Pendragon, or King Arthur Pendragon, is a Tabletop role-playing game (RPG) in which players take the role of knights performing chivalric deeds in the tradition of Arthurian legend. It was originally written by Greg Stafford and published by Chaosium, then was acquired by Green Knight Publishing, who in turn passed on the rights to White Wolf Publishing in 2004. White Wolf sold the game to Stewart Wieck in 2009. Wieck formed Nocturnal Media, who updated and reissued the 5th edition originally published by White Wolf. In 2018, it returned to Chaosium.

After it was published in 1985, Pendragon won several industry awards, and reviewers highly recommended it; in following years, it was included in several "Best of" industry lists.

Setting Like several other RPGs from Chaosium (most notably Call of Cthulhu), Pendragon has a literary basis, in this case the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur. To separate itself from other fantasy RPGs, it tries to hew close to its source material in Arthurian legend. The typical suggested adventures might be a political struggle, a military clash, or a holy quest for an artifact, rather than dungeon crawls.

An important part of the game is the time between adventures, during which player characters manage their estates, get married, age, and have children. In a typical suggested campaign, the characters might have one adventure per year, and the campaign might carry over across generations, with players retiring their character and taking the role of that character's heir. This is quite different from most role-playing games, where one set of characters is played fairly intensively, and there is typically little consideration made of what happens to their family or descendants. The influence of this idea can be seen in the Ars Magica RPG, which also encourages stories taking years or decades to unfold.

The default Pendragon setting is a pastiche of actual fifth- and sixth-century British history, high medieval history (10th to 15th centuries), and Arthurian legend. The political forces are roughly those actually present in sub-Roman Britain: Roman authority has collapsed, and Britons are fighting Germanic, Irish, and Pictish factions. However, technology, culture, and society are thoroughly feudal, drawing more from post-Norman conquest Britain of the 11th century and beyond. Knights bear unique coats of arms, joust in tournaments, follow chivalric customs, and pursue courtly love. In effect, many trappings of the milieu in which the Arthurian romances were composed are projected backwards. Many of the campaign events and personalities come from the great mass of Arthurian literature composed from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. That said, there is flexibility for a gamemaster to tweak the default setting to whatever is desired: one set firmly in the Dark Ages, one set in a more fantastic vision of Arthurian Britain with magic and miracles comparatively commonplace, and so on.

System The rules system of Pendragon is most notable for its system of personality traits and passions that both control and represent the character's behavior. Otherwise, it uses fairly traditional game mechanics for normal play, based to some degree on the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system. It also has a set of charts and tables for determining what happens to a character's family in between adventures. The characters' ability scores are based on the BRP standard, but skills are resolved using d20, rather than d100.

Personal Traits

These are thirteen opposing values that represent a character's personality. The Traits are: Chaste / Lustful, Energetic / Lazy, Forgiving / Vengeful, Generous / Selfish, Honest / Deceitful, Just / Arbitrary, Merciful / Cruel, Modest / Proud, Pious / Worldly, Prudent / Reckless, Temperate / Indulgent, Trusting / Suspicious, and Valorous / Cowardly. The values on the left side are Virtues and the values on the right are Vices. The Traits are 1-20 points split between the opposing values (e.g., 10/10, 14/6, 5/15). For every point above 10 on a Virtue, a point must be placed below 10 on another Virtue. Characters start during character creation with a base of 15/5 in Valorous/Cowardly (as the player characters are assumed to be willing to accept perilous tasks by nature of their role), a base of 13/7 in their Religious Virtues (as the player characters are assumed to be aligned with Christianity, however pagan knights are noted to exist with their own set of Religious Virtues listed) and a base score of 10/10 in the remaining values.

A d20 roll is made to use a Virtue (e.g., Merciful to show mercy towards a captive mortal enemy) or resist a Vice (e.g., Deceitful to deceive a friend). If the roll is at or below the value, it Succeeds and the desired result occurs. If the roll exceeds the value, it is a Failure and the opposite result occurs. If a Virtue or Vice is rated at 20, the opposite is rated at 0; any roll on this trait is automatically successful (e.g., an Energetic character's attempt to persist in a difficult or arduous task) or automatically unsuccessful (e.g., an Indulgent character who must use Temperate to resist gluttony or intoxication). This is congruent with Arthurian legend, in which a hero's weaknesses are his downfall (like Lancelot's lust for Guenevere) or a villain has a moment of nobility (like King Uriens of Gore showing mercy to Prince Arthur rather than striking him down).

The Chivalric Virtues are: Energetic, Generous, Forgiving, Just, Modest, Temperate, and Valorous. Characters possessing point values in these seven Virtues totaling above 80 are granted a bonus to Chivalry rolls.

The Chivalric Vices are: Lazy, Selfish, Vengeful, Arbitrary, Cruel, Proud, and Cowardly. Characters possessing point values in these seven Vices totaling above 80 suffer a penalty to Chivalry rolls.

