Looking to get into Pendragon. What edition is the best and where should I start?

Yeah, Sir Palomides (sp), actually one of the most noble and also well developed of the knights (at least in Mallory). There was also his father and brother (all three converted to Christianity, Palomides held it off until he had done enough great deeds)
I'm not sure what happened to him in the end though since he just up and vanished towards the end

the game goes into extremely in-depth explanations of how it works, it's not easy to repeat really and encompass the whole thing. Better you just grab a pdf of it and read it yourself.

did they ever release a chansons de geste sourcebook for this game? i could really go for a peers of charlemagne campaign

I'm pretty sure there was a Charlemagne book.

...

i cant find anything on it. maybe i'll read the dnd 2e charlemagne paladins book and go off that

He was the knight who killed the questing beast wasn't

Arthurian mythology is always fun with just how many odd places it had people from to show how EVERYONE wanted to be a member. I almost wish they'd known about Japan and China in more detail at the time so they could have introduced more crazy knight examples

Oh. Do you have to make a new character every generation?

sir Martin from King Arthur's Disasters always filled that itch for me and I always include him in my Pendragon games.

Some might call this heresy, but if I ran this I would kill off some of those movers and shakers and have the pc's inherit their position, then just use the campaign as a guideline rather than a direct way to run it.

Probably how I'd do it, too.

If you can read spanish, get the Spanish 5.1 version. If only for dat art.

Like seriously, it fits the setting and it's top notch quality.

The black and white is less fitting but good.

Less Pre-Raphaelite, you mean, and more historically accurate.

>Arthurian mythology is always fun with just how many odd places it had people from to show how EVERYONE wanted to be a member. I almost wish they'd known about Japan and China in more detail at the time so they could have introduced more crazy knight examples

I still think of those guys like a medieval superhero league, complete with contrived scenarios for the good guys to fight each other and see what happens.

But what if I want to play a Saxon who leaves Britain following the Norman invasion and offers his sword to the Byzantines in the great Anglo-Varangian migration in which the Varangian Guard suddenly became almost entirely English after the Scourge of the North of England?

I might want to fight Greek/Roman magicians and Saracen and Turkish despoilers of Roman antiquity!

mega:///#F!TwUxkbhA!CVBXFzEzPwNZ50BG4abhFQ

You're not wrong. Except medieval superheroes killed their enemies.

True. Named bad guys could sometimes call for mercy and be more likely spared than not, but for the most part yeah.

I'd recommend Pendragon even if you don't actually play the game for the sheer fact that the people who worked on it really managed to put all the Arthurian myth together and in perspective in a way that won't confuse the fuck out of the average person.

Well, truth be told I've been binging on Prince Valiant and have been craving a game about knightly shit. Can't really do it in other systems.

Apparently this is not a world where you can piss on Calais from Dover.

despite being such an enormous influence on fantasy I know nothing about the King Arthur stuff and I'd like to play this game

what could you guys tell me to read from the actual sources?

>tfw you want to run pendragon with your group
>tfw the guy currently running a game for the group lets you know he has enough campaign material to run his DnD game until the end of time
>tfw can't be assed to run game with assburgers from FLGS or online

GURPS

Latest edition is the best, but the rules don't change much between editions so you can use sourcebooks for any edition.

Go to Gutenburg.com and read "Morte d'Arthur".

Morte d'Arthur is really the classic, which brought together all kinds of influences and largely shaped the definitive idea of the mythos we have today.

Also interesting though are Chretien de Troyes four (and a half) poems, which are really the starting point for Arthur as a literary figure.

Geoffrey of Monmouth turned the Welsh legend into a pseudo-historical king, and de Troyes took that pseudo history and plugged in into the world of chivalric poems and courtly love. It was an instant hit and made Arthurian legend (as the Matter of Britain) one of the big genres of chivalric literature.

They are tales of Love and Knights, with lots of quests and melodrama. Arthur is a suprisingly tangental figure, with the action following the Knights and their loves of the court.

Erec and Enide (c.1170), is all about the eponymous love story but unsually for the genre they are happily married early in the story and it's what comes next which is the main focus.

Cliges (c.1176). follows the adventures of Alexander, Prince of Byzantium and aspiring knigh in Arthur's court. Quests, Love, Magic and Dynastic Politics ensue.

Cliges is notable for having Arthur's Britain be the capital of chivalry in Europe with an international cast of Emperors, Kings, Knights and Princesses featuring.

Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (c.1177-1181) is probably the wierdest tale, with the most high fantasy elements.

Yvain saves the lion from a dragon and the two go off on a series of magical adventures but the greatest challenge of all is winning forgiveness from his wronged wife.

Gawain features heavily, as in most of Chretien's works, as the most gallant and acomplished of Arthur's knights and is clearly the authours favourite but never the hero of his own tale.

Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (c.1177-1181 alongside Yvain).

This is Lancelot's debut to the mythos, and the origin of his illicit love affair with Guinevere.

