Taming a Griffon

[Adaras]

Hi everyone.

I was sitting and reading in the core book and got thinking, is it possible to tame and ride a Griffon or Hippogriff into battle? I imagine youd need to have them from eggs to rear them properly! As far as I could read the Griffons have a deep hatred to humans. 

Could any of you maybe give me some ideas and inspiration to the various challenges and obstacles you might face trying such an endevour  

[Leingod]

1 hour ago, Adaras said:

Hi everyone.

I was sitting and reading in the core book and got thinking, is it possible to tame and ride a Griffon or Hippogriff into battle? I imagine youd need to have them from eggs to rear them properly! As far as I could read the Griffons have a deep hatred to humans. 

Could any of you maybe give me some ideas and inspiration to the various challenges and obstacles you might face trying such an endevour  

There are rules and a ready-made adventure for bonding with hippogriffs in The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories.

[Adaras]

Ooooh? Gotta check that one out thanks Leingod  

[Leingod]

10 minutes ago, Adaras said:

Ooooh? Gotta check that one out thanks Leingod  

Of course, that's for Runequest, so a different system, but built along the same lines enough that you can move it over here just fine. 😉 You just have to use Passions in place of Rune Affinities.

The basic system is that the hippogriff has a personality of its own; it has its own passions and ideals, and it won't bond easily with a knight who doesn't share those things in common. Give each hippogriff three Passions, and two ideals that the PK can appeal to when trying to convince it (see below).

If you have a high affinity (let's say, 15+ in one or more Passions the hippogriff prizes, like Energetic, or Indulgent, etc., and no strong opposing Passions), then the bond is a "match." You don't need to roll for it, you just do something to show that matching affinity.

If you don't have either matches or oppositions, or if you have both, the bond initiates "with disparity," and you have to make a roll for it using some appropriate skill, and you get a bonus if you appeal the hippogriff's ideals (like, say your hippogriff prizes its freedom; you can use an Orate roll to try to promise it you won't try to bind it or steal its freedom, for example).

And if you don't have a match and you do have an opposing Passion, the hippogriff refuses to bond, and you can only forcibly break the hippogriff with a successful Horsemanship roll (likely quite a high one). Noble creatures that hippogriffs are, this is an act that gains Glory of a negative sort and likely loses a point of Honor to boot. In addition, any other hippogriffs are likely to consider the knight an enemy.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Leingod

[Adaras]

I guess a Griffon would be the same with probably some more "evil" passions? probably also harder to bond with.

[Leingod]

1 minute ago, Adaras said:

I guess a Griffon would be the same with probably some more "evil" passions? probably also harder to bond with.

Well, not necessarily. In the above, another point to consider is that older hippogriffs aren't as easy to bond with, as they're more set in their ways, thus they can only bond "with disparity." You might transplant that over to griffins and have it that they can be bonded with, you just need to get them very young, so there can be an adventure to acquire eggs or chicks (cubs?) if the PKs really want their griffin mounts.

Of course, the problem then arises that it's more than a little unfair for a knight to be attacking his enemies from the air. You could rule that it's fine for monsters like dragons and giants, but at least against other knights fighting from griffin-back probably suffer penalties much like using bows would, if not more so.

[Adaras]

Yeah there is also the problem with attacking people from the air in a battle that is called "oh hi every archer on the entire battlefield yes I am a nice target aint I"

[Tizun Thane]

To be honest, I am not sure about the idea itself. It sounds a little too much high fantasy for KAP. A little too much D&D to my taste.

IMHO, the KAP Campaign should be grounded in reality. Not full of knights riding griffons to battle like in Warhammer Battle. Maybe it's juste me.

[Morien]

21 minutes ago, Tizun Thane said:

To be honest, I am not sure about the idea itself. It sounds a little too much high fantasy for KAP. A little too much D&D to my taste.

IMHO, the KAP Campaign should be grounded in reality. Not full of knights riding griffons to battle like in Warhammer Battle. Maybe it's juste me.

