Voord 99

One of the amusing things here is that in the 19th century (a Roman woman in the 2nd century AD had more freedom in law than an English woman in 1820 in significant respects) a standard cliché was that the Romans had given too much freedom to their women, and this was sure proof of their horrible decadence. Interestingly, if you turn the perspective away from women warriors, which for obvious reasons tend to interest roleplaying games, to legal position (control of property, etc. — not exactly what fun RPG sessions tend to be about), the “Celts” (it’s a bit of a problematic term) start to look less enlightened than the Romans. Cultures are complicated and full of tensions, and are always being pulled in different competing directions. That being said, medieval noblewomen could exercise a *lot* of power and independence, of course. Arguably, for the same reason as Roman women — in both periods, status trumped gender, and what mattered about a wealthy aristocratic woman was that she was wealthy and aristocratic. I always feel that one of the ironies of medieval romance is that it doesn’t have as many interesting strong female personalities as actual medieval history, which is full of them. None of this is to say that ZedAlpha shouldn’t do what they and their group like, of course. Especially if The Mists of Avalon is an influence and replicating the tropes of modern Celtic historical fantasy is part of the goal.

I just ran an adapted version of the Mysterious Manor as an all-squire adventure, as it happens, and it worked pretty well. A bit of a sitcom, with the long-suffering squires having to get their bumbling, lustful knight out of a pickle. (The year was even 501!) It’s in Tales of Chivalry and Romance.

This is a clever campaign concept (that could also be good for a short Pendragon campaign that ended with Arthur’s coronation.) One minor detail that I’ll throw in (that you may already know, of course) is that 3e’s The Boy King had a character in the Forest Sauvage called the Lost Knight of the Red Feather who was eliminated (not sure why, perhaps just space) in the GPC. A character like that, a friendly knight who is condemned to wander the Forest Sauvage endlessly, might be a good thing to have in this game, IMO — he can turn up at random when you need him to put the PKs on the trail of an adventure, or if they need an extra sword at some point.

Practically speaking, the intent seems to be to supply a distinctive campaign concept, so I think Tizun Thane’s suggestion is about right for the numbers, but I would keep it a kingdom* (i.e., the character becomes a pennath in KAP terms). I think it’s a great concept for a campaign, especially for a group who doesn’t need the “training wheels” aspect of the early GPC and is playing the game a second time. You can stand off a bit from the detailed BotW-style medieval-England simulation stuff and have a game that shades a bit more towards fantastic romance. Arthur will still be the player king’s overlord, probably, but the relationship’s a bit different from being one of his actual barons. *Not sure that Tizun Thane meant to imply otherwise, and they may have just meant that it would be about the same size as a barony.

If you’re sitting at high table, it’s +1 extra Geniality, irrespective of what you roll. So if you critical, that’s +3 Geniality per round. This definitely would not be compatible with the very high Glory for “winning the feast” RAW…. But the occasional situation where a person gets 15ish Glory just from being the centre of attention and seated among the most prominent people is fine, IMO. A fumble is -1 — I simplify the rules and leave it at that, with no second APP roll. If for some reason someone was actually relegated to the lowest position (probably as a calculated insult, i.e. it would be part of the story, not the result of a random roll), then I’d impose the -2, and probably also call for a Modest/Proud roll. The Honour loss (p.6) is tricky, because Honour loss is a big penalty — I’d probably let that depend on how the PK reacted.

These are really good. The only addition I can think of is that one might mention the possibility of some unmarried NPCs in the family who are monks, nuns, and (depending on when you’re drawing on for your version of the Church(es)) priests.

Without knowing the details, I wonder if the Sleeping Beauty vampire could be reworked as a belle dame sans merci figure.

Seating should be based on rank, what I read on this topic. Not exhaustive reading, but this appeared to be the consistent assumption. You sit where you sit. There’s room for debate about who outranks whom, and ordinary knights are grouped together with plenty of room for variation within that group, but an APP roll should not put you at high table ahead of people who clearly outrank you. What I do is (basically) keep the mechanic but interpret it differently — the APP roll determines how much people pay attention to you “overall,” not where you sit. Same effects on Geniality, you can run things essentially the same way. (I have some house rules that do change things, but they don’t affect the basic principle, and you could stick much closer to the BoF RAW and still do it.) About the only thing is that some cards don’t sit well with being at high table — that’s the only area where you do have to depart from the BoF. Everything else can be rationalized. E.g. critical APP = “Everyone’s looking at you throughout the feast, you can’t draw cards because it’s as if you were at high table, being watched by everyone.” (That’s not how I handle it in practice, but one could.) And honestly, I don’t map out all the NPCs. I have one NPC incident per PK per round planned in advance, to serve the story, and bring other NPCs in as cards and PK choices dictate, if necessary inventing them on the fly, but mostly trying to obey the Law of Conservation of Characters and use NPCs who’ve appeared before. I’m also pretty flexible about letting the players say what they want to do and going outside the BoF if necessary, rather than playing strictly by the minigame rules.

