Manifestopheles

1 hour ago, Voord 99 said:

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.”

That's a good idea, actually. That would allow for another layer of gray morality. I will keep that in mind for my campaign as well.

4 hours ago, Clydwich said:

I think it would be a good idea to know which region you are planning to play in. Most of what is now Holland (the province) and Zeeland were not that heavily populated, and there were few, if any, nobles/knights there. Part of why the power of nobles in those provinces was never very great, and West-Friesland was not even subjugated by the Counts of Holland until 1300, although that could make it an exelent frontier setting. Flanders and Gelderland had more nobles, and Brabant in particular. Friesland did only reluctantly acknowledge the Holy Roman Emperor (titular ruler of Friesland\Frisia) most of the time, And Utrecht\Sticht, with the Oversticht (Overijssel), was a Bischopric, which gives some other wrinkles.

I'm aware of all these regions and factors. I am planning on basing the campaign mostly in Brabant, since that's where my alleged ancestors, the Counts of Cuijk, hailed from. Not to mention the Cuijk dynasty also had dealings with Sticht Utrecht as well as representatives in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. Basically however I would like to run a campaign around the history of their feuds with the Counts of Holland (with the death of Floris V as centerpiece), and their involvement in the war between England and France.

7 hours ago, Voord 99 said:

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.

Yeah I see what you mean. Again though, given the timeframe of what I'm thinking of, Christianity has already become the norm in Europe and there are no pagans left to convert. The crusades are a different story, of course, but I'm not necessarily planning on involving them in my campaign at all. The fact remains however that, in the perception of people at the time, Christianity was not just objectively correct, but a simple, indisputable fact of life, so it goes without saying that characters in such a setting would be exclusively restricted to Christian Personality Traits and Passions. Now it remains to be seen which of the two rulesets actually represents that outlook better with regards to what I'm looking for, although as far as I can tell Pendragon should already be more than sufficient as is.

Now if I were to run a campaign about the Crusades that would open up another can of worms entirely. That would definitely be a way to put the PKs' chivalric values to the test.

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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.)

I wonder what those would entail though and why you think they wouldn't fit. I do think a healthy dose of Christian features would make sense given their prevalence in the Middle Ages, and since this is not going to be Arthurian in that regard I may have to supplant certain features in Pendragon regardless. I personally do like the idea of patron saints for example, at least conceptually.

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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.

I can get behind that, making the combat more gritty would definitely be something to look into.

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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.

I suspected the Cymri and Franks in their respective settings might be better since that's probably how they viewed themselves at the time. You might be right about using a default origin with a twist. Personally I think I might go the route of other RPGs with regards to custom races and the like where they're all supposed to be balanced out, most likely by way of a bonus to their physical attributes. I don't know if that's what you mean by a "twist".

1 hour ago, David Scott said:

We actually have the Paladin author on the forum @Ruben. I suspect he's from the Low Countries, and could weigh in here.

 

Yeah I figured he might be, probably Flemish judging by the name, although I might be wrong. Just another reason I decided to get the book after all

That's true... ideally I think I might combine the two as well, but just use the Pendragon ruleset and character sheets with regards to skills and passions and stuff. I do want to take advantage of some of the extra features from Paladin, honestly...

Good day gents,

I'm new to the forum but I've been planning on running a Pendragon campaign for a long time now, assuming I could ever get a hold of a group of players willing to play with me. Either way, due to my own research into my ancestry (I'm half Dutch with some alleged aristocratic roots dating back to the Middle Ages), I've been thinking of running a campaign specifically set in the Low Countries. It would probably begin at a somewhat later date than the traditional Pendragon campaigns (around 11th century AD, just before the start of the First Crusade), and would be less focused around Arthurian mythology and more around the politics of the the time in that region. So basically my main question is, what ruleset would be better suited to run the campaign with? My instinct says to go with Pendragon and leave Paladin (which I do not yet own) aside, since Pendragon allows for more generic character creation, with universal skills and passions, while Paladin is more specialized and focused around the Charlemagne arc. On the other hand, the landed nobility of the region are largely Frankish nobles as well, especially in the southern regions around Brabant and Flanders. Then again, you also have the Book of Knights and Ladies (which unfortunately does not include any information on Batavian character origins (other than the Frisians, but those are a different story entirely), let alone on the different provinces of the region, which were, and still are, very different from each other in many respects, but I'm sure I could make something up.

What do you think. Do you have any other pointers on what I should be looking for?