Guinevere is abducted , and Lancelot and Gawain must rescue her. Aside from usual chivalric shenanigans the poem focuses on the forbidden love angle and in many ways is Arthur's nadir as a character in his own mythos; ineffectual, cuckholded and rather a sidenote to the real action.

Finally there is Percival; the story of the Grail. This unfinished poem is Chretien's other big addition to the Arthur mythos with the Grail Quest. Sadly I don't have a pdf copy, but the opening alone is worth a read as one long joke in which the punchline is always the Welsh.

And those are the four and a half poems of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian cycle. It's a strange world that laid the foundations of all that followed but at the same time a lot of elements that are now integral to the mythos are absent, even those such as Merlin and Morded that predate the poems and are featured in de Troyes' main source Geoffrey of Monmouth. At the time, the poems proved wildly popular and soon cemented the Arthurian mythos as the cynosure of chivalry across Europe, although now they are rather overshadowed by all the later works that followed in their footsteps.

Why?

Camelot is 500 years or more before the Norman Invasion, isn't it?

I'm sure Pendragon is great for Camelot and has a lot of nice specific rules. For general "lets run around the historical world!" stuff, GURPS tends to be a good way to go.

Do any of the most recent editions do a good job of giving an in-setting reason for the rapid advance of tech in the game (for those unfamiliar, the game starts with players using weapons, armor and equipment that are period-accurate for post-Roman Britain, but as each generation of the campaign progresses, tech advances up to the full-plate knight of chivalric myth within the span of a few generations).

I'm basically fine with that being in the game to be clear, I could just never pick up on a clear in-setting reason for why they chose that approach.

>Can't really do it in other systems.
There's a Prince Valiant RPG.

Camelot is from the alternate timeline where JFK doesn't die

Also Pendragon isn't really that history specific, because of people's misconceptions about the era i.e. there are anachronisms like knights running around in plate armor because that is how people often think ofr the Arthurian myths

I really like how it works. The start of the game is relatively accurate to the actual time period, with the anachronism of mounted knights existing as a class. Each era accompanies a leap forward in technology as the splendor of Arthur's reign causes advanced growth. So by the time Lancelot comes around, you're in the high middle ages, and by the end of Arthur's reign, technology is in line with the Wars of the Roses. Better arms and armor becomes a form of character growth.

I was under the impression that arthurian myth is generally ahistorical.

Reminder that Arthur literally conquers the Roman Empire and becomes the Emperor at one point.

Anyway this is an indepth review of 4E if you care.

projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/divinecoffeebinge/pendragon/

Arthurian myth generally depicted its events with whatever technology and social concepts are contemporary, even though the story is set in 6th century Celtic Britain.

yeah it is, Malory even said Mordred assault the Tower of London with cannons

Since it's a 'lost age' it's easy to explain that things were better then went to shit.

Yeah, but pendragon has wider appeal, I figured.

user, I'd love to play Pendragon with you.

I've read that Lancelot was a largely a later invention, which is why he reads as a self insert. What happened to Camelot before Lancelot was written?

Does Pendragon account for a 'post-game' campaign after Arthur is carried away to Avalon and Camelot falls? Or is it just 'and then history happened' at that's it?
A 'post-Camelot' decline era would be pretty cool if you ask me.

Camelot and Lancelot were invented at the same time by Chretien, because he wanted to rhyme the place Lancelot was going to his name. So they're tied together.

Arthur goes to Rome to become Emperor. While he's away, his nephew Mordred, whom he left as the ruler of Britain while he is away, treasonously marries Queen Guinevere and leads a rebellion. Arthur returns to quell it, and is killed in the battle.

Also of note, Arthur and Guinevere are childless while Mordred has a shitton of kids in just the time that Arthur was away.

And Guinevere goes along with that? Damn.

Wasn't there an even older version where Arthur was some kind of barbarian warlord?

In the earliest stories, he was a Celt following the withdraw of Roman authority from Britain. This makes him the actual heir of civilization, as opposed to the invading Saxons against which he fought. This was sort of forgotten over time.

The glamour and magic of king Arthur's court pushes things forward, until the right courtly period is reached, but the magic fades as the kingdom does.

It's a simplified Pendragon system.

The game is supposed to kill all but one of the players characters, and all their realatives.

But whatever happens, the next few years are mapped as Saxons attacking and all the magic and technology fading away.

I used the latest edition for the storyline but I ended up using Runequest 6 to run the actual game. Got all the way through 25 in game years when we ended it.

Is that The Pendragon Campaign rolling into Saxons!, or The Boy King?

I don't know now, but some years ago you needed the basic rulebook plus Adventurous Knight supplement, to play a PC from any culture. I had bought the supplement about Vikings, but it's boring as hell.

>arthur wielding joyeuse

huh.

>It's the guy who uses the word cynosure

So, anyone want to get a game going

Don't know about Pendragon, but AD&D 2E had a Charlemagne's Paladins book in its historicals line.

>he game is supposed to kill all but one of the players characters, and all their realatives.

jesus is that necessary? Does everyone just simultaneously drop dead after Arthur goes away? The stories kept going in several sources, Lancelot and Guinevere themselves don't die until long after Arthur's gone.

