Thoughts On Concluding a One Ring Campaign

On By ArthurIn After Action Report, Tabletop RPGs, The One RingLeave a comment

For the last year and a bit, I’ve been running the second edition of The One Ring for my Wednesday evening group. It’s been a lot of fun; we played through the Tales From the Lone-Lands campaign, with me drawing extensively from the Ruins of the Lost Realm for further material whenever the player characters went off-piste. Over the course of play we’ve batted our ideas about the game back and forth, and what better time to go back, do an autopsy, and consider our conclusions?

The Challenge of Canon

I went with using a prewritten scenario collection rather than all-original material as a result of several considerations. Firstly, I thought Tales From the Lone-Lands was pretty good as far as published campaigns went, and wanted to use it. By and large, I am mostly satisfied with it; we felt that the scenario Kings of Little Kingdoms didn’t land right, with the revelation about what the culprit is up to and who they’re imitating not really landing well, but otherwise most of the scenarios landed well (including, thank goodness, the conclusion). The second reason I used it was simple enough – I wanted to save time.

Over the course of play, a third good reason to use prewritten material emerged. The general consensus of the group was that if we’re going to do The One Ring, it’s because we want to play through material which cleaves reasonably closely to Tolkien’s worldbuilding and ethos. It’s not automatically the case that a prewritten scenario will capture Tolkien’s tone, of course, but taking your own efforts to mimic the Professor’s style and trying to assess whether you’ve really done a good job is tricky – it’s generally not good practice to mark your own homework.

Conversely, because the scenario was a text by another hand, I could look at it, think about it, consider where I saw the Tolkien-ness in it and where I saw the discordant notes, and adjust accordingly. (The one major instance where I didn’t, in fact, was Kings of Little Kingdoms, which is possibly why it was the weakest episode of the campaign.) A lot of the fun of the campaign came from the group going off on tangents about some Middle-Earth subject or other and simply discussing that – something which is frequently going to be an added flavour of fun in RPGs based on beloved fictional settings that the participants all have fairly developed views on – and it was good to be able to engage in that discussion on the level of another person engaging with the prewritten material rather than chatting about my own inventions.

Likewise, having Ruins of the Lost Realm to enrich the campaign was handy in its own right because it allowed for the players to have a reasonable amount of degrees of freedom, so that when they took an unexpected route across the map I could pull something out for them to encounter as an extra little side story. Of course, I could have just improvised – but I liked the sense that we were all exploring a real place where there were things placed where they were placed, ripe for discovery under the right circumstances.

The most extensive improvised segment of the campaign was the characters’ unexpected trip into Moria, which allowed me to make use of the glorious boxed set and dip briefly into the sandbox possibilities of it.

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Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle o’ Borg!

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Free League, Limithron, Mörk Borg, Pirate Borg, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

One of the signs that a tabletop RPG system has really made it once people start selling reskins of it. D&D hacks have been coming out almost as long as Dungeons & Dragons has; the Powered By the Apocalypse system has become the big beast of the self-proclaimed narrativist end of the market because people seem to find it easy to crank out some playbooks, develop a moveset, and toss a PbtA game out there in the genre of their choice.

Of course, some games are easier to reskin than others. PbtA‘s move format, love it or hate it, has the benefit of each individual move being comparatively simple – you decide what event in the fiction triggers it, you describe what the move represents, you specify the roll, you outline the outcome of the roll. Basic Roleplaying can be adapted as you wish through the simple expedient of adjusting the skill list to suit your setting and then picking an appropriate subset of the existing subsystems (or inventing your own bespoke ones); the BRUGE manual provides handy checklists for this purpose. D&D 5E reskins make a virtue out of the fact that most people interested in such projects don’t really want a radical shift away from the type of gameplay that D&D 5E offers and so you can just do a fairly straightforward surface-level palette swap rather than actually re-engineering anything.

Somehow, Mörk Borg has managed to become one of those indie RPGs people like to make hacks off, despite the fact that producing something which doesn’t look like an abject embarrassment next to Mörk Borg or CY_BORG feels like it would be somewhat demanding. You need a big heavy doom metal concept, you need great art, you need lots and lots of interesting tables and charts with options on, and all of them need to reinforce the setting and atmosphere. A good Mörk Borg-alike needs to be information-dense, in part because the underlying action resolution system is dirt simple and so it’s very much the cool setting content, awesome tables, and engaging artwork that’s providing the meat.

