Voord 99

These things are very different for speakers of different languages, too.

If you are a native speaker of English (I and all of my players are), Norman French can be a significant marker that says, “This is medieval!”   There’s a whole set of romantic ideas about England in the Middle Ages that dropping into it evokes.  Plus, there’s a really gut sense for the English-speaker that goes beyond that that French=high status, the language of the educated, aristocratic.  Speakers of lots of other European languages have those general associations with French as well, of course, but it’s really intense if you’re a native speaker of English. 

So a knight called “le Cure Hardy” — that sort of thing is for me really evocative of the High Middle Ages in general and of Malory in particular.  In contrast, I basically don’t care for the ethnic side of the game as much, and I’ve minimized it — for instance, there are no distinct “Roman” knights (well, there are in Rome, but not in Britain) in my game.

I’m also just dealing with my frustrations with how I was taught French in school, which was relentlessly focused on the practical and systematically ignored anything about France that was not about very boring practical uses.   Fun fact: I have read a lot of French in my life, and spoken French moderately often, but I have never actually written a letter to an auberge de jeunesse, despite the Irish educational system being convinced that was a critical skill that anyone studying French needed to have.  

So plunging into all this is fun for me, damn it!  I intend to inflict Sir Whatever des Nerfs Durs on my players very soon.

Yes, I use a lot of the Welsh names from there.  The various spellings are particularly helpful, as you can have several different versions of the same name for different characters.  (I’d also suggest that people look at the list of Ogham names if you want a resource that lists what Irish names would actually be like in the 5th-6th century.)

What would also be useful would be a thorough account of the different ways in which medieval romance invented all those vaguely faux-classical names and other made-up names that were never actually real names.  There are an awful lot of those in the sources, and I think they’re an important part of the color — once I get into the reign of Arthur, I’m hoping to make most names like that.  

Obviously, one can just come up with names that sound similar, but I’d be interested, admittedly largely for intellectual reasons, in a more “authentic” way (or ways, really) to create fake names.  If anyone knows of a study of that across the genre, I’d like to read it.  Doesn’t have to be about Arthurian material, specifically.

Yes, and one wants to be somewhat careful in modern French with a word that once meant “to kiss”...

People here may well know all about this already, but in case you don’t...

So, you’re an English-speaking Pendragon player or GM, and you want a knight to be “le [fun Old French adjective].”  A really useful resource here is the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, which can be searched for free online.  What makes it particularly useful is that you can search the modern English translations of words:

https://anglo-norman.net/search/

All adjectives will have the headword in the masculine singular*, suitable to be attached to a male knight.  You will have to do a bit of work if you want the feminine (“la [adjective]”), but the rules are fairly easy (sometimes easier than modern French).  The feminine form is often in one of the examples if one looks through them — if you have absolutely no French, look for la or une in front of a word, in which case it’s feminine singular.  That is, if the feminine is not given (the dictionary will give it to you if it appears in irregular forms).  Note that spellings were very variable, and the dictionary gives you a range, which is nice.

The AND isn’t an Old French dictionary as such — it’s a dictionary of the dialect of Old French spoken by the Norman conquerors of England.  But it’s fine for Pendragon purposes, especially since it includes Wace’s French (and it wouldn’t surprise me if Anglo-Norman French affected the way in which Malory understood the Vulgate).  As far as I know, there is no equivalent reverse-searchable dictionary of Old French as a whole that is easily usable by an English-speaker.  

The Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (translations in modern French) can be searched for an Old French word, if you want to check a word found in the AND.  It’s still a work in progress, and full coverage and full functionality are not yet there, but it’s useful if you have modern French.

 https://deaf-server.adw.uni-heidelberg.de

I’ve wasted a remarkably large amount of time finding weird meanings for words, so here’s a bit to throw into a scenario.  The PKs have to find a knight known as Sir Gilbert le Gentil.   Solution: he’s the knight with a male peregrine falcon (proper, which is very irritating for the poor bastard who had to paint it) on his shield.   It’s canting arms, since gentil can also mean the male peregrine falcon (or “tercelgentle,” a word which was entirely new to me).   Good chance for a high Falconry to shine.

