mj6373

I would say that this most recent point is salient to the extent it's less a separate explanation for a different portion of knighthood and moreso an overlap/explanation for earlier cases. While there's certainly real room for people to distinguish themselves and earn exceptional rewards, when we're talking patterns, those come down to incentives and power structures. If a lord is choosing from among his household knights who to make an officer, or who to set aside extra money to support a family for, he will, when able, be far more likely to choose one of the "second son of a landed guy" household knights, because this may improve relations with the family and make for a grateful future vassal if something goes wrong. And while continued dependence on one's parents/siblings is undesirable and therefore probably uncommon, second son knights will also have greater security simply from having a wealthier father/brother to ask for help. So whatever scarce resources of officer positions and marriage income and son-knighting-funds are available to supply to household knights, they will overwhelmingly go to those household knights in the "second son of landed knight" camp, assuming any are available. Just my two cents.

Not sure how worth mentioning this is, but even if you get the commoner population right, Pendragon's logistics regarding knight upkeep (and the implications for sustainable proportions) aren't going to match real life because Pendragon glosses over a lot of the practical realities that made the feudal system arrange itself the way it was. Specifically, manor-holding knights were closer to norm than exception. Pendragon treats the infeudation and subinfeudation of land as practically an optional thing that lords just do to reward their greatest supporters, and in fact that they'll be penalized for doing very much of, which couldn't be further from the truth. Medieval transportation and communication logistics make it much more efficient to have knights independently managing a manor or few and using the income to provide their own military upkeep locally to bring to bear for yearly military service than it is to make all your distant holdings bring you everything they can carry in taxes and then personally funding your whole military commitment from there. A lord would have some household knights on the payroll, of course, particularly those they can afford directly from the income of their primary/central estate that doesn't have to travel far, because having full time knightly "employees" around is useful, keeps your estate safer, communicates strength and largesse, etc. But pushing beyond that, using income from beyond your local range to keep more household knights and footmen on your personal payroll, makes your ratio of "commoner labor|military force" worse, not better. That's not to say lords were keeping as little land beyond their central estate as demesne as possible, because even though it *does* lower the total military output capacity of your holdings, you *need* enough strength not tied to your vassals that you aren't easy for a strong vassal to rebel against. But the idea that a lord would keep upwards of 80% of their land as demesne, and get Honor hits for going below that because it makes them seem *weak*? Very silly. The whole "80+% of knights are household knights" idea doesn't even make sense for the class's sustainability. Bachelor and mercenary knights generally don't have any knighted children (they usually can't afford to care for a wife and kids to begin with, much less the exorbitant costs of knighting one of them), and landed knights generally only knight their first and second sons, the Heir and Spare. The refill population of household and mercenary knights comes overwhelmingly from second sons of landed knights whose older brothers didn't die before having their own kids, which by itself essentially guarantees that landed knights and living heirs thereof should make up more than 50% of the knightly class. Of course, sourcing your knights differently can change those facts to some extent. While I don't use this idea in my campaigns, Book of Knights & Ladies suggests one potential difference between early and later Periods being that early Periods are more open to having lords errantly foist knighthood upon commoners who impress them, and being less interested in whether those common-born knights have a position lined up to fill with their new knightly status. If such knights are common enough, they'd at least contribute to a much higher proportion of mercenary knights. (Personally, I run it almost exactly the opposite way - knighting some rando who impressed you is an enormous show of largesse and positive acknowledgement of virtue that seems fitting more to the prosperous and generous times of Arthur, *doubly* so if they're not being knighted to fill some urgent need on the knighting lord's part.)

