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Voord 99

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  1. A while back, I disappeared down a rabbit-hole doing a lot of exploration with different ways to house-rule the Book of Feasts. To recap, the problems, for me, basically come down to two. The glory award for “winning the feast” is very high, and compares favorably to other things. Also, it is always a PK who gets it — no matter who else is at the feast. This is, I understand, because Mr. Larkins intended the feast rules to see very occasional use, and if so, it’s not a problem. But I think it’s helpful to have a version of the rules which can see routine use. There are several scripted feasts in the GPC and feasts are useful things for plot purposes, plus they were also a major part of medieval culture. Also, there are a lot of fun cards, and a lot of them won’t come up if you have feasts only a handful of times in the campaign. These problems will increase if you have fewer players. (I have two.) This is less important, but as far as I can tell, the APP roll for where you sit steamrollers entirely over how things were supposed to work, which is that people sat in the appropriate place for their rank in society. This is purely a historical-accuracy point, and so does not matter as much, but it’s still bothersome to me that one of the great lords of the realm can end up sitting below a poor mercenary knight if the APP rolls go that way. So this is what I ended up using, and having played through quite a lot of feasts at this point, I think it’s worked well. I’ve eliminated the concept of “winning the feast” entirely. There is no Glory award for accumulating the most Geniality. Instead, PCs get their Geniality as Glory at the end of the feast (x2 for royal feasts or other situations where famous people are observing, on the usual principle). But they can also acquire Glory for things like performances during the feast. This is in the Book of Feasts (p. 9: “In addition to other benefits listed on the card, Glory from successful Skill rolls is awarded as normal”)— spotting this is one of the things that persuaded me that trying to preserve the “winning the feast” concept was unhelpful, as there are plenty of opportunities to win Glory without it, and if a GM is giving out Glory for successful skill rolls on top of allowing someone to win the feast, the amount of glory at a royal feast could be stratospheric. The APP roll does not affect your seating. You sit where you sit: knights sit with knights, as they are supposed to. If you’re seated wrongly, that’s a matter of a failed (or more likely, fumbled) Stewardship roll of the person organizing the feast. However, mechanically, the APP roll has the same effect as in the BoF, by giving you a bonus on Geniality or, if unfortunate a minus. It represents, not where you sit, but whether or not people are paying attention to you admiringly in the context of where you sit. The only difference is that, unless you are sitting at high table (because that’s where you should sit), you can draw cards, and if you are sitting at high table, you have an automatic +1 on top of this. The APP roll is APP modified by Glory, which makes criticals a bit more common, but as there’s no “winning the feast,” the main effect is that it makes other rolls easier, if they’re modified by Geniality. It makes a difference e.g. if you’re trying to loosen tongues to make an Intrigue roll to find out some plot-important information late in the feast — it’s not terribly important in itself, although in a five round royal feast a critical APP is a not too shabby 20 Glory, all other things being equal. Being able to draw multiple cards is not based on Glory, but on APP modified by Glory. (The basic idea here was suggested by Tizun Thane.) This is divided by 10 (with rounding). This might seem a little stingy, but the rationale is as follows. One of the goals of the “winning the feast” idea is to incentivize APP, and I think that’s a good idea. As I’ve eliminated “winning the feast,” bringing APP in here seemed like a way to compensate. At the same time, I don’t want to eliminate Glory entirely — it both makes sense, and is desirable in game terms. So the threshold for 2 cards is 15, so that if you have mediocre APP you need to be really distinguished to get the choice between two cards; but a player who wants, can get that from the beginning of the game, or near it, without sinking too many points into APP. 13 APP means that you only have to wait for 2000 Glory, for instance. 3 cards will probably never come up, but I’m OK with that, as it speeds things up. The 100 extra glory for attending any royal feast is gone, as is the 100 Glory for sitting Above the Salt. Of course, there are scripted GPC feasts that come with Glory awards for witnessing something important, and that sort of thing still applies. I wouldn’t recommend exactly this for every campaign, but if you’re going to have feasts often, I think something like this is probably a good idea. I find that the combination of the varied incidents on the cards and having specific things that the PKs are interested in finding out through Intrigue, along with various pre-planned events and challenges, do a good job of keeping players motivated without the Glory awards needing to be very large.
  2. I’m planning to take the Beowulf stories from Land of Giants, set them in Britain, and when my players twig, which won‘t take long, say that a later lying Anglo-Saxon poet stole it and attributed it to his ancestral national hero. 🙂 I have my specific weird idiosyncratic problems with the basic decisions made for Pagan Shore, which I think were fundamentally not the way to approach Ireland in the Arthurian world — and I’ve ranted here about that at probably excessive length already.* But as regards usefulness, it has the added problem that it’s an uneasy compromise. It’s got decent support for Irish myth from a society-and-customs point of view, but because it has to make it compatible with Arthuriana, it’s too low-powered to reflect the ridiculous things that Irish heroes are supposed to be able to do. So even if you wanted to use it as the basis for adapting Pendragon for an Irish setting, you’d find that it leaves undone quite a lot of what you would probably want it to do. It’s not enough like Arthurian romance to make for a decent alternative Pendragon setting; it’s not enough like Irish myth to ditch the Pendragon setting and play in the world of the Ulster Cycle or the Fianna stories. To be fair to some of these “alternative settings” sourcebooks, they don’t give less campaign support than some GURPS sourcebooks that cover things like all of Chinese history. *Although I am absolutely fascinated with it as an Irish nationalist subversion of Pendragon.
