You could easily imagine a campaign of Pendragon playing out as a simulation of Dark Ages/early medieval feudal life without any mythical or supernatural elements at all.Ĭontrast a game like Edward E. Pendragon's strict adherence to its own timeline also means that developments like Arthur's accession, the Round Table, and chivalry itself are relegated to the Appendices. Meanwhile, the off-season Winter Phase alone of the game's chronological, dynastic character development process takes up 6 pages. Magic and magicians only get 3 pages out of its 276 pages Monsters and Fabulous Beasts only get 7 pages. In turn, bold human questers sometimes enter the Faerie realm to seek the greatest adventures." Unfortunately, the core rulebook at least under-delivers on that promise. Their magical residents, such as the Green Knight, often visit the world of men. Their cities and castles appear and vanish like mist. Entire kingdoms of immortals lie both beyond and within Arthur's realm. The Introduction states that "Among the kingdoms of men lie the mythical domains of Faerie - great dark woods and bright shining fields unexplored by human foot or thought. This is a superbly detailed recreation of the knightly culture of Arthurian legend - but not of much of the world beyond that, least of all in its most fantastical and fabulistic aspects. Players need to be very clear on what they're getting. My issues with the system, which shouldn't detract from a superlative game, are how far it goes - and what it leaves out. "It begins in the Dark Ages and ends in the War of the Roses, just before the Renaissance, allowing you to sample the developments of armor, weapons, castles, and customs in a process of accelerating change." Yes, the choice of player character types is basically knights-and-that's-it, but that's the whole point of recreating Arthurian Britain. "The game crowds the entire Middle Ages into its framework," as the introduction says. The imaginative modelling of an alternative medieval history that somehow manages to compress every tradition between 6th-century Welsh ballads and the 15th-century Morte d'Arthur into a single consistent whole is done in exquisite detail. Pendragon switches from elegant simplicity to depth and complexity when it comes to character creation and the setting. It's no wonder that the latest (2018) version of Runequest takes over Pendragon's Passion system pretty much wholesale. Stafford rooted his design decisions there in his wish to be true to the spirit of the great Arthurian tales: in the process he created a system of drama and emotion that works universally.
Meanwhile, the Traits and Passions articulate personality and moral dilemmas in a far more meaningful way that D&D's iconic nine-branched Alignment system. My main drive was just to get everything under the d20 system." Lo and behold, it works. just the d20 and the d6 when you roll for damage. "I wanted a nice simple system that worked for everything.
"The skill system is from everything that we had ever published beforehand, but I used a d20 instead of a d100 just because it was easier," Stafford told Kenneth Hite, when interviewed at GenCon in 2014. Much of that success comes down to the sheer elegance of the game system, combined with its emphasis on moral choice and character through Traits and Passions, and the skills and combat resolution mechanic, which boils everything down to single rolls of a 20-sided die. (According to feedback from Chaosium, the current 5.2 edition is the definitive one, with no further editions planned at present.) As Nocturnal stated in their Greg Stafford tribute, "Greg considered King Arthur Pendragon to be his masterpiece." At the time of writing, it's sitting at #5 on the RPGnet Game Index of the greatest RPGs of all time. First published in 1985, it won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1990, and even the current 5th edition won the 2006 Outie award for Best Retread. Pendragon is literally the stuff of legend. The Boy King is ready to become a Conqueror. We pass the torch to our friends at Chaosium, knowing that greatness awaits.
King arthur pendragon rpg 5.2 full#
Nocturnal Media spokesperson Steve Wieck said in the announcement, "it's clear that for the fire to become a bonfire, the wheel should turn full circle and Pendragon return to its origin, return to Chaosium. There are two very good reasons to revisit King Arthur Pendragon - the sad demise of its creator, Greg Stafford, and the reversion of the game rights from previous publisher Nocturnal Media to Chaosium, with the blessing of the Stafford estate, as announced in December 2018.
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