Morien

Fate comes from Book of the Manor where is basically makes the weather worse (and hence higher chance of a poor harvest) IIRC. If you click on my harvest house rule link in "IV.2.) Economic Circumstances: Income", you'll see how it works in our house rules. Using Book of the Estate, the Fate would not matter: poor harvest is a problem for the peasants, not the Lord.

Oh, we used one of those free family tree trackers online for some of the families, but mainly, I just put the names into an excel sheet with the birthyear and current age calculated from the current year. Then date of death when that happened.

OK, so if anything, I am probably giving out more Glory than you are. With the knights around 50, I would imagine that keeping their stats up starts to be an issue? One of our old knights got retired by his DEX finally dropping to 3 before he could gain another Glory point to raise it higher. Anyway, I have not needed to do what you did with regards to the skills 20+ & Glory, as I said. The fate point use and the focus of the players to keep the damage at 6d6 means that they seldom have any points left over to boost their Sword skill too high. They value the lifesaving properties of the fate point more than +1 Sword.

I think I would be even more harsh: I'd look at the family tree and ask "Is it reasonable for this guy to be a knight?". Forget about the Family Knight rolls altogether. For example, if the Father's only sibling was a woman who never married, then obviously there won't be any family knights from there. And even if I'd have a Father's Male Cousin still alive, from his third aunt, then I would say that no, this guy is probably an esquire and hence would not be a (middle-aged) family knight. Nor would his sons be young family knights. Yes. If one PK has an Aunt who has married, and another has an Uncle who has married, it would make sense that they might be married to one another. Assuming everything else works out (no previous marriages between those two family branches, consanguinity and all that). But yes, for example it would make perfect sense that the PK1's eldest married Aunt would actually be PK2's mother: eldest daughter of a vassal knight ought to be marrying a vassal knight, as a general rule. Which would make the two PKs cousins. Assuming that the Players agree and all that. You could even make it random by rolling a 1d6 and every possible PK family would be a number, with the remaining numbers connecting to an NPK family. I believe that I have commented before: you are crazy, man. Yep, very much similar thing happened in our campaign, the PKs primarily marrying each other's sisters. Which is a nice way to explain why this group of knights sticks together. Although I guess that you can also explain many things away with the fact that they are all roughly the same age, so they probably would have rubbed elbows in Sarum for the last 14 years or so, complaining about their onerous duties to each other, and so forth.

You could also allow: Each skipped tribute paid later will lower the Grudge by 2d6+3 * activity modifier (0.5 for lethargic, etc). In our campaign, the Saxons tended to demand the skipped payments after the fact, even if they raided in between. However, if you kept up to date with the payments, they did not raid you. After all, if you pay and the Saxons raid you anyway, then there isn't much point in paying, is there? So I would only roll vs. Grudge if the county has not paid tribute for that year. Up to you if the Saxons would demand the skipped payments too, or if they would kinda gloss over those, figuring that the raid was enough. If the Saxons do require the backpay as well, then this system might be a bit too harsh: you get raided AND have to pay the tribute that is in arrears? But if the Saxons feel that they are 'owed' money, the Grudge score would stay high. Which means that even the Lethargic Saxons are quick to punish you if you 'relapse' in your payments, which is probably reason enough to keep up with them. Note that I have not playtested this in any way. But just by eyeballing the numbers, you would get something like: Lethargic Saxons: Grudge +5 per year, so 1st year Grudge 5 = 25% chance of a raid, second year Grudge 10 = 50% chance of a raid, which probably happens so -5, 3rd year Grudge 10 again = 50% chance of a raid... This is probably a bit too common, as it becomes almost a yearly occurrence and starts becoming a Pillage, too. Hmm. If the Raid (regardless of severity) becomes -10 instead, then the Lethargic Saxons would basically reset their Grudge after every raid. So you have the choice of paying them 1 Lot per year, or every 2 years or so, they will raid you, which probably causes that same 2 Lots of damage and also messes with your building projects. This is not really 'Lethargic' as such, I admit, but also means that they are not jumping straight for the throat, as you might get away not paying them every time. So if you skip the first year, but pay up the second year, skip the third year (Raid, Grudge goes to 0), skip the fourth year, pay the fifth year, skip sixth (lucky, no raid), pay 7th, skip 8th (Raid happens, Grudge drops to 5), pay 9th... In this case, in 9 years, you have skipped 5 times, paid 4 times, and been raided 2 times... So 8 Lots of tribute & damage vs. 9 lots had you just been paying. Yeah, seems to work OK. You could simply have the Belligerent Saxons demand double tribute, and make the skipped tribute maybe 1d6+1 per Lot instead. That way, you don't have to multiply. Lethargic Saxons ask for normal tribute (1 Lot, skipped 1d6+1 Grudge), Belligerent ask for double tribute (2 Lots, 2d6+2 skipped), and Zerg ask for triple tribute (3 Lots, 3d6+3 if skipped).

