Great Pendragon Campaign Follow-Up

From 2017 to 2021, I ran the Great Pendragon Campaign, starting in 480 AD (I think technically the year 479 actually) and running to 535 AD. For most of that time, we had a great time, but the vicissitudes of a global pandemic forced us to move online. This was better than nothing, but while I have had great success with online campaigns played over Zoom and a virtual tabletop, moving a face-to-face campaign online changes something about how it’s played.

Pendragon (at least in its 5th edition incarnation) has several “mini-games” which are clever ways to “gameify” what are generally relatively mundane (at least, non-adventuring) events, like feasts, battles, and land and dynastic management. These “mini-games” had always been prominent in our face-to-face campaign but when we moved online they became much more prominently part of our “gameplay loop”. Combined with the online format and a lack of video feeds from the group (most players were “audio only”), I think the combination of a video-game like “gameplay loop” facilitated through the VTT and the distractions of playing a game online encouraged us to get into a bit of a rut. The game really became a means to stay in touch socially during pandemic lock downs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as a great admirer of Pendragon, I felt we were “letting down” the game in a sense. That’s a hard sensation to get past as a GM, but I had a plan.

When restrictions on gatherings lifted (not before all the players had contracted and suffered through COVID-19, including one who came close to death and spent a very scary period on a ventilator in hospital), I resolved to try to re-energise the game when we returned to face-to-face play. Our regular session time was on Friday evening at the end of the working week, and while this hadn’t been an issue before the pandemic, when we resumed the game in 2021, this time slot proved to be a challenge. Maybe we were suffering lingering after effects of COVID-19. Maybe going back to work in person after a year online not having to commute was too much of a shock to the system. Not to be overlooked: three quarters of the group had become parents just before lockdown and were certainly getting a lot less sleep than they had been when we were last playing face-to-face. Having the energy to get the campaign back on track was challenging!

We tried though. I ran some of the adventures in the Great Pendragon Campaign book and older 4th edition adventure modules, to push us out of the regular “gameplay loop”. They didn’t click the way earlier adventures had done, or the way the same adventures had clicked when I had run them for previous groups. Pendragon adventures are often written like medieval romances: there’s a lot of allegory and if there are problems or puzzles to be solved, they usually need to be solved with “genre-correct” reasoning and actions. Our group tended to approach them like puzzles in a D&D dungeon. The composition of the group had changed over the campaign (as is frequently the case) and several of our long term members had left the country and left the game: maybe we had lost that “allegorical perspective”. Or maybe we were just out of practice with Pendragon adventures, whereas there had been several D&D campaigns we were all involved in across the same period, and we were approaching the game with a different “default” mindset. I say “we” because I certainly contributed to the dynamics at the table even if I wasn’t the one trying to solve an allegorical puzzle like a Gygaxian trap.

I love Pendragon. And I love the group of players I was running it for, they’re great friends and I’m privileged to have had the opportunity to run a game for them. I was running my Chivalry & Sorcery campaign for most of the group at the same time and we’ve all played in several other campaigns with other referees before and since. Eventually, I concluded that I would rather keep hanging out with those friends in other games than feel like we were doing a disservice to King Arthur Pendragon and the Great Pendragon Campaign by pressing on when we weren’t getting the feeling or energy right, and so I put the campaign on hiatus (in 535 AD) during 2021 and since it’s now 2025, I suppose it’s safe to say it’s not likely to come off hiatus.