Tales of Valour
With the ending of our Ars Magica campaign, and whilst we wait for a Cyberpunk Red campaign to begin, we are starting a filler game of Pendragon. In preparation, the GM and I also used it as an excuse to watch or 4K version of Excalibur over the weekend. Since our group is still remote we are using FoundryVTT for running the campaign. In case you don’t know or haven’t guessed, Pendragon is a game that dates back to the early 80s, and is based around the tales of King Arthur. As a Brit, the mythology of Arthur and Merlin and the historical background in which they’re set is pretty familiar to me. Though I can’t say that I’ve ever read Le Morte d’Arthur.
We are starting in the Boy King era (514 AD, shortly after Arthur has drawn the sword from the stone), and we all get to make Knights based around Sarum. At the start I didn’t have much idea of what sort of character I wanted at the start, but then seemed to start gravitating towards a Knight who is slightly on a small side, but highly dextrous and good looking. He’s taken skills such as Flirting, and a trait of Lustful – which is highly unknightly. It’s not the sort of character I normally play. Or indeed, am great at playing. But it may be interesting to give it a try. I guess he’s as much a bard as a knight.
We all get Knighted by our Lord, Sir Robert Count of Salisbury. I made my DEX check after being knighted (apparently you have to be able to leap onto the saddle of your horse) and get 25 extra glory. Rolling for a random shield, I have three De-Crescent Or on field azure. Various shield generators seemed unable to draw them correctly, so I put something together in Inkscape. My attempt doesn’t look great, but at least it’s about right.
Whilst we are discussing physical features, it turns out we’re all good looking Knights, and a couple of us have maxed out our Oratory skills. The other orator is a big hulking knight though, and I’m a slender of build and dextrous. The third knight in our party is also highly dextrous. So we may have some overlaps in the type of builds we’ve all gone for.
Character generation took a while to get through, so by the time we’d finished there wasn’t much time for much more than a review of what historical events had happened recently, and what the geopolitical situation was. It’s all pretty standard Pendragon, and having rewatched Excalibur meant I knew who some of the less famous people were. Though apparently the film isn’t entirely accurate, and we don’t get the bright shiny armour that they had in the film. At least not yet.
For next session, it sounds like we could be going to the wedding of Arthur and Guinevere.
As far as the Foundry implementation of Pendragon goes, it wasn’t entirely smooth. It had the same problem that my own Traveller system had with v13 of Foundry – the change in CSS classes to allow dark mode completely broke the readability of everything. They don’t seem to have fixed this in Pendragon, so you have to switch to light mode to be able to read text on the parchment style backgrounds.
Character generation has a nice step by step guide. It wasn’t without some complications, and some bits needed intervention by the GM to get them to work. On the plus side, since it’s a fantasy/medieval game, all the nice icons that come with Foundry are actually useful. It’s a real shame that they don’t provide anything useful for SciFi settings.
Also, running two instances of Foundry (with two licenses) on a single Raspberry Pi works just fine. It just needed an extra DNS subdomain set up. This allows both of us (myself and the Pendragon GM) to do prep on our campaigns at the same time, without having to switch between the two worlds.
Everything does seem to be working now, and we’re ready for the second session next week when we’ll get to remind ourselves how the system works. It’s been several years since we last played Pendragon, so it would be good to have another go at it. As I said at the start, this is a bit of a filler before we start a Cyberpunk Red campaign. It may last a few weeks, it may last a few months, but we’re not expecting it to last much longer than that.
