Hi there,

New to KAP. Can someone enlighten me - does the Book of the Estate supersede the Book of the Manor, or does it complement it?

Thanks

Chris

Both kinda ;)

Book of the Manor is a detailed system for managing a manor or smaller properties. It is great for the player knights in your typical campaign. The default property is 6L, it covers 6L-(under 20L).

The Book of the Estate covers those properties granted/gifted from the King (in theory). It can consist of properties from another estate-holder and could even be used to cover manors. An Estate covers properties from 10L-100L. It is more broad and covers a wider range of properties. The BoE is for large property holders up to a couple thousand population. The system is more generic and less detailed than BoM.

Unless you're playing with Bannerlords, I would use BoM. But if you don't want to mess with actual domain management then BoE is better.

(Note that the default manor in BoM has income 6L with a hand-waved "money you don't see such as tithes etc" mechanic. BoE changes the default income to 10L and shows all the money that you previously didn't see. But has less detail for your use of it.)

To Kilgs excellent assessment, I will add that the forthcoming Book of the Warlord will detail the holdings of barons (warlords) — the super-rich, whose holdings can be £150 or more! A different scale, and the last one you're likely to see, since the only thing above the barons is the King, and the game system does not anticipate a scenario where a PK becomes king.

Note, these three levels — manor, estate and baronial estate — all have different priorities and levels of granularity. Warlords will feature less granularity than estate, and have more "big picture" stuff in it. All of the barons in Logres in the Early Phase will be identified, and some of them detailed.


Best,


T.

i really want to know what to do if my players take charge of a town/ or market town or try to expand there home fief to a town. every game i have run someone has tried this. (usually in anarchy) will there be anything i can use for towns in Warlords?

IIRC, you can't really move up to a town. Towns are independent charters held from the king and "ran" by mayors. There's no path from manor to town. You can have a village spring up in your manor, but when you get to towns (Market Towns) they're a completely separate entity.

Greg may correct my if I'm mistaken about this, but it's what I recall.


Best,


T.

i really want to know what to do if my players take charge of a town/ or market town or try to expand there home fief to a town. every game i have run someone has tried this. (usually in anarchy) will there be anything i can use for towns in Warlords?


Depends on what you mean by town... if you're talking something like Warminster/Wilton in Salisbury, then you would generally be a Castellan or Steward. Those can be fiefs (in the basic game) awarded by a noble. For example, Sir Amig is given Tilshead.

Somewhere there is a list of the amount of income a town brings you... but I can't remember where. It might just be on this site. Try searching for Officers or Castellans etc.

i really want to know what to do if my players take charge of a town/ or market town or try to expand there home fief to a town. every game i have run someone has tried this. (usually in anarchy) will there be anything i can use for towns in Warlords?


(First of all, Kilgs already said pretty much what I would have said about BotM and BoE. So not much to add there save that I much prefer BotM myself, as I like the chance to play around with good/bad harvests and the like.)

Like Taliesin said, there is not really a way to do the expansion. However, I would not see a problem with a knight being given a fief of a 'town', which is basically just a village writ large. Real towns having royal charters are different, of course. If I were the GM, I would simply model it as '3xmanor' or something like that. If I were feeling real eager, I might make it '3xmanor, shift results towards the mean by one category' to reflect the fact that most of your income would come from tolls and stuff, which MIGHT not be as variable as the income from your own field, as it is averaged over a larger area. So:
Disastrous -> Bad -> Meager -> Normal <- Good <- Excellent

That being said, BotM does offer quite a lot of scope for the PKs to increase the value of their manor (some might feel too much). In general, the rate of return for the investments is that you make up your initial investment in a few years, if the investment is not destroyed, and after that, profit. Naturally, during the Anarchy this might not be that easy, given all the Saxon raids. But in more peaceful times, one of the PKs has expanded the manor's income from its initial £6/year to (on average) around £12/year. In practice, making it worth as much as two manors. I would also let the PKs, if they are really interested, to try and take advantage of the influx of Iceni refugees when Anglia is established. Especially if they were out there helping some peasant refugees, escorting them back to their lands. In short, allowing them to make new villages, if they have the money for it (I think it was around £10, detailed in BotM).

So yeah, in summary, if you are playing around with individual manors or a few, BotM works really well, and can even model some expansion (after all, a manor with loads of investments in a local center of trade).