  3. It’s not at all a thing you need to run the game, especially not if you’re planning on the default knights from Salisbury. But if you want a more pseudohistorical game, Book of Sires is useful — and it’s also just enormous fun (at least if you’re me). It’s a very in-depth, year-by-year, thing where one rolls through one’s family history for two generations. Like the random family history in the corebook, but much, much more detailed (and with a broad geographical scope). The main reason why I think it’s especially good for a more historical game, is that for such a game it’s helpful to have the politics and intrigue spelled out in detail, and BoS gives you a ready-made set of choices that different families can have made in the past, to side with this or that faction, which can echo down to the present day. Plus it’s fun. Did I mention that? It’s a game in itself.
  4. The Book of Uther would be, for me, the next most practically useful thing after the GPC. It extends the GPC backward by 5 years, and also contains a lot of other useful material. The campaign extension can be bought as a standalone thing if you don’t want the other material. If one gets the BoU, I think one should make sure to combine it with the free Marriage of Count Roderick (recommended in Morien’s thread). One can combine the courtly challenges table from MoCR with the random court adventures tables from BoU to give one a very large number of things to happen in any courtly setting.
  5. Previously titled: Not the Great Pendragon Campaign: Would Merlin have voted for Brexit? Don’t answer the question! That’s a joke. No fights! What’s prompting it is the issue of what Merlin’s motivation is supposed to be in the GPC. The clearest ongoing strand is that he does say “Britain” rather a lot, suggesting that he’s basically all about the British nationalism. This is probably especially (not exclusively) a reflection of Mary Stewart, who is named in 1e as the source of Mr. Stafford’s favorite interpretation of Merlin. In other words, we’re in historical-Arthur-land, with Merlin’s motivation being to drive out the invading Saxons. So the GPC does not take its cue from Malory here. But then, that would be hard to do. One of Malory’s most interesting moves is how his Merlin doesn’t really have motivation. We hear an awful lot about what Merlin does, very little about why Merlin does it. This is a striking intervention, because in the Vulgate, Merlin is very strongly framed as a Christian figure and he has clear overall Christian motives. You get a little hint of this Merlin in Malory, when Merlin brings up Christ in the Sword in the Stone passage, but other than that, I think it’s absent — Malory secularizes the Vulgate Merlin. Malory gives us a bit more of what was probably overall the most prominent medieval Merlin, which is the prophet. This aspect tends not to come up in the GPC as much, no doubt in part because to modern sensibilities, an Arthur who has been helpfully been told details of the plot in advance and doesn’t act on that knowledge is a bit of an idiot. So, the usual rule that I try to follow in these Not the Great Pendragon Campaign threads is that I ignore modern retellings — this is about asking what value one might find through consciously choosing to adapt for a campaign the things that the GPC doesn’t use from strictly medieval and maybe early modern literature. But I’ll break that for a moment here, because there’s an appealing modern Merlin that I’d like to mention, which is T. H. White’s — the Merlin (well, Merlyn) who wants to bring about a just and good king.* This one is rather easy to incorporate into the GPC as written. Honestly, it’s the motivation of the Merlin in the game that I’m running at the moment, although he’s such an arrogant $#%^ — taking my cue from the Vulgate there 🙂 — that it’s not at all obvious that he’s essentially about trying to bring about a just kingdom in which everyone is treated decently and isn’t particularly invested in defeating the Saxons except as a means to that end. If we hold true to our principles, though, what are some Merlins we could have in place of the GPC’s? Merlin the Prophet. This one is really important. Prophecy is what’s most important about Merlin in Geoffrey, and in fact, despite the enormous popularity and influence of Geoffrey’s history in the Middle Ages, his prophecies of Merlin seem to have been even more popular (quite separately from any connection between Merlin and Arthur). Aside from the post-Geoffrey fascination with Merlin’s prophecies, the Welsh Myrddin that Geoffrey appears to have adapted was also a prophetic figure. But prophecy is hard to use in a roleplaying game. One can confine Merlin’s prophecies to the overall broad narrative of Arthur’s rise and fall, but even then, if you tell PKs stuff, they’ll act on it. Or you can leave them vague enough that you can bring them about in different ways (which is what I do with prophetic dreams in my game). But it’s still not an easy option. Vulgate Merlin! The devils respond to Christ descending into hell by deciding to make their own person, in horribly misogynist ways, but don’t worry, thanks to Christian guilt, it’s all OK when Merlin is baptized, and so saved, whereupon God grants him knowledge of the future to match the knowledge of the past that the devils have given him. This one is probably a hard sell to most modern audiences, unless your players are really interested in trying to get into that medieval mindset. Let’s say that it would be less jarring on the players if they came to Pendragon from Paladin. 🙂 The Welsh Myrddin. There are a lot of complications here, and to be honest, it’s not material that I know well. But a Merlin who was a bard who went mad when his lord died in battle — it’s certainly a different take. This one I think one could use, with sufficient surgery on the overall GPC plot, a wild, unkempt, crazed man of the woods who emerges at random or at any rate inexplicable times to intervene in the plot. *There are hints at this Merlin in KAP, such as when the BoU suggests that maybe Merlin is responsible for poisoning everyone at St. Albans because Uther just won’t cut it as king. But generally, although we have an Arthur who is solidly a Good King, it’s not really suggested that this is because of Merlin’s influence or anything like that.
