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Not really. The "needs of history" are basically the need of story. Cultures that adapted and altered the Arthruian legends to make them more accessible to their audience or to promote a s[efic agenda (both Lancelot and Galahad were added for specfic reasons) are doing the All storytelling alters things in someway to fit the goals of the story, even if is is just to provide a structure. Reality isn't tighly plotted with easy to follow stroeis that resolve themselves up neatly. Criminals? I think you are being unfair. Neither Dumas nor Shakespeare claimed to be historians, or to be telling a ture histroy. They were storytellers. As for Homer, he probably didn't exist but instead was a pen name the stories were attributed to at a later date. They are not like, say Geoffrey of Monmouth who passed his writing off as some sort of history, or how a lot of so called historians were mostly writing propaganda. Yup. Exactly. Arthur's Camelot is the golden age that never was. I don't think that people are necessarily a more historical version of Arthur, but instead one that is closer to the version they prefer. The thing about the King Arthur legend is that there are lots of variations on it, and different bits and not one cohenet narritaive. That's why even things like how Arthur get's Excalibur has multiple versions (is it the sword in the stone or given to him by the Lady of the Lake?), and how things have been changed in the game over the years. I think that is a natural desire too, as the legend King Arthur continues to evolve over time in order to remain relevant. That's why T.H. White's Arthur is more social worker and less monarch than Malory's Arthur. Richer, as there are no doubt people who are interested in Arthurian Lore who have no interest in playing Pendragon. I agree. But I also think that Pendragon is solid enough to cover some of the variants in supplements. I disagree somewhat with you here. If they game knew what it wanted to be then it would have been that in KAP1 and never changed. Pendragon has changed with editions. KAP1 was more vague and open ended, but over the years, it has become more defined and tied closer to Malory. One example of that is Camelot. In KAP 1 it was Cadbury Castle, a site that was recently suggest (by Ashe) as a possibility for a historical Arthur. In KAP3, Greg switched it to Winchester, and stated to phase out the use of Celtic and Roman place names for those used in Malory. Another is how the sword in the stone was merged with Excalibur in the GPC.

Somewhat. I think some of the changes with Arthurian lore were more natural and occurred as the story was unintentionally altered and updated when retold over the ages to people in different times and places. Hollywood's changes tend to be more deliberate or out of ignorance about the story they are supposedly retelling, or even to simplify a complex story to make it more easily understood.. But I'm sure a lot of the changes to Arthurian lore over the years were deliberate too, so probably not too much different than today.

Yup. IF someone has the money and is in the right location. Nope,. and it's easy to see why. Just imagine millions of aircars flying around a big city during rush hour, and what the typical fender bender will be like at 1500 feet. In fact if you look at the Jetsons closely, you might start to wonder just why everything is on platforms up in the sky? IS ther something wrong with the surface of the planet that prevents people from ever going there?

Yup. That sort of thing happens all the time with writing- not just SciFi. Mystery writers have to craft thier story in such a way that there is some sort of mystery, and then add in enough clues so that the detetive can figure it all out. It's really the same thing. Just logically working out what it takes to get the desired result.

Yup. That's exactly the problem. Each country and region has versions of the tale that make Arthur out to be a local hero. IS he from Logres, Cornwall, Northumbria, Britanny, or elsewhere. No matter which version we pick, there will be someone, somewhere who will wish we pick their version. I ran into some of that myself with the Book of Sires. Sometimes I would have liked to gone in a different direction that Sires did with some events and people, and no doubt would have done so if I had written it. But if I had, there would be people wishing that I had gone in a different direction. Ultimately, each GM gets to decide things in their campaign. I've changed a couple of things here and there- some by design and others by accident, but it's still recognizably Pendragon. Yeah tracking down Arthur is really difficult, It's probably that Arthur is probably a title or nickname rather than his actual birth name,

