Pendragon Play Report - Year 7, OR: Why I Dropped Sun King's Palace

01 Feb, 2025

Regarding where we left off, and how the hexcrawl wasn't all it was cracked up to be

On the last play report we had stopped in the middle of Where the Wheat Grows Tall. We ended up finishing it, one of the characters got an eye that makes people think they're being set on fire (and used it on a whole crowd of bandits a while after it), another got a beard made out of straw, and the third got a crow familiar he can't use.

My last impressions of Where the Wheat Grows Tall are that it is an interesting adventure that nonetheless doesn't go far enough in the Slavic theming (it has an extremely American-looking barn out in the middle of nowhere), nor does it give quite enough information on operative details that I found necessary. I probably wouldn't put it very far up my list of priorities for running again.

At the end of it, however, I had the main fairy-spirit-thing, the Noon Lady, give all my players a vision of the moon smiling, and of a tower looking out into the Bristol Channel. The entire world spun around them, the powers of sun and moon rotated around, it was a whole thing, and they rightfully treated it as their next hook. This was a hook for the Sun King's Palace, which I hoped to be the next big thing in the campaign.

After that happened, I was finishing up my absurd indexing of all the locations from all of the Pendragon sourcebooks, and making a sort of hexmap with them.¹ My plan was to transition the game into a hexcrawl and develop the regions slowly, as we went by them. It was... of middling success.

The player-knights were released by their liege, King Leodegrance of Cameliard, as the nature of the knightly retinue in Britain changes in the 7th year of Arthur's reign, which provided a nice excuse to go hexcrawling.² This wasn't me trying to force them onto the hexcrawl, to be clear, things just fell into the right place and I rolled with it. Mostly, this was the consequences of the players' actions, as the lady whose lover they had beaten and captured a few years ago got the ear of their liege and convinced him they were scoundrels.

Being free to roam, and having only a vision of a tower in the south of Wales, they decided to hexcrawl there, and that took a session. They wandered around, found a castle with a bunch of statues, ducked out, killed a random encounter's worth of bandits... it was fine. I noticed at this point that there was nothing really that interesting on their way that got their attention, and when they were 2/3rds of the way there I just skipped to the tower. In the future we've agreed on me simply calculating their way there, rolling the encounters, and narrating the journey as a series of vignettes instead; Britain is much too dense to do any meaningful exploration, as every hex would be "You come upon a castle".

On their way they asked Merlin what their vision was all about, and Merlin also told them that it seemed like it was a very big deal; perhaps even a prophecy to maintain the Enchantment of Britain even after Arthur is gone! With the implication being that magic would be gone after Arthur.

This was almost 3 sessions of build-up. Where the Wheat Grows Tall ended up feeling like the set-up for Sun King's Palace, Merlin threw them in that direction, it felt like they were going somewhere really Important. Then they got there and I was thoroughly disappointed.

Inside the Sun King's Palace, and the disappointment found therein

We played through 2 sessions entirely inside the dungeon, exploring every room in the Garden portion except for one (so about 1/5 of the dungeon), and only in the second one I started noticing some issues that really didn't encourage me to try and salvage it.

Of the matter of the NPCs, and how we must parley with weapons

Firstly, the encounters aren't very good. This is subjective of course, but the introduction talks a lot about how "the players should take care and parley", "most encounters can be solved by talking", etc, and yet the random encounters in the Garden are:

• The Hunt, which can have up to 10 HD and whose main motivation is hunting the players;

• Inkblots, little 1 HD goblin things that pretty much always attack;

• An animal, which doesn't speak, and may be a tiger which will likely attack;

• A Basilisk, which obviously preys on the players;

• Or a Fairie Dragon. I didn't get this encounter so I'm not sure, but it just seems like it's there to fuck with the players.

Out of these, the only one that is genuinely able to parley is the Fairie Dragon, and it's also the only one I didn't roll. Adding to that, most of the rooms themselves involved someone just attacking the players, or simply talking to them in a way that didn't really lead anywhere. I liked their "stage directions" (the Mannerisms), but most of the NPCs just didn't have any goals or wants, they knew a lot of stuff and ended up sounding cryptic, which obviously complements the Dark Souls vibe but that doesn't make them very interactive. With most NPCs, my players came up to them, talked for a while, then said "damn, sucks that happened to you, can we do anything to help?" and the answer was invariably "no", because there isn't!

