Wizards of the Coast provided new pre-generated characters with the materials for the upcoming season D&D Encounters: Council of Spiders. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw them. After five seasons without any new pre-gens we get six Drow characters to choose from for D&D Encounters season 10.
As I actually read through the new adventure I realized that playing any race other than Drow would present players with considerable challenges this season. With that in mind it only made sense that Wizards would give us Drow pre-gens. After all, D&D Encoutners is still an introductory program so they needed to give us more than Belgos if new players wanted to play Drow PCs.
Now before you get too excited about having these new pre-gens I have to warn you that they will seem remarkably familiar. It looks like whomever was in charge of making these new pre-gens just took the old ones, changed the races to Drow, slapped new pictures on them and left the rest pretty much unchanged. In the case of Belgos, who was already Drow, his character sheet is the same (although the card’s layout was adjusted slightly).
The other five pre-gens are a Cavalier, Cleric, Mage, Slayer, and Thief. The only one of these five that has any significant change is the Cleric and that’s only because the previous pre-gen worshiped a sun god. I did a very quick check of the numbers and it seems that two of the characters have the incorrect point-buy for their abilities: Chali, the Rogue, is 1 point under the normal spend and Syndrina, the Paladin, is over by 4 points.
However, despite my nit-picking criticisms of these pre-gens I must admit that I’m still very pleased and excited that they were provided. I know we have some players who only ever want to use the pre-gens so they’ll finally have something different to pick from this season. It might even be an interesting change for an experienced party to play nothing but these pre-gens this season.
You can find these six official pre-generated characters along with all of the other pre-gens Wizards has provided since the inception of D&D Encounters in the Dungeon’s Master Pre-Generated Character Library.
- Download PDFs of all 6 new pre-generated characters.
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10 replies on “D&D Encounters: Council of Spiders – Pre-Generated Characters”
…Did Wizards of the Coast feel that their previous pre-gen characters weren’t already terrible enough?
that wizard looks like a rebuild of Jarren as a drow instead of human. I wish they had looked at some more thematic choice of spells. Illusionist would have been a nice perspective.
@Astrolounge
I would hardly call these pre-gens “terrible.” They’re simple and not exactly optimized in all cases, but they’re not that bad. In fact I think they’re just what you want/need for brand new players – nothing too fancy or difficult to play. It certainly beats the alternative of stopping a game to create a new character from scratch or worse yet turning a player away because they don’t have a character of their own.
Wow–Thanks for posting these!
I am very glad that WotC has returned to making pregens–the first three seasons of Encounters & especially the Red Box pregens were all awesome fun…you just have to mention Jarvis at my gaming table to get laughs!
And not laughing at their min / max effectiveness, but at how they were played at the table–having pregens brings a cohesion to the Public Play experience that I really enjoy…
Hrmm… I guess this means the next seasons will NOT be a DnD Next playtest then, eh? I heard this on the rumor mill… glad to see some more definitive information.
They mentioned they were going to do something different this season. I was really hoping it would be moving beyond levels 1-3…
[…] (Paladin Cavalier), Zarra (Cleric War Priest). We’ve scanned and posted copies of all six D&D Encounters: Council of Spiders – Pre-Generated Characters. They are also available in the Dungeon’s Master Pre-Generated Character Library along with […]
I’ll admit that I find Ryltar the Slayer to be badly constructed, but that’s just me. Of course, I’m crazy about building nonsense characters, so what do I know…
The Warpriest has a Longsword as a weapon, but the Character Builder doesn’t allow that (I was using the Character Builder to make level 4 versions of these pregens – my table will be starting at level 4, so I wanted to have appropriate level pregens if needed). Also, now that the campaign is loaded in the Character Builder, it’s completely STUPID that in a campaign set in Menzoberranzan, where the PCs are drow, you can’t selet Lolth as your deity.
I checked your math for the point buy for the Paladin and the Thief, and you’re wrong, they’re both fine. For the Paladin, they started with 18 Str, 11 Con, 8 Dex, 10 Int, 10 Wis, 14 Cha, with +2 racial bonus to Dex and Cha. For the Thief, you’ve got 14 Str, 11 Con, 16 Dex, 10 Int, 10 Wis, 14 Cha, with +2 racial bonus to Dex and Wis.