Morien

By the way, the +5/-5 reflexive bonus should not apply to missile weapons, just in melee. If anything, the knight is a harder target while getting up, as the shield would cover all of him while he is on his knees.

Indeed, if you look at The Great Hunt -adventure (free download), which a sort of a preview for 6th edition, you can see that the movement speed has been fixed: the pregen knights have movement rates between 17 and 19.

This is a known problem with KAP movement speed. It is simply way too low. A longbowman can shoot between 6 to 12 aimed shots per minute. That is one arrow per 5-10 seconds. Taking the most generous assumption, this is 1 arrow per 5 seconds. A knight should be able to sprint 50 yards in 10 seconds, so two shots would seem more reasonable. This quick reality check would indicate that reinterpreting KAP Move as yards per second would be more realistic and a combat turn should be 5-10 seconds. As for other matters, some of which you already identified: 1) SIZ 6 is insanely low for a knight. You are the size of a 12-year old child or thereabouts. 2) Did you remember that a shield gives you cover, i.e. subtracts the armor value from the archer's skill? 3) Where is your horse? You are a knight, not an infantryman! 😛 Anyway, once you fix the above movement speed issue, the chances are that: 1) The archer will miss at least one of those two arrows. 2) The second arrow is not enough to knock you down (either DMG < SIZ, or successful DEX roll). 3) You get to the archer after having taken a few points of damage and proceed to chop him up. If you have your horse, the archer gets one shot off, likely misses, and then gets lance-charged to death.

Scotti are the Dal Riada Irish, on the coasts and Islands of Western Scotland and Northern Ireland (KAP 5.2, p. 21). They are mentioned in GPC, and further explored in Beyond the Wall and Pagan Shore. They are also in 4th edition as well as in the Book of Knights & Ladies, along with all the other non-Salisbury, non-Cymric options.

Agreed. Well, yes and no. I would actually look at the Lance skill more than the Sword skill itself, as what we'd expect to see as the new Horsemanship. Given that Horsemanship gets used more now, I would expect that it gets more checks (as you suggest later) and thus increases a bit more. But yeah, some minor rebalancing needs to be done to most NPK templates in the core rulebook. That being said, an average middle-aged knight should not be rocking a Sword 20 anyway, IMHO. The fact that this also limits (at least some) the minmaxing of a single skill (Sword) to stratospheric levels is very good, IMHO. And speaking of Lance skill, I am going to houserule it that it is simply a Horsemanship-capped Spear and that is it. I find it irksome that you need a specific skill for a very specialized occasion (charge on horseback, capped by Horsemanship now anyway), when we have good mechanism already in place. Poking with a lance used Spear skill anyway already, so it makes perfect sense to me to get rid of the Lance/Charge skill. BoA is in dire need of an overhaul anyway. I would give an experience check for Horsemanship in that case, yes. I am also generous with experience checks, and I think that is a good idea in general. Players like to see their characters improve, and the experience check system is very self-limiting as you need to roll over the skill or a 20. Thus, soon enough you are looking at 10 checks to get a +1 to the skill, so why not?

I am going to push back a bit on that... Since you only do one Chirurgery roll per week, the likelihood is that you don't start rolling until after the adventure is over. In other words, you basically return to it once you have done all the rest, rather than stop the adventure in the middle of the story. Furthermore, it is easy enough to roll 8d20 and see what happens in those two months of healing, if the PK will pull through or not. Assuming healing rate of 3 and a reasonable healer of 15+, if you survive the first couple of weeks, you will most likely heal up OK; it is those first couple of rolls when you are barely above 0 that are the tense ones. I agree that once you are like at 10 HP, the rest of the rolls are just to see how much of a 'time penalty' you have due to your wounds, but if you are going to the winter phase anyway, it hardly matters. It is somewhat different if you are playing multiple battles or adventures per year (guilty!). For instance, one of our PKs got a major wound during the Roman War and missed out on the second big battle as the result. It happens. Anyway, my point is that the Chirurgery rolls a) usually happen after the adventure, and b) rarely take more than a couple of minutes to resolve, so even if Chirurgery is needed every session (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't), it is not a significant timesink. (Especially in comparison to the idea of rolling 4d4 and 1d8 armor values vs. each hit you take...) Now we have encountered situations in the adventures where the PKs need Chirurgery and they are in the middle of nowhere, but that is where hermits and witches and beautiful daughters of a local poor knight become so useful. 😛