Just as a fun goofy question to get people talking about their campaigns, who are the oldest/longest-lived PKs you've had? And how badass were they? Do you think the accrual of experience over time overshot the loss to their Attributes compared to their youthful counterparts, or vice versa (or was it about equal)? You can mention NPKs as well if you had an unexpected bout of luck keep a recurring one alive/relevant much longer than expected, but it's sort of a given that the major Round Table Knights from the source material have impossibly inflated skills and attributes at either end of the aging curve, so I'm mostly interested in unexpected success for characters under the normal rules, and what it looks like. For my one complete run of the GPC, the first generation age of death distribution was pretty lopsided - two of the PKs had died before the Anarchy had even started, not yet 30, while the other two survived til the start and end of the Conquest Period respectively. That last guy was 63, and lemme tell ya, attribute decay was catching up to him pretty hard - his skill was tremendous, but he hadn't been particularly big or strong to begin with and had withered a fair bit, so he was dependent especially on his high Sword (he had the Family Sword from BoK&L, which pushed him into the 30s) to get lots of crits and avoid hits due to how low his damage output and Knockdown threshold were compared to knightly opponents. (Technically he "lived" much longer than 63, but only because he died at the Grail Castle and accepted the resurrection deal, he was still out of the campaign bar a touching reunion with his foster daughter at the conclusion of the Grail Quest.) And don't worry about those players whose first characters died super early, because their heirs turned out to be even more extreme successes in lengthy living. They were both just about Arthur's age, with fathers who died within a year or less of conceiving them, but who got a healthy boost to their circumstances from the nature of those conceptions and deaths. One of them had a half-Faerie daughter and earned quite the posthumous promotion by saving Madoc and killing Gorlois before dying of his injuries, so said daughter had high Attributes (especially CON), passive Glory, and didn't have to start making Aging rolls til nearly the Tournament Period, so she ended up living long enough to be the one to complete the Grail Quest at 66 years old. Between solid Attributes across the board, rareness of major wounds, raking in tons of Glory, and good aging luck, she hadn't needed to spend extra resources keeping her Attributes reasonable yet, so she could instead achieve stupid high pinnacles of skill, more or less only surpassed by Lancelot by the end of her run. The other one had cucked and then killed Octa (and was rewarded for it by being invited to a certain elevated dining position), and the son he had with Octa's wife inherited the Marvelous Family Axe (+8 Protection), plus got the most absurd string of luck with the Attribute rolls in Entourage's squire advancement rules, putting him +4 SIZ and +3 STR over what he'd have had if generated at adulthood. So he had ultra beefy Attributes, did tons of damage to take enemies out quickly, and rarely took damage from anything less than a crit from a knight-tier foe, which, combined with his player judiciously spending several pre-35 Winter phases on Attribute-raising and many more Glory bonuses on it post-35, kept him going all the way to Camlann, where he finally died at a ripe 74 years old. Tough bastard didn't go down without a fight even then, either; I was a little worried he'd end up being the final survivor, but the dice didn't quite come up septuagenarian. Spending all his Glory preserving his Attributes did mean his combat skills never got as high as the other two characters mentioned, though, but he still had Axe in the mid-upper 20s.

Awesome! Lots of great ways to Pendragon. I was just explaining my logic for my own campaign, with Arthur taking a role in the fall of Western Rome and subsequent establishment of the Byzantine Empire (and taking a bit of extra territory that happens to be easily reclaimed when Arthur's reign shatters), rather than postdating it. Having him war with the Ostrogoths is its own very cool take if you're big on having the Byzantine Empire be a thing already for whatever other plot interests you've got going.

Look, I love Pendragon's extensive anachronism as much as anyone, but the Byzantine Empire is definitionally a successor/continuation state to Rome's fall. Just 'cause the continental character options said Byzantine characters are an option doesn't mean it actually makes any sense for it to coexist with Arthur conquering a still-existant Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire just lives a little longer than it did historically (honestly it's only like 50 years anyway which is way less than the usual anachronisms) to fall to Arthur instead.

The default assumption of Pendragon is that vassals are rare and weak, because it treats the norm as "Liege keeps 80% of their land demesne and has a crapton of household knights." This is pretty silly, to me; infeudation is IRL a vastly essential part of being a landowner in the time of knights because managing more than a bit of territory yourself is impossible and hiring someone to run it without leasing it to them is inefficient. The goal of feudalism is to maximize the amount of military power produced per unit of land, which is best accomplished by having vassal knights running their own manors in exchange for giving you military service; so most of a king's land is infeudated, and their larger vassals sub-infeudate most of their land, and so on for anyone who has more land than they could reasonably administer themselves (which is not much more than a single estate). Plus the successful perpetuation of the knightly class doesn't even really make sense with less than 20% of knights able to support families, of which each can only expect their eldest son to be family-supporting, and that 80% non-landed knight figure *really* doesn't gel with the proclaimed rarity of knighting anything past a second son. So I just throw out the idea that a liege is hoarding demesne land because infeudation weakens them. Of course, while that removes the concern that a liege would be unwilling to reward service with land, it also means that they're *already* going to have infeudated most of their land, so they won't necessarily have much to give. This is, in essence, why marriage to an heiress is vaunted as such a rare and special reward - the liege likely has little to no land to spare from their demesne to reward overachievers, and certainly wouldn't snatch back land from other loyal vassals to do so (that's how you run out of loyal vassals in a hurry), but if it so happens that a parcel of already-infeudated land has gone to a maiden, it's essentially been freed up to "grant" to another knight without technically being stripped from the original vassal's family. While I wouldn't be opposed to a liege granting land out of his demesne's reserves every once in a blue moon, I'd say the main paths to promotion should be 1) strategic marriage, 2) holding office, and especially 3) conquest. One of the reasons land ownership webs get so messy and geographically disconnected is precisely because the normal thing to do when you conquer an area, as a lord, is to reward your current vassals who just did the bloody work of conquering it for you with portions of the land in accordance with their station (and perhaps at this stage a little extra to some smaller vassals for stupendous deeds in battle, wink wink nudge nudge to the overachievers), and not necessarily in accordance with the geographic proximity of a given vassal to their new land. And once you have a bit of land to your name, you can of course conquer on your own time, and ask your liege to let you hold the new manor you captured in their name. So for me, the PK families tend to accrue land particularly during the Anarchy, Boy King, and Conquest Periods, simply because that's when most of the territory-grabbing wars can happen (some even started by the PKs, perhaps, depending on their positions in Salisbury during the Anarchy), and indirectly by the increase in available heiresses with so many men dying. While this is an exceptional battle, this is mentioned directly as a consequence post-Badon with landless knights getting manors and landed knights increasing their holdings, and you can sort of use it for inspiration when imagining what reward an Anarchy-era party might get if, say, they managed through clever political maneuvering to have Salisbury conquer a large chunk of Essex (as happened in my only complete campaign). Then after that, the rest of the campaign features a pretty darn stable political map, barring the rare substantial marriage or somebody earning an estate for saving Guenever from a dragon or whatnot. Basically, the early war-heavy periods give the players a chance to earn, through stupendous martial deed and political maneuvering, the status that their family will carry for the remaining largely-peaceful periods. (Of note is that I also tend to have Arthur essentially remain in charge of the land he gains during the Conquest Period rather than just kind of bailing from the continent, hence why I included that Period, but canonically you don't need to give your knights further land rewards at that point if you don't want to, because by GPC default Arthur is just like "meh, they called me Emperor, all the spent lives have been worth it now, I'm going home" and everything goes back to before he got there. Personally, I like the idea of him essentially bringing feudalism to the continent by raising up local leaders who side with him into lords, and otherwise bestowing continental territory to his greatest supporters. He even conquered further east than in canon, in part so I could reclaim some years I'd shaved off the Uther Period to make Arthur younger at the start of Boy King, and so I could justify him making a gesture of restoring and granting Judea to the Jewish RTPK.)