Well, building on your suggestion... Each skipped tribute: 2d6+3 Grudge Lethargic: halve the Grudge increase Belligerent: default Zerg: double the grudge increase Then roll vs. Current Grudge score. If the result is a success with a value 1-10, it is a Raid. If the result is a success with a value 11-19, it is a Pillaging Raid. If it is a critical, it is an invasion intended to ravage the whole county or even conquer it outright. Raids lower the grudge by 5 per severity.

As far as I know, there is no official mechanic for it and Greg never shared what might have been in his mind. Personally, I prefer to go more with the story since that is also how the players are making their choices. "I heard Essex got defeated by Caer Colun last year so maybe we won't pay them this year since they are probably too weak to go looking for new enemies..." Now they might be wrong on their estimations, and I would not be afraid to go off-script if they have been especially insulting to the Saxon aethelings. But I don't think I would leave it solely on the dice. YPWV, of course. 🙂

Oh, I agree with that, but would it be profitable? That's the important question. Is it worth putting manpower into it, especially layout? At the moment, BoM costs Chaosium nothing and if people want to buy it and mine it for ideas, they can. Maybe if Estate goes through another revision, we might get an appendix added... Or if there is a Book of Arthur or some such, an appendix on how the landholding changes...

Well, if you check my house rules thread, there is a link to the harvest system we use, which has variable harvests, random events and Hate Landlord. What do you mean by state of the land? Hate Landlord & natural population growth? We don't track the latter, but it crops up from time to time in Expanded Manorial Luck. Anyway, my point was that if you already have Estate and Entourage, Book of the Manor doesn't add much. Although granted, there are a few things which are nice. What parts, in particular? I am asking out of real interest, since obviously the hope was to make it understandable. Although to be honest, I wish I had told Greg to simplify the whole Assized Rent, Court Profits and Customary Revenue to a single number, and round that sucker off. There is no real need to keep track of fractions of Libra...

I'd argue that it is unnecessary, even without considering the flaws: The follower stuff is done better in Entourage (with some very useful Marriage tables & other rules, too), while the economic system, like you stated, is in Book of the Estate, as are the improvements. As for Warlord, the Economic system is explained in Appendix D, although naturally the lack of space means that it needs to be more condensed than in Estate. Funny fact: Appendix D was written before Estate was revised, so it, in a sense, is the foundational document and Estate is the expansion.

