2013-05-17 Pendragon RPG

Recently Joshua Petronis-Akins asked in the Pendragon RPG Google+ community:

Could anyone sell me on Pendragon? What makes it cool?

Coming from a D&D background, this is what made us want to play Pendragon RPG and The Great Pendragon Campaign:

**a multi-generation campaign**—play your knights, their sons, and their grandsons
**the annual cycle**—every session is about the adventures during the summer and the “levelling up” in winter
**personality traits**—knights have multiple traits that come in opposing pairs such as *just* vs. *arbitrary* and usually whenever you increase one, the other decreases; these traits sometimes get used to determine what the character does *in spite of what the player might wish*

I really like the combat system: your skill is a number; roll below this number to succeed, roll the exact number to succeed critically. In a round, there is no need to roll for initiative. It’s all opposed checks. If you want to fight multiple opponents, you must split your skill between all your opponents and roll for each one. This is devastating. If you hit, roll damage. The opponent checks whether this value is higher than their *knockback* stat. If so, succeed at a horsemanship test or fall off the horse. Armor reduces damage. You can further reduce damage using a shield, but only if you had a “partial success”—only if you succeeded in your check but lost against an opponent who succeeded with a higher roll.

Critical hits count as 20. If your skill rises above 20, just add that much to your roll. If your skill is 23, you roll 1d20+3. Thus, your crit range in effect is 17–20.

It’s interesting, it’s different, and it still works.

Our campaign is still in the Anarchy period.

There’s a German campaign wiki, if you want to take a look: Ritter von Salisbury.

Ritter von Salisbury

Things we’re not that much into:

**the resources game**—gaining manors, building fortifications, hiring men, the minutiae of earning your taxes, paying for upkeep
**the family events**—we switched from the table in the rulebook to Telecanter’s Dramarama (with a few changes once we discovered that too many of our relatives kept eloping with butchers and tax men)

Telecanter’s Dramarama

I bought the books in 2011 from RPG Now, and they’re still doing fine:

bought the books

/pics/8539404868_eaab402d46_n.jpg

/pics/8539409258_dd5be18586_n.jpg

/pics/8538296923_732dc0d2d7_n.jpg

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

⁂

I played Pendragon like when I was around 15 (that is >20 years ago, 1st edition...) and it’s one of the RPG I remember because it was really thematic. I don’t know if playing a D&D campaign with a paste up Arthurian universe would make you feel like a knight nearly as well as Pendragon

– Pierre Gaston 2013-05-27 11:11 UTC

---

I’m convinced that it wouldn’t work as well. I’ve never bought books that proposed to add the Arthurian flair, however: HR2 Charlemagne's Paladins Campaign Sourcebook for AD&D 2nd ed.

– Alex Schroeder 2013-05-27 14:15 UTC

Alex Schroeder