Morien

For example, p. 228. I didn't check if the table is repeated elsewhere or not. It is hinted at throughout the book. Such as p. 183: "An Impoverished household knight is not required to remain loyal to his lord since, under the feudal oath, his lord promised him sustenance." Then we can go to p. 94 where we have: "Breaking an oath –3" [Honor Loss]. (EDIT: Also, p. 92: "If the Gamemaster permits the play of a household knight with an assured household but no land, like Sir Ambrut, then roll 2d6+6 for his Loyalty (Lord) Passion." and p. 23: "Typically, a knight’s obligations are to serve loyally in his lord’s military campaigns and to advise his lord on important matters. In return, the lord owes his vassal protection, sustenance, and livelihood." In the case of the Vassal knights, the sustenance/livelihood is the land grant/gift. In the case of household knights, p. 23 again: "Knights bachelor derive their income directly from their lord, either through direct maintenance or by cash payments.") Book of the Entourage includes a squire as part of the knight's mesnie (p. 22: "A mesnie is the armed part of a lord’s entourage. For a poor knight, a lone squire must suffice."), and lists two acceptable reasons to dismiss the squire (p. 14-15): 1) The squire has turned 21 and hence ought to be fully trained and ready to go out into the world. No longer the responsibility of the training knight. 2) The squire has acted dishonorably, demonstrably and possibly repeatedly so. BotEnt, p. 15: "If the squire is released for any other reason his knight loses 3 Honor." Not in the long run. See my previous post.

Personally, I like the levels so that mercenaries are more expensive than household troops in the short-term (i.e. during the campaigning season), but cheaper in the long-term (since you don't pay for them when you don't use them). Whether GPC's £2 per month per knight is a tad too high can be debated. I keep vacillating between £1 per month per knight (thus about £4 per campaigning season) and £2 (£8 per campaigning season). I am also toying with a model of £1 (or £2) hiring fee + £1 per month to make it less cost effective to just hire a merc for a month, as naturally the merc would prefer some job security as well, and is likely losing employment opportunities between short gigs. I generally play it by the ear a bit: if everyone is hiring mercs, costs are high, but if the kingdom is at peace, then mercs are more easily and cheaply available as they have harder time finding work. I would imagine that many might become robber knights after the big wars are over, hence giving Arthur's knights something to do!

BotM is outdated. See GPC instead. There are, at least, two good reasons: 1) You need the extra forces NOW. 2) You are honor-bound to keep the household troops (mesnie, including the footsoldiers) in your service: they have sworn their allegiance to you, in return you have sworn that you will see to their upkeep. Dismissing them without a just cause costs Honor. Like the saying goes: a household knight is for life, not just for a summer. Thus, hiring a mercenary knight for a campaigning season is MUCH cheaper than swearing in another household knight for a couple of decades whom you don't really need past this summer.

No, it was a typo on my part. I corrected it now to Poor.

The normal upkeep for knight+family is £6 (£4 for unmarried, childless knight). The Knight pays £3. Thus, £3/£6 = 0.5. His Glory Total is 3000. His Annual Glory is 100. For the year that he is going around with just £3 maintenance, he gets 100*0.5 = 50 Annual Glory instead of 100. His New Glory Total doesn't care about the maintenance, just how much Glory is gained (from any source). Thus, his new Glory Total is 3000+50 = 3050. If the 0.5 multiplier would affect Glory Total instead of Annual Glory, then it would be (3000+100)*0.5 = effective Glory of 1550, but this would become a bit screwy when he ups his maintenance again. I could see the multiplier applying to any Glory Skill Bonus, though, although we don't really use that, either.

"See, we was brunging this siege train to take London back from the Saxons, but those Levcomagus bastards said a nasty thing about our Mum, so..."

