Voord 99

On patronymics, don’t forget fitz. [EDIT: Oh, I’ve just spotted that you mentioned it. Apologies.] Fitz could also be used to form matronymics where the mother was notable, and given the inclusion of female knights, I think that a fair number of players might want to go with taking the name from the mother sometimes. (I must admit, “MacHywel” sets my teeth on edge - I’d keep Irish with Irish and Welsh with Welsh.) In general, I think there’s no “realistic” option here. One can disentangle - 1) 5th-6th century AD naming - 2)The tendency of people to give Cymric knights names that are from later Welsh. Cf. Irish knights - I believe (not an expert!) an actual Irish name from about 500 would have been e.g. Ivagenos maqos Cunavali, not Eóghan mac Conaill, although I think (think!) that by the end of the period that corresponds to Pendragon they would be losing the final syllables (to the delight of everyone who learns modern Irish and has to grapple with the initial mutations). -3) the fact that the “accelerated history” aspect of the game (11th-15th century England) moves from a period in which family surnames were not normal to one in which they were. (I think there’s room to do something with that. The first generation of PKs found their families and at that time there is no family name. The families take their names from the first PKs and the specifics of their careers. E.g., if a first-generation PK acquires a new manor, then the family can take its name from that, not the original one. This happened in the Norman Conquest - the de Clares didn’t take their name from wherever they were from in Normandy, but from their new landholding in England.) -4) Modern historians of the Middle Ages, for sanity’s sake, tend to refer to families by consistent names that weren’t necessarily in use throughout the period (e.g. Plantagenet) or, if they were in use, don’t appear consistently in documents in the way that they would in later times. To some extent, Pendragon does the same thing: Malory attaches “de Ganis” to particular characters, but he doesn’t talk about the “de Ganis house” (faction, clan, whatever) as a collective entity, and he attaches “de Ganis” only to some of the characters that we would refer to as part of that house. -5) The fact that names are in general one of the areas where the source material doesn’t reflect historical reality. Medieval romance is full of fanciful names, often ones more or or less reminiscent of classical antiquity. One consequence is that (although there are of course different characters with the same name), the repertory of personal names is wider than it was in reality. One reason why in reality individuals accumulate different by-names (some of which evolved into family surnames) is that there were relatively few first names in use, so that there were rather a lot of Johns (Hughs, Richards, etc.), and it was practically necessary to distinguish this John from other Johns - and this was often more important than fixing John as a member of a particular family. (For one thing, cousins could have the same names.) So, honestly, I think one can go with whatever keeps things clear for oneself and one’s players, and if there are no fixed rules, well, there’s no single reality here and what realities there were didn’t have very fixed rules in any case.

Anno CDLXXXII. Uterpendragon rex Loegriae ad Cadorium regem Somersetensem legatos misit argentum impetrare. Eodem anno, Godefridus, frater Germani, qui miles nuper creatus erat, cum Gerontio ad aulam regis Uterpendragon apud Lotegarsell perrexit. Ibi Meleri, soror Godefridi Germanique, adeo temeraria erat ut cum Madoco principe non sine impudicitia quadam loqueretur. Quo reperto, maritus Meleri, nomine Ennianus, victus a Madoco in duello mortuus est. Deinde Gerontius et Godefridus ad Cornubiam iter fecerunt; nam Godefridus mulierem Cornubiensem ducere volebat. In ea terra, hoc mirabiliter eis accidit. Forte in Neot, militem gregarium Gorlois ducis, occurrerunt, qui vir improbissimus amore insano captus Igernam, uxorem Gorlois, rapiebat. Illum in pugna debellaverunt atque interfecerunt, sed Igerna parturiente, in manerium quoddam, quod aliis maneriis nullo modo similis erat, refugerunt. In quo manerio anus erat, quae potionem mirificam in caldaria faciebat. Hac muliere officio obstetricis perfuncta, filia parvula ex utero Igernae nata est, et mirabile dictu tres guttae e caldaria in ore huius infantis ceciderunt. Quae puella, nomine Morgen, imposterum callidissima fiebat atque de artibus necromantiae et de invocationibus malarum spirituum permulta sciebat. Gorlois dux, maritus Igernae, tantam gratitudinem exhibuit ut Godefridum atque Gerontium magnifice donis pro meritis suis donaret, nam Godefrido manerium Neot, Gerontio ensem suum dedit, quem sibi Aurelius Ambrosius rex Loegriae beatae memoriae dederat. Quae cum accidissent, Gerontius et Godefridus ad Berkesciram quoque itineraverunt, ut in agros Australium Saxonum equitationem facerent. Eo anno hoc quoque accidit. Godefridus cum domum revenisset, repperit sororem suam Meleri videri fugisse. Those of you who can read Latin will notice that we’re diverging quite a bit from the BoU. Essentially, I flipped the Invasion of “Summerland” (here Somerset) and Passionate Prince adventures. (You’ll also notice that quite a lot happened in the player knight section.) When we get to the end of Uther’s reign, I’ll pull all the BoU canon sections of the Annales together so that they could be used in other campaigns, and at that point I can revise these years so that they match the official history. Also, any snotty classicist who shudders at argentum impetrare or other medievalisms – deal!