>Lancelot and Guinevere themselves don't die until long after Arthur's gone.
Did they at least die painfully?

Emotional / spiritual agony if anything

>jesus is that necessary? Does everyone just simultaneously drop dead after Arthur goes away?
PC are supposed to fight in the battle of Camlann and thus die

Aw.

Fate/stay night Réalta Nua

They both spend the rest of their days in misery trying to make spiritual penance for what they did. Guinevere becomes an abbess and Lancelot a priest / monk who shrivels away because of his constant fasting and praying. When he hears that Guinevere is on her death bed he rushes to see her and she wills herself to drop dead minutes before he arrives because she swore they should never see each other again. Lancelot just deteriorates away and asks the remaining Round Table knights to fight in the Holy Land where they all die on Good Friday.

Isn't it that modern retelling that was not relevant for the mytho for centuries?

That's much more satisfying.

What's Avalon like?

Those expressions are killing me.

What's this pic from? It's pretty good.
Aquelarre books have this kind of pics in the third edition.

Medieval art has a few gems.

...

T-that's not how I imagined hunting dragons was like. That's more like a mercy for the poor thing than anything else

Ran the Great Campaign from 485 to 511, the year after Arthur becomes king.

Personally I think the players had the most interesting characters across all campaigns we've played in Pendragon.

Their climb to fame during the Uther period to their years as advisors during the Anarchy period is something I often reminisce. The sessions that started with a intense crisis meeting as Saxon's made advancements or demanded tribute sending the players out on fairly hopeless quests of finding allies. They finally settle with King Idres of Cornwall helping him expand his borders and killing the other likely candidate to the throne, the King of Wales. Idres who later refuses to recognize Arthur as king.

Sir Richard emerges as a great leader, he led all troops available to the Player knights to quell the usurpers in neighboring Rydychan during the Anarchy years following Uther's death and succeeded, sharing the manors between the players.

Sir Allard who was dressed in rags during Uther's last years comes across great wealth thanks to his fellow knight gifting him Oxford for his contributions and he founds a new flame for further glory, slowly becoming the greatest swordsman in England (ended at 30 in sword skill, would've become king of England if plot hadn't happened).

511 they are in their mid-forties and have 10k+ glory, they are starting to look at retirement but with dissent within, conflict with Saxons, Picts and Cornwall brewing I don't see any of them dying in bed.

I would love to return to it and most of the players appears to want to return as well if we fast forward the really railroady years or send them on adventures away from Arthur.

It's Thomas Cole's 'The Present'

It actually does say that, the last line of the campaign is 'history reasserts itself'.
Now if you listen to Malory it wasn't over there though, a dude named Constantine takes over for Arthur and reigns honorably, I'm not sure but I think it another source there's even further campaigns against Mordred's sons. There's actually an old DOS game where you play in the Post-Arthur world and try to keep Britain together and gather what knights remain.

>in some cases the system is chauvinistic

Seems a bit lame and railroady, desu, but it is the end so it's fitting, I suppose.

While it's very much kind of a dumb way to look at it, it does say essentially wanting to play a female character means you don't get to do much shit.

Just makes me more likely to play one pretending to be a dude, honestly, so I don't see it as a fault of the system, really.

>not Malory names even a little
>also obvious errors like confusing Gwynedd and Gwaelod
White Wolf Publishing indeed.

The guy who's going to insist on trying to play a woman disguised as a man who is also a knight
Saints preserve me, why does there always have to be one of you cunty fuckers?

It's never a woman either, that's what really gets me. I've never once in my life had a problem with a female player over this kinda shit, they just accept genre, play a man and have a blast.

Cunty fucker, really? I don't always do it, either. I just like the trope and if it fits with the genre/game and the DM allows it, I go with it. If not, I shrug and make a dude.

It's not really that big of a dealio.

>Cunty fucker, really?
In my experience, yes.
>I don't always do it, either.
Sometimes is bad enough.
>DM allows it, I go with it. If not, I shrug and make a dude. It's not really that big of a dealio.
This on the other hand is good but also not my experience at all. In not acting like a whiny sperg about it you're in a distinct minority.

Yeah. That being said, lady knights are part of the general genre, what with motherfucking Bradamante in the Roland mythos. Now Pendragon is really not that suited to lady knights, but it's also not something to tear your clothes for either way.

>Bradamante
Not really part of the "Roland mythos" nor Matter of France at all; Bradamante is a strictly early-modern novel character, it's like calling T.H. White's backwards-living Merlin part of the Matter of Britain.

>>in some cases the system is chauvinistic

It's fucking supposed to be. The SETTING is chauvinistic as shit. If people can't deal with that, they should have a seance and make sure Thomas Malory can attend.

That's a really big stretch unless you want to say that Bradamante was invented by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

You know what I want? Given the timeline of Pendragon, I want King Arthur to go up against Belisarius, the Last Roman in a great battle for the fate of the Western Roman Empire. The Taghmata of Byzantium vs Arthur's army and the cream of Western Europe.