The best game I ever played in was a campaign of Pendragon. Our GM had a real gift for making grand, epic storylines that still meshed with the Arthurian style... with occasional detours into over-the-top. This is one of those detours.

Many in-game years prior - before I'd joined the game - the PCs had encountered a Fae Knight, who had been intended as an antagonist... but they chose, for whatever reason, not to deal with him. Oh, they foiled his plans and rescued some fair maidens from Faerie, but the Knight himself went unpunished. Accordingly, our GM, Bobby, kept him around as a recurring foil; every so often he'd be revealed to be behind a plot or he'd release monsters into the wild or whatnot, but the PCs never could quite manage to confront him.

It's while ending one of his pawns' rampages that I join the game, as Sir Raon, an Pagan Irish Knight come to Camelot to try and impress Arthur enough that he will recognize my family's claim to the High Kingship of Ireland; I fall in with the rest of the PCs, who are probably the most motley bunch in Britain at this point, including a Wotanist Saxon whose family pledged service to Arthur after the Battle of Badon Hill, the last scion of an old Roman family trying to return his family to greatness, a noblewoman who disguised herself as a Knight in order to avenge her brother, et cetera; my friend Russ had previously been in the game as an Irish character, and my character was a relation of his, which made for a nice hook.

We went on all sorts of adventures and quests and the like, as you do in Pendragon, and we were all lucky enough and successful enough that our characters remained in fine heroic trim well into their 40s (Pendragon characters age; typically one adventure or quest is one in-game year, and when you hit a certain age you have to start rolling during the Winter Phase to see if you start losing stats; typically even when our stats were aging away we had gained enough Glory to buy them back up again). As a character's standing in the eyes of his peers is based off of their Glory - which is given for doing things that are, well, Glorious, like completing quests and saving maidens and getting married and the like - and our characters refused to curl up and die of old age so they kept racking up more and more of it... suffice it to say we were really, really badass. Like 'overpowered to the point where I'd've called us munchkins if I hadn't been there to see us earn every point' badass.

Eventually we become aware that the Fae Knight is attempting to essentially usurp the power of the Goddess-figure of the British Pagans - he plans to become a divine figure himself and use his power to drive the Christians out of the British Isles with fire and blood, and while our group's Pagans are all in favor of stopping the spread of Christianity we're not so jazzed about the fire and blood parts. Ergo, we swear to hunt and kill this guy. Unfortunately, while we've been racking up Glory so has he, so that he's now a figure of ridiculous power; the next time we see him he's not riding the awesome Faerie Destrier he'd been mounted on in the past. Dude's riding a fucking dragon. And we learn that his power has progressed to the point where a magical spear (referred to by various characters, depending on their religious affiliations, as Rhongomyniad, Gungnir, or the Lance of Longinus) is the only weapon on earth capable of unhorsing (undragoning?) him - and even once he is knocked off of his mount, he can only be killed by a blessed sword forged specifically for this purpose in the hills of Faerie. Cue multiple quests for these weapons, taking us to Scandanavia, Jerusalem, Tir na nOg, and Rome.

Finally we obtain the weapons and learn that the Faerie Knight will be at Stonehenge on Midsummer's Day, and head out to meet him in battle. The plan - insofar as Pendragon characters ever plan, really - is a simple one - the Lance goes to the PC with the best Lance skill, while the Sword goes to the PC with the best Sword skill - but two of us are tied at 21 points (remember how I said we were overpowered? The usual maximum is 20, but the 'magic points' you amass through Glory can be spent to keep raising a skill or a stat over and above that maximum). The tiebreaker is easy - the other guy is a Christian, and I'm playing a Pagan, so I get the Sword because it's my Goddess we're trying to save.

When we arrive at Stonehenge, we challenge the Knight, and agree to do battle on a nearby field; as we're preparing, a veritable army of Faerie creatures arrives. It is made clear to us that any unknightly conduct (like, say, all of us ganging up on the guy) will result in said army swarming us. We also learn that the only thing keeping the dragon under control is the golden reins held by the Faerie Knight; once (if?) he is knocked off his mount, it will be freed from his control and will almost certainly be exceptionally pissed off. So the plan is amended - Billy (the guy playing the Lance-wielder) will joust with the Faerie Knight in an attempt to knock him off the dragon; once he does, I rush in to engage him at swordpoint (this was agreed-upon before the fight began; the two weapons could not be wielded by the same person for some reason) while the rest of the party deals with the dragon.

...okay. So the aforementioned Dragon Joust at Stonehenge happens. First thing, the player rolls a Passion.

A quick primer on Passions - in Pendragon, a Passion is a skill to represent a deep emotional attachment to something and the way that it can inspire you. In one of Chretien de Troyes' stories, Sir Cligès receives several strands of hair from his love, Lady Fenice (I think it's Cligès; this might be from Erec and Enide if I'm remembering wrongly, but the story is the important bit); he weaves these strands into his surcoat so that they will always be near him, and each time he sees or feels them he is reminded of his love for her.

In Pendragon, you can roll one Passion per encounter if it's relevant - so that by looking at your Lady's Favor, for instance, you could roll Love (Lady). If you succeed, you can add +10 to any single skill; if you get a critical success (rolling exactly the value on d20), you can double any single skill. Billy's knight touches the ribbon from his wife's hair that he wears tied around his left wrist, succeeds, and adds points to his Lance skill; the Fae Knight does not roll a Passion at this time, which has me a little nervous. See, if he'd rolled a Passion for his Lance skill he couldn't roll another one to enhance his Sword skill - so it looks like he's saving the Passion bonus for when hye's facing me. Gulp.

