This is the original Pendragon Campaign (1985 – I am bouncing all over the place this week, just roll with it).

Greg Stafford’s idea here is that the struggles and adventures of the players knights are part of a larger story playing out in the background – a year by year unfolding of the glorious and tragic tale of King Arthur. Sometimes they will witness key events,  sometimes they will play a key role, bust mostly they are the stage dressing. The Campaign provides that dressing through a timeline of events. There is plenty of other material, too – monsters, important NPC stats, some scenarios and location information – but it is that timeline that forms the backbone of the game. Of this slim, 75-page book, just 10 pages are dedicated to fleshing out the 75 years the campaign is intended to run. The print is very small, but there is plenty of gorgeous art from Lisa A. Free to spice it up.

Stafford would revisit this concept again in 1991 for the Boy King, vastly expanding the timeline to run over 130 pages, and even then he only covered 40 of the now 80-year campaign. He’d finally complete it in 2006, in the Great Pendragon Campaign, a massive 434 pages detailing 80 years of campaign time, and including over 100 adventures. When you take into consideration that, setting aside multi-session adventures, every session of Pendragon is supposed to roughly coincide with a year of the chronology, you’ve got a truth massive game here. And that says nothing of the effort and research it all took to reconcile dozens of often contradictory versions of Arthur’s legend into a cohesive, compelling whole.

Its a wild, 20-year labor of love on Stafford’s part, and it totally shows through. And it all started with ten pages back in 1985.