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This review originally appeared on RPGShop.com.

There are some games that attempt to cover a broad variety of genres and situations, and there are some that pick one genre, one situation, and simulate it very well - as you can guess from the title of the game, Pendragon simulates one particular era very, very well, to the point where the default character is automatically a noble knight of the Realm. Contrast that to AD&D, where there are some six or seven default classes, five or six different races and several different worlds in which you can live.

That’s not to say that Pendragon is a bad game; far from it. It may, however, be a substantial switch for just about anybody who’s accustomed to a broader kind of game. What makes this game substantially different from AD&D - and to some degree, better - is its emphasis on history, on lineage, and on the legends of Arthurian lore. Rather than writing their own backstories, each player sends his father and grandfather through a series of dice rolls, like a Lifepath roll in R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk. Depending on how you roll, your grandfather might have died during a significant battle with great glory, while your father died at the hands of the Saxons on a patrol of the borders - but whatever glory they collected trickles down to you as part of your family lineage. You’re not just a knight - you’re part of a tradition. That kind of attention to detail extends throughout the entire game.

What it’s about, basically, is being a knight during the period when King Arthur ruled - the land is healthy, but it’s also plagued by threats both material - Saxons, villainous knights, and the like - and supernatural, including the mysterious faerie. King Arthur has ruled for quite some time, but as anybody who’s familiar with Arthurian myth will realize, it isn’t going to last long. So it’s up to the knights - the PCs - to ensure that the kingdom doesn’t fall before its time, and to try to earn glory for themselves and their deeds. Succeed, and you enter into the realm of Arthurian legend; fail, and you die at the hands of a Saxon raiding party.

There are, actually, two different forms of character generation. One of them involves creating a knight from Logres - you’re automatically from a barony in Salisbury, with your father as a noble lord and yourself as the eldest son of said noble. That’s for players who want to immediately get into the game without a lot of futzing around with dice rolling and points attribution. You could make a pretty decent knight with these rules, but you miss out on some of the extra flavor that’s contained within the more complex, but more diverse, advanced character generation rules. Pendragon offers a _lot_ of options here, even going so far as to trust the player to completely make up his own knight. Munchkins will love that option - Pendragon refers to one such minmaxed character as “Dax the Maxed Sax”. More mature role-players, hopefully drawn to Pendragon’s depth, will be able to create the characters they want without having to compromise. The book itself recommends a mixed version, which combines the best of both worlds.

The system itself, and the attributes that revolve around it, are fairly simply - you’ve got five attributes, four fewer than Call of Cthulhu. (INT, POW, EDU, and SAN are left out, for those who are familiar with that game. If you’re not, then you should be.) The flexibility of the Basic Role-Playing System gets proven once again with a new mechanic for simulating the noble drives - or lack of same - that drives characters within Arthurian stories. Each character has a set of virtues, determined by their religion, that define who they are. The Christians, for example, take Chaste, Modest, Forgiving, Merciful and Temperate for their virtues - but the Pagans take Generous, Energetic, Honest, Proud and Lustful for theirs. It’s a neat bit of contrast between the different religions. In addition, some Passions aren’t general - you can hate Saxons with a vengeance (18) and love Lady Muerne in a chaste way (5) without having to alter your basic Passions.

Passions also define who the characters are, at heart - what they’re after. A knight can be driven into a raging madness by a failed Merciful check, or driven into a passionate wooing of a particular lady with a failed Chaste check. Success, on the other hand, means that you’re able to avoid sleeping with the temptress, or killing a helpless enemy, and that, in turn, increases your knight’s glory. Glory, in turn, allows both players and GM to determine how valorous a knight is - and that grants stuff like extra attribute points every “winter season” - when knights return to their homes to wait out the winter months. The entire game is as close to true Arthurian role-playing as you’re going to get, essentially; it’s an excellent marriage of the setting to the rules, something that Green Knight Publishing picked up from Chaosium very, very well.

The resolution system has been simplified from Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing System, however - instead of the percentage dice that Chaosium’s BRP uses, everything has been simplified down to a d20 roll, trying to roll underneath a particular number in order to succeed. The actual game mechanics are summarized on three pages - that’s how simple it is. The basic skeleton of the Basic Role-Playing game is still here - a 1 gives you both a critical hit and the possibility of raising a skill, while a 20 is a natural fumble. I do miss the slightly more flexible percentages of Call of Cthulhu, but it’s really not that much of a problem. The Passions are handled in a much similar fashion, where you take checks in various Passions and their opposites in response to role-playing situations - if you run from a fight that you might have won, you take a Cowardly check.

