Pregen ideas?

[Crom's kid brother]

Hi,

I just bought The Coming of Hanuman online and I think it would be a really great game for a Con. In late October my wife and two friends of mine go to Necronomicon in Tampa, Florida. I am considering running the adventure at the Con this year.

One thing however that is one my mind is that I will need to make pregenerated characters for the game. So I was wondering if you people could give me some idea on how to make about six pregens for this particular adventure. Any ideas?

Thank you

 

[FailedSpotCheck]

I PM'ed you.

 

[Crom's kid brother]

Thanks, that could work

 

[Crom's kid brother]

Alright maybe I wasn't clear. I don't really just want some pregens to start off with. What I want is some pointers on how you other GM's would create pregenerated characters for a one-shot game. So my questions are:

Do you use a variety of races and classes or just keep it to one race and maybe a couple of classes?

Do you usually make them all the same level?

Do you write-up alot of backstory, a couple of paragraphs or nothing?

Come one give me some feedback!

 

[Trodax]

Well The Coming of Hanuman starts off with the characters being in the employ of the Turanians and sent off on a scouting mission, so I would strive to make a group of characters who sort of make sense in getting this mission. You could have them as an elite mercenary scout-group of outlanders (if you wanted very diverse characters) or just make them all Turanian soldiers (in that case maybe you could insert some sort of tension between some of the characters in their backstories, to spice things up).

Personally, I might put together a group of 6 characters for this scenario like this:
* Turanian officer in charge of the scouting group; Soldier with decent Int and Cha
* Zuagir cast out from his tribe; Nomad and really good tracker (Track + Skill Focus (Survival))
* Kushite mercenary; Barbarian included as a secondary tracker
* 3 Turanian regulars; all are probably Soldiers but you could make one an archery-specialist and one a Soldier/Thief multiclass to diversify them a bit

(If you don't want one of the players to be in charge of the others, you could always have the officer as an NPC who gets killed early on; this would leave the group leaderless and more open to internal discussions.)

Do you usually make them all the same level?

Usually I would, yes. However, for a one-shot, you always have the option to mix things up a bit. For example, I might make all the characters mentioned above level 2, except the Turanian officer who is level 3, or something.

(BTW, the scenario can be quite tough so might be hard for level 1 characters, even if there are 6 of them.)

Do you write-up alot of backstory, a couple of paragraphs or nothing?

I would write up some kind of backstory, yes. For a Conan one-shot, I'd keep it to a paragraph or to, though; no need to over-do stuff. :wink: