Morien

Are they all surviving? Generally I expect the PKs arrange the marriages of their children or siblings. Often enough the old PK is dead and the guardian has arranged marriages to at least the eldest daughter, although this doesn't always happen, if the next PK is much older. After that, I have a random family event table that may generate marriage proposals for the daughters. I also start dropping hints to the players about the need for dowries. Generally, that are able to find a match since the old PK was usually quite Glorious and the current PK is likely on his way to Glory as well. So there are NPKs looking to form marriage alliances too. Also, other PKs might be looking for wives for their brothers or household knights; in our campaign it is quite common for the PKs to allow their HHKs marry a suitable Stewardship-focused lady, since their manors tend to be scattered around Britain and hence need stewards anyway. So giving the manor for a brother to care for and allowing him to marry is a fine way to establish a spare cadet branch of the family.

Just to expand a bit on that... As a rule of thumb: 1. The eldest son of a vassal knight will marry the eldest daughter of another vassal knight. 2. Younger sons of vassal knights marry when they can support a family (either as favored household knights or as more highly paid esquires) and usually marry a widow of a vassal knight (the hhks) or a younger daughter of a vassal knight. 3. Younger daughters of vassal knights tend to marry older vassal knights who already have an heir from their first marriage or esquires. Naturally, all of the above gets modified by the beauty of the bride, the size of the dowry, the fame and connections of the father/brother/family/husband-to-be, etc. In our campaign, the first-gen PKs were establishing family ties by organizing matches between their sisters and other PKs. In the later generations, there are still some PK family marital alliance building, but it tends to be more between NPCs, while the PKs themselves are marrying rescued damsels introduced in the adventures. One of the advantages of having reached the Romance Period... 😛 Alas, the Players have not been too keen on playing matchmakers, so the brothers/sisters/cousins have mainly gotten quietly married in the background, or sparking some family drama due to random family events I am rolling up. For example, a vassal knight cousin of one PK fell in love in a mere younger sister of another PK, and vice versa. The prospective mother-in-law vetoed the marriage in no uncertain terms, due to the girl's paltry dowry, so the PKs had to get involved and negotiate between themselves to get the dowry up to an acceptable level.

Normally, you would simply RP things out. As I mentioned in above, you can just use the random marriage tables without the modifier from the liege to find what the PK can find without the Liege's help. In particular, the Random Husband Table already assumes that it is the Lady's (possibly NPC) father/brother who is arranging the marriage, and the category she uses depends on how big her dowry is. Note that in both cases, trying to find a wife or a husband, the roll is the best you can do, and trying to back out of that marriage would be an insult. You can't just keep rolling every year and wait for a high roll; that is what accumulating the modifiers are for.

The Book of the Entourage presents the updated RANDOM marriage table. Compare with KAP 5.2, p. 130-131. EDIT: Ah yes, I see your point. Normally, the knight can try to arrange his own match, which is done via roleplaying. The GM can use the table in the Book of the Entourage, but it has mainly been constructed to take into account how much good will the PK has from the liege. You could use it without that modifier (actually, Loyalty and Deeds) to mimic what the PK might be able to find on his own.

Quick Googling, no guarantee of quality, but possibly of interest: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/faerie-queene/arthegall Alas, he is missing in Book of the Warlord. There is an editorial error for sure in assigning Warwick (Warcastle) to Sir Ederyn at the end of the Boy King. It should be Sir Edelin who is the heir of Sir Ederyn (who is dead by then), and has been holding the castle during the Anarchy. Easiest 'fix' would be to change Edelin -> Artgualchar, which then would fit with the 4e timing of Kenilworth being given to the Daughters during the Anarchy by the Earl (Baron) of Wuerensis. However, if you want to go more with the Faerie Queene and BotW, then making Artgualchar the son of Edelin would work nicely, and have him take over at the end of the Conquest. Up to you. Wuerensis doesn't really play a major part in the GPC, so feel free to do what you want. In Blood&Lust, Artgualchar gets mentioned by name ONCE, at the very end. So not really a major player, and in our campaign, I switched it so that Arthur was the liege lord of Stoneleigh, instead.

A few years later, 4e said. So somewhere in the early 500s. However, Book of the Warlord contradicts this. In Appendix A, Leodegrance takes Kenilworth (Red Tower) during the Anarchy and then returns it to Arthur. It is Arthur who grants it to 'The Maiden Knights', The Daughters of Boudicca, after he has upgraded the Castle, by the end of the Boy King. So This would likely push it to 514 at the very earliest, possibly even all the way to 518, as reward for fighting bravely at Badon Hill? Possible. Or perhaps even better, let the female PKs to start it, or at least act as the inspiration for the Iceni ladies. I think it would reward PK agency more this way, and let them have an impact on the world.

OK. I did remember that bit, but the "a major order of female knights in default Salisbury" would have been news to me. 🙂

Where was this announced?

