he 6th edition of the justly storied Pendragon RPG has been released. The work of Greg Stafford, the creator of the Glorantha setting, the world of RuneQuest and King of Dragon Pass, Pendragon merges the reality of the early medieval period with the myth and pageantry we commonly associate with Arthurian romance.
The game is about playing knights in this fusion of reality and myth. You’ll battle the Saxon invaders, Christian and Pagan knights will rub shoulders and cross swords, and you’ll face both the mundane challenges of managing a medieval fiefdom as well as the fell sorceries of Morgana le Fay.
If you’ve played Call of Cthulhu or Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing, there will be much in the mechanics that looks familiar. The dice rolled are percentiles (two 10-sided die). You try to roll under a number that’s usually a stat and a skill score. Pendragon adds a blackjack-like wrinkle by making rolls closer to your target better, though any roll over is failure.
What makes Pendragon unique is its focus on the mental and spiritual landscapes of knighthood. In addition to your stats, your character has traits, competing ideals like Modest/Proud, Energetic/Lazy, and Chaste/Lustful. Becoming more Modest means you’re less Proud, and as one or the other grows stronger, it will have a greater pull on your actions. Your character will be challenged on these traits, and sometimes you can call on them to improve a dice roll.
Your knight also has passions, like loyalty to their home, religious devotion, fealty to their liege, and their station within the hierarchy of medieval society. When your passions and traits conflict, it can drag your knight towards actions that you might not choose from the point of view of a 21st century person sitting at a kitchen table. And when your traits and passions reinforce each other, it can be a powerful force in the game mechanics.
Your goal as a knight is Glory. Glory is earned through public acts that are, well, glorious. Things like defeating dangerous monsters, saving your liege lord’s life, and winning the Pentecost Tournament. Social recognition will also grant you Glory, things like becoming a knight or joining the Round Table.
Glory is something that can be inherited by your character’s descendants, and your character almost certainly will have descendants. The game assumes that the winter is not spent adventuring, but rather back at home, managing your fiefdom and taking care of the more mundane tasks of being a knight. Years go by quickly, sometimes with only a single noteworthy event or quest taking place. The game is designed to take your knight’s family from the death of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, through the lawless period before Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, into the glory days of Camelot, and then surviving the decline, ending at the Battle of Camlann, where Arthur and his bastard son Mordred slay each other.
The Core Rulebook is gorgeous, with the pages laid out like they came from a medieval manuscript. Even the margins are populated by snails, homicidal rabbits, monsters, and, of course, knights. The book includes a system for randomly generating coats of arms, all the rules you need to create your own knight (who can be of any gender), and equip them with the weapons and armor available at the opening of game (as Arthur claims his throne and the Knights of the Roundtable spread the justice and prosperity of Arthur’s kingdom, technology advances quickly, giving you access to the full harness we associate with the phrase “a knight in shining armor”). You can manage your fief, engage in single or group combat, and earn glory through audacity, courage, and luck. Or you can go mad and run off into the woods to live like a wild animal for a few years.
Unlike earlier versions of Pendragon, the Core Rulebook does not include things like how to create an adventure, the details of the assumed starting point (the County of Salisbury) or stats for NPCs and monsters. That information has been saved for the forthcoming Gamemaster’s Handbook; the space opened up has been used to help players understand the rules better, clear up areas of confusion from past editions, and provide more information that will aid in immersion during play. However, the rules have not changed terribly much from even the 1st edition of the game; some skills have been combined to streamline things, the addition of Obsessions makes it clear how certain Passions are supposed to work, and the like. GMs eager to get started now can use the material found in any previous edition of the game. In addition, the first series of adventures, a linked series collected in the Grey Knight book, is out as well, to give budding Game Masters a model to work with.
If you’re interested in historical and historic RPGs, if you’ve always wished your D&D paladin could be challenged more by temptation and recognized for staying true to their word, or you just love the literature of the Arthurian mythos, Pendragon is a must-own. Talk to the goodly folk at your local Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy® today to get your copy of this august tome.
All Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy® locations are independently owned and operated by local folks. Not all stores will carry all games but will be willing to attempt to special order any that they do not carry. (And they’ll carry most.)