EDIT: I’ve found another online Old French dictionary where one can reverse-search from an English translation, and one peculiarly useful for Pendragon, the Dictionnaire électronique de Chrétien de Troyes: 

http://zeus.atilf.fr/dect/

Also, an alternative to the DÉAF (above) once you’re exploring a word that you’ve found is to work backwards from Middle French: the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français links from its entries to several other dictionaries, including ones with Old French (which is how I discovered the Chrétien dictionary).

http://zeus.atilf.fr/dmf/

*Also nominative, but this is a point that is not likely to come up.

I really like the idea of having the players be squires through the death of King Ambrosius, so that their careers as knights coincide with the reign of Uther as king.

One thing I noticed playing through the BoU before the GPC is that one needs to give some thought to 485, since it is so thoroughly designed as a “training wheels” year.  The Marriage of Count Roderick helps a little, because if you run the Skirmish at Allington in 485 in that context, while it no longer serves its intended function as an introduction to deadly combat with other knights, it works excellently as the opening to Roderick’s Marriage: Act Two — The Vendetta.

But Mearcred Creek/Borderstream probably shouldn’t be the default big event for PKs that year unless you jazz it up in some way, because in the previous year they’ve just gone through two of the most interesting battles in the entire reign of Uther, possibly in the entire campaign.  (I cheated — I made 485 the first year for which I used the full BoB rules, with a PK leading a unit and making the decisions, so that it was still about learning new mechanics and also the first time that the PKs could affect the outcome of a battle.)  It might be worth dispensing with it entirely and give the PKs their own separate adventure, or possibly have them sent to experience the real action in Essex.

I think that’s an interesting one.  Looking again at the passage in Book 8, Teucer responds to Agamemnon’s praise by saying various things.  But at the end Teucer says that he hasn’t yet shot the “raging dog” Hector, and the narrator goes on to say that he was eager (that his thumos was impelling him) to shoot Hector.  (Which he fails to do, and Hector throws a rock at him, ending the episode.)

Hector definitely counts as a major hero, so that would suggest to me it’s not the case that killing a major figure with the bow wouldn’t count at all as a source of honour, but that it would count less.  Mechanically, I’d say that it would be less extreme a penalty to Glory than Paladin (1/10 Glory), but there would be a significant penalty.  Maybe 1/3?  Or it might involve an element of who you are: Teucer (who’s Ajax’s half-brother, but is a nothos, born from a slave or concubine) maybe has more room to develop a weapon like the bow and can retain more of the Glory for winning with it.

One interesting question is whether Homeric Glory should be zero-sum in some circumstances, including combat: defeating an opponent only increases your Glory because it reduces his.  Or somewhat - you a flat mininum for the victory, and you can add to that by taking some of the dead man’s Glory, perhaps increasing the amount taken if you both boasted beforehand and/or you taunt him afterwards, successfully despoil his corpse, etc.

That might mechanically match winning with the bow — because you didn’t really match yourself against the other hero, his Glory is not all that significantly reduced, and so your own increase is not as significant.  Nevertheless, you did win, and winning is rather important to the hero’s value system, so you do get some Glory.

Teucer is probably the most major hero on the Greek side who’s primarily defined as an archer, and he’s given a special archery-based aristeia in Book 8.  But he’s given a hard time for using a bow in Sophocles’ Ajax (admittedly by Menelaus, who is a %^$# in that play), and while that’s later, there are traces of a disdainful attitude towards archery in the Iliad, specifically in Diomedes’ words to Paris in book 11.  That being said, Agamemnon praises Teucer in very honorific terms in book 8, so any disdain for the bow can be overcome by the simple and very Homeric method of killing enough people.

So it’s evidently basically OK to use a bow on the battlefield.  Or indeed a rock.  The system damn well better have thorough and detailed lifting-of-huge-rocks-and-throwing-them mechanics.

You might want to modify the archery rules quite a bit in that case — they’re really designed for a game in which they’re something for GMs to use against players, and they’re well-designed for that purpose: straightforward and efficient, without having to remember or look up very much.

But they’re not really designed for players to use and find interesting.  At least for me, an awful lot of the appeal of the combat system lies in the opposed roll, which gives a great sense of two warriors clashing and allows for meaningful partial successes.  Beyond that, you have meaningful special tactical options in melee, defensive fighting and going all-out.  

Archers are basically rolling the same unopposed roll over and over again.  With longbows, they can be effective, but they’re always going to be boring.  Crossbowmen are potentially worse, because they may not even get to roll the same unopposed roll over and over again every round.  