Depends how technical you want to get, but I believe wardship would imply far-reaching claims for Cerdic to have not only the right to administer Robert’s lands, but the duty of administering them, until Robert comes of age. There was no adoption possible in English law in the Middle Ages. (Adoption was generally not a medieval thing, unlike in the Roman period. I know less about the different systems on the continent than I do about England. But I believe that mostly they were not keen on adoption either, despite the much greater influence of Roman law.) So being a guardian of a ward was more like being their adopted father, both in law and symbolically, than it would be for us. Also, the king had the special right of having the underaged heirs of his tenants in chief become his wards (this comes up with Ellen in The Marriage of Count Roderick), so conceding wardship in this case would probably give Cerdic quite a lot of the appearance of having Robert as his vassal that he is seeking. So one might want to call it something other than wardship if you’re big into the “medieval law sim” aspect of Pendragon. (If you’re not, of course, none of the above has to matter at all.) Although Cerdic might try to pull one over on legally inept PKs. “Wardship? Oh, it’s not a serious legal thing. Essentially honorary, really.”

I think the candidates don’t all have to be the handful of powerful magnates who dominate politics, or their heirs. People marry up sometimes. Sir Blains is raised as a possibility in the text, at least in the Marriage of Count Roderick. But also one might consider a Sir Blains type who isn’t actually Sir Blains himself, someone who is not a great lord or king themselves, but is closely connected to one who pushes their cause. One thing that would seem likely is that some of the candidates are not themselves great lords or kings, or in their direct line of succession — they’re the brothers or second sons of the magnates. This sort of thing was not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Robert doesn’t try to become King of Ireland himself, he tries to install his younger brother. It’s more reliable in some ways as a way to build power than trying to amass everything in one family line. My players have latched onto Cornwall and are really interested in it, so I suspect I’ll be hunting around Meliodas and Idres’ families for a male relative who can fit this model. But I’ll also have an eye on Lot, Uriens, etc. - this is an opportunity to create possible connections for the PKs that I can exploit in later periods. Lot as a teenaged squire has already featured, so bringing him back in would be nice, even if Salisbury is a very long way from Lothian. I think one might also want to try to communicate the chaos of the period in some of the offers. For instance, there could be a marriage offer from a minor baron, or a knight, who legitimately “shouldn’t” be a big deal, but who has seized control of lands that have no lord, very possibly some of Uther’s lands, and has made himself a genuine magnate. Marrying Ellen or Jenna will help him secure his position by giving him a marriage alliance with an ancient family of unquestionable legitimacy that will support him. But Baron or Sir Ambitious is also precisely the kind of ruthless, charismatic, and competent military leader that Salisbury needs, and at least right now deploys significant resources that he will use in defense of Salisbury. The flipside of that is a painfully young nobleman with a great name and ancestry, but who right now has very little, and is seeking the marriage in hopes of acquiring the resources with which to retake his lands. This is, admittedly, a bit like the Rydychan Usurpers, and one may not want to duplicate the story. One could differentiate it by having it be a great, or at any rate great-ish baron with extensive holdings in Hantonne/Hampshire that have now been taken over by Cerdic, and whose other lands (what were his outliers) are some combination of small, not obedient to his authority, or too threatened or outright taken over by their neighbours to do anything. This is an opportunity for the PKs to do what’s right (from a medieval perspective) by allying with this deserving but objectively useless individual, since they have absolutely no chance of reconquering Wessex, and it’s only going to provoke Cerdic if Young Baron Exile marries Ellen/Jenna. But if they are sufficiently woolly-minded and romantic to back this, they see their idealistic devotion to the claims of blood rewarded when Arthur comes along and Somewhat Older Baron Exile is restored to his lands — and is very generous to the people who supported him when he had nothing. One could also have some fun with a succession crisis somewhere, where it is in dispute who is the rightful lord is after lord and heir both died at St. Albans. Both of the two main claimants want to marry Ellen or Jenna, and it has nothing to do with Roderick and Robert’s house at all. It’s because *Ellen* is descended from the family in question, and while by the strict rules of succession it shouldn’t matter, having a child who is descended from the family on both sides might in practice be the thing that tips the balance and gives the title to your child over your hated second cousin twice removed. Of course, if it’s Jenna’s marriage, the single most important thing is whether her husband tries to murder Robert to make his own son Count of Salisbury...

