Voord 99

I don’t really expect this, but I’d like to have more explicit discussion of toolkitting mechanics and ways that your Pendragon game can be different and discussion of how to achieve that, and what the effects of X change might be. E.g., instead of throwing out “Which Arthur is this?” but only really providing much support for one specific kludge-together of the “historical” Arthur, Geoffrey, medieval romance (disproportionately Malory), and a fairly close simulation of law and custom in the actuality of later medieval England, lay out a few different possible settings and what you could keep or not keep from the GPC, keep but modify, etc. Also, this is a bit parochial (I’m from Ireland), but I am not really a fan of official Pendragon Ireland, and since presumably there will be an Ireland supplement book, that’s an area where I think there’s room for significant changes without it having to disturb much else.

Way back when, I was quite generous with experience checks. And I’ve still been doing that in my just-started game, because I trust my players not to do the “knight slaughters helpless peasants to get a check in Sword” thing, about which the rules express a (reasonable) concern. I’ve always felt that the BRP experience mechanic is already elegantly self-limiting, especially when you only check for an increase every year, and demands less attention from the GM than, say, Glory awards. There are also squire creation rules in the Book of Knights and Ladies, but IMO the later ones in Book of the Entourage are better. They make squires very fragile at the start, though, so someone going from playing a knight to a fresh fourteen-year old squire may find it a terrifying experience if they end up doing any fighting at all. Might be better for your players’ psychological condition to promote an older squire to a full character, rather than giving them the full squire experience.

I think it’s one of the things I am most likely to adopt, in combination with DEX for unhorsing. Mechanically, it’s an elegant solution to the problem that (a) you want Horsemanship to have a vital mechanical effect in combat and not just be a skill for special tests when the GM remembers to devise them, but (b) DEX also has a tendency not to matter enough - which has produced the push-pull between “roll DEX to see if you‘re unhorsed, no, wait, roll Horsemanship, no, let’s roll DEX, actually...”. This way, both matter. But it’s also a partial solution to something that has bothered me for a long time, which is that Pendragon doesn’t clearly reflect one of the recurrent things in Malory, which is people differentiating between how good a knight is on horse versus on foot. To the extent that this is mechanically meaningful in Pendragon , it was in the Horsemanship unhorsed-or-not roll, if you were using that, and in the separate Lance skill, but not really anywhere else. I’ve been playing around with the idea of separate Melee (Horse) and Melee (Foot) skills. But using Horsemanship to cap weapons skills gets one a lot of the way there - it definitely is possible with this rule to describe someone as clearly a better knight on foot than they are on horse, although perhaps not vice versa.

There’s obviously room for different games to play differently. (For what it’s worth, my personal preference is, female knights are exceptional, but if people, male or female, play one, I won’t foreground it as an issue. Because I am primarily interested in the game as genre emulation of medieval romance.) But I think you’re exaggerating the extent to which this is a radical change: Twentieth century thinking allows for extrapolation where the Middle Ages did not. The Arthurian legend has survived for 1400 years because it has been able to adapt to the needs of its audience. There is certainly room in the Enchanted Realm for women knights today. [emphasis added.] - Knights Adventurous (1990), p. 80. It’s absolutely not the case that Pendragon has ever required that the GM allow female knights and make them a recognized “thing” in its world, but, thirty years ago, it was strongly encouraging the GM to do so, and using language not unlike Kung Fu Fenris’s “evolve” to describe that. I’m not sure that what Mr. Larkins is describing adds up to that much more in its actual effect than if you relocated Kenilworth Castle to Salisbury.

Hey, “cosmopolitanism” is definitely staying true to the source material. Arthur’s court is supposed to be so great that it attracts knights from all over the world! One thing about Pendragon is that its Arthurian world is rather small. I want the Gawain who is knighted by the Pope at 15 and goes off and has adventures in the Middle East* before he even finds out who he is. *I don’t actually, at least not the last part, because it’s basically the Crusades. But I do want something of medieval narrative’s love of handwaving long distances and just getting the hero to exotic and very vaguely understood lands on the other side of the known world without sweating the details.