Correct. For one-manor knight, the -3 Lots becomes "Kick out the Chaplain" or (if childless) "Lose the £1 you saved from not having to support your kids". Here is the point: The PK's ordinary upkeep of £4 comes out of ARMY expense, and the Lady's £1 upkeep comes from COURT expense. The children's ordinary £1 upkeep comes out of FAMILY expense. The rest of the FAMILY expense is just extra upkeep, so losing that will drop them to ordinary. (However, for Barons, this extra upkeep is around £30, so dropping £27 and keeping £3 in the back pocket for Rich is an OK abstraction.) So for 1 manor knight: -1: Lose DF -2: Servants Poor -3: Kick out the Chaplain to keep the Kids at Ordinary -4: Kick out the Lady's Maid to keep the Lady at Ordinary -5: Army (i.e. the knight himself, squire and 3 footmen) drop to Poor, and the rest of the family follows suit.

There is a reason that the minimum drop is to Ordinary at -3 Lots, since this is just the removal of the Family Expense, which is 10% CR (= -£1 = 1 Lot). If the Family would drop to Poor, that would be -£3 and more importantly, they'd live at a worse level of maintenance than the Chaplain and be equivalent to the foot soldiers. That simply would not do. A couple without kids would simply be able to afford to forego that 1 Lot family expense since that would have gone to kids anyway. A couple with kids would probably kick the Chaplain out (£1 expense = 1 Lot) in order to keep the kids fed. -5 Lots would just see them all Poor, with the Chaplain having gotten the boot if there are kids. But like Atgxtg said, it is much more likely that the PKs would be paying the temporary losses out of their loot, in order to keep the place functioning at the normal capacity.

100% agreed.

Ended rightly, as they say.

Yes, that is fair, since you are not using the lance against the other opponent, only your shield. But I could see arguing it the other way, too, that the PK is still holding the lance and able to threaten both opponents until the last moment. But you can certainly go with your interpretation. I don't allow 'line astern' charging in the same round, since I feel that this has a potential for abuse. After all, the most opponents you can normally have in a mounted-vs-mounted melee is 2, one on each side. If 'line astern' charging in the same round is possible, this might become 4 enemy lancers charging you, 2 on each side. So I don't allow it, and while it is possible for the PKs to queue up to charge, only 2 charges (one from each side) arrive during the same round. So the PK won't ever be faced with a situation where he needs to split his skill vs. 4 lance attacks. At the same time, the PKs can't swamp an NPC with more than 2 charges, either. In our campaign, the usual situation for such a conveyor belt charging in our campaign is a giant in the open. Swords tend to bounce off the giant's skin, so a stout lance is needed, and by doing the charge in pairs, the PKs spread out the risk and Glory.

It is your game. YPWV, Your Pendragon Will Vary, as Greg used to say. That being said, even with 10 Glory per £1, I have not seen a wholesale 'Glory-buying spree' from the players. But it is definitely more appealing to them than the old 1:1 rate. Only for Conspicuous Consumption. I count a higher than normal Standard of Living as CC, too: better food on the table, more lavish clothes, etc. In short, if it is consumables or background stuff ("I hire a bard to compose songs / spread tales of my great heroics."), it is OK to use CC, IMHO. If it is something that is permanent (armor, horses, construction, treasure), then it is not CC. Although I admit that I am thinking that cosmetic improvements on a horse should count: for instance, a basic charger would not qualify, but if you want a midnight black one with ten times the price, the extra 9*price you'd pay would count as CC as the only point of it is to make the neighbors go 'ah' and 'oh' with jealousy. The midnight black charger is no better than an ordinary one in a charge nor give any bonuses to horsemanship, it simply looks cooler, so yeah, that satisfies the CC criteria for me.