Pirate Borg, the self-proclaimed “worst pirate RPG ever made”, is Luke Stratton’s pirate-themed Mörk Borg hack, developed via his Limithron label and put out in conjunction with Free League via the Free League Workshop program. As well as the core book and small adventures like the introductory scenario Buried In the Bahamas, the naval combat scenario The Battle of Dead Man’s Cove, and fun little endeavours like The Sinking of C’thagn, an adventure provided as a big fold-out poster map with the adventure details on one side, Stratton/Limithron has put out two thick expansion books with a similar form factor to the core. Down Among the Dead is primarily written by Stratton, whilst Cabin Fever is a “best-of” compilation from a Pirate Borg writing jam hosted on itch.io. As a result of all this, Pirate Borg enjoys a level of support beyond that of many indie RPGs.

The basic concept is simple enough – it’s pirates but engagingly spooky, like The Secret of Monkey Island with a doom metal soundtrack. (The illustration for the “Antiquarian” optional class in Down Among the Dead is a homage to an iconic scene from LeChuck’s Revenge, in fact.) The setting is the “Dark Caribbean”, a horrifying alternative to our own world. Here, the islands have been blighted by the Scourge – hordes of the undead out to drown the world of the living in bleakest horror. Despite the danger posed by them, human greed still leads desperate and violent individuals to seek their fortunes here – through piracy or through more official channels – in part because of the incredibly valuable narcotic known as Ash, produced from the refined remains of the undead.

So far, so hardcore. One thing which does give me slight pause is the concept that all of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were, in this setting, all dead when Europeans showed up to settle the islands. This feels perilously like taking Europeans off the hook for the atrocities involved in colonialism at the time, although I suppose the door is left open for a reveal that Christopher Columbus did something horrific and blasphemous back when he visited which devastated the region and unleashed the Scourge.

Other than that, the setting feels comparatively open compared to the claustrophobic worlds of Mörk Borg and CY_BORG; there’s still a drumbeat of increasingly apocalyptic events you’re supposed to drip-feed into your campaign, mind you, but the nature of this apocalypse feels more flexible and, most significantly, you feel less fenced-in geographically, given that you can sail around from island to island. In contrast, the Mörk Borg world is actively falling apart at the seams, whilst CY_BORG takes place in a single densely-packed city.

There’s a simple hex-based naval combat system to complement the “sailing” side of things, which is just as much as packed with flavour as everything else. The mark of a really solid table-heavy game is when you can crack open a book, see one of the tables, and think “oh my god, that looks like so much fun” – as is often the case with Pirate Borg (Down Among the Dead has a set of tables for randomly generating your very own pirate flag, how cool is that?).

All this plus a truly meaty sample scenario in the core book (in comparison to the Mörk Borg sample dungeon, which I think you can blitz through in a session or two, the scenario here could support months of play by itself) makes Pirate Borg excellent value even by itself. The strong support line is a boon, and it feels like you could also fold in material from Mörk Borg itself a bit more easily than with CY_BORG.

Supplement Supplemental! (Cults, Forests, Creatures, Screens, and Catalogues)

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, BRUGE, Chaosium, Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams1 Comment

Time for another article where I give quick breakdowns of supplements I’ve looked at lately. This time, it’s mostly Basic Roleplaying-based, with supplements for RuneQuest, Pendragon, BRUGE, and Age of Vikings, but I also dip into the grim darkness of the far future to see what’s going on with Imperium Maledictum.

The Gods of Fire and Sky (RuneQuest)

This is the latest volume in the Cults of RuneQuest supplement series; this one covers the pantheon ruled over by the sun-emperor Yelm, whose members take in everything from abstract illumination through to humble cooking fires. Some of these deities have been alluded to in other volumes in the series; The Lightbringers, for instance, is defined in part by the constituent gods’ involvement in the Lightbringer’s Quest to bring Yelm back from the underworld after Orlanth, the lead Lightbringer, killed him in the mythic before-time and came to badly regret the consequences.

However, there is a very clear logic to why these deities have been put into this book: the pantheon as a whole represents a particular cultural outlook, rooted in Dara Happa and with outposts elsewhere, which offers a direct contrast to the outlook presented in books like The Lightbringers. Indeed, the Yelmian version of the narrative has a rather different emphasis, in which the divine justice doled out by Yelm is so potent that it reached out beyond the grave and caused his killers to die, recasting the Lightbringer’s Quest less as an epic journey and more as a penitential pilgrimage of Orlanth and his co-conspirators to apologise to Yelm for being bad, and for Orlanth to sacrifice himself to bring Yelm back.

