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No I mean't making all the stuff in BoM get brought up to BoE standards. Put the £10 manor economic model into BoM (and into the core KAP rulebook as well) and have the various enhancements in BoM adjusted to match the values in BoE. Plus there are some things in BoM that aren't in BoE. I'd like all the economic rules to be compatible with each other. Variable harvests could be an optional rule. For instance a fixed income of £2 could be replaced with £1d3 and so forth. MAybe the fixed income of a manor (£10) could be replaced with 3d6 or even 2d6+3 adjusted by weather, raids and so forth. It. wouldn't take much work to accomplish, either.

I wonder if a revised BoM is a possibility. It wouldn't take too much to update BoM to BoE's mechanics. Increase the manor income, put a space limit, and replace variable income with fixed income using the low average die results. That should do over 80% of the hard lifting.

IMO Estate does a better job of things. Manor adds a lot of neat details but with all the die rolling and such it seems to eat up a lot of game time, every year, plus it can lead to runaway escalation with income. Estate eliminates more of the variable rolls and uses fixed values for things, which speeds things along, and it introduces the concept of spaces, limiting the number of income producing improvements than a manor can reasonable hold. IN BoM, someone with a lot of money could but lots of investments, clear land for new villages and turn a typical manor into a holding that could produce ten times as much as a single manor, or even more. With Estate that's just not possible as there isn't enough free space in a typical manor to build that many investments or clear much land. With my last campaign Manor was one of the two manor reason why the campaign crashed and burned (my only Pendragon campaign ever to do so). The new campaign uses Estate and the results have been much better, even if the knights are somewhat poorer.

I suspect not. One of the things Arthur does when he becomes High King is restore lots of land to families who lost it during the Anarchy. While I suspect that mostly meant to Saxons, there were other land grabbers. So while ther Anarchy could be a realtively easy time to expand your holdings, keeping it all is still tricky. IMO the best time to try and expand is during any of the wars. Taking manors that are held by a vassals of a lord that your liege lord (or King Arthur) is at war with is probably the easiest way to grab land that you can hold onto -if your side wins the war. The land will probably be far from the PKs home (Salisbury), but I think it is still the easiest way to get an actual estate by conquest. Yes, on multiple levels. Not only can is possibly lead to getting more land somewhere down the road, but it gives you someone to help out during raids and such.

Yup. Exactly. Except that a player could try to role play things to try and get manors that are close to each other. For example, courting a heiress or widow who lives nearby, and if on a border, he could try to conquer a manor across the border. That would make getting manors close together more likely, but would be much more difficult to pull off, as it limits the knight's possibilities. I also suppose that in some rare cases a knight could make arrangements with his liege lord to swap a manor or two to consolidate his holding, but such things would be rare, and require a great deal of trust and loyalty, as consolidated holding would make the knight more powerful and more difficult to deal with militarily. Basically, I believe such an act the Knight from a rich vassal knights with several manors to an estate holder. I think historically though, the reverse was more likely to occur.

