the other matt's rpg blog

Our group started our first Pendragon adventure last night from the Starter Set.  After a brief rules review, we chatted a little bit about various “questions” for our group to tackle.  The starter set pointed out in various places that we should try to agree on whether we want to luxuriate in lavishly detailed scenes or if we should just get through them quickly and move on.  We all weren’t quite sure so agreed to try out getting a very detailed scene and seeing if we liked it. The starter set also made it clear that the purpose of the game was to earn glory, and find out “what kind of knight are you.”  I made sure to emphasize these points. The players picked Sir Asterius, Dame Lynelle, and Sir Evrain.  It was a nice mix of characters - the stranger in a strange land, the knight hiding a secret identity, and the knight in love with Lady Morcades, respectively.  I had generated some names of squires for them before the session started and we randomly rolled to see what their age was. 

Initial Thoughts Running a new game is always a little daunting.  The enthusiasm for the new game usually helps me ride through it, and access to other players online makes finding advice or getting questions answered pretty easy.  It's still more work than playing a familiar game though. It hasn’t been any different, really, for Pendragon.  I’m really excited for it.  I don’t have so much personal time in my life to devote myself fully to it, but I’ve been examining it in chunks for a little while now.  Luckily, the Pendragon starter set somewhat follows the format of the Cthulhu starter set.  It begins with a Solo adventure that you can play immediately.  Then a rules booklet, and finally a booklet of scenarios.  It differs from Call of Cthulhu in two important ways though: there are no character creation rules, and the scenarios are linked into a specific mini-campaign. In the first case, this is understandable, but disappointing.  In Cthulhu, character creation is already fairl

(Halloween 2021, Spring 2022, then July 2023 - Aug 2023) I’ve gotten a lot of Mileage out of this thing!  When I first bought it I played the solo scenario, Alone Against the Flames, and had a blast.  My wife played it, and my then-current group played it too.  Just telling each other what happened to our characters was extremely fun and told us what the game was about.  After playing this scenario, I ran Edge of Darkness for everyone (on Halloween) and it was a perfect intro to the game not just for my friends, but also for me. A few months later, another friend group got together to try out the game.  We played through The Haunting, (from the Quickstart), and then started a Terror Australis campaign based on everyone’s interest.  At this point, I had purchased the Keeper rulebook, but usually just used the much lighter and more portable books in the starter set. I didn’t try out any of the remaining scenarios in the starter set, though.  But then I moved to another state and slowly