vegas

That is (essentially) RAW in 5e. You may either 1) strike first unopposed or 2) take a matching +10 both strike opposed. (The difference with "Defense" tactics being the defender CAN do damage when faced with an Uncontrolled Attacker.)"

It has taken me a while to get back to this, but I have some info for you. I have read the paper and it has the 11C data you are looking for. Also, the ratio of 2.5:1 in the 14C is not quite as simple as that. Here goes with the data. 1086: 4,500 secular clergy; 150 nuns*, 740 monks: 890 total; 5:1 secular to monastic 1377: 24,900 secular clergy; 2,054 nuns, 3,205 monks, 2122 regular canons, 3242 mendicants: 10,623 total; 2.3:1 secular to monastic. The 1086 data comes from the Domesday Book and the 1377 data from the poll tax. Both of these are minimum estimates rather than complete censuses, but hopefully the under-counts are roughly equal between groups so we can use the ratios. Also the note the details; BoU seems to treat canons as secular clergy in the discussion. Some of the nuns would have been canons and of course the regular canons are identified. Assuming the ratio of regular canons of nuns matches that of the males, we could recalculate the ratio of secular to monastic as 3.2:1. *in the text he suggests 200, in the table he uses 150. Obviously this is a guesstimate on his part, but I reproduced his figure in the table.

Funny thing, I have tried to look at this too because one of my players wanted to be a monk, but didn't sync it up to the setting-wide statistics. I like what you are doing here, but some comments. It is unlikely in population statistics that the distribution will be normal within a range or that the average is the mid-point of the range. Instead we would expect something looking more like a Power Law or Benford's Law or Zipf's distribution with the vast majority of locations to being very small. The range will have will have a mode close to the minimum, the average pulled higher by the right-hand tail of the distribution, but both of the points below the mid-point of the range. Similarly for priories (which I suspect would be distributed on the same curve as abbeys, with some overlap as priories are effectively small abbeys, even though being slavishly literal the BoU descriptions would not allow for that.) If I was going to choose some figures to fit the 500K population, 10K clergy figures,... [redacted] EDIT: I looked up the paper mentioned in your link (THE CLERICAL POPULATION OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND, by JOSIAH COX RUSSELL, Traditio, Vol. 2 (1944), pp. 177-212) and it paints a more complex picture. I'll come back and post more later. A related but slightly different point, I would assume that priests tend to be collected together in noble courts and urban cathedrals so villages remain relatively under-served. The clergy in Logres tend not to choose to reside with the commoners in the field such that several villages often share a single priest.

Certainly Greg was sloppy with definitions of all sorts, but I gotta disagree with you on what burghers "clearly" includes. In plain English the word might refer to the urban middle/upper class or any city dweller. Which sense did he mean? It is not clear! But each time he used the word, it is associated with the upper class and other classes that are city dwellers get other descriptors. And as you just wrote, the math doesn't work unless there are city dwellers in addition to the burghers, suggesting burghers (the legal class) are city dwellers but not all city dwellers are burghers (the legal class). On this view, it is certainly (as you suggest) the case that a minority of the urban population are slaves and escaped slaves (as slaves are a minority of the population as a whole). The majority of urban populations will be yeomen and escaped/released serfs: servants, laborers, craftsmen, etc. There will be a population of clergy, but again a minority. Burghers (the legal class) are the merchants, traders, the enterprise owners, and they too are a minority of the total city dwellers. That model fits quite nicely with a 500K total population, 25K burgher population, and another ~50K of other city dwellers (exactly how many depends on your estimate of the total urban population.)

