Morien

I know you said you'd start at 485, but I'd be tempted to start it near the end of 484, with the armies having returned from Mt. Damen and more knights being needed. Do the intro here and you'll have the knights ready for 485. However, I would urge you to keep Pellinore and the Questing Beast for 490s, since they become more plot-important then. If you have access to the 4th edition Adventure of the White Horse, it is a very nice, mystical but combat-light adventure which will introduce the more magical elements to the game. It is a very nice adventure to run for newbies, although it requires a bit of touch-up to port it back in time to 485 from 531, but not that much. You could easily throw in a little raid, either from Levcomagus deciding to take advantage of most of the attention being in Sussex, or even a riverine raid up River Avon by Kent. As for heiresses... Rather than get hung up on heiresses that are going to be outside the reach of the PKs for years and years, come up with some of your own eligible ladies for the PKs to woo and win. Here are some notes that I wrote to a friend of mine who was thinking of trying his hand in KAP GMing with his local group. I suggested that he ought to start from 479 and avail himself to the Marriage of Count Roderick free scenario as well. " I very much recommend focusing on introducing suitable ladies for the PKs to court. And I recommend having one NPC Rival as well, like I mentioned before, to make it a bit more personal for the PKs. Here are some suggested ladies: 1) Lady A : This would be the lady that the Rival and at least one of the PKs would go after. Beautiful and Rich (although not an heiress). Dowry: £20? 2) Lady B : Little sister of the Rival. Rich as well, and probably not as much of an ass as the Rival is. The Rival's dad is already dead, so he inherits the family manor and becomes a Landed Knight before the PKs does. Also, this means that he decides who his little sister marries. Dowry: £20? 3) Lady C : The plain and poor (in comparison at least), but skilled and a kind personality. Dowry: £10? 4) Lady D : The most beautiful but also most impoverished (very small dowry: £4?). Perhaps she is the daughter of one of the Count's household knights who dies in 480 so she becomes the ward of the Count? She might be trying to seduce one of the PKs into a marriage*, if her looks don't seem to do the work without help. If the PKs are sneaky, they might try to conspire for Lady D to seduce the Rival and hence get him out of the way with regards to Lady A... * As heirs to vassal knights (I'd keep the dads still alive at this point), the PKs are very eligible. However, while their fathers are still alive, it might not be possible for the PKs to marry just yet, as they cannot support a wife (not to worry, situation is soon remedied). The Ladies should be around 15-17 when they are introduced, so that there is some time for the PKs to woo them (APP, Flirting) and their fathers/brothers/guardians (Courtesy might help). Ladies C & D should be reasonably easy to achieve (once the PKs have inherited their manors, see below), but Ladies A & B are the real prizes. Really, one could say that getting married is the whole point of this mini-campaign! On a macro-level it is Count Roderick trying to find a wife, and on personal level, the PKs are trying to get suitable wives, too. "

Not to mention that a Tutor is just £1/year for the check, without a skill roll anyway. If we assume Read 10, this fails half the time. So a £4 book will need 8 years to get 4 checks, and the PK would have gotten those 4 checks for £4 in 4 years without any investment in Read skill using a Tutor. Thus, a £4 book only starts to become useful if the PK boosts the Read to 15 ASAP, and uses the book to get more than the libra amount of checks. I would be very much tempted to limit the Tutors to their own skill as far as how high they can train a PK. So if a Tutor has a skill of 15, that is the max they can help the PK, so if the PK has the same skill at 15, no benefit. That would force the PK to hire a tutor who would be more qualified, and hence more expensive. In short, though, I don't see the experience checks being too unbalancing, and I would be much happier with a PK spending £20 on a library of books than on mercenaries.

Well, he already did have the £4 per knight (incl. squire & horses) per year in play, so... Certainly. Like said, I would be totally fine with the Lawyer being 12d per day and costing £2 per year retained. An unretained Lawyer would probably spend many a day hunting for clients or moonlighting as a scribe for a much lesser fee... A Chirurgeon with 20d I am a bit more iffy. Sure, if that one visit from the Chirurgeon is enough to get you through your weekly healing, then sure. But if you are having to pay that 20d every day for a week, it becomes expensive real fast, especially as the knights often need several weeks of healing to get Healthy again after dropping to Unconscious. It would not be rare to require something like 5 weeks of healing or even more, which at these prices would be 700d. (We very rarely if ever make an issue about Chirurgeons in our campaign, as there are usually ladies around who are happy enough to help the valiant knights. But when the PKs were in the habit of venturing into Forest Sauvage and the like, they used to bring their own Retained First Aid Specialist with them as a Party Healer. Saved some lives.) IMHO and all that: A 120d per night courtesan should not exist. (Nor would they be French! Franks are still half barbaric!) Courtesans of this stature are not selling their wares per night, but are very well kept mistresses of the higher nobility. Anyway, back to the books... I actually agree with you here that the cost of the (unilluminated) book would probably be mainly the material costs... And given how rare some of the paints are, even illuminated books might have a significant material cost still, although obviously it would require some more artistry as well. Anyway, since I am not trying to run anything like SimManor, I would just put a reasonable cost down and tell the Player to have fun with it.