While I understand the desire for swords to be pre-eminent, since they were the go-to sidearm for those who could afford them in medieval warfare, I'm not a big fan of the current implementation with ties breaking other weapons, because it's incredibly punishing to anybody who puts in the work to get non-Sword skills into higher crit ranges, I generally dislike punishing people for critical successes, and it doesn't actually represent the main advantages of swords in a fight; while they are sturdier than other weapons, their main advantage wasn't bashing other people's weapons apart. The real advantages of a sword are the extreme level of control from the even weight distribution and the versatility to hit with both slashes and stabs along the entire length of the weapon. As such, I'd propose that while they should retain their durability as far as being the only weapon not broken on a fumble, their advantage on tied rolls should be hitting the enemy - possibly simultaneously, if both fighters are using swords. (On double-critical ties, regardless of what weapon the enemy is using, their reward for a critical success ought to be the sword still dealing normal damage, rather than doubled.) This does a bunch of things I like - it represents the sword being able to score hits in situations where any other weapon would be parried, doesn't make everything else seem ultra-flimsy and punish non-sword weapons with breakage on what should be a critical success, and (while this doesn't super apply to me because I houserule crit modifiers to allow results over 20 so not all crits are ties) it means that fights between very powerful sword wielders like high-end Round Table Knights are much more likely to achieve the kinds of dramatic storytelling moments where they're both continually wounding each other and potentially even hit the ground at the same moment. If you prefer to keep the rule where crits automatically tie against each other, then this leaves high-Sword characters with a significant but not ridiculously overwhelming advantage against characters who specialize in a different weapon - if you're a guy with Sword 30 going against a Saxon king with Axe 30 (possibly because one or both of you is Inspired), the sword-wielder has a clear and stark advantage, but not to the extent that the Saxon is basically a non-threat because he'll more likely than not lose his weapon instantly. Also, while this isn't personally a houserule I'd go with because I just kinda think a wider variety of viable weapons make the game more interesting, if you're a big realism stickler and want to represent another primary advantage of swords that made their use so crucial to knights, I'd make it so any top-heavy swung weapons like axes, maces, hammers, flails, etc take a -5 on horseback. Your control of distance and strike timing window are significantly limited on horseback compared to on foot. Spears and swords are great at compensating for these limitations (and thus for exploiting the many advantages being on horseback provides) since thrusts are quick and linear (and benefit from the horse's momentum), and for sword slashes you have leeway for imprecise distance since hitting with any of the weapon's length will cut the enemy. Swung weapons are much more stringent with their timing and distance requirements since an imprecise hit is just bonking somebody with the haft, which is relatively harmless to somebody in any significant armor.

