sirlarkins

Great work @Scotty!

By no means! I'll always support these sort of thought experiments, and you never know: they may even lead to actual products down the line. My inbox is always open for pitches, after all.

Oh, for sure. But I tend to put this bit of advice from the core rulebook front and center in how I've treated titled P-Ks: So I don't think I've ever had more than one P-K of baron or higher rank in play at a single given time.

How many titled PKs do you have in your games!? 😉

From p. 5: "Before each feast, each Player-knight and lady in attendance must make a single unopposed APP roll." (Emphasis added.) The APP roll is specifically intended for player-characters. Seating of Gamemaster characters is entirely at the Gamemaster's discretion. Now if we're talking about titled Player-knights or ladies versus their non-titled companions, I agree that some sort of modification is certainly in order. Personally, if I had a titled player-character in my group, I wouldn't even have them roll. They're sitting Above the Salt whether they like it or not. If leaving it up to a roll, my solution, as I wrote in my designer's notes, is to replace the jewelry/fashion modifier to APP with a Glory bonus. Either +1/1,000 Glory (max +10) or by brackets, as suggested. In fact, if I ever do a v2 of the feast system, I'll probably end up going with a modified system in which Glory modifies APP in some way (or perhaps even vice versa!). I do want to keep APP in the mix to some extent, however "unrealistic" it might feel, both because it makes it a vital statistic in the game (as mentioned) and also because it feels truer to the Aristotelian medieval mindset towards beauty.

Correct--there is no umlaut in the place name. On the map, however, it is spelled with an umlaut.

Not quite yet, but getting there!

On the poster map of the city, "Grunewald" is misspelled. (Note lack of ü umlaut.)

Yes, quite right—there are a couple, much bigger fish to fry before we can get to the BoSalisbury.

Something I've been contemplating trying out: use the Lady character generation rules and have the players roll up a background character as another player's wife. They can Winter Phase their character, have some say and autonomy in decisions involving the husband-knight's estate, and even bring the character to the forefront for selected scenarios. (Idea somewhat inspired by the concept of the Shadow in Wraith, if you're familiar with that game—though hopefully less adversarial!)

Paladin has rules for converting pagans, though the focus is on Christian Player-knights converting Gamemaster characters (since there are no pagan P-Ks in the game). An interesting detail: You might also allow the converting character to make a Religion roll, with a success granting rolls for checks in each of the new convert's Christian traits, and a critical granting automatic checks.

Keep this up and you might just get named Atgxtg the Butler.

If you ever run the "Adventure of the Tournament of Dreams" from Tales of Mystic Tournaments, it's mostly located in Powys and you could definitely have lots of Cambrian tribesmen about to inflame any Hate passions still present in the group.

This is something we'll be clarifying in future publications, but it reflects some changes Greg was in the midst of making to the chronology of Salisbury. For the time being, you can do as Morien suggests and simply treat Jarren and Jaradan as interchangeable.

This is correct; it's an opposed roll. If both rolls fail, then nothing happens—you don't react, in this example, and neither gain nor lose Geniality.

Perfect example! 😂 But to reiterate my point from a few posts up, if the Glory totals seem too much, or if you want to mess around with introducing geniality as a factor for Gamemaster characters, by all means mess around with it. (And I'd love to hear what you come up with in the latter case.) The system is quite adaptable, and what's presented in the book is simply how I like to run it and what works for my group. Feasts are meant to be fun after all, and their primary purpose is to drive role-playing and intrigue. Anything beyond that is open for tinkering, in my opinion. YPMV, and all that.

The intention here is to create an abstracted system that doesn't require a lot of bookkeeping and encourages players to compete against each other. For that to work, the potential Glory has to be worth their time and effort. To me, as a GM, figuring out the "why" is part of the fun—and often quite easy to do after the fact by looking back on what cards were played, who the PK interacted with, what events transpired, etc. The Glory award is meant to represent a sort of aggregate boost in notoriety, the informal knock-on, magnifying effect of court gossip. That fresh-faced knight probably wasn't the most objectively genial person at the feast, sure, but he got everyone talking and therefore gets a bump in Glory (which, after all, is simply a mechanical expression of how much people talk or think about your character). Also recall that Glory needn't represent "positive" attention—just attention, period. Some of the Glory could be said to come from jealous gossips!

Because tournaments are formal recognitions of Glory, whereas feasts are informal. Think of it this way: the "most genial" knight is among the attendants who gets talked about the next day. In modern terms, they'd be one of the attendees at a Hollywood shindig (among several) who got their red carpet photo retweeted the most. Your example of the PK winning by default doesn't prove that the feast was dull. It's just that, with the PKs all leaving the feast early for one reason or another, that PK was at the feast the longest and therefore made the most lasting impression from among his cohort.

That's because the intention is to measure the relative geniality between player-knights. In other words, it's who among the player-knights is the most Genial, not who is most Genial overall. (In that case, an average player-knight would almost certainly be outshined in all but the smallest feasts.)

Keep in mind that the host of the feast is the only one guaranteed a seat Above the Salt; everyone else requires a Critical APP result. Granted they can modify their odds with jewelry and a successful Fashion roll (for which they'll need the assistance of a wife or Tailor, as that's a non-knightly skill), but in my play-testing I've never had more than two player-knights seated AtS at any given feast based on APP rolls. I really like how you handled the players trying to do an end-around on those rules, too. An Arbitrary check and "cheesing off the wife" are a fine price to pay! At the end of the day, if you find feasts are leading to too much Glory for your taste, you're always free to modify the totals. Remember that all Glory awards are merely suggested amounts. Per KAP 5.2 (p. 122):

You're not the first to bring up this apparent discrepancy. I'm actually writing a "Designer's Notes" post for the Chaosium blog that will in part address what the thinking was behind this mechanic, along with a suggested house rule or two. The idea is that any feast in which you break out the Feast Deck and the special rules is going to be the feast of the year for the P-Ks. Not necessarily the grandest or largest feast they attend or host, but the most memorable, and therefore the one deserving of Glory. As Morien suggested, I would limit these to one per year. So if your group wants to game the system and take turns hosting, fine. If you have a five-player group, each knight is earning an extra 100 Glory every five years. I also like the suggestion of going out of your way to make things complicated for the host--putting on a feast should be stressful!

It will be an updated PDF. If you've already purchased the book, you can simply download the new version.

All Pendragon-based games are coming over as well. In addition to Paladin, which is just in the process of rolling out, we have two other unpublished games—Before Iron/Myrmidon being one of them—that we're slotting into the production pipeline even as we speak. More details once I'm able to speak on them.

::waves:: Thanks! I'm looking forward to carrying on Greg's legacy to the best of my ability, ably assisted by the good folks at Chaosium. I am the current custodian of his digital and paper KAP archives, and we communicated pretty much daily right up until literally the day he passed, so I've got plenty to work with to that end.

I first came to Greg's work via Pendragon, but have since discovered and fallen in love with Glorantha as well, like so many others. Greg and his work changed my life. Words cannot express the depth of my admiration or my sadness. I shared some other thoughts and memories over on my blog: http://www.sirlarkins.com/blog/2018/10/11/the-passing-of-a-legend