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Slouching Towards Tokyo Episodically

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Sons of the Singularity, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

The Sutra of Pale Leaves is a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1980s Japan and sold in two volumes – Twin Suns Rising and Carcosa Manifest. Rather than being developed in-house by Chaosium, the project was spearheaded by the Sons of the Singularity, an indie RPG design house which has put out several products under its own name. The founder Sons of the Singularity are Jason Sheets and Jesse Covner, two Americans who met whilst working in China, but they have ample connections to Japan (Covner in particular following up his 15 years in China with a 7 year stint working in Japan); their design team for this project also includes people from a range of backgrounds, from local Japanese designers to expatriate Anglophone gamers.

This puts The Sutra of Pale Leaves in a particularly advantageous position when it comes to presenting an English-language RPG supplement for gaming in Japan. Having a mixture of people born and raised there and more recent immigrants means that the team is not only steeped in the culture, but can also get a handle on what aspects particularly need to be explained to outsiders without prior exposure (or whose encounters with Japanese culture are limited to some anime and manga).

On top of that, all of the participants are well-placed to take a look at Japan’s thriving Call of Cthulhu play community and draw on innovations originating there, whilst at the same time being steeped enough in English-language materials for the game that they know how Chaosium typically presents their products and how Anglophone readers expect scenarios to be presented – so they can act as intermediaries not just on the level of national culture, but also in terms of the different roleplaying subcultures they hail from.

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The Nocturnal Chronicles of Pendragon

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Nocturnal Media, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs3 Comments

Handsomely presented with gorgeous cover art and hardcover presentations in trade dress which allows them to sit seamlessly next to your 6th edition Pendragon collection, the new “Pendragon lore” releases from Chaosium consists of two extremely useful reference works used by Greg Stafford in devising the game in the first place, and useful to referees and anyone researching Arthurian myth in general.

Le Morte d’Arthur is Thomas Malory’s epic summation of the body of Arthurian myth as it existed in the 15th Century, a work which both encapsulates how diverse the preceding Arthurian sources really are and ended up becoming the touchstone for numerous major works thereafter, from Pendragon itself to John Boorman’s Excalibur to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King and so on and so forth. This version adds marginal notes from Arthurian scholar John Matthews and from Greg Stafford himself (Greg having fortunately finished these prior to his untimely passing in 2018), as well as a short foreword from Michael Moorcock. The Arthurian Companion is Phyllis Ann Karr’s encyclopaedia of Arthurian concepts, delivered along with a set of excellent essays on the subject, which has been put out in various editions, having been originally commissioned by Greg Stafford as part of the research process for an Arthurian boardgame before it then got used extensively in preparing Pendragon.

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In Liberty’s Shadow: Taking the Rivers Across the Sea

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Referee's Bookshelf, Rivers of London, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs6 Comments

In Liberty’s Shadow is really the first truly chunky supplement for Rivers of London, Chaosium’s RPG based on the urban fantasy series created by Ben Aaronovitch; the game’s had a few scenarios come out for it as well, but other than that players and referees have had to make do with the core book, their imaginations, and the admittedly fairly thick stack of Rivers novels when it comes to material for the game prior to this supplement coming out.

The default assumption of the core Rivers of London rulebook book is that PCs will be members of the Folly – a group that’s one half secret society, one half obscure Metropolitan Police department, which focuses its efforts on providing community policing to London’s “demi-monde”, the local occult subculture whose nature is subtly shaped by the esoteric geography of the city. That’s a very specific focus, both in terms of what player characters are likely to be getting up to and the geographic scope of their exploits, but that also tracks with the focus of the series. The full-length Rivers of London novels which form the backbone of the series are very much focused on Peter Grant and his work, which almost entirely takes place in the UK and only occasionally strays outside London. Things get more diffuse in the penumbra of expanded media around the series, which includes short stories, novellas, an upcoming TV show (assuming it doesn’t die somewhere in development hell as TV shows often do), and a graphic novel series co-written with Aaronovitch’s old Doctor Who buddy Andrew Cartmel; some of the expanded media stories have touched on other parts of the world, focused on characters other than Grant, or explored periods prior to the present day. Even then, these are very much occasional exceptions.