When the Homeric game comes out, I’ll be really interested to see what it does with spear-throwing, because it’s a major skill of the Homeric hero, and Homer narrates combat with the heroes actively using their shields to block thrown spears.  And the heroes may look down on bows, but they’re acceptable battlefield weapons in a way that they’re not for knights, so bows should also be jazzed up as an interesting PC (PH, I suppose) option.

1 hour ago, Boamvndvs said:

When creating the knight I was unlucky rolling STR. I rolled 2d6 + 3 and got 6. (STR however gave the maximal possible value of 15, on 2d6 + 3).

I imagine that you did this, but just in case: after your rolls, you can add five more points (max of 3 with any stat), plus you can increase stats during the squire period.  Unless a player really wanted a challenge, I would immediately raise a SIZ roll of 6 to 9, and would then probably increase it further as a squire.

To add to Morien’s point: even with the Paladin RAW as written, a knight’s charger in this situation should be able to Gallop, for 24 yards = getting there in 2 rounds, so that the knight can attack on the third.  The archer has a 30% chance of hitting each shot (12-6 for the shield), so the archer will hit a little more than half the time on average before the knight closes if the knight is fighting as the knight expects to fight, on horse.  

Assuming ring mail, the average damage is trivial; when you go up to chain, half the time there is no damage at all.  On average, a typical knight will have no chance of being unhorsed.*  So even without more sensible movement rules, as long as a normal knight is on horse, this situation is still unbalanced in the knight’s favour.  This is a very brave archer.

Now at the end of Paladin, when 6d6 longbows come in, getting unhorsed by longbowmen probably happens a lot, and is no doubt very annoying for the knights in question...

*Part of what’s going on in the scenario is that the knight doesn’t just have an extremely low SIZ — they also have an average DEX.  If one takes the big risk of creating a knight with a low SIZ, then I think one probably should think about compensating by making DEX high.  Even if damage suffers, they can always hold off an opponent until a comrade can assist them.  A knight who is routinely knocked off their horse is not much good to anyone.  

I’d guess that this character will probably rarely make it through five rounds of melee before suffering knockdown (no better than partial success about half the time, the large majority of damage rolls qualify for KD, fails DEX 40% of the time).   Battles in particular could be horrific — being alone and on foot is not safe.

To add a bit, at the time when the game is (ostensibly) set, the fifth and sixth centuries, “Scot” (Scotus) meant “Irish,” and there was no concept corresponding to “Scotland” — the area that is modern Scotland would not have been seen as a single entity.

By the time when the game is mostly modelled on (11th-15th centuries), that had changed: Scotus meant “Scottish,” there was a Kingdom of Scotland, and Scottish identity had come into being (which is not to say that medieval ethnic identities worked the same way as modern ones).  So Scotland appears quite a bit in the actual Arthurian sources, which — to the extent that they have clear geography at all — tend to project the geography of their own day onto the imagined past.  Geoffrey of Monmouth has a fictional origin myth for Scotland (Albania) that pushes it back until four generations after the Trojan War.  One amusing thing is that Scottish writers in (IIRC) the 15th-16th centuries latched onto the version of Gawain’s origins in which he is the illegitimate son of Uther’s daughter Anna and claimed that Lot had been legitimately married to Anna — and that therefore Gawain, not Arthur, had been the rightful king and that Arthur was a usurper (and also not anything like as all that as the English said). 

It’s one of the cases where the conflict between history and legend in the game is fairly strong, and a game that kept closer to the sources could certainly get away with having a Scotland (which one might call Albany — Albany in King Lear is an echo of Geoffrey).

1 hour ago, Tizun Thane said:

Thanks for quoting my opinion about it 😉

You do not cap combat skills with horsemanship when your game is about knights. It's an abomination. ^^

I can see that, but, weirdly and perversely, it’s because it’s a game about knights that I like it.  I’ve been playing with it through seven years of play now, and with my players, what it does is essentially ensure that they keep raising their Horsemanship to match their highest weapon skill.  Which suits my image of knights, people who have been trained from a young age to be cavalry warriors and who can reliably perform difficult equestrian feats even under the stress and confusion of combat.

You do have to go through the NPC knights and lower their Sword and raise their Horsemanship, though.  15 is now a bit amateurish.  I’ll be curious to see what happens when the knights have a few more years under their belt — I’d speculate that the biggest impact of the rule might be that a Sword skill of 21 is really good, and higher than 22 becomes unlikely for any PK.   (After all, you’re looking at 6 Glory points to achieve Sword 23 and Horsemanship 23, and you probably won’t reach 20 until you’re already pretty experienced.) 

