From Squires To Knights: the Pendragon Starter Set

After a long and careful development period, the 6th Edition of Pendragon is beginning to emerge. First up is the Starter Set, a product in the tradition of the Starter Set boxes that Chaosium have put out for Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest; you get a slimline boxed set with a form factor similar of the Chaosium boxes of yesteryear, a solo adventure to give you a taste of the setting and rules, sufficient rules to run at least short-term games for your buds, and some meatier scenario material to play with, and perhaps a few bits and pieces of more general use even for experienced players of the games in question.

Out of the three games that Chaosium have applied this formula to, Pendragon may be the most uneasy fit. Call of Cthulhu, the game in which this approach was pioneered, lends itself to episodic play and very self-contained investigations; an adventure book with a clutch of such self-contained scenarios is comparatively straightforward to devise. Moreover, with the default setting being 1920s Earth, the Starter Set doesn’t need to spend a lot of time getting basic setting ideas across.

RuneQuest is a touch more difficult, with a somewhat crunchier system and a setting which is very different from standard fantasy fare. Nonetheless, the RuneQuest Starter Set does purchasers a favour by providing a nicely-developed little pocket setting to help inspire subsequent scenarios, and whilst the current edition of RuneQuest has somewhat more emphasis on tying adventures to the passage of seasons, it’s still viable to soft-pedal that a little for the Starter Set and still give a good idea of what RuneQuest is about, and provide a clutch of scenarios that give a nice RuneQuest-y experience.

Pendragon, however, is a game which absolutely shines in long-term campaign play; although it is absolutely viable to play a short-term Pendragon campaign or even a one-shot, the game really sings when you embrace the “generational play” aspect of it and players start founding their own knightly dynasties playing out against the grand backdrop of the Arthurian saga. It’s not really possible to convey that within the scope of a starter set, leaving the design team here the job of trying to figure out how to provide a cross-section of distinctive Pendragon stuff without leaning on generational play.

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Fortunately, Pendragon has one other major innovation which is much more suited to be put front and centre like this – the mechanics around Traits and Passions, which add game mechanical weight to your character’s personality and, at extremes, make it progressively more difficult to make your character behave in a way contrary to well-established strong personality traits. Sometimes a character’s instincts in Pendragon will override any attempt at calculated play – and the more hard you took a character in a particular direction, the more likely this is to occur. The text here repeatedly emphasises the idea that the point of Pendragon is discovering what sort of knight your PC will become, and that’s an excellent way to put it.

Your solo adventure this time around is The Adventure of the Sword In the Stone, which draws on a hefty dose of T.H. White to present a scenario where you’re a page in Sir Ector’s court and buddies with the young Arthur when he’s a squire, and get caught up in events that lead to him drawing the titular sword from the titular stone. Rather than doing a standard Glory and Honour calculation from your actions in the scenario, you instead calculate a final score based on your deeds during the adventure, which gives a picture of how you end up being remembered. (I got to be Arthur’s first squire and became a Knight of the Round Table, so I did pretty well.)

I was quite impressed, reviewing the table, at how many things were possible in the solo scenario, suggesting it had a range of hidden depths beyond those I saw in my playthrough. I was also impressed to see that female knights are overtly and explicitly a thing in the assumed version of Arthurian England the game presents; this has been the case in the game for a while, with even the 1st Edition saying that you can have women as knights at your table if you want and Stafford asking Phyllis Ann Karr to look for examples of women as literary knights when she was compiling The Arthurian Companion. This is an evolution from 1st Edition, mind – Greg Stafford assumed there that women knights would not be a character type by default – but given that he asked Karr to find sources, it seems likely he had a change of heart fairly early on, and certainly in 5th Edition he’d come around to the idea that you absolutely should include female knights if your group has any desire to do so and made sure to provide some examples.

When you encounter a lady knight at the tournament she even mentions in passing that she is descended from the Amazons, which was an origin I offered for a tradition of knighthood among women in my home 5th Edition campaign, so there you go – I’m now canon. I am sure this is the result of parallel evolution – it doesn’t take much contemplation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, original Arthurian source, and his claims of the Britons being refugees from Troy to come to the brainwave that some of the Trojans’ allies, the Amazons, might have come along with old Brutus for the ride.

Between this and women being spottable on the cover and the internal art (but not, thank crikey, in boobplate!), this might be the edition which has gone furthest in saying firmly “we are going to assume women can be knights, if you assume differently then it’s your table I guess but you’ll be out of step with us”. The assumed proportion is one in twenty knights being women – so this is far from egalitarian, but an emphasis is put on the medieval era being an unkind, unpleasant time, at least at the start of Arthur’s reign, and how part of the point of the Arthurian story is to show a better society briefly flowering in that span of time before Arthur’s fading powers and Mordred’s rising ambition snuffs that out.

The rules booklet you get here is fairly wide-ranging – even providing fairly simplified rules for the Winter Phase, the crucial part of Pendragon play where you see how the windfalls and ravages of time affect your knight – and to my eyes it looks to offer enough that it would be wholly viable for Chaosium to put out scenario books like those they have put out for Call of Cthulhu where you can play the adventures just fine with only the Starter Set, which is a nice gesture for groups who might not be able to spring for the full-fat rulebook but could afford to get a scenario book or two to squeeze a bit more value out of the very price-competitive Starter Set.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at how viable it to put a fairly terse rules booklet for Pendragon – after all, 1st Edition did – but something has to give, and here it’s character generation. Whereas the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set has a quick-paced simple character generation process which generates entirely serviceable PCs, part of the joy of Pendragon character generation is getting a flavourful family history which gives rise to relevant Passions and so helps shape gameplay, which a quickstart character generation process would short-circuit.

Your refereed adventures here constitute The Sword Campaign – a tight set of adventures set during and immediately after the Londinium Tournament where Arthur draws the sword from the stone. The scenarios are designed to introduce some fun concepts like tourneys and battles and so on in the course of play, and will leave players feeling like they were involved in some fairly significant campaign events, so that’s all good.

As for bits useful even to seasoned players – there’s a set of battle cards here which I can see being very handy for making battles run a little smoother, the rules booklet will probably be useful to keep to hand even when a full-fat rulebook is available for ease of consultation on some points, and there’s some appendices produced as separate leaflets to give rundowns on specific things like battle or tournaments which could likewise prove handy.

Nonetheless, I found that this largely whetted my appetite for updated core books (plus an updated Great Pendragon Campaign), all of which we’ve been reassured are in the pipeline. If it sounds like I am down on the box, I am not – it’s a lovely thing to have and I’m excited to see all that 6th Edition has to offer – but ultimately, it is a Starter Set which cannot hope to give as full a summation of what Pendragon is about compared to what the Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest Starter Sets offer, simply because it’s just not viable to cram Pendragon‘s generational play into this style of starter. A truly valiant attempt has been made, however, and if this as accurate a taste of the writing and production values of 6th Edition as the Cthulhu and RuneQuest sets are of their respective games, the new edition is going to be an absolute treat when it emerges.