Travel light and bring your friends: The player, most of the time (even when they are supreme king of Pendor), should only be traveling with companions and troops you get from prisoner stacks and the tavern slavers (omen seekers, cheap squires that would be upgraded to adventurers/knights, etc.) Your party should be around 20 in strength.

Learn to kite everything into something that will attack it, beat it, and give you a chance at capturing the spawn: You can't fight Wolfbode and his 1000-man army but that 1200-man Sarleon army you led him to, that was supposed to be sieging nearby towns such as Poinsbruk, most certainly can.

Otherwise, they would just be spending a lot of time in it as part of some Unique Spawn's slave train and whining on the wiki and the forums about the 5th consecutive time Maltise escaped their clutches. Quick-saving and reloading will be a central part of the new player's experience in the festering, war-torn reality that is Pendor. Mount and Blade is a dynamic game that will throw a lot of possible scenarios at you.

Don't jump in Realistic Mode if you're new.

You could ask yourself these questions: 1.) What kingdom/pretender will I be swearing vassalage to? 2.) Where would my personal fiefs/capital would be? (I suggest Ethos- Laria because both towns are adjacent to each other, have huge hinterlands, and Laria has free border patrol if you've got good relations with the Noldor) 3.) When will I start wrecking Pendor up? 4.) How will I be doing this? 5.) Why am I playing this game?

Always plan ahead: Before every game you must have already planned what you will be doing in the playthrough.

Will you succeed in fulfilling the prophesy or will you simply be a hapless adventurer already with finances in the negative on Day 90, begging and scrounging around the entirety of Pendor for coin to pay your 100 Hero Adventurers or to maintain your crumbling microstate? They only await the arrival of the prophesied Hero/Heroine of Madigan who will unify the land and restore much needed peace and prosperity to Pendor. A land rife with conflict: its people having been made to endure centuries of disease, injustice, war, death, and destruction. I have always been touched by PoP's premise.

Mount and blade warband pretenders