I would disagree about needing Estate for the Warlord. Was there a particular section you had in mind? Like the various investments in Estate? I'd argue that the high level play works fine without them. Although I admit that Castles will be a nice addition so that you can build your own / upgrade as the Baron of Somewhere. IMHO, each expansion book stands fine by itself. Perhaps a bit too fine: Estate - Warlord - Uther form this continuum that repeats a lot of the information already in the other expansions to make them truly standalone. But admittedly it does lead me to feeling that there is a lot of repetition and it would have been cleaner to have Book of the Landholdings or some such with all the estate & honour building info, as these differ mainly in scale and detail rather than in type. And leave the world detail for Uther. But I am sure that there are people who feel differently, too, and and these are the books that we have. 🙂

Sorry, I misremembered. It was this one: http://kapresources.wpengine.com/Pendragon Forum Archive/index.php/t-2571.html And http://kapresources.wpengine.com/Pendragon Forum Archive/index.php/t-2589.html

Away from computer right now but if you look in Nocturnal Archive in the House Rules, there should be one of mine about Harvest, Raids and Wasteland and I talk about the Saxons in Anarchy too.

Ah, that is where the misunderstanding happened. You see, I was saying 'I give checks pretty much on any other result than a failure', and you replied that you were thinking of giving checks on failures and criticals, hence implying that you do not give checks on successes and fumbles. But glad that I am helping you 'see the light'!

No, the RAW is: 1. Critical success, OR 2. "A success in a significant situation is achieved." Now skill 20 is 100% to achieve either of these conditions as long as a significant situation comes up. However with your 'failures + crits' house rule, skill 20 cannot fail, so you have to get a crit to get a check, 5% chance. That is what Atgxtg is pointing out, Skill 20 went from 100% to get a check and then 5% chance to increase = 5% total chance to improve by experience, to 5% chance to get a check and 5% chance to increase = 0.25% total chance to improve by experience. Clearly a much worse proposition. He also makes the valid distinction that while you might roll Sword several times during an adventure and hence stand a much better chance of critting at some point (especially with modifiers like attacking a knight who is trying to get up), some of the less rolled skills you might only get a single roll per year, and the above math would be correct.

Added: II.12.) Critical Passion increases? Rather than giving an automatic +1 (and hence ensuring that Passions that got past 20 started skyrocketting), you get an immediate experience increase roll as in Winter Phase: roll 1d20 and if the result is larger than the current value of the Passion or a 20, the Passion goes up by one. You also get an experience check to roll later at Winter Phase. This keeps the 20+ passions from shooting to 30 and beyond by simply rolling criticals often enough in play, as you still need to roll a 20, but helps to raise the lower passions if you get lucky. Passions 20+ ought to be rare, since they are so very useful! (Especially in vanilla KAP, where you can't fail nor fumble when using them any more. Can you say 'Overpowered'?) I agree that skills past 20 ought to be a big distinction. Most of the RTK in our campaign have Sword & Lance 20-24... there are maybe a dozen who have them at 25+, and even Lancelot has them more like 30 rather than 39. Then again, the Inspired bonus for us is just +5, so it is still not that easy to beat an RTK. As I mentioned in our house rules, since we use Glory Points as fate points, most Players save them for that or patch their SIZ or STR to keep 6d6 damage, rather than raise their weapon skills. I think the highest weapon skill at the moment is 21, and she is already close to 40, with almost 11000 Glory. In our first Pendragon campaign, the highest Sword Skill was 28 (29 post-mortem), at Badon Hill. The character had a bit over 18000 Glory, and was considered the best swordsman in Britain, with only Pellinore mentioned as a potential other claimant. Do you give out loads of Glory? Since to reach skill 25, you would need 1+1+2+3+4 = 11 Glory Bonus Points, so 11000 Glory after reaching skill 20. I consider myself quite generous when it comes to Glory, but it still takes the characters a couple of years per 1000 Glory, usually.

In 4th edition Vassal Service solo, assuming I am reading this right, you got checks to all of the relevant skills and could choose which relevant Traits to check.

