Disclaimer: This series is made possible by the generosity of the fine people of Chaosium, who provided me with a review copy of the game on PDF. No further compensation was provided to me, and all opinions in this series are mine.
It’s time to earn our title as a knight, as we tackle the character creation rules for the new edition of Pendragon.
Character Creation Methods
Pendragon supports 3 methods of character creation: Pregenerated Character Templates, Constructed characters where you get to assign points and make deliberate choices, and the Random method where you let the dice decide. For this character I’ll be using a mix of the last two.
Personal Information
Player-knights of the corebook have a very specific origin. It assumes the current year is 508, and that the characters are all Cymric knights from the county of Salisbury, and your lord is Robert, the future Count of Salisbury. While it feels like this is a remarkably specific locale, I suspect this is to make sure that all the characters in a play group share a common origin and lord that will cut down on a bunch of complications that is better reserved for more experienced groups.
The corebook also goes on to explain that other homelands, cultures, lords and religions will be available with the Knights & Ladies Adventurous supplement and other forthcoming books.
We begin by choosing the knight’s gender, religion and name. I’m going with a male knight named Stephen, a devout Christian.
Characteristics
Pendragon has 5 characteristics: Size (SIZ), Dexterity (DEX), Strength (STR), Constitution (CON) and Appeal (APP). These are pretty self-explanatory, though the book does take a moment to explain that Characterstics were intended to explain the nature of the characters body, while Skills measure cultural knowledge. Hence the lack of Intelligence characteristic!
To get Sir Stephen’s scores, we roll on the aptly (if amusingly) named, Random Cymric Characteristic Table. Each characteristic is a 2d6+5 roll. After a bit of rolling, we have: 10, 12, 15, 8 and 15. Cymric characters also get a +3 to their CON score after rolling. This gives us:
SIZ 12, DEX 10, STR 15, CON 18, APP 8
He’s not easy on the eyes, but you’ll definitely want him watching your back in a fight!
Given his low Appeal score, Sir Stephen’s appearance is categorized as “ill-favored” and now I have to pick two negative Distinctive Features. This leads to some rather interesting situations as his appearance will prejudice people against him on first impressions simply by him having… Red hair and Green Eyes. Silly in today’s standards, but such is the way of the time.
Derived Characteristics
Given his initial stats, I take a peek at Sir Stephen’s derived characteristics:
- Knockdown – The threshold at which he’ll roll to see if he’ll be knocked down. Stephen has the average of 12
- Major Wound – Stephen is hardy to say the least, and the damage he’d need to take to suffer a Major Wound is 18
- Weapon Damage – Interestingly, the damage you do in combat is mostly reliant on your stats. In Stephen’s case his SIZ and STR characteristics grant him an impressive 4d6 weapon damage
- Brawling Damage – If Stephen ends up hitting someone without a weapon, he’s still able to apply the 4d6 with punches and kicks, and half of that when using an open hand slap
- Healing Rate – Stephen heals at a rate of 4 Hit Points a week, or on a successful First Aid roll
- Movement Rate – Stephen has a combat movement rate of 17
- Total Hit Points – Stephen has an impressive total of 30 Hit Points
- Unconscious – Stephen falls unconscious at 7 Hit Points
Looking good so far! The ladies might not swoon for our green-eyed ginger-haired knight, but they’ll run to him to protect them!
Personality Traits
Here we get to the most interesting bit of Pendragon. If you read my Let’s Study for RuneQuest, then you’ll remember the Rune Pairings. Pendragon has something like it, but it’s a huge list, and defines the kind of person your knight is.
Each is represented as a pairing of opposed traits, with each pair always totaling 20 points. The character is most likely to act in accordance to the trait with the higher value. Since I did say I was going for Random Character generation, I’ll be rolling for all of these pairings to see where I end up.
