My Pendragon campaign: The hook

Okay, so here's what I had in mind

It occurs to me that the reason I tend to get into the pedantic weeds about King Arthur Pendragon RPG is that I actually wanted to use it to set into motion a story for which it is not perfectly suited. As Greg Stafford himself makes clear from the start, Pendragon RPG tries to be a big tent, a game that includes any and all aspects of the Arthurian mythos from the 6th Century Welsh folk legends to the high medieval chivalric romances (most of which were French); but his primary influence is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which culminates the high medieval phase of the Matter of Arthur.

The story that I brainstormed was not geared to take advantage of this particular aspect of the mythos. What I had in mind was a more basic adventure and coming-of-age story, and there was probably more politics thrown in and what would pass in that setting for geo-strategy than chivalric ideals and romance. The premise was that Arthur, distracted by a crisis taken from the canonical source material, that requires not only his personal attention but the involvement of his leading knights, orders one of his B-team knights, one Sir Edgar of Devon, to deal with an uprising on the Saxon Coast. Arthur doesn’t have any resources to spare, so Sir Edgar takes with him his two adopted sons, a recently-made Knight Bachelor named Miles and Miles’ younger brother Virgil, a squire. From his personal funds, Edgar hires a young Knight Mercenary on the make named Alan de Breton to fill out the party. Along the way, they meet a orphaned girl of pagan British origin — Christianity, a Roman import, and native paganism coexist uneasily at best — named Gwynneth; she has some magical powers and she must decide whether she hates the Saxon invaders enough to help these Christians who are stamping out her religion.