Ah, you haven't missed anything Morien is always here and I'm often lurking. 😉 I like your idea to add another dataset for perspective and consistency, but the challenge of this approach leaps out; it is a hazardous methodology to try to estimate a larger whole by dividing from an estimate of a small fraction. Small errors in either the percentage of urban dwellers or their number will result in large errors in your estimate of the total population. So we must take this with a heaping of salt. I also think you are misreading BoU when you equate burghers with town dwellers to get your 5% urban estimate. You recognize this isn't strictly correct in your parenthetical, but proceed to assume that most inhabitants of towns are burghers. "Social Classes" in BoU pp 93-94 section makes explicit there are others in urban spaces. The people living in towns are not just the "Townsmen" who we read are "the burghers, bourgeois,... petty town bureaucrats.... [the] merchants and traders" but also there are "Craftsmen" who include "common craftsmen and artisans" that are "in villages, towns, and cities" and "specialized ones" who "live only in cities." And while they are not mentioned in BoU, if we are world building we have to recognize there are other classes present as well: the burghers have servants in their homes and laborers in their enterprises. Servants historically came from unmarried commoner women who migrated from rural areas, and commoner women and men performed urban labor. The towns and cities will not only have slaves owned by the burghers, but also host runaway slaves and serfs who seek a better life by begging, laboring and hoping to apprentice. Taken as a whole, the market town and city populations are going to be just a diverse in social classes as the rural areas, with the burghers representing only the very top of the urban social pyramid. This breaks the key assumption of the methodology, that we can back into the total population by dividing the estimated urban population by 5% burghers. Not only would I expect burghers are not "most [of the] inhabitants of towns", if we recognize they are the upper stratus of urban populations, we would expect they are in the minority.

There is a contradiction in the duration of Melancholy which introduces an ambiguity in healing the condition. p 24 reads: "The length of the Melancholy is usually equal to 1d6+1 days". In contrast, p 20 has a table of Melancholy duration based on the magnitude of the Passion which range from 1d6 hours to 1d6 weeks, and none of which are 1d6+1 days. In the cure for the Melancholy affliction described on p 24, an Opposed roll is made against the "fixed opposition" referenced prior. The phrasing and presence of the error makes it ambiguous to understand the intent of the rule; are we rolling against the actual length of Melancholy in days or are we making a separate 1d6+1 to set the "fixed opposition" regardless of the length of Melancholy. Reference to the usual length of Melancholy should be removed as it just adds confusion whatever the intended rule is.

This is a fun (to me) conversation, but I have to prep for my game session (more fun and more important!) so I will try to brief (obviously hard for me!)... I didn't mean to start a side-bar on the size of the Battle of Hastings, only make the point by illustration that 2600 knights is very small for our imaginary 12C Kingdom of Logres when we look at an 11C invasion force from the little duchy of Normandy managed more. There were not yet knights in the sense of Pendragon in the 11C, so I am not sure how parse this farther and distinguish "cavalry" and "cavalry knights". If you don't find this illustration compelling, oh well, but for me it drives home the problem. I am 99.9% sure we both understand perfectly, but somehow we are talking past each other here. Yes, their upkeep is the same, the associated foot cost is the same; the difference is the vassal has his own court, family, and discretionary spend so a vassal costs £10 while HH knight (and associated foot) cost £5.5. Yes, it does if we take the table literally. It however cannot mean what it is labeled or there is an error in the math because it breaks a lot else otherwise. If it is literally rents, then yes there are on the order of 3,100 manors and 310,000 households. If we are using 4.2/household, you need over 1.5M people when you add in the non-manor commoners, clergy, & nobles. And if there is £31,800 of manor income AND income from forests, mining, urban populations, court fees, etc. then we break the economic model too. £31,800/2600 knights is already £12.2/knight. If you pour all these other sources of income on top and you aren't spending 55% army, 25% court, etc. (As you can tell, I have already been swimming in the numbers of BoU to try to make sense of things.) I suspect someone erred and £31,800 is intended to be total "government" (kings, vassals, & clergy) income of Logres in part because everything just works if it is. £31,800 less clergy portion is £26,800, divide by 2600 knights is ~£10/knight. That is too suspiciously perfect to think that was not how somebody built that table. Regardless, one way or another, something has to give. For me, wanting to keep the total Logres population at 500,000 and 2600 knights, I assume that was government income rather than assized rents. The other solution is to triple the population and add more knights & foot. Pick your poison. I will have to give this a think. It seems a little like having the tail wagging the dog since we are making squire training the driver of population. There are so many things that could influence that number - violent deaths of knights (and squires!), prevalence of esquires and commoner squires - it seems a volatile place to build out from, but that is just a quick take. Yeah, I assume close to the same but simpler. I have all the spares marry but only provide one HH knight (dad retires, get the gear), then in the 3rd generation you have 60% vassal, spare, & 1st cousin. Repeat with cousins marrying providing one HH knight and its 80% vassals, their brothers, 1st, & 2nd cousins, and the last 20% are either distant cousins or great soldiers that got promoted. Half of your bottom 40% (2nd cousins & further removed from a great family) either don't marry or their kid ends up a mercenary knight or less.