Actually £1 + £0.5, and that is assuming that she will have her own maid rather than sharing one at the court of the liege. It could be that the money (and the extra £0.5) goes to the upkeep of the underaged children, instead, who also become wards of the liege lord normally. But yeah, the point I was making before is that since the 1-manor-knight's £3.5 Widow's Portion takes also care of about £1.5 worth of footsoldiers, this means that what the PK is losing to his mother is only the remaining £2, which can be filled in by £1 DF + £1 Chaplain being removed, leaving him with enough funds to support a wife and kids. In other words, the PK just loses the DF (the chaplain is more of an RP aspect, the GM can handwave that). Of course, if the GM wants to make it real simple, just calculate the new expenses based on 2/3 of the CR, with the other 1/3 and obligations going to the widow's guardian. So the 2-manor heir would have a CR of £13.3, meaning DF £1.3, and SD of £7.3, which comes nicely to about 1 knight (the new PK) and 6 footsoldiers, with £0.3 left over to top off the upkeep of the Widow's Portion knight. Simple and easy. Or the GM can make it even simpler and assume that the mother dies shortly thereafter, or that the liege appoints the PK as the guardian for his own widowed mother, meaning that she simply takes the place of one of the courtiers. Problem solved. YPWV, after all. For instance, I don't really use the rules for the relief: the tax you are supposed to pay when you inherit your holding, equal to the annual income of the holding. I am having hard time figuring out where the average NPC knight gets that money, especially with the 2:1 transfer rate of render to treasure, and the need to find dowries for the younger daughters, etc. I mean, assuming he lives for 20+ years, you can just about make it, by saving all of your DF, but this is somewhat counter to the implied intent that DF is mostly spent as it comes. Many PKs generally manage it, though, being much more active in adventuring and in battles, gaining loot, but the same is not usually true to the NPCs. Especially as many of them would die young in battles, too. Anyway, since I didn't bring up the relief at the beginning of the campaign, I am not about to introduce it more than half-way in.

She would be in trouble, since the gift manor reverts back to the liege at the death of the original recipient. In such a case, there would have been an alternative dower that would have been agreed upon by the groom and the bride's guardian, such as her dowry set aside for her to live on/remarry with, if the husband dies first. The dower is a contract between the would-be-husband and his would-be-wife's family. He cannot promise her the land, since it returns to the liege. The liege has not promised to maintain the widow with land; he has just promised that land to the knight for the knight's life, that is all. Also, I hasten to note that the guardian does not have to, and usually doesn't, maintain the widow with the full amount of the dower. So while in the example given in above, the widow ought to be getting around £4 to live with (after SD obligations), the guardian would probably pocket between £2-£3 and support the widow at Ordinary level. Same thing if your marry a widow as a vassal knight: since she is bringing in £2 extra as widow's portion but the wife & kids is already accounted for in your £6 upkeep, that £2 is Free Income*, baby! This is why (landed) widows are so desirable! * Check with your own GM. Some would just add her Widow's Portion CR to yours and calculate the SD and other expenses accordingly. Which admittedly is something I might do as well, in order to keep it consistent with a case of a widow who has a full manor as her Widow's Portion. The point is, it would be basically still be a boost to the husband's holdings while she is alive. Also, arguments about the agreed upon dowers and giving them over to the widow or her guardian were rife, too, giving a good opportunity for a (would-be) husband to champion the widow's cause. (Reference: Eleanor of Leicester.)

Looks like it is one of our houserules again. No one was spending money on consumption at the old 1:1 rate, and 2:1 is not worth it, either. At 10:1, it starts to become more competitive. We do lower it to 1:1 after the first £10 per year. Although to be honest, if a Player wishes to spend £100 to buy 1000 Glory, that would be fine by me. That extra Glory Bonus Point will be much less disruptive to the game as an ability to suddenly hire like 50 mercenary knights.

Granted, since gifts are not inherited. (Normally, that is. The liege lord may re-gift them to the heir, but a heiress implies it was a grant.) Her widow's portion is 1/3rd of the dead husband's lands. Since the third one was a gift, that goes back to the liege, meaning that she gets 1/3rd of his original one and 1/3 of her own manor. But note that her guardian (the liege, since obviously the father is already dead, or husband if she remarries) would take control of her portion and take care of her. Doesn't change. It is still 1/3+1/3 manors. However, the Countess might simplify things and just tell the uncle to rule both manors and deliver an agreed-upon amount of render (like £4) to the Countess for the widow's upkeep. (£4 = 10% Family Expense + 10% DF from the two £10 manors.) The eldest son (of both the previous PK and the heiress, I assume) will inherit both manors, but the widow mother will keep her widow's portion (1/3+1/3) until she dies. In practice, though, she might seek to relinquish part of those lands to her son so that the son may support a family more easily. (You can do it by dumping the Chaplain in order to support the kids and hoping you don't need a clerk and be able get the spiritual guidance from the village priest...) Once the widow dies, those lands return to their original owners/heirs. So yes, the son will recover all those lands. If the widow remarries, the new husband will control the widow's portion and derive income from it, until she dies (see above).

