Video Game / Prophesy of Pendor

Pendor, a land once ruled by a powerful empire is now divided into five kingdoms which are in a perpetual state of war with each other. To make matters worse, evil cults roam the land kidnapping people and committing human sacrifices for their evil gods in an attempt to bring their gods into human world once again. However all hope is not lost. Legends tell of a hero who will rise one day, unify the land and bring peace back to Pendor. You are a traveler from the land of Barclay who for one reason or another has recently arrived into Pendor and you just happen to be the hero that Pendor is looking for. You get a vision from a goddess telling you to unify the land and befriend the Noldor elves to the east, beginning your quest to become the ruler of Pendor.

Prophesy of Pendor is a fantasy total conversion mod for Mount & Blade Warband. What makes it distinct from most other Mount & Blade mods is its highly detailed original low fantasy setting, rather than one based on an alternative take on Calradia, a historical period or another work of fiction. In addition the mod adds a plethora of new features and tweaks into the game to improve the experience and make it more challenging. Probably the most notable of these new features is the Knighthood Order system, which allows the player to join and fight for one of the many Knighthood Orders found in the setting, or even found their own one and in exchange receive powerful Knighthood troops that you can deploy on the battlefield. The mod is currently at version 3.9.5 and can be downloaded from ModDB, Nexus Mods or Steam Workshop.

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Tropes used in this modification include:

• But Thou Must!: Though the game gives options to fight against the elves, like joining the frantically anti-elf Order of The Ebony Gauntlet or launching a surprise attack on their capital, the player must ultimately befriend the Noldor to beat the game.
• Can't Argue with Elves: Noldor are an extremely arrogant people to say the least and most of them think at the start of the game that the best way to deal with the human problem is to kill them all. This only makes the challenge of befriending them them even harder.
• Crapsack World: Pendor has been in a nearly constant state of war for decades. To make matters worse, evil cults, slavers and bands of robbers freely roam the countryside looking for fresh human sacrifices or people to kill, enslave and rob.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Donavan is a particularly sadistic example. He is obsessed with unit discipline and is known for frequently giving cruel punishments to soldiers who refuse to follow orders. This behavior puts him at odds with quite a few companions, but his methods are highly effective and he can be a valuable asset in training your army into a proper fighting force.
• Generational Magic Decline: Magic has slowly disappeared from the world over time and even the Noldor, famous for their magical prowess, don't posses capability to naturally wield magic anymore and have to rely on the power of Qualis Gems instead.
• Fallen Hero:
  • Sigismund Sinclair is a Pendorian folk hero known as "The Hero of Madigan" who became a legend after he and his wife took arms to protect the innocents from the various threats that roam Pendor. However after his wife died in battle, Sigismund began to forget the ideals he once stood for and became a loner who roamed the land killing anyone who fell into his twisted view of evil, now dressed entirely in black armor.
  • Order of Eventide is a splinter faction of Order of the Dawn who left because of Dawn knights tendency to burn everyone. Evintide instead decided to focus on combating the heretics. However in their attempts to study their enemy, they ended up getting corrupted by their texts and became heretics themselves.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture
  • The Fierdsvain and the Kingdom of Sarleon are two classical European fantasy factions, Fierdsvain being primarily Norse inspired while Sarleon has an English/French flavor to it.
  • The Kingdom of Ravenstern is also inspired by medieval Europe, this time styled after Scot Ireland with a bit of a Norse flavor thrown in.
  • The D'Shar Principalities are Persian-like nomads.
  • The off screen Baccus Empire is basically Ancient Rome. They were a once mighty empire similar to ancient Pendor that fell into civil war and invasions by barbarians. The two remaining parts of empire are also different types of counterpart cultures.
    • The Empire in Pendor retains much of the Greco Roman style aesthetic you'd expect from such faction combined with late medieval/renaissance era technology and weaponry.
    • Melitine Empire on the other hand is clearly based on Byzantine Empire. They are part of the empire that survived much of the chaos during the barbarian invasion.
  • Jatu are the typical steppe people primarily based on the Cumans with elements also taken from Mongols, Huns and other Eurasian Nomads.
  • Mettenheim are based on the Renaissance era German and Swiss Landsknecht mercenaries.
  • Barclay is an offscreen, technologically advanced colonial empire based on Portugal and Spain.
  • Some of the knighthood orders also count.
    • Order of the Dawn are a group of religious fanatics who burn anyone who has committed a sin in their lives (i.e. everyone) and originate from the game's counterpart of Portugal/Spain. Sound familiar?
    • Faction called The Inquisition added in version 3.9 is meant to mirror them even further.
    • Order of the Radiant Cross are a group of knights that both practice and protect practicioners of medicine, similar to The Knights Hospitallers.
    • Scorpion Assasins are the games version of... well, Assasins.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Averted with the 3.9.2 version that adds firearms to the Barclay troops.
• Knight Templar: Fittingly for the trope name, some of the knighthood orders fall under this trope
  • Order of Dawn are a group of fanatical followers of goddes Astraea who wish to destroy all evil in the world, but they are so obsessed with their quest that they believe everyone is guilty of something and thus prefer to murder everyone they deem evil before asking any questions.
    Player: How do you determine who is guilty and who is innocent?
    Knight: After all, every human is guilty of something! When in doubt, we simply burn them all. Our wise goddess will sort them out.
  • Oder of The Shadow Legion are a group of hardliners that fiercely belive in the old ways of the Baccus Empire, to the point that they are willing to co-operate with the Snake Cult to help them overthrow the current emperor.
• Low Fantasy: There are some High Fantasy elements here and there and the story is an epic following the protagonists attempt to unify the land and bring bring peace to pendor, but otherwise the setting falls heavily to low fantasy territory with magic having mostly disappeared from a largely human populated land.
• Mineral MacGuffin: Qualis Gems are some of the few remaining items of power in the world, capable of empowering magic weapons or empowering knightly orders.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Order of Ebony Gauntlet are an extremely Anti-Noldor knighthood that wear red and black armor, hunt down anyone who they even suspect to be related to elves mercilessly, while promoting the importance of human blood purity. They also have their own stab in the back/well poisoning theory blaming the elves for the red plague that killed much of Pendor's population in the past.
• Nintendo Hard: Wasn't vanilla Mount & Blade hard enough for you? Well, prepare to face hostile armies numbered in hundreds and filled with Demonic Spiders right from day one.
• No Woman's Land: Zigzagged; The treatement of woman heavily varies between different regions of Pendor. Some Knighthood Orders treat women as equals and allow them in their ranks and Fierdsvain widely employs women in their ranks, but most Kingdoms seem to have traditional gender values while Veccavia is an outright Inversion where men are treated as slaves.
• Religion of Evil: The Heretics worship a god called Erida Occisor who demands human sacrifices from her followers to gain power and once again manifest herself in the human world. Snake cult follows a much similar principle with their god, Azi Dahaka.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Noldor are a nation of proud and haughty Elves which power on Pendor is gradually decreasing. One of the conditions to win the campaign is to gain their friendship... which is easier to say than to do, since they are initially hostile toward you and their units are among the worst Demonic Spiders of the mod. It was even more difficult in earlier versions of the game, as this objective required to beat two full Noldor parties of more than 400 men, each of them led by an insanely powerful lord.
• Shout-Out: Noldor are named after one of the three High Elf clans in Tolkien's Legendarium.
  • The snake cult is straight from Conan the Barbarian (1982). They even use the same double-headed snake sigil.
• Sssssnaketalk: Snake cult priestesses talk this way, including Alyssa.
• Vestigial Empire:
  • Pendor itself was once a unified land ruled by a mighty empire, but the country has since fractured into five kingdoms and a few smaller domains.
  • Original Bacclus empire faced a much similar fate and the only parts of it that are known to have survived are The Empire and Melitine Empire.

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