The combat system is fairly simple, including rules for knocking people down and critical wounds among the standard roll vs. roll mechanic. However, weirdly enough, damage isn’t dependent on what kind of weapon that you’re using, but on your Damage statistic, a number of d6s determined by a small bit of mathematics with your attributes. Using a weapon adds or subtracts a six-sided dice from your damage stat, using your fists subtracts two of them. The overall effect is startlingly simple, reducing combat to a simple measure of the men involved, instead of the weapons and armor being used. Various weapon skills determine how good you are at using a particular weapon, and most of the weapons involved have special bonuses - for example, the morning star tacks on an extra d6 against anybody who happens to be wearing chain mail, while an axe negates the penalty that footsoldiers have against horsemen. It reminds me of Mordheim, for some reason, which has similar rock/paper/scissors weapon usage at times. Riding a horse, meanwhile, ups your damage level immensely, which makes calvary charges truly ferocious.

Damage, however, is going to be quite a switch from what most fantasy gamers are used to. While there is magical healing in this game, it’s going to be rare - healing. if any is available, is accomplished through first aid, which can grant 1d3 points on a success and 1d3 3 on a critical. Each wound is recorded seperately, however, so the two point badger bite can be healed seperaely of the fourteen point lungs-removed-and-wrapped-around-your-neck-like-a-bowtie wound. There are three different kinds of wounds - light, major, and mortal - so that a noble knight who gets pecked sixteen times by a woodpecker will be able to stay on his feet longer than a noble knight who took a sword wound - a major wound can permanently injure you, dropping your statistics. It’s a nice switch from AD&D, where you can drop to zero without any trouble - but then again, I haven’t had a character’s CON drop by three points because I didn’t sidestep a lance at the right time. Simulation is the name of the game here, rather than fantasy, and players and GMs are going to have to keep that in mind.

The supplemental material in this book is truly amazing. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the history and practices of the various religions in Arthurian lore - Paganism, Christianity, Judaism and Wotanism. In story terms, they’re quite meaty; in accuracy, I couldn’t tell you. There’s guidelines for chivalric behavior, which most will find invaluable. There’s maps and locations aplenty of Salisbury, which is the hometown for most PC knights. And, most helpfully, there’s rules for magical characters. Neatly enough, magical ability derives from how religious you are. Pagan wizards gain patronage from various pagan gods, but gain limitations as well - for example, a priestess of Gwydion gets a 10 bonus to Glamor magic, but can’t marry. (Most pagan limitations involve having to lead various ceremonies at certain times of the year - none of them are really nasty.) Christian wizards - mostly religious figures, such as friars and the like - derive patronage from various Christian saints. Somewhat like Mage: The Ascension, magic is broken down into general slots - making friends with animals, dispelling evil spirits, healing, travel and the like - each of which has its own particular tasks. Wizards draw on their own life force and on the life force of the land around them in order to pull them off - but while you have a rough idea of how many dice you can roll, you can never be sure of generating enough to pull off the effect. All of the magic here is properly Arthurian, and fit precisely into the Arthurian setting - it’s very well done.

I could go on - I should, really, but the size of the book is somewhat overwhelming. There’s 371 pages of Arthurian lore here, enough for even the most rabid completist. In the back, there’s several simple and short scenarios, and the average clever GM should be able to come up with a worthwhile campaign without much trouble. There’s also a minor army of monsters, all of them suitable to an Arthurian campaign, character sheets for the famous members of King Arthur’s court, a synopsis.

Heck with it. If you like Arthurian lore - and I admit that I’m even beginning to get into it, given the contents of this book - then you must have Pendragon. AD&D, while a noble effort - especially the third edition - just can’t measure up to the amount of attention and care that’s been given to this product. And the fact that there are _supplements_ to what’s got to be the official source on Arthurian role-playing blows my mind even further. It’s a big, meaty bastard of a game, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly.

P.S I’m glad to note that I didn’t once refer to the indispensable gamer/King Arthur movie, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

P.P.S “It’s just a little bunny rabbit, they said!”

-Darren MacLennan
This review originally appeared on RPGShop.com.