There was a short adventure for Pendragon (also other systems) called “The Black Knight” in White Dwarf #83.

I did something like this once, but it wasn’t meant to be a regular solo — it was a special event in which the PKs spent the Winter Phase at the monastery of an actual saint. Autochecks to Religion (Christian), and Read Latin if the PK already had it; they could test the Christian* Traits and Spiritual, and potentially get checks in those. If a PK succeeded in all of those rolls (neither did), they would have had the option to take a Love God Passion. *In normal Pendragon, Roman Christian — we’re using the pre-5e setup in which there is only one set of Christian Traits.

No rewrite, I’m afraid. Still the same post.

I think part of the problem here is that the rules talk about moral tests in a different way than they talk about Trait rolls earlier in the same section: Some of these tests use absolute Trait values. For example, only those characters with an Honest Trait of 15 or more may pass uninvited through the doorway into the Palace of the Lake, where lives the fay Nimue. In other cases, a character must pass a less rigorous test and make an unopposed roll against a particular Trait. Success gains the reward, while failure indicates that the consequences of fail- ing the test ensue. Thus, anyone who answers a “justice riddle” correctly (i.e., succeeds in a Just roll) can enter into the great feast hall of King Bagdemagus on St. John’s Day, while failure to answer the riddle means a cold meal outside. This does not read as if the idea is that someone with Just 5-15 automatically enters King Bagdemagus’ feast hall by just saying that their character answers the riddle correctly. And this sort of thing is elsewhere in the rules, such as the Valorous roll for challenging monsters. This section is located late in the discussion of Traits, after the section on “Trait Disputes” (where it also looks like 5-15 are expected to roll). Note also the reference to tests using absolute Trait values, which reasonably might lead one to infer that the next part is also meant to be new rules for Traits. So it’s not unreasonable, I think, for people to read things like the Chaste roll in The Adventure of the White Horse as being rolls that everyone has to make to pass the test. There’s also the whole “letter vs. intent” problem here. Because while the rules literally say that only 16+ characters have to roll, they justify and explain this as “people act according to their character when they act without thinking.” Which sounds as if Morien’s rule fits the intended purpose better. Not saying that it is what was meant! But am saying that the rules are not well-written to communicate how they are supposed to work — letter and stated intent should always match. When the way the Trait rules are explained is unclear, people are sensibly going to look at how Trait rolls are described elsewhere, and draw inferences.

This wouldn’t do much, but I don’t think there’s a reason not to allow a critical DEX roll to prevent knockdown even when the damage is 2xSIZ. EDIT: Another thought. Battle narratives in medieval romance sometimes feature an unhorsed knight springing quickly to their feet. How about opposed DEX rolls to get up from knockdown by a mounted opponent too quickly to be attacked, so that it’s only -5/+5?

That’s true, although in practice that hasn’t come up as much in our game. It’s tended to be “Can I ignore one opponent or not?” But that may be a matter of me not being imaginative enough about the choices that I have opponents make. I’ll be interested to see how this aspect of the 6e combat rules interacts with what 6e does with the optional combat tactics. They were modified significantly between 3e/4e and 5e, so I imagine they may be tweaked again. For instance, if one went back to 3e’s “Defensive and Uncontrolled cancel each other out,” then you’d be giving the higher-DEX character a straightforward veto on those tactics (nice and easy to explain), as long as they want to force a normal opposed roll. But let’s assume that nothing changes (and we are talking about one opponent only). Opponent fights normally: Sir Dexterous can respond with Uncontrolled or Defensive. Not very useful. I think this is most useful late in the game? If armor is very good, as taking an opponent’s attack in return for +10 might be acceptable against an average opponent — if your DEX is high enough that you’re not that worried about Knockdown. Most situations in which you’d fight Defensively are situations in which you’d do so no matter what your opponent chose to do. Opponent fights Defensively: Sir Dexterous can respond with Uncontrolled. Both have +10, so tied criticals not unlikely. But if they don’t, only Sir Dexterous can do damage, and they have a decent chance of it being critical damage. This has some use, e.g. in situations in which Sir Dexterous wants to finish off an opponent so that they can go to the aid of a comrade. At any rate, it makes Defensive less viable for the other person. They’re probably better off accepting normal combat against Sir Dexterous. Opponent’s attack is Uncontrolled: 1) Sir Dexterous can fight Defensively, if they want to stall, although it’s not a great option, as they can’t do damage. 2) They can go Uncontrolled themselves, +10 to both, resolved simultaneously. 3) Or just fight normally, as they would most likely have done in any case. This is where I think it’s really hurting Sir Dexterous that they probably have lower damage than Sir Big, especially if they are fighting Sir Big. Their most appealing counter is probably (3), but the effectiveness of (3) is dependent on damage. It looks to me as if, if you wanted to enhance this effect, one thing to explore is if one can provide Sir Dexterous with an option that makes it a very bad idea for Sir Big to try an Uncontrolled Attack, that his faster and more cunning opponent will just exploit his recklessness. Some version of Double Feint in which you have enhanced Knockdown? (Has the same problem as the existing Double Feint, in that it’s probably a little too good, meaning that the cost of failing the DEX roll needs to be high or it needs to have a significant negative modifier — creating the difficulty that caused Mr. Stafford to remove Double Feint.) One possibility might be that Double Feint normally only allows you to bypass your opponent’s shield (which makes a certain narrative sense) — but if they’re not getting shield protection anyway, as with All-Out Attack, Double Feint has an enhanced effect? (EDIT: I am also assuming here that whatever one did with Double Feint, DEX would not be modified by armor.)