Book of Knights & Ladies p. 57 has rules for playing a 16 year-old, which take the starting skill values of a character's culture, reduce any above 5 by 3 or to 5 (whichever result is greater), and then skip a couple of the steps you'd normally take making a PK (no setting one skill to 15 and three to 10, no four advancements) but you still get the 10 free points. Attributes and Winter Phase advancement are unmodified compared to adult knights. Book of the Entourage p. 16 modifies squire character mechanics more extensively. It can cover a squire of any age from 14-20, with 14-year-olds taking -3 each to SIZ and STR and alternate gaining one point to one or the other every year after that to end up at regular adult Attribute allotment by 20. He has mostly standard cultural skills, except in First Aid, Horsemanship, Sword, and Lance, which start at Age-11 (although this seems kind of Cymric-specific and might be better re-framed as "subtract (21-your age) from the cultural value" since applying the rules as written to non-Cymrics will leave some cultures with 14 year old squires having more skill in an area than grown knights ought to have). He gets none of the skill advancement of a starting PK, not even the 10 free points BoK&L squires get, but his Winter Phase advancement is modified, giving him five extra skill points from being trained by his knight on top of normal Winter Phase advancement. Since neither system modifies the actual allotment of Trait, Passion, or Attribute points, both seem like they'd probably produce knights slightly more developed in those respects than ones generated at 21 years old, but not to an extent I'd worry about, especially considering the next point. BoK&L squires lose ~17-21 skill points relative to the cultural baseline, then a further harder to quantify amount from not having the "set one skill to 15, three to 10, and get four advances" bit. Depending on how strategically the player would deploy these options for a starting knight, this will probably represent another 35-50 point deficiency for a character built as a squire, but potentially less for the sort of player who'd spend their starting advances on Traits or Passions. So basically 50-70 skill points to try to cram into five Winter Phases. Considering BoK&L squires use regular Winter Phase advancement, it feels like you'd need a GM who's preeeetty generous with experience checks to have any chance of reaching the capabilities of a standard starting PK. If you pick the Gain 1d6+1 in Skills option every Winter Phase, you'll gain an average of 4.5 skill points per year, five Winter Phases, comes to 22.5 (we'll round to 23). In order to make up the rest of the difference, you'd need to average at least five successful experience check rolls on skills per year. Starting with low skills means higher odds experience check rolls will be successful, so this isn't totally crazy or implausible if you've got a generous GM who will give you experience checks just for hanging out with your knight while he does stuff even if you don't contribute much, but if you've got the kind of stingy GM the core rules encourage who only hands out checks for plot-significant or critical successes, you're going to end up very underdeveloped as a knight. Entourage squires vary a bit more since they don't have a set starting age, but the broad strokes are pretty similar. 14 year olds definitely have it pretty bad starting out - if their culture even has enough points to lose, they'll shed 35 before even getting to the 45-60 lost from not having set value skills, advancements, *or* the ten discretionary points. On the other hand, that 35 (or lower multiple of 5 for older squires) is exactly canceled out by the five extra skill points per Winter Phase, so for purposes of how our knight eventually turns out we can ignore it. Using the aging rules for producing squires over 14 (as opposed to using those squires in play) will, perhaps expectedly, produce fairly standard knights - on top of reducing the age penalties for starting skills, to the tune of five skill points, you get eight points per year, or 48 by the time you're a 20 year old squire. That already clears the low potential end of the deficit, and another theoretical year of the same would make you a pretty bog-standard starting knight. But of course, that's basically just two different methods of character generation ending up at the same goal, so let's look at how Entourage squires compare if actually played as such. Ignoring the five extra Winter Phase points and age-based skill penalties, since they cancel each other out, we've got seven Winter Phases to make up the 45-60 point deficit. Which, already, seems like a significant improvement in our odds of parity with regular knights compared to BoK&L squires - more time to compensate for a smaller difference. The average results of training for seven Winter Phases round up to 32 points, which is 2/3rds of the low end of our range and over half of the top end, so we have seven Winter Phases to try to get the other ~13-28 points. Assuming the sort of unusually active and adventurous squire (albeit still not one who would dare steal an important fight from his knight) who'd be worth playing as a character, even a pretty stingy or unlucky average of 2 successful yearly experience checks (which, I'll remind, any experience checks you do get are much more likely to succeed with a squire's low skills across the board compared to a grown knight) clears the low end, and GMs who are on the generous end of the spectrum with awarding checks (averaging 4+ successful experience check rolls per year) start getting into the realm where a played squire will outstrip a well-optimized knight who's generated at 21 years old. Though, that said, even if your played squire ends up 10-15 skill points ahead of optimally generated comrades his age upon knighting, it's a minor enough reward for all the effort of playing through the relatively weak and limited period of squirehood. Another consideration is whether you're going to allow early knightings (regardless of whether you play out the squire period or not), as per BoK&L pointing out that some cultures and circumstances might warrant knighting 18 year olds, and even more exceptionally rare circumstances as young as 17 (such as the famous case of Lancelot, whose adoptive mother was the Lady of the Lake who protected Excalibur for the Pendragons, and asked Arthur to knight Lancelot early since she'd foreseen her coming death and wanted him able to support himself). To be honest, I'm a pretty lenient GM, so unless I had a good reason not to, I'd probably let a player build his 17-18 year old knight as a regular knight, with their conveniently prodigal skill and physical development for their age being significant to why a lord would acquiesce to the knighting in the first place (as opposed to letting a clearly unqualified child embarrass the office and die horribly by becoming a primary combatant before they're ready), and just not worry myself over the definitely-extant but fairly moderate mechanical advantages. If you don't want to do that, and want to represent the harsh realities of being thrust into the world of independent knighthood as a half-trained teenager (perhaps to avoid all your players hunting for excuses to knight their sons as young as possible), then I'd say go all-out with it by using the Entourage rules, building the knight as a 17-18 year old squire and then having him lose the bonus five skill points per Winter Phase once he's knighted, since he doesn't have a knight showing him the ropes anymore. Not only will such a young knight most likely be rather vulnerable and unimpressive on the battlefield initially, the effects of interrupting his education at such a crucial juncture will persist well past the point his peers have also been knighted. Although the gap will gradually become less significant over the decades, he will always be worse-mannered, less dangerous, and/or generally somewhat inept in the essentials of knighthood compared to his same-age peers, who may either pity him or turn up their noses at him for his oafishness. This is *arguably* the verisimilitude option, but frankly, while he's obviously going to be the biggest example of this by a country mile and I'm not expecting any PK to keep up with him, the existence of Lancelot tells me that Pendragon is open to rare, talented young knights excelling among their peers. So take of this analysis what you will, but as a GM, I'd suggest that nine times out of ten you're going to get a better play experience out of letting your player squires use the rules from Entourage instead of the ones from BoK&L. I would only use the BoK&L rules if your GMing style is very liberal with experience checks but you don't want that to result in the player squire becoming any stronger than a normally-generated PK would be by 21, or if you especially value squires having decent combat skills right out the gate.

