First!!!!!11111 Also Pendragon.

Hey everybody and welcome to Killer Forklift, my own little voice in the vast trough of unimportant pop-culture reviewing nerds. Because, gosh darn it, there just aren't enough guys with beards and glasses who ramble on about stupid shit on the internet.

Lets see go over to the stuff shelves and grab something to look at, shall we?

"I gift you with this sacred letter-opener."

Allrighty, so here we have one of my favorite tabletop roleplaying games of all time, King Arthur Pendragon, or as it's usually called, just Pendragon. Now for whatever reason, Pendragon never seems to have really picked up among the mainstream gaming community, which is damn tragic. There's levels of mainstream acceptance in the gaming wold a lot like there is in music. You have your highly-successful-but-arguably-over-hyped bands like Metallica (Dungeons and Dragons), then you have the stuff that people who started listening to Metallica and moved on to the other mainstream-but-not-really-played-on-the-radio metal bands listen to, stuff like Slayer or Anthrax (World of Darkness). Then you get sort of really into thrash and start listening to Toxic Holocaust or old stuff like Sodom (Legend of the Five Rings and Call of Cthulhu). Then there's the really bad stuff, the stuff everybody's heard of but nobody with half a brain likes, like Avenged Sevenfold (F.A.T.A.L). I don't really remember the point I was trying to make except that Avenged Sevenfold sucks (although I guess that song "Afterlife" is maybe kinda okay in the same way rolling up your character's anal circumference in F.A.T.A.L can be sorta fun).

"Your anus can comfortably fit twelve inches."

Wait, I think I remember what I was trying to get at. Below that, there's this layer of drunken bar-bands that get really devoted little following but never play more than five or six shows and most of those are played in abandoned factory buildings on the south side of town. Pendragon is one of those bands; it's not perfect and it occasionally throws up on the front row, but its pure, man! It hasn't sold out and started doing things like memorizing it's own bass-lines.

                                                    
                                             
Pendragon takes place in, surprise surprise, the time of King Arthur, in dayes ofe olde whene knightse wheree bolde and all that. The mechanics are pretty standard for the most part; you play a knight (or if you're really not into actually contributing anything to the party, a woman) and you go one quests and fight in battles and generally go around being a tin-can wearing feudal badass. Depending on the time during Arthur's reign your campaign is set, you can pick from a number of cultures and religions to sort of personalize your knight.

Just like this guy.

While this sounds pretty standard fantasy stuff, Pendragon departs from conventional roleplaying games in two major ways. The first is that every game sessions takes exactly one year of game time, and you are not expected to play the same character through the whole campaign. The idea is to found a dynasty, beginning with Uther Pendragon's rise to power and playing fathers and sons all the way to Arthur's death some seventy years later. This shift can be shocking for some players, and it does cause you to not get so attached to your characters; add this in with the fairly brutal combat (not L5R brutal but still pretty intense) and you do sometimes find yourself looking at your character as a conglomeration of statistics rather than as an imaginary person.

"You're not real!!"

However, this is somewhat offset by the other unique feature of Pendragon, which is that your character's personality and behavior HAVE STATS. All characters have a list of personality traits organized on a "Vices and Virtues" scale (i.e. Energetic/Lazy, Chaste/Lustful, etc), and there are situations where the game-master can force you to roll on these traits to see how you behave. Particularly high personality traits grant Glory bonuses (Glory being part of the game's leveling-up system as well as recognition in-game), but having these traits so high basically robs you of the ability to make decisions for your character at all.

"Roll Chaste/Lustful".

While it may not really sound like your cup of tea, especially if you're really into traditional DnD type-gaming, Pendragon really does allow you to become part of a sweeping epic story, and it is precisely because its such a weird little system that I love it so much. I recommend it and you should probably go out and buy it and give it the old college try. Be warned though, it's out of print and I've seen the huge-ass campaign guide (aptly titled "The Great Pendragon Campaign") go for around 300 bucks on Amazon.