We've got some games scheduled using his Pendragon. Can I expand for opinions on this particular work of his?

I love Pendragon and haven't played it for years.

I am just about to run The Great Penragon campaign though.

I have also had an inkling to run a Robin of Sherwood-style game using the rules.

A tremendous game, and a great influence on me as a designer.

-clash

Its one of the best games ever, of course, and all right thinking people know it.

I've not played in a couple years, but I played the hell out of that game in college -- two or three separate multi-year long campaigns of awesomeness.

Is there any specific advice you'd like? What're you doing with it specifically?

I hope those were concurrent and did not stall your graduation.

Nothing specific, just any and all impressions. How about some highlights remembered from specific adventures/campaigns? Any particularly innovated rules or subsystems of note?

I can crap on about Pendragon until King Arthur rises from his grave.

PD was the first game to demonstrate to me how system could support setting, and how limitations can spur creativity. It was very likely due to my experiences with PD that I was open to the Forge games when they came along. I had internalised the idea that system matters, because PD didn't play like anything else I ran.

I ran practically nothing else during the 90s. I hacked the game twice, once for a Gloranthan game and once for a more historical game.

When you consider that it has been essentially the same game since GS made it in the 80s, you see just how far ahead of the pack he was.

Given the right group, I'd be happy to run or play PD again.

Dude, I was in school for a really long time. Happens when you change grad programs twice....



The thing that springs first to mind is the first time I played the Heart Blade adventure from "Blood and Lust."

The Heart Blade is an adventure where a PC knight falls in mutual love with a beautiful heiress -- a goal of any smart player knight -- and as they go to get married, she's kidnapped by an evil knight. As part of this there are quests, witches, a magical sword dedicated to love that is going to be turned to serving hate, true love, giants, revenge... it's like the Princess Bride but serious.

Anyway, at the end of the adventure the PCs come in with their quests done, but fail to sway an important NPC (his brother was being held hostage and they couldn't get him past his Love: Family passion to follow his Honor passion), and as a result in the huge final fight... fail to save the fiancée. She dies bleeding in her lover's arms, swearing to him that this is not the end.

Everyone was a little devastated, as we'd mostly to that point played the kind of games where either there was no true love in peril, or the true love in peril would of course be saved. The players were also a bit startled by the way the Traits and Passions system had played out across the adventure, making NPCs (and their own characters) take actions that you might not have expected -- people caught between love, honor, vengeance, and loyalty doing the kinds of fucked up, irrational things that characters in the source literature do.

Anyway, the knights live on, they move on to the next year's adventure and have a really bad year of getting their ass kicked. The PC whose fiancée died is despondent and is out riding near the lake on his lands one night, when an apparition of his dead fiancée rises out of the water and begs him to come with her to the land beneath the waves where they can be together. The player can't decide if he should trust her or not, and we end up rolling some Traits.. and in the end he doesn't go, and she retreats into the lake weeping.

For the rest of the character's life he was never sure if it was her or not, and if he should have gone with her. His bitterness grew until he finally ended up in a small-scale war with the NPC who wouldn't help him in the first adventure, and ruined his family and reputation in doing so. In the end he ended up working with Mordred, because he was promised help in defeating his enemies, and became one of the men who rode against Arthur in the last battle.

I developed a campaign structure for PD that sprang from the deadliness of the combat system and the fact that I was running the Viking variant Land of Giants. I encouraged players to pursue their own chr's careers without regard to a party. When we followed one PC out of the original party, we generated new chrs that were associated with the new situation. Every so often we would pause one's groups adventures and go to another group. So the players had folders of half a dozen chrs each.

The effect was to build up the idea that it was a big world and any one PC was a small part of it.

As I started to read the rules recently (to prepare for this very game), it seemed to me that one or two sessions is not going to do it justice. Am I wrong in this?

No, PD really works best over at least twenty or thirty sessions. Ideally, you want time to see your chr get old and his sons and maybe grandsons grow up.

I would definitely recommend sticking to 1 year=1 session as far as is practicable. Otherwise you'll just never get there.