I do wonder a bit about those prices. For instance, Estate has a Writer cost £2 per year + £1 in equipment, and these are translations or new works, not mere copies. Simply copying a book ought to be even cheaper and faster. Or to use another example, a lute player is a whopping 60d per event in KAP 5.2, but in Entourage, you can hire one for a full year with 120d, just the cost of two events. Or Chirurgeon for a day is 20d, so 140d for just one week, but hiring one for a year is £1+, depending on the skill(s). Lawyer is 12d per day, and Estate gives £1 as the yearly fee. (The argument could be made here that the Lawyers ought to start from £2 rather than £1, which would make their yearly salary equal to 40 days, which would be somewhat more balanced.) Common 'professional woman' is 5d per night, whereas a commoner concubine would be £0.5 (+£0.5 for the kids) per year. So 24 days = 1 year (ignoring the pimp here, which I admit makes a big difference on the money the woman herself gets to keep). Granted, I do recognize that there is a definite discount for having retained someone for the whole year instead of just for a day, but in some cases (like the lute player), the difference is so huge as to be silly.

I think we are talking a bit past each other here. I am talking ONLY about getting an experience check to be rolled in the Winter Phase, as the OP suggested, not any flat bonus to the skill.

Exactly. Especially when you look at the Tutor in Book of the Entourage, who grants a check for an annual cost of £1. You will need to be using that book at least £ amount of times before it breaks even with a Tutor, and that is ignoring the limit of a Read roll. Frankly, I would probably rank the books by their capped skill (10 for basic introduction cost £1, 15 for intermediary texts cost £2, and 20 for classics like Commentarii de Bello Galico for £4) and let the Player go hog wild in assembling a library. This is an excellent moneysink as far as the GM is concerned, since no matter if they have 100s of books, they can just benefit from one at the time. So let them waste as much money as they want.

Exactly. Thanks for the assist! No worries.

I find the items in BoK&L too strong in many cases: the tables are from a totally different power level compared to the main KAP 5.x book (save perhaps the healing potion in KAP 5.x). However, talking about the OP, I would be fine with it. Sure, it will be a bit cheaper over long term than hiring a tutor in a skill, but it is behind a Read Latin roll, which is normally waste of points, so it is hardly unbalancing by any means, especially as you can only benefit from one book per year. Jeff brings an interesting point of what this might do to the knight's reputation. So yeah, I don't see a problem here. It is not a bonus, it is an Experience check. A Bookworm Solo, if you will. It would be stupid to lose your Yearly Training for a potential check in Read & another Skill, since Yearly Training already gives 1d6+1 skill points without any experience rolling up to 15, same cap the OP is suggesting. Sure, if there is a Saxon raid that manages to burn down the manor, then the library is likely to go up in flames, too. But I would leave that to dice. I would not target the PK specifically, unless the PK manages to get the peasants so worked up that they burn the manor themselves to get rid of the sorcerous lord/lady. Heck, that reputation might even be beneficial in some cases, though, if it spreads to the Saxons, too. Might discourage raids at the cost of making your own peasants step warily around you.

In our world, HRB is definitely pseudo-historical, with some stuff that can be correlated with real history. The further back you go, the more of a fairytale it is. However, when it comes to KAP, HRB is (at least mostly) true up to where Malory takes over. Some adjustments were necessary for consistency; for instance in HRB Gorlois is the one who is helping Uther win at Mt. Damen. However, this would conflict with the way he and Uther have been presented in GPC (and Book of Uther), where Gorlois is NOT at Mt. Damen and it is Merlin who counsels the Britons to rally and attack. Hence, Gorlois is absent in that battle in KAP. Anyway, the point is that Britons ARE Trojan exiles. They DID fight Giants for Britain. Caesar did have to do three trips to Britain instead of just two. King Arviragus did beat back the Roman invasion of Emperor Claudius, and the Romans didn't take control of the whole island (minus Caledonia) until during Severus (Septimus). You can see this in the Chronology appendix of Book of Sires. And like Atgxtg said, Vortigern and the coming of the Saxons is pretty much based on HRB, with some Anglo-Saxon Chronicles mixed in.

Just to add to the already excellent answers... Greg was adamant that HRB, as much as possible, was the true history of KAP Britain, not a garbled fable mixing myth and history.

Yes it is a reference to the size. If memory serves, it is especially to the height of the tower in question, in Lordly Domains.

BotW, p. 51. Treasure -box.

My guess: Cambrian War, Savage Mountains. Although I agree, if the Gomeret Knights were waiting for mercenaries to help to take the Castle, it should not matter that they are from Logres.

Heresy. There is just one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#/media/File:PIA17172_Saturn_eclipse_mosaic_bright_crop.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Allatius#In_popular_culture

Since Passion modifies the Skill itself, you add it before you divide the Skill. However, since reflexive modifiers depend on the opponent, too, I always apply those after dividing. So let's say we have Knight A with Sword 18, impassioned +10 to 28, on a horse and fighting against two other knights (B and C, Sword 15 each) on foot. Knight A can divide his 28 any which way he wants, but let's be boring and say it is 14 and 14. Now, because he is mounted and B and C are not, +5/-5 modifier applies against each of them, resulting in 19 vs. 10 match-up. Yes, this is great as long as you are on a horse, but if we flip the situation and A is on foot and B and C are mounted, the match-up becomes 9 vs. 20.