Well, it wasn't about whipping the peasants being a Just action. Rather, per p. 109 of the GPC, Gorboduc's foreman is whipping serfs, and when the players roll Just, the game says the treatment is harsh, but *not* unjust (aka, by the GPC's standards, that treatment alone shouldn't be considered sufficient reason for a highly-Just knight to intervene). Sorry for the confusion.

Hey, guys, I had an interesting discussion in my campaign not that long ago that I've been thinking about ever since, and wanted to share my thoughts with y'all. It all started when I was running the Gorbuduc part of the Sauvage Quest, headed by a Jewish PK trying to rescue his son and foster daughter from the Sauvage King. We hit the part where the commoners were getting whipped harshly by Gorboduc's bandits, and PKs do a Just roll and are told on a success that it's okay for peasants to be treated that way, and my player immediately shot back, "Nope. Maybe that's Just for Christian knights, but Jewish culture has always placed a high value on taking our history with persecution as motivation to help other persecuted groups. *My* high Just score should *compel* me to intervene, not prevent it." And I agreed with the logic (especially considering Judaism has Just as a religious Trait in Pendragon, per Books of Knights & Ladies, so it'd feel especially off to rule following Jewish codes of justice as Arbitrary, even if a Christian knight might think of protecting a peasant from the whip as an Arbitrary action), but it did get me thinking about the ways the tenets and characteristics of knighthood could be interpreted differently or change across time and place, especially with regard to treatment of commoners. For one thought I had based on this, I recalled that the Honor loss for kidnapping or raping a woman, or attacking unarmed people, only apply to those of noble and spiritual status. This seems entirely fitting with the "commoners are barely even people" mindset of the Uther and Anarchy Periods, but I feel as though Arthur's concept of noblesse oblige should expand which targets of cruel violence cause Honor loss in the later Periods. Not like commoners should get *rights* or you should stop losing Honor for doing manual labor or anything crazy like that, but just as the rise of Arthur and Guenever mechanically incentivizes knights taking up better moral Traits and putting women on pedestals instead of seeing them as breeding stock with the Chivalrous and Romantic Knight mechanics, I think noblesse oblige should get some extra mechanical weight by making unjustified harm to commoners (or at least those within your own land) cause comparable Honor loss to doing so to nobles and clergy. What are you fine folks' thoughts on this? Do you have any of your own examples you've used in your games, or disagreements with either my ruling in the Gorboduc situation or my idea for changing Honor loss based on Arthur's increasing standards for knightly behavior?

I guess I'm just curious how y'all deal with the fact that a bunch of the Round Table Knights are lords, sometimes even kings. There's just this constant awkward tension of which thing they have to be distant from to focus on the other thing. Either you've got a purely theoretical Round Table filled with knights who are rarely questing or advising Arthur because they've got their own lands to attend to when not mustered for war, or you've got a bunch of really present and active Knights giving us the glamor shots of everybody sitting at the Round Table discussing stuff with the King, but then you've gotta assume they're pretty disinterested in their leadership duties and have pawned them off on paid administrators or family members or the like, which makes them seem like a somewhat irresponsible lot. In my campaign I basically decided to replace scutage with the opposite, because I don't think scutage is a very honorable concept for an exalted warrior class, so basically I flipped the concept so during peacetime the serfs pay their lord a questing fund to get him to go journeying, during which time they more or less govern themselves. But that's obviously abnormal, I just thought it was a fun way of exemplifying Arthur's kindness to commoners and love of questing.