  6. Anno CDXCII: Dei gratia, Uterpendragon rex Loegriae et Igerna regina filium genuerunt, qui rex post Uterpendragon futurus fuisset. Sed Merlinus, quem omnes amicum regis esse putaverat, hunc infantem abstulit. Itaque ius erat ut Merlinus, de alta proditione attinctus, morte damnaretur. Quod sine mora factum est, sed ille nullo modo inveniri potest. Quae cum acciderent, hoc quoque accidit. Merlinus, dum illum famosum Arthurum qui tum temporis parvulus erat, summa cum sollertia aufert ut salvaretur, in Silva Salvagia forte (ut videbatur) in obviam fuit Godefrido cum Aemilio, qui miles gregarius Sarisburiensis et frater Gerontii erat. Nam Godefridus Aemiliusque Rodericum comitem ad curiam regis apud Legecestriam comitati erant. Qui cum advenissent, Pelinoro obviaverunt, qui nunc rex factus erat in Cambria, et cum eo Silvam Salvagiam venaturus introierant. Ibi bestiam quandam mirabilem viderant, cuius cupidine Pelinorus adeo captus erat ut eam temerarie persequeretur. Sed Godefridus Aemiliusque diu in Silva erraverant, dum tandem viam invenirent qua egrederentur. Prius quam exirent, pica ab eis visa atque audita erat quae eis dixerat se milites spectare iussu Salvagii regis. Itaque, Godefridus Aemiliusque, cum egressi essent, Merlino obviam ierunt. Eos Merlinus iussit se defendere atque viros, qui sequerentur, impedire. Quo audito, Aemilius eos sine mora adortus erat et a Brastia milite, qui eis praerat, vulneratus et de equo deiectus est. Postea non solum Aemilius sed etiam Godefridus de proditione inculpati sunt. Sed, ad petitionem Tathei sancti quae fecerant dimissa sunt; nam creditur quod milites ambo a Merlino fascinati essent. Sed Gerontius atque Aemilius Tatheo in cura commissi sunt; itaque reliquam partem anni manserunt in eo monasterio quod vir sanctissimus apud Venta fundaverat Eo anno Robertus, Roderici comitis filius et Helenae, natus est. Interesting year for this exercise, because there would be a case for the PKs being mentioned in the ostensibly earlier “Logres” section. But what happened to player knights as a sideshow to the big Merlin story arguably might be left out as relatively unimportant, so this is another one where there’s canon GPC material (first paragraph, last paragraph), and material specific to my PKs (everything else).
  7. At the time, there was no British Christianity — Celtic Christians are described differently and more positively than Roman Christians (with Grail Christians then described still more positively), but the list of Christian virtues remained the same for all in 3e/4e (the same as the later Roman Christian ones). So implicitly, they probably would have had the same Trait adjustments back then. My sense is that, with the development of British Christianity as the most common and “better” form of Christianity for PKs in the game, the idea of Grail Christians tended to fade. You can see some of the same concerns that are reflected in the creation of Grail Christianity (not a thing in the source material, obviously) in the sidebar ”What about Pagans?” on p.168 of the GPC.
