It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. [...] (Malory I,1) We have recently started a new campaign of Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon (KAP, 1st edition) as a play-by-post game. I did consider the campaign for up to 4 players and till now only 2 slots are filled. If you are interested, drop me a line to <<a href="mailto:pendragon-by-post@posteo.de" rel="nofollow">pendragon-by-post@posteo.de</a>>! About KAP: The first version of that game has been published 1985 by Chaosium. The original author is still working on the game and has a version 5.2 of the rulebook coming. The old books have been re-released as pdfs and are readily and cheaply available. The differences between versions aren't huge - it has mostly got more detailed over the years and comes with less randomness now. The game itself tries to capture the story of King Arthur, that legendary king of Britain, who has been immortalized in tons of books and films throughout the years. About the GM: First things first: I am no native English speaker - in a play-by-post game that might show from time to time. Other than that I do play rpg's since my 5th year at school and that is about 30 years ago. I stumbled upon Pendragon when a German version came out (mostly based on the 1st edition rulebook and the Noble's Book), failed miserably, and appeared in my local gaming store in the shelf of cheap books. I bought it, instantly fell in love with it and pressured my gaming group to give it a try. We went through the whole story at least twice in this year - from before Arthur's birth until the end of his realm. Sometimes playing every day of the week after school. That particular group fell apart when we all left school and my later gaming groups never got the Pendragon fever. The book went dusty on my shelf. I bought the books of later editions just to read them and sometimes dream of starting the Pendragon campaign once again - but besides a skype based try of KAP 5.1 that didn't last long, it never happened. Today I play a weekly campaign of Savage Worlds with a group that does not want to play KAP and lacking a second regular timeslot for another campaign, I've decided to give the play-by-post format a try. My experiences in play-by-post games are slim - I'm learning as I'm going and we aren't that far yet, but it is already good fun. About the game: We collaborativly write the narrative of the game. Rolls are done in a dice room here or are made by the GM (especially in combat situations to save on time). The original plan was to post 1-2 posts a week per player, but it turns out that posts usually don't take up a lot of time and can be spaced in between other stuff. We ended up with quite a few more posts a week than anticipated. The easy to learn and easy to handle 80s style rules of KAP lend itself nicely to the format. Here is a small quote out of our play (Sir Gwair and Sir Aeron being the two first player knights and they have just been stopped by a group of bandits): SIR GWAIR rears up his horse as much as safely possible, hoping to intimidate the bandits with both his words and appearance - while giving Sir Aeron more time to react. SIR AERON You heard my friend! Give us way and we will spare your miserable lives! Sir Aeron prepares for the attack. He has his eye on the two scoundrels blocking their way back. FIRST BANDIT You heard the gentleman! Prepare for death and leave some room for horse-meat as well! OTHER BANDITS Death! Death to the knights! With their spears braced the bandits close in on the knights. The two in front of them attacking Sir Gwair while the two from behind move to Sir Aeron who hastily draws his sword from the scabbard. While Sir Gwair drives his horse to meet his attackers another thought keeps fighting for his attention. What was that other thing I saw, before these scoundrels jumped out of the woodwork? A shadow. Something dark further down that road. But even while he was thinking these thoughts, the steel of his sword clashed against the wooden shaft of the bandit’s spear.