This affects the problem with the Book of Armies having some very formidable opponents.  They become more formidable still when PKs can’t just send their Sword skill into the stratosphere as quickly as possible to ensure that they always get their shield bonus.  So far, I’ve had to be pretty generous about picking weaker options in all those “GM rolls X and picks one” situations from the BoB.  In 6e, it might be necessary to redo all of the BoA to reflect that knights are not going to be rolling a 20+ weapon skill as often.  

There’s also a question about whether you should give an experience check for Horsemanship when it was capping a skill — I tend to think that one should, at least if it was in something like a battle, but I’m on the generous side with experience checks.

Anno CDLXXXVI:  Hoc anno Uterpendragon rex apud Sarisburiam curiam Paschalem tenere decrevit.

Itaque Seriol dapifer Roderici comitis, quod Sadinal dapifer regis aegrotabat et ipse festum debitum ordinare debebat, Gerontium Godefridumque petiit salmonem quendam captare.  Quem cum retulissent, anulus aureus in eo mirabiliter repertus est ab Uther rege.   Sed in eodem  festo  in quo illud accidit, accidit quoque hoc mirabilius.  Ille ensis, quem Merlinus in paludibus Avallonis adeptus erat, ab eo Uther regi datus est; quo viso, omnes praesentes mirifice stupefacti sunt.  Postea Corneus dux de Lyndesey adeo commotus est aspectu illius ensis ut Uther regem Loegriae in regem Britanniae eligere vellet.  Nam antea, quamvis Uther dominus suus esset, id Corneus facere recusabat.

Cum Gerontius ad partes septentrionales Loegriae cum Uther rege iter fecisset, ad Falegantem regem missus est eum rogare num ille quoque Uther ad regale culmen electurus esset; quo cum advenisset, ei a Falegante corona aurea ostenta est, quam intactam Falegantis dixit indicio futuram esse quod Britannis non opus esset rege Britanniae.

“In this year for the first time, one finds a combination of the two strands of material.  Elsewhere the interpolator does not seem to have often been excessively concerned about integrating the new additions into the earlier chronicle.  Reconstructing the original text of the first Annales is hardly possible for this year, although for a speculative attempt see…”

The above contains a version of the Great Sword Feast (one year early), and also a reference to the Duke of Lindsey agreeing to elect Uther High King afterwards.  But the PK’s main adventure was so attached to the feast that it wasn’t practical to separate out the GPC elements as their own introductory paragraph that could be used in other campaigns.  I’ll redo it when I get to the end of Uther’s reign.

Just to add a bit on the vulnerability and the difference between Pendragon and D&D.  HP in D&D can only really be conceptualized as some sort of abstraction of your chance of dying or the extent of narrative protection, or whatever.  HP in Pendragon are called the same thing, but they have a much closer resemblance to being a mechanical representation of how tough your body actually is.   You are never not vulnerable, even in armour.

In Pendragon, at least at the start when damage reduction is capped at 19, you pretty much always *can* be vulnerable if your opponent criticals.  Even with the new critical rule, a 5d6 opponent will be doing 9d6 on a critical  (In my game, they’re still doing 10d6.)  And when mounted, there’s a sneaky +1d6 built into that because of unhorsing.  

At that point, if there’s a roll towards the top of the range, 50ish, even a chivalrous knight with 20 Sword has just taken about 30 points of damage.  Which if their SIZ and CON are decent might not kill them outright, but will 5/6 times cause them to lose a precious stat point, and will make them unhealthy — and they may die of their wounds afterwards.  

(Admittedly, the system for that is a bit of a problem, because one has to stop the game and make potentially quite a lot of the same roll over and over again.  It does a great job of representing what it’s supposed to represent, a person hanging on between life and death, but it can go on for rather too many rolls to be interesting.)

Now statistically, that takes a run of rolls all going the right way (or wrong way...).  But you’ll be rolling for combat over and over again — it will happen at some point.  If you put your players up against inspired famous knights (or comparatively ordinary opponents in the Book of Armies :)), the probability of that sort of thing will go up dramatically.

Out of armor, that all translates into being horrifically vulnerable.  One thing that the game does really is make one viscerally aware of why it’s dishonorable to attack an unarmed knight.

