Was talking about more obscure older game systems with friends last night and we realized what the funniest thing you could do was.

So, King Arthur's Pendragon is an obscure curiosity of a game system from the early 90's that is about, well, being knights in the Arthurian cycle. It has some things to recommend it, namely that the guy who was responsible for it from its inception until his death around 2018 was a real scholar of this stuff.

But the thing that made people remember the game was 2007's The Great Pendragon Campaign which is a rule and adventure book that lays out year by year shit for your characters to do from the year 485 to 566; from basically being young unproven knights in the middle of Uther's reign all the way down to the Battle of Camlann.

A period so long you are guaranteed ICly to wind up going through at least two characters because old age is going to catch up to your first one.

Running this is not the funniest thing you can do.

There's support albeit fanmade for actually running out the coda mentioned in The Great Pendragon Campaign out to 577; killing the sons of Mordred and retaking of Hampshire and Salisbury, helping the younger Breunor the Black, the death of King Mark, the election of Sir Constantine to the throne, and ultimately, the Saxon conquest of Britain.

This coda requires a mandatory third Knight for most players because as written the Battle of Camlann doesn't end until all but one PC is dead, who gets to see the end of the battle and take the sword back to the lake. TBH if you began from the original start date in 485 your second characters might be old enough to have sons anyways.

This is still not the funniest thing you can do.

oh, nice

5th edition Pendragon has a supplement called the Book of Uther, which pushes the start date back to 480, presuming your default knight's father died a little earlier and had them a little earlier, or having you play your character's dad, a veteran knight who ultimately by plot fiat has to die by 484 at the Battle of Mt. Damen.

So this pushes The Great Pendragon Campaign out to almost 100 years (480-577) and requires a minimum of two knights, but more than likely three or four (480-484, 485-529, 529-566, 567-577 are our default assumptions).

This is still not the funniest thing you can do.

Pendragon is an iterative game. You can convert even 1st edition materials up to the current 5.2 edition. Also the entire gameline is up on DrivethruRPG in PDF form, and every adventure is designed to either be things that can happen any time, or is given a specific year. You can make the game itself a lot longer than it is already through this. BUT!

In particular, one 4th editions supplement, with rules for being the bad guys (aka the Saxons), fittingly just titled Saxons! is of interest to us, because it gives a whole campaign timeline for Vortigern's era, pushing our start date back to 449, which means you are now playing what is traditionally your first character's grandfather.

....

So the average player is now going to go through five knights if you do this; your grandfather begins in 439, your father in 460, your first knight in 485, your second (presumably son) no later than about 529, his son probably until the battle of Camlann, and then probably the grandson to finish out the story.

I kind of want this

I will take this time to point out that step one of chargen is to figure out how your great-grandfather was as a knight (born 410, knighted in 431, died ~438) and his own deeds, so if you really think about it, the full true version of The Great Pendragon Campaign is 167 years long and we only handwave like the first 40 of it (410-449).

But this is still only the setup to the funniest thing you could do.

This is like rpgception, how deep does it go...

So you take the I would guess about five years of weekly sessions it would take to play out literally all of Pendragon as written, from the era of Constantin, Constans, Vortigern, Aurelius Ambrosius, Uther, Arthur, and finally Constaine of Cornwall, literally six generations of knights...

And then when you finish.

You look your players dead in the eye.

And you slam down a copy of the sister series PALADINS! on the table and go "okay roll up new knights, it's 738 and time to set the stage for the Matter of France."

That is the funniest thing you can do.

holy shit

If a GM did this to me

I would be Orlando Furioso

ayyyyy

holy shit

My favorite thing here also is that Paladins! explicitly states that if you have for some reason run TGPC, your version of that myth cycle is the canon one for this version of Charlemagne and Friends.

So you are in fact still playing the same campaign, albeit indirectly.

I do kinda want to play Pendragon at some point just to experience it

It's just such a focused concept for a game

Yeah, I'm utterly fascinated by it. I had a coworker who wrote for the line.