Since the “historical” Arthur possibly has more to do with the cultural politics of 9th-century Wales than it does with anything that really happened in Britain in the C5th-C6th, that’s not automatically relevant.* But in any case, Pendragon’s version of paganism is quite unlike anything that is likely to have existed, and is more like modern paganism, that wouldn’t matter in any case. *See Guy Halsall, 2014, Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nicholas Higham, King Arthur: The Making of the Legend, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. I find the quote function on the forum difficult to work with, so for speed I’ll put the remaining quotes in italics. That not a break at all. Medieval people looked at things through a medieval lens. They pretty much retconned Rome and anient Greece into a Feudal structure. It how people like Julius Cesar and Alexander the Great end up being viewed as Knights. I basically agree with you that this is how it should be, and I’d go further, but as of the Book of Sires, it no longer is: Aurelius Ambrosius invents vassalage entirely - about a decade before play begins if you start in 479. That’s what I was referring to. And there has always been a certain amount of fudging here - back in 3e with The Boy King there were traces of a pseudohistorical post-Roman Britain, with tribes like the Iceni and so on, “Roman knights” who are essentially urban civic elites, the equation of the “Emperor Lucius” with Theodoric, and so on. But the fudging level goes way up with the BoS. (Which is, however, enormous fun.) But they are all over the place in Arthruian Lore. Look at the orgins of characters such as Gawaine, and Kay, or items such as Excalibur and the Holy Grail. All have pagan roots. There are things that may ultimately go back to Celtic pagan stories, but it’s at several steps removed in the stories as we have them. You eliminated pagans? How to you represent Merlin, the Ladies of the Lake, Faeries and other Pagan elements of the setting? Pretty much exactly how they are represented in actual medieval romance, frankly. Not really a problem for me. The game is not about them. It depends a lot of what sources you use. There were (and still are) a lot of Celtic Pagan and semi-Pagan elements in the Arthurian tales as well as in the historical setting. Such elements remain in many of the stories and also explains why some stories make so little sense to modern readers. Not all of those are things that it makes sense to identify as particularly pagan, though - they’re characteristic of Welsh literature well into the Middle Ages, long into the Christian period. They affect Welsh retellings of stories that originate on the continent, like retellings of Chrétien, for instance. And one should not underestimate how weird continental medieval romance can seem from a modern perspective. Medieval literature is often very distant from modern sensibilities, full stop.

Personally, I feel that female knights are less of a break with the source material than (as Morien notes) pagans or a pseudohistory in which vassalage is invented recently, and yet everyone treats it as if it were ingrained practice since time immemorial.* There is at least one female knight in an Arthurian romance (Melora, recently mentioned by Leingod) and, as Morien notes, one finds them elsewhere. It’s closest to the source material to treat female knights as exceptional and sometimes disguised as men, but not impossible. On the other hand, it would be closest to the source material to treat Pendragon’s version of pagans** as impossible and not there at all. Descriptive statements, not normative - one can turn these dials in the direction that suits you as far as I’m concerned. As far as issues of representation go, there are sensitive questions there, and there’s a risk of tempers flaring. But while the fictional integrity of a setting does matter, it does not necessarily matter more than whether or not actual people feel excluded from the game - different gaming groups will strike the balance in different places. And Pendragon’s setting is a bit of a hodge-podge of different Arthurian things. It’s not really a seamless coherent web of things that make perfect sense to begin with. *Admittedly, I eliminated both from my game. But they are taken for granted as acceptable in “normal” Pendragon **The kind of “pagan” foreigners who appear in actual medieval romance are another matter. They pose other problems, of course. And they are not Britons.

An interesting detail is that Disheartened has been folded into Melancholic - in fact Melancholic is more like Disheartened than what used to be Melancholic -, and so that -5 hits you after the situation that provoked the Passion roll. This is another thing that encourages you to roll Passions (in this case Famous ones), as a failure doesn’t affect your chances during the critical situation where you call on the Passion. Plus, you get Glory for Melancholy, and a fairly generous award at that.

Wild speculative theories, absolutely. Devotion looks like it might be Love (God) - the Religious Knight has 15 in it. Station is tricky. Perhaps following the rules of your knightly status, possibly encompassing some things that currently fall under Honour (e.g. not doing physical labor, spending enough to maintain a lifestyle appropriate, having your reputation impugned)? I notice that the Champion and the Courtier have it as a high Passion. Honour would then be more narrowly personal honour, not breaking oaths and so on. However, I find it hard to see how often you would use Station if that’s what it is, without it overlapping an awful lot with Proud.