EDIT: Also, the new rule (which not everyone likes — I know that Tizun Thane considers it an abomination :)), that Horsemanship caps combat skills when on horseback, does an awful lot to slow the growth of Sword above 15.  So if you’re restricting training in high skills, and are also thinking of using that rule, I’d bear in mind that the effect of any restriction on training will be almost doubled unless your PKs are going to be fighting on foot a lot.

13 hours ago, Leingod said:

It could be a thing where you tell the players from the beginning, "None of you are making it out of this fight alive" and tell them this is about getting to decide how they die and what they do in this doomed final battle. 

Yes, I think it would only be fair to tell the players.  One of the problems with the GPC is that a fair bit of it, especially early on, consists of scripted events where the PKs can’t affect anything.*  But in this particular case, they will all know that Arthur is going to have a decisive victory, so if they’ve stuck with fighting against him, it will probably not come as a surprise that it will end badly.

*This is a problem with using the BoU, because it extends the period, so that 487 feels like 492.  I just did a very short version of the Lindsey Embassy (in 486).  Even as a brief coda to a year in which a lot of other stuff happened, and the PKs had their own separate adventure, I still got the question about whether there was anything the PK could have done to change the King of Malahaut’s attitude, and had to admit that there wasn’t, although I would have allowed them to impress the king and make useful contacts for themselves for the future.

I’ve already decided that when it comes to the Treason Trial, they’ll have a chance to avoid it happening and also that if it does, their decisions about how to answer and die rolls will matter — they may end up being condemned.

1 hour ago, Morien said:

I would actually be more worried about the players ending up on the Saxons' side at Mount Badon, than whatever side they choose in the unification war.

Saxons! p. 96: The Battle of Badon ends the Saxon campaign with the glorious deaths of its player characters. Their descendants will be oppressed for years to come, but may have the opportunity to join Arthur’s courts as knights.

I think - in the perhaps unlikely event that the campaign gets to 518 with them still on the Saxon side - that’s more-or-less how you probably have to play it.  

Or a modified version.  Any British knights who fight on the Saxon side at Badon die — the best they can hope for is to die at the hands of someone famous (no shortage of possibilities).  However, Arthur (Merciful 17+) spares the lives of their children, and  has them brought up to be knights at some loyal court, and — who is to say? — they may one day earn their father’s lands or other lands once again by their heroic deeds.

Honestly, it all sounds great to me, too.  Tragic dilemmas like liege lord vs. family are exactly what I like about Pendragon.   think a big question here is, what Passions are they famous for?  This seems to me to be the sort of situation where the downside of having that Passion that you use for inspiration becomes relevant.

Either way they go, it’s a story, and whichever tie they betray, that’s consequences for generations down the line.  It may well be a good idea to adopt Morien’s advice of having Robert go with what the PKs want, to make siding with their parents and the Saxons a choice that they can make.  But I’d suggest that, since it’s not what Robert wants to do, he should hate them for making him do it — at least if you’re using his GPC Passions and characterization in the text.  And I think it should be obvious that they are making him do it, that he is only doing this because his position as the new earl is so weak that he cannot afford to defy his most important vassals.  The consequences if they side with Arthur over their families are also pretty obvious.

No matter what, Arthur will later on no doubt have a lecture about how it illustrates the importance of some knightly value, the smug bastard. 🙂

2 hours ago, Tizun Thane said:

According to the legends, there is one honorable way to do it. You give back your lands to your lord, saying publicly he is not a good lord, and you can not be his vassal anymore. Of course, it's a bit drastic...

Rydychan potentially gives them a bit of flexibility here.  The campaign can fairly readily continue by relocating them there, perhaps as household knights of the Countess until heiresses etc. become available.

Of course, the fact that something is dishonorable does not stop characters in romance from doing it...  Betraying your lord can even be presented as the right thing to do — I’m thinking of that person (the name currently escapes me) who falsely swears loyalty to Claudas but betrays him out of a higher loyalty to the family of the dead Ban.  I personally like to interpret that as an Honour vs. Loyalty conflict, mechanically (he never generated a Loyalty Passion to his new lord, and kept his old Loyalty Passion instead, but is bound by his oath as a matter of Honour nonetheless*).   But I can see that one might alternatively mechanize it by mitigating the Honour loss (but absolutely not removing it entirely) as an unusual case in which the demands of Honour are more complicated, pretty much the sort of “good reasons” exception that you suggest.  Not sure if this situation offers any room for that sort of “exceptional case” thinking, though.

