Pendragon (role-playing Game) - History

History

The first edition was a boxed set published by Chaosium in 1985, and was designed and written by Greg Stafford. Chaosium planned a second edition, with minor changes to the rules, but this was never actually released; they released a third edition, with rules revised by Stafford, as a single softbound book in 1990. The fourth edition, published by Chaosium in 1993 and reprinted by Green Knight Publishing in 1999, was also released as a softbound manual: the core rules remained consistent with the third edition, but the book was expanded to include rules for player-character magicians and for advanced character-generation (the latter had originally appeared separately in the third-edition supplement Knights Adventurous). Green Knight Publishing also released a cut-down version of the fourth edition aimed at beginning players, The Book of Knights. Original designer Greg Stafford produced a much-streamlined fifth edition, which was published as a hardcover book by White Wolf in December, 2005. The most notable supplement for this edition is The Great Pendragon Campaign, a massive (432-page) hardcover scenario book which details events, adventures and characters from Uther Pendragon's reign in 485 through to the end of the Arthurian era. The earlier version of this supplement, "The Pendragon Campaign", won the 1985 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement., and "The Great Pendragon Campaign" won the 2007 Diana Jones Award.

Over its history the game spawned a number of supplements dealing with areas within or beyond Arthurian Britain and creating characters outside the culture of the Cymric Britons:

• Saxons! - The origins of Anglo-Saxon England (Southeast Britain); Angle, Saxon, Jute, Frisian & Frankish character generation
• Beyond the Wall - Pictland (Caledonia, roughly modern Scotland); Pictish character generation.
• Pagan Shore - Ireland; Irish character generation, including Feudal Irish and two types of tribal Irish Celts: the Cruithni (Irish Picts) and Lochlannach (somewhat ahistorical Norse).
• Land of Giants - Scandinavia and Nordic areas of Britain during the era of Beowulf; Northmen character generation.
• Blood and Lust - Logres (Southern Britain); loosely describes the lands of Lindsey, East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex and the Saxon Shore of Essex, Sussex and Kent.
• Perilous Forest - Cumbria (Northern Britain); describes the lands of Cumbria (Northwest Britain) and Northumberland (Northeast Britain).
• Savage Mountain - Cambria (Wales); Welsh characters.

The regions profiled in the latter three supplements were internal to Arthur's realm, thus used standard character generation.