Winter Phase Summary PDF (in progress)

[Sir Mad Munkee]

NOTE: there are now 2 versions of the Winter Phase Summary sheet:

Plain vanilla KAP 5.2 childbirth
Improved Morien & Thijs childbirth

 

 

I'm GMing my new campaign's first Winter Phase tomorrow, and wanted a one-sheet with all the relevant stuff to do, collecting all the bits and bobs from BoEstate, Bo Entourage, etc. I'm hoping others might also find it useful.

Having said that, I'm almost certain I missed something, for the same reason I wanted this: there are far too many rules expansions, options and exceptions in too many different books.

Here it is, have a look, enjoy, and throw your feedback in! 👍

https://www.dropbox.com/s/aijzh8d54h9zcjw/WinterPhasev02.pdf?dl=0

Edited March 16, 2019 by Sir Mad Munkee

[7dot62mm]

Neat and really nicely laid out!

You could add some of these things if you feel they'd add value:

* Page references to where to find the various solos in the Pendragon rulebook

* In section 2 is there a rule saying the equivalent of "A die roll of 20 always results in a one-point increase in the score, even if currently 20 or greater." ... or is it just our house rule?

* In section 5 is there a rule stating the equivalent of "All horses suffer a –1 modifier for each year of the horse’s age beyond 7 years" ... or is this another house rule of ours?

* You could add family events, i.e. sister marries.

* In section 7 I think you should add "Traits cannot be increased over 19. Passions cannot be increased over 20. No statistics can be raised higher than its maximum cultural value, which is usually 15, 18, or 21. SIZ may not be increased after age 21 and no statistics may be increased after he reaches age 35."

In section 7 maybe: " For NPC squires roll 1d6 and add the points to any of the squire's skills desired, to a maximum of 15."

For player squires "Roll 1d6 for SIZ and 1d6 for STR at each Winter Phase. Result: 1-3) no growth, 4-6) 1 point of growth. The squire also receives additional training from his knight, which is represented by 5 additional skill points that the player may distribute to the squire’s skills. In addition he receives the normal Winter Phase choices same as knights.

* In section 8 add conspicuous consumption.

* Section 3 add 1 to age of squire, if he becomes 21 years old escalate the matter to the GM

* Followers Experience (Book of Entourage): "Each Winter Phase, during Step 2: Experience rolls, after finishing the rolls for your knight, all Followers also try to improve. All Key Skills and Passions Skills for Followers have a chance to progress. First, raise their Age stat by one year. Second, attempt to raise all their skills and passions. The amount and method depends on the ability’s current value:
15 or less: +1 point per year up to 15
16-20: roll 1d6: 1-5 = nothing, 6 = +1 point, up to 20
20+: roll 1d20: 01-19 = no gain, 20 = +1 point.

* If your character is or holds an office with a Baron or higher noble, decide on his future attitude towards graft and corruption, as explained in BoW p. 51. Decide what types of Graft the officer will attempt to partake in during the year to come and write it down.

[Sir Mad Munkee]

32 minutes ago, 7dot62mm said:

You could add some of these things if you feel they'd add value:

* Page references to where to find the various solos in the Pendragon rulebook

* Followers Experience (Book of Entourage): "Each Winter Phase, during Step 2: Experience rolls, after finishing the rolls for your knight, all Followers also try to improve. All Key Skills and Passions Skills for Followers have a chance to progress. First, raise their Age stat by one year. Second, attempt to raise all their skills and passions. The amount and method depends on the ability’s current value:
15 or less: +1 point per year up to 15
16-20: roll 1d6: 1-5 = nothing, 6 = +1 point, up to 20
20+: roll 1d20: 01-19 = no gain, 20 = +1 point.

Have another look. That's all in there. I re-worded the improvement stuff (under section 6, Household Member Improvement) you quoted to fit it in, but it's the same in meaning. Is the wording confusing?

36 minutes ago, 7dot62mm said:

* In section 2 is there a rule saying the equivalent of "A die roll of 20 always results in a one-point increase in the score, even if currently 20 or greater." ... or is it just our house rule?

