Morien

Based on p. 76: "These may not be purchased again." So no, by RAW you are not allowed to build them, save to replace the original. However, in our campaign, I do allow them, i.e. you can double your horse herd / weapon & armor production for export.

Dammit, sorry, you are right. It is in the investments, not in the constabulary section. In my own notes, it is simply a £40 horse herd, but in the published Estate, we do give the table that you posted, with no explanation. Yeah, we should have added another column noting that the space requirement scales up as well. Mea culpa.

Not in the investments. Investments are in specific blocks scaled for £10 manor, each taking 1 space. The whole point is that if you want to build a larger investment, you just build more of these basic blocks. This would be wrong. You can build as many investments that require space that you have space for. For example you could have those 5 vineyards and 5 horse herds if you have 10 spaces. They don't all need to be same. And that 'of each type' is there for a reason. You can have the above 5 vineyards and 5 horse herds (since those are limited to 10 space slots) AND 10 Coneygarths (limited by the 'of each type' limitation). Each space-limited investment takes 1 space. If you want to have a bigger vineyard or whatever, you have to build more than 1 basic vineyard. You only run into this problem when you make up larger investments on your own rather than using the investments as given.

Text also doesn't have a £400 horse herd. It has a £40 one. If you want a £400 horse herd, you need to buy 10 horse herd investments. Also, there is this text on p. 90: "Only one new Investment of each type may be built per £10 of Assized Rent." The intent very much was that it is the one limiting you to 1 Coneygarth per £10, thus 2 Coneygarths for £20, etc. And that makes no sense if you can just build 1 HUGE Coneygarth ten times bigger in yout £10 manor.

So the short answer is "No". A slightly longer answer is "Each £40 horse herd counts as one investment taking 1 space, so a £400 horse herd counts as 10 investments taking 10 spaces."

This is 10 horse herds, each costing £40, and hence take 10 spaces. Given that the £100 estate has ten spaces and can build ten improvements in a year, the estate can get all of them built in a year but it takes all available space. All of it scales with the size of the landholding. The basic 'building blocks' of investments are scaled for £10 manor sizes and take 1 space (if they are space-limited), and to get a maxed out £X estate horse herd, you just build (X/10) horse herds which takes all the available space (X/10 spaces). You could build 5 vineyards and 5 horse herds in that £100 estate instead, and also do all of that in a year. Or 10 armories to max them out. £10 manor can build 1 armory per year, and maxes out at 1. £100 estate can build 10 armories per year, and maxes out at 10.

I don't think it does. I would remember if it did appear in the Book of Knights, or any of the 3e - 5e adventure books.

In the beginning it says: "Your father (born in 724) was also a notable knight, living in the Ardennes and serving under King Pepin." So in 763, he should have been on the victorious (King Pepin's) side. Other than that, my quick interpretation matches yours.

Ah, I thought you were asking what happens when you play by LD rules. As for BotE rules, not having a wife doesn't help much since then you need a steward to do all the Stewardship stuff while the PK is out fighting and adventuring. And the steward costs the same as the wife. Not having any kids does save the £1, yes, as per the explanation in BotW p. 169 (Appendix D box about £10 manor, which also explains the steward substitution). So £2 DF for the first manor, and if you are feeling generous, you could give extra £0.5 DF from Family expense since the PK does not need to boost the wife's nor children's Standard of Living. But frankly, I would not bother.

LD is using 'Money you don't see' with £7 income - £1 for fief upkeep (for 1 POP manor) = £6 per manor. So, no.

I really dislike the idea of Teen Lot having already subdued all the fractious Northern Lords under his banner. Arthur is able to do it because everyone in Logres is tired of in-fighting and there is an actual miracle. Of course it helps that most of the major lords of Logres as well as surrounding kings bend a knee to him swiftly. That is not the case in the North. Besides, it makes Arthur less special when we have Lot the Wunderkind already doing the same song and dance a generation earlier.

He is also a King and a warleader in 484 in SIRES.

Lot is already the Hegemon of the North by 485, so I'd say that he ought to be at least in his mid-twenties by then. 1e Pendragon has his birth year as 468, but this was when the campaign would have started in 510, not 485. So he ought to be pushed back some. Lot's words about a beardless boy would ring somewhat hollow if he was a beardless boy hegemon of the North at the tender age of 17, a year YOUNGER than Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. Pushing his birth year a decade back to 458 would work for me. That would make him 32 in 490, a man in his prime, with a long reign still ahead of him. But I would be fine with him being born as late as 460, too. King Uriens would be an obvious character to include, too, whom the PKs might meet later. King Nentres gets killed off rather early, so he matters less.