If it helps, in my own campaign PKs have gotten manors in the following ways: The first PK role played his way into marrying a widow. This took several years and some negotiation. Just recently, about 17 years later in game time, the Count formally granted the manor to the PK's son, finally making it a holding that can be passed down. It has been improved somewhat over the years and produces around £13 The second PK got land by reclaiming a manor that had been taken by an evil knight (so evil that he had a redcap serving him). As the evil knight had wiped out the family that held the land and there were no know claimants, the Count promised to grant the manor to whosoever reclaimed it for him. The PKs did so and one of them, whom the others promoted as as the hero of the encounter, was granted the manor. The third PK marred a widow (his third wife) after leading a force to recover a farie stone with healing properties that helped to save the Count from the plague (I started the campaign very early, in 410, so this is all long before Counter Roderick). As teh PK played a major part in helping to save the Counts life (along with Coventina, a Lady of the Lake), he had some very nice modifiers on the random wife table and was rewarded with a heiress with a manor. Later, the same PK lead a unit that captured an enemy commander in battle, and he was gifted a second manor near Portus Dubris (Dover) by King Constatin. The last PK got his first manor due to his position in a Knightly Order than the PKs had established early on. Due to the Order being comprised almost entirely of knights from Salisbury (the original PKs plus a vassal knight and some inlaws), and it part in saving the Count from the plague, the order was granted the manor of Little Langford and the (Ogre inhabited) remains of the old Hill fort of Groverly Castle. Although technically the knight is really the steward of the manor, the order decided to make that PK the knight in residence to fulfill their military service obligation to the Count. This came about in no small part because all the other members had land. Recently the same PK finally got a manor of his own from the "A Prefect Wife" card at a feast. As the PK is now late in his career, has over 10,000 Glory, have served the Count well in many ways, etc. He rolled well on the table and got an heiress with £11 in land and £37 in treasure. So after 25 years each PK has managed to acquire one family manor to raise their status to vassal knight. A couple have a second manor as a gift, which they can not pass down. Only one PK has a chance as two manors, but he turned it down. The son of one of the PKs ended up saving the lift of General Aetius from assassins (actually several other PKs played a bigger part in it, but as the younger knight failed several Awareness rolls he missed a lot of things and so went into the general tent and helped to defend the general against the two assassin inside the tent, and thus looked good in front of the general), and had the chance to marry one of Aetius nieces (who had a nice villa with two vineyards and three wineries that produced something like £20/year), but the player had to bow out as the player had already gone to great effort to marry into a prestigious Roman family back in Britain and if he would have backed out of it at this late date (the wedding was set for the next year, and had been for over a decade) he would have insulted the family and made a powerful enemy. But basically, like Morien says, you have to earn it by doing great things for somebody important. I'd also caution very strongly against awarding manors lightly. Doing so can both cheapen the effect, and lead to major escalation. I usually try to find other rewards besides land or portable treasure. Stuff that has a personal value to the PKs. That way the players get the satisfaction of their actions being recognized and rewarded, but don't end up with too much wealth or land. For example, the PKs knightly order was formally recognized by the King for it role if combating the plague (knights now get 25 glory for joining), a statue of a griffin (its worth some libra but it's mostly a prestige thing for the order and is really just a big rock), and more recently, .Gorcely Castle (a old ruined hillfort that is really just a money pit. While the PKs recent military success abroad has allowed them to get permission to fortiy it from King Constatin, actually doing so, and manning it, will take a lot more money that the members can muster, and just building a great hall, stables and outbuildings should eat up the remainder of their war booty). So while all those rewards are nice, none will really make the knights richer or give them more land.

Mostly be somehow being gifted or granted other manors by a lord. It is deliberately difficult to really expand a holding by much in KAP5. It's not like the old version where knights could just keep marrying heiresses after their wives died in childbirth. Most nobles have to keep about 70=80% of their manors themselves, so there are only a relatively few manors available for knights to hold, and generally speaking more manors usually means more knight service owed, so the knight would need to have his own knights to fulfill his military obligation to his liege lord.

Hoiusehold knights are rolled up the same as vassal knights, only then tend to be a little poorer. This is spelled out in the Book of Knights & Ladies, but you can basically ignore it for chargen if you want to- it usally doesn't make much of a difference. There are rules for rolling up PK squires in the book of Entourage. Boiled down to their simplest: They start at age 14, with -3 to SIZ and STR All their skills start at the normal starting values except for the Knightly skills of Awareness, Courtesy Battle, First AId, Sword, Lance, Horsemanship, and Hunting witch all start at 3. Each Year the Squire: Gets back one of the points of SIZ and STR lost. Even years is SIZ, odd STR until they grow up to normal STR and SIZ at age 20. Get 5 skill points that they can put into raising their knightly skills (above) in addition to their normal training and practice. This is due to the "on the job traning" that comes from being a squire to a knight. Get 5 glory per 1000 Glory of the knight they are serving . Being the squire of King Uther (GLory 27550) is way more glorious than being the squire to Sir Nobody (Glory 1,001). Story wise, just what do you need? It doesn't look like you would need to change much to make it work.

You could. What I do is have the unit Commander makes a battle roll, and apply a modifier based on the outcome (+5 for a decisive victory, -5 for a decisive defeat). It gives pretty good results but I think is a little more accutate than just going with the outcome, as some units can take heavy casualties before the fight is won.