The one that really jumped at me was Jacole, an NPC that is mentioned earlier in a room that you necessarily have to go through to get to. Jacole just attacks the players as they come in because she's crazy, and nothing else. No real rhyme or reason, she's been corrupted by the force that inhabits the palace - the Abyss - and her entire description and interface is "what can she do in a fight". But she's located in a room that you need to go through if you want to escape from the dungeon, because the other way has a monster called "Milkshakes" that also simply attacks out of nowhere and deals 4d10 damage on an attack with +8 to hit. Killed one of my knights too.

Jacole's positioning is also telling, because if you look at the map, it says that she's connected to an adjoining room, but there's no description of an exit for that room. It just says:

If weakened, she hides in the “Backstage.” Entering the Backstage while in combat creates a pocket dimension for you and her. It isolates you from your group but lets you face Jacole one on one. If she’s defeated, the Abyss’s hold on this room fades and the backstage returns to its original form.

Except my players were coming from the Backstage, through a door that wasn't described in Jacole's room, therefore I had no way of knowing where they emerged in there and what was the tactical positioning.

It just seemed like the placement of these rooms were meant for players to simply run through them, considering they're two extremely tough fights back to back. There isn't really anything there for them to find either.

Of the great and noble rewards for knights of great worship, and the lack thereof

This takes me to my other big disillusionment: there are no rewards or treasure in the dungeon, you have to put it in yourself. I wouldn't have a problem with it, except the dungeon doesn't tell you that. My players were about to enter the penultimate room in the Garden when I realized that there simply hadn't been anything there for them at all, then I remembered the context-less "random treasure table" at the start of the book and thought I was meant to roll there for the treasures in the rooms. So I rolled it and what I got was:

• Envelope with a broken seal. Inside is a letter addressed to you. It says: “Let’s go to the garden. You’ll find me waiting.” (No indication of who that might be, no NPC seems to fit, and "the garden" isn't a single location, it's the region they're already in)

• Messy sketch of the room you’re in, only there’s a face hidden in the shadows.

• And extinct, flightless, cold climate bird in a cage.

This was during a session, mind. I had ignored this table at first because I assume it was for random, minor shit you might find when prompted perhaps, not that it was the main treasure table for the entire megadungeon. The most money you can get out of it is 30 gp or 50 sp. Thankfully I wasn't using gold as XP, but it still felt strange that there just was nothing in there for the players.

Of the geese and the little problems that mine the foundations of trust in Man

Third issue I noticed made me mistrust the entire book. So the main objective and thrust of the dungeon is that there are Pieces of the Sun spread around it, and that if you collect all 5 of them you can do some big, important stuff. One of these pieces were distributed among 5 geese by a giant, and this giant is also sitting right at the very first room, so naturally it was the first thing my players started working towards.

You'd think that would be a major thing, right? Odds are this is the first NPC you see and it asks you to look for her geese; there's a throne that shows you "the thing you want the most" in the dungeon and it might be her geese since you probably don't know anything else about this dungeon.

The geese aren't in the dungeon.

Let me fix that: there are two geese in the dungeon. The other 3 go unmentioned, except in the start where it says that there are 5.

At this point it felt like the book was actively fucking with me because things felt entirely random. One NPC mentions another named Jacole, and you find out later she's actually inside the dungeon; other NPCs (inside the aforementioned throne room) mention an NPC named Ninodon, who isn't in the dungeon. There's 5 geese? There's 2 geese now. There's 1d6 geese, why not? Simply make stuff up.

Of the perfidy of the Sphinx and a question of tone

The fourth thing I really disliked is an NPC, the Sphinx. It says that every time you backtrack there's a 1 in 20 chance of finding it. It will ask the players a riddle (you need to come up with it, of course) and they're literally frozen in place until they answer it.

