Voord 99

Thank you! There is something quite expensive that I’ve been looking to buy from them.

The Homage *should* win out. But envisage a situation in which a knight has Homage (X) 10 but Fealty (Y) 17. My understanding is that in the real world, English knights did not always prioritize the lord they were supposed to. The way i would handle it* is: if Homage wins out, the knight absolutely should not suffer an Honor loss — they are obeying the rules. They might suffer a Fealty loss, especially if their Fealty is Notable. If Fealty were to win out, Honor loss is reasonable, along with Homage loss. *If we were using Homage and Fealty as written. As it happens, we’re not.

I was in a 4e game that, like most PbP games, only existed briefly. This was on Myth-Weavers. I can say that the game adapts well to that format as far as what we did. However, there was essentially no combat before it ended, and combat is often the place where PbP games bog down. I can also say that there was plenty of interest and several reliable players (the game ended because of the GM’s RL pressures, not because the players stopped posting).

That’s one that I probably won’t be taking over into my houserules, although I’ll have to see what my players think. I really like the flavor of the current Major Wound rules, especially the Valorous roll. At a minimum, I’d be inclined to allow a PK to stay conscious in extraordinary circumstances if they make an appropriate Passion roll.

What King Idres should obviously do is get help from Ireland, in return for agreeing to pay tribute. This will have no consequences in the future whatsoever. 🙂

Given the extreme prominence of the Old Testament in medieval literature and thought, I think one should canvass David and Bathsheba as one of the models for Uther and Ygerna. It would certainly be the sort of thing that would have supplied for an educated reader a great deal of the framework within which the story would have been understood. I’d quibble about looking for explicit authorial comment as a requirement to read Geoffrey as presenting Uther negatively (in this particular incident, not overall). There’s an interesting discussion in Siân Echard Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition: she notes that Uther conforms to a recurrent pattern with British kings in Geoffrey, in which they put their personal desires above the good of their subjects.

I think creativehum is raising a more fundamental question, though, about the game not being designed to supply “Punch the Nazi”-type pleasures. (Nice shorthand.) I think that’s very true. For instance, KAP makes significant efforts to be more inclusive than the sources in the area of gender, but it is fairly insistent that you should play from a non-modern (or at least, highly conservative) perspective when it comes to class and social hierarchy. KAP oriented towards genre emulation of medieval romance. Insofar as it’s not about genre emulation, a lot of it is about emulating the actual later Middle Ages. KAP does a great job at those things. But if a game does what it does well, by definition it will fight you a bit if you want a different experience. You can twiddle the dial to some extent, but there are certain experiences where you’d be better off playing a different game entirely. There’s nothing wrong with that. In my group, this problem hasn’t come up, because of our idiosyncratic backgrounds and interests; we tend also to be a bit tongue-in-cheek and ironic/humorous in our approach to the game, which probably helps.

Actually, now that I reread the rules, it appears that it’s supposed to be Glory that bachelor knights get from their liege, not from the person who knights them. However, I’ll be adapting this for the above purpose nonetheless. It’s 1/100th of the Glory, capped at 1000 (for King Arthur). That seems reasonable enough, and not likely to cause too much Glory inflation. And there are definitely some good story possibilities in the fact that when you knight someone, you’re vouching for their honour…

Book of Knights has one solid addition to character generation that I really like: Glory from the person who knights you. This is both true to historical reality and, more importantly, is something that comes up in the literature. I’m going to add that to my game when Arthur “introduces” chivalry. But overall, I think 4e is the better bet (although creativehum is 100% right that the way it’s put together is ugly and off-putting). Aside from what has already been said about it, it has several short adventures (originally from 3e) with advice about how you could link some of them into a longer adventure, which would give very much the sort of episodic picaresque feel that many medieval romances have. And for any PC from default Salisbury, there’s a very nice little family history generator that will help get players into the setting. And although it’s geared to Salisbury, it could be used for many other places in Logres without needing any real adaptation, allowing one to use at least a few of the alternate locations with it for PK origins. If you run out of material from 4e and your players are hooked, there are excellent collections of published adventures from the 3e/4e era, all available cheaply as PDFs. I’d cautiously suggest Perilous Forest as being particularly suitable for a minicampaign (which not to say that it’s the best IMO or anything like that). It’s a geographically contained sandbox-y affair in which the player knights are supposed to wander around northwest England in search of adventures.

From my new favourite KAP GM resource: https://insearchofholywellsandhealingsprings.com/2013/04/19/holy-wells-and-healing-springs-of-lincolnshire-an-overview/ The other PKs have to get water from a nearby holy healing well by midnight, or the PK dies. They have to overcome some challenge, obviously. Maybe grab one of the faerie creatures from the back of the GPC to be the guardian of the well. Or relocate the Maid of Stevington Well from the Forest Sauvage section in the Anarchy Phase to one of these Lincolnshire wells and run that adventure now.

Even in English, the word “rider” could be used to mean “knight” in the Middle Ages, like in German. (There is one other European language in which a common word for “knight” is not connected to horses, but it’s a cheat: it’s medieval Latin.)

No, if you are sufficiently saintly, like that annoying bastard Galahad, you can in fact survive indefinitely only on taking Holy Communion and have no need for other food. Of course, it helps that you attend Mass several times every day. 🙂

Of course, if anyone actually eats anything at the Grail Feast (aside from participating in the Eucharist, I suppose), then they have committed the sin of gluttony and are immediately thrown out. 🙂

Alternatively, if you only have two PKs allow them Battle + a second roll, to make two knights the equivalent of four. Off the top of my head: First roll is always Battle. Second roll, GM rolls 1d6. Awareness Horsemanship Energetic Valorous Reckless Prudent This is if you don’t want to clutter things up with NPKs, which would be an alternative.

I’ve never read the story, but some vague thoughts. To start with the obvious, I think that it’d be easy enough to make the snake the problem of the year to which everyone has to find a solution, rather than something that takes “Caradoc” out of play or hindered (aside from being hindered during this one adventure).* One might want to reserve it for when the players start to get bored with all the battles and observing famous things at the beginning of the Boy King era, to give them a year where the game feels different. At that point it is a matter of a series of challenges for the PKs. 1)There needs to be something interesting that the PKs have to achieve to discover the bath of vinegar trick. It sounds learned, so maybe they have to do some favor for scholarly monks or nuns at an abbey? I’m lazy, so I’d just use one of the various short adventures and come up with a reason why the monks/nuns want that. 2) There could be a secondary challenge of persuading the beloved to co-operate, since she is taking a risk (and in the story, she is the one who suffers). If “Caradoc” doesn’t have an established “Guinier”, then maybe he needs to get one, find a woman who will love him, and vice versa? If he does, just how much does she love him? If he’s married to the typical NPC wife — who might after all be feeling a little worried about being married to a man who locks up his own mother — then she demands some task, perhaps connected with her family, as adventure no. 2. 3) The really interesting bit is how the PK deals with his biological father Eliavres, and his mother after this. Forgiving/Vengeful, Love (Family) — it could all get a bit difficult, even patricidal and matricidal. For the future: suppose that “Caradoc” had a twin that, unknown to him, Eliavres spirited away and raised? *For what it’s worth, we’re one of those groups where the players always have a backup character that gets played sometimes in place of the main character, e.g. when the main character rolls Fear (Sea Travel) and can’t go on the adventure for the year. So taking “Caradoc” out of play for a bit wouldn’t be a problem for us.