Exactly. The key is communicating with the Players, finding out what they want and how things work. I have had some Female PKs in my campaigns, and yes, the inheritance issues can crop up from time to time. For our current players, this is not an issue. They are quite happy to let the manors go to the eldest son and either play the eldest or have a daughter become a knight errant. Here are some backgrounds that they have had: 1. She was the eldest of three daughters. They split the family manor, with the agreement that the Knight Sister got £4 per year and took care of the knight service, while the other two sisters got £1 per year each and made sure that the Stewardship part was taken care of, too. 2. She was the eldest of two daughters, no sons. Since we needed to actually get her from Salisbury to Cornwall to join the other PKs, we decided that her liege lord was planning to marry her off to one of his cronies before she would be knighted. So she ended up fleeing to Cornwall and offer her services there as a household knight at first, and later earned up a manor for herself. 3. She was the only surviving child of a landed knight. No inheritance problems here. 4. She started out as a younger sister of a vassal knight, retained as a household knight by the liege of the PKs. She married into a manor, and then earned another one with her own heroics. In another campaign, one player did ask about the inheritance issues, as she was worried that since she only wanted to play female characters (fair enough), how would that impact on her ability to retain control of the family lands and such from generation to generation? My answer was that we can easily make that a special case, even if the rest of the society would follow 'normal' inheritance rules. Easy enough to come up with an excuse that one particular estate (and any future manors earned by the title holder) would go from the Mother to the eldest Daughter. It is only a problem if you (and the player!) want it to.

It just takes one heiress off the board... maybe. It depends how the society takes woman knights in your campaign. If it is not a problem then it is not a problem. In our campaign women knights are rare but accepted as knights. This includes also their right to choose their spouse just as male knights would. YPMV. As for the campaign question, anyone below the comital family are extras. They do not by themselves influence the plot meaningfully, unless the GM wishes them to and it is always easy to come up with other NPCs if needed. In other words do whatever you want with them, you won't derail the campaign. You could jump ahead to 496 where I think a few more names are mentioned. Again, up to you how influential these NPCs will be.

Some, but there is a lot of mail in KAP until 530s, and even after that. If it is not allowed to rust, mail will keep for centuries, let alone a generation or so we are talking about here. Sure, but you can justify it by scarcity. The thing is, thanks to the squishing the plate armor development of about 200 years to only 30 years or so, there is a much smaller pool of talent to draw from. You could still have the same Master Armorer of Camelot, who came up with the breastplate in 520s (assuming that it is in general market by 531), still in charge of overseeing the Gothic Plate production in 560s, or at worst, his original apprentice, now a Master himself. But hey, if you want to bring the price down to a chainmail level in your campaign, I would not dream of stopping you. (Of course, if I recall correctly, you are still about 100 years off in your 400s campaign?)

You might want to check the first link I added to a discussion in 2018 in Nocturnal Forum. I think you will find that we are not quite as far apart as you may think. My issue is more with the fact that each PK would have around half a dozen family knights, connected only to that one PK in question. And also, the whole 'Army' section in character sheet needs removing, since it is very much giving the false impression that these are people that you can easily rally together when there is a 'crisis', which many new players take to mean 'I want to raid but I don't want to pay mercenaries'. Those lineage men would deserve some help from the PK, not just act as arrowfodder. But they make things even worse, since once you have an average of 5 knights and 12 other lineage men, this is 17 NPCs per PK. Sure, you don't need to keep track of all of them nor even detail them, but that also means that they amount to very little in the game. Since they just pop up in the Family Event (if they pop up, the family member roll is pretty buggy, too), they don't have much emotional weight at all. Frankly, the best, most impactful NPC family members have been the children and the grandchildren of the original PKs. This is because they have the family history and names. You know where they grew up, and you probably had a hand in marrying the girls off to as good husbands as you could find, and maybe even betrothed your sons, or at least tries to ensure that they would get knighted, etc. You are simply more invested in what happens to them. I would much rather have a nice family tree of named characters*, and some of whom would actually link the PK families together. One's uncle could be another's aunt's husband, and so forth. Rather than an 'Army' of nameless 'Family Knights'. And since some of them are shared by the PKs, this makes the whole world feel more interconnected, and ensures that other PKs are more inclined to go looking for Cousin Larry, too, when he goes missing. * Who then populate a Family List of 20 rows (rcvan's suggestion), where you can easily roll 1d20 to see who it is this time rather than coming up with the duds (grandfather and father already dead by default, potentially no brothers nor sisters left, etc...).