Actually according to one kenjutsu expert there is. Apparently back when AEG was creating the L5R RPG they consulted with an actual kenjustu instruction and he was surprised that damage was STR based. Apparently you don't cut with force impact, but with the motion of the strike. Think slicing instead of chopping. Yeah, base skill. It's just something of a thought experiment to help make DEX and APP more useful than they are now compared STR, CON and SIZ (the super stat). One of the major goals would be to make lady characters more useful/playable. The best stat (APP) is practically worthless. DEX is nearly worthless. The armor penalty makes it only useful for a couple of things, with knockdown being the most significant, and SIZ and Horsemanship tend to offset DEX. Uh, maybe it's time to get back to what's new with Pendragon. As far as I know there are a few supplements (Book of the Castle, Book of Salisbury, Book of the Magician) a few spin off RPGs (Hellenistic Greece, and Feudal Japan) in the pipeline, plus maybe a couple of things that they are keeping quiet about until they are further along.

LOL! I think I've got the same players.

To ensure that you stay that way, I won't tell my players that you're the one who took away their extra income!

Ah. One option you might consider is allowing for Iai to be used in place of sword, but capping the sword attack at the Sword skill. So someone with Iai 20 and Sword 16 would attack at 16, while swomeone with Iai 15 and Sword 22 would attack at 15 on the first round, and continue on at 22. This is how RQ and most version of BRP handle attacks for horseback, capping the weapon skill at the character's ride skill. Pendragon doesn't do it as it would just lead to everybody maxing out their horsemanship over their other skills, but That sounds interesting. I wonder if allowing it to sub for either STR or SIZ might not be a good idea for standard KAP? I could help make PIcts nasty again. Some of us have been debating the idea of basing social skills on APP/2 and Dex skills at DEX/2.

Yes, I agree. Because of this. kay, I think I've caught up. Thanks for explaining it to me. Yup. Probably. I know I was using an outdated version of Entourage for a bit and it lead to some confusion with the random wife stats and marriage tables. My confusion here was mostly in viewing "lots" as actual lots of land and not as 10% increments, plus I was viewing things mostly from the viewpoint of a single manor. All in all , though I'm not in too bad a shape here. I think I might have to talk to one or two players to fix a manor and the PKs with either lose £1 or trade off one investment for a refund. Thanks for the help.

Okay. And give 5 times the reward if raided or plundered.(i.e £15 instead of £3) Okay, so lots are 10% increments of the land, while spaces are 1 per £10 worth of rent/land. Okay. Got it. So a holding with an income of £50 would still have ten lots but five spaces. BTW, just what does count as assized rent? For instance how about the market town and port bonuses? For instance would a holding with an assized rent income of £50 but which including a market town port (+20%) have an assized rent income of £60 and thus 6 spaces? No I don't see. Because that's not how it worded. In Estate the costs and incomes from investments and improvements are fixed, not presented as a % increase. If it does work as a % increase then the change is huge. I can see the £100 estate being able to fill ten spaces with dairies and getting +£20 income but isn't that fact that £20 is 20% of £100 basically unrelated? It really just building ten dairies (and having ten free spaces to do so). Yeah, I see that now. Basically i had confused "lots" with spaces. It seems that lots are just 10% increments of rent income while spaces are actual units of land used for specific investments. I might have to fix one of two PK manors next session, but it shouldn't be a bit deal. I was allowing them to build additional investments by sacrificing lots for additional space. It was working out fairly well, too. Thanks for the clarification.

I generally ignore the followers fate table except to see what happens to significant NPKs who drop during a battle and are not rescued by the other PKs. For the most point all followers fates does it slow the game down. It's much easier/faster, and IMO more accurate to just roll once on the followers fate table, with a modifier based on the outcome of the battle. It's much the same with the PKS rolling damage on most enemies. Unless the players are going to go into extended rounds to try and take prisoners there is really no need or purpose to rolling damage on the NPKs.