  8. This is a bit of medieval business that can be thrown into an adventure when the situation comes up. The knights are outside of Logres. (This is on the principle that Logres=England). A commoner accuses one of them of something serious and seeks trial by combat. It’s probably best if the knight is comparatively young and inexperienced, so the combat is not a pushover. Courtesy roll. Fumble: Absolutely, trial by combat it is. On equal terms, and it would be cowardly not to do this right now. Failure: I don’t know whether that’s possible or not. Success: Absolutely not. A knight need only accept a challenge from someone else of noble birth. Everyone knows that. Critical: In Logres (=England), that’s true — trial by combat is only possible between peers. But in [foreign place where they are] (=Anjou, historically) a commoner can challenge a noble to trial by combat. However, and this is important, the knight is on horse and the commoner is on foot. They only fight on equal terms if the knight is lowering himself to challenge the commoner. (There was a similar custom in Artois where whether the knight wore armour or not was based on who was challenging whom.) Courtesy check, 5 Glory for displaying exceptional knowledge of knightly behavior. As long as they don’t Fumble and rush into something that compromises their knightly honor, they don’t embarrass themselves. If they don’t know this, someone will probably fill them in soon enough. The commoner in question, or his/her champion (if champions are allowed) turns out to be a veteran footsoldier — enough to make this a bit more challenging than knight vs. unmounted opponent would usually be. I found the information that sparked this in Ariella Elema’s 2015 Toronto dissertation on the history of trial by combat in England and France in the Middle Ages, which has lots of other good stuff and is open-access: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/67806/3/elema_ariella_m_201211_PhD_thesis.pdf
  9. For what it’s worth my thoughts in the Discord thread were largely… Just because someone‘s a commoner does not mean that their family do not care about chastity in women, and the kind of commoner who is likely to be a guest at a feast is probably a rich free person who, while not noble, is not necessarily without ways to retaliate. Legally, in England fornication and adultery fell under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. I believe that the likely penalty is penance, which for a rich person is probably going to be doing good works, which translates in effect to a fine. But there’s also an inevitable aspect of public shaming. Also, at least in some cases, the condemned person was supposed to refrain from intercourse with their spouse while doing their penance, so no childbirth roll that year? Adultery was considered grounds for ending a marriage, so there could be ramifications there, although the attitude of the ecclesiastical courts was to discourage that option and encourage penance and the preservation of the marriage. If you want complications, and you’re bored with the usual secular noblewoman, think about having the woman in question be a nun. Enchantresses can probably be put in a special category that suspends the rules of real life a bit, so that might be a “safe” option. Although obviously, an enchantress should probably also be a major recurring character. The following is my quick translation of part of a famous medieval poem about an unmarried pregnant woman. It gives a sense of just how serious the consequences could be: Because of this, my mother beats me, Because of this my father berates me, Both deal with me harshly. I sit alone at home, I don’t dare to go out, Nor to have fun in public. When I leave the house, I am looked at by everyone, As if I were a monster. When they see this womb, One nudges another, They shut up while I pass by. Always they nudge with the elbow, They point me out with their finger, As if I were something weird. They nod at me to point me out, They judge me worthy of being burned, Because I sinned once. You can read that to your player next time their knight sires a bastard on some poor unfortunate peasant woman. 🙂
  10. Anno CDXCI: Eo anno Uterpendragon rex in Cornubiam cum exercitu perrexit Gorlois ducem puniturus de facinoribus permultis ab eo commissis. Gorlois autem non ausus est cum rege congredi, et in castrum suum Terrabil fugit; et uxorem suam cum aliquot homines armatos in castro Tintagol posuit. Uterpendragon igitur exercitum suum ipsius divisit in duas partes et alios suorum, quibus Madocum principem praefecit, ad Terrabil destinavit, alios secum duxit ad Tintagol. Sic castella ambo obsidebantur. Multis post diebus, Gorlois dux exercitum Madoci turpissimo inhonestissimoque modo nocte atque de improviso adortus est. In qua pugna Madocus princeps, filius Uterpendragon regis, contra Gorlois ipsum viriliter pugnans, miserrima sorte interfectus est; sed Dei gratia, mors principis non exstitit inulta; nam Gorlois quoque in eadem pugna mortuus est. Nam Gorlois a Godefrido milite occisus est, quod hoc modo factum est: cum Madocus cecidisset, cui subvenire non solum Godefridus sed etiam Gerontius iam conabatur, Gerontius Gorlois de equo eius excussit. Quo facto, Brastias, miles gregarius et homo Gorlois, repente milites Sarisburienses aggressus, Gerontium quoque humotenus deiecit. Quod cum accidisset, Gerontius, vehementissime timens pro Godefrido (nam ille equum non habebat), egregia atque praestanti fortitudine a solo in Brastiam quam celerrime irrupit. Quo impetu Gerontius a Brastia caesus est, sed effecit ut Gorlois dux a Godefrido interficeretur. Deinde Godefridus a Brastia debellatus est, sed contritiones suae non adeo graves erat ut moreretur. Sic exercitus regis victor exstitit in hac pugna, quae apud Terrabil facta est, et mox Igerna et alii qui in Tintagol castro erant se dediderunt. Duobus mensibus matrimonium Uterpendragon regis et Igernae cum gaudio et honore celebratum est. This is back to being part-canon, part-not, and with the return of distinct “Logres” and “Salisbury” sections, there returns also the OTT pro-Uther perspective of the “Logres” section. If you don’t mind slanders against Gorlois, and want to use this in your own campaign, everything in the first two paragraphs and the very last paragraph is GPC canon.