Seconded. I’m going to study this carefully as I work up to this year. This is one of the big problem pieces in the GPC for me.

Rereading the Wastelands adventure, I can see that Ringan’s question was actually something that Mr. Stafford noticed and addressed (p.168): “He [Pellam] had been considered invulnerable because he was the paragon of virtue. However, his wicked brother convinced him to adventure in the realm of Romance, and he sullied his perfect life.” I suspect that might be based on the detail in Malory that Pellam holds a feast that’s open only to knights who bring their wives or paramours. But I think I might like merlyn’s suggestion better, and it could make a good modern addition to the story if one made the Dolorous Stroke a consequence of Pellam’s failure to acknowledge the fact that his brother was wicked in the first place. Which immediately leads to the question — what would be a good way to make that a story about the player knights? Very much off the top of my head, I think the following might be a possibility that integrates it with the GPC. 1) Have an encounter with Garlon as a Forest Sauvage adventure during the Anarchy. Use this as an opportunity to have the PKs meet the Brown Knight of the Wilds a little earlier than his official debut and learn Garlon’s identity and relationship to Pellam from him, and also learn that Pellam is devoted to his brother and is blind to his faults. The plot might revolve around the PKs getting some sort of untransmissible (important!) way to overcome Garlon’s invisibility. 2) 515, before Balin’s adventure. The PKs encounter the Brown Knight of the Wilds again, who is seriously wounded (by Garlon). He is travelling to King Pellam to give him a final warning that he must cease to overlook Garlon’s crimes, or terrible things will result. But Garlon found out about this. The Brown Knight begs the PKs to complete his task for him. They have to overcome Garlon’s opposition to reach Pellam. (This is where the PKs having a way to defeat the invisibility that they cannot share with anyone else might come in handy for the GM.) When they get there, Pellam refuses obstinately to listen to this final warning. One could have the refusal turn on Pellam’s pride in his descent from Joseph of Arimathea - it is precisely because he is the most noble person in the world that he cannot envisage that his brother could be less than moral. 3) Years later, when playing through the Wastelands stuff and encountering the Brown Knight of the Wilds for the third time, he fills them in on what happened as a result of Pellam’s refusal and how it has led to everything that they are experiencing in that story. When they meet Pellam in that adventure, they learn how he has repented from his mistake. Weave in a brief encounter or two with Balin at suitable points in the course of other adventures, and have some sort of parallel moral test for a PK based on Proud/Love (Family) as part of the Grail Quest many years later.

Scattered thoughts:- - It’s an obvious point, but the mere fact of having the most noble descent tends to create a presumption from the medieval perspective that Pellam is morally a better person than everyone else, and this was still to a certain extent true in the Victorian era when Knowles wrote. I am far from certain that a reader in either period would have felt inclined to look for evidence to validate the king’s character in the way that we do. - Especially given the religious dimension to Pellam. “Worshipful” after all means “worthy of reverence” as much as it means “personally honorable,” and while “worship” was not yet an exclusively religious word in Middle English, it did already have religious uses among its range of meanings. In Malory, I think a lot of it is about the horror of striking someone who deserves reverence in a way that goes beyond even a normal king, because of who he is. What Malory says is “And King Pellam was nigh of Joseph’s kin, and that was the most worshipful man alive in those days.” So the context indicates that Malory means “worshipful” to refer primarily to Pellam’s descent and status, not his character. No “truest” - that’s Knowles being a Victorian sentimentalist. Malory is, as usual, much less soft-focus than his Victorian admirers. - Subversive reading: I note that in Knowles, it’s Merlin who describes as Pellam “truest and most worshipful.” Maybe he’s not, and it’s a cunning lie that Merlin tells for his own purposes... - I’d be interested in how many instances in the literature there are of someone being criticized for enabling a relative’s actions and being held responsible for not taking action to prevent them (as distinct from witholding co-operation). Might make for some useful points of comparison.

I wonder how many Americans have the strength of will to play through an adventure involving the “fae village of Boston” without feeling an irresistible urge to do the accent? It would be a different take on the world of Faerie, I’ll say that.