Given the core book’s strong focus on the Folly and London, one might think the natural first significant supplement to do would be a “rest of Britain” book. Although the Met doesn’t have UK-wide jurisdiction, it’s still well-placed to lend help to other forces, and Folly PCs aren’t necessarily Met officers in the RPG since the Folly does have civilian consultants. As a result, you’d expect to be able to set Rivers of London scenarios elsewhere in Britain with reasonable ease – the consultant PCs aren’t really disadvantaged by being outside London, and any police officer PCs can be “on secondment” to a local force (the Folly perhaps pulling a few esoteric strings to help this along) for the duration of a scenario. Aaronovitch has done entire novels in the series set in other areas of the UK – I believe the latest one takes place in Aberdeen – so he’s probably got a deep bench of notes on the wider occult geography of Britain, and the rest can be cooked up from urban legend, weird bits of true history, and a sprinkling of folk horror.

As such, In Liberty’s Shadow is a bit more of a departure than I expected, focused as it is on fleshing out the demi-monde of the USA and the various groups that interact with it. This isn’t entirely untouched territory for the series; Aaronovitch has done an entire novella set in 1920s New York, and in the present day of the series there’s an FBI agent who helps out Peter Grant sometimes. Even then, it still feels like a supplement which falls mostly outside the scope of both the default assumptions of the core rulebook and the usual scope of the novel series.

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Is the Doctor Who RPG Fading Away Into the Vortex?

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Cubicle 7, Doctor Who, Edition Warrior Bullshit, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Vortex System9 Comments

A few weeks back I was browsing the Cubicle 7 website and saw that they had a big sale ongoing for their hardcopy books for their Doctor Who RPG – as in the second edition core rulebook was going for £16, with the PDF bundled in, which is £6.33 less than they’re selling the PDF of the core rulebook (first or second edition) for on DriveThruRPG. In fact, there’s really steep discounts on physical product across the entire line – including the Doctors & Daleks books which adapt the game to the D&D 5E system – which makes me strongly suspect that Cubicle 7 are expecting to lose the licence and are trying to get rid of their old stock.

It would not be enormously shocking if this were the case. The second edition – heavily branded around the Thirteenth Doctor era – came out in 2021 and after that has had a fairly desultory amount of support compared to the extensive releases that were put out for the first edition, which emerged in 2009, went through three distinct printings (for the Tenth, Eleventh. and Twelfth Doctors), and had a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks put out for it, including a multi-volume series covering each of the first twelve Doctors’ eras respectively and guides for running campaigns based around UNIT or the Paternoster Gang. Oh, sure, there’s also been the Doctors & Daleks product line, but taking a big-name licence of theirs and repackaging it for 5E D&D seems to be Cubicle 7’s standard move if the licence in question of theirs allows it and they don’t expect to have enormous amounts of time left on it – see how they put out Adventures In Middle-Earth towards the end of their custodianship of The One Ring, and those books have largely been quick repackaging of second edition materials.

Between this and the lack of any content playing on the 60th Anniversary specials or the Ncuti Gatwa era, it certainly seems like the Doctor Who RPG simply isn’t that much of a priority for Cubicle 7 any more – particularly when they’re also quite busy with a range of Warhammer RPGs (two Old World-based ones, one Age of Sigmar-themed one, and two Warhammer 40,000 ones), and are also gearing up to put out a new edition of their The Laundry RPG based on Charles Stross’ eldritch espionage series.

This seems to be the curious doom of official Doctor Who RPGs – despite in principle being a choice bit of IP to build a game around, the franchise seems to have struggled to find a licensee who’ll actually make a major priority of making a success of an RPG based on the show. FASA basically treated it like the neglected, unwanted step-sibling of its Star Trek RPG, to the point where they basically used a reskinned version of their Star Trek system for it despite it being a poor fit. Virgin Books put out Time Lord at around the same time they kicked off the New Adventures novels, but it’s pretty obvious that that was a little self-indulgent treat Peter Darvill-Evans let himself have rather than something they were going to seriously support. And now the Cubicle 7 line seems to have spent the last few years in a state of managed decline.