Billy knocks the Fae off his dragon mount. Yay! Now the rest of the team attacks the dragon - which can breathe fire now, by the way, now that its mouth isn't being held closed by magical reins - while I step up to attack the Fae Knight.

The dragon never gets an attack off. The Wotanist Saxon Knight steps forward and attacks with his saxon Greataxe, crits, and beheads the damn thing in one shot.

See, Pendragon has ten sets of paired Traits - Lazy/Energetic, Cowardly/Valorous, Lustful/Chaste, et cetera. These Traits are opposed; raise your Energetic by a point and you lose a point of Lazy, for instance. Several of these Traits are 'Chivalric,' meaning that if the sum of those Traits adds up to a certain value you receive what's called the Armor of Chivalry - free Armor points that you always have, which is a lifesaver sometimes. In addition, each religion has five key Religious Traits; if you have 16+ in all five Traits you get a Religious Bonus, which varies from faith to faith. Of all the in-game faiths only Christianity has no key Traits that are in opposition to any Chivalric Traits, meaning that Christians have a much easier time getting a religious bonus and the Armor of Chivalry at the same time, but it's possible - if harder - for other faiths to do it (for instance, Chaste is a Chivalric Trait, but Lustful is a key Trait for Pagans; you have to accept that your Chaste will be low and try to raise the rest of the Chivalric Traits higher).

The reason I explain all of this is because while all religious bonuses are good - Christians get extra hit points, pagans heal faster - the Wotanist religious bonus is an additional 1d6 damage. So the Saxon rolls his damage - which is high as hell (I think it was 7d6? Maybe 8? I forget, it was a long time ago) because he's a Saxon and thus geared towards hitting things hard - plus 1d6 for his religious bonus +1d6 for using a greataxe, +1d6 because his particular greataxe was blessed by Wotan after a ridiculous amount of carnage in an adventure in Scandanavia (during which we joined up with Beowulf after he became King and helped him drive away his enemies)... doubled.

Bobby just kinda gapes at him for a moment, shrugs, then turns back to me. The Fae Knight has rolled his Hatred (Goddess) Passion and scored a critical success, allowing him to double his Sword skill of 20 to 40. I roll my Love (Goddess) Passion, with a hefty bonus, and crit as well, doubling my Sword skill from 21 to 42.

A word about Pendragon combat mechanics (and the last mechanical digression, promise). To attack you roll a d20; anything under your skill is a success, with the exact value being a crit. If your skill is over 20, you add whatever points you have above 20 to the die roll, and crit on a 20 (or more). You make opposed, simultaneous rolls, and whoever makes their roll by the most points wins (i.e. if my skill is 15 and I roll a 4, I made my roll by 11 points; if you roll your skill of 16 and get a 15, you made it by one point, so I win and you take damage). If you and your opponent both make the roll by the same amount - or if you both crit - no damage is done; you bounce off one another.

Can you see the dilemma? Both the GM and I are perfectly capable of declaring a crit without bothering to roll the die; his lowest possible roll is 21, and mine is 23. So after we bounce off one another a few times, Bobby has us roll our Energetic trait; failure means that your Sword skill drops 5 points to represent fatigue. The next Energetic roll after that will be at (Energetic - 5), unless you scored a critical success on your last test, and so on.

Remember earlier I mentioned that Energetic is a Pagan virtue? Yeah. By this point in the campaign my character is the paragon of Pagan Knighthood (Sir Ywaine, the 'canon' Pagan paragon, has 9000 Glory to his name; by this point I had 14k and wasn't the most Glorious of the group by a longshot), and part of the reason for that has been my willingness to dump XP into my Pagan Traits. Fae Knight has an Energetic of 20; I have an Energetic of a mind-boggling 23.

So we fight. And we bounce. And we fight some more. And we bounce. And the rest of the party starts a fire and starts cooking dragon steaks. And we fight. And we bounce. And we keep fighting.

The combat began at high noon. Finally the Fae Knight is tired enough to have to start taking defensive tactics, giving up his chance to hurt me in exchange for +10 to his skill for defense; in response, I adopt the 'Saxon Berserk' tactic (taught to me by my good buddy the Saxon!), giving up my defense for a +10 to my skill in attack. Finally - finally! - I land a hit - a critical, no less, because at this point any ordinary hit would just seem anticlimactic - and kill the Faerie Knight... just as the sun is coming up over the horizon.

We fought for eighteen hours.

The rest of the party leaps up, prepared to defend me if the assembled army of redcaps, trolls, and Faerie nobles should break their pledge and attack, but they turn and vanish into the mists without a sound. I stagger to the party, wipe the blood from my blade, and declare in a calm, steady voice:

"Save me one of those steaks."

And then I fall over and sleep for a day or so.

Sir Raon retired about three IC years later, having never gotten Arthur to back his family in Ireland - though he commanded his sons to continue the effort - but having made out pretty okay for himself, becoming a Duke and receiving the green garter of a Knight of the Table Round, and keeping the old ways of his ancestors alive in his lands, and to this day - in the game's version of England, at least - in a castle outside of Sarum, his sword rests in the chapel, untouched by rust and wrapped in a dragonscale scabbard.