Here are some ways that I can think of to complicate that basic framework for your players, if you wanted. 1) I think it’s more than just the court of Salisbury’s relations with Silchester, because that would imply that Duke Ulfius always has a choice. It’s also a matter of Silchester’s position, and all the things that you say about how Saxon armies need to pass through Silchester also mean that Duke Ulfius is horribly exposed himself. Ulfius may say that Aelle is his ally, and he’s not Aelle’s vassal, but the facts of the matter are that he’s paying tribute to Aelle and not the other way around. It would make a lot of sense for Aelle to extract an oath from Ulfius to allow his army to pass through Ulfius’ lands. One way to play this would be to have Ulfius turn up and say essentially what he does in the GPC: it’s tribute, but it’s not vassalage, you should ally with Aelle too, the Saxons don’t get along. Putting the best face on it. The next year, envoys from Aelle arrive and, if anyone laughs at them and points out that they would have to march through Silchester, the Saxons smile and say that Ulfius has sworn to allow them to march anywhere they like. Alternatively, once London falls in 503, Ulfius is in a very unpleasant position. I might encourage the players to think that they can count on him until then, and then have it turn out that he practically can’t do anything from that point on. Worth remembering that Ulfius’ ability to do anything at all is limited by his vassals’ willingness to do in practice what they are supposed to do, and in the Anarchy that may mean that it is very limited indeed. Especially as he is, according to the Book of Uther, someone who has recently risen to this position of prominence because of his personal friendship with the dead king. It’s not like Salisbury, where you have landed families with long histories of loyalty to Roderick’s house. Players might develop very cordial and friendly relations with the duke’s court, and then find out that does them no good at all when Ulfius’ vassals tell him that they are not going to get raided on top of the tribute that they are paying, all to help those arrogant bastards in Salisbury. 2) It depends on exactly how you want to play Cerdic’s relations with Aelle, but if they are mostly hostile to one another, only getting along when Nanteleod poses a real threat, there is room to make the choice between good relations with Wessex and good relations with Silchester mutually exclusive. From Cerdic’s perspective, it is perhaps most important to undermine Aelle, and that might matter more to him than Salisbury per se. So a condition for good relations with Salisbury is that Salisbury raids Silchester or otherwise damages Aelle’s ally — especially as Cerdic not unreasonably might envisage that Aelle’s relationship with Ulfius will one day become vassalage if things go on as they are currently going. After all, one of Cerdic’s biggest strengths is that he has a reasonable claim to the throne of Logres — preventing situations in which Britons develop positions of dependency on Saxon kings who aren’t called “Cerdic” is politically desirable for him. 3) Early in the Anarchy, Somerset/Summerland should arguably be a bigger deal in the GPC than it is, at least if you’re following the history of the preceding years in the Book of Uther. Eventually, the king of Somerset has got Idres to worry about, but before that, he has a recent history of Roderick taking lands away from him and Somerset raiding Roderick in response. Presumably, the very first thing that happens in the Anarchy is that Cadwy takes those lands back and then maybe he pursues his own claims on other lands in revenge. So fine, you’ve got Saxons to worry about on the one hand - but from the other direction you have Somerset actively trying to conquer. This is, admittedly, complicated by the fact that Somerset is supposed to be this mysterious magical kingdom, but the BoU/GPC does not generally exempt the place from the power politics stuff. 3) One thing that I personally would stress is that the PKs’ most serious enemies might well be in Salisbury itself. The GPC presents this as a situation in which, once Lycus swears loyalty, that more-or-less ends dispute and from then on all of Robert’s vassals are united behind whatever the PKs advise Ellen to do. It really should “realistically” be much messier than that. (Obviously doesn’t have to be - the GPC itself specifies that you don’t have to run the Anarchy as about the high politics at all, and can just have the knights adventure in the Forest Sauvage if you like.). The PKs have recently experienced the highly variable nature of even a strong lord’s authority in the Gorlois-Uther story, so they should be prepared for the possibility that the same sort of thing not only can but probably will replicate itself at a lower level given the extreme weakness of Ellen’s authority. Pretty much any hard decision they make will have someone somewhere disagreeing with it, and finding various open or covert ways to withhold co-operation. Some particular stresses: a) Unlicensed castles. These were big in the historical Anarchy of the 12th century. One option might be as follows. A rich landed knight whose lands are mostly in the south and exposed to Wessex refuses to contribute to the walling of Sarum at the beginning of the period, and it turns out that they were hanging onto their treasure to build an unlicensed castle instead. They quite reasonably point out that they have the most need for it, and if and when there is a king they will seek a license for it, and if they fail to achieve that, they will dismantle it. But it is also the case that, if this knight resist the dictates of Ellen and her court, the PKs have no easy way to bring them to heel without a lengthy and not terribly practical siege. Even if this knight is quite sincere, if the PKs let them get away with it, that sends a signal to other and disloyal knights that they too could do this. b) Even if you’re going with the old centralized territorial holdings, you could give Roderick a couple of outliers with their own vassals. The reason is that, as Mr. Stafford noted on his website, those fall at the beginning of the Anarchy. That means that the Anarchy opens with Robert, i.e. Ellen, i.e. the PKs, failing to do something very important. This is exactly the sort of thing that other vassals might look at and seize upon as sufficient grounds for them to not live up to their obligations — some sincerely, but others using it cynically as an acceptable excuse. There is a real risk of a bandwagon effect in which Ellen’s authority unravels completely as a result. So what objectively stupid but politically necessary thing are the PKs going to do to shore up her authority? Pick a fight with Wessex, just to show that Ellen will fight to defend vassals closer to Sarum? Choose someone at random and make an example of them? One can make this worse by bringing in the lands that Ellen brought into the marriage. She is very possibly attached to them, not through sentiment, but because those are where the knights are who are most loyal to her. She may sensibly want to try to hang onto them despite difficulties, or possibly even want to abandon Salisbury for them entirely — creating a nasty contrast with what happened to Roderick’s outlier vassals. c) Actual medieval England was notable for the tendency of knights to have multiple lords, and my understanding is that in practice knights with multiple lords did not always neatly prioritize one loyalty in cases of conflict in quite the manner than Pendragon suggests, and were capable of allowing self-interest to dictate which loyalty they chose to regard as most important. The larger landowners very possibly hold some of their manors from lords other than Robert, and one can inject, for instance, a landed knight whom the PKs have reason to suspect is actually working to advance Ulfius’ (or whoever’s) interests over Ellen’s, even if in theory Ellen is their liege. c) There have to be at least a couple of knights in Salisbury whose forebears wanted to support Vortigern and in their heart of hearts never really accepted Ambrosius’ legitimacy — knights with low Hate Saxons scores that are outweighed by their attachment to Vortigern’s house. These might make good enemy figures for the PKs. What if there is a suspicion that a knight who has built an unlicensed castle in fact intends to use it to help Cerdic invade? Another possibility is that among Cerdic’s British knights are knights from Salisbury who fought for Vortigern, were stripped of their lands, and now want their lands back. They still have relatives in the county, some of them with high Love Family Passions, who have never really accepted the knight from Brittany or wherever who ended up with the land as its legitimate lord. They might not care much for Cerdic, but they do want Sir Chooses Sides Badly back as lord of Idmiston or wherever. d) Finally, and obviously, there have to be knights who just hate the PKs for some reason and are working against them. It could be sheer jealousy at how the PKs become Ellen’s favored advisers. Someone might connive to make the PKs’ plans go disastrously wrong in order to usurp their role at court.

