Call Me Deacon Blues

Which Lady of the Lake is killed by Balin? And gave Arthur Excalibur? Is it one of them, or the other Lady, Nineve? Is she even in the GPC? I can't remember 

From what they've shown of the game, there's very little difference... Passions have been reworked somewhat, some of the skills are slightly different, between the quick start guide and the 5th edition books you should be able to figure most of it out pretty easily. 

I can probably take one later, but also you can just go to roll20 and create a game to see the sheet. It's not bad. I would have preferred more space for family and retinue members, so I don't have to make seperate sheets for all of them.

Right, pretty sure skills are capped at 15 at creation, barring a couple of exceptions.

And I'd assume the core book will be out soon after the starter set, one of the reasons for the delay was to get the starter set going first and get them both out around the same time. Course, they haven't put an official date yet, but I'd be surprised if we didn't at least have an announcement by Gencon, if not the actual core books present there

As to which books will be superseded, it also bears mentioning that the Book of Feasts will likely be unnecessary, or at least less necessary, since the feast rules will be in the core book (or possibly GM's book). I would assume they will use a rollable table fro feast events instead of the cards, though, so maybe it would be worth it to pick it up for them.

Book of Sires would still be useful, as far as I'm aware, and it's my favorite Pendragon book out there, so it might still be worth it. Might need to adjust the bonus Passions and things a little bit, to match 6th edition, but otherwise should be fine.

Someone mentioned in the Discord that David Larkins was planning on updating the adventure The Grey Knight, and of course the ones from the GPC are being updated, but otherwise, any older adventures might be useful if you want to run them. There's very little difference between editions, though for the older ones, you might want to buff up any NPCs in it a bit. 

At least the original plan, back when Knights and Ladies Adventurous was going to be published under 5th edition instead of 6th, was to leave an Continental cultures out of it. Some things they've stated implied that might no longer be the case, in an interview Larkins mentioned having a total number of cultures that at least matches the number appearing in BoKaL, and there are a couple 6th edition sample characters with foreign cultures, but I'm not sure. The main difference they said back then was that they were removing any Cultural Skills and replacing them with bonuses to the component skills instead, so for instance, instead of Cymric knights getting Spear Expertise (a combination of Spear, Great Spear, and Lance), they get, like, a +3 bonus to the Spear skill (which now works for all polearms anyway), and the Lance skill has been changed to the Charge skill, which all knight characters get at a high base level from the jump.

On 3/29/2023 at 12:37 PM, Robin "RoM" Mitra said:

Many thanks again. I still wonder why some skills are so low in the first place. In other systems 25% chance of success is often the default, when a character has never used that skill before. But I will take your advice and give it a try. After all that's why I am playing Pendragon to try something new (for me at least).

 

Interesting. I wonder how my players will like that tomorrow. Looking forward to it. 🙂

So, I dunno if the quickstart mentions it, but in general, success at a Courtly skill grants 10 Glory. In most situations, knights aren't really expected to be impressive dancers or super well-mannered, a failure just means you're living up to the (low) expectations people had of you. Whereas a success means that you actually impress people.

There are exceptions to anything, of course, but in general, in this system, success = something good happens, failure = nothing happens, crit = something great happens, and fumble = something bad happens. And if it's an opposed roll (of which many rolls are), there's also the partial success, which = something okay happens (the main example of this is getting to defend yourself with your shield/parry value).

It might seem weird at first that tons of skills are very low... but that makes it all the more sweet when you succeed and get some glory. And, though this is technically a GM thing and not explicitly written into the game, I give out checks for low skills (10 or less) on any success, and checks for high skills only on a crit. I'm not sure if they explain experience checks in the quick start, actually, but it's one of the ways to advance your character.

And, finally, every knight will generally have a few things they specialize in. Every knight should be somewhat good at fighting, and horsemanship, and a couple of things they're all kind of okay at, like hunting and first aid, and then beyond that, you probably only get 1 or 2 skills to be really good, from the start. It's showing this is where the character puts their focus, and the rest are just a default value decided by their culture and their stats (since the default values of Courtly Skills and Combat skills are determined by your APP and DEX, respectively).