One thing I find interesting is that Pendragon has from the beginning encouraged the possibility of games that break with the source material in their assumptions about gender* and religion - but from the beginning has been insistent about sticking with the source material’s assumptions about class. It makes for a striking contrast with what I affectionately call Schlocky Modern Arthuriana (Merlin, Cursed, etc.) which often goes out of its way to question that - we have had at least two Lancelots in other media whose defining trait was that they weren’t noble, but deserved to be knights anyway. Not endorsing any particular approach, before people rise to defend the honour of the game. It just interests me from the standpoint of the cultural history of the present moment. *And yes, that there are no women knights in medieval romance, including Arthurian romance, is an oversimplification, before someone points it out. Also, She-Knight is one of the great lost comics characters that never were.

A possible addition to that is that, if you pick the weeks for Madness, you get a roll on the Madness table in the GPC, with the possibility of checks, useful contacts with poor but decent knights, etc. I’d probably say that you couldn’t pick the longer one, and have the benefits, unless you have a Famous Passion. But I’ve never really liked the Madness rules, because they don’t create moments that correspond well to the classic moments when madness happens in the literature - and RAW, a really strong Passion (20+) means that you can’t go mad, barring modifiers, which is the exact opposite of the way that it should be. So I’m sympathetic to removing madness as a possibility for normal Passions, which is in fact what I was already doing - I’m inclined to think that it should go further, if anything. (What I’m thinking of doing is having Madness be an additional thing that happens on top of Shock for Famous Passions, or Passions that you critical, so that it happens when you fail.) I have mixed feelings about the new Passion rules overall. I’m a bit wary of the added complexity of Exalted Passions. One thing that I like about Pendragon is that it’s a fairly simple and elegant system that does what it needs to but no more. And I’d say that what this might end up doing in practice might be not so much to restrain the advantage of being Inspired/Impassioned as really incentivize players to get those Passions up to 20 to guarantee the +10. Arguably, the advantage of having a Passion at 20 or higher is already as great as it needs to be, because you can’t fail the roll for Inspiration. What intrigues me, though, is the revamped list of Passions, which looks very promising and looks to me to map the emotional world of the knight better than the current ones do. I don’t think the Quickstart discusses the revised Passions specifically, however, unless I missed it.

I would wonder if there could be an additional penalty for trying to do this from horseback to a single unmounted opponent. Intuitively, it seems like it would be easier to lean to the right to strike at someone below you with a single weapon in your right hand than to lean enough to strike at them with a second weapon in your left hand as well.

I think I would probably reverse it, so that it wasn’t the product of an epic quest, but a means to complete one. In an otherworldly/off-the-map/faerie context, obviously. One can, and very possibly has to, tame/befriend the hippogriff to fly up the impossibly tall mountain or whatever, but the knight can’t take the fantastical creature back into the (relatively) normal world when they’re done. They might meet the hippogriff again next time they’re in the right sort of context, though.

The Dorset coast is famous for smugglers, as it happens, with plenty of beaches and sea caves that were used to bring in goods in secret in the 18th century. So there is no shortage of real geography that the Saxons could exploit. Also, now that Syagrius is no longer a “praetor,” the most likely explanation of the Dorset praetorship is perhaps that it’s a unique affectation and not an actual title, civic or otherwise. The count became known as “the Praetor,” because of the first count’s fondness for obscure bits of Roman antiquity, but it doesn’t mean anything specific. I think it’s not really suitable to be a surviving Roman title in Britain - while there was still an official called the praetor in late antiquity, I am fairly certain you would only find such a creature in Rome and Constantinople, and it had been a long time since praetors existed outside that context. Happy to be corrected if there were praetors running around in the 5th century - it’s not a period that I know particularly well. EDIT: It occurred to me that one could approach the question from the other direction - “praetor” not as a “real” survival in Pendragon’s pseudohistory but as a much later medieval Latin thing, like all the other medieval things retrojected onto the 5th-6th centuries. So I looked up “praetor” in the DMLBS, and medieval English authors use “praetor” with varying degrees of fancifulness as a translation for various positions, mostly ones that reflect the praetor’s role in ancient Rome as a judge. One that caught my eye was the use of “praetor” as a translation of “sheriff.” One possibility is that Jonathel starts the Anarchy as the Sheriff of Dorset in control of the county castle and royal treasury at Dorchester. If he also holds significant lands in Dorset, that’s a very plausible power-base for dominating the county. His most important title is Sheriff, so that’s what people know him as, the “Sheriff of Dorset.” But because Dorset is (or used to be, anyway) all-Roman, there are plenty of literate people there who are talking about him in Latin, and they translate whatever people “really” call sheriffs as “praetores,” pretty much as if this were the 11th century.