This becomes a question of the designer's intention. If the GPC is obsolete, and we are modeling the Uther era as 12th Century Britain, then for sure, the population should be larger as you suggest. The number of knights and armies should be larger too. Your points about levy and mercenaries are fine, but 2600 cavalry is less than what Harold and William each had at the battle of Hastings in the 11th Century, and that was not Harold's full army! If Uther is 12C Britain, then armies must be even larger. I will say, I am surprised by your take that the BoU is not intended to be compatible with the GPC. The conceit of Pendragon has always been to project back on the Arthurian world a society and technology that did not exist, representing the genre from a later time, and this has to be doubly so for the dark ages where we have scant historical record to work from and can't really speak about society (royal, noble or otherwise) in that time frame in terribly meaningful way. Regardless, for the purposes of this demographics exercise, I take the GPC as is for now and am using a dark age setting as my load star. An imaginary dark ages with Arthurian tropes and types is what I want for my setting and what the GPC describes. As you note later on, household size and population growth rates are connected. Faster population growth rates requires larger households (more offspring) for the same life expectancy. This exact point is made in your source on p 5, section 2. "A Benchmark for 1377." Also note, the text in that section 2; the historians listed in that Table 1 are all just guessing. They know there is an under-count of children in their data, and they are plugging in different estimates for the under-count driving the household size and ending population for their estimates. That is fine, guessing is required. But the high middle ages was a period of extremely fast population growth (see your source, Table 8 C) while growth rates in the dark ages were less than a 1/10th as fast. Household sizes have to be adjusted down accordingly. You will find no literature about dark age households sizes because there is no data like the 1377 poll tax. We just have to model it and guess too, but when we guess, it should reflect the growth rates for our time period. I haven't given a lot of thought to appropriate household size for 12C setting (yet). For a dark ages setting, it has to be smaller way smaller than 4.2 or 5. No, I do understand - all manors are the same size, but knights cost different amounts - and I explained in my endnote [5] that I know this calculation is wrong and called it a "happy accident". I'm just following what you were doing and pretended that all knights are funded by manors and seeing what happens. It turns out it works perfectly, though of course we have to then find funds for court costs and lavish lifestyles. But also, no, 285 commoners per manor does not result in 750,000 commoners, because this simple calculation (285 * 2610 ~750K) ignores too much. I avoided going down the path of trying to reconcile all the income sources to expenses in the OP, because it involves a lot of detail and yet there isn't actually enough data to complete the tie out, so it becomes a frustrating exercise in minutia that I spared readers. (Of course I had already tried to do it!) But I can point the way: BoU p 9 shows L12.2 of income in Logres per knight, which is a clue there are substantial sources of income in addition to rents from basic L10 manors. Some of them can be enumerated: 10% higher rents in market town Hundreds, 20% higher in ports, royal income from natural resources & forests. We can tally all those up using the assumption of a commoner population of 495,000, 90% of whom are on manors, and 285 heads per manor, and conservatively they provide ~L18,500, leaving ~L7,500 needing to be "found" to fund 2600 knights. Some of the sources of the extra L7,500 are noted without being quantified. The largest of these is church income - tithes, gifts, and labor of monks and clerics (there is a number listed for bishop and abbot rents but it is difficult to interpret). Tithing by peasants alone should be way more than enough to fund the 290 knights of the robe. For this high-level analysis, we can treat that as if it is L2,900 leaving L4,600 to explain. We know 10% of the population is the cities, ports, and market towns, and they are productive and taxed too, but not how much. If we assume they provide per capita as much as peasants in port Hundreds, that is another ~L2,000 reducing our gap to L2,600. We know the royal share of forest income, but not the baron's share (and we know they get a share from example honours); there is income earned from court profits and other liberties which are described at length in BoU without quantification; there are manors with productive investments that generate extra income. Those are the sources we know of from the books, and if we allow ourselves, we can come up with more. What we have quantified with conservative assumptions got us 90% of the way there to L26,000. Make slightly less conservative assumptions and add some value to these items that we haven't quantified at all and you can bridge the last 10% and justify funding 2600 knights with 495,000 commoners. I agree that 60% is high (and so is the 40% suggested in BoU), but it fits with the fiction that all first born sons become knights, and some later born sons will be too. And you are right, there aren't enough noble squires to go around. That is probably why in the literature so many knights have a dwarf for their squire! More seriously, I think the fix is just to acknowledge that there are more lower-class squires among the household knights, while of course the 20% vassal knights (ie. the PKs) are going to disproportionately get the noble squires. 5e doesn't deal with these issues because it assumes the PK is a vassal. If 6e moves the assumption to them being HH knights, I hope things like the squire tables and marriage tables get adjusted accordingly for these lower status knight. Forgetting older adults is common. A LE(0)=35 population is going to have LE(21)>>14 (in fact, it is about 35) so there will be lots of older adults and many widows/widowers. I would discourage you from using the game table survival rates for modeling the population as a whole. It seems nice for internal consistency, and is probably easy for you since it is on your computer, but will not end up giving reasonable population-level statistics because a game table is necessarily limited by our dice mechanics, and you are going to end up propagating errors which don't matter at the PC-level but will mess up your population statistics. (In addition we really should use different assumptions for the peasantry than the nobility, but that is another matter.) If you just look at a LE(0)=35 life table, you see that ~40% of the population is under 21, ie. ~.66 children per adult. Yes, this is a demographic problem too. It can't be both 80% HH knights AND HH knights don't marry; the population of knights would collapse. I don't really have a view on whether or not 80% HH knights is historical, I just take it as a setting given, but then because of the demographic reality, I assume nearly all HH knights do marry, and when they retire, their eldest son takes their place to keep the population of knights roughly stable. Your solution of 50% (or less) HH knights works too. One way or another, something has to give. Yes, the population growth in the GPC is another impossibility. To me, the answer is just don't model the demographics required to move BETWEEN eras. It would be ridiculously weird the speed of population growth required. Instead, just like the technology magically advances between eras, I would just magically advance the population statistics too, and make each era is self-consistent and consistent with its historical analog, but give up on trying to tie the change between different eras together demographically through birth rates, households sizes, etc.