I'm curious if you went ahead and played and how that went, feel free to share here, or in the discord

7 hours ago, Morien said:

My take:

Historically, dual-wielding weapons wasn't really a common thing in the battlefield. You had your spear/sword and your shield, or later on, a two-handed weapon (usually a polearm or a pollaxe for the English knights in particular). Dual-wielding in the sense of having two weapons was much more common in the civilian context where you wouldn't be carrying around a big shield during your everyday life, but might carry a sword and/or a long knife for self-defense purposes. In those situations, might as well pick up pretty much anything you can use to help you parry the opponent's weapon, but it doesn't mean that you'd be attacking with both windmill style, which is what many of the RPG dual-wielding rules tend to imply (double attacks and so forth). It is much more about being able to parry and control the opponent's weapon with one of your own while you are stabbing/cutting him with your free weapon. So bonuses to parry seem appropriate (similarly to, but worse than, an actual shield), double attacks less so.

Since I've got a player interested in dual wielding, though we're waiting to see if 6th edition has more in-depth rules, I think some pretty fair dual wielding rules would include the bonus to Parry that we already know about, if the weapons are under different skills you have to use the lowest, one a hit you can deal damage from either of your weapons (so, if you're wielding an axe and a mace, you can use the axe on shield-users and the mace on chainmail wearers), and on a crit you get the benefits of both special weapons (in the aforementioned example, if you were fighting an enemy with a shield and mail, you'd get both bonuses). Maybe this will require some kind of penalty to get the attack benefits... -5 seems a bit harsh, -1 seems a bit light, and this game doesn't really do in-between very much. It's still got kinks to work out but I think it's a way to let players who really want to do it that option, without making it better than the baseline, but also not making it so much worse that no one wants to do it. I'm also saying this without seeing the full combat rules of 6th edition, so they may well have rules for this already.

In regards to Parry value of a dagger, on I wanna say the Discord, David Larkins said that when wielding two weapons, you raise the Parry value by like, 1 I think? Something like that. So yeah, while a dagger by itself has no Parry value, wielding sword and dagger together DOES raise the Parry value.

If you wanted to be super literal about it, I'd probably roll Horsemanship against a prone enemy, treat it kind of like an unarmed strike just with the horse's damage.

Though I don't think this exactly needs modeling. Fighting-horses give +5 to attack rolls already models them kicking, biting, and trampling, and plenty of times in battles and such where a PK unhorse their opponent I've described the foe as being trampled under their horse's hooves... both of those examples given mention first striking with a lance, and the other killing with swords, I think that's all we really need.

I'm away from book, but I feel like it mentions if you deal a major wound to an enemy in battle, you get glory equal to their weapon skill instead of their listed Glory value. I do it anyways, and I don't think it's a house rule.

I go with Dame, because it's fun to call someone Dame. Try it sometime, it makes you feel like a PI from an old movie.

I would honestly give checks for all of the first category, except maybe Dagger and Siege. Keep in mind, this is representing the squire learning how to do the basics of being a knight, I'm inclined to be more generous with checks rather than less, especially if they're starting with lower starting skills. Though if they're not starting with lower skills, it might not be an issue.

9 hours ago, Morien said:

Just to point out something... In our campaign, generally the eldest son gets knighted with the Universal Aids, i.e. the peasants pay for the equipment, etc. However, the spare usually needs to wait until the father kicks the bucket and inherits the father's old equipment and gets knighted with those, while the eldest gets the manor. Of course if the father has done well and is still around, he could buy the equipment for the second son, which would leave his own equipment to an even younger son (or to the eldest, to make up for the money that went to the knighting of the second son). Anyway, this often means that the second son needs to cool his heels for a while, maybe working as an esquire in the Liege's court, until dear old dad dies and everyone nudges forward a slot: heir household knight -> vassal knight, spare esquire -> household knight.

Exactly... only the richest of vassals can actually afford the knighting process for their spare and younger sons. Since my players are usually pretty good at getting lots of money, I created costs of knighting packages (the equipment, horses, a small feast, and then round up to the nearest libra to cover any miscellaneous costs) to give to my group since their kids are getting to be the right age. It's on my other computer, and I only did it for Uther/Anarchy right now since that's the period we're in.

See, that's actually not it, but it was the only thing I was able to pull up with a Google search myself lol

I was actually referring to something I read about and now can't freaking find... but it was like a stone inscription saying something to the effect of "the warrior Arthur stood here." Something like that? I remember reading an article that said it predated any actual texts we had. Could be wrong, I love Arthuriana but I'm not too up on my ancient texts

I can't really weigh too much in on this, except that if I remember correctly, the oldest reference to Arthur we've found so far was an inscription on a stone or something, and called him "The warrior Arthur." Which makes me wonder if him even being a king at all was ever historical

I just linked the document to someone looking for info, someone else wrote the thing, just to be clear. And yes, I show up as Sir Deacon on there.