  11. Anno CDXC: Hoc anno pugna inaudita magnitudine facta est prope urbem Kaerlindcoit, quae aliter Lincolnia dicitur. Nam Octa Eosaque, ille Hengisti filius, hic Horsae, in Loegriam cum exercitu perrexit et Dei gratia ab Uterpendragon rege totaliter victi atque superati sunt, ita ut, Eosa capto, Octa ignominiose fugato, ex aliis Saxonibus strages magna faceretur. In eadem pugna Godefridus miles gregarius Sarisburiensis summa cum gloria cum hostibus conflixit; nam, cum Octa rex se ipse eriperet nec, sicut Eosa consobrinus suus a Gorlois duce, caperetur, nihilominus vexillum suum regale a Godefrido occupatum est. Gerontius autem infortunatius pugnavit; primo enim impetu graviter vulneratus est. Postea Britones in urbe Lincolnia convenerunt ad epulandum, et. cum cenabat, Uterpendragon rex Igernam, uxorem Gorlois, aspectavit et, sicut Neot, amore illius feminae incaluit, ita ut totam intentionem suam circa eam verteret. Itaque proceribus Loegriae praecepit advenire ad aulam suam apud Lotegarsall cum uxoribus eorum, quas omnes magnifice donis donavit, sed ex eis omnibus Igernae dona splendidissima atque pretiosissima dedit. Dum haec geruntur, Godefridus Gerontiusque, qui Rodericum comitem Sarisburiae ad Lotegarsall comitati sunt, compererunt quod spiritus quidam Meleri, sororem Godefridi, sequeretur, qui spiritus apparuit in figura Einion, qui maritus Meleri fuerat at a Madoco principe in monomachia occisus est. Per hunc visum Godefridus adeo commotus est ut nihil dicere posset, sed Gerontius spiritum rogavit quid desideraret; quo audito, missam pro anima Einion celebrari curaverunt. Deinde, Roderico comite aegrotante, Godefridus Gerontiusque apud Lotegarsall manere coacti sunt, dum omnes alii magnates cum comitatibus suis proficiscuntur praeter Gorlois ducem. Nam illum Uterpendragon rex abire non sinebat; adeo erat captus amore Igernae. Tandem Gerontius miles ab Ulfio duce ad Gorlois Igernamque missus est cum poculo aureo, quod Uterpendragon rex Igernae dari voluit. Quo dato, Igerna tam vehementer commota est ut maritus suus comperiret quod rex uxori verba impudica inseruisset. Itaque Gorlois confestim iratus est et ex curia recedere cupiebat, et cum consilio Godefridi militis, a quo Leget, cognatus suus Cornubiensis, consuluit, Gorlois regi dixit suos ab Hibernis oppugnari et ab eo petiit ut sibi domum redire permitteret. Quod cum permittere Uterpendragon recusasset, Gorlois cum comitatu suo sine licentia e Lotegarsall profectus est et ad Cornubiam perrexit Reis milite ductore, qui vir Sarisburiensis Godefrido consobrinus erat et ab eo receptus in hominem erat. Per haec factum est ut Godefridus quoque in suspectu haberetur. I’ve gotten a bit behind with these — we’re playing through 492 at the moment. As you can see, there was a lot to write, although I could steal a fair number of phrases directly from Geoffrey. A lot of this is canon, but none of it completely, and I’ll have to redo this year when I pull these together (pretty soon, as we are coming to the end of the reign of Uther). Octa was not captured in this version of events (I wanted the PK decision to go for Octa or the banner to matter), and so even the first paragraph is not quite right. (To make it canon, change Eosa capto, Octa ignominiose fugato to Octa Eosaque ignominiose captis.) After that, my PKs’ story was so thoroughly interwoven with the Uther-Igraine-Gorlois triangle that there’s non-canon material everywhere. Also, my running conceit is that the canon “Logres” stuff is told from a pro-Uther perspective, and when I redo this I’ll need to change quite a lot to make it suit.
  12. I’ve been able to push “High King” back before Pyle into the 19th century. -One possibility is that while I am moderately confident — still very happy to be corrected on the point by someone whose Old and Middle English are better than mine — that “high king” in English meant a “great/elevated/noble (etc.) king,” it might have been read differently in the 19th century. There’s one suggestive passage in Layamon, where the king of Iceland submits to Arthur and says that Arthur will be his “high king.” - More tangibly, though, there is something that I found in, of all places, an 1873 commentary on the Roman poet Juvenal (by Pearson and Strong). This is worth quoting: Rarely has a use of the passive voice been so annoying. Cite, you bastards! But It appears that someone by 1873 had tried to connect “Arthur” etymologically to the Irish title of High (Ard) King, and I suspect that this long-forgotten and fanciful theory is the origin of this idea that has so thoroughly cemented itself into the modern Arthur.
  13. There’s relatively little information in the court sections of the GPC that can’t just be gossip that PKs pick up, possibly dependent on an Intrigue roll at the end of the Winter Phase. The suggested things that people like Madoc say are often more like characterization notes. Early on, I think royal court should feel like an enormous deal to the PKs — wow, all these important and powerful people! “Duke Ulfius actually looked at me, because I was standing on guard when he called on the earl. The king’s best friend actually looked in my direction! I mean, I think he saw me. There was a cat near me. He might have been looking at the cat.“ They probably shouldn’t go too often, to preserve that sense of it being a big thing for them. That way, they can feel a real sense of becoming more important when they pass a high Glory threshold and you decide that Roderick feels that it sheds lustre to have them routinely form part of his entourage. If you want that to happen early, though, Roderick might well think it a good idea to have them accompany him to every royal court after the Great Sword Feast. But I do think it’s a good idea to find as many ways as possible to make those signposts (Notable, Renowned, Famous, etc.) translate into concrete differences in the player knights’ experiences.