EDIT: I’ve been trying to track the episode down — it’s been many years since I read it — and I’m a bit worried that either I read it in a modern retelling, or my memory is simply garbled and wrong.  Honestly, I think I was thinking of Banin, and forgetting that he adds the condition to his service to Claudas that he can leave whenever he likes.  So ignore everything in italics, pretty much — I’d interpret this in my game as him never generating a Loyalty passion and preserving his Honour scrupulously by being legalistically correct about the exact details of what he swore.

*This is not the RAW: the rules are clear that Honour is supposed not to apply if it’s covered by another Passion and that a character in this situation has to generate a new Loyalty/Homage.  I use Honour and Loyalty a little differently from the rules.

I think it’s not that much of a stretch in the GPC minus the BoU, as Merlin is fairly clearly the only reason why Uther is so generous, and in the GPC I don’t think that Uther has ever been shown going against Merlin’s advice up to that point.  But once you bring in the BoU, it does get a bit difficult to reconcile with that Uther.

As far as upsetting the other dukes, though, I think one can counterbalance that with the likelihood that the great lords in general are perhaps not entirely happy to see the king crack down on any one of them.   Indeed, some of them may well have been discreetly pleased that Gorlois has not been turning up when he’s supposed to — it sends a useful message to the king, and the great thing is that they aren’t the ones sending it.  So Uther ending up having to reward Gorlois might not bother them too much, especially if it prompts the king to be appropriately generous to them for their loyalty.

The BoU helps on this point, because it fleshes out the picture and makes it clear that Gorlois has plausible and defensible (in my campaign, genuine) reasons for not turning up in each instance.  Also makes it clear that Gorlois saved the kingdom from disaster as recently as 480 (and that then Uther was a [expletive deleted] about it, which probably did not endear the new king to at least some of his nobles).

18 hours ago, BioKeith said:

...Indeed, Margawse arrived in the city just in time for a great feast that Arthur was holding. Sir James quickly saw a place sat for her at the high table – giving up his own seat to her...

...James saw a benefit to appeasement however, and so Arthur invited Margawse to remain at Carlion for the summer....

What I’m getting from this is that the downfall of the realm is ultimately all Sir James’s fault. 🙂

On 2/22/2021 at 5:56 AM, Morien said:

https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/gem/index.htm

Translation by Sebastian Evans (1904)

[snippage]

I am more than happy to admit that I am not reading the original Latin (nor can I) and the translation might be out of date. I am simply commenting on the translation I have easy access to.

Oh, not to worry.  There’s a lot more interpretation going on in pretty much any translation than is apparent to the reader who isn’t comparing it systematically with the original.

Evans was an interesting figure, a poet, painter, journalist, and barrister aside from his activity as a translator (from multiple languages) — one certainly can’t say that he was overspecialized.  It’s not impossible that he was translating a bad text accurately, but I have to wonder if as an Englishman at the height of the British Empire he translated (perhaps unconsciously) in a way that minimized the possibility of negative readings of Arthur’s behavior.  If I’m ever in a position to look at the edition he used (San-Marte’s, 1854), I might see if a comparison can turn up other instances.

Thank you — I assume that the Latin Reeve and Wright print for “then” is tunc? 

I’ve had time to sort out what the different versions in Hammer represent, although it’s clear that as an edition of the First Variant Version it’s got problems, and it’s been superseded.  But anyway, it’s clear that tunc is the vulgate reading as well as the First Variant Version reading, and it looks from what Ringan says that Reeve and Wright confirm that tunc is the correct reading.

Upshot: “at the end of this time” looks like it is either a moderately serious mistranslation — in which case, I’m curious as to who the translator was —‚ or else is translating a copyist’s error in some manuscript somewhere (which would be more forgivable).  In either case, it’s misleading at best: Geoffrey is more likely saying that Arthur increased his household during the twelve years, and he absolutely is not unambiguously saying that it came at the end of the period.

Even more nitpicky observation: the  Variant Version of Geoffrey edited by Hammer (the only Latin text available online, unfortunately) doesn’t say, “after this time” — it says “at that time, then” (tunc), which can mean “next,” but in this context would more probably mean that Arthur increased his household during the twelve years.  (It is not precisely equivalent to English “then.”). 

