Udy tells us about his experiences with the Seventh Sea TTRPG system, the Scion system, and the focus for this episode, Pendragon! Pendragon is a generational RPG where you play a small noble house in England during the time of Arthurian legends. You play a knight or lady that is the head of your household with responsibilities to your subjects, your lord, and the king. As play proceeds, your character finds friends, makes enemies, gets married, has children, goes on quests, fights wars, and all that other good stuff from Medieval history and myth. Eventually your character dies and you transition to playing the heir you’d raised as the campaign proceeds. There are many campaigns you can play, but the main focus is on the Great Pendragon Campaign that details the events from the ~480 to ~570. This covers the rule of King Uther, King Arthur’s rise to prominence as the boy who pulled the sword from the stone, Arthur’s rule, his decline and death, and a small wrapup afterwards. The PCs can be directly involved in these events or on the fringes depending on a group’s preference.
Historical sources indicate that there was a King Arthur who ruled over parts of Britain in the 500’s. Little is known about this real person. King Arthur became a legendary figure due to French moral fables written about the Knights of the Round Table in the 1100’s. At that time Christian Europe was losing lots of wars to Muslims. Many Christian nobles were spending more time fighting amongst themselves instead of looking outward to what the Catholic Church considered a greater enemy. To prevent this infighting, many priests and educated men wrote stories with the intention of improving the moral character of European nobility. These stories used the Knights of the Round Table as a common setting. The hope was that if European nobles read these stories they would become moral people, stop fighting each other, and join the Crusades against the Muslims.
Udy and I talked about a few different sources for the story of King Arthur. While there are hundreds of books to read on Arthur, both ancient and modern, the best English sources are probably Le Morte d’Arthur written by Thomas Malory in 1485 at the end of the Middle Ages or The Once and Future King written by T.H. White in 1958. If you’re in the mood for something lighter and more subversive, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a lot of fun. There are many examples in film as well with my personal favorite being the 1998 Merlin TV miniseries.
During the interview we briefly discussed a piece of art that one of Udy’s players drew.
If you’re interested in Pendragon the game is available on Chaosium’s website: https://www.chaosium.com/pendragon-rpg/
Udy also recommended the Pendragon Discord server for all those cool modifications people have made to the system over the years: https://discord.com/invite/CfvJzeX
And Seventh Sea is also available on Chaosium’s website: https://www.chaosium.com/7th-sea/
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