Interesting. So if an estate holder with ten manors (£100 income) gets raided and suffers 3 lots temporary damage, it basically means that raiders took 30% of his income (£30), and that he could loose up to that 30% during the harvest. But how does that work manorial improvements and investments? Should the bonuses be scaled to fit with the larger sized lots? For instance if a landholder with an estate valued at £100 were to assign one one his ten lots to a dairy would that be the equivalent of ten dairies and produce £20 instead of £2?

One thing that might help is that BoE links the income not to the villagers but to the fields, or lots. Each lot that is worked provides £1 of income, and a manor has ten "lots". To get more income a lord would have to be able to clear a new lot of land (which requires permission, as the land usually comes from nearby woods, not to mention funds), and then get enough serfs to work it, set them up with homes and so forth. Or use the new space for manorial investments. Working with lots makes the match much easier, and you don;'t have to worry about how many villager or hamlets a particular manor has, or anything like that, and can just focus on the ten lots.

There are a few things to keep in mind. First off, Manor and Estate were done at different times, settlement sizes aren't the same between BoE and BoM. A village (300-600 people) in BoM is equivalent to a town (375-625) in BoE. Generally speaking, the math and economics of the Book of the Estate mostly supersedes that in the Book of the Manor. So in general you can assume that the values from Estate are the correct ones. So the Hamlet = £1, Village = £6 (£4-8), and Town = £9 (£6-12) from BoM p. 7 is outdated. BoM was written when the typical manor was assumed to produce 6 in income, which BoE upped to £10 (actually more than £120 but the knight won't see more than £10-20 of it). Secondly, actual income varies wildly from village to village or from farm to farm. That's actually one of the reasons why the "Manor" was used as a basic economic unit, both in the game and historically. It allows the size of holdings to vary based upon how productive they were. So holdings are smaller and more tightly grouped on the fertile plans of Salisbury, and larger and more spread out in the hillier regions to the west. BTW, what are you trying to do with this? Do you have a player trying to expand his holdings?

Sounds like a plan. I was curious as to if Username was using Iai for attacks or just to draw a weapon in a fight (and avoid the rearming penalty). If I were doing it. I'd allow Iai to be used in place of sword for the first round of combat, if the weapon is sheathed, without a penalty. I figure the need to learn a separate skill would make up for the lack of a penalty. Mechanically, I think Pendragon works okay for a Feudal Japan setting., although I do believe that many of KAP weaknesses (i.e. DEX and APP practically being dump stats) are more pronounced, especially in the latter eras when Samurai become more cultured. I could also see some of the honor peanlties being more severe on lower ranking Samurai trhan of higher ranking ones.

Well there is a Samurai version of KAP in the works. BTW, the rules presented on the site look very KAP3-4 ish. How do you run Iaijutsu? Historically it was used to both draw and strike with one motion.

Are you hoseruling it, or do you have some playtest version of the Japanese Pendragon game? I'd be curious to see what you are using. I suspect that about 70% of KAP tranfers over okay, but some of the stuff could be interesting.

I thin kj that is mostly a problem for the horse. Realsitcially, that's why Knights didn't usually wear their armor and ride their warhorses unless expecting trouble. KAP3 Knights Aventerous did have a fatigue penalty for this, which I think was fair. I've worn armor, but haven't slep in it. I think the bog problem isn't the with the metal as much as with the padding and temperature. Knights wore a padded arming doublet/gambeson/aketon under their armor. This was made up of multiple layers of cloth and similar to a modern heavy blanket or comforter. After travelling all day it would probably get hot and sweaty and then the sweat would chill when the knight stopped to rest. This would probably mean sleep in wet, cold clothing all night. Add to that the effect that metal has (it gets hotter under sunlight, and acts as a heat sink that draw the knights body heat away when the weather is cold, and I would expect sleeping in armor to be very uncomfortable, with knights being cold, wet and miserable. It would be even worse during inclement weather. Overall I would suspect that there were probably a couple of months in Spring and Fall where it might be okay, but otherwise it would either be too hot or too cold to be able to get much sleep in.

That one is a surprise. Do you use it to provide clues as to when something isn't "natural"?

Yes, that's basically what it comes down to. You weight the pros and cons of each and decide which you'd prefer - or come up with some middle ground between the two.