That's straight up BoEntourage, page 10, and exactly what you quoted above, isn't it? "20+: roll 1d20: 01-19 = no gain, 20 = +1 point."

43 minutes ago, 7dot62mm said:

* In section 7 maybe: " For NPC squires roll 1d6 and add the points to any of the squire's skills desired, to a maximum of 15."

Hrm, where's this from? BoEntourage pg. 10 just describes advancement as it is on this sheet and discussed above. Wouldn't need both, would you?

37 minutes ago, 7dot62mm said:

* In section 7 I think you should add "Traits cannot be increased over 19. Passions cannot be increased over 20. No statistics can be raised higher than its maximum cultural value, which is usually 15, 18, or 21. SIZ may not be increased after age 21 and no statistics may be increased after he reaches age 35."

* Section 3 add 1 to age of squire, if he becomes 21 years old escalate the matter to the GM

* In section 8 add conspicuous consumption.

* In section 5 is there a rule stating the equivalent of "All horses suffer a –1 modifier for each year of the horse’s age beyond 7 years" ... or is this another house rule of ours?

Good ideas. 👍I've added them, so reload it and have a look (same link).

As for family events and some more complicated things, I've either included "with the GM" or referenced a page, where the content would've been too complicated to get into on a one-pager. And anything from BoWarlord I've left out for now, since I haven't read it in detail yet.

 

[Atgxtg]

NICE!

[Sir Mad Munkee]

Just now, Atgxtg said:

NICE!

 Gramercy!

[Atgxtg]

3 minutes ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

 Gramercy!

I'm working on a GM screen, not really for play, but to be a quick reference for the tables and reference  that get used a lot, like the Winter Phase. You managed to condense all this stuff down to one page! Saved me a lot of work. I just have to shoehorn it to fit my screen size. 

[Morien]

Childbirth modifiers or the childbirth table is wrong. Where did you get this?

 

I don't see the PK squire stuff that was mentioned earlier, but that is good; those rules should be used for PK squires, not for follower squires.

[Sir Mad Munkee]

14 minutes ago, Morien said:

Childbirth modifiers or the childbirth table is wrong. Where did you get this?

Hmm, I know I started originally with a sheet someone else had done. Maybe those were his house rules. I'll flip through the relevant books and correct it. Thanks.

14 minutes ago, Morien said:

I don't see the PK squire stuff that was mentioned earlier, but that is good; those rules should be used for PK squires, not for follower squires.

Yeah, there are all sorts of imaginable rules and modifiers, but I was going for a "so y'wanna play a knight?" kind of game, and ignoring any other variations. Wanted to keep it all on one page, after all.

[Sir Mad Munkee]

20 minutes ago, Morien said:

Childbirth modifiers or the childbirth table is wrong. Where did you get this?

On a quick look, I'm finding "-5 if Poor, +1 if Rich, +5 if Superlative" in KAP 5.2. Do you know of any other relevant modifiers in other books?

[Morien]

If you go by the KAP 5.2 Childbirth table, then no.

The modifiers you had earlier were the suggested variant childbirth modifiers ( http://nocturnalmediaforum.com/iecarus/forum/showthread.php?2155-New-Childbirth-Table-amp-Blessed-Birth&p=18243&viewfull=1#post18243 ), worked by me and Thijs on the Nocturnal Forum. But they should be used for the rules for Conception and Birth being separate rolls (& tables), not with the KAP 5.2 childbirth table (which, as an aside, I find murderous for the women  and very displeasing).

 

[Atgxtg]

56 minutes ago, Morien said:

not with the KAP 5.2 childbirth table (which, as an aside, I find murderous for the women  and very displeasing).

That's an understatement. 

I've found it to be the biggest glory and land  inflation problem the game: Knight get married, gets more  glory, more libra and and possibly another manor, wife dies in a few years, knight remarries and repeats the process. Carry that though two or three of generation and everybody ends up as legendary knights  with massive estates. 

