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Uqbarian

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    Playing RPGs since school
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    Running D&D (4E & 5E), working up to a KAP campaign
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    Brisbane
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    This is my blurb.

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  1. Just for fun, I had a poke at clergy numbers. BoU p. 7 lists the clergy as about 10K in number, or roughly 2% of the population. BoU also lists 26 BC abbeys, 37 RC abbeys and cathedrals, and 12 pagan sites. However, only one pagan site is specifically listed as a ‘pagan abbey’ (Stone Abbey of the Giant), and one is listed as a ‘[c]ommunity of practicing Pagans’ (Longvale), so let’s say there are 2 pagan abbey-equivalents for a total of 65 abbey-equivalents in Logres. From BoE p. 86, abbeys typically have in the range of 20 to 80 monks but can be larger. (BoE has a separate entry for nunneries, but BoU says these are ‘always attached to an abbey’, so I’ll assume these are included in the abbey count for convenience. I'm also assuming the 'monk' counts include priests who live in the abbeys, distinct from village priests.) At a minimum of 20 monks (or monk-equivalents) per abbey-equivalent: 1300 monks At an average of 50 monks per abbey-equivalent: 3250 monks At 80 monks per abbey-equivalent: 5200 monks (There might be a few large abbeys with hundreds of monks and nuns, but I don’t think there’d be enough of those to skew the average above 80.) Priories are ‘too numerous to list’ (BoU p. 77). That suggests to me there are at least twice as many priories as there are abbeys, so I’ll take 130 priories as a baseline. Priories are listed under British Christianity, but there’s no reason to suppose Roman Christians don’t have them too, and the Salisbury county map shows two RC priories. (I briefly thought the Salisbury map might help for counting priories. In Salisbury county, BoU lists 2 BC abbeys (Ambrius and the Rock) and 1 RC abbey (Borders). Looking at the county map in BoW pp. 206-7, I make out 4 priories (2 RC, 2 BC), but the map doesn’t show the abbeys of Borders or the Rock (one might say they’re hidden inside the castle icons), so we don’t know how many priories exist within other castles or towns on that map.) From BoE p. 89, priories typically have 5 to 15 monks. Let’s say 10 monks per priory across 130 priories, for 1300 monks. Adding that to our average abbey figure (3250 monks) gives a total of 4550 monks. How about village priests? From BoU p. 75, canons (RC priests) ‘outnumber monks significantly’. British Christianity doesn’t have canons, but I think it’s reasonable to suppose that BC monks who conduct services in villages similarly outnumber BC monks in monasteries. I’ll call members of both of these categories (i.e. secular clergy for both RC and BC) ‘priests’ for convenience. If the village priests don’t outnumber monks ‘significantly’ but are instead roughly equal in number, we could say there are 4550 priests to give us 9100 monks plus priests, or about 10K to match the BoU population estimate. ('Significantly outnumber' could mean priests in abbeys + village priests outnumber actual monks, but I don't think that makes sense in the context. However, we could fit more village priests within the 10K by assuming fewer priories and/or a lower abbey average.) If instead there are 1.5 village priest-equivalents per monk-equivalent, i.e. 6825 village priests, we have 11 375 clergy all up.* Say we round to 12K to allow for the foreign churches (based in London), a few hundred hermits and anchorites, and/or a couple of hidden pagan orders. That can still fit within the rough 2% estimate from a rough 500K total population. (One thing that jumps out at me, though, is that even at 4550 'village' priests, there should easily be enough for at least one priest per manor.) For those of us who favour a larger total population, we can assume a high-end abbey average, more priories, more priests relative to monks, more pagan clergy, and/or a lower proportion of the total population (though for the last, I wouldn’t want to go below 1.5%). *EDIT: And that's probably still underestimating secular clergy. I don't have a copy of J C Russell's paper on clergy numbers, but a citation at this Stack Exchange page has 24.9K secular clergy versus 10.6K religious (i.e. monastic) clergy, though that is for 1377. I haven't found a good eleventh-century breakdown online.
