I have recently been rereading the Pern series by Anne McAffrey, and thinking about it as a RPG setting. Spoilers are going to crop up in this, so if that bothers you, you might want to avoid this particular tag. This first post will give a high level overview of the setting and how people are organised within it. Follow-up posts will think about possible adventures and provide more details about dragons in particular.

So, what is the Pern setting, and what makes it a bit special compared to other fantasy settings out there? Well, to start with, it is not really (or not only) fantasy. Most of the books start with something akin to the following:

Rukbat, in the Sagittarian Sector, was a golden G-type star.  It had five planets, two asteroid belts, and a stray planet it had attracted and held in recent millennia.  When men first settled on Rukbat’s third world and called it Pern, they had taken little notice of the stranger planet, swinging around its adopted primary in a wildly erratic elliptical orbit.  For two generations, the colonists gave the bright red star little thought—until the desperate path of the wanderer brought it close to its stepsister at perihelion.

When such aspects were harmonious and not distorted by conjunctions with other planets in the system, the indigenous life of the wanderer sought to bridge the space gap to the more temperate and hospitable planet.

The initial losses the colonists suffered were staggering, and it was during the subsequent long struggle to survive and combat this menace dropping through Pern’s skies like silver threads that Pern’s tenuous contact with the mother planet was broken.

– Dragonquest, Prelude

That serves as a pretty good quick summary: Pern was an uninhabited world colonised by humans at some point in the distant future. They ended up needing to fight against myccorhizal Threads dropped from an erratic body in the solar system. This came by every 200 years, and a Pass of the Red Star lasted about 50 years. Thread chews through anything organic in pretty short order, stopped only by metal, stone and water. It even burrows a short way into earth and soil, especially organic rich soil.

In order to meet the threat of Thread in the air the colonists bred (through genetic engineering) rideable dragons from one of the native lifeforms of Pern - little foot-long dragons. This would act as a self-replicating airforce that did not require a high technological base. They also created some grubs that would help protect land and the plants on it by preventing Thread from causing damage, but this would take time for them to spread, and was also less psychologically appealing, compared to burning Thread out of the sky. The series starts off about 2500 years after landfall, during the 9th Pass, and sees sweeping changes to the entire planet as part of the fight against Thread, and the rediscovery of this space-faring past. Other parts of the series focus on the first Pass and the trials and tribulations of the original colonists. There is definitely room for some play at these times, but the major events are well-described in the books and tends to leave fairly little breathing room for players to do their own thing. The setting also drifts back towards more science fiction as a result of the various things (re)discovered at this time, while the chronologically early books have people with full knowledge of spacefaring.

So while it is interesting, there might be more scope in play for taking Pern as a fantasy setting, and using a time outside that described in the main books. A fairly in-depth timeline is available here, and the main times covered by the books are here. The fourth or fifth Pass are pretty much open fields for fan stuff to happen in, or for games to use the canon of chronologically early books without needing to worry about the big changes rediscovering the past brings about during the ninth Pass. Of course, with a willingness to set aside the important characters in the novels a satisfying campaign of rediscovering that past might well be had.

The Landscape

Pern is a full planet, with two major continents. The southern continent is larger and generally a more comfortable place to live, which is why it was the first focus of the human colonisation effort. The northern continent is generally smaller and hillier but the latter means that it has better rock for tunnelling and generally building in stone. At some point during the first Pass, all the colonists ‘moved north to shield’, abandoning the southern continent.

The landscape in the north is generally temperate, aside from the island of Ista which is warmer, implied to be somewhat tropical. The southern continent is definitely tropical, at least in the areas that are discussed in the books. The stereotype for the south is that the fruit trees are just there for the picking and life is easy. In reality there are various fevers and nasty insect bites. There are also large cat-like predators, which are absent in the north.

Society

This is going to talk about things as they stand throughout most of Pern’s history, up until the start of the ninth Pass: the south is uninhabited, and all Pernese live in the north. Organised society consists of three major divisions: Hold, Hall and Weyr, along with people who live outside that. The following is a brief discussion of each.

Holds

This northern continent is now divided in various major holds, each with a Lord Holder, responsible for everything in their desmene. They grow crops and raise livestock and generally have regressed to a broadly agrarian culture. A portion of their production is tithed to the weyr responsible for protecting them.

Lords Holder have a council for matters affecting them in general. I would assume that leadership of this council varies over time. There is a pecking order of seniority in order of hold founding (making Fort, the first hold founded, the most pre-eminent) as well as age and experience of the Lord Holder implied in the books.

Holds are organised along a more or less feudal model. Lords Holder are at the top of the pile, with smaller holds being represented by them in the council. It is suggested that holds can be as small as a single family by various passages in the books. For anything within a major hold, the Lord Holder is pretty much absolute. They can exile troublemakers, assign land to people, hire people from various halls, and so on. Holds are also likely to have at least some armed fighters (armsmen), although in general warfare is not that common. They act more as bodyguards and deal with small raids and similar sorts of events.