I always thought the simple fix for this was to give the wife a CON roll to survive, and if she does it is treated as if she recovered from a Mortal Wound, which will possibly lower her CON for the next time. 

[Sir Mad Munkee]

Thanks to @Morien's clarification, here's a new version which (I think) covers Morien & Thijs' great childbirth suggestions. I quite like 'em! 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xo1lmatjx0ia5ix/WinterPhasev03.pdf?dl=0

 

Edited March 15, 2019 by Sir Mad Munkee

[Morien]

14 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

That's an understatement. 

I know. I just tried to not distract people with full invective.

14 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I've found it to be the biggest glory and land  inflation problem the game: Knight get married, gets more  glory, more libra and and possibly another manor, wife dies in a few years, knight remarries and repeats the process. Carry that though two or three of generation and everybody ends up as legendary knights  with massive estates.  

Not only that, but it very very much undervalues the Wives. After all, if they are likely to drop dead in a few years, there is much less incentive to actually caring about them as people. Or even worse, you put in the time to court them, and then they die on you like mayflies. For instance, there was one NPC lady whom the PK pursued, and wouldn't you know that she dropped dead like a couple of years into the marriage. All that half a dozen years of flirting and courting, gone.

In addition, given the murderous child survival rules (fortunately, THOSE got fixed in Book of the Estate), you were looking at only 1 in 4 children surviving to adulthood, on ordinary. This meant that your wife was likely to give you two children before she died, and of those two children, one, MAYBE, would survive to adulthood. So in the end, you had something like 25% chance of a living adult son from that marriage to carry on the family legacy. Not a good thing, dynastically.

With the new childbirth rules Thijs and I came up with, the chance of death in childbirth is much rarer now, and hence more of a tragedy when it does happen, rather than 'oh, goodie, I can get the marriage Glory again'...

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Morien said:

I know. I just tried to not distract people with full invective.

In this case it might be worth it. This is a problem but is rather subtle and can slip under the radar and really ruin a good campaign with escalation. The esasies way to get golory and land shouldn't be the childbirth table. 

2 hours ago, Morien said:

Not only that, but it very very much undervalues the Wives. After all, if they are likely to drop dead in a few years, there is much less incentive to actually caring about them as people. Or even worse, you put in the time to court them, and then they die on you like mayflies. For instance, there was one NPC lady whom the PK pursued, and wouldn't you know that she dropped dead like a couple of years into the marriage. All that half a dozen years of flirting and courting, gone.

Yup. I had an adventure where the PKs (who were in exile at the time) were working to protect a princess and regain her kingdom (think Pennath, not king) from the treacherous vassal knight who had slain her father and usurped the land. Needless to say the PK all generated an Amor for the lady, and they went off to try and defeat the baddie. 

 

It turned into one an all-nighter of the most memorable adventures we played, with players still talking about it over 25 years later. The PKs, plus Mordred (that's another story) manged to sneak into the castle, lower/ruin the portcullis, and then assault the keep. One PK in particular got on a hot streak and not only was critically inspired by his Amor passion, but started rolling phenomenally as well, and went though the opposition like it was paper. Usually without even noticing. There were two headless dead type things starting guard at the main entrance, in full armor, and he went up, split his attack still, criticalled them both and went inside without even realizing they were just normal footmen. Everyone else had a hard time just keeping up with him. He pretty much turned a suicidal assault into a victory. . He won the day, killed the usurping knight and won the hand of the princess. 

It all became rather anticlimactic when she died in childbirth. 

2 hours ago, Morien said:

In addition, given the murderous child survival rules (fortunately, THOSE got fixed in Book of the Estate), you were looking at only 1 in 4 children surviving to adulthood, on ordinary. This meant that your wife was likely to give you two children before she died, and of those two children, one, MAYBE, would survive to adulthood. So in the end, you had something like 25% chance of a living adult son from that marriage to carry on the family legacy. Not a good thing, dynastically.

With the new childbirth rules Thijs and I came up with, the chance of death in childbirth is much rarer now, and hence more of a tragedy when it does happen, rather than 'oh, goodie, I can get the marriage Glory again'...

