Chaosium Launches Pendragon Community Content Program

The Companions of Arthur already has 15 titles for Pendragon 6e

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Chaosium in partnership with DriveThruRPG launched a new community content program for Pendragon 6th Edition called The Champions of Arthur. At the time of writing, there are already fifteen titles available ranging in price from Free/Pay What You Want to $10.00 in PDF format with some also available in print-on-demand hardcover and softcover.

From the announcement:
Today marks the sixth anniversary of passing of the revered founder of Chaosium, Greg Stafford. Among the many accolades he earned in his life as one of the greatest game designers of all time, Greg considered the award-winning Pendragon roleplaying game to be his magnum opus. So today is a fitting day to officially launch a new program for independent TTRPG creators themselves to create for Greg's famed Arthurian roleplaying game.

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Full guidelines are available for those wishing to publish their own material. The only edition available for rules reference is Pendragon 6th Edition as all previous editions are prohibited. The exception is that material from “Appendix 2: Characters and Creatures” from Pendragon 5.2 is allowed until the publication of the Gamemaster’s Handbook. You can reference setting material from previous editions along, just not the rules. Public domain sources such as Le Morte d’Arthur are also allowed.

The store also prohibits the publication of any non-Arthurian material. So no alternate settings or other mythologies allowed with Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne specifically named as not allowed. The storefront also does not allow products “primarily written by AI language generators” and does not allow any “AI Art”. Several art packs have been made available for use with the program.

In addition to the content asset packs Chaosium has made available, the following titles are already available under the program:
 

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Darryl Mott

Darryl Mott




Someone get the license for Tortall and make me a Pendragon game in that setting.

I'll pay $69.99 for good content.
As @aramis erak mentioned, this program is only for Pendragon as a core setting. But you could come pretty close to Pendragon by using Basic Roleplaying and using the options that are most similar to Pendragon. For example, Passions are an optional system described on pages 214-216 of the latest BRP, and seem to me pretty much an identical version, translated form d20 to d100 -- even down to "famous" passions that force behavior.

Note that you cannot try to sell a Pendragon clone using BRP rules. So you'd need your Tortall game to be sufficiently different. Honestly though, pretty sure you'd want that anyway ...
 

Celebrim

Legend
As @aramis erak mentioned, this program is only for Pendragon as a core setting. But you could come pretty close to Pendragon by using Basic Roleplaying and using the options that are most similar to Pendragon. For example, Passions are an optional system described on pages 214-216 of the latest BRP, and seem to me pretty much an identical version, translated form d20 to d100 -- even down to "famous" passions that force behavior.

Note that you cannot try to sell a Pendragon clone using BRP rules. So you'd need your Tortall game to be sufficiently different. Honestly though, pretty sure you'd want that anyway ...

The point is that I don't want to spend 2000 hours making a Tortall setting. I'm not saying I couldn't. I certainly could smith out my own Tortall setting and game, but its equivalent to doing most of the work of creating a new edition of Pendragon. Actually, in some ways it might be harder, because you can't just look at the old edition and tweak it.

I love the concept of Pendragon, but simply put, the Arthurian setting really only appeals to students of history at this point. It's about 50 years past being a major fandom and its own historical verisimilitude (which let's be clear I don't object to and isn't wrong) appeals less to a typical group of nerd friends now than the sort of anachronistic modernity set in a fantasy setting of something like Tamora Pierce's "Tortall" universe which offers character diversity and an easy relatability that Medieval Europe just doesn't. And on top of that "Tortall" is still a really good setting for a game about dynastic knights and their followers where the same sort of interesting interactions between belief systems and virtue is possible, so I think Pendragon largely works for it.

I collect Pendragon because I admire the work, but I know I'll never have a group to play it with.
 

The point is that I don't want to spend 2000 hours making a Tortall setting. I'm not saying I couldn't. I certainly could smith out my own Tortall setting and game, but its equivalent to doing most of the work of creating a new edition of Pendragon. Actually, in some ways it might be harder, because you can't just look at the old edition and tweak it.
Right, you said you wanted someone else to do it; what I was saying is that although they couldn't use Pendragon for it, they could use BRP and, in my opinion, it would work well.

I love the concept of Pendragon, but simply put, the Arthurian setting really only appeals to students of history at this point. It's about 50 years past being a major fandom
I guess it depends on your definition of 'major'. I can easily list a ton of Arthurian works I'd rate as major from 2000+ onwards. My favorite would be THE BURIED GIANT by Nobel-award winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 2015. There was a Netflix series, CURSED, that premiered in 2020 and was popular enough. THE GREEN KNIGHT (A24 films) also did pretty good business.

Arthurian legends are also huge in modern Anime; I've watched FATE/STAY KNIGHT and CODE GEASS, but I'm not a true anime buff, though my understanding is that many more also share a lot of Arthuriana.

Even the classic musical CAMELOT had a revival a short time ago,

You could make a case that "Peak Arthur" was 1990-2010, when we had MISTS OF AVALON hugely popular and widely read, the tv series MERLIN going gangbusters, SPAMALOT on Broadway etc. But search engines show that searches for King Arthur have remained at high rates since then, and new versions in many media do not seem to show signs of diminishing.

And, of course, THE GREAT PENDRAGON CAMPAIGN is always cited when there's a thread of the form "campaigns I'd love to play in".

My feeling is that the story of King Arthur is a very strong one that has resonance across cultures and has been consistently popular for many centuries. If I was asked which IP we would still be consuming in 200 years, I'd rank it ahead of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or any of the current biggest hitters.
 


Konrad13

Explorer
Not sure about how Arthurian mythos isn't still popular, there is still new series and books and such being published and plenty of people online I see talk about trying to rework other systems (typically D&D into systems that do Arthur and his knights (usually unaware Pendragon even exists sadly).
 

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