Pendragon is a tabletop rpg, not unlike dungeons and dragons, that deals specifically with Arthurian legends. The players take the role of romano-british knights, whose exploits, though left unmentioned by the chroniclers, run alongside the massive drama spanning nearly a century that is the collective arthurian mythos.
The game is NOT high fantasy, but neither is it entirely historical. It takes the various disparate facets of the mythology, the english chroniclers, the welsh balladeers, the french and german troubadours, modern historians, and sort of fuses them together into a cohesive universe. Instead of having the entire game play out as either a bunch of romano-celts in their hillforts, or full-on victorian fairy tale , the story is marked into several phases of society and technology.
The campaign begins in the first of these phases, the dark age that is set apart by the golden one of Arthur's Camelot to come.
The First Phase, the beginning
Phase I, technologically and politically analogous to the late 11th century. Knights clad in conical helms and chain-mail hauberks, with kite-shaped shields atop unarmored chargers. What passes for a castle in most of Britain is a wooden Motte-and-Bailey. It is a harsh world. Chivalry and courtly romance is all but non-existent. This is the time of battle-lords. Might makes right, and the Cymrics are losing.
The year is 485 AD.
King Uther is on the throne of Logres. The Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, invited to these shores by the traitorous King Vortigern, now dead, continue to hold the South-East. In nearly 19 years of combined effort, he with his brother King Ambrosius, "The last true roman" before him, Uther has been unable to dislodge the foreign foe. With every passing year, more wolf-headed longships and the honey-haired barbarians who row them appear than the last.
If this weren't enough, there is trouble at home. Half of the great barons are hesitant if not recalcitrant towards Uther's temperamental rule. Chief among them two of his dukes, Corneus of Lindsey (modern day lincolnshire) and Gorlois of Tintagel. The wizard Merlin, though trusted adviser, is a fickle ally and is often away on his own affairs.
One steadfast vassal, on the other hand, is Sir Roderick, Earl of Salisbury; your liegelord.
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You are a young, vassal knight, aged 21-26. You serve the Earl of Salisbury from your manorial estate as did your father and grandfather before you. Will you serve your lord with honor and bravery? Will you marry well and ensure the future of your family line? Will you defend the defenseless, honor the church, and rescue fair damosels? Or will you be a dastardly robber-knight, preying on the weak and innocent, spitting on the church and kidnapping those fair damosels in the first place? Will you slay the monster, or will the monster slay you? It is 485, and you have just won your spurs as a knight. Adventure awaits.