My Badon had a *ton* of setup. During the fight alongside Nanteleod at the end of the Anarchy, Ælle's wife Brona and young daughter Kendra fled to Britain's side because Brona believed Ælle's reliance on destructive sorcery would lead to the most brutal and senseless massacre in history, and he was already ensorcelling anybody who opposed him. She had a special Women's Gift, a song that frees people from sorcerous influence, which she hoped to use to save the slaves and Saxon civilians Ælle was planning to turn into draconic beasts of war. But alas, due to the treacherous Cornishmen led by Prince Mark, the back line was broken, so King Cerdic reached and killed Nanteleod and a possessed Prince Celyn killed his own mother before she could get close enough to the magic's focal point for the song to dispel it. In the following mayhem, the Salisbury knights brought Kendra back as a guest in hopes she could some day succeed where her mother failed, and she began a private and forbidden romance with the Player Squire Deirdre, who was also the rightful heiress of Cornwall Duchy. (Which, at the moment, Cornwall Kingdom had joined the Saxons in exchange for aid reclaiming those lands Gorlois had once stolen, only for the Saxon giants to immediately betray Cornwall Kingdom to keep the Duchy for themselves.) Fast forward to the year before Badon, Deirdre goes with Earl Jagent to try to liberate Cornwall Duchy from the vile and oppressive giants, but is lured into a trap by the Earl and King Idres of Cornwall Kingdom, who intended for the Earl to swear fealty to Idres and forcibly marry Deirdre to bring control of the Duchy once again back to the Kingdom. Deirdre was able to form a loyalist faction from her cell due to the ire Jagent's Earl procured to himself (between the forcible marriage of their savior and violent attempts to force the pagan populace and Deirdre's Jewish contingent to convert to Catholicism) and get a messenger out, but Idres used foul and dangerous magics to start a blizzard around the city to prevent interference, though his dabbling in such forces drains away his life within months, leaving the kingdom to Mark. Deirdre escapes and overthrows Jagent's Earl, but is unable to begin mustering forces until the heat of next summer comes to break the blizzard, causing her to be late to the muster. Queue Badon. Of the three players whose main knights were present at the start of the battle, I gave them all control of their knightly family members so they'd have extra characters to cycle between when one died or became too injured to continue, so that I could go as hardball as Badon deserved; one PK who got married late had four younger brothers who he'd managed to win manors and knighthood for earlier in the campaign, one who got married super early had four knighted sons due to his own largesse plus two of them having skipped twelve years of childhood due to the changeling plotline in Anarchy, and the third had an eclectic mix of knightly family members, so it worked out to where everyone had five knights to carry them through the brutal four day battle, except Deirdre's player who only showed up for the big finale. The player luck was pretty lopsided. The first PK lost all four of his younger brothers and only barely survived while getting his attributes shredded by wound rolls, but it wasn't so bad play-wise since both his sons were close to knighting age. The second player managed to not to lose his main knight nor any of his sons. Third one lost his cousin and father-in-law outright and his maternal grandfather was left bedridden by wounds. In sum, they managed to kill or capture multiple Saxon Kings, and Kendra was able to rouse her brother from his possession before he could be forced to repeat his kinslaying. By this point most of Arthur's forces had been decimated and were backed into a corner, but Celyn switched sides and protected Kendra long enough for her to complete her song, reversing the transformation curse on all Ælle's victims just as Deirdre's reinforcements showed up. It seemed to be turning into a rout against the Saxons, but Ælle, unwilling to accept defeat despite his children's pleading, absorbed all the draconic energy that had been unwoven from his victims into his own body, mutating into a horrible eldritch parody of a dragon with nine legs, five tails, and dozens of mouths randomly strewn about its already-decaying carapace, which it used to devour the children of the man it once was. Between the bolstering effect of Excalibur on Arthur's leadership and a critical Passion success for her dead amor on Deirdre's part, she managed to fight down the dread beast, firmly securing Arthur's near-pyrrhic victory over the united Saxon front. It's a rather high-fantasy take on the battle, but we had a lot of fun and it was a really cool change of pace to be able to go wild with all our characters braving the potential of death and so many succumbing to it.

The major items of Arthurian myth are very often artifacts from old Pagan stories that were Christianized outright or combined with known Christian artifacts for a Christian audience. Of particular importance are the Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Danann, which have really clear analogies to key objects in the Arthurian mythos. The Stone of Fál, which cries out or roars in the presence of the rightful monarch, became the stone part of the Sword in the Stone symbol. The Lance of Longinus as used in Arthurian myth is a composite with the Lance of Lugh. Excalibur is heavily inspired if not outright based on Nuada's Sword of Light, Claiomh Solais, a sword that shines like the sun and serves as the kingly symbol of the Tuatha De. And finally, the Holy Grail is heavily inspired by the Cauldron/Platter of the Dagda, which provides infinite perfect sustenance which ensures excellent health and supernatural longevity (though not typically the resurrection and healing the Grail would come to be known for). Personally, I decided to lean fully into this interplay by making all of said objects have both Pagan and Christian connections. There's already lots of thematic involvement in Pendragon with Britain's nature as a former Roman colony, so the way I handled it was that Rome had stolen three of the four treasures during their initial occupation (with Excalibur being the exception as it was hidden in the lake), then those objects played pivotal roles in the Crucifixion of Christ and surrounding events (relevantly here the Spear and Grail being used to kill Jesus and catch his blood respectively), before being stolen back to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea. (Strictly speaking, the occupation began just slightly *after* the birth of Christianity historically speaking, but this is Pendragon, knights shouldn't even exist for a couple hundred more years, so I'm happy to fudge details.) In fact, I actually went even further de-Catholicizing some elements of the lore, as the way I see it, British Christianity under the Joseph of Arimathea founding myth would both predate and basically ignore everything Paul added that made so much of Catholicism what it is. While a Catholic knight certainly *could* have completed the Grail Quest, it was much more open to pagans and others who were exceptional in spirituality and virtue, and it ended up being a Jewish knight who completed the Quest in my campaign.

