Uqbarian

Thanks, folks! I'm thinking on the mundane side, but I'll look up those adventures too. We're in the Uther period. A shopping trip to London could be an adventure in itself, so I might try that.

So, I have a PK who rolled a Love (Wife) of 16. Does anyone have suggestions for plotlines/scenarios that can make use of this? There's always the old villain-abducts-wife routine, and also enemies of the PK accusing the wife of something awful, but I'm trying to come up with something a bit less obvious.

Apparently it's being worked on, but Chaosium haven't made an official announcement about dates.

Expanding on Morien's point, I think the manors that Roderick holds directly (his demesne manors) won't normally have knights present. They'd be managed by a bailiff at each manor or equivalent, reporting to Roderick's seneschal. The people living at them would be more or less the usual manorial staff minus a knight and family. (If I'm reading Book of the Warlord correctly, a single steward is enough for outlier holdings within a single county, and for the county that contains the caput major the steward's duties are folded into those of the seneschal. For that many manors, I'd be tempted to throw in a few stewards as middle managers between the bailiffs and the seneschal, though, with each steward doing a circuit through about a dozen manors.)

For what it's worth, the 5.2 rulebook mentions this on page 109 under "Crossbow": "Knights generally scorn the use of crossbows in combat, although some may welcome their use in hunting (only!)." (Presumably those knights who do use them in hunting also train up their crossbow skill.)

Hooray! Thanks for that information.

Are the Book of Castles and/or the Book of Salisbury still in the pipeline?

From what I've read, I get the impression (at least for high medieval France and England) that that concern was mainly on the father's side. E.g., it was not usual for a boy to be sent to his paternal uncle's household than to his maternal uncle's, but the latter was relatively common. And on the other hand, in Chaucer we have a knight and squire who are father and son. (I don't think it's commented on as particularly unusual within the text, but I could be wrong.) For the Pendragon period, it's also worth considering the strong traditional relationship in ancient and medieval Celtic societies between mother's brothers and sister's sons. (Some of this comes through with Arthur and Gawaine, for example.)

Thanks. Yep, something like that would be easier to follow.

If I've understood the logic of the books, the social status isn't a hard line, right? As in, some lady wife replacements could conceivably be commoners, and some overseers of bailiffs could be esquires, as long as a commoner is never placed higher than an esquire in a particular reporting line. (This struck me also because Book of the Warlord mentions knightly stewards for large outliers or other significant parcels -- Sir Blains, Steward of Levcomagus, is presumably an example of this type. Obviously that's way beyond the manorial scale, though.)

For me, the numbers (and the material around them) help me get an idea of the big picture of Logres and the interests of Uther and his barons, as well as giving me a range of benchmarks for things like how valuable a particular gift is. If, say, the PKs start a feud with Sir Staterius of Thornbush, I have a pretty good idea of what resources he has, and if they've annoyed some other minor baron, Staterius still provides a useful model. The economic (and political-legal) details look particularly useful for the Anarchy (if my game ever gets there!), and more generally if any of the PKs become estate holders or otherwise have reason to be interested in high-level politics and military decision making.

Swans Hundred provides 66.6L to Sir Staterius in BotW. For the Salisbury hundreds held by Count Roderick, I get an average of 60.52L. (This count doesn't include the free manor of Ebble (14.6L) or the fee farm of Elmstump Hundred (46.5L?).) They range from Vagon at 22.7L to Thorngate at 102.1L, so the income of Swans looks reasonable to me. (There's also the wrinkle that these values may not always be for the whole hundred. For example, the hundreds 'held' by Count Roderick may still contain pockets held by other lords. FWIW, Stafford had a preview draft of Swans for the Book of Salisbury up on his old site which had Swans at a total render of 97L, with 72.8L belonging to Staterius or his vassals. Something similar could explain the low value of Vagon Hundred.) EDIT: Re Salisbury NPCs, I think we have names for about a dozen senior/notable knights, but we don't know for sure which of them are vassals and which are household knights.

I'm going with similar figures in my game, except about 30 vassal manors -- 20 single-manor grants (for the potential PK manors), half a dozen gifts/grants for officers, and a couple of bannerets. There's no need to assume the 20 potential PK manors are all held at the same level, of course; ones that don't go to PKs can be assigned to officers and/or bannerets, keeping to 20 manors held by Salisbury's vassals within Salisbury county. Another benchmark from BotW is that Salisbury has subinfeudated 264 libras' worth, so about 26 manors. Again, not all of those have to be in Salisbury, of course.

The version of this on Stafford's old Pendragon site noted that there were another 30 or so manors not shown on the map, which would fit with your estimate of 150.

Try Book of the Warlord, page 103. EDIT: There's also a post by Morien from the old forum archived here that could be useful (designed for after Lindsey, but easy enough to adapt).

True, that. Indeed, though it seems unlikely that one parish would cover all of the possible player manors.

I don't think this is mentioned in the rules, but just to add another line of possible backstories, there was the real-world possibility of a widow paying a fine to her guardian so she could marry her own choice of husband, or even to not marry at all.

(emphasis added) Thanks! Treating it like Running Away makes perfect sense. Thanks also, Tizun Thane!

Say you're using the Book of Battle rules and the players get an opportunity to fight an enemy leader (page 78), but the leader decides to escape. How do the players stop him from escaping? Is it just something like using the rules for attacking multiple opponents (to represent fighting past a bodyguard to engage the leader)?

Even before that, books would tend to cost significantly less by the beginning of the thirteenth century than they did at the end of the eleventh, as lay literacy increased, universities emerged with associated book trades, and the relative importance of scriptoria declined. Increased use of paper also lowered prices for cheap books well before printing. Definitely!

Yep, I got that first part, and the second part makes sense (but also allows for something closer to £5 for a small non-illuminated book). Neat! That's also when a coat of mail might cost 100 shillings, going by Hodges's list. (Hodges also mentions a set of 126 books going for 113 pounds in 1397, but prices would tend be lower then, though he doesn't mention what sort of books these were.)

I have a literate knight in my game, and I've been thinking similar thoughts. I like your take on the training use. Prices might be a bit higher, using the given copying rate -- a book would probably have something like 200 pages at least,* so you'd theoretically be looking at 4+ libra. That seems a bit high to me, particularly as that's for non-illuminated books, but I guess it can work for the early period (EDIT: though 2-3 libra also seems fine to me). I'd bring costs down a lot (maybe 50%) after the Conquest period (reflecting twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments). I can see why Atgxtg went with £20+, but I would use that sort of price for heavily illuminated works. The most common books in the early period would be gospels (containing one to four of the gospels) and psalters (containg the Book of Psalms), both of which would also often include extra material such as liturgical calendars, glossaries or litanies. A portable single-volume Bible would actually be rare before the thirteenth century. Books of hours are another thirteenth-century development. (I think the rulebook overstates medieval illiteracy somewhat. There's evidence that literacy was not uncommon among knights and barons, even from the 11th century, though there would also have been a broader range of competencies than we're accustomed to think of.) *I'm thinking of something like the Stonyhurst Gospel, an 8th-century gospel book that contains the Gospel of John in 188 pages. It's in a very small format, but with a larger format you'd be more likely to include more than one gospel.

Thanks!

Yep, I'd probably go with Ambrosius refurbishing it. I wish there were more clues as to who Renn might have been, though. The closest name I can think of is Brennius.

KAP 5.2 says Ambrosius "built these massive earthworks as a part of a defense system against the Saxons to the east." The Dike appears to have been renamed Renn's Dyke in BoW and BoU. Maybe Stafford did have a new origin in mind?