My group tried out both rulesets - the one from BoM, and the one from BotE.
We found that the simplified economic model from BotE (income is fixed, bad years affect only the peasantry) worked best for us.

Retrospectively, I think this is due to us playing through one year per session, which always ends in a winter phase. Using the complex economic system of BoM simply took too much time when everyone was already a bit tired, especially when dealing with more than one manor at a time. We also felt that the complex economic system did not benefit the gameplay or our immersion into the game.

Apart from the economic issue, both systems allow for manorial improvements to be built, and that's where the real gameplay value is, since they help you to flesh out your family, improve your character by giving additional checks, and are an investments into future knight generation.

Retrospectively, I think this is due to us playing through one year per session, which always ends in a winter phase. Using the complex economic system of BoM simply took too much time when everyone was already a bit tired, especially when dealing with more than one manor at a time. We also felt that the complex economic system did not benefit the gameplay or our immersion into the game.


Yeah, Your Pendragon May Vary, as Greg is fond of saying. I happen to have some players who enjoy tinkering with their manors so spending a bit more time looking after the manors is not a problem for us. Especially as we tend to play 3 - 5 sessions per year. The Manorial part takes maybe one hour or so, for a group of 5 players. Round it to 15 min / player. But yes, I can see how that would be tiresome if you are doing that every session and it is taking a quarter of the time. Immersion depends of course what you like to play... I admit that as a GM, I like seeing the PKs occasionally stress about money, if they can afford to build a new investment, or if they should hoard the money for a bad harvest, or maybe build a moat to keep the Saxons away... YPMV.

So it is then Safe to BoW won't cover towns. thank you that is what i need to know.

for sake of argument though the PK that came closest had a habit of building hamlets, to the point where by year 6 of anarchy he had 10ish all clustered about his fief.

he wanted to incorporate it into a town and since i didn't have a better option i had the Countess refuse him charter.

is the official line he just can't growth his village into a real town?

Thanks for the replies!

The way that BotE and BotW use towns and cities is that they are part of the lands granted to you and are taken into account in terms of the annual income/value of the land. You don't go around asking permission to build new hamlets/towns/cities from the king or from a baron. This is the sole right of the King. I'm not particularly savvy when it comes to real medieval history, but I suppose that in real life a landholder could ask for permission to develop a land, especially under expansionist circumstances for settlement. But generally speaking, your knight wouldn't go around micromanaging towns and cities. They're basically part of his responsibility as a landholder but his duties are basically to collect taxes (through his officers) and little more. I may be wrong.

As far as personal preferences, I much prefer BotE to BotM, but it's a matter of taste. Notice that BotE is not just for Banneret knights and above, but it also allows you to simulate single manors. You can use both books together or use just one of them. The advantage of using BotE (and the upcoming BotW) is that they give you a unified, simple and highly scalable system that allows to simulate everything from single manors up to counties and dukedoms. You can even easily extrapolate from there and simulate a kingdom if it comes to that. Notice also that BotE and the rest of the series will be the default land management system from now on as far as KAP is concerned.

Hope that helps.

for sake of argument though the PK that came closest had a habit of building hamlets, to the point where by year 6 of anarchy he had 10ish all clustered about his fief.


1. What I'd like to know how in the world did he manage to build 10!!! hamlets in his land during Anarchy! Thos suckers cost money, time and most of all people.

2. That aside, can his lands even support 10 new hamlets or is this counting any old hamlets he may have had, too? (I'd definitely get a bit hesitant about anything over +50% (i.e. 3x£1 hamlets) and definitely would disallow anything above +100% (6x£1 hamlets).

3. Hamlets are agricultural farming collectives. You know, peasants & fields, hence scattered. If he uproots all of those peasants and sticks them into a single spot, they will starve. Historically, towns needed about 10 times the rural population to support the artisans and such with food. So I'd think it is pretty unlikely that there would be more towns in Salisbury. The opportunity is simply not there.

I'd talk to the player and ask what he really wants. He wants to rule a town? Play the politics, get Tilshead or something as your fief. He wants to get more money? Investments. He and the GM feel that building a town would be a cool thing to do? Excellent, sit down and work out rules how that happens. GM doesn't wish to touch that with a 10-foot pole? Drop it like a bundle of pestilent clothes and burn it! Only way to make sure!