Pendragon Play Report - Year 7: The Spectre King; also Pyrrhic Weaselry, the Havoc Cut Playtest

22 Feb, 2025

One of the games that most beat my brains, that most tendered my loins, that most verbed my nouns a third time, was Pyrrhic Weaselry by Dr. Screwhead, DMed by the excellent JaceyS along with DGB.¹ It's simple but it provides an interesting narrative structure to the game that I had never really internalized. Recently I tried my hand at changing it just slightly to both keep it compatible with OD&D in the event of me wanting to use it, but also shifting the wording of it to suit my tastes a little more.² This was the product.

In my Pendragon game, the players were marching towards a fight against an evil monster in a module, so I thought it would be a fine moment to put these ideas to the test.

The setup in question is simple. Somehow, the Saxon (read: basically Viking) King Hengest has returned. He wasn't able to rest easy in his grave for one reason or another, so it's the player's self-appointed job to figure out how to kill him once and for all. It's a very simple and direct Pendragon module where you basically talk to 3 or 4 different people and then prepare to face a really strong enemy. In D&D terms, I had him as level 7 monster³ with the proportions of a regular man but much stronger.

In Pendragon this guy is an absolute beast, the only way to kill him for sure is for the players to get at least 29 or 30 on a 5d6 / 6d6 (a 3.59% chance!). The way I was going to run this in B/X was just give him Supernatural HD - that is, only track hits that landed with max damage - with maybe ways of limiting him.

Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about any of that.

I won't relate the entire fight beat by beat as I don't recall it perfectly, but I will note that, once the elision of the game is down, people started to think and value disarming the opponent a whole lot more. Positioning, such as footwork, also was a lot more emphasized, since you just needed a well placed slash on the neck to kill someone.

The fight took around 30 minutes of three lvl 3 PCs against this lvl 7 monster, they brought down his horse, chopped off his hand, beat his helmet out of his head, then pinned him down and lopped off his head.

It started out a bit clumsy, as people had a hard time thinking of suitable compromises, but once we got in the swing of things players seemed very engaged by it, instantly thinking of group tactics and of the reality of the situation in a much more interesting way than usual.

What could have been a killbox in a featureless plain (since they purposefully fought in an open battlefield so as not to worry about terrain) trying to kill a much stronger monster in a series of attack exchanges became "He runs himself through his belly with his sword to try and hit the knight behind him", "Oh shit, I'll sacrifice my torso armour then, he opens a hole in it but it doesn't get me" and so on.

Afterwards I discussed it with my players, they seemed to think it was very entertaining and enjoyable, and were fine with keeping it as our standard resolution procedure. They did think that having a 50/50 "get out of jail free card" might make things too easy, but we recognized that it was mostly a matter of fictional positioning, and that the Spectre King had a lot more leeway than usual due to having 3 attacks every round and being supernaturally tough (due to being undead).

That said, I wasn't liberal enough with that fictional positioning: the lynchpin in their strategy was that one of the players tackled the Spectre King to the ground and held him there for a round while another was trying to cut his head off, but the Spectre King was supernaturally strong, so maybe I should have said that the player just wasn't able to hold him like that.

Another thing that I'm not sure how I feel about is that it's pretty hard to gauge wounds without any benchmark. I followed Screwhead's suggestion of removing the wound gradation that PW had, but that resulted in me not really being very sure what the consequences of a slash on the ribs would be. It's not bad enough to break them or get the character to immediately die or stop fighting, it just makes them start bleeding and hinders them.

A lesson I should take about that from JaceyS' game, however, is to use these wounds basically like FATE Tags. So using them as "allowances" that expand the fictional positioning, or as disadvantages that makes the player's life harder. Maybe they declare an attack and I say that they waste their turn holding their side in pain, or the next attack goes to open the wound on the ribs to try and cut their whole guts open, that kind of thing.

Overall, I found it a very rewarding experience. They did survive the fight with basically minor bruises because of a string of good tactics, good luck, and me not really being able to think on what the monster could compromise on. I look forward to playing more with it.

Anyway, I don't have a cool hook for NEXT TIME, ON

SUNRISE QUEST!