Pendragon
Pendragon Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 08/04/01 Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 5 (Excellent!) Pendragon is just about the Alpha and the Omega of Arthurian role-playing; while it may not have too many applications outside of an Arthurian setting, it does have a good number of mechanics that you could cannibalize for another game. If you are a big fan of King Arthur, though, then is the first, last and only game you'll ever need to play a knight in King Arthur's court. Product: Pendragon Author: Greg Stafford, Sam Shirley, Bill Bridges, King, Midgette, Savoy, Free, Dizerga, Swekel, Byerts and Blum Category: RPG Company/Publisher: Green Knight Publishing Line: Pendragon Cost: $30 Page count: 350 (!) Year published: 1999 ISBN: 1-928999-00-X SKU: 2716 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 08/04/01 Genre tags: Fantasy Historical	This review originally appeared on RPGShop.com. There are some games that attempt to cover a broad variety of genres and situations, and there are some that pick one genre, one situation, and simulate it very well - as you can guess from the title of the game, Pendragon simulates one particular era very, very well, to the point where the default character is automatically a noble knight of the Realm. Contrast that to AD&D, where there are some six or seven default classes, five or six different races and several different worlds in which you can live. That’s not to say that Pendragon is a bad game; far from it. It may, however, be a substantial switch for just about anybody who’s accustomed to a broader kind of game. What makes this game substantially different from AD&D - and to some degree, better - is its emphasis on history, on lineage, and on the legends of Arthurian lore. Rather than writing their own backstories, each player sends his father and grandfather through a series of dice rolls, like a Lifepath roll in R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk. Depending on how you roll, your grandfather might have died during a significant battle with great glory, while your father died at the hands of the Saxons on a patrol of the borders - but whatever glory they collected trickles down to you as part of your family lineage. You’re not just a knight - you’re part of a tradition. That kind of attention to detail extends throughout the entire game. What it’s about, basically, is being a knight during the period when King Arthur ruled - the land is healthy, but it’s also plagued by threats both material - Saxons, villainous knights, and the like - and supernatural, including the mysterious faerie. King Arthur has ruled for quite some time, but as anybody who’s familiar with Arthurian myth will realize, it isn’t going to last long. So it’s up to the knights - the PCs - to ensure that the kingdom doesn’t fall before its time, and to try to earn glory for themselves and their deeds. Succeed, and you enter into the realm of Arthurian legend; fail, and you die at the hands of a Saxon raiding party. There are, actually, two different forms of character generation. One of them involves creating a knight from Logres - you’re automatically from a barony in Salisbury, with your father as a noble lord and yourself as the eldest son of said noble. That’s for players who want to immediately get into the game without a lot of futzing around with dice rolling and points attribution. You could make a pretty decent knight with these rules, but you miss out on some of the extra flavor that’s contained within the more complex, but more diverse, advanced character generation rules. Pendragon offers a _lot_ of options here, even going so far as to trust the player to completely make up his own knight. Munchkins will love that option - Pendragon refers to one such minmaxed character as “Dax the Maxed Sax”. More mature role-players, hopefully drawn to Pendragon’s depth, will be able to create the characters they want without having to compromise. The book itself recommends a mixed version, which combines the best of both worlds. The system itself, and the attributes that revolve around it, are fairly simply - you’ve got five attributes, four fewer than Call of Cthulhu. (INT, POW, EDU, and SAN are left out, for those who are familiar with that game. If you’re not, then you should be.) The flexibility of the Basic Role-Playing System gets proven once again with a new mechanic for simulating the noble drives - or lack of same - that drives characters within Arthurian stories. Each character has a set of virtues, determined by their religion, that define who they are. The Christians, for example, take Chaste, Modest, Forgiving, Merciful and Temperate for their virtues - but the Pagans take Generous, Energetic, Honest, Proud and Lustful for theirs. It’s a neat bit of contrast between the different religions. In addition, some Passions aren’t general - you can hate Saxons with a vengeance (18) and love Lady Muerne in a chaste way (5) without having to alter your basic Passions. Passions also define who the characters are, at heart - what they’re after. A knight can be driven into a raging madness by a failed Merciful check, or driven into a passionate wooing of a particular lady with a failed Chaste check. Success, on the other hand, means that you’re able to avoid sleeping with the temptress, or killing a helpless enemy, and that, in turn, increases your knight’s glory. Glory, in turn, allows both players and GM to determine how valorous a knight is - and that grants stuff like extra attribute points every “winter season” - when knights return to their homes to wait out the winter months. The entire game is as close to true Arthurian role-playing as you’re going to get, essentially; it’s an excellent marriage of the setting to the rules, something that Green Knight Publishing picked up from Chaosium very, very well. The resolution system has been