Yup. While the mortality rates in the middle ages were high, they weren't that high. Perhaps the only RPG where a player character had a higher character of survival adventuring than his wife and kidded did "safe" at home. I'll probably incorporate the new childbirth rules next week. One of my PKs pursued and won a faerie wife (getting the Griffon Egg wasn't easy), and no sense putting all that effort to waste. 

[Sir Mad Munkee]

I've put in those childbirth rules, for all the very sensible reasons above. I left out the "blessed bonus" bits, which I love, partly due to space limitations on the one-sheet, but also because I quite like the idea of them being the GM's little secret: a player rolls a blessed birth, doesn't have to roll survival, and forgets about the kid until he becomes PK age, then the GM says "by the way, you were a blessed birth, remember? Gimme a d6 roll..."

Now I've got 2 versions of the Winter Phase Summary sheet:

Plain vanilla KAP 5.2 childbirth
Improved Morien & Thijs childbirth

Enjoy!

[Atgxtg]

13 hours ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

I've put in those childbirth rules, for all the very sensible reasons above. I left out the "blessed bonus" bits, which I love, partly due to space limitations on the one-sheet, but also because I quite like the idea of them being the GM's little secret: a player rolls a blessed birth, doesn't have to roll survival, and forgets about the kid until he becomes PK age, then the GM says "by the way, you were a blessed birth, remember? Gimme a d6 roll..."

If you really want to have fun with it. Make them roll child survival each year and if they fail the roll, then say, "Oh, that's right, you were blessed. You live."

13 hours ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

Now I've got 2 versions of the Winter Phase Summary sheet:

Plain vanilla KAP 5.2 childbirth
Improved Morien & Thijs childbirth

Enjoy!

Decisions, decision....

[Sir Mad Munkee]

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

If you really want to have fun with it. Make them roll child survival each year and if they fail the roll, then say, "Oh, that's right, you were blessed. You live."

😆

[Cornelius]

On 3/16/2019 at 2:41 PM, Sir Mad Munkee said:

I've put in those childbirth rules, for all the very sensible reasons above. I left out the "blessed bonus" bits, which I love, partly due to space limitations on the one-sheet, but also because I quite like the idea of them being the GM's little secret: a player rolls a blessed birth, doesn't have to roll survival, and forgets about the kid until he becomes PK age, then the GM says "by the way, you were a blessed birth, remember? Gimme a d6 roll..."

Now I've got 2 versions of the Winter Phase Summary sheet:

Plain vanilla KAP 5.2 childbirth
Improved Morien & Thijs childbirth

Enjoy!

Maybe something for another discussion, but I just noticed that a knight already gets a +1 and has a 1 in 20 chance of getting an heiress. I assume you used a published table here, but I still feel that this is way to easy. I would not have heiresses in a random table. These should need real roleplay to get and some action by the PK to gain.

[Atgxtg]

16 minutes ago, Cornelius said:

Maybe something for another discussion, but I just noticed that a knight already gets a +1 and has a 1 in 20 chance of getting an heiress. I assume you used a published table here, but I still feel that this is way to easy. I would not have heiresses in a random table. These should need real roleplay to get and some action by the PK to gain.

I think your missing the fact that the land is the "Widow's Portion"

That's land that the Wife gets to maintain herself that reverts back to her former husband's heirs upon her death. The actual holding is probably three times that, too. 

So a Knight who gets the "21: Widow of a rich vassal knight. Dowry: £6d6 treasure.2 Widow's Portion: £1d6+7 land (see p. 18)." result only has that land for the life of his wife, and can't pass it on. That actually works out to the wife maintaining herself on a portion of an a holding with a total income of around £24-39, with the other £16-26 going to the heris of her former husband upon maturity and the remain portion going to them upon her death. 

You need to get the 25+ results to bag a heiress, and then hope she doesn't have any sisters to divide the land among.

 

So it still can happen on the table, but it's pretty rare, and it probably harder to achieve randomly that by roleplaying it, since when you RP it you know what you are going to get out of the match before you go into it. 