This may be because my players are relatively new to the game and aren’t the type to worry about optimization in any case. But I find that using the 6e Quickstart rule of declaring actions in combat in inverse DEX order can do a little — not saying that it does a lot — to make DEX a bit more meaningful, largely in situations in which you have multiple opponents. This depends to an extent on random Trait rolls determining exactly what an opponent does, so that it’s not too predictable. Is that Saxon that the PK knocked down going to be sensible and fight defensively while they get up, or are they feeling heroic/aggressive and going to force the PK to fight two opponents this round? Or is that one going to run away, so that, if you have a higher DEX, you know that you only have one actual opponent if you ignore the one who’s fleeing? More varied combat options would add to this effect, but I know they’re hard to design. At any rate, I’m finding that my players are actually giving their characters reasonable if not stellar DEX. 12-13ish. It might be that they just dislike the idea of slow, clumsy characters, though.

Total size of the armies is a background detail that to my mind often doesn’t even need to be specified. I think the descriptions of battle size in qualitative terms, “the whole armies of two barons,” “all the knights in Logres,” etc. are practically more useful for the GM a lot of the time than worrying about exactly how many people that is. Medieval literature is capable of having battles with combatants in the hundreds of thousands that nevertheless are decided by the exploits of a single knight, so I personally don’t feel there needs to be a conflict between unrealistically large armies and focusing on individuals, if what you’re going for is mostly genre. It’s another area where I’d like to see the game lay out different options and discuss different possible feels you could have for your game by twiddling the dials. “If you want a gritty, pseudo-realistic “historical” Arthur, use Column A. If you want a fairly exact simulation of realistic numbers for England in the time corresponding to a particular Phase, use Column B, by Phase. If you want medieval romance, take column B and multiply all numbers by 10… no, actually, make that 100. 🙂” I’d sort of like Glory for Battles to be more sensitive to how consequential a given battle is, and how much PKs contributed to the outcome.

The option I’m using, for what it is worth, is to stress very hard that she is Morgan le Fay. She is not a normal human with normal human motivations — she has weird otherworldly aspects to her. It is dangerous to suppose that you, a normal mortal, can understand how her mind works. Also: Morgan’s origin in Malory is the rather boring idea that she went to school in a nunnery and there learned a lot about magic. This does not really explain how she becomes a queen in Avalon — it’s something that sets her up to be a run-of-the-mill enchantress. And I personally feel that Morgan has become so iconic that she deserves more than that, an equivalent to Merlin’s special origin story. So that’s a gap that can become a story for the PKs, as it did in my game, the story of how Morgan as a child becomes halfway to being part of Faerie and no normal mortal enchantress.

I’m in a 4e(ish) game on Myth-Weavers, although I’m afraid it’s not my game and I couldn’t say one way or another whether the GM would be open to additional players. That being said, if you wanted to GM yourself, I am fairly certain that an ad on MW would garner interest.

The important thing that one needs to bear in mind when characterizing Morgan is that she needs to end up in a happy romantic relationship with Ogier the Dane. 🙂

Worth noting the reference to Camilla and other female warriors from classical texts in Oleksandr’s quote from Orderic. Medieval readers were familiar with such figures both from classical works and from medieval reworkings of the material. These classical and medieval texts are not in some box that hermetically seals them from Arthurian literature — there’s no reason why a medieval reader of Virgil would switch off their ability to admire Virgil’s Camilla when writing a work influenced by the Aeneid, but with a different setting.

