Like several other RPGs from Chaosium (most notably Call of Cthulhu), Pendragon has a literary basis, in this case the fifteenth-century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur, and it studiously avoids fantasy RPG cliches in favor of its source material.
Adventures are often political, military, or spiritual in nature, rather than dungeon crawls, and are often presented as taking place congruently with events from Arthurian legend.