I don’t know. It’s obviously different from how the GPC expects play to be. But I think there’s room for adding this kind of horror to something that’s already a bit of a genre hybrid. After all, the entire Anarchy is one single sentence in Malory. The appearance of weird and disturbing supernatural events can be seen as a symbolic reflection of the absence of a king. I personally am going to let my players dictate quite how things go, but if (as I suspect) they will be getting a bit bored with battles against Saxons at that point, I am provisionally hoping to play up more the way in which the death of Uther throws Logres itself into chaos with many people trying become king. Which is, after all, what Malory says, and what gives the Sword in the Stone episode its greatest significance. There is a whole subtext to the reception of the “historical” Arthur as a modern myth that flourished in the postwar era. Some of that’s admirable - Arthur as last defender of Romano-British civilisation against the Saxons reflects Britain’s self-mythologization of its opposition to Nazi Germany. Which was, you know, a very good thing. But some of that postwar subtext is not so great, at least from my perspective - many of the key texts in the rise of the idea to popularity appeared at the same time as the postwar backlash against immigration, and I think there is a connection there (which is not to say that it was necessarily a conscious connection on the part of any individual author). So I think it’s fine for GMs and players in the 21st century to revisit that element if they want and change its emphases, and rethink it as a different sort of myth. It’s interesting to me, for instance, that in BioKeith’s adventure, the Saxons are also victims, in a way, and the *real* enemy is something else.

And let us not forget that “Hector” is “Ector,” for more possible confusion. But that’s a very impressive family tree. I’d definitely like a thorough Book of Families that went through a bunch of these (choosing between the many conflicting versions, obviously). In some ways, I think it’s more important than maps. Geography is very vague in the source material, but while the specifics of lineages vary between works, it’s usually pretty explicit and precise how people are related within a given work.

No idea if the OP will read this, but... “Is the goat OK?” Merciful check!