Not so sure they need an extra penalty but -1d6 sounds ok.

Who also show up in the aforementioned The Adventure of the Heart Blade (Blood & Lust sourcebook).

Depends what you mean by 'revised'. Book of the Manor introduced a new system for Manors. Book of the Estate and Book of the Warlord introduced a new economy system usable for any size of a landholding, all the way from a £1 parcel to a £100000 Kingdom. Neither of the two uses LD's POP, nor FOOD and COIN division.

Not to mention the de jure king of Gorre, once Uriens dies. No. We actually had a similar thing in our campaign in 511, with Margawse... There was quite heavy speculation that one of the PKs was actually the father of Mordred, and the campaign left that ambiguous, as in no point was Mordred's descent from Arthur mentioned (a departure from GPC); instead, Mordred claimed the throne via his status as Arthur's nephew and the Regent of Britain, thinking both Arthur and Gawaine had died in a battle against Lancelot. There was never any push for Mordred to be a PK, nor was I offering it as an option. As said, I would not allow him to be a PK, so this question would not come up. There is also the point that no doubt Morgan had a wedding night with Uriens soon afterwards, so who is to say who is the actual biological father? But speaking of this more generally, you can go either the nature or the nurture method. Tor obviously is more the 'nature' example: he is Pellinore's bastard, and clearly favors his biological father not only in stature but also in personality as well; 'blood will tell'. Whereas his legal father, the shepherd, is a much more timid soul. Since I don't want to get bogged down with such details as a GM, especially as the PKs have a tendency to die before their children are all grown up (with some exceptions), I just use whichever parent was the PK and give them a break on the Famous Traits and Passions, and that is it. Keeps it simple for me.

As I replied in Discord: Knights are not magicians or miracle workers. The trait critical is just a trait critical. However, YPWV. If you want that to matter a bit, and if you have already portrayed AA as ill, have him recovered the next morning, the fever having broken. A healer monk arrives to court, quite confidently promising to heal the king with the elixir. 'Thank you, but I am feeling fine. I have no need for your services, good monk.' 'W-what???' Play up the surprise of the monk a bit, but then he slinks out of the court, unable to poison the king. This means AA is Hale and hearty when the Saxons arrive, and rather than the defenders being in chaos with their king dead, they are confident of victory. Especially AA, who might be feeling a bit too confident after the miracle healing. He leads the charge into the midst of the enemy, gets cut off and slain by berserker axes. Thus you can have your cake and eat it, too. But players who know that he died by poison in HRB might appreciate this difference. Especially if you claim that had AA been poisoned, the Battle of Salisbury would have been LOST by the Cymri, leaving Salisbury burned and ravaged until Uther's victorious army would have caused the loot-sated Saxons leave.

Neither; I made up my own. If I were to use GPC table, I would definitely pre-roll the opponents and try to come up with a story explanation as to why this is the progression of the enemies. However, I think the GPC table is 'too easy'. At this stage of the Campaign, the PKs are at the very least in Full Plate for 16 points of armor, +6 from the shield, and +5/-5 from horseback vs. footmen, even ignoring the lance bonus of +5. Sure, some of the footmen have halberds and great spears, but the vast majority of them don't. So my gut feeling looking at the opponent list is that the PKs will slaughter their way through the opponents without raising a sweat, especially if they are survivors of Grail and Twilight periods with skills in 20+. EDIT: Just to add... I have not used the Book of Armies, but on a quick glance at what armies it suggests to use, I don't agree with it, either. In my mind, it should be more likely to run into some elite knights towards the end of Camlann, not to some guys in armor that is three generations out of date! Also, most of the opponents in the Book of Armies are infantry, and see above.

Somewhat disagreed. The Wasteland part is in GPC, but that is just 12 pages out of 128, so around 10%. Some of the Malahaut info is in GPC, but not the Perilous Forest & the Wall, as far as I can remember. The Adventure of the Perilous Forest is a nice long adventure, 27 pages, and there is another 19 pages of 16 short adventures, some of which will work nicely as the main adventure of the summer when you plump them up a bit. In short, I stand by my decision to recommend Perilous Forest over the Tales of Chivalry and Romance and Tales of Magic and Miracles. Although I admit that if all you are after is some adventures to run, then the ToC&R and ToM&M are more useful. Also, I would rank Saxons! below the adventure books and PF and BtW in usability. The Saxon kingdoms are pretty much wiped out at Badon, and prior to that they are very much enemies of the default GPC, so it really doesn't matter so much what the details of their societies are like. Whereas it is possible that the PKs will participate in fighting in Ireland during Romance, and get involved with the tournaments and such. I agree that as a book, Saxons! is very nicely written and it would be invaluable for a Saxon campaign, whether KAP or historical, but in a default GPC, it is simply not that useful. That is really my complaint about Pagan Shores and Land of Giants as well. They are much more geared as variant campaigns, making characters in those distant lands and playing there. However, where they fall down (and Saxons! and Beyond the Wall do not) is that there is very little support for such campaigns. Pagan Shores doesn't have a single adventure in it. Land of Giants has two adventures adapted from Beowulf's tale, which fair enough, but they don't really make for a good campaign skeleton.

