mj6373

Hmmm, an interesting thought. That said, I don't know if I necessarily agree. I feel like the natural thing to do when you hold one manor and get another, if it isn't close enough to your first one to personally manage both of them, is to promptly subinfeudate it to an unlanded younger brother, cousin, etc. Now your dynasty is stronger and the newly-landed knight of your family owes you a huge favor, and, while it isn't likely much help yet at only two manors' worth of holding, you have a vassal to help out in any future wars or to host feasts for you or whatnot.

I love Pendragon. I love the relatively early start date, and the generational gameplay such a lengthy campaign creates. However, it does create an interesting problem - the rules and genre of the game ask for and incentivize players playing larger than life heroes, people defined by Arthurian ideals of honor and passion and loyalty and courtly grace and noblesse oblige, but then they drop your first characters into the broken world decades prior to Arthur bringing the golden age defined by those ideals. In order to properly contrast Arthur's resplendent, magical, virtuous kingdom with the world before and after, the world before must be filled with the vices, dishonor, and disloyalty Arthur banishes. Yet, with a few exceptions, the rules don't encourage you to have your first character be a bit of a turd compared to his kids and grandkids, to fit the settings they each live within. Instead, you're left trying to live up to the ideals of Arthur's court before Arthur or his court exist to recognize it. So how do we address that? Well, first of all, even before we get into how the culture and on-the-ground viewpoint of the knights would affect character viewpoints, we can take stock of the situation from an entirely ordinary viewpoint. Obviously if the president raped someone, you wouldn't want him in office anymore, but would you immediately stop paying taxes, or try to assassinate him personally? Probably not. Those especially devoted and diligent in their opposition may spend hours using every available means of litigation and protest and publication to undermine him and try to get him lawfully thrown in jail, but it's considerably rarer that one would go so far as to get themselves imprisoned or executed for the extent of their resistance. Second, remember that as far as the Great Pendragon Campaign is concerned, the knights really have no way of knowing prior to Uther's death that he raped Igraine. Obviously this doesn't solve the out-of-character issue, but as far as players being more aware of the event timeline than their characters are goes, it's no secret that the guy will immediately thereafter lose two sons, be sick as a dog for years, then get better exactly long enough to watch all his closest friends die around him before he succumbs to the horrible poison as well. Third, if you're up for a whole lot of creative effort, consider that new stories can result from the characters pursuing more plausible ways to oppose Uther's dastardly activities. If your players really can't countenance serving a guy as he abuses and ultimately kills a loyal vassal before raping his wife, there's a pretty messy yet also wonderfully simple way to resolve that issue - just open up the opportunity for them to swear Homage to Gorlois and serve Cornwall. They can fight to save Gorlois and his castles from Uther's assaults, they can capture the deceitful Prince Madoc who reneged on his honor-bound agreement to help an ally on the continent, they can properly direct their outrage towards the antagonistic King Uther after his magical rape of the duchess comes to light. Maybe they even create a quirky alternate timeline where Uther, rather than Madoc, is the one to perish on the battlefield shortly after conceiving Arthur, creating a brief period where not-very-honorable-but-at-least-opposed-to-rape Madoc takes the throne of Logres and makes reparations to Cornwall in an effort to atone for his father's sins. Things are tense but cautiously optimistic for the next few years as efforts are made to repair relations and Gorlois marries his daughters off to surrounding kings to ally more of the realms against the Saxons. Madoc is, idk, infertile or something, so Arthur stays next in line. (Illegitimate, but so was Madoc, so whatever.) Then bam, all the lords (now including Gorlois and King Madoc) die horribly at a victory feast, Merlin or Ygraine herself run off into hiding with baby Arthur, the PKs play out the Anarchy from a Cornish perspective, and things roughly right course by the time Arthur rises to power, with a few serial numbers filed off and edge cases filled in with new material.

The houserule idea: If a character owns multiple non-neighboring parcels of demesne land, do not track outliers on the expense budget. If you wish to tax these outliers, halve their income and apply it towards meeting servitium debitum (including officer pay) at the primary residence (caput major for barons), then any resulting deficit or surplus is applied to the discretionary fund. Example: If a character owns a £50 estate and a £10 manor, they can draw £5 of income from the manor to their estate. (The other half goes towards everything necessary to make this happen - the expenses for the steward to keep the manor running, the cost of the ox-cart team(s) and guards to safely transport the material over long distances in a world with terrible road infrastructure and heavy tolls on the handful of good roads, etc.) Since the manor's income adds a £5.5 demand to the knight's servitium debitum (an extra household knight, squire, and three footmen) the remaining £0.5 must be paid out of the estate's discretionary fund. Note that if you wish to use the outlier more efficiently by assigning a knight to maintain himself and a trio of footmen directly on-site and thereby avoid the significant expenses of transporting the assized rent to your estate, that's called "enfoeffment." Justification: Feudalism exists because the communication and logistical realities of the medieval world make holding everything as demesne completely impractical, and serves to maximize military output within that context. Reducing vassalage to a strictly disadvantageous thing that lords do to reward their favorite people, and making it a point of disrepute if less than 80% of their lands are demesne, is nuts, and more importantly, not nuts in a way that I think improves the game. Historically the vast majority of landholdings are subinfeudated, and while household and mercenary knights do make up a significant minority, the majority of knights are landholding vassals or heirs thereof. Using up half the income to transport the other half seems like a fair enough oversimplification on average, a bit too harsh for close parcels and a bit too generous for distant ones, to avoid getting bogged down in calculating distance and how speed is affected by weather and road quality between every parcel. And mechanically I think the outcome is advantageous - it's more cost-effective to infeudate your outliers, and entirely necessary to subinfeudate most of it across something as vast as an honour, but on a parcel-by-parcel basis it's inexpensive enough for a baron to very affordably hold a few extra demesne outliers, which has the benefits of consolidating some of his power (to keep him safer and deter unruly vassals), letting him benefit from Improvements built on those outliers, and of course having some on hand to enfoeff later as reward or dowry. So... What do you guys think?

Got it, thanks!

Hey guys! Fairly simple rules question here. Vineyards are an Investment, listed on p. 93 of Book of the Estate. It costs £12 to construct one, then costs £1/year for three years for the vine to grow to maturity, then you start making £3/year in profit. However, the vines have a 5% chance of dying each year. If they do, do you have to re-do the £12 upfront investment, or do you just restart the three year growing period?