Too fiddly for my liking and d4 and d8 are an anathema. 😛 The damage roll itself is already highly variable, 4d6 is 4-24, a span of 20 points. As Tizun Thane said, even if you have a chainmail hauberk (10) and a shield (6), you start getting really fearful about your life when faced with Saxons (5d6 damage), especially if they are using axes (shield protects only 1d6, although I prefer the older formulation of +1d6 dmg vs. shields to be consistent with maces and hammer and putting the onus on the wielder rather than the defender to remember the extra die). This is 6d6 damage, average 21, which means that even if you get the shield, it is 5 point wound. You can probably take 4 of them before the fifth knocks you out. However, if you are faced by two Saxons, the chances that you get a shield bonus go way down. Now you are probably looking at 11 points on average, and if the roll is a bit high, it can be a Major Wound, knocking a stat point off your stats and likely sending you unconscious with a single blow. In any case, two of these hits might be enough to knock you unconscious, and three means that you are dying (although probably can still survive if you get first aid). Point is, if you get surrounded on foot by three Saxons with axes, you are likely going to be unconscious or dying in a turn or two. You are very vulnerable if you get outnumbered, even by the relatively common 'Saxon Raiders'. It is the war horse that tips the odds in your favor, but if you don't have that, things get real tough. As I mentioned, this does change a bit when you get more advanced armor and the chivalric bonus, which is huge, too. My players' characters are currently rocking Partial Plate (14), shields (6) and Chivalric bonus (0 to 2, thanks to our tiered system). This means that most of them have 21 to 22 armor points with a shield, so regular sword duel has a lot of clink in it, and even criticals rarely cause a major wound, unless it got past the shield, too. Granted, this doesn't mean that they are invulnerable vs. lances or monsters, though. Just that they can take a lot of beating from regular swordwielders. But that happens later in GPC, and if you are playing in earlier times or a more historical setup with just 8 point byrnies, your PKs will be feeling the icy touch of death often enough to feel vulnerable, trust me.

Downgrade armor. Trust me, you start feeling very vulnerable when all you have is a 8 point byrnie and a 6 point shield (half of the time), and facing two enemies hacking at you with 5d6. KAP is a quite forgiving system in some sense, but you can be taken out quite easily by a single critical hit or a couple of good hits past the shield. I don't know how it is in 5e, but in KAP, getting ganged up on when you are not encased head to toe in plate armor is always bad news. That being said... the default KAP is playing knights, seeking to get to the Round Table. You know, heroes. 😛 So if you are going for the unheroic, you probably want to go either historical Dark Ages without nice big horse and shiny armor, or you want to play non-knights, and while you can do that with KAP, you are missing quite a bit. Although now that I think about it, it might be a pretty fun quick campaign to play the commoners in a knight's manor, and try to have yourself and your family survive through the Anarchy... Finally... there is no resurrection spells in KAP, and healing spells are not in Player-control, either (until Codex Mirabilis, at least). So getting hit hurts, and getting hit multiple times tends to mean that it is time to rest and take it easy for a month. You can't just cast all the healing spells, raise the dead PCs, and continue on the next day. The vulnerability is somewhat built in. I would also add that while the point in KAP is to play a family, if your characters drop dead every other year, it is very difficult to get any sense of continuity for the characters. And it is very difficult to keep the family going if your character doesn't have time to marry and have kids before getting his head bashed in. Easier option: Use normal KAP up to 15, but disallow the use of Yearly Training to raise skills above 15 (normally, that is where the rules shift from 1d6 skill points to 1 skill point). This seriously slows the skill progression down, and you probably won't see many skills above 20 even if you allow Glory for that, too.

That is how it already works, by the way. We use the highest modified die roll. So Skill 25 vs. skill 20, and the die rolls are 16+5 = 21 and 20, the 21 wins even though the roll itself (16) was lower than 20.