Yup. In fact, that touches upon mydesire for one or more books that give us variant versions of the tale. Amore Celtic Arthur, a more Roman one, etc. Not necessarily. Khanwulf pointed out the Roman Hippika Gymnasia, a series of military exercises and games conducted by Roman Calvary that could eithe rrepace tournamnets, or morph into them. I used the Hippika a couple of times in the "prequel" peroid of my current campaign. I think he was historical, , but the historical Arthur probably bore little resemblance to the legendary one. THe legendary one is also a combination of several late Roman/Post Roman leaders such as Aetius and Riothamus. Yes it's certianly possible. The underlying core rules set to Pendragon is still RQ/BRP and is flexible enough to work for just about any setting. Pendragon has a few wrinkles that make it favor knights a bit more, but you can still do just about any setting with the rules with a bit of tweaking. I have it, and it's nice. There are some choices they mde with it that I'm not fond of (Vortigern as Uther's brother) and I am not as fond of the Fate game mechanics as I am of PEndragon, but it is a nice Arthrian RPG. GURPS Camelot was't bad either. There are probably at least a half dozen Arthurian RPGs out there. Not entirely. The big differences are in both culture and religion. In Medieval Britian all the Knights would be Roman Christian, at least until Henry VII split form Rome and started the Church of England. All those Pagans and "Cymric Christians" (i.e. more pagans and heretics) would be rooted out as heretics. I think the BoU probably is a little too medieval, considering how widespread other religions and cultures are in Pendragon Britain.

Yeah. Technologically we're getting pretty close to being able to do it,, but economically it isn't viable for most people. For most people it's better to just drive 200 miles and use up 10 gallons of fuel, than to fly 200 miles and use up 25 gallons of fuel - and that's not even counting the increased cost to purchase, insure, maintain, and store said vehicle, or any of the other problems that go with aircraft. Putting a couple of hundred pounds of stuff in the trunk of a car might affect the acceleration, handling, and put a bit more wear on the shocks, but with a light aircraft it could prevent it from being able to take off.

THat would seem to eliminate any sort of "Knights of the Round Table" version of Arthur for you, then. How about a more historcal one with Arthur being say, a Roman or Dacian leading calvary against invading Saxons? It is. I think the way to go with it is to look at Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur as a fantasy novel, and Pendragon an RPG set in that fictional world, which, just so happens, bears similarities to out own in the past.

Yeah, except that those versions of the characters are different in more than just name. Essentially you really do need to run a different version of Pendragon to go with it. Because most of the cultures that were into Arthur at the time were themselves French. It's always a problem with Arthur is every cuture that adopted the legend put thier own spin on it, and endeavored to make it local.

True, and that works both in terms of failing to predrict something, but also in terms of preducting things that (Still) haven't come to pass. Atomic cars for instance. Oh there is that, too. What I was referring to are things like ships not carrying enough fuel to get into space, or transporters. While we will no doubt make future improvements, some SciFI stuff is probably going to remain fantasy.

Pretty much. At least that's what most real world terraforming plans for Mars look like. Of coruse in the real world there are other factors that might not apply in a SciFi setting. For instance the difficulties in getting something into space, fuel requirements, expense and so forth. But if they figured out a way to get objects into space cheaply, without needing so much fuel, as with many SciFi ships, the Terraforms could be a faster, more hands on affair. Yeah, People wouldn't go there with a reason. So either some sort of rare resource, scientific curiosity, or maybe religious or political reasons. I agree. It would be like getting your own, brand new planet. People would be free to set things up however they wanted, without having to deal with whatever restrictions that they didn't like on their home world.

Well there are different factors at work here. In the real world, space exploration is beastly expensive, which limits the number of people who can afford it to mostly countires, large companies, and eccentric billionaires. Now the first two (governments and companies) have to answer to other people who contrl the purse strings, and can have shake ups in leadership every few years, which can change priorities. Plus it is very risky, and takes time. We'll probably get there eventually, but it's more of a long term thing. We've really only been going into space for a little more than 50 years, so we're not really doing too badly considering. It's just that in SciFi, our tech is much better, in some cases impossibly so.

Really? I mean it's not like Cymric naming conventions come up in many other RPGs. All place names tend to get shifted for langage anyway. Most English speaking places use Rome, not Roma, and so on. It's not like you could use older names with your players, assuming you knew them. It is ironic.Almost as ironic as when the Saoxons hoped Arthur would come back and save them from King John. But then the legendary King Arthur is more medival, and thus Anglo-Saxon-Norman than historcal.. I doubt it. Thy tried getting rid of the modern place names in some of the latter supplements and it just made things much more confusing to play. My players barely know where London is, and might be able to find Sarum or Carleon, but they'd be hopeless lost with Welsh place names. Unfortunately, Welsh (itself a Saxon word) isn't a language that comes easily to non-native speakers. Personally, I'd love there to be one or more "spin off" books that cover alternate version of Arthur. One more Cymric, another more Roman, and so on.

