Pendragon Play Report - Years 5 and 6

30 Nov, 2024

After the last session, for the following ones, we tried using SimpleQuest and then coming back to Pendragon, but neither felt right. Even automated, it was just too slow, but Pendragon was perfectly serviceable.

The last year was just a long battle, too boring to summarize here. Basically the Saxons attacked and the players were caught prisoner at Donnington while the army beat them back and Arthur became proper king.

This year I tried doing something different: we shifted to B/X with some OD&D flavour - you can see my quick reference document for it here - and I ran a big part of Where the Wheat Grows Tall, so spoilers for that.

For context: 1 of my players (Edwood) wasn't able to make it, so we ran it with 2 characters, both lvl. 2 Fighting Men.

The basic conceit is that there's a walled off field of wheat behind a family's homestead. It's looked over by two fairy-deities, the Noon Lady and the Midnight Maiden, both of which are tied to their wooden idols inside the field.

Recently - no timeline given, but implied to have been a few days ago - the elder son was sweet-talked by a fairy-witch that lives there to use the field again, and to tear down the icon of the Midnight Maiden; so he wandered in and was cursed by the Noon Lady for his troubles.

His younger sister went after and got lost, the father went looking for his children, the mother went after the father and was taken by the poleviks, and the younger son went after his mom. The only one left is the middle daughter, who's alone and scared.

The family has a brownie living at home which gives the players a rough rundown of events, and there's also another spirit whose nature is... unclear. But the basic hook is this: go into the field, look for the family, there's old buried treasure there too, and possibly deal with the unbalance that resulted from the felling of the Midnight Maiden's idol, which made the Noon Lady crazed with power.

I have run WTWGT before... kinda. Last time the players wandered in and died, but I had read it before so most of my prep had already been done. This time I added in the context that the players were looking for victuals for the main army during a military campaign and just wandered into the region after hearing that it had been deserted semi recently.

I won't give a play by play but they basically wandered into the farm, talked with a few of the NPCs available, and got the hook of rescuing the family from the field. They entered it, got pulled down by a random encounter into the tunnels, met the poleviks, rolled very good Reactions and were taken to the idol of the Noon Lady, then killed all of them and chopped the idol down.

They haven't finished it quite yet but overall, I'm of two minds about this module.

On the one hand, the art is very moody and evocative, the writing is sparse and only focus on the necessary, and the overall mood is heartbreaking, so I enjoy it.

On the other, I think it lacks some pretty important details. For instance, there is a Polevik den underground, and the text says "there's many of them sleeping here", but doesn't say how many, so when my players decided to raise a hoe menacingly to one of them I had to fumble quickly with the dice to figure it out.

Also it hides motivations and the exact timeline of what happened into room descriptions, which is terrible because critical information is left at the end of the book, only implied by the rest of the text; which isn't that big of a deal, but it's stuff that other characters who show up in other parts of the dungeon might know, so if you haven't read it very well and internalized everything, you might be at a loss.

I wasn't a huge fan of one of the (1 in 6) random encounters either, namely the strangling roots. Every time you enter a location, one of the encounters is "a bunch of roots show up and try to drag you underground", which befuddles the players and might send them in the direction of the poleviks once again. I don't like it because it activates before the players have much time to react and sends them to a different location entirely.

The last thing is that it didn't really make it very clear where exactly the Midnight Maiden and the Noon Lady are. They're both said to have physical forms and that's it.

A few of the monsters and encounters also don't have great motivations, which makes me struggle with reaction roll - almost to the point where it feels like you're not supposed to be rolling for it, except the book calls out reaction rolls specifically in the text. For instance, there's a spirit named Wierga in the granary, said by the brownie at home to be his sister spirit, but the adventure doesn't say what the hell is the Wierga, what can it do, or what it wants besides "idk, serve the Noon Lady maybe".

None of that detracts from the fact that the adventure is very charming. The mood oscillates every so often but I didn't mind that, and despite it taking place in summer, it has a very strong Over the Garden Wall / autumnal feel. The core mystery of what happened to the family and how to solve the fairy situation is pretty difficult too, it's a situation where there are no right answers, thus making it very interesting to put in front of players.¹

Anyway, Sir Elias and Sir Eogrim chopped down the Noon Lady's idol with a garden hoe without exploring the thing fully, so things are bound to change a lot. We'll see how much next time... on...

SUNRISE QUEST!