Prophesy of Pendor 2: SaxonDragon Unveils the Vision Behind a Living World

For over a decade, Prophesy of Pendor stood as one of the most accomplished mods in Mount & Blade history: a free, fan-made creation that outlasted commercial releases and built a devoted global community through nothing but quality and word of mouth. Now, its creator Jim "SaxonDragon" Landes is bringing Pendor back, not as a mod, but as a fully funded standalone game, rebuilt from the ground up.

We spoke with SaxonDragon for an exclusive interview. In this first installment, he introduces the project, the team behind it, and the design ambitions that set Prophesy of Pendor 2 apart, including systems that, in his own words, have simply never been implemented this way before.

Prophesy of Pendor began as a mod for Mount & Blade: Warband that grew far beyond anything its creators anticipated, building a devoted global following over more than a decade through nothing but word of mouth and the quality of the experience it delivered.

Pendor is a low fantasy medieval world on the edge of collapse, with ancient knightly orders fading and dangerous new powers rising, and you enter it as a lost heir to a forgotten throne, a bloodline with the power to unite its fractured kingdoms, if you can survive long enough to try.

That birthright is not a gift. It is a target. The moment you begin to rise, the forces that profit from Pendor's division take notice, and the danger that follows is proportional to your ambition. It is a world with real history, real politics, and real stakes, where the journey from nameless wanderer to shaper of kingdoms is not a scripted story but something you build yourself, one decision at a time.

The evolution of the team between Prophesy of Pendor and this new project is, in many ways, a story about the natural arc of a modding community. The original team was built entirely from passion, people who found each other in forums, united by a shared love of the base game and a belief in what we were building together. That kind of organic assembly produces remarkable things, and the original Prophesy of Pendor stands as evidence of that.

But passion, as a binding agent, has its own lifecycle. The people who gave so generously of their time and talent over those years have moved on, many of them into full-time positions in the gaming industry, which is in its own way the most satisfying possible outcome. Others continued modding as a hobby alongside careers that offered the kind of stability and benefits that a startup development studio simply cannot compete with.

That is not a criticism; it is the honest reality of what a modding team is and what it can reasonably offer its members. Modding is built on passion, but passion alone doesn't pay rent. In a world where earning a livable wage grows harder by the year, the notion that talented developers and artists should sustain years of serious creative work purely for the love of it is an expectation that has always asked a great deal of people, and asks even more today.

So when it came time to build the team for this commercial offering, I started essentially from scratch. I secured funding for the project and brought over a handful of developers from the Starium XCV project, people whose work I knew intimately and whose instincts I trusted. For the skills we lacked, particularly those specific to the new platform, we hired deliberately and carefully. Of the original Prophesy of Pendor development team, the only returning member is myself, carrying the vision, the design principles, and fifty years of accumulated instinct about what makes a world worth inhabiting.

As for where we are in development, we are firmly out of pre-production and into production, and it is worth being precise about what that means at this stage, because the scope of what we are building is considerable. The game world itself is fully realized and extensively documented, Pendor's history, its factions, its political geography, its lore, the bones of the world are solid and the detail runs deep.

What we are now undertaking is the humbling volume of work that turns a well-designed world into a playable one. Design documents are in active development across every major game system, conversations, economics, combat, political systems, events, encounters, and voice acting, to name the principal ones, and several of these systems represent approaches that, to our knowledge, have not been implemented in this way before.

Alongside that, we are building art assets, implementing game systems into the engine, and testing everything as we go. It is the phase of development that is simultaneously the most exciting and the most demanding, where the vision stops being a document and starts becoming a reality you can actually play.

Where to begin. The most fundamental difference between Prophesy of Pendor and what we are building now can be captured in a single distinction: the original mod was built on a framework that emulated a dynamic world. We are building one.

That might sound like a subtle difference. It isn't. Emulation is clever approximation. You create the impression of living systems through careful design and sleight of hand. What we are building now are true synergistic systems that operate on one another in real time, each one influencing the others in ways that produce outcomes no designer explicitly scripted. The world doesn't perform dynamism. It generates it.

The foundation of all of it is terrain and geography. That is the base layer from which everything else flows. Geography determines what raw materials a region can produce. Raw materials determine economic output. Economic disparity between regions fuels trade. And trade, once you introduce the capacity to disrupt it, becomes the nervous system of a living world.

Raid a merchant caravan and you haven't just won some loot. You have created a supply shortage in the destination that caravan was never going to reach. Prices shift. Demand rises. Other actors in the world respond. The ripple moves outward from a single player decision in ways that feel organic because, within the logic of the simulation, they are.

Underlying all of it is a decay system I developed years ago and have deployed in Starium XCV. It is a system in which every location in the world, regardless of what positive or negative forces act upon it, gradually recovers toward a baseline state. A village burned by raiders doesn't stay burned forever. A prosperous city disrupted by war doesn't stay disrupted forever. The world breathes. It heals. It normalizes. And that normalization creates a constant, realistic rhythm beneath the surface of everything the player experiences.

The Knighthood Order system has been radically extended, and this is an area I am particularly proud of. In the original Prophesy of Pendor, a Qualis gem founded your order and from there the system was relatively straightforward. Your companions trained your order's troops and you spent currency to improve their capabilities over time. It was functional, and players engaged with it meaningfully, but it was essentially an economic progression system dressed in knightly clothing.

What we have built in its place operates on an entirely different level. The currency and companion training model has been retired entirely. In the new game progression is driven by two things: Qualis gems and Relics. Where the original game had one type of Qualis gem, we now have six distinct types, each carrying its own properties and significance within the world of Pendor.

Relics, discovered throughout the world in ruins, in loot, and in places that reward careful exploration, are brought to the Oathstone and used to improve both domain strength and relic strength, unlocking capabilities that evolve your order in ways that feel truly earned. When you found your order you choose conceptual domains that define its character: its values, its identity, its place in the world of Pendor.

The lore has deepened to a level that I think will actually surprise even players who know the original well. Every lord in the game has been assigned a personality index that governs not just how they behave but how they communicate. What they value, what they respond to, what they dismiss, what they fear. Conversations with lords feel like conversations with specific people rather than variations on a template, because they are rooted in character rather than function.

The companions have been transformed entirely. Barclay and Amala return, more fully realized than before, and they are joined by new companions who bring their own knowledge, their own cultural perspectives, their own biases and blind spots to every interaction. These are three dimensional characters who see the world through specific lenses shaped by where they came from and what they have experienced. What they know, how they see things, and how they talk to you will reflect all of that.

The map itself has grown substantially, with dozens of new villages, castles, and ruins, each with documented histories, current lords, and lord families with their own stories. That layer of detail is entirely optional. You can ride past a ruined fortress and never once wonder what happened there, and the game will not penalize you for it. But if you are the kind of player who wants to pull that thread, who wants to understand why the ruin is there, whose family built it, what brought it down, that story is waiting for you.

This is, in every meaningful sense, the game that Prophesy of Pendor was always trying to be. Every system connects to every other system. Every decision carries weight. And the world that surrounds those decisions has been built with a depth and intentionality that fifty years of thinking about what makes a game world worth inhabiting has finally made possible.