It basically slows the skill progression to a crawl and makes the PKs not all that heroic. With these rules, They will be lucky to reach skill 15 in 10 years of play. That is... painful. You will not see much skill progression at all past 15, which is pretty much the starting skill level for PKs in their main skills (Sword, Horsemanship, Lance). Furthermore, you CANNOT use Yearly Training to increase your skills past 20 anyway, so in order to get those skills to 30, you will need to roll those 20s in experience phase (unlikely) or use the limited number of Glory points. The best way to slow the progression is to control how much Glory you give, IMHO. The other houserule to limit skills of over 20 that I have seen some people to use is to require that each step over 20 costs the excess in Glory Bonus Points. So 20 -> 21 costs 1 GBP, but 21 -> 22 costs 2 GBP, and so forth. This will pretty much ensure that people max out around 23, which is still very good, but not game breaking. Or you can do an even more draconian version and say that the GBP can only be used to get the skills up to 20. This way, the rest of the GBP would get used on Passions, Traits and Stats. You still get an effective cap on skill at 20 unless someone gets very lucky, and no one is getting it to 25 or above with experience checks alone. But this is a bad idea, IMHO. You will only have a 10% chance on any skill to advance in experience checks, meaning 10 years per +1 on average, so why even bother with experience checks at that point? Or maybe that rule is just for skills higher than 14 and others use the normal rules of rolling over? That would be more reasonable, but still not very heroic. It is better to use the chargen & experience rules as is, IMHO. If you want the PKs to start a bit weaker, you could cap their starting skills at 12. This would basically add a couple of years before they get their skills up to 15, rather than straight at the beginning. Finally, KAP combat is quite realistic. Even if you have skill 20, if you are attacked by two knights of skill 15, you are in heaps of trouble. Even two spearmen with Spear 12 can give you grief in early phases, when all you have is a chainmail. That, by the way, is another thing to keep things dangerous for the PKs. If you don't let the technology to advance past the chainmail, the combats will remain much more dangerous.

If you are ONLY using it for Skill 1, I would be tempted to make it 50/50. A confirmation roll of 11+ is a critical. This way, you have an equal chance for a success (2.5%) as for a crit (2.5%), which matches skill 2 having equal weights for success and criticals (success on 2 (5%), critical on 20 (5%) ). The other way, as I suggested, would be to use it for all skills: if you roll a natural 20, reroll your skill and if the result is equal or less than your skill value, it is a critical. Otherwise it is a success with a numerical value of 19 for opposed roll comparison purposes. This has the nice effect that it makes criticals rarer as your skill becomes lower, a nice smooth diminishing chance. Or, if you want to keep the criticals common for skills 10+, you could have the confirmation roll to be skill+10.

Glad you are enjoying! It is a fumble. The confirmation roll would be against 1-10 = -9, and since he can't succeed with that skill, it is a fumble instead of a failure. In short, if your skill is 10 or less, all nat1's are fumbles, no need to roll for confirmation. Normal success, since the exception (skill 1 or less) comes into play. This is to ensure that skill 1 doesn't go direct from failure to a critical. However, a more elegant way to do this would be to have the confirmation roll for nat20s, and judge that the current 'half-critical' is simply a success. I might go with that in the future. In the confirmation roll, you roll your (modified) skill again, and if it is a failure, nat20 is just a success. This is similar to how critical hits work in D&D (or at least Pathfinder, since I have not played 5e), where if you rolled a hit in the critical threat range, you roll to hit again and if it succeeds, you have confirmed a critical hit. Otherwise it is just a normal hit. You are quite welcome. Anything else I can help you with? 🙂

Marshal doesn't get to order anything if there is a Count/Regent who objects to his plans. All of the Marshal's authority comes from the Count, and orders are delivered in the name of the Count/Regent, not in the Marshal's own personal authority. Certainly plans like sending a portion of Salisbury's army out of the county (or even reshuffle the garrisons) is a big enough decision that you have to have the Count's/Regent's OK to do this. Thus, if the Countess is the Regent, I can see her sending some of her bodyguards away to fight, since if there would be a Count, he would be in the fight with ALL of his bodyguards.

