Tell Me About Your Oldest Knights!

[mj6373]

Just as a fun goofy question to get people talking about their campaigns, who are the oldest/longest-lived PKs you've had? And how badass were they? Do you think the accrual of experience over time overshot the loss to their Attributes compared to their youthful counterparts, or vice versa (or was it about equal)? You can mention NPKs as well if you had an unexpected bout of luck keep a recurring one alive/relevant much longer than expected, but it's sort of a given that the major Round Table Knights from the source material have impossibly inflated skills and attributes at either end of the aging curve, so I'm mostly interested in unexpected success for characters under the normal rules, and what it looks like.

 

For my one complete run of the GPC, the first generation age of death distribution was pretty lopsided - two of the PKs had died before the Anarchy had even started, not yet 30, while the other two survived til the start and end of the Conquest Period respectively. That last guy was 63, and lemme tell ya, attribute decay was catching up to him pretty hard - his skill was tremendous, but he hadn't been particularly big or strong to begin with and had withered a fair bit, so he was dependent especially on his high Sword (he had the Family Sword from BoK&L, which pushed him into the 30s) to get lots of crits and avoid hits due to how low his damage output and Knockdown threshold were compared to knightly opponents. (Technically he "lived" much longer than 63, but only because he died at the Grail Castle and accepted the resurrection deal, he was still out of the campaign bar a touching reunion with his foster daughter at the conclusion of the Grail Quest.)

 

And don't worry about those players whose first characters died super early, because their heirs turned out to be even more extreme successes in lengthy living. They were both just about Arthur's age, with fathers who died within a year or less of conceiving them, but who got a healthy boost to their circumstances from the nature of those conceptions and deaths.

 

One of them had a half-Faerie daughter and earned quite the posthumous promotion by saving Madoc and killing Gorlois before dying of his injuries, so said daughter had high Attributes (especially CON), passive Glory, and didn't have to start making Aging rolls til nearly the Tournament Period, so she ended up living long enough to be the one to complete the Grail Quest at 66 years old. Between solid Attributes across the board, rareness of major wounds, raking in tons of Glory, and good aging luck, she hadn't needed to spend extra resources keeping her Attributes reasonable yet, so she could instead achieve stupid high pinnacles of skill, more or less only surpassed by Lancelot by the end of her run.

 

The other one had cucked and then killed Octa (and was rewarded for it by being invited to a certain elevated dining position), and the son he had with Octa's wife inherited the Marvelous Family Axe (+8 Protection), plus got the most absurd string of luck with the Attribute rolls in Entourage's squire advancement rules, putting him +4 SIZ and +3 STR over what he'd have had if generated at adulthood. So he had ultra beefy Attributes, did tons of damage to take enemies out quickly, and rarely took damage from anything less than a crit from a knight-tier foe, which, combined with his player judiciously spending several pre-35 Winter phases on Attribute-raising and many more Glory bonuses on it post-35, kept him going all the way to Camlann, where he finally died at a ripe 74 years old. Tough bastard didn't go down without a fight even then, either; I was a little worried he'd end up being the final survivor, but the dice didn't quite come up septuagenarian. Spending all his Glory preserving his Attributes did mean his combat skills never got as high as the other two characters mentioned, though, but he still had Axe in the mid-upper 20s.

[Morien]

43 minutes ago, mj6373 said:

Just as a fun goofy question to get people talking about their campaigns, who are the oldest/longest-lived PKs you've had?

Most of our PKs die in the saddle, as it were, and seldom live past their 40s, as that is when they have enough Glory to catch everyone's attention As The Great Hero Who Really Ought to Be Doing Something About This Big Darn Dragon Over Yonder. Usually ending in either more Glory and even more high-risk quests, or, well, retiring from life.

One dragon-slayer decided that she was getting too old for this stuff, and retired to her manor to rest on her laurels. Since the Player in question stated that he wished to skip to a younger character and let this one live a long retirement, as far as we know, she is still in her manor, sipping her beer and enjoying life with her husband, kids and no doubt grandkids. She is an NPK now, current age 46, but we have not tracked her for some years so who knows how spry she still is?

Another PK got forcibly retired by losing to an opponent who took her as a prisoner. She is still a knight, but has been out of the circulation for a decade and a half, essentially a houseguest with a major noble. Granted, the relationship turned more amicable in a hurry, since he was a good guy, just one who had rather harsh rules for any challengers who lost (you come for the King, you better not miss). We have been updating her from time to time and the age is starting to nibble at her, her damage has fallen to 4d6 (might be even lower now). We were joking that the loss of her SIZ and STR while her APP remained meant that she actually looked more conventionally pretty than she had during her whole career, and while the APP finally dropped a couple of points, she is still pretty spry and healthy at 58.

We have had one PK who actually died from old age at 57, after having been bedridden for a decade or so (low DEX). Naturally, the Player was playing the son. Still, not a bad age, for a veteran of the Anarchy and King Mark's Best Buddy.

There is one Player-Lady who is probably going to outlive everyone else, but she is cheating, as she fell in love with a Faerie Lord and vice versa, opting to forsake her mortal husband (and her child was half-Fae anyway, taking her along to meet her real dad). She is more Fae than human now, occasionally showing up to help her old friends, but with most of them dead, including her foster-son who returned to the real world, she is unlikely to show up again lest the PKs seek her out specifically or an adventure happens to take them to Overthere.

In a previous campaign, there was a Player-Lady born in 516, who lived all the way to the end of the campaign, retaining her APP 20+ to the very end despite the GM pulling some shenanigans (I admit to it). She was rumored to be half-fae (and pretty much confirmed by the Fae they met), but this brought her no system benefit. Still, the Player proceeded to roll over a decade worth of 'no attribute loss' from the Aging table from 35 onwards. So, the GM being a bastard, the events conspired and she traded her unaging/long life to Morgan Le Fay in return for the safe return of her lover and liege lord, Earl Agravaine. The game effect was that she would always potentially lose at least one extra stat each year, but wouldn't you know, she continued rolling 6's in the attribute loss table from time to time, too, and used her Glory Bonus Points for the rest as needed. Thanks to her age, she went from 'annoying little sister' to the (Honorary) Aunt (or even Great-Aunt) of most of the PKs in the party, and the Countess-in-all-but-name in Salisbury, and the feud between her and Guenever brought about the fall of the Round Table. After Camlann, she sided with Mordred's sons (Good Orkney Boys) against Constantine the Lying Usurper, but alas, she was captured in the final battle and burned as a witch by the vindictive Constantine, when she refused to bend the knee to him and publicly lie that Arthur had named him as the heir (he hadn't, in our campaign)... Her children with Agravaine survived, though, marrying into the noble families of Britain, mainly in the North out of Constantine's reach.

 

Edited July 14 by Morien