Agreed. I didn’t mean that all of the added Paladin Christianity rules would be troubling, just the ones that are oriented towards those themes. That being said, the setup of my (I hope) upcoming Pendragon campaign is pretty much as you describe, so that we’re eliminating pagan knights. The way I’m handling that is to eliminate religious Trait bonuses entirely. The reasoning is that, if Christianity is the universal norm, then Christians aren’t unusually chaste, modest, etc. — they define what it is to be typical. A 10 in a Trait means “about average for a knight in this medieval Christian society.” (Instead, I’m going to let players (of which there may be only one) choose the Traits to add +3 to as their family Traits.)

Forgot to say this. Nothing interesting - I just meant that everyone might be given Cymri stats with a couple of added things that are specific to regional stereotypes. What those would be for the Low Countries in the Middle Ages, you would know better than I. Or what they are nowadays...

YMMV, but I think it’s one thing to adopt Paladin’s perspective that Christianity is objectively correct and you should convert non-Christians, by force if necessary, if you adopt the portrayal of Saracens and Persians as pagans who worship Apollo and Jupiter It’s another if they are actual real-world Muslims. I would not personally be comfortable playing through a version of the First Crusade in which the system represents it as objectively the case that the Crusaders are the good guys and it is a metaphysical fact that slaughtering Muslims en masse is absolutely and unequivocally good and moral action, backed up by the observable fact that God answers Christian prayers very visibly. All that’s OK with me if you keep it a little distanced by making it a representation of the viewpoint of the literature. Although even then I was a bit surprised that there was very little discussion of these issues in the introduction to Paladin and explanation of the choices made. But I personally would not be OK with projecting it onto real history. True enough, although the thing about Pendragon is that you’re still fine hours later when the adrenaline rush should have faded. But I prefer it that way, for pretty much exactly the reasons you stated.

My feeling on this is that one can sort of divide the differences between Pendragon and Paladin into two categories for the question of whether you take them over for something like this. There are the differences, like the Christianity mechanics to which Morien refers, that are very specifically aimed at the source material. Those have relatively little application outside of what they are designed to do. (And personally I might find some of them, ah, problematic if one were to rip them out of their literary context and try to apply them to the actuality of the First Crusade.) Then there are the differences that read, essentially, like someone’s well-thought out and well-tested house rules for Pendragon, and aren’t really specific to the setting. Those are another matter, but it’s a question of exactly what you want to achieve. Some of them I might not use even when playing Paladin itself, but might use in a different setting. E.g. I like the flavour of the Pendragon rule that knights can take several wounds below their Major Wound threshold without it being a problem until they pass the Unconsciousness threshold, and might not use the Paladin rules there even in Paladin. But I might well think about adopting those rules in a setting like the one that you describe, where I was trying to stick closer to gritty historical reality, so that, no, you can’t be stabbed five or six times and ignore it. As far as character creation goes, though, I’d agree that you could just use Cymri as your base and tweak it for the regional differences that you want. It might simplify matters to say that every region gets one combat skill and one non-combat skill that they’re particularly good at, but is otherwise similar. In Pendragon, Cymri are explicitly designed to be better than everyone else, and the same appears to be true of Franks in Paladin. Unless that’s something you want for similar setting reasons, I’d say that making everyone “Cymri with a twist” might not only be easier, but more desirable.

If you haven’t seen them yet: I personally quite like the look of the Advanced Siege mechanics in Paladin, and I’ve been thinking about possible ways to adapt them in Pendragon. Anyway, that system has multiple rounds, with different possible tactics chosen by the attacker. However, it doesn’t match the Battle rules (simple or BoB) for presenting things from the perspective of the individual combatant, and that is perhaps a problem for what you want. The GM is instructed to have things for the player knights to do, with a brief list of suggestions, but the actual mechanics are very much a commander’s eye view of the siege. That being said, it’s fairly easy to see how you can riff off the tactics chosen, and the rolled results, to generate tasks and problems for the knights. I particularly like the focus that those rules have on the morale of the two sides: does the commander keep his nerve, do his knights maintain their faith in him — and what about the commoners shut up in the fortification? I’d identify that as a particular area where you could interwine the story. Instead of having morale checks triggered (or only triggered) by certain results, have the player knights trigger them by their successes or failures. There are also more complex siege rules in Lordly Domains, although not as complex as the (advanced) ones in Paladin.