All in all, looks pretty reasonable. Some comments: Firstly, why did you ignore the count's personal retinue of 12 knights who live in Sarum? Surely the Marshal would have them to command, too. Secondly, depending how the PKs have consolidated Salisbury county, they might have access to more knights than 75. Thirdly, depending on what kind of invasion/raiding you are expecting when the army is away, that should inform how much men you wish to leave behind. Footsoldiers are fine defending castles, but they are less able to react quickly and chase down raiders. Stripping both patrols away might be a bad idea. Fourthly, there would be more vassal knights than 10, but I see you assume that 5 of them are unassigned PKs, and others would be tied up in garrisons & included in patrols. So I don't really have an issue with this one, just wanted to add this comment. 🙂

Yep, that is an option and the one that the players should take if they decide to go against their liege lord, as they are going against their vows anyway. At least this way, they minimize the honor loss. Granted, I get the idea here that the Anarchy has played out very differently from the 'default', what with the Saxon alliances. I would actually be more worried about the players ending up on the Saxons' side at Mount Badon, than whatever side they choose in the unification war. After all, one is politics, the other is existential. Also, who did Jenna marry? If that guy is siding with Arthur and Robert does not, then there is a good chance that Robert, even if he survives, will get disbarred for his treachery and the county goes to the pro-Arthur chap via Jenna. In our campaign, Robert was captured and switched sides to Arthur in 511, with Prince Mark denouncing him as a traitor and refusing to give up Salisbury. Robert died to an unlucky crit against Prince Galegantis in 512. Thus, Salisbury went after Terrabil to Jenna's husband, the Praetor of Levcomagus, who was a personal enemy of the PKs. Thus, the defeated PKs ended up relocating to Cornwall. Here it will be much harder, if they side with the Saxons, as the Saxon kingdoms end up being wiped out. A much better play would be to back Arthur up and then use those family connections to try and claim rulership of the newly reconquered Saxon county, since you are married to the princess. But this would require foresight that the players likely lack, and would not make so much sense given the circumstances as explained. That being said, hopefully the PKs will have younger brothers or sons of their own, who can try to revive the family fortunes during the Roman War...

In our campaign, Salisbury became a vassal of Cornwall and fought against Arthur until submitting after the Battle if Terrabil. Remember that the default GPC with Robert siding with Arthur is for you to change. Given the fact that you have changed Salisbury's alignment by having them ally with the Saxons, and Robert's trusted, high glory advisors telling him never to trust Merlin, he might choose to go against Arthur, too. I would let the Players decide which side they wish to be on and have Robert side that way. The Honor loss for betraying your life lord is big enough that very few Players would choose to do it.

https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/gem/index.htm Translation by Sebastian Evans (1904) If Arthur increasing his household and fame is concurrent with those 12 years, that would resolve one issue. There is still an issue of that extra year between Badon and the 12 years of peace that would need to be accounted for. The wars in Norway, Denmark and Gaul seem to be accomplished in the span of the next nine years (mainly in Gaul): "After a space of nine years, when he had subdued all the parts of Gaul unto his dominion, Arthur again came unto Paris and there held his court." Arthur then returns to Britain, at the beginning of spring. He receives the Roman emissaries at Whitsuntide, and then invades Gaul in August, wintering in Gaul. Arthur receives word of Mordred's treachery in the following summer, and heads back to Britain to meet Mordred at the battle of Camlann. So, the reconstructed timeline (as far as I can tell) is as follows: Year 1: Battle of Badon Year 2: Conquest of Ireland and Iceland Year 3-14: Peace and the gathering of the knights, assuming they are concurrent Year 15: War against Norway, Denmark and Gaul, Duel with Flollo. (Most generous assumption is that this year counts as one of the nine, although I don't think it should, based on the translation. Instead, it seems we should count nine years onwards from the end of the Duel, so we should be at the end of year 24 and Arthur returning on Year 25.) Year 16-23: War in Gaul (the other 8 years) Year 24: Arthur returns to Britain, receives emissaries, declares war on Rome, defeats the Romans in Gaul. Year 25: Arthur is informed of Mordred's treachery and returns to Britain. Battle of Camlann. Now I can see shaving maybe a year off, if you count Year 24 as the ninth year of the War in Gaul instead of as its own year, But this would still leave 23 years between Badon and Camlann, not 21. Counting also the war years of 2 and 15 as part of the 12-year peace is the only way I can make it fit 21 years, and that is a somewhat torturous interpretation of 12 years of peace. As I said, my reading would be the opposite to this generous interpretation, having Arthur winter in Gaul after organizing things and then return the following spring, i.e. Year 25, and Camlann happening in Year 26, 25 years after Badon. I am more than happy to admit that I am not reading the original Latin (nor can I) and the translation might be out of date. I am simply commenting on the translation I have easy access to.

