Sir Caradoc Gets His Ass Beat, Lies, and Doesn’t Fuck



In my personal tabletop circles, Pendragon has historically floated around as something lots of people love the idea of but haven’t found time to try yet. It’s all about the grand campaign and its reputation, friends having friends who are involved in games that have already been going on for 5 years, often organized by players a few generations older than me who have an extensive history as wikipedia editors and who you sort of have to feel out how chill they are with people who aren’t cishet yet have compellingly mesmerizing stories about their longform game exploits. The opposed passions stats stand out easily to a player taking their baby steps into ttrpgs, and the intrusion of family history with the deeds of your parents coming back to get you and the need to train a successor add some appealing weight to the world if you have (as I had at the time I first heard of Pendragon) mostly played pretty discontinuous games of DnD where consequences are handwaved away.

Recently, approximately a decade on from when I initially heard of Pendragon, I was invited to play in a game of Pendragon 6^th Edition, a shortform game of the starter scenarios of The Sword Tournament, The Forest of the Silver Deer, and The Broken Sword. I played Sir Caradoc, a knight rolled up randomly in a way that did produce some notable and fun results: his best characteristic being Appearance, best skill being Flirting, not being particularly lustful but being remarkably selfish and cruel: all this suggested to me someone who knows they can leverage their good looks for social advantages. The squire-life-simulation lent itself well to this sort of interpretation, in a way that not every game where you have to fill in this much character sheet reaches. Unfortunately the book itself did not feel like a good reference object to use: information is spread out awkwardly over too many pages.

The adventures themselves felt extremely linear and made me wonder how they compare to the Grand Campaign itself. The sense I got was that, rather than playing to achieve any particular outcome, I was playing to see if my knight stayed relevant to court life during predestined events. The “starter adventure” guardrails were firmly in place with last minute saviors arriving at the big battles at the end of the first two adventures to turn losing battles. As a guy who was until the finale bare minimum competent at fighting, Caradoc was outclassed by all but the underequipped pictish goons that served as early antagonists, and he got consistantly fucked up in big fights. Even after raising his sword skill significantly, the third adventure was brutal on him: in an honorable duel, Sir Pellinore one shot the poor bastard into unconsciousness, and having to face a nuckelavee with the wound Pellinore gave him led to another knockout. This part is not a complaint! I threw him at those situations on purpose to not lose face and I actually really like the simultaneous action choice and resolution combat of this game, it’s a far more interesting animal than a lot of other modes of involved tabletop combat. A cleaned up and clarified separate version of the combat resolution chart would be appreciated (running theme of the book as a reference object).

The second of the two starter adventure scenarios, in which Caradoc and two fellow player character knights sought to navigate the politics of delivering several gifts to various petty lords who we hoped would join the war effort, felt like the most interesting of the bunch, with numerous decisions to be made as to navigating the bickering and treacherous nobles and the opportunity to find clever solutions and make impactful calls as to course of action. It definitely gave Caradoc his most notable moment: in response to King Nym’s theft of the gifts for the other lords, Caradoc put that flirting skill to use and put the moves on Nym’s son, convincing him to spill when and where the treasures would be. Caradoc of course is dedicated to his beloved Bernard, the hunky stableworker he brought with him from Cambria, and isn’t overly compelled by romance, and so breaks the poor boy’s heart by just absconding with the stolen treasure rather than meeting up for a promised tryst, winning an enemy and cementing Caradoc as famously cruel. That’s some delightful Arthurian bullshit and it felt like the object firing on all cylinders!

Tragically a lot of the rest of the time the game and adventure feel like a cumbersome obstacle to the playing. I cant help but wonder if a play by post format would be ideal for this game: the intrusion of choosing what to roll from a large menu for the likely result of “you don’t learn/know much about this and so you stand there while predetermined events happen” would be less of a pain as something you give a moment of attention per day, and still could get to the fun results. I also could see the stripping down of the game to just the opposed passions being generative to better feeling play for my tastes: if the levers of chance are removed fully from skill at specific action and placed entirely on capacity to bring ones self to take action, it would produce much less frictional experience I think. This is of course also contingent on the given adventures: I’d love at some point to see if other published adventure material has a significantly different shape across authors and editions.