It is not just you. That being said, a hippogriff-riding knight does appear in Orlando Furioso, so at least in Paladin, those things are around...

Anyway, another thing to keep in mind is that griffons definitely and probably also hippogriffs are meat-eaters. Feeding them will cost literal TONS of meat per year. An adult male lion eats about 16 pounds of meat per day. I'd imagine these things would eat even more: flying takes a lot of calories! So if we double that, it is 32 pounds per day, times 365 days, is almost 12000 pounds of meat per year. And that is assuming that doubling the meat intake was enough.

(Quick check: a 10lbs house cat eats about 0.375 pounds of food per day. An eagle is approximately the same weight as a cat, and eats between 0.5 - 1 pounds of meat per day on average, so yeah, doubling the meat intake sounds about right.)

If the griffon is fussy and wants horsemeat, 12000 pounds of meat on hoof is probably somewhere around 18-24 sumpters, or roughly £10 - £12 maintenance, per year. Not to mention that it might consider the horses around it as fair game, too, which would not endear the Griffon Knight to his friends and neighbors. If the griffon can be fed with lesser animals, then the cost would likely be maybe half of that, perhaps even as low as £4, which is still over three times what the charger eats.

[Adaras]

Well I wouldnt say it should be something like a normal thing but like a product of an epic quest. 

But yeah its not meant to be an easy to manage or obtain that would be silly thing if it was something that you could make like a cavalry unit of griffon riders.

[Atgxtg]

I had a player who wanted to try this, but it was slightly more practical in their case.

Early on the original PKs had to get a griffon egg in order to complete a quest (one PK wanted to marry a faerie and her father set some conditions, including the grffon egg, and a golden bridle that tamed any beast it was placed upon-that I subconsciously plagiarized from the Myth of Bellophon), and fought a pair of griffons to do so. After the adventure the PK decided to form the knightly Order of the Griffon, and made retrieving a griffon or griffon egg a requirement for membership.

So, some year later, the sons of the original PKs were on an adventure and came back with a couple of griffon eggs, which hatched in baby griffons. The knights gave one away to Count Salisbury, but kept the other one, with one PK hoping to train it as a mount. 

 

I used the menagerie rules from the Book of the Manor (one of the few bits that didn't make it to the Book of the Estate) making it a very expensive pet, and I have some horse training rules that could have been adapted to the griffon - I figured it would be more stubborn and harder to train than a horse, but it never came to be. 

In general I agree that a PK riding a griffon is probably too high fantasy to fit Pendragon. It's okay as a one off for an adventure, and might work for a PK during the time of great enchantment, but otherwise feels too D&D-ish.

 

BTW, my intent was to foreshadow the Adventure of the Knight of the Griffon, from the GPC, and I wonder if my players will put it all together when it happens. 

 

 

 

Edited September 23, 2020 by Atgxtg

[Tizun Thane]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

BTW, my itnet was to foreshadow the Adventure of the Knight of the Griffon, from the GPC, and I wonder if my players will put it all together when it happens. 

Good Idea!

4 hours ago, Adaras said:

Well I wouldnt say it should be something like a normal thing but like a product of an epic quest. 

Yes, of course. I can imagine some game when suddenly, it became a possibility

[Atgxtg]

The danger of course is that of making something exotic become mundane. Stuff like magic, epic quests, and even high stats are good in large part because of their rarity. Once they become commonplace they loose their impact. As I used to tell my players, "if everybody has an 18 Strength, then nobody does."

Edited September 23, 2020 by Atgxtg

[Voord 99]

I think I would probably reverse it, so that it wasn’t the product of an epic quest, but a means to complete one.   In an otherworldly/off-the-map/faerie context, obviously.  One can, and very possibly has to, tame/befriend the hippogriff to fly up the impossibly tall mountain or whatever, but the knight can’t take the fantastical creature back into the (relatively) normal world when they’re done.  They might meet the hippogriff again next time they’re in the right sort of context, though.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Voord 99