I run a somewhat more high-fantasy (influenced by Irish mythology) take on the GPC, and so my portrayal of Guenever has been twisted unusually by the circumstances. The primary differences for the purposes of this discussion are that Cornwall is a Faerie land, and half-faeries have significantly more intense anti-aging, tending to reach their cultural coming of age and then slowing down precipitously to 1/10th the aging rate. The two half-Faeries in this campaign are Jewish PK Deirdre, whose aging slowed down at 12 upon her bat mitzvah, and King Arthur, who is British Pagan in this version and whose aging slowed down at 14 after his coming of age hunt. Thus, Arthur doesn't simply have a Boy King Period where he's young, but sort of fundamentally IS the Boy King, only ending up physically around 20 by the time the story ends. (This was a thematic change to emphasize that the downfall of his current kingdom were the failures of youth and inexperience, albeit on a Faerie scale of life, which will be addressed by his eventual return.) So as far as this campaign is concerned, Arthur and Guenever did truly love each other... when they got married, and were physically around the same age. They had a few happy years together, both bright-eyed and excited to be the royal couple, to have unparalleled power to make the world better for their subjects and to defeat the evil forces that ail them. But Guenever kept growing up, and Arthur largely didn't. He remained a rambunctious lad while she changed from a girl into a woman. The longer their marriage goes, the more out of sync they fall, the more uncomfortable she feels trying to connect with her husband, the more physically and emotionally exhausted she finds herself. Her concepts of the world and her ambitions are growing, her desires are growing, and Arthur, through no fault of his own, can't keep up. So she becomes more and more focused on her own political power and its exercise. Again, this starts well - she's virtuous and driven, tempering her desires for results with her need to ensure nobody is unduly harmed and that courtly rules/obligations aren't violated. And yet she grows more and more lonely, unable to interest Arthur in her courtly life or political aspirations (though he does not disapprove of them, simply finds them uninteresting), unable to find anything in their relationship but the longing for what they had when she was younger. Enter Lancelot. He's everything Guenever wants - a manly knight, an upstanding champion for her romantic and political ideals, someone who mentally stimulates her with his courtly and artistic skill and passion. But to get those things forces Guenever to push past the nominally-acceptable bounds of Amor into the definitely-forbidden realm of Lovers. And this pushes Guenever away from that "playing by the rules" commitment. She's still trying to do the right thing, but more willing to push the bounds to do it, and more willing to fight underhandedly to keep the things that give her happiness in her life. And of course, seeing Lancelot as her true soul mate, she expects monogamy from him even though she, like, has a husband. (Who, to be fair, she probably doesn't sleep with anymore and is bound to in matrimony only legally rather than in practice, but still.) For Arthur's part, I think he knows about and is fine with the affair because he loves Guenever and Lancelot and wants them to be happy, but he knows its discovery would be intolerable because both the lovers and the majority of his court are Christian and Christians are weird about that sort of stuff, so he helps keep it under wraps, until eventually Mordred spills the bag and everything falls apart.

He's actually paying for all three, not just two of them! It's his second, fourth, and fifth sons who came of age simultaneously (because the forth was his son that got replaced with a changeling for two Winters and thus aged by 10 years, and the fifth is the changeling itself who he convinced to stay in his family once the aging curse was broken by the Enchantment of Sauvage ending), and he came into a big enough windfall as rewards for both clearing the Sauvage Quest and capturing King Aethelswith for ransom during the Anarchy that he can afford a big event to knight all three of them and have a big Glorious event to honor them before things return roughly to the adventuring status quo. And thanks for the helpful numbers! I don't own BoM, and I wouldn't have wanted to buy it just for these cost guidelines when I'm replacing the rest of the rules I would have gotten from it with Book of the Estate anyway.

They're probably somewhere obvious that I'm just missing, but for the life of me I can't find any guidelines about what's actually involved monetarily in being the sponsor of a tournament (aside from the cost of any prizes offered), or what limitations and the like. Like, clearly there's gotta be something, since people aren't generally running weekly tournaments to farm Glory, and seemingly the main difference between a Local and Regional Tournament isn't the noble rank of the person running it but rather them having a bunch of extra money to pour into it. It's mostly relevant to me because I'm wondering whether it's possible for someone who got an unusually large influx of cash (generous rewards, very successful plunder year, etc) to be able to spend it running one tournament a size bigger than their income/rank would normally allow, to mark a very special occasion or the like. Due to an unusual resolution to the Sauvage changeling plot, one of the PKs is having three of his sons come of age to be knighted in the same year, and since he's come into a fat wad of cash, wants to spend the rest throwing a big tournament in their honor, but we're not sure what the economics on that look like.

Immortal soul? Pshah. If your bridge doesn't give me annual Glory and experience checks, I don't want it.

Those both make sense! Thanks, Morien!

1) If you get Free Income from Improvements sufficient to cover an entire Endowment, and then you die and your land is reassessed after the church is built, do you owe servitium debitum on the increased productivity of your land, even though it went straight from Free Income to an Endowment during your lifetime? 2) If you give at least £10 as an endowment to an abbey, does the abbot owe you servitium debitum, as if they were a vassal?

