The War of the Dragon Banners | Learn to Play Pendragon 6E

Creating your character

Character Creation will be handled in Session 0 via the system in Pendragon 6E, Chapter 3, Creating your Player Knight (P. 39 - 59). I strongly recommend Players have a copy of this book and familiarize themselves with this process, as we will be likely doing so several times throughout the campaign as Player Knights are retired due to death, injury, or simple old age making them unable to fight on. (Pendragon is a Generational Game by design, so you are guiding a whole Knightly Dynasty more than a single character, and should be ready to make new characters often as the game continues.) A decision we will make early on as a group is whether we will be using Constructed or Random Characters (P. 42 & P. 43, respectively). The former option allows one to make a character that fits their vision, while that latter makes for more unique, quirky, and odd knights which can, if the dice fly high, end up starting stronger than the consistent values assigned in the process of constructing characters. It is also highly recommended that Players carefully read and review the material in Chapter 4 - Traits & Passions (P.61 - 93) & Chapter 5 - Skills (P. 95 - 113) to understand how these aspects of their characters interact with both the system and their roleplaying expectations.

Preparing for the session

This is a game run over the internet, so some form of reliable voice communication is necessary. I use Zoom for my voice and video communications, so downloading the Zoom Client is recommended so you do not have to join via your web browser. Having a Webcam is optional but highly recommended, I like seeing my players' smiling faces. I use Discord to coordinate between games. Please send me your Discord Handle on joining the game so I can invite you to my Discord Server and you can meet your fellow players. You will also need a free Foundry Account to join the game's VTT. This also simply requires an account be established, and takes a few minutes at most. I will need your account information to invite you to the game. I do strongly recommend you acquire a copy of Pendragon 6th Edition and begin reading the rules. I will be teaching as we go along, of course, but it helps to have at least a baseline familiarity with the rules. I recommend simply reading straight through the first seven chapters, a total of about 150 pages, that will introduce the basics of the setting, the system, and the mechanics of combat, the primary duty of the Knightly class. Before we come into the first session, please at least have picked a name for your first Knight Character. It would also help to have selected a number of other names for the Knight's parents, siblings, and cousins. Until a Player Knight has wed and sired (or borne, in the case of Female Knights) an heir, it is likely their heir will be a brother or a cousin instead. A Knight must always have an Heir - without one, their family line ends, and their lands become forfeit to the Crown! As far as the Dynasty is concerned, this is the worst possible outcome, and should be avoided at all costs, so come prepared with names enough to create a family tree for your Dynasty. I recommend you consume plenty of Arthurian Media to get yourself in the mindset. While it could be argued that public interest in Arthuriana peaked about 50 years ago, it's a well that doesn't exactly run dry, as it's been a cultural staple of Western Europe for going on seven centuries now. I recommend personally John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), the Merlin series starring Sam Neill (1998), King Arthur (2004), and the Green Knight (2021). If you want further reading, you can't go wrong with the prime source: La Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, but there are great fiction series by T.H. White (The Once and Future King), Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon), and a personal favorite, the Warlord Series by Bernard Cornwell. If you want your inspiration in Video Games, I can recommend the Crusader Kings series for inspiration in how your Knights lives will look & feel (though it focuses on your characters' lieges, not you) and King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame. [Obviously, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) is a classic, but it's a sendup of the genre, so watch it for laughs, not for research.]