  2. Yeah, that's fair. I hadn't thought about non-slave servants in town households, which would be another significant part of the urban population. Also, BoU p. 94 does clearly equate 'townsmen' (as a social class) with 'burghers' (the legal class), and it further describes the social class as just the merchants and traders, both of which support your side. On the other hand, p. 93 does say 'while some [burghers] are farmers, most are manufacturers, merchants and traders', so the class isn't just the merchants and traders. There are ways to reconcile that inconsistency, but I think they can be turned to either side of the argument. So I haven't really shed any light on anything. 🙂
  3. Oh man, one of my favourite topics and I missed it! It's all fuzzy and there's a lot of room for variation, but another thing that I think lends support to the higher population suggestions is the town populations. Book of Uther p. 93 says that burghers (town dwellers) are about 5% of the total population of Logres. (In context, I assume this includes families.) (Not all the inhabitants of towns will be burghers, but I think it's reasonable to assume that most are. My assumption is that slaves make up the only significant non-burgher town population for counting purposes.) There are 64 market towns and cities. (BoU p. 98 says there are 64 in Britain, but given the list and the associated map, 'Britain' here evidently means the kingdom of Logres.) Of these, 3 are great cities, 5 are large cities, and the remaining 56 are market towns. (Some of the market towns are small cities, but I don't think BoU says which are which. It's worth remembering that 'market town' and 'civitas' are legal categories, whereas 'city' is more of a size category in this context. For example, there could be a settlement somewhere that has only 12 permanent residents but is officially a market town, and there are definitely town-sized settlements that don't have market town status. On the other hand, 'burgher' is also a legal class rather than a social class. I'll assume for convenience that residents of non-market towns do not count as burghers.) Using figures from BoU p. 96: 3 great cities, each about 10K pop: 30K 5 large cities, each about 5K pop: 25K 56 market towns (including small cities), say average 750 pop: 42K* Total urban pop: 97K *This is probably an underestimate, as non-city market towns are given as 625-750 and small cities are 750-1500. This also doesn't include towns without market town status. Regarding slavery, my personal preference is to assume it doesn't exist in Logres, but it is there in the book, so I'll try to factor it in. Looking again at BoU p. 93, up to 20% of the commoner population are slaves, and slaves are found in the 3 great cities (Londinium, Venta and Glevum) and 2 of the large cities (Camulodunum and Durnovaria). (Slaves are also found in Eburacum, but that's outside Logres.) Taking 20% out of those cities removes 8K from the urban pop count (2K for each of 3 great cities, 1K for each of 2 large cities), leaving us with 89K. If we assume this non-slave urban population is roughly equivalent to the burgher population, and if we accept that the burgher population is 5% of the total population, that suggests a total population of roughly 1.78 million. If we instead assume that the urban population contains a significant number of non-burgher and non-slave inhabitants -- let's say an arbitrary 14K because we can see where this will get us -- we're left with 75K burghers and a total population of roughly 1.5 million.
  4. Thanks, folks! Sorry, I must have misunderstood something -- I thought gifted manors were the ones that reverted back, whereas granted manors were those that could be passed on. (In this case, the manor was originally granted to one of Alain's ancestors anyway, so it's definitely in the heritable category.)
  5. I haven't got there, but my guess is there'd be a mix of attitudes. Probably most lords are going to treat their estate as their primary responsibility, with their RTKship as more of an honorary thing. (The GPC notes that a knight's life doesn't need to change all that much if he's appointed to the Round Table -- he has more prestige but no actual duties.) Some lords might be keen on being at Camelot or out questing all the time, and others might indeed see them as somewhat irresponsible (cf. Pellinore). Even the eager Table-staying/questing lords, though, are probably going to have someone in their family running their estates or kingdoms in their stead. Those situations can give hooks for intrigue and adventure, of course. (And it'd be handy to have a bunch of these in the later periods as situations that Mordred can exploit, both to work his allies into positions of authority and to criticise the Round Table as an institution.)
  6. Say Sir Alain is a vassal knight with a granted manor. He has a younger sister, Lady Bronwen, and a younger brother, Sir Celyn. (Bronwen is older than Celyn.) Alain has no children. Bronwen is married and has a son; Celyn is also married and has a son. Sir Celyn dies, then Sir Alain dies. Does the manor go to Bronwen's son or Celyn's? I think the 'logic' of the situation is that, when Alain dies without a child, one would check for male collaterals first. I've read a couple of references that deceased collaterals are represented by their descendants, which suggests that Celyn's son would inherit. (As in, if Celyn was still alive when Alain died, he would inherit, so Celyn's son inherits by filling Celyn's place in the tree.) But I'm not sure. (I've also read that this sort of thing wasn't settled law in England until the mid or late thirteenth century, so my actual answer in-game -- still in Uther period -- is likely to be that there's a family squabble, it's kicked back to the count to decide during escheatment, and he picks whoever he likes best. I'm still curious as to what the 'real' answer would be, though.)
  7. Oh! Yeah, I'd just ignore polygamy (at least in Logres, Cornwall and Northumbria). I'm not sure Celtic polygamy would work without partitive inheritance anyway, and the latter is clearly not assumed in KAP. I can't find a link, but I remember reading a paper suggesting that polygamy was already less common among Britons in the Roman period than it was among the Gauls, and that the practice declined over time. Even if that's not historically accurate, we can easily suppose that it's true in the fictional history -- the Cymric elite assimilated to Roman customs (and the retrojected English medieval ones) enough that elite British pagans in Logres are practising monogamy, primogeniture and all the rest of it, just with slightly different rituals from their Christian comrades. If you still want to keep polygamy as an option for pagan knights (without messing with gavelkind), one workaround you could use is to say that the custom is for a man to take one wife (whose first child inherits) and (optionally) one or more concubines (whose children don't inherit the main property, much like any subsequent children of the first wife). And for fertility rituals/bonfire nights etc., maybe the social expectation is that a pagan knight with property to pass on performs those rituals with his primary wife anyway. (To gloss this in the fiction, maybe fertility rituals when the elite are involved are tied into sovereignty rituals, so the knight and his wife represent Pwyll/Manawydan and Rhiannon/Epona, or something like that.)