Oh indeed - I mean if you changed the rules in the way that the OP is suggesting, and you could continue to use a broken weapon.

The time when it would come up most would probably be in battle, at least if using the BoB. Squires can be lost fairly easily if they’re inexperienced, and mechanically it doesn’t matter for your Glory or Unit Results what you’re fighting with, as long as it doesn’t affect your chances of winning an opposed roll. Outside battle, I think use of the Combined Actions rule would probably make it come up a little more often. That is, until chivalry becomes a serious factor in how knights behave.

I can see a possible reason to err on the side of “not that much better than no weapon at all. “ “Breaks non-swords on a tie” is the main mechanical thing that pushes towards swords as the default hand-to-hand combat weapon. Weaken that, and other weapons look more attractive. I’m looking at maces in the early period when other knights are wearing chain, and thinking, “Well, when I get a tie vs a sword, I’ll have a problem. But I’ll still be able to fight, and think of all the many other times when I’ll get +1d6 damage.” In particular, if a Cymric knight can use their spear with Spear Expertise after it’s broken, saying “Now it’s a shorter spear” - even if you did the equivalent of treating it as a dagger (-1d6 damage), I think you might see a fair number of Cymric knights deciding that it was an acceptable price to pay for being able to raise two skills for the price of one and just getting Spear Expertise as high as possible. That might or might not matter, depending on one’s preferences. To me personally it would, because swords are the default melee weapon in the literature. (Spear Expertise bothers me even as it is.) So I’d say that one might want to rule, whether or not this is realistic, that a broken weapon is no longer properly balanced for being a weapon (or defective in other respects - my non-expert sense would be that a broken sword would not be much good to a skilled dagger fighter, because you can’t stab with it effectively). So it’d be a completely new weapon skill - if a knight wants to be “The Knight Who Can Fight with a Broken Axe,” then they need to train that up as a personal speciality.

I think It might well be the case that this is the default assumption - that you’re in a situation in which the PCs aren’t socially outshined by more important people. Pretty much all the cards assume that the only relevant other people present are other knights, and ladies of indeterminate rank, aside from the host. I think one problem is that the rules do cover different kinds of feasts, including royal ones. Also, I think that in practice the time when a GM is likely to want to haul the Book of Feasts out is at one of the scripted feasts in the GPC, a lot of which are either hosted by the king, or at least attended by the king with a lot of famous people present. Which is why the Book of Feasts is a great idea! Something for player characters to do on scripted occasions to break up the GM describing things that they’re witnessing. And I think the goals of making APP valuable and providing an arena at which lady characters can be active and achieve things are both worthwhile. I think, in many ways, the difficulty is that the contest to win the feast is mechanically tied to your seating, which produces an incentive to tie that, in turn, to APP. Everything that I’ve been reading - including some passages in the Book of Feasts - suggests to me that where you sat was supposed to be fixed by your rank. You could read off the hierarchy of society from looking around the room. There were tricky situations, and disputes, but they were about how different people ranked, not how glamorous they were. (Disclaimer: my reading hasn’t been exhaustive, and it’s been harder to pin down specifics than I had hoped.) Your idea of having APP affect card draws instead solves a lot of the problem, because being able to choose which card you use is a powerful advantage. Arguably it’s a better mechanical way to achieve the expressed intent of the rules — that good-looking people have better things happen to them. So I am definitely going to use that, no matter what else. But I wonder if there’s a case for going further and simply eliminating seating entirely as a factor in the contest. Unless the GM wants to have you seated in the wrong place as a story point, the assumption could be that you are seated correctly, and no-one thinks well or badly of you because of it. It is how things should be. You could keep most of the existing rules as mechanics: a successful APP roll is +1 Geniality/round, etc. You just break the narrative link, so that the roll doesn’t represent where you sit, it represents the overall impression that you made on the gathering. The only thing that would need to change is that, on a critical, you could draw cards as well as getting +2 Geniality/round. But, you know, drawing cards is the part of the BoF rules that everyone seems to like — it’s certainly the part that I think is the most enjoyable — so why not extend it to everyone? I’m assuming that one would have a less generous Glory award than 10xGeniality, as obviously a high-APP character could really rack up the Geniality with 2 per round plus a choice of cards. Also, If I went with this option, I think I would probably go with APP + Glory/1000 for the roll, so that Glory does have some effect.