Who is this Sphinx? Well, it says that she can "slip out of her Painted World" which she had been bound to, and that she messes with people. This is all of the characterisation she gets, except that she's one of the triplets that had a finger in busting this whole world down. What does she want? What is she seeking? Can you enter this "painted world"? Wait, does that mean there's PAINTINGS adorning the walls of the palace then and she can slip in and out of them, gone unmentioned in every single room and description until now?

In the end it doesn't matter. Her main function is showing up and being very annoying, and this is where I started to have my most serious misgivings with the book. See, the tone of it is really variable. At some points it feels like it's meant to be heartfelt and wistful, it constantly evokes Dark Souls in imagery which has a very melancholic tone: one of the possible results in the reaction table is "overwhelming melancholy", the whole background of the palace involves the Sun King being a dick to his entire family and so there is the possibility of a real feeling of loss in this place, etc. Yet, the NPCs are filled with modern, funny references and silly directions; the Fairy Dragon pranks the players, some nymphs explicitly instruct the DM to meme on the players with ligma jokes, one of the knights has a Wonderwall reference, one of the men who are dying from the sad Stain in this place instructs the DM to "Be a sad boy. Sniffle and wipe tears from your eyes. Bemoan your circumstances in Shakespearean fashion."

There's nothing wrong with being acerbic and having humour to help parse the horrors of the dungeon, but it honestly started feeling like the wistful and melancholic bits were pretty much just set dressing. The Sphinx itself feels like a mean joke a DM might pull - here's an NPC that can freeze you in place and just wander off as you try to answer a riddle. The adventure was more interested in putting these descriptions of how to best clown on your players or attack them (one of the inkblot encounters is literally "falling on your head") than it is with giving them interesting motivations and things to do in the palace.

Of elvish matters, and the lack of consideration for disadvantaged persons

The final nail in the coffin for me was something pretty minor. The door to the second "level" of the dungeon, the Mausoleum, is called the Door of Similes. It's written in it that it will open for a simile, and then that simile becomes real for an hour, so if you say "I am strong as a lion" you turn into a lion for an hour. Cool, right? I think it is. The issue is that it's written in Elvish. There is nothing in the dungeon that teaches you to read Elvish, there's no indication that you need to bring an elf or know elvish into the dungeon to pass through, and none of the Elf NPCs are either in a position to come to the door with you, or have a strong motivation to leave where they are to help you with this. There is one hidden door that gives access to another level, and that's that.

Simply put: if you don't have an Elf in your party or someone who knows how to read Elvish, you'll be stuck in the first floor. As it happens, my party was made up of an English knight, a Welsh one, and a Jewish sorceress / holy woman. There are no elves in my world. I had described the door in a language they couldn't understand, at the time trusting that they would come upon a solution to it, and as they were preparing to enter one of the last rooms of the dungeon I went "Oh shit. There's no one they can ask for help with that door. They will be stuck in the first floor."

This finished draining any will I still had to run this dungeon. I was defeated by my disappointment. I couldn't trust the book anymore, I stopped liking the NPCs, and it simply didn't feel worth it to put in the work to salvage it. Because of how much I had built it up, my players were also pretty disappointed that it ended up being a whole bunch of nothing.

Ending it all

I ruled that the Abyss simply finished corrupting the entire dungeon and it sank into oblivion, my players the last people to ever see it. Afterwards they got and followed the hook for the Spectre King Pendragon adventure, something which I only settled the night before the session.

Overall, I enjoy certain ideas in the Sun King's Palace, but I simply don't think I'll ever want to run it again. Not that the dungeon itself is bad, I quite liked some of the rooms, I enjoyed the background of it all, it had the makings of something that should really appeal to me, but it didn't.

I'll also admit that a big part of the problems I had were exclusive to my group, so my advice to anyone planning on running it is to simulate a group delving on the dungeon first, and checking what happens to the characters and how they're changed by the end of the experience.

Anyway, the session ended with Sir Eogrim being accused of MURDER in a manor in the Cotswolds! Will the players manage to free my man? Will I finally find an adventure that I like in an uncomplicated way?? Will I ever find the time to prep the Gentleman Wizards game amidst having to now prep a bunch of stuff in Pendragon that I had hoped to only use about 3 months in the future after they were done with Sun King's Palace???

FIND OUT NEXT TIME, ON...

SUNRISE QUEST!