  8. Are you talking mainly about records, or about social recognition? As a minor point, it's worth noting that things like parish registers are quite late. There are medieval examples from the 1300s, but as formalised and uniform systems they really get going in the early modern period. However, elite marriages would of course tend to be more heavily documented, not least because of the extensive property involved. On the other hand, it's also worth noting that the Romans already had marriage certificates in the Republican period. For KAP, we can (if we want) imagine that this (along with other aspects of Roman culture) affected Romano-British marriage customs, property law etc. enough that elite British pagans have written records comparable to those of the Christian churches. (There was probably also a lot of convergence in how the legal system handled this stuff over the fictional history.) Further, KAP does kind of assume a uniform secular culture among Britons (at least in Logres). Knighting is the same for a pagan knight and a Christian knight, though the ceremonial beforehand might be different. If they're vassal knights, their manorial charters are going to look much the same regardless of their religion. So one possible answer is that there's a shared set of standards and processes for recording marriage contracts etc. among the upper classes in Logres and the surrounding 'civilised' kingdoms.
  9. I'm also curious about this as I'm trying to set some dominos up for my game. Book of the Warlord touches on this a bit (page 30). Basically, Uther tolerates a certain level of feuding between barons, including barons raiding each other's estates (or even outright occupying holdings). If he decides a feud is getting out of hand, or if one of the barons makes an appeal to him, he might try to settle things. (Uther and the barons probably also see raids to some extent as something like 'live-fire exercises'.) I'd expect that at least some barons accept a certain level of feuding between their vassals as well. As above, so below. (If you decide Ulfius thinks that way, then that opens up another possible avenue against Sir Blains.) I think fallout would tend to be limited as long as damage is relatively minor (in Book of Estate terms, mostly raiding and a bit of pillaging, to minimise permanent damage) and precisely targeted (to avoid bringing in other parties). Of course, feuds have a tendency to escalate... The Roderick-Blains feud (as distinct from the underlying tribal Salisbury-Silchester rivalry) also has the interesting wrinkle that the two main parties aren't equals. If Blains was a minor baron in his own right, Roderick could crack him like a nut. If the feud was between Roderick and Ulfius, it'd be a more equal contest (though Uther would be quicker to intervene). As it is, Roderick probably isn't applying all the pressure he can bring to bear, so as to not provoke Ulfius, while Ulfius (and Uther) are sitting back to see how Blains handles it with his own resources. (That's my take, anyway.) But if, say, some Salisbury knights get lost and pillage a Silchester manor that doesn't belong to Blains, everyone will be upset.
  10. A bit like AlHazred's chess image, I like a Morgan who's working at or near Merlin's level with a different agenda for Mythic Britain. Maybe not even opposing all the time. My vague idea is that she, like Merlin, has performed divinations and prophetic visions, but neither of them see the whole picture, or at least Morgan thinks she has seen parts of the picture that Merlin has missed or discounted. I also like a not-exactly-evil Morgan who is interested in testing people for weaknesses rather than destroying Arthur or his realm, but also has a rather cruel sense of humour. (This does mean toning down or removing some of her actions from the campaign, of course.) What her agenda actually is (or Merlin's!), I haven't really worked out, but unless a player decides to explore that side of things in depth, I'm happy to handwave a lot of it as beyond knightly understanding. There's also the option of going back to the Vulgate version, in which Morgan starts out as friends with Guinevere but comes to hate her after Morgan's affair with Guiomar is exposed. There she's not so focused on opposing Arthur directly as on bringing Guinevere down.
  11. Greg said on the old forum that these were drafts for what was going to be the Book of Salisbury. At one point the idea was that each Salisbury hundred would get a map and detailed description. Last year sirlarkins said the Book of Salisbury is still in the pipeline as part of a GM's Resource Pack.
  12. I would hybridise 1 and 3: one main PK with 3-5 ally knights. If they're best friends, they don't really need any more reason to adventure together than a normal group of PKs do. You could streamline the ally knights to reduce paperwork, maybe something like the husband knight in Book of the Entourage (beefed up a bit to be closer to PK level). Depending on one's emulation preferences, this approach also allows a 'get out of death' option: if the PK would die and the player isn't ready for that (e.g. the PK has no heir), one of the allies who is present can take the fatal blow instead. (This is more or less what we're doing in the one-player-and-one-GM game I run, though obviously that isn't the same as solitaire. I like doing the paperwork, though, so I'm happy to run four pseudo-PKs. 🙂) Here's a thread by Autumnflame over at RPGnet for an intermittent solo game that was (maybe still is?) run roughly this way with Mythic GME.
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