What Overlord Jim brings to the table

This game will be run using the Foundry VTT, so a free Foundry Account will be necessary. I use Zoom for the Visual and Audio Communications during game, and I use Discord to host the 'Forums' where we communicate between sessions. This campaign's Initial phases will effectively be 'playtesting' content that I am writing to expand the setting via the Companions of Arthur, eventually dovetailing into the Great Pendragon Campaign, which is widely regarded as one of the finest RPG Campaigns ever written, and every quest I write that deviates from that path will likely also end up being submitted as a work on the Companions of Arthur. I am a Freelance Writer who writes content for these games all the time, and our table is going to benefit from my work in this regard. My GMing Style embraces the Rule of Cool, which I was playing with long before it got its name, and while on most of my Learn to Play Games I tend to play closer to Rules As Written in the name of teaching it right, my preference is to find a way for whatever fun idea the Player brings to the table to at least have a fighting chance to work out. I root for your Characters and give you every opportunity to prove yourselves Heroes. Monsters will stalk the countryside for your Heroes to confront and destroy. My Villains will embody the worst things in their worlds so your Heroes can thwart their plans. My worlds are full of Evils both grand and banal, all put in there in purpose for you to confront it. If something is wrong in my settings, it is to you to do something about it. Make the world a better place, and know I'm behind you all the way. I am a Simulationist by nature, so I like complex systems and tolerate a high degree of crunch in my games. Pendragon's Winter Phase involves a fair amount of this, which I find strangely satisfying, to mind the budget necessary to keep your Knights in the field doing their Quests and marching to War. And speaking of War . . . Combat is where my GMing Style really shines. Being the Knights you are, you should expect to end up in battle more often than not. Your kingdom has enemies both without and within, as the brutal Saxons invade from the East, the Picts raid the north, the Irish pirates plague the West Coast, and to say nothing of the bandits, monsters, and rival Kingdoms - War is going to be a constant presence, and the crucible in which your legend is forged. But my favorite is watching your characters come alive through you, as you speak their words and do their deeds. It's a magical moment, when I see you become your character. I live for that, and want to evoke it every chance I get. I love the Virtues and Passions of Pendragon, as it helps you to focus on the Character's Inner life, which is far more interesting than how many hit points you have left with which to live it. Do the great and heroic deeds. I want to help you write the legends the bards will sing of your deeds for generations to come.

Homebrew rules

I am removing the caps on all Passions. (Pendragon 6E, P. 75) You are free to go as mad as you want.

How Overlord Jim creates a safe table

This section is extremely important, please read it thoroughly and carefully. I will be sending out an Pre-Game Survey prior to Session 0 to implement many of the necessary safety tools. Please fill it out mindfully and deliberately, as we will be confronting a lot of difficult subjects over the course of the campaign. Lines & Veils will be discussed at Session 0 and reviewed throughout play. It is my usual practice to take a mid-game break, and we can and will take breaks as needed to process difficult scenes. I will also generate a Digital Deck of Player Safety for the game, and we can review it as often as necessary. We'll use the Open Door, X, N & O Cards as well, and I will do Debriefs & Stars and Wishes as well. Rough waters lie ahead, and I want us all to make it through okay. Warnings about the Setting: Pendragon is a Knightly Fantasy, but it is grounded in an ugly Medieval Reality, and as a Medievalist Scholar myself, I know this better than most. The world your Knights inhabit is nothing like our own. It is, in pretty much every way imaginable, much, much worse. Abandon all your modern ideas about how things "ought to be" - the Medieval knows only how things are. There is a strict Caste System that has been in place for generations which assigns your place in it at birth, and it is a Caste System of which your characters are the principal beneficiaries. Your society has very firm rules about the roles of the peasantry, the roles of women, and the Feudal Hierarchy of which you are a part. Furthermore, as Knights you are a warrior class, and as such you will be called upon to go to War with great frequency. With War comes the probability of Character Death, and Lifechanging Injuries can put your Knight out of action forever, forcing their retirement as an active character. Medicine is at best primitive, at worst actively harmful, and healing never happens in an instant. Magic is mysterious, rare, and dangerous, and it is almost never regarded as a good thing by most 'right-thinking' people. The ancestor organization of the modern Catholic Church is also extremely prevalent in the setting, and can be a force for good or ill depending on how the individual believer chooses to act upon their faith. The Kingdom is in the process of Conversion from the Old Pagan ways to the new Christian Church, with all the tensions that will cause. Adding to that, illness and injury also threaten the lives of your kith and kin, and plague does not respect the bounds of castle walls. Even a knight's children can perish of childhood diseases, and their wives die in childbirth almost as often as a peasant's do. It is a hard and unforgiving world, which is what makes your characters all the more heroic for living in it, much less trying to make it a better place! This is what you are called upon to do - to not only uphold the Highest Virtues of the Knightly Class, but to actively better the world you live in by your actions. Aurelius Ambrosius - and, in the future, his nephew Arthur - will be calling upon their knights to help them build a better world. How will you answer this call will determine the legacy your knights leave to their heirs and successors. A Special Note about Female Knights: Pendragon as a game system explicitly permits women taking up arms, and it will remain an option in this game, but be aware that such a character will be a Trailblazer in their culture, changing the way their society thinks about what women can and cannot do by their actions, fighting their way uphill against sexism & classism from NPCs stuck in the past the whole way. Some players relish such a challenge, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea, and I respect that, but the fighting culture of Knights and Chivalry that gave us the Arthurian Romances was a Classist, Racist, and Sexist Old Boy's Club. Smashing that Glass Ceiling with an Iron Gauntlet will be a truly Herculean effort that only you can decide is or is not worthwhile.