Pendragon Campaign Report
Subtitle: Give a fuck about tradition, stop impressing the dead.
And so things are brought to a close.
After around 6 months of playing with a brief break for the holidays and a shitty vacation, we decided to push the button on it. With one character dead and another still fresh, we stood at a crossroads: either open a new chapter in the game and keep going, or quit while we're ahead instead of letting it fade away. We chose the latter.
This campaign was a huge learning experience for me. For one, it is my second and longest campaign DMing by voice currently, I feel like I have such a better sense of things I never even considered - how long would a given challenge take, how long should a session take, when am I talking too much, etc - but it also gave me a clearer insight of my own likes and dislikes.
In this campaign, I've learned I don't really like pre-written modules. Those who know me might know that I've spent about 13 years in this hobby not using modules, and that this campaign was, in many ways, me trying to stitch a bunch of them together with the Great Pendragon Campaign and seeing what comes out. And I do see their value, they're easier to prep for and great for mining ideas, but I've also noticed that I end up in a strangely myopic mood when I do that, as if overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content and unable to determine if I seriously want to play that, or if it just looks very pretty and I like the idea of having ran that module.
I've learned that no DM is an island, and that maintaining a consistent tone is a lot harder by voice than it is by text. I don't have the freedom or the improvisational skills to describe things off the top of my head in a way that sets the tone; I don't have enough control of my tone of voice to convey whatever emotions I want, and that no matter how much I've written about a topic in my own notes, if I can't find it or remember it in the moment, it simply won't come through. But that's not the end-all be-all, this is a social game, and when the players have the buy-in and interest, the tone establishes itself.
Something I didn't learn but only doubled down was that systems only matter to the proportion that the players understand them and are willing to engage with them. Having switched it quite a few times along this campaign, from Pendragon to SimpleQuest to Hârn to OD&D to Pyrrhic Weaselry, I've noticed that they all mostly play the same when all you're doing is trading blows. More importantly, the biggest lesson I took from all of these is that the most important feature of a system is for it to focus the prep on the things you like to prep. It's no use having a deep tactical system if you personally aren't interested in manipulating statblocks; if you end up disliking messing with enemy's skill lists, don't have a system where that's the main way to characterise them.
I've learned that the Great Pendragon Campaign demands a lot more work by voice and with players who don't know Arthuriana than it did with my previous campaign, where it was a Duet with a player who knew Arthuriana and acted as my co-DM with the planning. And also that I am unwilling to put in that work.
I've learned that I don't care about isolated dungeons, because I don't particularly like the dungeon procedure as the focus of the game. The Adventure Site, to me, must exist as a transitory space in the world of the game; a challenge location you must go in but whose stakes are bigger than itself. Incidentally, this is part of why I feel like I've bounced off of modules - it takes work to make them less self-contained, enough work that simply doesn't justify using them for most of the time for me.
I've learned that "starting again" in the middle of a campaign sucks. I kept thinking about it in terms of "arcs", that such and such "arc" would begin and then end and then we could just kick off a new one. It's just not that simple; when I finished the "Saxon Invasion" arc and started the OSR adventures arc, things just felt lost. And then that one ended abruptly, so I started a new one again. It doesn't work. It makes things feel disjointed and without continuity, especially when the characters themselves haven't been given enough material to have a strong goal that they're working towards.
This feeling of being dragged by the march of time is something I mentioned before, and that I have felt before when DMing Pendragon, but never had I felt it so strongly. It is incredibly important to get the players to develop long-term goals as soon as possible, and I definitely failed to account for that.
This is a big part on why I felt like finishing the campaign. With the death of Elias and the death of Valerius, we would be forced to start again. Another new arc, this time with the bothersome weight of six months of playing behind it, in a world that was starting to feel not mine. This isn't my Arthurian Britain; not the one I built last time. There were no modules or Dolmenwood Encounter Tables in that one, the player went down to the Welsh underworld, fought werewolves and witches, pursued a happy family life and failed due to the weight of Chivalry.
The enemies used to be massive horses representing the sins of a Saxon King, and now it's just a giant sitting in a moor, disconnected from his entire region. My inability to turn this damn giant into something interesting is, I think, emblematic of the mental funk I had gotten myself into.
And then I noticed something interesting. In my quest to remind me of what this hobby was all about, why I keep doing it 15 years after starting, and what made me love it in the first place, I found myself going back to things from my childhood. I've rewatched Avatar the Last Airbender for the first time since I started playing RPGs; I've been rereading Dragon Ball and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I found myself being transported back to when I would see something interesting in these things and put them in my games. And somewhere along the line I came across this image once again.
This strange, beautiful illustration of a blue man holding a vajra and a dragon's head is one of the first things I had ever seen of Glorantha. It's not that it is a niece piece of art (though it undeniably is), but it's the promise that it holds. That of a strange, fantastical world that is impossible to be fully known even to its own inhabitants; and thus, a world that can truly be made mine. So I started writing down notes on things I would like to have on a game, locations I would like to put on this game - Karin Tower from Dragon Ball, Kyoshi Island from Avatar, etc - and I felt this feeling that I had almost forgotten, a feeling I didn't get from just stitching modules together. Simply put, I found myself having fun.
This was when I noticed what I had become; what I had made of my childlike wonder: lists of names and adventures that held no personal importance to me beyond checking on a list that yes, I have ran The famous and beloved-by-the-community Adventure of the Spectre King, that iconic adventure of Pendragon... and thought it was fine. It was ok.
I don't want my hobby to be "just ok". I don't want to satisfy the inner pedant in me that demands lists, productivity, and a lingua franca with other members of the hobby. I don't want to read 20 pages of mediocre, tortured writing from the 90's just to cross off a name from a list I compiled from the hall of fame of the old bastards who built this whole thing. I want my games to be borderline incomprehensible to others, for my players to tell stories of their exploits and not be met with "Oh yeah I did that too" or "During that moment, I picked the other choice" like a stupid videogame. I want to care about my monsters and characters, I want the story we tell to feel as a continuation of itself, as something that is alive and evolves as the characters evolve with it, not for it to be a hollow echo of literature that I don't even care about.
I want my hobby to be mine, and to feel like a genuine part of a mosaic of infinite and beautiful expressions heightened by passionate individuals who keep making it theirs too, not like just another in a long list of customers who have been served by this same deaf and dumb waiter named "Tradition". Simply put: I want to have fun.