Every knight is going to die — the game is just a question of how he lives his life.
Greg Stafford, The Great Pendragon Campaign
Often just called Pendragon, KAP is a roleplaying game written by famed game designer Greg Stafford and first published in 1985. It’s currently published by Chaosium and the 6th edition has been slowly rolling out in the last year or so1.
It’s based on a variation of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying system and has one official variant setting in Paladin and a somewhat related Prince Valiant rpg2.
Pendragon is usually used to play part or all of the Great Pendragon Campaign - its 81 year mega-campaign framework.
The Game
Many of the game’s basic pillars are similar to mine, as it’s the origin. It’s a game for knights, emphasizes character “Traits” that determine virtues and passions which can inspire and drive to madness, and is built for covering a long period of time - for starters.
The core mechanic is a d20 roll-under system. Each skill, attribute, trait, etc. is rated 1-20 and you want to roll the d20 under that value3 while in contested rolls like combat you also want to roll higher than the opposition - giving it a “blackjack” twist4.
There are no classes (though supplements introduce playing as different cultures, as ladies, or as younger characters - with different rules and adjustments for setting them up) and skills and traits have a neat use-to-advance mechanic5.
The core character traits are paired, so if you have a X in one, you have a (20-X) in its opposing trait. These can really pull the character in different directions - especially if a trait becomes high enough, at which point it can force actions.
The default session framework is following an entire year, with a single adventure during the warm seasons, then following developments in the world and family over the winter and spring.
The Supplements
Across the editions, these supplements were particularly influential in my thoughts to designing this new game6
- Book of Sires especially, and Book of Knights and Ladies before it, which inspire:
- Expanding the pre-Arthur content.
- Deepening the family creation content past what the simpler and less varied tables in the main book.
- Trying to figure out what more foreign knights might look like. Knights and Ladies is not incredibly polished and elegant in design (Sires is significantly better though a lot more focused in its scope), but it triggers a lot of ideas.
- Book of the Estate for thoughts on “what does owning land look like?” both in what kinds of stories are out there to showcase and what people are looking for out of that gameplay. There are also books of the Warlord, Manor and Entourage which have nuggets of their own - but I’d definitely start with the Estate first. I don’t know about Lordly Domains, which was from even earlier editions and the 6th edition version hasn’t come out yet.
- Book of Feasts has a neat though pretty completely side-mini-game subsystem for feasts. It’s an interesting subsystem and it really emphasizes how games can center types of adventures that aren’t just combat.
- Saxons! There’s a variety of supplements that focus on a particular area and people, including outside of Britain proper - but this one I think had the most influence, framing a couple different ways to run the enemy’s perspective in the broader Arthurian campaign.
- Land of Giants is the other major outside-area supplement that influenced this game, since more than the others it’s really a separate campaign that happens to run at the same time.
- It was a major influence for A Wind Age, A Wolf Age.
- I also have a significant tie-in to this in my arrangement of the GPC - not necessarily following the same framing as this supplement does, but mining it heavily.
Footnotes
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There aren’t huge changes between editions. A lot of groups use material from older editions with new ones. I was first introduced to it in 5.2 (the 5th edition had multiple publications as it switched ownership and editor-lines - this was the last one before 6th edition). Even then several of the supplements I got and have mined for info come from 4th edition or even 3rd (which actually is the second edition for silly reasons). ↩
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Tied more specifically to the Arthurian-adjacent comic strip Prince Valiant, it’s hard to find these days. It was also created by Greg Stafford and is a lighter and faster rules take on Pendragon. ↩
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Roughly, speaking. There’s also modifiers that can apply; you can get scores over 20 and there’s special ways to resolve that, etc. ↩
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i.e. you ideally want to roll the highest possible under the score. Higher scores mean you have more room to roll higher than the opposition. ↩
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When you use them you mark the trait. When levelling up you roll against the current score, which means you get diminishing returns advancing things you’re already great at. ↩
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Which is not saying they’re necessarily the best or most important to get to play the game - and I might be minimizing the effect of the ones that contained sets of adventures because it’s hard to remember which thoughts emerged from which published adventures, and then further which adventures came from which compilations. ↩