It is temporary damage, so it doesn't carry over. 1st year: Pay 2 Lots of tribute, recover one = 1 Lot of damage = just lose discretionary funds. 2nd year: 0 damage, since it was temporary. Pay 2 Lots of tribute again, fail recovery, = 2 Lots of Damage = lose discretionary funds and short some of the servants, no biggie.

It is value in render = food and livestock and clothing and all that stuff. Mind you, they can pay it in silver, too. One of the years in GPC explicitly states the Saxons driving cattle off as tribute in addition to a payment of silver. So if I were using BotE, I would allow the Stewardship roll to make up for the 1 Lot of damage, whether it is livestock and harvest destroyed/stolen by a raid or given to Saxons as tribute. (Since the tribute is per manor, this means that for a typical £10 manor, 1 Lot = £1, so they are equivalent). Now, we are using our own houserules for the harvest and such, but I do let them get +£1 on a successful Stewardship, so it is pretty equivalent, except that in our campaign, the PKs can get that +£1 even if there is no damage/tribute. Also, since the harvest/maintenance accounting is done at the Winter Phase, it really doesn't matter that much. Either the PKs are able to make good of some of the damage, or they will just use £1+ from their treasury to buy food and stuff to make up for the missing Lot(s).

Not directly, if it is temporary. However, if it is a chronic situation, expect some servants & courtiers getting laid off, which I would expect to impact on the Glory that the noble gets from his landholdings. Also, the knights start grumbling, especially as their horses don't fare too well if their upkeep is cut for long. So I'd pretty much see a situation that something like -1 is almost negligible, since it is just from DF. Then after that, -2 and -3 are something you can do, but -4 and -5 starts to be iffy on the long run. Anything past -5 had better be just a one-time thing, and probably results in mass lay-offs anyway to keep the army and the family at least on Poor. Also, I would treat tribute as Temporary Damage, and allow stewardship rolls to stretch the resources out a bit (Supply Replacement, ESTATE p. 46).

Thanks!

Just realized that my math was a bit wrong on these last two steps (and no one called me up on it!). I think I was working with a couple of variants and didn't correct these two lines before I posted. I got it right in the bolded effects summary, so people probably didn't bother with math. -7 Court Impoverished, -6.25%. Total: -64.3%, but handwaving with the sale of raw materials. -8 Army and Family Impoverished, -7%. Total: -71.3% + the sale of raw materials.

Simple option, just reduce the squeeze damage by 1. I think we had a discussion about the BotW's squeeze damage being a bit high as it is, if you search the forum. As it is, Squeezing is probably a stupid idea, whereas it works better as a temptation. So I could even see an argument lowering it by 1 regardless and then lowering it a second time during Anarchy if you have to pay tribute: the peasants realize that this is to avoid their huts being burned, so they might grumble a bit but they are not about to abandon their homes and fields over it, since it is probably as bad if not worse elsewhere.

No permanent damage. It is simply render that would normally go to the lord and now doesn't. Squeezing is getting extra from the peasants. That being said, I would lower the permanent damage from squeezes during Anarchy: things are bad everywhere so better to stick with the lord who is not a total psycho.

Thanks for the clarification. I was already a step further which was basically not giving any or very minor cultural skill differences. Let the Player decide what kind of a Saxon he is playing, I say, rather than locking him/her in to be a Great Axe wielding boatsman. Heck, the Berroc Saxons have been living inland (albeit alongside Thames, admittedly) for almost a century by the start of GPC!

Yep, now you got it. As for DEX/2 +0 or +3 or even +5, all of those would be fine by me. Even +5 would just get DEX 20 guy to 15, which is still OK.