Preamble: I’m still working on my houserules for modifying the Book of Feasts. I wanted something more historically accurate and grounded in primary sources than my earlier vague “the GM should assign an appropriate default position.” Something that would reflect the way in which people in the Middle Ages actually thought about this. COVID makes the research tricky, because my local university library is shut and I’m dependent on what I can access online. But here goes... The main (almost exclusive) source on which I’m basing this is John Russell’s Boke of Nurture (which sounds rather like a new Pendragon release...) This is from about 1450, so it is late in the medieval period. But it at least corresponds to the world that Malory knew, so if you’re foregrounding Malory as the “main” source for your game, it would make some sense as a way to get at how he might have imagined the world of the stories. It would be reasonable in Pendragon to make it looser and more slipshod earlier on, and more fixed and restrictive towards the end of the game. Plus, some positions won’t exist early on — the mayor of London has been discussed here already, and before Oxford and Cambridge are founded, there is no need to take account of people with degrees. At any rate it is a medieval account of where people should sit at feasts. Some of this draws on commentary on Russell in the 19th century edition to which I had access — very possibly dated, but also useful, because it’s from a time when concerns with precedence were still a significant aspect of British society, and so is interested in clarifying the nitty-gritty of how things are supposed to work. I’m not an expert, so it’s very possibly that I have misunderstood Russell on some point. Correction will be welcomed. Also, it is an obvious consideration that normative “how-to” texts like Russell are often not entirely accurate from a descriptive perspective, and liable to construct ideal models of how things “should” work. Indeed, there is at least one place in Russell where it looks very much as if he’s warning people against doing something precisely because people do in fact do that thing all the time. From a Pendragon perspective, that sort of normative idealization is not necessarily a problem, of course — it’s similar to how the game draws on idealized views of courtly love. Anyway, what follows is what I came up with. Intro.: The following system has been modified to fit Pendragon’s pseudo-historical setting and extensively abbreviated. (Russell has a lot of different entries, some of them for positions that don’t exist in Pendragon or at any rate are unlikely to come up. If anyone wants to know where to seat a lesser baron of the exchequer, which is to say a puisné judge, John Russell has you covered.) A) Russell seems to be thinking in terms of a five groups, which I will call “classes,” to which people at feasts may belong. I have listed them in the next section. All other things being equal, you do not eat seated with people of a different class. In fact, Russell seems to think that you should never be seated outside your class. But for Pendragon purposes, Glory should be an equalizer — a sufficiently glorious knight “sits at the high table at every court except Camelot.” I’m using Tizun Thane’s suggestion of flipping the mechanical role of Glory and APP, so that Glory affects seating and APP determines number of cards. But alternatively, if one prefers to stick closer to the Book of Feasts, APP could be the equalizer. At any rate, there should be a roll that allows you to move up (or on a fumble, down), even if Russell would be very cross with us. B ) Order within a class matters, but it does not seem to be as important to Russell (who in fact seems to semi-ignore it in the last class). For Russell, the key point is that you need to be seated with your peers. C) However, you do need to be attentive to differences between people of theoretically the same rank, and these confront the person arranging a feast with great difficulties. Blood is more important than livelihood (income). (That Russell stresses this so much is almost certainly a sign that it was not always the case in reality.) See below for how this would affect player knights. One could in principle reduce the contest of “winning” the feast to a contest between people of equivalent rank — that is, one is not trying to be the most notable guest at the feast tout court, but the most notable person of knightly rank. No matter what, no-one expects you to compete with the Count of Wherever (unless you are a Count of Wherever). D) Russell assigns a lady to the higher of her father’s rank and her husband’s rank. Russell articulates this rule for ladies of royal blood, but it is easiest to suppose that it applies generally. Women can marry up; they are not degraded by marrying down. It would follow that a husband and wife will be separated if he is of lower rank, although Russell does not comment specifically on this. The five classes: * marks something that I have inserted or changed significantly, either in content or in order, or both, or have made a perhaps questionable interpretation of what I think Russell means. RC = Roman Christian; BC = British Christian; P = Pagan. Obviously, Russell only thinks in terms of the first. It may not be the case that a court recognizes the status of religious who are not of that court’s religion. Decisions about