I'd suggest keeping it simple. Give humans a Base Jump distance in feet, and maybe tweak it up or down a little for STR, SIZ and/or DEX (something like +1m per 4 STR and -1 m per 3 SIZ (see below) might work, but it's probably not worth the trouble). Standing jumps should cover about half to two-thirds as much as a running jump For the skill roll, keep it simple: Say a success jumps the typical distance, a failure half that, a special twice that, and a critical three times that. Note that if you use a 10 foot./ (or 3m) distance for a running jumps and 7 foot (2m) for standing jumps, the numbers match up pretty well with real world values. Yeah, frankly I think you are using the wrong ruleset, or should I say subset of BRP. MOV is a very abstract way of having movement rates that reflects the relative advantage in combat. With humans getting bumped up from MOV 8 in RQ2 to MOV 10 in BRP it reduced the relative advantage of horses. Based on your other threads you probably want something a little more crunchy. What you might want to look at instead is the Move rating in RQ3. In that version of BRP HUmans moved at 3m per Strike Rake, which doubled to 6 if they were running. Horses had a Move of 10m/SR which is closer to the real world ratios. No, and it probably shouldn't. What horses are running into is something know as the square-cube law. What that means is that when you double the size of a creature, you cube it's mass, but only square it surface area. Now muscle power (STR) increases with the square, not the cube, so as animals get larger their ability to jump compared to their body weight drops off. That's why a grasshopper can make a standing jump of around ten times it's body length, a human about about 1.15 times it's body length, and a elephant cannot jump at all. That's all before allowing for the weight of riders. In game terms what's happening is that each 8 points of STR bumps the jumping distance up by around 2m, but each 8 points of SIZ reduces it by 3. Past a certain point a creature cannot lift it's bulk. That's also one of the reason why we don't have 50 foot tall humans, or man sized insects, and why the largest creatures live in the water. Past a given point, their structures cannot support their own weight.

Glad you like it. Well there is realism and there is believably. You don't want it so far fetched that they players can't swallow it. Also, there is the fact that what ever science players are aware of will come back to haunt you if you contradict it. For instance, in one campaign I was playing in the GM has a river flow from the ocean to the mountains. Most of the players didn't have a problem with it, but two of us, being quite conscious of gravity and how water tends to flow downhill, actually took it to mean something significant. It wasn't, but water flowing uphill seemed like a clue. And that helps. All that fancy tech can help to flesh out the game world too. I once set up a game based on the idea of using an airship and filling it with air. I did a little research and it looked like such a ship could fly on a Mars-like world. So I created one, put rare gems on it, and set up domed, pressuring colonies, that used carbon-fiber airships and devices that extracted oxygen and carbon from the carbon dioxide atmosphere. I think the science and math mostly worked out.It did help flesh out the setting and technology involved, as the tech that was used was derived from what was needed to make the airships practical and functional. Since everybody needed air, everyone/play had small air compressors that no only provided air to breath, but also proved to be a easy portable way to pressurize high power airguns. It made the setting something other than a generic colony world.

Yeah, when you want them to be. It's really an old SciFi and gaming trope. If the story would be ruined by something readily available in the setting, then come up with an in setting reason why it won't work. It's why there can be wield ionic fields in the atmosphere that mess up the transport in Star Trek, or why there were strange restrictions to prevent high level spells like Wish from working on old D&D modules.

Maybe not. The thing is with weapon damage is that there is a bit of a disconnect between reality and gaming. In real life, lethality is somewhat hard to guage, as there are so many factors that apply. For example, with modern firearms, shot placement is far more important that bullet weight or caliber, yet most RPGs tend to focus on the round or weapon rather than the skill of the marksman. In the real world the differences between one firearm and the next isn't so obvious. A bullet with twice the mass, or muzzle energy, or both of another bullet isn't two or four of even eight times more lethal than the first. In RPG game terms, though, everything is spelled out clearly in black and white. Weapon #1 does 1D8, weapon #2 does 1D10, so weapon #2 does more damage. Factor in things like hit points, and gamers quickly learn to think that weapon #2 is better than weapon #1 because in game terms it is significantly so, as it does 1 more point of damage on average. Now what I'm getting at here is that most modern firearms are quite lethal enough, and SCiFI weapon don't necessarily have to do more damage to be effective. An energy weapon that did the same damage as a slug thrower, but had better range, accuracy, or capacity would still be a significant upgrade. So if you don't need to include force shield tech, if you can keep the damages down. Oh, and if you want to really keep the weapons tech under control, remember that the more high tech something is, the more that can go wrong. Imagine if some high tech society could generate a EM field and that it messed up most electronics. The military would have to use "obsolete" tech, as mechanical stuff would be reliable in a EM field. My suggestion is figure out what you want the setting to be like, then reverse engineer the reasons why it would have worked out that way. , .