“At last” (denique) in this version fairly clearly means “towards the end of the period of peace,” as it starts the narrative of how the peace comes to an end.  (When I say, “in this version,” this bit is not in all the manuscripts of which Hammer provides the texts, and right now I don’t have time to sort through his introduction for how they relate to one another and to other versions that were out there.  At any rate, there are at least two different versions of this section, one that seems to present Arthur somewhat negatively for ending the peace, another that doesn’t.)

So as far as the versions of Geoffrey go that people were actually reading in the Middle Ages (as distinct from what he originally wrote),  there were Geoffreys in circulation who were saying that it was 12 years of peace and then the Norwegian war begins.  That broadly seems to be how Wace understood Geoffrey, although he’s not 100% explicit.  

I’m curious as to what Reeve prints in his 2007 critical edition, if anyone has access to it.  I may buy it, as it’s not too expensive in paperback, and it doesn’t seem like my local university library will be opening any time soon.

When I’m done with the reign of Uther, I’ll pull the canon bits together and revise them so they all actually are canon (I’ve moved some events around), and at that point I’ll provide a translation.

Anno CDLXXXV: Uterpendragon rex suum exercitum direxit contra Australes Saxones.  Sed postea nuntii venerunt, per quos cognovit quod multos Saxones a Frisia advenerant et terram Lucii ducis invadebant; a quibus milites Lucii miserrime victi sunt.

Eo anno Gerontius Godefridusque, milites Sarisburienses, pugnabant cum nonnullis militibus Cilcestriae, qui in Aldintonam equitationem faciebant.  Sed fortuna Gerontium Godefridumque victoria privavit, et non solum a militibus fugati sunt sed ensem Gerontii, quem a Gorlois duce ceperat, amiserunt.

Deinde a Roderico comite ad Ulfium ducem missi sunt, quasi ei dona daturi, re autem vera ut diceret Helenam, uxorem Roderici, iam gravidam effectam esse; nam Rodericus putabat id factum inimico suo Blaines, qui Levcomagi senescalcus castellanusque erat, maxime displiciturum esse.  Milites autem, cum ad Cilcestriam pervenissent, didicerunt quod Ulfius dux abesset, et, cum revenirent, comitabantur a Blaines.   Hoc iter dum faciunt, Gerontius contra Blaines iratus est, quem culpabat quod patruus suus Ithel caesus esset.  Tandem monomachiam fecerunt, in qua Gerontius superatus est.

Deinde Gerontius Godefridusque, a Blaines in silva quadam relicti, hanc rem mirabilem experti sunt.  Collem aut tumulum viderunt trans rivolum quendam, in quem erat mulier cui erat caldaria magna.  Prope dormiebat cervus albus, pulcherrimus et forma et magnitudine, atque virgo milesque, uos brevi tempore milites Sarisburienses agnoverunt; nam illa erat Anna, filia Uterpendragon regis, hic Meliodas Cornubiensis, filius regis Felicis.  Godefridus cum appropinquavisset, extemplo somnum invitus cepit; eum Gerontius iuvare conabatur, cum ille quoque dormire per magiam coactus est.  Ambo milites idem somnium somniaverunt, de homine, cui caput esset corvi; qui eis videbatur primum vinum praebere, quod recusarent, deinde aquam, quam, cum bibissent, putarent meliorem esse quam omne vinum.  Cum autem surrexissent, Anna ab eis impetravit ut firmiter promitterent se de ea re tacituros esse.

Denique Godefridus atque Gerontius, postquam revenerunt, cum exercitu regis in terram Australium Saxonum perrexerunt, et in proelio quod ibi factum est apud Mearcredesburne Gerontius ab equo suo deiectus est, Godefridus milites nonnullos Roderici sine dedecore duxerunt.

As usual, the first paragraph is canon, now from the GPC, and can be used in any campaign that has the Battle of Mearcred Creek/Borderstream.  Nerva made me feel guilty, so I stuck in a couple of extra medievalisms this time.

39 minutes ago, Tizun Thane said:

For the record, the involvement of Tristan with Arthur's court is much older than the Prose Tristan. It's a shared universe even in the time of Béroul or Thomas. In Beroul's work, Yseult swears an oath in front of the king Arthur to "prove" she is faithful to her husband for example. It's the infamous ambiguous oath.

That’s what I get for posting from memory without checking!