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Get A Bundle Full Of King Arthur Pendragon Malory Style

By Christopher Helton

I tend to use the phrase "you could play for years off of this" when talking about a bundle up at the Bundle of Holding site. However, with the new bundle built around Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon roleplaying game, I have to change this to saying "you could play for generations off of this bundle" instead.

Built around the writing of Sir Thomas Malory and his Le Morte d'Arthur, King Arthur Pendragon celebrates the literary and Romantic roots of the Arthur legends. Probably one of the earliest fantasy RPGs to eschew the standard tropes of tabletop gaming (dungeon crawling, killing monsters for advancement and etc.) Pendragon has long been a favorite of gamers and designers for its integration of culture and religion into the game and the rules for playing. The importance of religion and culture  have been hallmarks of Stafford's designs since the creation of Runequest and his Glorantha setting.

Like every Bundle of Holding, 10% of the money generated goes to charity. In the case of this bundle the charities are Conservation International and Worldreader. At the time of this writing, the bundle has raised $15,998.67 (10% of which goes to the charities).

The basic contribution of $9.95 will get you the core collection for this bundle: the 5.1 edition rules for King Arthur Pendragon, The Book of Knights and Ladies and The Book of Records. Contributing over the threshold amount (just over $21 at the time of writing) also gets the bonus collection of The Great Pendragon Campaign, Book of Battle (Second Edition), Book of Armies, The Grey Knight and Tales of Chivalry & Romance.  If you pay over the threshold amount and new PDFs are added to the collection, you will receive those as well. All PDFs purchased through the Bundle of Holding are DRM-free, which means that you can move the PDFs around your computer and mobile devices and use them as you want.

The core collection gives you all of the rules that you need to play Pendragon and gives you an expansion of the character creation rules that are in the core Pendragon book. If you're expecting a game that plays like the classic 80s fantasy movie Excalibur, you might be a bit disappointed by Pendragon. You aren't going to find much in the way of flashy magic, like you might find in Dungeons & Dragons or Runequest (Stafford's other big roleplaying game). This owes to the source material that Stafford chooses to highlight, magic just wasn't as important to the Romance writers as were the ideals of chivalry and courtly love. For me, this isn't a bad thing. I like the fact that not all RPGs are Dungeons & Dragons. We need variety in the hobby and in the industry.

The core rules for King Arthur Pendragon give you all the rules that you need to play. One of the draws of the Pendragon rules for me is the idea that the personality and drives of the characters are as important as any other part of the character. While this may seem a strange thing to highlight in a world that has games like Fate Core and Burning Wheel, back in 1985 (when the first edition of Pendragon came out) this was a very revolutionary idea for gaming). This also serves to put the ideas of the source material in the foreground of the system and in play.

Based off of the Basic Roleplaying rules from Chaosium Games and used in games like Runequest, Magic World and Call of Cthulhu. However, despite these common origins, the Pendragon game has grown in different direction than those other games. While it is easy to see the common origins, you shouldn't expect Pendragon to play (or even look) like those other games. At its heart, Pendragon is a game about knights, so all of those other bits and pieces that you find in other fantasy games just aren't as important to it. I think that Pendragon was one of the earliest games to have such a tight focus (I could be wrong, and I am sure that someone will point out an earlier focused game that I have forgotten), and it is that focus that has kept people interested in the game for so many years.

With The Book of Knights & Ladies you get an expansion of the character creation rules that appear in the core book. In part this means new rules for knights of other cultures on the British Isles besides the English (now you can have knights who are Irish and Picts, among others), characters from Continental Europe, and an expansion of the role of Ladies in your Pendragon games. One of the appeals of roleplaying is that you can play in a historical setting without having to acknowledge the cultural and societal tropes of that setting. There are people who think that historical and/or genre fidelity should be the most important part of a roleplaying game's simulation, but I am not one of those gamers.

There is also a number of expansions and explanations of the options from the core book that are detailed in this book. You also get new Passions and personality traits explained as well.

The Book of Records is a handy form-fillable PDF character sheet that allows those who want to print out sharp and clean character sheets to do so. Those whose penmanship isn't the best will also delight in this.

The bonus collection of the Pendragon bundle focuses on the campaign side of things. Giving you a number of  shorter adventures (in Tales of Chivalry and Romance) and a longer adventure (The Grey Knight). You can even slot The Grey Knight into The Great Pendragon Campaign, expanding its use at your gaming table. Tales of Chivalry and Romance and The Grey Knight are both written for earlier editions of King Arthur Pendragon, but can easily be converted to the current version of the rules included with this bundle. These are also both scanned PDFs rather than original electronic files, do to their having being created before the advent of desktop publishing and the PDF file format. The scanning on both is very crisp and clean, and the file size is not enormous either.

The Great Pendragon Campaign is probably the only RPG campaign to span 80 years of game time. Written to accommodate the entirety of King Arthur's reign, this massive campaign gives you everything that you need about the life and times of Arthur that wasn't included in the core rules. You are probably wondering how characters interact with a story that spans eighty years. This is where the generational aspect of the King Arthur Pendragon rules come into play. Just as the parents and grandparents of your knight character will impact who they are during character creation, so will that knight eventually impact their children and grandchildren. Yes, by the end of this game you will likely be playing characters that are the children of the character that you started out with. This was another innovation of the Pendragon game, and not one that has often been duplicated in the mechanics of other roleplaying games since. How you play your character now, and the actions that they take, can have an impact on generations yet to come in Pendragon.

Hurry and get your copy of King Arthur Pendragon because this Bundle of Holding only lasts through Monday morning, June 9 at 11AM Eastern US time (GMT -5).

Christopher Helton is a blogger, podcaster and tabletop RPG publisher who talks about games and other forms of geekery at the long-running Dorkland! blog. He is also the co-publisher at the ENnie Award winning Battlefield Press, Inc.  You can find him on Twitter at @dorkland and on G+ at https://plus.google.com/+ChristopherHelton/ where he will talk your ear off about gaming and comics.

Christopher has a crowdfunding page to help raise money to defray the costs for going to the Gen Con gaming convention and cover it for his Dorkland! blog and Bleeding Cool. Please click here to go to the page and help out.

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