  14. I think that what Call Me Deacon Blues is probably thinking of is another reference to Arthur in the Historia Brittonum: Est aliud miraculum in regione quae vocatur Ercing. habetur ibi sepulcrum iuxta fontem, qui cognominatur Licat Amr,* et viri nomen, qui sepultus est in tumulo, sic vocabatur Amr:* filius Arthuri militis erat et ipse occidit eum ibidem et sepelivit. “There is another wonder in a region that is called Ercing. There is located there a tomb beside a spring that is named Licat Amr and that was the name of the man who was buried in the mound, Amr. He was the son of Arthur the soldier (Arthuri militis) and he himself killed him in the same place and buried him.” This is in some ways more revealing than the earlier HB reference, because it’s in passing**. Y Gododdin’s reference to Arthur, which perhaps goes back to about this time (I believe that it is considered likely that the reference to Arthur is no earlier than the 9th or 10th century, as it is only in one version of the poem, but that it may well go back that far) also suggests that initially, the legendary Arthur was a warrior-figure. I believe it’s widely accepted by people who work on this stuff that this is the earliest Arthur that we can really identify, a legendary warrior about whom people told stories in 9th century Wales, who was apparently not a king in his earliest version. *The text that I am using (not a very good one) actually has Anir, not Amr, which apparently is a variant reading — it would certainly be a very easy change for a copyist to make by accident. I’ve changed it to Amr to correspond with what people prefer in discussions of this passage. **There is another reference to “Arthur the soldier (miles)” in the same section, but I don’t have access to that — for some reason it’s not in the Latin text to which I have access (probably because it’s not in all manuscripts). You can find translations online readily enough.
  15. Important fact about bears, and by “fact” I mean something that is not at all a fact, but that people in the Middle Ages believed — they are born head first and so have weak and vulnerable heads. This is a good bit of lore for the squires to discover and use to defeat the bear to make the adventure more interesting. Also, for God’s sake, change Sir Jaradan’s reference to the bear possibly being a “chipmunk” to something that actually exists in Britain. 🙂 But you can use the idea that no-one believes it’s an actual bear to justify squires rather than knights being sent after it. And people should be impressed that they killed a bear. It’s a big deal — bears were not normal everyday wild animals in medieval Britain, so this is very possibly the first bear that anyone in Salisbury has ever hunted. The game is set at about the time when they were probably going extinct.
  16. I think one shouldn’t oversystematize or suppose that there were definite rules that applied in all times and places. There was no “Committee on Knighthood” that met and decided things, and then laid them out clearly in documents that everyone could consult. Knighthood evolved over time, worked differently in different places, and to a significant degree its development was the product of struggle and disagreement, not agreement. As I mention somewhere in this, the Church did make a serious effort at one point to try to control the making of knights — weird from a modern perspective, but if one bears in mind that the clearest analogies to an “order” of people set aside from others that one could join would be found in the clergy, one can see how the Church might have a strong case that this should be their thing. There’s also the wrinkle that stories about knights — and in Pendragon those are of particular concern — are generally set in imagined pasts that may be consciously intended to be different from the present, and are shot through with highly idealized ideas about knighthood that are often intended to contrast with knights in the real world. But then those idealized views did feed back into the self-conception of actual knights. In some ways, the great age of chivalry is the 15th-16th centuries, not earlier. You really did have people setting out to be knights-errant then, for instance, inspired by reading romances like Amadis of Gaul (the appetite for romances in the early print era was enormous). Don Quixote is closer to reality than one might think.
  17. Paladin is more uncompromising than Pendragon when it comes to wanting you to play from the perspective of the source material, especially as regards religion, so I’d be prepared for that — I think Pendragon is an easier on-ramp in that respect. The mechanics aren’t identical, but are very similar. Paladin tends to be a little more complicated than 5e Pendragon. Paladin feels to me in some ways like it might incorporate things that started as house rules for Pendragon. 6e will apparently add complexity, so this may not be true when comparing Paladin to 6e.
  18. Of course, historically, part of what was at stake in Arthur as “King of England” was England’s claims to dominance over the rest of the island. I’ve mentioned before one of my favorite bits of Arthuriana, which is the Scottish authors who argued that, as Gawain was Anna’s son, he was the rightful heir to the throne, so in fact it was the “Scotsman” who should have been king, and Arthur was a usurper (whose achievements had been greatly exaggerated by the English). One thing to note about this is that the “of Britain” part in “High King of Britain” is also a subtle modern shift (assuming that it is modern). From Geoffrey on, there’s plenty of emphasis on Arthur as a king who has the allegiance of other kings, but those kings aren’t all in Britain, and while there is some ambivalence about the conquests on the continent, at no point, I think, is it suggested that Arthur’s conquest of Ireland is problematic. Which is unsurprising, given the context in which the narrative of Arthur’s reign took shape. I’ll mention that Pyle uses it only once, but his is still the earliest use that I have discovered.* It’s part of his adaptation of the bit in Malory where Lot and the rest refuse to accept the “beardless boy” Arthur as king. Thanks especially to jmberry1s for pointing out the likely pan-Celticism and especially the details about American Celtophilia, about which I know nothing. *Actually, there is at least one romance source that does call Arthur “High King,” but there’s a reason — it’s the Irish Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil, which not terribly surprisingly uses Irish terminology when talking about Arthur. And he’s not High King of Britain — he’s the High King of the World, and the significance of that is very vague. (In fact, I don’t think the work ever identifies Arthur as British, although I’d have to reread it to be sure.). This would not be where the use of the title by Pyle comes from, I think, as I don’t think it was translated before 1908, and it does not seem to have enjoyed very wide distribution, especially outside Ireland.