THere could be a couple of other ways to limit ther "Space fantasy" tech. Maybe some substance messes with it, preventing from being useful in some environments., or convesely some substance is required for it to work. For instance maybe the pseudo anti-grav created a magnetic field, but requires a high content of ferrous metal (iron) to push against to give full lift. Or you can do like they do with Star Wars. The contra-gravity there works by pushing against an existing gravitation field. Te net result is that it is weak where gravity is weak. Mostly. A little trivial counts as flavor text, and sometimes can even be a clue to some problem in an adventure.

Wives also bring in-laws.

Most of the major sources seem to present him so, although as he is written in all but the modern versions, he would still seem pretty arbitrarily to us. His emoitions override his sense of justice quite often. I could see Uther listening to Tor's Father. Uther isn't entirely bad, although he has been given a bit of a downgrade in recent year. That sort of depends on what the lie was, if it hurt Arthur somehow, why the knight lied, and how Arthur reacts to it all. Oh, a bit of a tough one. On the one hand, Arthur doesn't like being lied to, on the other hand the knight is protecting a lady, and acted out of compassion- both of which couuld score him points with Guinevere, who in turn might ask Arthur to be lenient. Then, there may or may not be a problem with the Church over a false marriage, depending on the knight's religionI think the key thing though is why did Arthur want to execute the hostages, and if he would coll down if given time. Maybe. Documents for that sort of thing is a more recent invention. Marriage was as much a matter of custom and ceremony as anything else. Especially for non-Christian religions. In some ways, just claiming that you were married to a woman counted as such -unless she denied it. The odd thing would be that marriages were usually a very public thing, especially for the upper classes, and it would be unlikely that no one would be aware of the marriage if it had happened. Oh, Round Table Knight, that up's the severity a notch or three, as he is now a direct vassal of Arthur. That technically makes his actions treasonous, if Arthur wants to look at it that way. That would the the extreme case though. I think it really comes down to the excuse the knight gives for his actions. Mercy, Amor, or even possible Just could possible save him and even maybe change Arthurs mind on the matter, if the can make a good case. If that's the case, then he might still spare the woman, as it's bad policy to createa new law and then do something contrary to it at the same time. I'd expect Arthur to do something along the lines of: Spare the Saxon Woman Punish the Knight- this could mean given him a unpouplar duty (i.e. night watch), or sending him into exile for a year, or maybe even something worse. Probably force the knight to marry the Saxon woman after all, unless that would mean more land and/or titles for the knight.

I depends on how much/far you want to go with it. Basically, it's a passion and can be used to pull the PK into any sort of direction or adventure you want. Give the wife a high Love (Family) and some relatives in some sort of trouble and you can use it to many any adventure more personal to the PK. Another thing you could do is give the wife desire some new bauble, article of clothing, rare food, whatever. Something that is rare and somewhat difficult to obtain, and then see if the PK goes out on his way to obtain it. For instance if the wife is just dying for a silk dress from Paris, one far to expensive for the PK, but he knows a French knight who knows someone who could provide the dress, if the PK could deal with some little matter of bandits, a giant, Saxon Pirates, huge marauding cat, Faerie Knight, whatever. It all really comes down to how many hoops you want the PK to jump through. Or you could have the wife doing something in secret, drop some hints to the PK, and see what he does about it. You could have her secretly buying him something nice for a present and just wanted to keep it a surprise. The PK comes home early from a trip, sees a magnificent warhorse in the stable, finds her wife entertaining Sir Gawiane, and discovers that she talked Gawain into finding one of those Frisian Destriers that the PK always talked about. I wouldn't overdo it, though. A high Love (Wife) shouldn't be a penalty. Even if the wife is deceitful and doing so bad things, don't necessarily just have her be completely wicked just to mess with the player. That's just picking on the player. Of course if she were already made out to be wicked in the past, that's another story.