Edited March 17, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Cornelius]

On 3/17/2019 at 5:25 PM, Atgxtg said:

I think your missing the fact that the land is the "Widow's Portion"

That's land that the Wife gets to maintain herself that reverts back to her former husband's heirs upon her death. The actual holding is probably three times that, too. 

So a Knight who gets the "21: Widow of a rich vassal knight. Dowry: £6d6 treasure.2 Widow's Portion: £1d6+7 land (see p. 18)." result only has that land for the life of his wife, and can't pass it on. That actually works out to the wife maintaining herself on a portion of an a holding with a total income of around £24-39, with the other £16-26 going to the heris of her former husband upon maturity and the remain portion going to them upon her death. 

You need to get the 25+ results to bag a heiress, and then hope she doesn't have any sisters to divide the land among.

 

So it still can happen on the table, but it's pretty rare, and it probably harder to achieve randomly that by roleplaying it, since when you RP it you know what you are going to get out of the match before you go into it. 

Unfortunately that is not what it says in the sheet. there it says:

21-25Heiress of vassal knight1 manor, 1d6+10

[Sir Mad Munkee]

3 hours ago, Cornelius said:

Unfortunately that is not what it says in the sheet. there it says:

21-25Heiress of vassal knight1 manor, 1d6+10

Yeah, the sheet’s intended as a summary, not a complete explanation. I haven’t attempted to include things that explained in detail elsewhere. That’d be a 10-sheet, not a one-sheet.

[Atgxtg]

8 minutes ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

Yeah, the sheet’s intended as a summary, not a complete explanation. I haven’t attempted to include things that explained in detail elsewhere. That’d be a 10-sheet, not a one-sheet.

3 hours ago, Cornelius said:

Unfortunately that is not what it says in the sheet. there it says:

21-25Heiress of vassal knight1 manor, 1d6+10

Ah, that's because it's the table from the core rulebook and not the updated one from The Book of the Entourage. They toned things down considerably and got rid of the "breed you way to more land" problem than existed.  In that case:

 

On 3/17/2019 at 12:12 PM, Cornelius said:

Maybe something for another discussion, but I just noticed that a knight already gets a +1 and has a 1 in 20 chance of getting an heiress. I assume you used a published table here, but I still feel that this is way to easy. I would not have heiresses in a random table. These should need real roleplay to get and some action by the PK to gain.

Yes, and the problem has already been addressed in the Book of the Entourage. Heiress with land, especially enough to  support a knight and his family., are somewhat harder to obtain. PKs would be better off trying to roleplay for someone and get a sure thing.  

Edited March 22, 2019 by Atgxtg

[Sir Mad Munkee]

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Ah, that's because it's the table from the core rulebook and not the updated one from The Book of the Entourage. They toned things down considerably and got rid of the "breed you way to more land" problem than existed.

Yup, basically the same problem: the BoEntourage table is definitely better, but also massive. One-sheet, meet two-sheet. That's why I put in the BoEntourage page reference.

[Atgxtg]

50 minutes ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

Yup, basically the same problem: the BoEntourage table is definitely better, but also massive. One-sheet, meet two-sheet. That's why I put in the BoEntourage page reference.

No problem. This is the kinda thing that happens when a game has three different versions of something. But as far as Cornelius' initial point goes, he's right. That why they toned it down some. In previous campaigns my PKs would accumulate large estates by inadvertently killing their wives through childbirth, and then remarry an heiress with a manor. With a little luck (back luck for the wives good luck on the marriage table) a PK can get a half dozen manors to pass on to his heirs. Even without much luck snagging another manor wasn't all that uncommon. 

[Sir Mad Munkee]

Apart from the income escalation, I’d be strongly inclined to not handout heiresses (tables be damned), more for the story implications than anything else. I like the idea of Roderick or Arthur giving a player a 2nd manor for some truly spectacular awesomeness, or a PK chasing a wealthy heiress for 5 years with some intense RP before snagging her. Just “oh, good roll, your income just quadrupled” is a bit weak.

Edited March 22, 2019 by Sir Mad Munkee