The books also refer to some places as beastholds and sea holds. The former are presumably livestock-focused farms, while the latter are fishing communities. It can be assumed that during a Pass agriculture, that is crop farming, is slightly reduced due to their vulnerability to Thread, although in general holds need to remain as self-sufficient as possible, because the difficulty of travelling between holds during a Pass makes bulk movement of goods all but impossible. The maps also do not show major navigable rivers in the north, which would really stymie bulk movement anyway: water is way more efficient for moving things around than land transport options. An important part of the holders’ duty is ensuring no greenery grows too close to the hold, for the same reason.

There is also a general underclass of ‘drudges’, who are essentially cleaners and similar ‘menial labourers’. These seem to be the lowest rung of society, aside from the holdless who are outside it entirely. It reads as though drudges are almost property, or are at least linked to the hold and unable to move freely. Non-drudge holders may well move, especially for new opportunities. The children of a given holder can usually expect to be given a portion of a hold to hold themselves, and marriages of convenience are definitely somewhat common as part of the politicking that goes on. Children of major holders will also usually be trained to hold that hold, including knowledge of important crafts, while smaller holders will get something similar but smaller scale.

Halls

Professionals are members of various crafthalls. Mentioned in the novels are harpers (entertainers, teachers, diplomats), healers, minecraft, smithcraft, woodcraft (forestry and carpentry), fishcraft, beastcraft (livestock breeding and management), glasscraft. Later novels include starcraft (astronomy) and computercraft. It is not entirely clear where beastholds fit into beastcrafthalls (since no books focus on a beasthold or the beastcrafthall) while sea holds seem to report to the fishcrafthall and a major hold, but most of the others are fairly straightforward: the halls run themselves and have representatives at various holds as needed.

Halls operate on a guild-like system: apprentices learn the basics, then become journeymen or journeywomen, and finally masters. Each craft will also have a singular master[craft], who heads the hall. For example, the masterharper is responsible for all harpers, the masterfisher will control all fishcrafters, and so on. These individuals seem to have a rank roughly equivalent to the Lords Holder. They will also decide where their various hall members will be posted and deal with discipline and promotion. They are also responsible for negotiating access to resources controlled by the holds.

Normal masters will usually leave the main hall to run a given craft at various places. Depending on the craft, they will be focused at certain areas (minecrafters will be concentrated in areas that minerals are present in, while harpers and healers will be everywhere, for example). Who owns the things made by a crafthall is not entirely clear, but it is suggested in some of the books that the holds benefit from the presence of various crafts at their location.

Weyr

‘Weyr’ is the term used for where dragonriders live. In the north, there are 6 weyrs: Fort, Benden, High Reaches, Ista, Igen and Telgar (at least two more are established in the south during the ninth Pass). They generally grow some livestock, but most of their supplies come from tithes from the holds that are under their wings.

Wyer society is considered looser and freer than hold and hall. Becoming a dragonrider is considered a major honour, with dragonriders being considered an elite within society. For the most part, aside from riders bonded to queens, dragonriders seem to be male (although there are some exceptions in the ninth Pass). For an RPG, I would drop this requirement, since it makes no real difference. When I get to writing about dragons in more detail I will go over more of this though.

One thing that is not really clear is what weyrs do in the Intervals between Passes. The number of dragons drops, as a result of Thread disappearing. Their ability to get around rapidly makes dragons useful as messengers and scouts. They can also transport other people, should it be needed. The books imply that this is relatively rare until later in the ninth Pass (partially because the books move away from fighting Thread and more towards exploration and politics, so people need to move around more).

The Holdless

Although it takes them a while to show up in the novels, there are also people living outside the system. These include traders who travel between various places, people exiled from holds, people who choose to leave, raiders. Being outside the system, aside from the traders, they are usually not interested in fitting in. The novels portray them as either desperate or otherwise with no option but to resort to raiding. Raiding will usually get a response from armsmen, since the lords holders are meant to provide protection to their people.

Traders move from place to place, usually as a caravan, which during an Interval only has to deal with possible bandits. During a Pass, they need to ensure that they stop in various safe places on the route and generally move slower. There is not much sea trade mentioned, although presumably some takes place. Traders will mostly move small speciality items, although there is mention of moving some lumber as well.

Conclusion

Without the dragons, Pern ends up looking like a fairly standard fantasy setting, albeit with fewer monsters and no vast unexplored wildernesses. This means that the core loop of many games: go into a hole in the ground and bring out treasure is not really a suitable one. It will require something that ties PCs to their community and their place in society. This will mean navigating the social web of a given hold and hall. Dragonriders are almost a group apart, so would require some extra thought for play. The next post will go into more detail about dragons and their riders.