  19. My own interpretation would be that, since a knight is normally knighted by another knight, it’s not odd that Ellen isn’t doing it. What is odd is that Robert wants to be knighted by someone of lesser rank than himself, and his own vassal on top of that. In the absence of the king, you’d expect him to be shopping around for a still greater noble, or perhaps the king of another kingdom. Historically, there was a lot of competition between prospective knghts to be knighted by someone important. This comes up in the romances — for instance, in the Vulgate, Gawain is very insistent that he will be knighted by no-one other than Arthur. (Seriously, Gawain, stop being a $%#$ and think of your poor old dad’s feelings for once.) Being knighted by someone important isn’t pure prestige alone, as you will be thought to be more trustworthy, which has obvious practical advantages. But there is prestige in it, too, of course. So Robert is choosing to lose face here, and is making the extraordinary declaration that he regards one of his own vassals as the best possible person to vouch for his own honor. I think, as long as my PKs at that point are sufficiently glorious to make this credible, I will probably have Robert choose, not the one with the higher Glory, but the one with the higher Honour. Incidentally, in Scotland there is a case of someone being knighted by another knight (not the king, and not their lord) as late as 1402. No idea what the last known example in England is. What I want to work into my own game is someone who insists on being knighted by the Pope.
  20. Not in the game, in reality. The idea that Arthur was “High King of Britain” is very widespread. (Google it.) And obviously, the idea that Arthur was a king, but that there were other lesser kings who owed allegiance to him is a very old one. But that’s a little different from describing that by using “High King” as a title. The “High King of Ireland” was a thing; so was the “High King of Scotland.” But in English, from what I can tell, while it’s perfectly normal to describe someone as a “high king” (it goes back at least to Beowulf), that’s not a title denoting a king who is set over other kings — it’s a way of saying that a particular king was a great king. (Obviously, “Bretwalda” was a thing, but that’s not the same as using the specific phrase “High King.” In the Mabinogion, for what it’s worth, Arthur is once described as the chief of British kings, but in other places, the way that the collection prefers to conceive of Arthur’s position is as “emperor.”) So what I’m getting at is that I think that “Arthur, High King of Britain” is a recent invention. Happy to be corrected on the point! But if it is recent, how far does it go back, who came up with it, and what was the context? I’ve been able to push it back as far as Howard Pyle in (I believe) 1903. And if it starts with him, that would be interesting, because it would mean that a pervasive aspect of the story of Arthur as it is understood nowadays was the consequence of an American retelling. Which would be worth exploring. I’m curious in part because, as I say above, “High King” (Ard Rí) is a real feature of medieval Irish, and if this does go back to the 19th century or the very beginning of the 20th, then it’s fascinating that it would happen in the context of the popularization of real or dodgy bits of Irish legendary and historical items in the Gaelic Revival, which would seem to be the most likely place from which the idea was borrowed. But does anyone know more about this?
  21. Deleted my earlier thoughts after consulting the GPC and seeing exactly when Robert is knighted. Robert is knighted in 509. If you’re sticking with that, the answer to whom they would owe that status would naturally be to him, as he would presumably knight any new knights in that year. I’d probably play up that this bond is unquestionable, even if their homage and fealty to him is not. As a knight, Robert can knight, whether or not he is really the count, and the relationship between a knight and the knight who knighted him is special. Especially if one of the father PKs knights Robert, as the GPC suggests. Robert then proceeds to knight that PK’s son as his own first act as a knight. Not a dry eye in the house. 🙂 It’s more interesting in 496-508, when there would be no obvious single person, and new PKs have to ask knights for the honor. Whom they choose to ask in that period would send messages. Although as Robert’s knighting approaches, it becomes feasible to delay one’s own knighting until he can do it.
