Pendragon

King Arthur Pendragon is an RPG in which players take the role of knights taking part in quests, tournaments and pining after courtiers in, well, Kin Arthur's England. Written by Greg Stafford and published by Chaosium, it has gone through a number of editions (notable skipping a second edition since Stafford wasn't overly fond of what he was seeing so he scrapped it and went straight to a third edition). It has passed through the hands of a couple different companies, first Green Knight Publishing then White Wolf then to Nocturnal Media. Chaosium, though, got it back in 2018 and got Stafford back just before he died to make the 5.2 edition.

After it was published in 1985, Pendragon won several industry awards, and reviewers highly recommended it; in following years, it was included in several "Best of" industry lists.

Pendragon has been lauded by pretty much everyone and has gotten as many awards as one of those Communist Russian generals have medals pinned to their chest (namely, A LOT). It's often considered one of the best RPGs out there but with a major caveat - the system is built to help facilitate a retelling of the Arthurian legends so a lot of things cannot be changed by the characters. Arthur will always become king, Guinevere will always fall in love with Lancelot, Galahad will always find the Holy Grail, and the Saxons will always be assholes.

Rules

The characters will have a large number of statistics, the core of which being their personality traits which are a set of thirteen opposing traits for things like Modest/Proud and Temperate/Indulgent. Each pair of traits will have 20 points allocated between them, almost all of them being determined by your character's culture and faith.

Then you have passions, things that drive your character such as "love for king," "love for family" and "seriously, fuck those Saxons. Next one I see I'll bash their fucking face in, I swear on me mum I will!"

You also have skills which range from the typical fighting skills like swordsmanship to more niche things like playing the lyre.

You also can have magic if you have the right supplements and you can alter your culture and faith as well so you could be from Aquitaine (Southern France), Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire successor state based modern in Greece and Turkey) and Zazamanc (basically North African Berber). There are also rules for playing a Lady of the Court (if you're not keen on playing a knight or you don't have a male heir, more on that in a moment) or even having faerie blood in you (which is not as fun as it sounds since fucking church bells can really screw with your character).

Each game session covers one in-game year (though sometimes you may need to do two sessions to cover that one year if you're on a particularly harrowing quest but need to stop for the night or something). The total number of sessions before the campaign is complete is about 90-100 sessions, so well over one year typically of IRL gaming. At the end of each session is the Winter Phase where your characters wine and dine with other knights and nobles, set up alliances and agreements, tend to your holdings, get married and have kids. Because of the length of time it's expected for the game to go, you're supposed to build a line of heirs to pick up and carry on the family legacy. It's fully possible to play a pagan knight under King Uther who dies, his Catholic son then taking up the family arms to try and carve out their own petty demesne before bending the knee to King Arthur, their daughter then going off to Camelot to rub shoulders with the ladies-in-waiting at court only to fall in love and marry a faerie knight and have their son become a Knight of the Round Table who goes questing with Galahad for the Holy Grail only to later see King Arthur ushered off to Avalon. That's just one path, but all sorts of crazy shit can crop that can make all that change.

The whole system is also based on a simple roll-under mechanic for any of your traits and usually opposed rolls for your skills. It's not hard though the character sheet and rulebook could do more to make things look a little easier.