Preamble: For many gaming groups, demographics is not an important topic at all, because the focus stays zoomed-in on a select group of knights. But for some of us that want to zoom-out, either for world building or to include a strategic view and even let their players participate in Britain-level war and politics, having a model of the demographics of the setting is nice. This post is for those people. Executive summary: The demographic data stated and implied in 5e sources don't all fit together. Morien suggests we should assume a much larger population of Britain versus Book of Uther. I would suggest this creates new problems and severely over-shoots at fixing the discrepancies. Instead, real-world demographics and history suggest we should keep the population of Logres as indicated in BoU and reduce the average size of households in manor populations to reconcile the data. Introduction: Elsewhere we read... and... Morien correctly points out all the demographic data given don't make sense. It is easy to see the problem: if Logres has 2600 knights and 475,000 commoners (95% of the population) that works out to ~183 commoners per knight, which doesn't easily reconcile with the number of commoners on a manor. Morien's proposal is to grow the population of Logres by 2.5x to 1.25 million to get the ratio of commoners to knights to 480 per knight which fits closer to the target. First a minor correction: KAP 5.2 p 43 tells us there are 420 commoners per manor, not 500, though the 500 figure is used elsewhere in KAP and 420 is within his range. Nevertheless the point stands that it is a long ways from 183 commoners per knight in BoU. One issue with this approach is that the language in BoU pretty clearly is meant to be the total population, not just adults, but hey, something has to give. Morien's solution, however, introduces new "problems". First, it makes the population unhistorically large. If there are 1.25 million in Logres, then there are about 2.5 million on Britain (Logres is half the population of Britain, 5.2e p 18) and add in Ireland and you have a population over 3 million on the British Isles. The Uther years are supposed to represent the dark ages and Anarchy the 1000s (GPC pp 25 & 70) and historically the British Isles had a population somewhere between 0.5 and 2 million people in that time period [1]. Second, increasing the population to 1.25 million in Logres implies a very small militarized force. With one knight there are another 3 foot giving a total force under arms of 2610 * 4 = 10,440 or just 0.8% of the population in times of internal wars and foreign invasion. By contrast if we leave the Logres population at 0.5 million, we don't have either of these problem: the total population of the British Isles comes out to ~1 to 1.5 million (reasonable) and the total men under arms in Logres comes in at 2% (reasonable for the setting). Alternative Solution: Instead of increasing the total population, I would propose decreasing the number of commoners per household in manors from 4.2 down to 2.85 during the Uther and Anarchy period. For a population with a life expectancy at birth of 35 years (historically reasonable and implied in the BoE survival tables) you would expect to see about 0.67 children per adult in a steady-state population.[2] (The population of the British Isles doubles once every 250 years in the dark ages; that <0.3% annual growth rate is practically steady-state.)[1] In addition, We can expect 30% of rural households will have a single-head. This is observed in historically[3] and is suggested by the high adult death rate (for example, about 1/3 of couples will have a partner die before their children reach 21.) Put these facts together and you get 285 adults on a manor (30 single-head of households, 70 married-couples, for 170 adults plus 0.67 children per adult for 114 children ~ 285 total population for 100 households). Multi-generational households obviously could increase the average commoners per household versus this simple model, but apparently this was not the norm, at least in later periods where data permits evaluation.[4] Studies from later periods also estimate rural households sizes directly at about 3.5, but population growth rates are much higher in these periods, making these estimates less applicable to our setting.