Hi all. I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the correct part of the forums or not. My apologies if this was to go elsewhere, but it looked the most appropriate.

Anyway, my issue. I've been interested in Pendragon since the early 90s when I first picked up the game. I played around with character generation and fooling around with manors etc, but never found anyone to play with. After a long hiatus, I stumbled onto Pendragon 5E and have picked up both the core rules and the campaign around 6 months ago. I still haven't had the pleasure to play it yet and have volunteered to do a one-shot at the FLGS, in less than a week. I've only recently returned to GM-ing and am starting to panic in how to both generate interest in a game not many seem inclined to learn (yet, I hope) and run a memoriable session. So I decided to turn to the regulars here at the KAP forum.

I'm mostly inclined to have everyone generate their own character to try and get them immersed into the session, however, I'm not sure how many will be there. If I go this route, do you think the intro adventure in the back of the core book would interest D&D regulars? Should I do pre-gen characters instead? I've got about 4 hours of time to fill and any advice would be more than welcome.

Thanks,

John

I think you should try to get your hands on "Blood and Lust", "The Spectre King" or "Savage Mountains" and run on of the adventures there. A number of them are excellent, and most of them have the right Pendragon feel.

Pregenerate characters if you have that little time.

I would strongly suggest doing pregens or using the preconstructed characters from the rulebook as many times as required and just rolling the family characteristic, manor and additional equipment at the time.

If you're stuck for a scenario, try RPG archive: http://www.rpgarchive.com/index.php?sysid=17&page=adv&sort=Alpha.

You might also want to print out the following crib sheet to keep by you, or to hand out to people: http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/dnd3e/documents/gk-pendragon-howto.pdf

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

Thanks for the input. I'll use pre-gens and that handout will come in handy.

That's a great scenario link, Elrick.

That's a great scenario link, Elrick.


It is isn't it! I've used a number of these before. I especially like this one: The Adventure of the Dancing Tree http://www.rpgarchive.com/index.php?page=adv1&advid=235 and have used it a number of times.

You could also use the Castle of Bones from this website. It's a great scenario and the risk of TPK is probably not so severe a risk in a one-shot as opposed to a campaign!

http://www.gspendragon.com/castleofbones.pdf

I wouldn't run the scenario in the back of the book though, personally, I think it is nice from the perspective of learning the rules but not so interesting overall unless you were looking to start a campaign. The Green Knight "how to play Pendragon" hand-out and a quick talk before hand will probably sort you out in that respect.

One other thing you might consider is letting people create characters, but getting them to pick one of the templates (e.g. "the courtier", "the hunter" etc) from the main rulebook rather than literally rolling everything from scratch - much faster. Just remember to update the equipment for the characters to be epoch appropriate if you are going to run the Castle of Bones scenario.