No, since you need a Steward to oversee the manor (that takes the wife's £1). If you are childless, too, then yes, you save the £1 normally spent on kids. Or you could be a typical medieval nobleman and use that to support your commoner leman and bastards...

You know, I even forgot that there was that little asterisk there in the Winter Phase. The 1-2 roll is bad enough, to add age modifiers (and so soon at that!) to the roll ensures that no (mere vassal knight) PK will ever be able to keep a more expensive horse for longer than a few years, making them a very poor investment. Not to mention that since I am a LazyGMtm, I don't like keeping track of the horses' ages. Hard enough to keep my players tracking the squires' and the wives' ages! Thus, in my house rules I just lowered the chance of a horse dying to 1, and left it at that. This should make bigger warhorses a more stable investment (pun intended), and I am even thinking of allowing them to improve their horse herds by using their best stallion as a stud. I am not sure I would let them get above Large Charger (Andalusian) without investing some more, but I think that might be an additional help... Kinda telling the player that if they are willing to put the money into it, I am not going to take it away on a bad roll. Not as if your armor is turning up rusty and useless 5% probability per year. Yes, because it became less labor intensive. Although I would argue that given how prevalent mail is in Earlier Periods and that the Plate is more of a single generation thing, there is a LOT of now 'obsolete' mail floating around that can be had cheaply (by comparison), while the few master craftsmen who have learned to make plate armor are charging as much as they can and keeping the prices high by scarcity. The thing is that even if they would start training apprentices to drive the price down, it still takes almost a generation to go from an apprentice to a master. So the squished timeline of Pendragon actually explains the high prices, especially when it comes to the top of the line product: there are probably just a handful of people who are churning out those Gothic Plates, and guarding their trade secrets jealously.

That is my suggested tweak to fix the brutal 20% survival rate in current KAP 5.2 rules. It is actually NOT what BotEstate is doing, which rolling family survival for each NPC in the family, regardless of age. It replaces the Child Survival, as it also covers children. What BotEstate does do is to bring the survival rate of children to about 70%, which is pretty much what my above tweak does, too. So same end result (as far as kids are concerned), but a different execution.

Depends. If you assume that the average horse is dragging one or two steps behind the best one, you see a rather steep rise in the price of horseflesh towards Late Tournament and Twilight. Same with the armor, since everything is becoming more expensive. You can easily be double or even triple that £20+ in Twilight. Although I tend to think that the Average rate doesn't climb as steeply as the Best. Also, when it comes to the War Spoils, given the way the horses die within a decade or so, unless you get very lucky and get that loot horse while the son is getting ready to be knighted, the horse won't survive long enough. Secondly, while the PKs rack up a lot of loot from adventures and such, the average NPK cannot trust to do the same. I think this is one of the reasons why the average equipment rate goes down in comparison, the average landed NPK simply can't keep up as the Universal Aid doesn't go up by the same factor as equipment prices do. If you look at Uther, everyone has 10pt armor and 6d6 warhorse (at least landed knights). If you look at Twilight, the best available is 18-pt Gothic Plate and 10d6 warhorse. But the average is probably more like 14-point Partial Plate and 7d6 Andalusian, with PKs likely in between with 16-point Full Plate and 8d6 Destriers. Granted, that might be my biased take on it since in our GPC playthrough, the Players figured it out very quickly that horses come and go but armor is forever... Thus, at the end almost everyone was in Gothic Plate but still riding Andalusians, since all the better horses were simply too expensive to be replaced once they croaked in Winter Phase.