It's supposed to be. The knight is spending all day moping about his failure, missing the source of his passion and so forth. It might not seem all that fair or make much sense to us, but it fits with the literature. As far as a character going mad during a battle, it has come up a few times in my campaign, and I handle it on a case by case basis. Note that the book does mention that madness doesn't have to happen immediately, and so the GM can opt to get through the battle. In my campaign, the following happened: 1) A pro-Pendragon Saxon Knight went made while defending Prince Aurelius and Uther against rebels in France (in 451) and had his horse jump a ditch and ride off into the rebel forces. Ironically, the player got on a hot streak and rolled a series of critical successes, in part due to penalties, before riding off into the forest at night. Those who saw him marveled at his amazing horsemanship and courage. The knight was found a year later, after an odd encounter with a one-eyed traveler, and reioined Aurelius' army in time to fight Atilla at the Battle of Charlons. He picked up the Love (Battle) passion and started to exhibit more reckless, animalistic behavior, (actually an Ulfsark) tenancies and once reportedly transformed into a large black wolf on the battlefield. In this case I used the incident to add a Wotanic subplot, including a hunt where the knight killed a huge black wolf, into the campaign. This added to the campaign,b ut was a mixed success as the player was torn between his Saxon values and his knightly ones. But, conflict is good for characterization and story. 2) Two other knight went made when invoking their Hate (Saxons) passion during a raid and went a little overboard on the slaughter, killing Saxon women, children and livestock. They were both pulled off of some Saxon warriors in horned helms (cattle) and sent away to be healed. This was a case of two players rolling remarkably bad, one even had Hate (Saxons) 19, at just the wrong time (it was early in the adventure of the session and the back up characters were not available). Rather than take both characters out of story, I decided to downplay the effects somewhat and just had them go off and be a bit more bloodthirsty than normal, as well as a bit confused. The full breakdown came later, after the adventure. 3) A third knight went made and ran on into the woods. He returned a couple of years later with some altered traits and a few odd skills and skill checks, such as Industry! He never wants to find out what actually happened. This was a case of the inevitable happening. I had a player who over-used his passions, and tried to look for an excuse to get inspired at every opportunity. Often this resulted in his rolling with a modifier as a passion might be viable but not directly applicable. In this case the fumble was going to happen eventually, and the loss of the character for a few years, and trait and skill adjustments (not all were bad) taught the player that passions are not something to be invoked lightly. My advice to a GM is use the madness to advance the story, but don't let it derail your game session if you don't have to. There is nothing wrong with a knight fighting bravely and then going mad after the battle. A lot of soldiers suffered from shell shock, and medieval combat was much more "up close" than modern combat. Warriors typically get to see the look in the eyes of people who they cut down.

It is authoritarian (Arthuritarian?). The right of High Justice (the ability to execute criminals) was a right belonging to Kings and jealously guarded by them. Greg even mentions in the rules that is is one of the reasons why knights tend to get imprisoned rather than killed. Imprisoning a knight, wrongly is a much lesser crime than murdering one. Note that there were a few exceptions- for instance bandits caught in the act, especially along the King's road, could be strung up on the spot, and killing someone in battle or fair combat wasn't considered murder.

Yeah, be careful with that. One thing about Pendragon is that, by RAW, a character at Skill 39+ will automatically critical the roll, unless there are additional modifiers. This means that someone with Sword at 20+ pretty quickly gets to near invincibility, and can lead to the game becoming dull because there is no more risk. I've got several PKs right now with weapon skills in the 25-32 range and they tend to be better tough when not inspired. It gets worse when two inspired characters run into each other. Morien has a houserule when he bumps down skill to keep the game playable at ultra high skill levels. It might be easier to show them rather than tell them. For instance let them run wild once with ultra inspired characters and see how boring it gets when they realize they can never lose. Then they have a better understanding on why there needs to be a change.

I assumed it was some sort of enchanted bell in the movie, considering how it floats and rolls, and that's it's behavior makes sense in the context of the film. I suppose it could just be a foam bell prop. As for a Drkkar, it only needs 1.5-3' of water -. very shallow draft, so that part works. Getting the Bell on to the ship would be the tricky part.