Actually it could go either way (as Atgxtg said it can get very complicated), but if you have already ruled it one way in your campaign, you should keep it like that. I was still remembering the "£3 deal until her children are grown" -deal. There is also the fact that since I was going to move for the 'emancipated' model myself, my brain was already in the headspace of letting the widowed heiress keep her own land while her children are growing, or, indeed, until she dies. But that emancipated model would actually let her choose her own husband anyway, rather than need the Countess' permission.

No, he becomes the vassal knight of his wife-heiress' manor (her inheritance) + 1/3rd of the dead husband's manor (her widow's portion). Once HER eldest son becomes of age and inherits, the husband loses 2/3rds of the heiress' manor to the son, but still keeps the 1/3+1/3 = 2/3 manors which are his wife's widow's portion, until she dies. If at any point the heiress dies, then all the lands revert to their heirs (the ex-PK's eldest son and her eldest son), and if they are still underaged, then their guardian, the uncle, controls those lands. EDIT: I think you mentioned at some point that the widow had done some stupid deal with the uncle that the uncle would keep 2/3rds of her manor as well. In which case, yes, the husband would only get 2/3rds of a manor (1/3+1/3), her widow's portion. I mean, he could try and make a court case out of it, but I think he would be in a rather poor position what with getting the heiress pregnant outside of marriage and a pre-existing agreement between the uncle and the heiress (or whoever the heiress' guardian was, actually).

She is an heiress, right? So if the Countess agrees to the marriage, the household knight becomes a vassal knight until HER eldest son inherits her manor (note: NOT THE FORMER PK'S ELDEST SON). So the uncle has very little leverage if that happens. However, the uncle could offer that he will speak on behalf of the pair to the Countess, arguing for the marriage, and if the marriage happens, then the heiress will voluntarily give back her widow's portion from her husband's manor. Since it would be voluntary on her behalf, there is no problem, if she agrees to this. (Whether she would agree depends a bit on how much influence the uncle has with the Countess and how much she and the household knight have.) Whose household knight is this guy, anyway? If he is the uncle's HHK to begin with, he would need the uncle's permission, too. Which would give the uncle some leverage as well as more of a stake in this, since it cuts both ways: how was the uncle so inattentive as to allow one of his knights to seduce this poor widow into this kind of a situation? The final option is that the uncle decides that the widow is dishonored and stops the payments on that excuse. The household knight, especially if he is the new husband, ought to champion his lover/wife's rights & honor in a court of justice or in a duel, if need be. Also, the Countess might have some incentive in looking after the rights of the widows, given that she is one herself. Something the uncle would forget at his peril. If the Countess were a man herself, there would be an additional thing working in her favor which is that handing out heiresses to his own household knights is one of the liege lord's greatest carrots to his knights. And by having this affair, the heiress has, at the very least, made herself a promiscuous woman and hence lowered her desirability. Sure, many knights might still marry her for the land, but she is definitely soiled. By allowing her to marry the HHK would assuage that stigma a bit, but might also encourage others to follow in her footsteps in the future, and not just the heiresses, either. On the other hand, if you follow Atgxtg's suggestion that widows get to decide their own actions rather than be put under guardianship, then the Countess might actually have a good reason to champion the widow-heiress and approve the marriage: why should the uncle get a say in this, you go girl! Especially if she is a bit of a romantic herself and approves of the love marriage.

As people said, easy enough with a computer program. If I were to roll it with actual dice: 1d20 + (1d8-1)*20, if over 155, reroll.

