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Pendragon (role-playing game)
Encyclopedia
Pendragon, or King Arthur Pendragon, is a role-playing game
(RPG) in which players take the role of knight
s 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. 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.". The 5th edition won the Outie award for Best Retread in 2006.
), 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 crawl
s, 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 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 said, it is possible to run a Pendragon campaign set firmly in the Dark Ages or in a more fantastic vision of Arthurian Britain.
(BRP) system, 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.
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 gamemaster-controlled characters.
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, allows creation of more diverse characters for fifth edition.
. Chaosium planned a second edition, with minor changes to the rules, but this was never actually released; 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., 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:
The regions profiled in the latter three supplements were internal to Arthur's realm, thus used standard character generation.
Role-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
(RPG) in which players take the role of knight
Knight
A knight was a member of a class of lower nobility in the High Middle Ages.By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior....
s performing chivalric
Chivalry
Chivalry is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood which has an aristocratic military origin of individual training and service to others. Chivalry was also the term used to refer to a group of mounted men-at-arms as well as to martial valour...
deeds in the tradition of Arthurian legend. It was originally written by Greg Stafford
Greg Stafford
Francis Gregory Stafford , usually known as Greg Stafford, is an American game designer, publisher and shaman.-Glorantha and gaming:...
and published by Chaosium
Chaosium
Chaosium is one of the longer lived publishers of role-playing games still in existence. Founded by Greg Stafford, its first game was actually a wargame, White Bear and Red Moon, which later mutated into Dragon Pass and its sequel, Nomad Gods...
, then was acquired by Green Knight Publishing
Green Knight Publishing
Green Knight Publishing was founded by Peter Corless after he bought the rights to the award-winning Pendragon role-playing game from Chaosium in 1998. From 1999 to 2001, Green Knight published supplements for the role-playing game, in which players take on the roles of knights and ladies...
, who in turn passed on the rights to White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf Publishing is an American gaming and book publisher. The company was founded in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant and White Wolf Magazine, and was initially led by Mark Rein·Hagen of the former and Steve and Stewart Wieck of the latter. Since White Wolf Publishing, Inc. merged with...
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
Origins Award
The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins.The Origins Award is commonly...
for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1990. In 1999 Pyramid
Pyramid (magazine)
Pyramid is a gaming magazine, publishing articles primarily on role-playing games, but including board games, card games, and other sorts of games. It began life in 1993 as a print publication of Steve Jackson Games for its first 30 issues, though it has been published on the Internet since March...
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.". The 5th edition won the Outie award for Best Retread in 2006.
Setting
Like several other RPGs from Chaosium (most notably Call of CthulhuCall of Cthulhu (role-playing game)
Call of Cthulhu is a horror fiction role-playing game based on H. P. Lovecraft's story of the same name and the associated Cthulhu Mythos.The game, often abbreviated as CoC, is published by Chaosium.-Setting:...
), Pendragon has a literary basis, in this case the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table...
, and it studiously avoids fantasy RPG cliches in favor of its source material. This has caused it to become something of a cult
Cult following
A cult following is a group of fans who are highly dedicated to a specific area of pop culture. A film, book, band, or video game, among other things, will be said to have a cult following when it has a small but very passionate fan base...
game, even within the narrow confines of the RPG market.
Adventures are often political, military, or spiritual in nature, rather than dungeon crawl
Dungeon crawl
A dungeon crawl is a type of scenario in fantasy role-playing games in which heroes navigate a labyrinthine environment, battling various monsters, and looting any treasure they may find...
s, 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
Ars Magica
Ars Magica is a role-playing game set in Mythic Europe, a quasi-historical version of Europe around AD 1200 with added fantastical elements. The game revolves around wizards and their allies...
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
Sub-Roman Britain
Sub-Roman Britain is a term derived from an archaeological label for the material culture of Britain in Late Antiquity: the term "Sub-Roman" was invented to describe the potsherds in sites of the 5th century and the 6th century, initially with an implication of decay of locally-made wares from a...
: 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
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
's Britain is depicted as thoroughly feudal. Knights bear unique arms, joust in tournaments, follow chivalric customs, and pursue courtly love
Courtly love
Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....
. 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 said, it is 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-PlayingBasic Role-Playing
Basic Role-Playing is a role-playing game system which originated in the fantasy-oriented RuneQuest role-playing game rules...
(BRP) system, 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.
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 gamemaster-controlled characters.
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
Salisbury
Salisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England and the only city in the county. It is the second largest settlement in the county...
, 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, 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 StaffordGreg Stafford
Francis Gregory Stafford , usually known as Greg Stafford, is an American game designer, publisher and shaman.-Glorantha and gaming:...
. Chaosium planned a second edition, with minor changes to the rules, but this was never actually released; 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
Green Knight Publishing
Green Knight Publishing was founded by Peter Corless after he bought the rights to the award-winning Pendragon role-playing game from Chaosium in 1998. From 1999 to 2001, Green Knight published supplements for the role-playing game, in which players take on the roles of knights and ladies...
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
White Wolf, Inc.
White Wolf Publishing is an American gaming and book publisher. The company was founded in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant and White Wolf Magazine, and was initially led by Mark Rein·Hagen of the former and Steve and Stewart Wieck of the latter. Since White Wolf Publishing, Inc. merged with...
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
Uther Pendragon
Uther Pendragon is a legendary king of sub-Roman Britain and the father of King Arthur.A few minor references to Uther appear in Old Welsh poems, but his biography was first written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae , and Geoffrey's account of the character was used in...
'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., and "The Great Pendragon Campaign" won the 2007 Diana Jones Award
Diana Jones Award
The Diana Jones Award is an annual award for "excellence in gaming". The award is unusual in two ways: first, it is not an award for a specific class of thing, but can be awarded to a person, product, publication, company, organization, event or trend – anything related to gaming; second, it does...
.
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, roughly modern Scotland); Pictish character generation
- Pagan Shore - Ireland; Irish character generation including two types of tribal Irish Celts, Cruithni (Irish Picts), Lochlannach (somewhat ahistorical Norse), and Feudal Irish
- 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 regions profiled in the latter three supplements were internal to Arthur's realm, thus used standard character generation.