[3] In any event 4.2 heads per household is not really supportable for this time period, while ~2.85 and certainly less than 3.5 seem more reasonable estimates. Of course 285 commoners per manor still doesn't get us all the way down to the 183 commoners per knight. We can close the gap if we remember that only 20% (or less, but I will use 20% for simplicity) of knights are actually landed. In those cases they need the full 285 commoners to fund a knight, his court and 3 foot. But 80% of knights are household knights and need only 5.5L (4L for the knight and squire, 1.5L for the associated foot) meaning it only takes 157 commoners to fund a knight and one manor supports 1.8 knights. Take the weighted average of these cases and you get... 183 commoners per knight, exactly the target. (20% * 285 + 80% * 157 = 183).[5][6] Now Morien seems to disagree and writes we need 1.5 children per adult (from the quote above) and that we need more monks and clergy too (quote below): Demographics and history don't support these assertions. A steady-state population of 15,000 nobles will have 9,000 adults and 6,000 children (that is, people under 21 are 40% of the population.)[2] The 9000 adults yield 4500 adult males (medieval sex ratios were actually tilted heavily toward men - let us ignore that detail) from which we need 2600 knights. 60% of adult noble males becoming knights is large, but it is not the case "there won't be enough children to replace the knights" as the population is in steady-state with this age distribution. This is not exactly consistent with BoU which claims 15,000 nobles would have 6,000 adult males (and by extension <6000 females and 3000+ children), but such a distribution would not be self-replacing. Hence it is not the 15,000 which is the problem, but distribution claimed in BoU that needs a small tweak from 6000 to ~4500 adult males to work demographically. As for needing more monks and priests, at 10,000 people, that is over 18 clergy per Hundred in Logres. Of course they are going to be clustered together in monasteries and cathedrals, but it is not at all obvious that we need to "allow for more" when historically several rural villages would share a single priest among them. Remember too that the clergy have a much smaller portion of people under 21 as a person is not part of the clergy until taking vows at age ~15, and they draw their numbers from commoners and nobles. It seems there are plenty of holy men for our setting without growing the population by another 2.5x [1] Josiah C. Russell, "Population in Europe:, in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Middle Ages, (Glasgow : Collins/Fontana, 1972), 25-71. [2] United Nations Model Life Tables, https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/data/model-life-tables. 0.67 children per adult can be observed from life expectancy tables for E(0)=35. [3] Maryanne Kowaleski, "Medieval People in Town and Country: New Perspectives from Demography and Bioarchaeology", Speculum, Volume 89, Number 3, July 2014. [4] Stone, Lawrence, The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500-1800, p 92, 1979. [5] It is something of a happy accident that the figure came out exactly to 183 commoners per knight. In the aggregate, this is not really correct, as I am just following Morien's procedure of focusing on the rural manor population, but we are ignoring that there is another 10% of commoners in market towns & cities, that some manors make 10% and 20% premiums over the standard manor, and there are sources of income besides manor income detailed in BoU - forests, natural resources, court fees, etc. - to fund the army. There is a lot of detail in BoU yet not enough to reconcile all the figures. We have to content ourselves with some back-of-the-envelope calculations to check the reasonableness, which in my opinion is perfectly adequate for a game about knights in a fictional setting. [6] If we apply the same 20/80 ratio of vassal to household knights to Morien's we end up with .2 * 420 + .8 * 231 = 269 commoners per knight, while his larger population now has 455 commoners per knight. He over-shoots the need by 70%.