But there was that brief little window when Cubicle 7 were going all-put to support it – an era when the line genuinely seemed to be doing well, had plenty of material coming out for it, and was getting critical plaudits, which has all come crashing down. It might be tempting to blame Chris Chibnall for this – goodness knows you can blame him for an awful lot of other stuff, given the absolute and total hash he made of the Thirteenth Doctor era. (And no, I’m not one of those people who think Chibnall botched the era from the start by casting a woman – in fact, I think his strongest season as showrunner was his first, the one when he was most overtly and consciously trying to follow a progressive agenda and showcase diversity, and part of the downfall of his era was the way all of that started to bleed away in favour of nostalgic bilge.) Having the core rulebook of the game be quite so heavily branded around an era which was so heavily rejected by many audience members (those who were still watching, at any rate) can hardly have helped.

However, I think Cubicle 7 made some unforced errors of their own with this edition of the game which can’t be attributed to Chibnall. Both editions of the game credit David F. Chapman as their lead writer, and both at least claim to be powered by the Vortex System, a bespoke game engine also designed by Chapman. However, the changes between the first edition (in its three distinct forms) and the second edition have taken what was a fairly solidly-designed if unexceptional little system and added some seriously wonky aspects to it – and on top of that, it’s flat-out changed the way action resolution rolls are interpreted, a change so fundamental that it’s really stretching the definition to claim that they both operate off the back of the same system. As it happens, I picked up a Humble Bundle package comprising PDFs of a large chunk of the first edition line a while back, so I’m in a position to compare here, and the results aren’t pretty.

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Sloppy New Year, RPG Fans!

On By ArthurIn D&D 5E, Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Date Night, Gaming Community Drama, RPG Maps Forge, Tabletop RPGs, Urban Realms (formerly known as RPG Tools)1 Comment

So, it’s the last day of what has been a fairly slow 2025 on this blog – I’m expecting things to pick up in the New Year – but I just had to jump on to discuss something I discovered today and mildly infuriates me, in part because it’s evidence of some seriously grifty behaviour on the part of some RPG publishers and in part because it’s one example of a broader problem.

The Enigma

Every so often, Facebook’s advert engine will bombard folk with a bunch of adverts for the same particular thing – probably coinciding with someone bunging them some money to boost their ads. A friend was posting about this, and I decided to comment pointing out a group of adverts I’d been getting a lot of – these ones promoting the D&D “date night bundle” offered up by RPG Maps Forge (archived version), whose main business seems to be putting out tools for digital mapmaking.

All well and good – but when I clicked away from Facebook it reloaded the page and I lost the advert, requiring me to do a bit of googling based on aspects of it I remembered in order to find the RPG Maps Forge website. In the process I ended up finding the shopfront for Fantasy Date Night, an outfit putting out a curiously similar product bundle (archived version). Note how closely aligned the marketing copy is on both pages – they even both have videos on the theme of “one partner passes a flower to the other across a gaming table”. (I’m actually quite amused by RPG Maps Forge’s version of that video, because it looks like continuous footage of an infinite numbers being passed across the table one by one).

We can dig deeper here. In both cases, the cover art for the adventure books on offer looks like it might be AI-generated – but let’s set that aside, because that’s just a hunch I have and I think there’s issues here going beyond whether there’s been cheesy tech-driven shortcuts in the production process. Both product lines have, through an astonishing coincidence, seem to have received the same number of reviews and the same average scores from those reviews. (Fantasy Date Night refers to them as “Verified Reviews”. Verified by who? Not me, that’s for sure, you can’t click through to see all of them.)

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Supplement Supplemental! (Cubicle 7 Catchup)

On By ArthurIn Cubicle 7, Games Workshop, Imperium Maledictum, Referee's Bookshelf, Starter Sets, Supplement Supplemental!, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Warhams, WFRP3 Comments

Time for another entry in my occasional series profiling RPG supplements I’ve been looking over. This time around, I’m finally getting around to giving a good look at some Cubicle 7-published stuff that’s been sat on my to-read pile for a while.

Starter Set (Imperium Maledictum)

As they pretty much do as standard for all their games, Cubicle 7 have made a Starter Set for Imperium Maledictum – that’s their “Dark Heresy by other means and with a broader range of potential patrons than the Inquisition” Warhammer 40,000 RPG, not Wrath & Glory, the somewhat newer Warhammer 40,000 RPG system oriented towards somewhat higher-powered, faster-paced action. It’s fine! There’s some nicely-presented sample characters, there’s a reasonably detailed and involved scenario which allows you to dip into various different types of play, there’s some useful play aids, and there’s a nice rundown of a hive-city offering lots of detail for future adventure.