  22. So, Gawain. (Gawaine, if you prefer.) Pendragon Gawain comes across to me as a bit of an uneasy compromise. Everyone knows that Gawain is one of world literature’s biggest victims of the Worf Effect, both in terms of how formidable he’s portrayed as being, and more strikingly still, in how moral his character is supposed to be. He goes from being top knight — and there is a lot of material in which that’s what he is — to being downgraded to show how amazing Lancelot is. By the time you’re in the Post-Vulgate, Gawain is a complete bastard. Morally, Malory dials it back a lIttle, to the point where some people do praise the complexity of his “hero-villain” Gawain, but on the prowess side, Malory’s Gawain is pretty clearly outclassed by several other knights. Malory is obviously the chassis on which canon Pendragon Gawain is built, but there’s also an attempt to integrate the more positive Gawain. (I believe that Hall’s translation of the English Gawain material is recommended reading in every edition of Pendragon.) It’s an interesting question how well this works: I remember feeling a bit of whiplash in 3e going from the core rulebook’s Super Nice Guy Gawain to the Malory Gawain of The Boy King — the latter really does not seem like someone who would credibly develop into the former. And I think it’s always a bit difficult to implement, “He’s a very decent and noble person, with this one flaw — which leads him repeatedly to murder people dishonorably.” Arguably, the single most effective Pendragon Gawain was in 1e, when he was pagan. Wouldn’t work for me personally (no pagan knights in my game), but for an orthodox Pendragon campaign, making Gawain the greatest pagan knight gives him a clear role to play. So it’s pretty obvious, I imagine, what I’m going to propose. What if, instead of trying to mash up different Gawains, one picked one and stuck to it? Option 1: The easy option is the villainous Gawain — nothing significant about the GPC needs to change as plot points, just (in some cases) in presentation. But one could have a lot of fun with it, and it would work well with a weak Arthur who can’t bring himself to see how terrible his nephew is. And every really famous superknight that one takes off the table opens a space for a superlative PK to shine. Steal the stories of the positive Gawain and give them to a PK! Option 2: The radical one is to commit to having Gawain as the greatest of Arthur’s knights. Not necessarily the best in particular qualities — Chrétien likes to play Gawain off against his main characters. But overall, the most glorious figure at court after the king. This doesn’t have to involve eliminating Lancelot (there’s at least one story where he features but seems clearly lesser than Gawain). But it would involve reducing him to “the knight whose distinguishing feature is that he’s the queen’s lover.” And it might be a good idea to eliminate Lancelot and have Arthur brought down by going off to fight the Roman War (earlier thread), and the Grail achieved by Perceval alone (another earlier thread) — which indeed is one of those traditions in which Gawain repeatedly features as the foil to the main character and greatest “normal” knight. If one does option 2, one should definitely use Gawain’s origin story from De ortu Walwanii. (Which I’m doing in my own GPC playthrough, with some changes.)
  23. Honestly, aside from the practical consequences, I’d also think about a 1-point Honour loss (and Selfish checks, obviously). In the later middle ages, there were elaborate written contracts specifying in detail how spoils would be divided. In this period, it would be less formal, but breaking faith with an informal but fundamental understanding is still breaking faith in a way that will bother people. One fun detail that is early medieval is that people might draw lots for the division, because there was no mathematically exact way of dividing up by value what was, after all, a bunch of different material things. One could add a random element to battle spoils (e.g. £10 and a horse of some sort becomes 9+1d3 and a roll on the Captured Horse table) to reflect this and also maybe to cut down a little on the feel of everything being standardized by some bureaucratic Department of Division (Spoils and Ransoms).
  24. The rules mostly seem to be interested in what happens when a knight swears fealty to additional lords, not succession. But I personally would have them generate a new Passion. It is very possible that one might not be as loyal to the heir as to the previous lord, for instance, or maybe even more loyal. (Gorlois might not have as high an Homage (Uther) as his Homage (Aurelius Ambrosius) had been.) RAW a new lord is 3d6, but that’s framed in terms of fealty to additional lords, and seems too low, even if the relationship with the person who knighted you should be special. Perhaps one might use the rule of rolling 1d6 for every full 4 points of the old Passion, so that a PK who is famous for loyalty doesn’t lose all the time spent cultivating the Passion completely (and after all, to some extent the Passion is a representation of how loyal they are to their oaths, which is why Paladin collapses it into Honour). However, I don’t think they should have to generate a new Passion when Robert comes of age, because I’m fairly certain that their homage and fealty will always have been to him — Ellen didn’t have the PK’s allegiance in her own right, but because she was managing affairs in the name of her son. In fact, if PKs swear to support her, it might be regarded as a separate matter of Honour in addition to their oaths of homage and fealty to Robert. Happy to be corrected on the point, but while Robert can’t yet knight as a child, I believe that he can receive homage and fealty. Kings definitely could receive homage and fealty when they were children.
  25. Trading items is covered on p.183 of the core 6e book. Basically, the lord will pay full “standard” price for anything except armour, for which he sends them to the blacksmith, who gives them half price. Trading with a merchant is half price for everything, so the lord is the way to go. If it’s coming up a lot, though, I’d think about complicating what the rules there say a bit. For a start, their lord is, I believe, entitled to some of their plunder. I think the amount varied, but 1/3 is probably a good default. Second, this is dependent on being in good odour with their lord — if they are in favor, then the lord may estimate the third generously and recompense them decently for anything that they turn over to him, but if not, well, this is a less happy exchange. Or he may take his third and leave them to sell the rest at whatever price a merchant will give them. Depending on how realistic you want to be, you may want to take into account that arms do not necessarily survive combat undamaged. Knights who never think to give something out of their plunder as a gift to somebody perhaps deserve Selfish checks and a certain amount of snark from their peers. You are supposed to be generous.
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