simplified from Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing System, however - instead of the percentage dice that Chaosium’s BRP uses, everything has been simplified down to a d20 roll, trying to roll underneath a particular number in order to succeed. The actual game mechanics are summarized on three pages - that’s how simple it is. The basic skeleton of the Basic Role-Playing game is still here - a 1 gives you both a critical hit and the possibility of raising a skill, while a 20 is a natural fumble. I do miss the slightly more flexible percentages of Call of Cthulhu, but it’s really not that much of a problem. The Passions are handled in a much similar fashion, where you take checks in various Passions and their opposites in response to role-playing situations - if you run from a fight that you might have won, you take a Cowardly check. The combat system is fairly simple, including rules for knocking people down and critical wounds among the standard roll vs. roll mechanic. However, weirdly enough, damage isn’t dependent on what kind of weapon that you’re using, but on your Damage statistic, a number of d6s determined by a small bit of mathematics with your attributes. Using a weapon adds or subtracts a six-sided dice from your damage stat, using your fists subtracts two of them. The overall effect is startlingly simple, reducing combat to a simple measure of the men involved, instead of the weapons and armor being used. Various weapon skills determine how good you are at using a particular weapon, and most of the weapons involved have special bonuses - for example, the morning star tacks on an extra d6 against anybody who happens to be wearing chain mail, while an axe negates the penalty that footsoldiers have against horsemen. It reminds me of Mordheim, for some reason, which has similar rock/paper/scissors weapon usage at times. Riding a horse, meanwhile, ups your damage level immensely, which makes calvary charges truly ferocious. Damage, however, is going to be quite a switch from what most fantasy gamers are used to. While there is magical healing in this game, it’s going to be rare - healing. if any is available, is accomplished through first aid, which can grant 1d3 points on a success and 1d3 3 on a critical. Each wound is recorded seperately, however, so the two point badger bite can be healed seperaely of the fourteen point lungs-removed-and-wrapped-around-your-neck-like-a-bowtie wound. There are three different kinds of wounds - light, major, and mortal - so that a noble knight who gets pecked sixteen times by a woodpecker will be able to stay on his feet longer than a noble knight who took a sword wound - a major wound can permanently injure you, dropping your statistics. It’s a nice switch from AD&D, where you can drop to zero without any trouble - but then again, I haven’t had a character’s CON drop by three points because I didn’t sidestep a lance at the right time. Simulation is the name of the game here, rather than fantasy, and players and GMs are going to have to keep that in mind. The supplemental material in this book is truly amazing. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the history and practices of the various religions in Arthurian lore - Paganism, Christianity, Judaism and Wotanism. In story terms, they’re quite meaty; in accuracy, I couldn’t tell you. There’s guidelines for chivalric behavior, which most will find invaluable. There’s maps and locations aplenty of Salisbury, which is the hometown for most PC knights. And, most helpfully, there’s rules for magical characters. Neatly enough, magical ability derives from how religious you are. Pagan wizards gain patronage from various pagan gods, but gain limitations as well - for example, a priestess of Gwydion gets a 10 bonus to Glamor magic, but can’t marry. (Most pagan limitations involve having to lead various ceremonies at certain times of the year - none of them are really nasty.) Christian wizards - mostly religious figures, such as friars and the like - derive patronage from various Christian saints. Somewhat like Mage: The Ascension, magic is broken down into general slots - making friends with animals, dispelling evil spirits, healing, travel and the like - each of which has its own particular tasks. Wizards draw on their own life force and on the life force of the land around them in order to pull them off - but while you have a rough idea of how many dice you can roll, you can never be sure of generating enough to pull off the effect. All of the magic here is properly Arthurian, and fit precisely into the Arthurian setting - it’s very well done. I could go on - I should, really, but the size of the book is somewhat overwhelming. There’s 371 pages of Arthurian lore here, enough for even the most rabid completist. In the back, there’s several simple and short scenarios, and the average clever GM should be able to come up with a worthwhile campaign without much trouble. There’s also a minor army of monsters, all of them suitable to an Arthurian campaign, character sheets for the famous members of King Arthur’s court, a synopsis. Heck with it. If you like Arthurian lore - and I admit that I’m even beginning to get into it, given the contents of this book - then you must have Pendragon. AD&D, while a noble effort - especially the third edition - just can’t measure up to the amount of attention and care that’s been given to this product. And the fact that there are _supplements_ to what’s got to be the official source on Arthurian role-playing blows my mind even further. It’s a big, meaty bastard of a game, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. P.S I’m glad to note that I didn’t once refer to the indispensable gamer/King Arthur movie, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. P.P.S “It’s just a little bunny rabbit, they said!” -Darren MacLennan This review originally appeared on RPGShop.com.