One thing I would likely do in a situation such like the above is to check with the players as well. For instance, if they like having a large party with limited time in the spotlight but sharing in all the adventures together, no problem with a larger group. However, if they want to be in the spotlight more, one option with a group of six would be to split them into two groups of three and run two campaigns in parallel. Granted, while GPC + published adventures give you a nice skeleton, if you want to focus more on the individual families and such, you still have to do some prep work. On the other hand, the two campaigns can also crosspolinate: the family events in one can also be used as background events in the other ("Oh, you heard that the Lord of Marston had a spat about the tolls that his neighbor imposed? They ended up dueling about it!"). And if you really wanted to, if the campaigns happen to sync, you could even bring the two groups together to fight in battles, where there is less personalized stuff anyway. A lot of early GPC especially is non-specific, other than the Sword Lake. You can easily have both groups participating in the Bayeux expedition (randomizing a bit what happens inside the town as it is being sacked), for instance, and even swapping stories about that when you have a common session. So in short, you could have them occupy the same world, even, just with the conceit that there is a bit of an alternative timeline feel there with one group doing the Sword Lake in one, the other in the other one. But like arranging marriages between the families would be possible as well, decreasing the overhead you have as the GM to make the world more 'alive', as you have the six players doing part of the work for you. But you still benefit from being able to give each player more screen time in each session you play with them. In Anarchy, though, things are likely to diverge more, so it might end up separate campaigns as far as campaign events are concerned. Unless... if you want to make it even more political in a way, you could have ALL six players decide which way they want Salisbury to go, thus adding a bit to the intra-PK politicking. This would obviously make some things easier for you, as it continues on a more or less common timeline. On the other hand, it might be more interesting for you and perhaps the players as well to see just how different things may get during the Anarchy...

I find four to be just about right too. It easily splits into two pairs as well. With three, there is more of a risk of 'third-wheel' when it comes to intra-PK interaction. I used to have six players and it was a bit of a chore. I currently have five. The problem is that with more players each of them gets less screen time. So it also depends what kinds of players you have. If some of them are more passive and happy with it being so, then six might work. But if all of them want plenty of screen time and personalized adventures and such, then six is going to be tough. Also, what is the reliability? If you are often missing a player due to scheduling conflicts or such, then in effect you have just five players present each time. As for combat: I strongly recommend having the Players handle their opponents rolls, too. Thus speeds up combat a lot when I don't have to do the opposed rolls one by one and can just ask each Player what the result was. Naturally this works better when the Players have more experience with the system. And I do roll for important enemies and such.

I'd say most of them have at least SOME fantasy elements, usually monsters or fae. Some are easy to modify away, some are integral to the adventure. Like you can run through the Heart Blade (my favorite) as an almost totally non-magical adventure, simply by downtuning the magical elements, the magical glade becoming just an ordinary glade, etc. However, you do lose some of the charm. The White Horse climax has a lot of magic in it, but if you don't like it, it is very easy to turn it into a vague 'blessing of Epona' which you either believe or not, with only the GM knowing if it actually has any rules-benefit. Other adventures, such as the Deceitful Fae, obviously requires there to be a fae. So maybe give the Tales of Magic and Miracles a pass if you don't want any magic and miracles in your campaign. The Cambrian War (my second favorite) is pretty much straight-up diplomacy/military/social multi-year adventure, without any magic in sight, unless the GM adds some. The Golden Circle becomes a bit boring (as well as easier, actually) if there is no magic to help to sustain the little Kingdom. But you could, if you wished, run it without any magical creatures and so forth, and the core of the adventure would still be there. It becomes a more straight up 'fighting tournament' at that point. The Grand Tourney of Logres doesn't have any magic to begin with, being just a big, famous tournament, so no problem there. However, it doesn't really get started until the Romance Period. Those just off the top of my head.