The Christian Religious Virtues are: Chaste, Forgiving, Merciful, Modest, and Temperate. Christian Characters possessing one or more of these traits at a value of 16+ gain a Religious bonus.

The Romantic Virtues are: Forgiving, Generous, Honest, Just, Merciful, and Trusting. Characters possessing point values in these six Virtues totaling above 65 are granted a bonus to Romance rolls.

Later on, other cultures were added for players who wanted to play a non-Christian character. The Pagan Religious Virtues are Lustful, Energetic, Generous, Honest, and Proud. This covers British and Welsh pagans. The Heathen Religious Virtues are Vengeful, Honest, Arbitrary, Proud, and Worldly. This covers Saracens and Picts. The Wotanic Religious Virtues are Generous, Honest, Proud, Worldly, Reckless and Indulgent. This covers Germanic and Scandinavian pagans.

Passions

Passions are higher values that influence a character's behavior. They are generated by rolling 2d6+6 or 3d6 (creating a base range between 3 and 18) and adding or subtracting various modifiers.

Passions roll on a d20, just like Traits. If a character fails a Passions roll, he goes into a state of Melancholy (hopeless depression) for violating his core belief. A critical failure or failed attempt to recover from Melancholy can lead to Madness, which forces the character to go into retirement until such time as he can redeem his actions or be forgiven by those he wronged.

Loyalty is a sense of duty to obey a liege, ally, or friend. Love is a feeling of affection for another person (a parent, sibling, friend, or lover) or people (allies / followers, friends, or family members) that the character has strong emotional ties to. Love (Family), an affection for family members, is common for daughters and firstborn sons. Hospitality is the courtesy of providing shelter, lodging, and protection towards a guest. Honor is a sense of duty towards following the rules of proper and noble behavior. Later editions added new Passions. Amor is Romantic love for a person, replacing Love for a lover. Hate is the obsessive dislike for a person, nation, or race. Station, introduced in the Sixth Edition, is how highly the character values acting in accordance with the customs of their social roles, e.g. how much deference they expect from lower classes.

A character's Passion is often used to create dissonance and conflict. An example would be a Loyal knight faithfully obeying a cruel order from his unjust liege (or an Honorable knight refusing to do so, no matter the reason or excuse). Another would be an Hospitable host giving protection to a rude and discourteous guest (or an enemy who abuses the custom for insidious ends).

Magic and Magic-Users

Only the fourth edition of Pendragon included mechanics for magic and magician characters. All other versions of the game, including the later fifth edition, assumed that the character was a knight or lady and restricted magic to game master-controlled characters.

Character Generation

The first through fourth editions allowed random character generation of characters from a wide variety of cultures of Great Britain and western Europe, which was expanded by later supplements. The fifth edition supports only point-based creation of young landholding knights from the default homeland of Salisbury, which was a preferred option in the third and fourth editions as well. The supplement Book of Knights and Ladies, self-published by Greg Stafford in 2008, allows creation of more diverse characters for fifth edition.

The regions of Logres, Cumbria, and Cambria profiled in the following three supplements were internal to Arthur's realm, and thus used standard character generation. Savage Mountains (1991) - Cambria (Wales); Welsh characters. Perilous Forest (1992) - Cumbria (Northern Britain); describes the lands of Cumbria (Northwest Britain) and Northumberland (Northeast Britain). Blood and Lust (1995) - Logres (Southern Britain); loosely describes the lands of Lindsey, East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex and the Saxon Shore of Essex, Sussex and Kent.

Over its history the game spawned a number of supplements dealing with areas within or beyond Arthurian Britain and creating characters outside the culture of the Celtic Britons: Pagan Shore (1994) - Ireland; Irish character generation, including Feudal Irish and two types of tribal peoples: the Cruithni (Irish Picts) and Lochlannach (somewhat ahistorical Norse raiders). Beyond the Wall: Pictland & The North (1995) - Pictland (Caledonia, roughly modern Scotland); Pictish character generation. Land of Giants (1996) - Scandinavia and the Nordic areas of Britain during the era of Beowulf; Northmen character generation. Saxons! (1999) - The origins of Anglo-Saxon England (Southeast Britain); Jute (Jutland), Angle (Schleswig-Holstein), Frisian (Friesland), Saxon (Germany) & Frankish (France) character generation.

Publication history The first edition was a boxed set published by Chaosium in 1985, and was designed and written by Greg Stafford. Chaosium planned a second edition, with minor changes to the rules, but this was never actually released. They released a third edition, with rules revised by Stafford, as a single softbound book in 1990. The fourth edition, published by Chaosium in 1993 and reprinted by Green Knight Publishing in 1999, was also released as a softbound manual: the core rules remained consistent with the third edition, but the book was expanded to include rules for player-character magicians and for advanced character-generation (the latter had originally appeared separately in the third-edition supplement Knights Adventurous). Green Knight Publishing also released a cut-down version of the fourth edition aimed at beginning players, The Book of Knights.