Pendragon Play Report - Year 7: The Adventure of the Mysterious Manor
Bit of a short one this time around.
Our group of knights and a rabbi decided to go up north, and so I decided to use an old Pendragon module I had on the wings: The Adventure of the Mysterious Manor, by Heidi Kaye, from Tales of Chivalry & Romance (1999).
The setup is simple. The knights stop at a manor so as not to sleep outside during a storm, a serving woman flirts a lot with one of them, and in the morning she's found dead with her throat slashed. Suspicion falls upon the knight who had been flirted with, since they're a stranger.
The module is, then, the knights investigating for the rest of the day. Each conversation with each NPC lasts about 30 minutes to 1 hour, and you eventually find out (spoilers) that it was the cook who did it under orders from Sir Turquine, who is the recurring villain from Pendragon along with Sir Brus Sans Pitie.
If the knights can't find the culprit, they'll have to fight a duel with the champion of the manor for their innocence and possibly wind up dead.
There's quite a few of NPCs here: the lord of the manor and his 2 daughters, his 6 bachelor knights, and 6 servants of the manor, topping out at 15 possible interviews squeezed over the course of 12 pages. Very impressive.
Due to its brevity, it lacks some information that would be very useful, such as the layout of the manor, where everyone slept, and most crucially a timeline of the events, but I didn't have a lot of trouble making stuff up for either of those.
Over the course of the investigation, players find out that Sir Barrius has a bastard son which he's presumably reluctant to acknowledge. The module says that suspicion of the serving woman's murder would fall on him, which I found strange, but that is exactly the first thing the players thought once they noticed he was the father.
It took us about 3 hours and a half to play through it all, spread over three 2-hour sessions (starting at the very end of one and finishing in the middle of the third). The only thing I found a bit disappointing in practice really was the culprit: Bart the Cook is sent by Sir Turquine to try and discredit the lord of the manor so that he becomes bitter and Turquine recruits him to... do evil around Britain, I guess? He's very two-dimensional, which is quite fitting for Chivalric Romance of course, but it's still a bit flimsy and "easy to swallow". I think if it had been a bit more messy it could have been more interesting.
Overall, I had a good time! As to the remainder of the campaign, I've started to incorporate more Dolmenwood encounters into it, seeded the Adventure of the Helmed Knight (which the players swore to "take a look"), and sent them straight into the Adventure of the Spectre King, both modules which I wished to test out for a while - The Spectre King being one of the old faithfuls of Pendragon.
As an aside, now I get why Pendragon doesn't allow enchanters, as one of the player is able to do magic. The possibility of not being able to magic-away a problem means that the game now has a status difference between players, and they can't all be at the same places at once, which is quite inconvenient and means they have to account for having "a servant" following these knights around. The player seems to be having a nice time though, and seemed very excited with the prospect of playing as a magician, so I'd feel bad asking them to throw that away. Besides, nothing like that has actually happened yet, so I may be just worrying over nothing much.
Anyway, we finished the session in the halls of the king of Roestoc (a kingdom occupying the south and part of the west of modern-day Yorkshire). Will our heroes figure out who is the mysterious Spectre Knight who has been decimating his knights? Will they follow through on their promise to the Helmed Knight to deliver his marriage proposal to the lord of Apperside Manor up to the north of York?? Will I find a way to not have Pendragon adventures be trivialized by the presence of a magician???
FIND OUT NEXT TIME, ON...
SUNRISE QUEST!