As for the adventure/regional books from 3e and 4e, they are still very usable in 5e (and presumably in the future 6e). Here are some of my thoughts on them: Blood & Lust (Anglia) is my fav, with Savage Mountains a close second. I prefer Perilous Forest to Beyond the Wall, which I am more lukewarm about thanks to its focus is on Picts. Mind you, a lot of the grail stuff was originally in Perilous Forest before basically copied over to GPC. So that diminishes the value of Perilous Forest a bit, but it still has good stuff in it. So my order would probably go... Blood&Lust, Savage Mountains, Spectre King (3e version, not the Tales of the Spectre Kings), Perilous Forest, Tales of Mystic Tournaments, Tales of Chivalry&Romance or Tales of Magic&Miracles, Beyond the Wall. Although I could see boosting Tournaments over PF, due to the Grey Knight and the replayability of the Golden Circle which has become an almost annual event for my PKs. Both C&R and M&M have a mix of adventures I like and some I am lukewarm about. I don't find Land of Giants all that usable in KAP campaign to be honest. The most digging I did on Pagan Shores was trying to figure out the politics in Ireland what with Strongbow and all that. So I did not find it super useful either, unless you are really getting involved there. Beyond the Wall slips towards the same verdict but is saved by the Treacherous Pict adventure which is very usable. Alas, as said, I don't find the Pict tribals as player chars all that exciting, so what pages could have been used for making adventures in the politically fractured Lothian were 'wasted' on shamans and spirits. As indicated in the previous, I prefer the 3e Spectre King to Tales of the Spectre Kings. The Grand Tourney of Logres is, to me, a more interesting and reusable adventure than the White Horror that replaced it. The Grand Tourney was in fact so reusable that I had to shuffle Sir Lupin off the mortal coil to stop the PKs from spending a session there each game year. 😛 Saxons! Has some interesting ideas, and I like what it does with Badon, but I find it quite overpowered and as a Saxon focused campaign, it is more of a variant campaign than really applicable to your default Salisbury campaign. The timeline doesn't fully conform with KAP5.2/GPC/BoSi either, although I did enjoy the summaries of the Saxon kingdoms in it. So if you can spot a trend... Those culture expansion books that set the campaign away from Arthur's Britain tend to get more of a 'eh, pass' from me. But if someone were into playing a more historical Anglo-Saxon campaign, Saxons! would be great for it. The Last Kingdom type of campaign or even earlier. But pretty much all the adventure and regional books have enough good material to be worth having. As I said in a forum post once, a KAP pdf book tends to be cheaper than a pizza, and while the pizza is gone in an hour, the pdf is for hours and hours of enjoyment. Heck, 10 USD for 4e is worth it for the White Horse and the Lands and Peoples chapters alone. Note though that most of the published adventures are written for Arthur's time. The Horned Boar would require only a bit of tweaking to work in Uther's times, though, and it would not be a huge stretch to make the White Horse into an almost generational event. The Faerie adventures from M&M would be easy enough to run in the Forest of Gloom or in the Forest Sauvage almost in any Period, too, without much tweaking required.

Check this out: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/11000-helpful-suggestionsadvice-for-new-playersgms-what-books-etc/ Also, the adventure/regional books are great. I will have to see if I can find what I wrote on those.

Do you have the Book of the Estate? It does spell out how much free space you have in your manor and what investments take spaces (p. 76). Also, page 90 limits how many investments of each particular type you can build in your lands, even if they do not take space. When it comes to enhancements, most of them are small, like statues, and most of the buildings. Build away. Fortifications are also likely more limited by your purse and time, as well as your liege lord's trust in you that you don't use that castle as a robber knight base to raid your neighbors.

Depends a bit how difficult I want to make it for the PKs. I sometimes do as you do in the above, and the first to knock their opponent out / off the horse gets to engage the primary target. Other times I might go for parity of numbers and the PKs can try to sort out amongst themselves who gets to engage the boss and who fight the bodyguards. In the case of the personal enemy, I would do the latter: the PK who has the enemy fight against the enemy, while the other PKs engage the other members of the enemy's unit. He wouldn't be riding around the battlefield by his lonesome, after all.

This is what 4e says about Grail Christianity: "Grail Christianity is a henotheistic earth religion which acknowledges the Creator and his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, but also acknowledges the divinely feminine in religion and life. Sometimes the feminine is characterized as Mother Church; Sophia, or Divine Wisdom; as the Virgin Mother Mary; as a man’s wife; or even as a pagan divinity, recognized as a mythic archetype." I am sure I saw a write-up of Merlin as a Grail Christian... Yep. In The Boy King, both Merlin and Vivienne are Grail Christians, which combines BOTH Pagan and Christian Religious Traits, and if they conflict, sweet 10/10 split is the correct answer. I think that in 5.x, with its British Christianity being founded by Joseph of Arimathea under the auspices of the Grail, would be the current 'Grail Christianity'. It melds together some Pagan (such as Energetic and Generous) and Christian elements. So the easy answer is, the Old Knight of the Wilds is a British Christian. (Also, this is a perfect excuse to actually introduce Sir Gregor of Stafford, from the Red Blade, as the Old Knight of the Wilds.)

Happy to help!

Well it remains part of Gentian county, as long as you are talking about county courts etc. BoU: "White Horse, Gentian: Uffington White Horse, Wiltshire" As for whose fief it is, possibly the Baron of Sparrowhawk/Marlborough.