A very quick skim of the relevant section in La Tavola Ritonda indicates that the Victorious Tower seems to be in a wilderness (diserto) called Spinogres (not the same as the knight Spinogres, who, confusingly, is also in the work). This all follows the Hard Rock tournament, which the GPC places in Clarence, so I’d cautiously* suggest that one could locate the Victorious Tower somewhere not too far from there. Perhaps up in the Welsh mountains. Incidentally, this makes Caradoc the Thirteenth somewhere about 85 in KAP when Tristan encounters him in (presumably) 543, if we suppose that he has to have been born about 460 to be a famous knight in Uther’s reign. *Cautiously. It was quite a quick skim, and my Italian is far from perfect. La Tavola Ritonda can be read for free in a 19th-century edition on Google Books, if someone with better Italian than mine would like to correct me. The edition has a useful index of names.

Anno CDLXXXI. Uterpendragon rex, cum tributum debitum non accepisset, exercitum contra regem Bedegraniae duxit et pugnam iniit. Rege interfecto, Uterpendragon Bedegraniam sibi subiugavit. In eodem bello in quo haec acciderunt, hoc miserrimum quoque accidit. Germanus miles cum cognato suo Brannud, qui pro rege Bedegraniae pugnabat, certavit et ab eo debellatus atque graviter vulneratus est, neque a Gerontio amico suo servari potuit. Itaque Germanus maestissimo modo in terra alienigenorum, a consanguineo suo occisus, de saeculo migravit. Erat vir religiosus atque pius, fidei amator, cui erat liberorum filia una. As before, if you want to use this in your own campaign, the first paragraph is canon from the Book of Uther (framed from a perspective sympathetic to Uther), and only the second part is specific to our campaign.

If you’re using The Marriage of Count Roderick, there’s an advantage to flipping this and making Leir’s Castle (Leicester), Edaris’ ancestral seat and the place where he has the strongest local roots. It gives Edaris a reason to have either a strong traditional affection or strong traditional hatred for neighbouring Bedegraine, which the knights will be invading later that year. So one can make the two disjointed events flow together a bit better. This is what I did in my most recent game, and it seemed to work pretty well, although a lot of it was because one of my knights rolled a grandmother from Bedegraine in the Book of Sires, and I wanted to build up to him confronting his cousins in the battle.

Anno CDLXXX. Pascentius Vurtigernii filius in Cambriam perrexit cum Gillomanio Hiberniae rege et ibi contra Uterpendragon regis fratrem pugnam iniit. In qua pugna Pascentius victus est atque obiit. Interea, dum haec agerentur, Ambrosius rex per perfidiam medici cuiusdam veneno graviter infirmatus est. Ambrosio rege aegrotante, Oisc rex Cantiae cum exercitu in Sarisburiam venit, et pugna magna facta est, in qua Ambrosius rex de hac luce migravit ad Dominum. Sed tamen Saxones per Gorlois ducis Cornubiae fortitudinem victi sunt. Uterpendragon, de Cambria reversus, rex factus est. Tunc primum Germanus atque Gerontius milites pugnaverunt in eodem proelio in quo Ambrosius rex beatae memoriae periit, et Deo adiuvante victores extiterunt. Mirabiliter accidit ut Hoel miles gregarius infantem quendam Gerontio daret, nomine Dornar, cuius parentes qui essent nemo sciebat. ...the name by which this text has been known, at least since Meissner-Maurenbrecher’s edition, Annales Salisburgienses, is something of a misnomer. The Annales are indeed much concerned with the doings of Salisbury and neighbouring parts of what is now Wiltshire, but, unsurprisingly, they consistently refer to Salisbury as Sarisburia. The mischievous suggestion in O’Carroll (1954) 673 n.34 that Meissner-Maurenbrecher deliberately misnamed the Annales Salisburgienses as a tribute to his native Salzburg can be dismissed as an insult to a pioneering, if frequently careless, scholar... If anyone wants to use this in their campaign, the first Latin section is canon from the Book of Uther, and only the second Latin section is particular to our campaign. There is one thing: I make it clear that Paschent dies at Menevia, which the Book of Uther does not seem to do (although I may have missed it). If you want to leave that out, remove atque obiit from the first section, following Pascentius victus est.

The Lordly Domains version has one classic motif that I personally intend to use: a young woman who will betray one of the castles in return for the PK agreeing to marry her, earning the eternal enmity of her father. (-1 Honour if you do it, plus Deceitful check if you promise to marry her and then don’t.) I’d suggest that in your version she could be Syagrius’ daughter. Let’s call her Ausonia. Ausonia saw one of the knights who were in the invasion of Frankland, unbeknownst to that knight, and fell in love with him on the spot. Give her a brother, Sir Apollinaris, who will escape and return at a later stage (allowing your players to kill off Syagrius).

The opponents in the Book of Armies (more likely to be integrated into the new expanded GPC than the core book, probably) could use a bit of thought, in a world in which knights’ Sword is capped by their Horsemanship when they’re not on foot. Things that were not overkill might become so now. On the other hand, the BoB’s Stand vs. Two is less scary with a flat -5 modifier. (Although I would still like a different result on Partial Success vs. Critical, one that reflects the partial success, since critical successes on Intensity happen quite often.)