Are you in the Pendragon Discord? Someone in there made a list of all the things said back when Chaosium had their little Zoom convention things a couple months back. SOmeone put it all in one document and David Larkins said it was all correct, I believe.

How I run it, I will subtract 1 from their Passion score, and then compare some of the new lord's famous traits and passions, if they have Traits/Passions in common, it might go up 1, go down if they're opposed, etc.If that makes sense.

3 hours ago, SirUkpyr said:

I *greatly* dislike the idea of the GPC being turned into 4 books - as that increases the buy in price for the campaign quite a bit.

Now seeing it updated - GREAT!

Perhaps 2 books where "Romance+Tourney+Grail+Downfall" being a single book would work, but 4 books would take the price for the GPC at over $100 dollars, and possibly over $150.

So, as I recall, it was 3 volumes, each one covering 2 periods starting with Boy King. Then an un-numbered (presumably 3, but I dunno) number of prequel volumes covering Anarchy, Uther, and Vortigern periods. But I'm not sure the up-front buy-in is as big a problem as you think.. Keep in mind that 6th edition is mostly targeted towards new players, who wouldn't necessarily WANT a huge tome. Keep in mind the original GPC is almost 600 pages long and was like $50 when it was first printed, what, 15 or 20 years ago? Simply selling that exact book would probably cost $60 or $70 today, maybe even more depending. Putting out smaller volumes, running $20-30 or whatever, split up across several months or years, would objectively be more attractive for newer players, maybe they don't NEED the entire campaign because they like the early days or arthur, or prefer just the middle periods or something. Considering how many campaigns fail to make it through multiple periods, it's more info than you'd think. Plus keep in mind that they're adding new material, so my guess is, end-to-end, even cutting out potential duplicate pages, they'll probably clock in at over 600 pages (at least if you count Uther and Anarchy volumes, maybe not without them).

Of course, I'm gonna get all pdfs anyways, most likely. Books are nice, but damn is it convenient, plus they're usually cheaper.

EDIT: To put this another way; I DO own the hardcover for Paladin and it MSRPs for $60, and is only about 450 pages. So we're probably talking $65-$70 minimum for a 1 volume GPC.

Incidentally, I stole the table from Paladin for my Pendragon game, and just treat Promotion as 1 step above their current station, i.e. Esquire to Household knight, to vassal with a gift manor, vassal with a grant manor, banneret with gift estate, banneret with grant estate, baron etc.

20 hours ago, redmoongoddess said:

Pendragon has mentioned the existence of Irish, Pict, and even Saxon cultures having warrior women, not necessarily as an common thing, but still a thing that occurs enough for them to not be in disguise. 

Now, I don't know if any of that was true in the real world...

Yes, they most certainly did. Evidence shows that women warriors date back to around the same time as men as warriors. But specifically referring to these cultures, I do recall that the Romans wrote quite a bit about Celtic warrior women. Now, the Romans were liars, to be clear, they made a lot of stuff up, especially about the cultures they were trying to demonize, I don't know about all the archaeologically evidence we may or may not have, but like... Pendragon takes place in a world where the HRB is an accurate retelling of historical events, I don't think it'd be that weird to take some of the writings from (admittedly well before) the period it takes place at more or less face value. Considering the Cymri as written are a mixture of the actual Celtic culture it's describing and the Normans, I don't think this is all that weird.

I believe David Larkins mentioned more rules for playing Ladies, and I think possibly Lady scenarios, in Knights and Ladies Adventurous. Maybe in his podcast, when they did that Cornwall game. I really only stayed around for character creation lol.

37 minutes ago, weasel fierce said:

I mean, it's no different than the medieval writers adding more Christianity into the original Arthurian tales 🙂 

Now, that's completely different. See, they were reading their modern values into ancient stories which we... shouldn't do? For some reason? 

For the record, I give out checks like candy. I have a slightly higher powered game than some, but it seems fine. I give checks on all crits, most fumbles, impressive successes, succeeding on a skill that doesn't come up a lot, like, say, Religion, etc.