Rather, it works fine enough in GPC, but less fine in post-BotW/BoU world. However, it can be made to fit that, if Uther is basically telling Gorlois that he can be the overlord of all of the Duchy of Cornwall, i.e. not just the Duke but the liege lord as well, as long as he acknowledges Uther as his King. Making him the equivalent of the territorially concentrated Duke that he was in GPC... Given that by that time, Uther has probably confiscated Gorlois' holdings in the rest of Logres and Gorlois is pretty much in open rebellion and has the support of the nobles in his Duchy, this is more of a face-saving compromise on both sides. But yes, that is a rationalization on my part.

Minor nitpick: In HRB, the 12 years of peace follows after Arthur has spent an additional year after Badon to conquer Ireland ("When the next summer came on he fitted out his fleet and sailed unto the island of Hibernia") and even Iceland (why would you bother?). "At the end of winter he returned into Britain, and re-establishing his peace firmly throughout the realm, did abide therein for the next twelve years." Also, it is not that obvious to me how long the gap between this peace and the start of Arthur's new expansionist urges were: "At the end of this time [the aforementioned next twelve years] he invited unto him all soever of most prowess from far-off kingdoms and began to multiply his household retinue... [snip] ...At last the fame of his bounty and his prowess was upon every man's tongue". So we are told that Arthur really started becoming more internationally-minded after those 12 years, but then there is just a vague 'At last', which to me would indicate passage of some significant amount of time. Granted, I didn't read HRB in such exacting detail to find out if there are chronological events that would pinpoint the exact total time interval to 21 years, nor did I start counting the winters from the end of the peace to Camlann. The actual Roman War part seems to happen in a single year (and quite late in the year, at that), with Arthur wintering in Gaul and then getting informed of Mordred's treachery the following summer. HRB does give a date for Camlann to be AD 542. I did not spot a date for Badon, on a quick look.

Tristram's birthyear, 501 in the Gamemaster Characters in GPC, is off by a decade. It should, IMHO, be 511, which then matches up with him being eighteen (as in Malory) when he duels Marhaus to the death in 529. Also, this fits with The Child's Mercy (Year 522) better when Tristram is 11 rather than 21! So that helps to shave of a decade from Tristram's life, even in a 'canonical' campaign.

Quick comment: I'd prefer to have all the skills and traits on the first page, so that I don't have to flip back and forth during normal game. We roll normal skills way more often than we roll any squire skills, for example, and crest and portrait is not that important for the player to stare at all the time; he ought to know them already. So Squire, crest and portrait can go to the second 'winter phase-y' page, IMHO. Also, Horse stats fit easily under the Stable in the second page to make room in the first page. You just need an additional box per stat line for the number of horses that you have.

If you are doing the standard 60 points into stats approach, that is almost what the +3 CON does, EXCEPT for the maximum value. That being said, most of the Players in my campaign have been more interested in getting their CON rather than their STR up. 6d6 at STR 15 and SIZ 18 has been enough for them, but CON 15 is almost a minimum requirement for them to keep those Major Wounds at bay, and a couple of them are rocking CON 21.

I think Atgxtg may have gotten Traits mixed with Passions... "E. Passions for Sons of Player Knights", p. 49. However, given that K&L doesn't offer any word on how to deal with the Sons' Traits, and KAP 5.2 treats Sons' Traits and Passions in the same way (inherit Father's values), I can very well see the argument that this Passion rule could apply also to Traits if rolled randomly. I'd still cap them at 19 or 20.

They are in the Book of Knights & Ladies, p. 50. https://www.chaosium.com/book-of-knights-and-ladies-pdf/ Or you can just ignore such fiddly things and create everyone with the same Cymric template. It is the story that matters, not the minor adjustments.

You mean Kelpie, GPC p. 387.