After quite a bit of rolling, we get:
Chaste 15 / Lustful 5
Energetic 5 / Lazy 15
Forgiving 14 / Vengeful 6
Generous 7 / Selfish 13
Honest 5 / Deceitful 15
Just 10 / Arbitrary 10
Merciful 13/ Cruel 7
Modest 15/ Proud 5
Prudent 12 / Reckless 8
Spiritual 10 / Worldly 10
Temperate 14 / Indulgent 6
Trusting 9 / Suspicious 11
Valorous 18 / Cowardly 2
Wow, well that certainly paints an interesting picture of Sir Stephen. He’s pretty much a decent Chrisitian as his christian Virtues all score pretty decently (save for Spiritual). However he’s certainly a poster child for some rather un-knightly behavior being Selfish, Lazy and Deceitful most of the time. I guess his liege lord is just glad that this one is almost absolutely fearless.
Passions
Similar to RuneQuest, characters are also defined not just by their Characteristics and Traits but also their emotional motivations, their Passions. Let’s see what we end up with after rolling for them and distributing a few points:
Honor 13
Homage (Lord) 15
Love (Family) 14
Hospitality 15
Station 14
Devotion (God) 10
Hate (Saxons) 6
Not bad, Stephen’s reasonably honorable, pays homage to his lord is hospitable and behaves decently according to his station.
Skills
Pendragon has a fairly extensive list of skills, each of which begins with a starting value that is either set at 5, or relies on your Characteristics. I won’t go so far as to list Stephen’s scores here, but one thing of note is that a almost every single skill relating to talking to someone has a starting value of APP-5! That pretty much means that our poor red-headed knight has a Courtesy, Fashion, Flirting, Folklore, Intrigue and Orate starting score of 3.
Stephen is destined to be a lonely man, it seems.
That said there are a few bonuses from Cultural Skill Modifiers, which is a skill package for all Cymric knights, which gives a +3 to Charge, Horsemanship and Courtesy.
Finally, there’s a Family Characteristic as well, which is an inherited talent that runs along family lines. This can be chosen from the entries in a table, or rolled on, which we’ll be doing now.
Stephen’s family is known to be Perceptive, granting him a +3 bonus to his Awareness Skill.
At this point we build up his skills with 10 points to distribute among his Skills.
Attaining Knighthood
At this point, we’re done with making a 14 year old Squire in service to a knight. This is a completely playable character if the GM wishes the game to begin with characters at this stage in their development.
That said, for a first character, it’s recommended that the players invest up to 7 years of Training and Practice, which helps develop the character further. Squires often attain knighthood at age 21.
For each year of Training and Practice, Stephen may:
- Distribute 5 points among Skills (perhaps brushing up on etiquette to make up for his god-given appeal?)
- Add 1 point to any Trait or Passion
- Add 1 point to STR, SIZ, DEX, CON or APP
As a Squire, Stephen also gets some starting gear, including a shield, a helm, a spear, a dagger and a Rouncy, a non-combat trained horse.
Knighthood requires a going through a rather intricate ceremony, and I find it interesting that the game actually has a script already included to do the dubbing of Squires to Knighthood, something that will matter quite a bit and lends a great deal of weight to a player. It’s a very nice touch, and something I don’t believe I’ve seen anywhere else.
Beginner’s Luck
As part of the last few steps of character creation, one gets to roll on the Table of Beginner’s Luck, which shows an heirloom or relic that they inherited through their family. Rolling at the table gets Sir Stephen a lance blessed by Saint Dewi, a religious relic that grants annual checks to all Christian religious Traits.
Impressions
Character creation in Pendragon isn’t quite as long and extensive as RuneQuest, but it’s still a bit more involved than I expected. That said, it’s not a bad thing, given how well the system generates a unique knight. Traits and Passions in particular do extremely well in terms of reinforcing the sort of emotional sense of play that Pendragon is famous for.
I honestly prefer randomly generating Trait Pairs as it does give quite the challenge in roleplaying but I can imagine more control-oriented players preferring to just distribute points manually.
Overall character creation opens up quite a lot of conversations with your fellow player-knights, and the oathtaking makes for a neat way to cap up character creation among your fellow players, giving everyone a sense of looking forward to the years they’ll face together.
I hope this series has been helpful to you, and if you’d like to get physical or PDF copies of Pendragon books, you can find it over at the Chaosium store HERE.
If you prefer PDF copies from DriveThruRPG, you can find it HERE for $24.99
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