Pendragon

 

Chaosium have, fairly recently, released a new edition of their Arthurian TTRPG, Pendragon.

This is the King Arthur of Thomas Malory, of the movie Excalibur or the book The Once and Future King, not the 6th century Dux Bellorum who defeated the invading Saxons at Mount Badon. It's medieval, but mythic medieval. Arthur's knights ride around in highly polished 15th century plate armour and have jousts and quests and what-not.

It's a generational game, in which time passes and your character ages and may die, of old age or the sword, and you carry on playing your heir. And so on.

Many, many years ago I was introduced to another medievalist game, Chivalry & Sorcery.

It was developed by a couple of medieval recreationists, and they wanted to be as historically accurate as was feasible in a game that included dragons and goblins and spell-casting wizards. We used it mainly as a resource for prices and wages and things like that, though a few of my friends have run C&S campaigns over the years. I still have a copy of my own around somewhere.

Although the idea of Arthurian knightly roleplaying appealed (and still appeals) to me, I found C&S too dense. And the typewritten text was really small.

Anyway, fast-forward to the present, and I got myself a copy of the Pendragon 6th Edition Starter Set from DTRPG in PDF form, just to have a look at it and see whether or not I'd be interested in playing it. It's only twelve YankeeBucks or so.

As a starter set, it's an impressive piece of work. However, it uses a different task resolution mechanic than any of Chaosium's d100 systems, which is a mark against it in my book, as I was really hoping for something that slotted into the generic BRP ecosystem.  I can't really be bothered learning a bunch of new systems any more — it's never really floated my boat, but I was (grudgingly) more open to it in the past.

It looks like, once again, this is an Arthurian game that would mainly be useful to me as a resource for home-brewed Arthurian gaming in another system. Which is a shame really, because what I've seen of it looks pretty good, if I only had the energy any more to figure out a whole new rules system. But life is just too short.