Finished our first year, and for the amusement of my players I composed the following, and thought that I might as well inflict it on the forum-reading public here. Anno CDLXXIX. Transiit Ambrosius rex cum exercitu in Frisiam et interfecta est de Saxonibus non minima multitudo. Eodem anno Gerontius atque Germanus scutarii cum Pelinoro Cambrense ursum terribili magnitudine interfecerunt atque a Roderico comite ense et cingulo accincti sunt. The Annales Salisburgienses is a curious text, which combines a record of events of general importance with a strange additional interest in the doings of two minor families. Further, the Latin of the two sections is markedly different. This suggests that the second strand of material, in light of its more literary character, comprises later interpolations into a text of earlier date. But see Von Heissendorff (2015), who argues... (If anyone wants to use it for their campaign, the first bit is canon from the Book of Sires - only the second bit is particular to our campaign.)

On France, you could go full Richard Blackmore and have Arthur be motivated by appeals from the subjects of the French king to liberate them from a tyrant who is literally worshipping Satan. Or maybe not. (Amusingly, a somewhat fictionalized Clovis actually appears in that version, and he is the most perfect person imaginable. Because he’s half-British. I mean, obviously.)

There’s this bit (5.2, p.238) Gamemasters should keep the final number for the opposing side secret from the players; this allows for some uncertainty to keep them guessing about whether to withdraw due to wounds, to use inspiration in a given round, and so on. It’s not 100% (as it could be addressing using Inspiration for Lance on the First Charge vs. Sword in later rounds, or Battle, or Horsemanship). But the wording does make it sound as if the assumption is that Inspiration is for a single round, and that bit got lost in the shuffle at some point and was never made clear. It makes a certain amount of sense - after all, a battle round of melee is an abstraction of several different fights (different “tasks at hand”), and it’s not obviously the case that one should conceive of a whole battle as a single “task at hand.” So, RAW, I can imagine a GM ruling that Inspiration is just for this one roll anyway. Where I think the BoB rules make an undeniable significant change is that you can’t reuse a Passion in a battle. I’m wondering how people feel about that in the context of 6e’s more modest +5 bonus (but also lowered penalties for failing the roll)? It’s one of those things that I can completely see should be there from a balance perspective, but it bothers me, because it’s so antithetical to the source material, in which a single extraordinary knight can be extraordinary all day long in battles (=keep making the Passion rolls), and it just feels odd to me to treat a character’s Hate Saxons (etc.) as a Hero Point that they use up and that they should metagame strategically as a limited resource. I can see that removing Shock (if 6e is doing that - we only have the Quickstart to go on, obviously) would make a difference here.

In another thread, Hzark10 mentioned those recurrent long, long combats in which two knights fight for hour after hour. I imagine this has often come up here, or on the old forums, and I know that the old suggested rule in which tied criticals caused 1d3 damage to both characters was partly aimed at this. So I hope I am not reopening something which has been done to death, but I’m interested in seeing what people think of a little house rule that I’m considering adding to represent those situations, and, especially, if there are possible problems that I’m not seeing. And I’m also very interested in hearing about other things people have done with an eye to this. Obviously, you can handle it with narrative alone - just declare when two knights of great prowess are going at one another that the combat round represents an hour or more of real time. But given how prominent single combat is in the literature, I sort of feel that one-on-one combat between knights deserves some special mechanics at least as much as battles do. So... Tied criticals in single combat: When two knights (only) engage in single combat on foot (only), then tied criticals have a special significance. (This assumes that both knights are fighting with swords, or that neither is.) Tied criticals indicate that the exchange of blows lasted for a long time, at least several hours. (If it matters, roll 2d6 hours.) The following then happens. - Both knights roll their damage rolls once, and this damage (after subtracting for armor, not including shield) is inflicted on the other knight. Major Wound rules do not apply to this damage, which represents many small wounds taken over the course of the fight. - If both are alive and conscious, the two knights also make opposed Energetic rolls. What happens depends on the results. Win or tie. The knight’s vigour and ardour for combat is undiminished. Nothing changes. Partial success. The knight can still summon the strength and determination to keep fighting, but his opponent is wearing them down. Until they can rest, the knight is at -5 to all rolls. This result may repeat in subsequent rounds for additional -5 modifiers (-10, -15 etc.). Failure: The knight (possibly both knights) collapse with fatigue brought on by their great exertions. If there is no convenient person or object nearby on which to lean, they end up prone on the ground. They can no longer defend themselves. This lasts until they are rested. Something may interrupt the fight and prevent it from continuing. If not, knights who are able to continue fighting may not necessarily choose to do so. Player knights should be asked what they want to do before proceeding to the next combat round. For instance, a chivalrous knight who sees that his opponent is tiring (that is, will now fight at at -5) should probably at least offer them an opportunity to rest before resuming the combat. Or, again for example, perhaps the two knights want to express admiration for one another’s prowess and ask each other’s names, and so discover that they are in fact cousins. Thoughts? I do want the bit about taking damage minus armour, but I’ve gone back and forth in my head over whether I want the shield to apply to it or not.