where pagan religious rank are fairly arbitrary: I put druids and enchantresses with the knights largely because it seemed most interesting for gaming purposes to have them seated with the PKs. I’ve assumed that abbesses rank the same as abbots, although Russell does not specifically address this. Class I: Royalty and higher. The Pope (who has no peer); emperor; High King*; king; cardinal; prince (son of a king); archbishops (RC); the Lady of the Lake (P)*; archdruid (P)*; great titled nobles of royal blood* Class II: Great nobles, not of royal blood. Dukes*; diocesan bishops (RC); earls. Class III: Lesser nobles and their peers. Barons; abbots/abbesses (BC)*; suffragan bishops (RC); mitred abbots/abbesses (RC); the mayor of London Class IV: Knights and their peers. Prior of a cathedral (RC); unmitred abbot/abbess (RC); household knights of the king*; prior (RC); dean (RC); archdeacon (RC); enchantresses (P)*; druids (P)*; knights (see below); squires of the body of the king*; doctors of divinity. Knights: Since player knights will normally be measuring themselves against other untitled knights, the internal ranking of knights is particularly important. The most important factor is “blood,” nobility of birth — how noble, and how ancient the nobility of the knight’s forebears. Of course, great families generally look after their own with lands as well, but even if a knight is poor, a noble ancestry is supposed to outweigh that deficiency. Within knights with equivalent “blood” (e.g. the default player vassal knights of Salisbury, who can all be assumed to be about as noble as one another), it is “livelihood,“ i.e. income, that differentiates one knight from another. Household knights, who have no income of their own, therefore would rank below all landed knights, except perhaps if they are well-remunerated officers — as long as they were not of more noble ancestry. I would add the detail (not drawn from Russell) that people shou;d judge your income from how you live — if a knight makes enough from other sources (e.g. plunder) that they can maintain themselves at a higher level, then that becomes that knight’s livelihood as far as the general opinion is concerned. This won’t be enough to make anyone think that a vassal knight with a single manor is the equivalent of an estate holder — people aren’t idiots — but a Rich knight with a single manor will be ranked above another vassal knight with a single manor who is not maintaining himself at that level. This is a place where APP, Fashion, jewellery, etc. could be worked back in, if someone wanted. Class V: Esquires and their peers. Esquires*; squires*; doctors of law; former mayors of London; masters of arts; other religious*; king’s bodyguard*; merchants and franklins. Possible application to the Book of Feasts: 1) The highest-ranking Class present defines the class that is Above the Salt. The next highest Class that is present defines Near the Salt. All remaining Classes are Below the Salt for purposes of Geniality (although in fact they may be seated separately), except for Class V, which defines On the Floor. (People in Class V are not necessarily literally on the floor, although they may be.) 2) Almost all of the time, a player knight is Below the Salt, and for a knight who is not titled, there is never any shame in this. It is always insulting to dine with Class V (“On the Floor”) if you are of knightly rank, especially since that can mean dining with commoners. 3). It should also matter to a knight (Modest/Proud rolls or something similar) if someone from a lower Class is allowed to dine with them or if someone of equivalent rank within their own Class accepts better seating when the knight is not honored. 4) And it should definitely matter if there is a seating error within the knights, and a knight who should rank lower (first by birth, second by livelihood) is given more honorable seating. For Pendragon purposes, however, there’s a qualifier: this should not apply if the preferred knight is of significantly higher Glory. It makes sense in Pendragon that an Unproven knight might defer without shame to a Respected knight, a Respected knight to a Notable one, and so on. 5) There is fertile ground here for Courtesy and Stewardship rolls. It is quite possible that someone is insulted when they should not be, because they have made a mistake about the ranking, or vice versa, fails to notice when they should feel insulted, and only discover later on that they have been judged negatively for putting up with it. Also Intrigue rolls, for obvious reasons.

One thing about which I am seriously thinking is ruling that the listed damage *does* include the +1d6 for a two-handed weapon, where appropriate, at least for some entries (you know which ones...). I initially assumed that it did, and only later spotted the bit about the GM having to add it. If one is going with the logic that the damage reflects multiple wounds over a period of time and is not the same as an individual’s damage statistic — I can see that, but if so the Major Wound and Knockdown thresholds for PC’s should be increased. (And indeed for the opponents MW does seem to be remarkably high, not that I think that it matters much what their MW is — am I missing something in the rules where it is critical to know that?) A more positive comment: I do very much prefer the way in which Glory works with the Book of Battles to the basic battle rules.