That would lead to way too many captives. Not to mention, the PKs themselves are not captured when they lose a round, so why would the NPKs be? My rule of thumb is that if you crit your weapon roll during the battle round, you also get a captive, IF the round is a success for your team, too. I.e. more wins than losses. In BoB2, taking a prisoner opportunity opens up if you have knocked the enemy unconscious (usually via Major Wound). But it is its own little procedure that you need to go through, it is not automatic.

Why not just ask the player for the name? Or if you wish to be sneaky about it, ask for a recognize roll (with hefty bonuses) and then start describing the event... Better than even odds that the player will supply the name himself.

I stuck it south of Cameliard, in the Arden Forest between Avon and Severn, so yeah, pretty close to Galvoie. (Sure, there is Worcester near-by, but that is hardly an issue.) I also made it a bit smaller. The adventure implies roughly 1 day of travel between encounters (IIRC). I was making it more like a few hours in between, meaning that it was possible to ride all the way to the capital in a couple of days. Not only will this speed up the adventure some, but it makes it easier to fit the kingdom on the map (unless you wish to claim that it is all in Faerie). Perhaps a bit, but on the other hand, the players seem to enjoy it as an easy source of glory. Also, I have reused it from time to time as a backdrop for other adventures, such as turning the magical protections off after Grail Quest and allowing the monsters to start attacking again, requiring the PKs to help in fighting them back.

I admit that I am partial to the idea (for KAP purposes) that the dike/dyke was built in Pre-Roman times, after the Belgic invasion, to help guard against inter-tribal aggression. And then refurbished in the chaotic times of 5th century, from the early chaos of Romans leaving to Pictish invasions to Saxon raids. In this case, Renn could be either one of the original Belgic Kings ordering it to be built, or someone who refurbishes it in early 400s. That being said, I could easily see some of the early battles of the March of Aurelius happening near or even on the Dike, and that would give rise to the secondary attribution of the Dike to Aurelius Ambrosius in later chronicles.

BoK&L, p. 117: "Clothing that is worn all the time always loses one half its value each year. Although part of the annual upkeep of a knight and his family of any rank includes repairs, etc., to maintain clothes appropriate to their rank, it does not cover the cost for repairing fancier clothing." So it gets rid of this rule (KAP 5.2, p. 130): "For all grades of maintenance, reduce the character’s best suit of clothing to half its previous value." IF the best suit is appropriate to his rank. (My rule of thumb is that Poor = £0.5 clothing, Ordinary = £1 clothing, Rich = £2 clothing, Superlative = £4 clothing. Barons and such might have even higher than this.)

I got around that by having a 'GM's diary' where I write up the years, adventures, names and places. Then I can just do a 'Find' in the text document and quickly enough find what the context was. Another thing that helps is to keep the NPCs in their separate documents as well, with a master list in excel, including a space for quick notes: "Dueled Sir Cynwal in Pentecost 523 over insult to a lady; lost."

If you want to streamline, just use the (successful) attack roll instead: odd roll = breaks, even = stays intact.

My understanding is that as long as you win the opposed roll, it counts as a (personal) victory for Glory purposes. See BoB2 p.70.

Oh, you mean the Expanded Manorial Luck doesn't have a dragon raid but the BotM calamity table does? It is not mine, but yeah, I am not too bothered about not having a 2.5% annual chance per manor of a Dragon attack in early phases. If anything, dragons should get more common in Romance and Tournament, IMHO! But even so, the Dragons should be rare and important enough that they wouldn't just appear, cause minor damage and then vanish again randomly. If a Dragon arrives to Salisbury, it is a major quest time!

I have often regretted that I didn't push harder to include at least Table D.2 from BotW to BotE. I think it is most succinct and clear representation on how the different incomes (and expenses) combine. Appendix D in general is the blueprint document, which I was able to write from the ground up (with some limits from Greg as to including Assized Rent, Court Income and Customary Revenue all as separate values). That being said, I think BotE p. 33 spells Customary Revenue out quite well: sidebar "Customary Revenue = Assized Rent + Additional Income." It also spells out Free Income: "New Investments built by the current holder can provide extra spending money, called Free Income. The holder does not owe servitium debitum for Free Income." However, I would admit that we probably should have had an example of this, to show how Free Income adds to Discretionary Funds. One thing that was discussed was that the trade bonus (BotE, p. 58) would go up after Badon Hill, as trade would pick up without the Saxon piracy & raiding. This would naturally increase the income in manors that benefit from trade. There was also talk of allowing the Assized Rent itself to increase a bit, too. All of which would add more money into the landholding system and hence make the landed knights richer and more able to knight their sons and maintain structures. Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the structures are not meant for a mere landed knight to be able to maintain. Such as hospitals and such should require at least an Estate Holder, if not a Baron.