King Arthur Pendragon 6th Edition (2024)
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
King Arthur Pendragon 6th Edition (2024)
High-Fantasy
English
Chaosium
King Arthur Pendragon is a tabletop roleplaying game of Arthurian chivalry, tragedy, and multi-generational legacy, originally designed by Greg Stafford and first published by Chaosium in 1985. It's one of the hobby's oldest continuously-revised games, having passed through five earlier editions and several publishers (including Green Ronin's Arthaus imprint and Nocturnal Media) before returning to Chaosium, who released the 6th Edition in April 2024.
Stafford completed the design draft for this edition before his death in 2018, with longtime Pendragon line editor David Larkins overseeing it to print - a fact the game's own promotional copy leans into, framing it as the culmination of nearly forty years of Stafford's design thinking on the setting.
Description
Players take on knights of Arthur's Britain, sworn to a lord and bound by a code of chivalry the game asks characters - and players - to genuinely wrestle with rather than simply declare. The Game Master (GM) runs a campaign built to span decades of in-world time: between adventures, a Winter Phase resolves a knight's marriage, estate management, aging, and family events, and campaigns are explicitly designed to carry a player from their original knight's prime through old age and into playing that knight's own heir.
The game asks a lot of a table willing to commit to it - character death by old age is expected, not a failure state, and a knight's personal flaws are written onto the character sheet where they can force bad decisions at the worst possible moment. In exchange, it delivers something few other RPGs attempt: a genuinely generational campaign where a table can watch the consequences of one knight's choices land on their grandchild decades later.