Pros
- impress your friends with your pronunciation of unfamiliar Welsh phonemes
- it’s your campaign, so you can retcon druids as having never been exterminated by the Romans because they had magic
- druids and bards are not just character classes but actual social roles
- many good opportunities for NPCs to say “What have the Romans ever done for us?” and “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”
- no need to come up with your own map; Google has you covered
Cons
- horrify Welsh people with your extremely bad pronunciation of common Welsh phonemes
- extremely sparse contemporary literary sources for the period; what little we have is problematic in its reliability
- the druid class in Dungeons & Dragons is laden with two or three centuries of ahistorical baggage
- Arthurian canon is a mess
#surely Arthur is considerably post Roman?
NOT ACCORDING TO GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, WHOSE HISTORIA REGUM BRITANNIAE HAS ARTHUR FIGHTING IN GAUL AND PREPARING TO MARCH ON ROME ITSELF, ONLY TO BE DISTRACTED AT THE LAST MINUTE BY HIS USURPATION BY MODREDUS (BETTER KNOWN TODAY AS MORDRED).
oh well if we’re listening to monmouth then anything goes
Hey, he’s still better than T.H White, whose Arthur is not just post-Roman, but post-Norman.
If you’re looking for good sourcebooks for such a campaign, TSR put out some historical sourcebooks for AD&D 2nd Edition (reading them as a kid helped to start me down to the road to a history PhD, so watch out, you might get hooked).
The Celts sourcebook has some more “grounded” Druid and Bard classes, and there’s some useful stuff for the sub-Roman period that you can cobble together between the Vikings sourcebook, the Rome sourcebook, and the Charlesmagne sourcebook.
Also too, Pendragon. Just… Pendragon, man.
It’s so good.
Never played Pendragon, but I read of it.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 