Pendragon is Greg Stafford’s Great Work. As much as Glorantha is wild and interesting and influential, I think Pendragon looms larger in his legacy. I consider it a perfect marriage of theme, system and source material, and it accomplishes this in ways I have not seen rivaled by other games.

Which isn’t to say it is a game for everyone: it isn’t. Pendragon is not a generic King Arthur RPG, it is a simulation of medieval Arthurian Romances, which is to say it synthesizes a great many poems and legends into one cohesive “history” which players play through. The game’s system judges actions from a 12th century standard, which can be a bit baffling for the modern moral mind. Glory is paramount – the game uses it as a sort of experience system. Virtues and vices exist on a binary scale, swinging back and forth between extremes. Family is a central focus – players will play several characters from the same bloodline during the full campaign.

At the start of the campaign, everyone is a brute. As Arthur rises to power, he civilizes England, so there is a natural struggle among players to look after their interests while also adapting to new chivalrous standards of behavior. Actions lauded as heroic at the start of the campaign might be regarded as a knavish by the end.

Anyone familiar with Arthurian legend will recognize the moral struggles – loyalty, honor, love – that are at the core of Pendragon. The system’s focus on character development (using stats as a guide for behavior rather than a thing to min/max) naturally invests players into an epic storyline that mirrors those struggles.

This is the second edition from 1990 (really, two thirds of it – Knights Adventurous, a rules expansion, is integral). Stafford’s fifth edition, first released in 2005 and tweaked a couple times since, is probably definitive. It is worth checking it and the Great Pendragon Campaign out, even if you don’t intend to play it. It is that good.