Pendragon (role-playing game)

Pendragon, or King Arthur Pendragon, is a role-playing game (RPG) 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. White Wolf sold the game to Stewart Wieck in 2009. Wieck formed Nocturnal Media, which has since updated and reissued the 5th edition originally published by White Wolf.

In 1991, Pendragon (3rd edition) won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1990.^[1] In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Pendragon as one of The Millennium's Most Underrated Games. Editor Scott Haring said "Pendragon is one of the few RPGs that has a moral point of view ... And it's a great melding of game system with game world.".^[2] The 5th edition won the Outie award for Best Retread in 2006.^[3]

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 generations, 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).

The default Pendragon setting is a pastiche of actual fifth- and sixth-century British history, high medieval history (10th to 15th centuries), and Arthurian legend. The political forces are roughly those actually present in sub-Roman Britain: Celts fighting Germanic, Irish, and Pictish invaders in the wake of the collapse of Roman authority. Technology and many aspects of culture, however, progress in an accelerated fashion, such that King Arthur's Britain is depicted as thoroughly feudal. Knights bear unique coats of arms, joust in tournaments, follow chivalric customs, and pursue courtly love. In effect, many trappings of the milieu in which the Arthurian romances were composed are projected backwards. Many of the campaign events and personalities come from the great mass of Arthurian literature composed from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. That being said, it is also possible to run a Pendragon campaign set firmly in the Dark Ages or in a more fantastic vision of Arthurian Britain.

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 behavior. Otherwise, it uses fairly traditional game mechanics for normal play, based to some degree on the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system,^[4] 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.

Personal Traits

These are thirteen opposing values that represent a character's personality. The Traits are: Chaste / Lustful, Energetic / Lazy, Forgiving / Vengeful, Generous / Selfish, Honest / Deceitful, Just / Arbitrary, Merciful / Cruel, Modest / Proud, Pious / Worldly, Prudent / Reckless, Temperate / Indulgent, Trusting / Suspicious, and Valorous / Cowardly. The values on the left side are Virtues and the values on the right are Vices. The Traits are 1-20 points split between the opposing values (e.g., 10/10, 14/6, 5/15). For every point above 10 on a Virtue, a point must be placed below 10 on another Virtue.

A d20 roll is made to use a Virtue (e.g., Merciful to show mercy towards a captive mortal enemy) or resist a Vice (e.g., Deceitful to deceive a friend). If the roll is at or below the value, it Succeeds and the desired result occurs. If the roll exceeds the value, it is a Failure and the opposite result occurs. If a Virtue or Vice is rated at 20, the opposite is rated at 0; any roll on this trait is automatically successful (e.g., an Energetic character's attempt to persist in a difficult or arduous task) or automatically unsuccessful (e.g., an Indulgent character who must use Temperate to resist gluttony or intoxication). This is congruent with Arthurian legend, in which a hero's weaknesses are his downfall (like Lancelot's lust for Guenevere) or a villain has a moment of nobility (like King Uriens of Gore showing mercy to Prince Arthur rather than striking him down).

The Chivalric Virtues are: Energetic, Forgiving, Generous, Just, Modest, and Valorous. Characters possessing point values in these six Virtues totaling above 80 are granted a bonus to Chivalry rolls. Christian Characters possessing one or more of these traits at a value of 16+ gain a Religious bonus.

The Chivalric Vices are: Vengeful, Selfish, Deceitful, Cruel, and Suspicious. Characters possessing point values in these five Vices totaling above 80 suffer a penalty to Chivalry rolls.

The Romantic Virtues are: Forgiving, Generous, Honest, Just, Merciful, and Trusting. Characters possessing point values in these six Virtues totaling above 65 are granted a bonus to Romance rolls.

Passions

Passions are higher values that influence a character's behavior. They are scored by rolling 2d6+6 or 3d6 and adding or subtracting various modifiers.

Passions roll on a d20, just like Traits. If a character fails a Passions roll, he goes into a state of Melancholy (hopeless depression) for violating his core belief. A critical failure or failed attempt to recover from Melancholy can lead to Madness, which forces the character to go into retirement until such time as he can redeem his actions or be forgiven by those he wronged.