Both Estate and Warlord are majorly Greg's vision & work, with the scattered holdings of the barons, hundreds, assized rent, production and all that. The math is my doing, so to speak, as well as the lion's share of the revisions of Entourage and Estate, with Greg giving the final approval. Basically, if you have the old, unrevised Estate and the new revised Estate, you can see the changes. My effort was mainly trying to make the economics as simple, consistent and scalable as I could, and make sure that the math worked out. And when I say simple, I mean that the bones of the system are simple: For each £10, you have: Army: 1 knight (first one is the PK himself) + 3 foot soldiers Standard of Living: +£1 to the standard of living (starts from £5) Discretionary Funds (i.e. the income left over that the PK can actually use): £1 That is ALL the player needs to know, and the GM doesn't need to much more than that. You don't need to get stuck on the differences between the Customary Revenue and Assized Rent and Other Income and Production. All that is in the background, and can be left there without problems. If new investments (from Estate) are built, then the PK will get to keep the income during his lifetime (i.e. it becomes part of the Discretionary Funds) and when he dies, the holding is reassessed and the investments are counted as part of the Assized Rent instead. Hence, they increase the Landholding Glory after that. As for simplifying the thing further, I generally use just £10 manors in our campaign, although I have allowed the PKs to build investments which will break this symmetry when a generational shift happens. Even then, I feel no need to follow holdings down to £0.1, of which the player just sees £0.01 = 2.4d. Rounding to full £1 is enough. In our campaign, I also use the old GPC's territorially concentrated nobility, i.e. the Count of Salisbury rules the County of Salisbury, more the continental French model of Middle Ages. This conflicts with the Warlord's scattered holdings approach (the Anglo-Norman model, introduced by William the Conqueror to make his barons less able to rebel against him, drawing from his own experiences both being rebelled against in Normandy and his own rebellions against the French King). Greg based Uther's kingdom HEAVILY to the historical Anglo-Norman England, so Warlord got the scattered holdings that are, IMHO, harder to GM. I prefer the 'mini-kingdoms' approach, that when you cross a county line, you have to deal with another Count with his own quirks and motives, rather than having a patchwork of different nobles, most of them absentee landlords. This might be what Percarde was referring to earlier, since I don't really have that much use for the hundreds: I have manors as the basic economic unit, and then I am happily dealing with just counties on the macro level. Not to mention, 20 or so counties & counts is much easier for me to keep track of than hundreds of hundreds and 50 or so Barons of the Sword: "So you arrive in Wuerensis, which, surprise surprise, is ruled by the Count of Wuerensis." It also helps the Players, IMHO, as it is much easier for them to grasp who the major players are and where their power base is. See this thread:

I have heard good things about it, provided that you don't overuse it. Especially the Glory rules need a fix, IMHO, since the PKs are only competing against one another, meaning that one of them always gets the huge amount of Glory for being Most Genial, even if they are all louts. See previous threads (such as this one https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/10767-book-of-feasts-question/ ) for some ideas and discussion on how to use the book. Personally, I have not used it yet, since I had my own feast rules, but I have been thinking about getting the thing and incorporating it to my own campaign.

I was referring to the knight's liege, as far as the ransom payments go, but yes, the same universal aid would be demanded from the peasants to ransom the landholder. Like it says in KAP 5.2, only the first ransom counts as an aid. For the second ransom, the knight would have to squeeze the peasants if he wants them to pay.

Good reason for the peasants to pray that the first child will be a feminine child. (Since the girls usually marry before they turn 21, which means that if there is first a son and then a daughter, the chances that his knighting at 21 and her marriage happens on the same year go up.)

Yes. Greg made that explicit in his posts. Also, "These four taxes give the knight the right to collect income from his holding" and the fact that the lord knight is especially singled out "When the aid is imposed by a lord knight, each of the lord’s vassals pays an amount equal to the average yearly income of his primary holding." There would be little need to specify just the lord knights separately, if only the vassals would pay. The idea that the peasants pay as well, not just the vassals, is supported by Susan Reynolds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_aid#Problems Finally, if the Vassal Knight has to pay around £20-£30 per generation (knighting of the eldest son of his liege, marriage of the eldest daughter of his liege, and ransoming the liege), and then has to do the knighting of his eldest son and dowry for his eldest daughter from his own funds, too, he would be bankrupt. Getting the latter from his peasants balances the scales a bit.

It is enough to just keep track of one value, and not even that, since you can just calculate it from age each time: Age-11 for most squires (sons of knights) and Age-12 for esquires' sons. It only becomes an issue if the squire is exceptionally talented, or learns faster than the default rules of Entourage (+1 per year until skill 15), or is over 26 years old (since 26-11 = 15, after which the improvement becomes more random).

To the PK, of course. He is their liege. Whose hall do you sleep in? Whose table do you eat at?

The Players update their wives & stewards, since we keep track of Stewardship. But as far as Squires and the rest of the entourage, we don't really bother. If we need to roll Squire skill, I pretty much assume that it is 15, or nudged upwards to 16 by the age of 20. Good enough for us.