It does, however, prompt in my mind the question of “who are starter sets for?” Should an RPG starter set pitch itself in such a way that participants who have never played a single RPG before can pick it up and get firm, careful guidance in setting up and running their first games? Or should tabletop RPG publishers in the English-speaking world simply assume that because Dungeons & Dragons is so dominant in the marketplace, nobody is ever going to start playing with any other RPG system ever and so there’s no point making your starter set beginner-friendly, and you are better off writing for customers who are basically RPG-savvy but might not be familiar with your system in particular?

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From Camelot To Whitechapel: Two Chaosium Referee Guides

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Core Rules, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs9 Comments

Time for a bit of a Chaosium special. Chaosium’s books have tended to get thicker and heavier over the years, particularly recently. That’s thanks in part to the glossier production values Chaosium have deployed ever since the Moon Design team took over as part of Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen’s emergency rescue operation, and in part to Chaosium’s long-standing drive for ever-deeper research and erudition on the part of their game designers (commercially necessary to justify putting out work based on not-exactly-copyrightable material like Arthurian myth or well-into-the-public-domain horror tales of yesteryear). Those factors will tend to drive up page count a tad, and whilst recent Chaosium material is certainly pleasant to read and navigate and tends to offer really excellent value for money in terms of the amount of material they pack into their books, sometimes concepts which previously were delivered in one volume can be deployed in two.

For instance, in some cases products which would have been sold in a single standalone package have been divided into a player-facing volume and a referee-facing one, both because packaging them as a single volume would be burdensome and because splitting them out like this is both commercially savvy (you tend to have more players than referees, so a player-facing book can sell several times as many copies as a referee-facing one) and in some respects quite useful. (Having several copies of the essential player-facing rules at one table can speed things up in actual play appreciably). A while back I reviewed the player-facing halves of Pendragon and Cthulhu By Gaslight‘s latest editions; now it’s time to look at what referees get in their books.

Gamemaster’s Handbook (Pendragon)

The 6th Edition Pendragon core rulebook may be the nicest-looking the core rules for the game have ever looked, but they did come in for a bit of flak when they first emerged due to a perception that they were incomplete. This, I suspect, comes from a misperception of how much you absolutely need to get a Pendragon campaign going and a mild lack of perspective. (That’s what I think on a kind day, at any rate; if I’m in a grumpy mood I’d say that too many people in the RPG sphere have become too accustomed to certain walled garden design approaches to the point where they feel lost if a product doesn’t provide the guardrails they have become used to.) Sure, the core book doesn’t offer a whole lot beyond generating knights and the basic procedures of having them go off, adventure, gain Glory, and use Passions and Traits, but that’s kind of all you need for a very basic Pendragon game.

Of course, all the complaints were in part based on an incomplete overview of the line anyway. Now Chaosium have brought out the next major entry in the line, the Gamemaster’s Handbook – and I defy anyone looking over this to suggest the core game is incomplete now. Along with the full procedures for running large-scale battles, this includes an extensive toolkit covering everything from guidelines for depicting magic (it basically comes down to “NPCs can do magic as and how the narrative requires it”, but you get a lot of pointers on how to make sure this actually pans out in an Arthurian-feeling manner), stats for major NPCs, a bestiary, setting details for Salisbury (the assumed start point of The Great Pendragon Campaign), some sample adventures, a good look at the major religions of the setting and how they are structured and interact, a couple of scenarios, and so on and so forth.

Two things stand out to me in particular; the first is the Running the Game chapter, which provides an important breakdown on different modes of running Pendragon and how you should shift gear depending on whether you want to do the full Great Pendragon Campaign or a more short-term campaign or anything in between, and the second is the chapter on Arthurian Acts, which covers all manner of common situations to being taken captive in battle (or taking others captive) to the cut and thrust of courtly love to tournaments to feasts, all of which have robust systems in place to support.

It is here that Stafford’s intentions for this edition – to draw on the absolute best of the 5th Edition support line and fold the strongest and most useful aspects of it into the core book – start to really come to fruition. There’s more to come yet – namely a supplement on playing the higher nobility, where I suspect a lot of the estate management stuff from prior editions has ended up, and of course an update to The Great Pendragon Campaign itself – but any referee that has this book to hand who doesn’t feel supported in homebrewing their own Pendragon sessions is in need, perhaps, of more assistance honing their skills than any published book can reasonably offer.

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