Loyalty is a sense of duty to obey a liege, ally, or friend. Love is a feeling of affection for another person (a parent, sibling, friend, or lover) or persons (allies / followers, friends, family members) that the character has strong emotional ties to. Love (Family) is common for daughters and firstborn sons. Hospitality is the courtesy of providing shelter, lodging, and protection towards a guest. Honor is a sense of duty towards following the rules of proper and noble behavior. Later editions added new Passions. Amor is Romantic love for a person, replacing Love for a lover. Hate is the obsessive dislike for a person, nation, or race.

A character's Passion is often used to create dissonance and conflict. An example would be a Loyal knight faithfully obeying a cruel order from his unjust liege (or an Honorable knight refusing to do so, no matter the reason or excuse). Another would be an Hospitable host giving protection to a rude and discourteous guest (or an enemy who abuses the custom for insidious ends).

Magic and Magic-Users

Only the fourth edition of Pendragon included mechanics for magic and magician characters. All other versions of the game, including the later fifth edition, assumed that the character was a knight or lady and restricted magic to game master-controlled characters.

Character Generation

The first through fourth editions allowed random character generation of characters from a wide variety of cultures of Great Britain and western Europe, which was expanded by later supplements. The fifth edition supports only point-based creation of young landholding knights from the default homeland of Salisbury, which was a preferred option in the third and fourth editions as well. The supplement Book of Knights and Ladies, self-published by Greg Stafford in 2008,^[5] allows creation of more diverse characters for fifth edition.

History

The first edition was a boxed set published by Chaosium in 1985, and was designed and written by Greg Stafford. Chaosium planned a second edition, with minor changes to the rules, but this was never actually released;^[6] they released a third edition, with rules revised by Stafford, as a single softbound book in 1990. The fourth edition, published by Chaosium in 1993 and reprinted by Green Knight Publishing in 1999, was also released as a softbound manual: the core rules remained consistent with the third edition, but the book was expanded to include rules for player-character magicians and for advanced character-generation (the latter had originally appeared separately in the third-edition supplement Knights Adventurous). Green Knight Publishing also released a cut-down version of the fourth edition aimed at beginning players, The Book of Knights.

Original designer Greg Stafford produced a much-streamlined fifth edition, which was published as a hardcover book by White Wolf in December, 2005. The most notable supplement for this edition is The Great Pendragon Campaign, a massive (432-page) hardcover scenario book which details events, adventures and characters from Uther Pendragon's reign in 485 through to the end of the Arthurian era. The earlier version of this supplement, The Pendragon Campaign, won the 1985 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement.,^[7] and The Great Pendragon Campaign won the 2007 Diana Jones Award.

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 (Southeast Britain); Jute (Jutland), Angle (Schleswig-Holstein), Frisian (Friesland), Saxon (Germany) & Frankish (France) character generation.
• Beyond the Wall - Pictland (Caledonia, roughly modern Scotland); Pictish character generation.
• Pagan Shore - Ireland; Irish character generation, including Feudal Irish and two types of tribal Irish Celts: the Cruithni (Irish Picts) and Lochlannach (somewhat ahistorical Norse).
• Land of Giants - Scandinavia and Nordic areas of Britain during the era of Beowulf; Northmen character generation.
• Blood and Lust - Logres (Southern Britain); loosely describes the lands of Lindsey, East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex and the Saxon Shore of Essex, Sussex and Kent.
• Perilous Forest - Cumbria (Northern Britain); describes the lands of Cumbria (Northwest Britain) and Northumberland (Northeast Britain).
• Savage Mountains - Cambria (Wales); Welsh characters.

The regions profiled in the latter three supplements were internal to Arthur's realm, thus used standard character generation.

Reception

Shannon Appelcline comments: "King Arthur Pendragon could be lauded as a top RPG solely based upon the innovation it brought to the industry. Its concentration on epic storytelling and its traits mechanic were both notable and original when the game was released in 1985. However, even today, Pendragon remains vital. It provides a picture-perfect model of literary knighthood and, through its well-crafted and well-considered design, effortlessly conjures its theme — so successfully, in fact, that few other publishers in the last 20 years have even tried to bring another Arthurian roleplaying game to market. You just can't improve on perfection."^[8]

References

External links

• RPG Encyclopedia entry for Pendragon
• Greg Stafford's Pendragon page
• Nocturnal Media