I'm probably missing some obvious indicator, but I'm a little confused about the relationship between when you sleep with a character and when you roll/apply the Childbirth roll. Like, if you marry or sleep with a woman during your adventures earlier in the year, do you roll for Childbirth that year, or next year? I know that things essentially round to "everyone is born and ages in Winter" for bookkeeping reasons, but I'm unsure whether you round up or down a winter as far as what year the kid is born.

Hey guys! Just trying to figure out some good ratios here. I made a post a while back trying to use a high cost of material transportation to justify why infeudation would be cheaper than maintaining mostly household knights, in order to undo the idea in Book of the Estate that lords would keep the vast majority of their land as demesne, but it was pointed out to me that my system made land nearly a non-reward since it was basically impossible to get any without immediately subinfeudating it, even just going from one manor to two as a vassal knight. So, instead, I wanna go with a social solution. Book of the Warlord gives rules to massively penalize Glory and cause Honor bleed over time if a lord spends too little on his standard of living; I want to adopt that idea similarly to having too little enfoeffed land for your station, treating vassals as an absolutely essential part of one's status, in opposition to the current rules which hold that having too *much* subinfeudated land causes disrepute and dishonor. However, I'm not sure what good ratios would be. It should clearly only start above a certain point, maybe once you have ~£50 or so in landholdings, and should probably scale so a higher proportion of your land has to be enfoeffed the more you have. As an initial think-as-I-write spitball, maybe anybody who accumulates £50 or more in manorial holdings is liable to have these legally compiled into an estate, and anyone with an estate is only supposed to keep 10% of their land outside that central estate as demesne. So if you're an average baron with £300 of total holdings, of which £100 is the caput major, then you have £200 of outliers, of which you're expected to keep no more than £20, or two average manors, as additional demesne land, and the other £180 should be enfoeffed. Honestly my history gland says it should be harsher than that, but probably if I did go any harsher then gaining new landholdings for great deed or conquest would barely feel like it matters. And anyway, subdividing estates makes the paperwork annoying, and this does at least accomplish my goal where the percentage of demesne held goes down the more land you have (since caput major size is fairly static and represents a larger portion of smaller holdings). What do you guys think?

That does make sense to me. Honestly, I was figuring most ransom going to the capturer would be halved *anyway*, by the general rule of "half the income you gain through war customarily goes to the liege lord," but it also makes sense that you'd invoke the feudal chain when you captured someone important simply because being able to force a ransom payment from their family/vassals is predicated on it not being cheaper for them to just invade and take their guy back. So the more important the person you capture is, the better a bet it is to send him up the feudal hierarchy and either get a cut of ransom or just an upfront reward, since your liege or the liege above that will be able to provide so much more resistance against rescue attempts.

Oh, huh. That does make more sense, but it also means I might need a refresher on the rules of capture and ransom. So, under what circumstances does right of ownership over a captured opponent go up the chain like that? Is this a factor of Uther and Octa being the commanders of their respective sides in the battle, or do all knights/nobles captured in a battle go to the commander of that battle to decide whether to imprison or ransom them (with the knights being rewarded to encourage the capture of enemies, regardless of what the commander ends up doing with them)? Or is it more universal and rank-based than that, and you'd still hand a king you captured over to your king even if you just captured him on the roadside somehow instead of during a battle commanded by someone else? (And yeah, I definitely wasn't thinking they'd be rewarded an estate *each* for capturing Octa. I'd either do what you say, and have the worth of an estate split evenly between the knights, or if my anti-equality bastard heart takes over, give the full reward to whichever knight actually defeated Octa directly, which would probably be whichever knight had the most Glory by rule of precedence, or whoever stepped in after that guy lost.)

Sorry if this is an odd question, and the answer might come down purely to "the GPC doesn't want the players getting insane wealth instantly" rather than anything in-universe, but like... KAP 5.2, p. 188 has guidelines for ransom that put the value of a king's ransom at around £2150. The value players get for capturing King Octa in 490, per the GPC, is £350. Additionally, Book of the Estate, p. 17-18, lists the capture of an enemy king as the kind of event that warrants being promoted to estate-holder. But while killing Gorlois is listed as a sufficient deed to earn an estate, capturing King Octa gets no mention as being so notable in either the GPC or BotE. (But the latter might be because they thought it would be redundant, after already giving the general rule about capturing kings?) I guess if Nohaut is a smaller-than-average kingdom, and we're assuming the ransom is split to the effect of 50% to Uther, 25% to Roderick, and 25% to the knight(s) who actually did the capturing, then £350 isn't an unreasonable figure for the knights' share. But I'm not sure if that's the intended reading, or if it's that the GPC generally has a lower idea of ransom value than KAP 5.2, or if Octa's one of those teeny tiny petty kings and Eosa's singlehandedly bringing 9,900 of the Saxons' 10,000-strong army. Maybe Uther calls him a king because he thinks it's funny, and rolls his eyes at the knights when they think they've done something impressive by capturing him.

*whispered chanting* Join Cornwall, join Cornwall, join Cornwall-