I personally try pretty hard to have a fair number of situations in which being Suspicious does not give correct information, and being Trusting is the advantageous thing to do. At the moment, during the Anarchy, this has slackened off a little, as I want the Anarchy to be a time when “bad” actions are easier and bring short-term rewards, but once Arthur is on the throne, I’m going to be making a conscious point to do this a lot. I also don’t tend to use Suspicious as a social insight roll, precisely to avoid it being a good thing. I prefer Intrigue and Awareness (and I wouldn’t mind if there were a third Insight skill). The way I look at it is is, RPGs often tend to reward people who are on their guard and suspicious, and cross every i and dot every t to prepare for the inevitable twist in the story, which is very often a heel turn by a friendly NPC, and it can be hard for players to switch off those ingrained reflexes. It’s important to get players out of that mindset. They need to go to the castle and sleep in that bed! Another thing that I do, which is similar, is make PKs roll Honest to be believed when they are telling an unlikely truth, especially if they are trying to persuade someone to do something.

More from the Roman de Troie. This time, it’s not something that’s directly applicable to Arthurian Britain, but rather an incident from medieval literature where one could change the names and use it for the PKs. Specifically, you need a PK with a Famous Hospitality Passion. The higher, the better. So, this is a version of the Telephus story from Greek mythology. It’s an elaboration of the version in Dares Phrygius, and between Dares Phrygius and Benoît, the details end up very different from the more familiar Greek story, although the same characters are there. In this version, “Duke Telephus” accompanies Achilles in the campaign against Mysia as one of the Greek knights, possibly Achilles’ vassal. In battle, Achilles mortally wounds and is about to decapitate Teuther (=Teuthras), the king of Mysia. But Telephus intervenes and uses his shield to protect Teuthras, because he was once Teuther’s guest, and Teuther looked after him so well that Telephus can’t bear to see Achilles cut his head off. (In Dares Phrygius, Telephus was Teuther’s guest when Telephus was a boy, so it’s a smaller difference from the standard idea that Telephus is Teuthras’ adopted son; Benoît changes that to “about ten years earlier,” so that what the reader would assume is that this happened when Telephus was an adult.) Teuther then makes Telephus his heir. Clearly, if we stat up Telephus, we’re giving him 20+ Hospitality. But it’s easy to see how this might come up in a game. Have some lord be very hospitable to the PKs, and then they end up fighting for some reason, and a PK with Famous Hospitality has to fail their Hospitality roll or feel compelled to protect their enemy from their comrade.

Reading the Roman de Troie (in translation) at the moment, in part because I’m thinking of working up the material for an alternative Pendragon campaign. And happened across the detail that for Benoît, Ajax Oileus (he treats Telamon and Oileus as surnames of the two Ajaxes) is from “Logres.” Now it didn’t take much digging to figure out what happened here. Benoît is adapting Dares Phrygius, who has Ajax son of Oileus as being, unsurprisingly, from Locris. Benoît, who presumably had no idea where “Locris” was, has mistranslated that as a placename with which he is familiar. Nor is it certain that he means “our” Logres, although it is possible — for Benoît, the Greeks rule all of Europe, and his geography is hazy and fantastic. (If I do run a campaign, there will be no map!) At any rate, it’s a bit of lore that can be thrown into a Pendragon campaign, to have this admittedly second-rank Trojan War figure form part of the British past. This Ajax Oileus is nicer than his Greek-mythology predecessor, incidentally: he protects Andromacha (=Andromache) and Cassandra from sexual assault during the sack of Troy. Still punished by the gods for physically dragging Cassandra out of Minerva’s temple, though, which seems unfair given that all he’s doing is implementing a decision that the Greeks collectively make. Gods will be gods, even in the Middle Ages, I suppose. One could, for instance, have Pendragon PKs have to find the place where “the castle once stood that was held by the lord who dragged the maiden from the temple and died for it.” It turns out that one of their own manors is where Ajax’s castle was, earning the lucky PK a little extra Glory for their lands having a link to the Trojan War. One could also do something with the fact that, thematically, for Benoît the Trojan War is largely about Trojans and Greeks hating each other. Even in death, Ajax Oileus may not have been able to give this hatred up, and of course Britons are descended from Trojans…

Story seed: there was a medieval story told about the famous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol in Rome — which people did not know was a statue of Marcus Aurelius — in which it was a statue of a Roman called Marcus who defeated an enemy king who was a magician by having his horse trample on him, because the magician could not be killed with weapons. Obviously, though, killing a fellow knight by having your horse trample on them would be, under normal circumstances, unchivalrous behavior. I mean, it’s unchivalrous if you don’t dismount and fight them on foot, let alone if you don’t even allow them to get up and just have your horse stand on them.

Found that: p.91. Alright, that does justify giving the MW score.