, and campaigns often carry over across generation, with players retiring their character and taking the role of that character's heir. This is quite different from most role-playing games, where one set of characters is played fairly intensively, and there is typically little consideration made of what happens to their family or descendants. The influence of this idea can be seen in the Ars Magica RPG, which also encourages stories taking years or decades to unfold (and which is also set in medieval Europe).
[edit] System
The rules system of Pendragon is most notable for its system of personality traits and passions that both control and represent the character's behaviour. Otherwise, it uses fairly traditional game mechanics for normal play, based to some degree on Basic Role-Playing, but also has a set of charts and tables for determining what happens to a character's family in between adventures. The characters' ability scores are based on BRP standard, but skills are resolved using d20, rather than d100.
[edit] History
The first edition was a boxed set published by Chaosium in 1985, and was written by Greg Stafford. Chaosium continued to publish the game up to and including the third edition in 1990. The fourth edition, reprinted by Green Knight Publishing, came as a thick single manual, King Arthur Pendragon. A version for beginning players was published in The Book of Knights. Greg Stafford has completed the much-streamlined fifth edition, which was published by White Wolf in December, 2005. The most notable supplement is the Great Pendragon Campaign, a massive scenario book which will detail events from Uther's reign in 485 through to the end of the Arthurian era.
Over its history the game spawned a number of supplements dealing with areas within or beyond Arthurian Britain and creating characters outside the culture of the Cymric Britons:
- Saxons! - The origins of Anglo-Saxon England; Angle, Saxon, Jute, Frisian & Frankish character generation
- Beyond the Wall - Pictland (Caledonia); Pictish character generation
- Pagan Shore - Ireland; tribal Irish character generation
- Land of Giants - Nordic areas during the era of Beowulf; Northmen character generation
- Blood and Lust - Anglia
- Perilous Forest - Cumbria
- Savage Mountain - Cambria (Wales)
The latter three supplements were intrinsic to Arthur's realm, thus used standard character generation.
A fan-made variant, Pendragon Pass, allows players to adapt the Pendragon setting to RuneQuest's role-playing game system.[1]