The new multiple opponents rule affects giants in an interesting way. Well, semi-interesting. Assuming that their larger size allows four knights to attack at once, at least for the Standard Giant - and I’d rule that way - you can get a giant’s attacks down by -15, to 0. That’s boring, so I’d probably have to have the poor giant concentrate on one opponent. Who presumably would fight defensively while their comrades made unopposed attacks - this is where it would matter with the new initiative rules that you probably have a DEX higher than 5. And so get criticals a lot of the time, and tie the giant’s 1 in 20 criticals. So less than 5% chance of the giant getting critical damage - about 2.5% for the kind of knight who has any business taking on a giant. I’d be OK with double-damage criticals here, since, well, it’s a giant. It should seem like it can squash a knight with a single blow without too much effort. I wouldn’t force the encounter on players, but they can choose to take the risk and fight with the conscious goal of minimizing that risk. Not so OK with Saxon berserkers, though, where I find Morien’s points rather convincing. There’s something about the elegance of double damage as a mechanic that I just like, but there’s a real problem there. I wonder if I might play around with capping criticals at 12d6 for normal opponents (not monsters, people with supernatural strength, etc.), and see how that works. I’m a bit reluctant to take away the 10d6/12d6 from player knights, but I am less concerned about hampering the rare normal knight who gets their damage up to 7d6, presumably with focused use of Glory points.

The notion of Celtic women warriors as being a routine thing in historical reality (as distinct from the definite historical reality of individual women warriors like Boudica) is iffy, in part because there really isn’t some single unified “Celtic” society that remains the same across a wide geographical area over many centuries of time, and collecting scattered isolated references that relate to different places and different times and then synthesizing them into a single timeless “norm” poses a lot of problems. Here’s an entertaining rant on the subject of popular misconceptions about “Celtic” women (by someone who has professional qualifications in the area): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/08/the-myths-of-avalon.html But the thing is, there are women warriors in Irish myth - and for Pendragon how common they were there in reality isn’t as important as whether they are an accepted part of stories. (Not that them not being in myths should exclude them, of course.)

For me its not so much the morality of all that, at least in some Pendragon campaigns. There’s no doubt that Carnahan’s nationalist framing in Pagan Shore results in a version that’s a weird fit for an Arthur who’s supposed to be this wonderful positive figure. But, then again, in a way that’s an interesting little piece of subversion that puts its finger nicely (among other things) on the whole oddness of having language about how unaggressive and un-conquer-y the Cymri are, when they’re modeled after the Normans, of all people. And this is something that could jibe nicely with some Arthurs, especially the versions in which it’s not Lancelot-and-Guinevere that bring everything down, it’s that Arthur conquers too much. And I’d also be fine with the right version of a Pendragon hack set in actual Ireland in the 12th-13th centuries, if handled with sufficient care and sensitivity. But at the end of the day, I don’t really see what you gain for the mainstream Pendragon game that’s so valuable by mapping the real history of the Anglo-Norman/English* invasion onto Pendragon Ireland in the first place. You already have the problem of reconciling the “Ireland” of medieval romance (mostly the Tristan material, obviously) in which Ireland is pretty much exactly like anywhere else, with an imagined historical Ireland in the C5th-C6th, at the cusp between pre-Christian and Christian periods. That’s a big enough headache. Dragging in a third Ireland from hundreds of years later mucks this up worse, forcing you to do unnecessary things like introduce the Hiberno-Norse. And the way in which actual real people from the 12th century like Maurice FitzGerald travel back in time to be inserted into the narrative in the same historical positions - I find that horribly clunky. My single preferred option is probably foreclosed by the “historical” Arthur element, but it would be to run with the bit about Arthur the Briton in Acallamh na Sénorach and mash up Marhaus, Iseult, and co. with the idea that Arthur was a contemporary of Fionn mac Cumhaill. The Fianna are really very PC-ish. *It is a somewhat fraught question in medieval Irish history what you call them. Amusingly, the recent New Cambridge History of Ireland has two completely separate parallel chapters on the invasion, one for each of the two positions (which are obviously connected to larger disputes about how to frame the narrative).