Nothing published, so you are going to have to make it up. I don't think it is too hard though as the basic structure of battles hasn't changed but you will need to come up with a "Morale Loss" for each opponent and you will need to prepare more "Opportunities" as they come up more frequently with the new rules. For Morale Loss, judging from the existing cards it looks like a rule of thumb is: commanders/elites: -3d6 knights: -2d6 foot: -1d6 +a bit missile/skirmish: -1d6 As for Opportunities, just use the examples in the Starter Set to inspire you and have several available. I don't know what other rules you have available to you. The 5e Core book has a table of "Special Events" and the Book of Battles has a table of "Opportunities" which are all less special than the Starter Set Opportunities, but I imagine you could use them too.

I don't know what was intended in BoKL but I agree that it seems broken, and I am guessing it is just poorly written. I ignore the second 6 discretionary points and only give the 3 discretionary, the religious trait adjustment, and the regional adjustment (which as you write is already a lot). I do allow the selection of a famous virtue and/or a famous vice, but they must be a virtue/vice for the religion of the character.

The morale minimum to engage is only 5, so no, I don't think that rationale explains it; if it were "better to retire and seek new, worthier opponents" then, it is the morale min that would be much higher. EDIT: the minimum morale to engage and the morale loss after engagement seem to be related for all the other Encounters except this one. Perhaps it is intended that they diverge for this card, but if so, this is the outlier.

Can't know for certain, but it is a safe bet that Battle Card for Pictish Knifemen should not have a morale cost of 3d6. It is a serious outlier from the others if it is intended. I suspect a correct morale cost is 1d6, perhaps less.

My version of Roman Pagans has Selfish, Just, Prudent, Temperate, Valorous. They were a warrior culture; hard not to have valorous for me. The four traditional Roman virtues were prudentia (prudence), iustitia (justice), temperantia (temperance, self-control) and fortitudo (courage). We gotta choose a fifth for the game. There are lots of virtues we could argue for and there is nothing wrong with your player's suggestion of energetic or honest. The issue you want to watch out for when choosing these traits, is that you don't want to (or at least be aware if you are) let a religious category double dip with the chivalrous category, or it is too easy for a PK to rack up bonuses. Chivalry is energetic, generous, just, merciful, modest, valorous. The player's proposed list has two traits that are aligned with chivalry (Just & and none that are opposed to it. That would make the roman pagan the best non-christian religion in the game. All the others have at least one trait that opposes chivalry. So for me, if we are going to add another flavor of pagan, it should have at least one trait opposed to chivalry. Selfish so there is one trait that opposes chivalry and it matches up with the Roman value of frugalitas (frugalness). It is not selfish in sense of "more for me" but rather it is specifically not generous. The ideal of generosity, especially to to the poor was a particular Christian innovation, so that seemed to me to fit my gamey need for balance of the pagans and the history. Hzark10's proud works too by opposing a chivalry trait and fits with dignitas (dignity) As always, YPMV.

FWIW this is more or less exactly what Steven Lumpkin did in his Pendragon campaign (youtube it). It was one a few changes they made as concessions to modern sensibilities.