Ignore this entire section.
It is badly presented and doesn't xcome close to what I had intended it to be and say.

Which section? What part exactly? Under which header? :)

Which section? What part exactly? Under which header? :)


p.32, under Army. And later p. 51-52, under Your Living Family. You are welcome. :)

I can understand this, especially regarding the levy (whose entity is clearly more linked to landholdings and what is not in Book of the Warlord and Book of the Estate).
Nevertheless, I think it is a pity to ignore the dice rolls about relative knights in your family, since we do not have other tables for such things about the starting family.

There are many good reasons to ignore the whole section about family knights and the army (family knights, kinsmen & levy), but it doesn't mean that you should ignore the whole extended family.

However, by removing those family knights, you elevate the PK as the only knight in the family. This makes him much more special. Also, you make GMing so much easier when each PK can't call upon half a dozen family knights and form big armies of knights each time they need some muscle.

Those kinsmen should be gone, too. If you have 3d6+5 them running around, that is at least second cousins, perhaps even further, and it becomes a true pain to follow them up.

That being said, you can easily roll 1d6 for your parents' siblings, as stated in p. 52 (KAP 5.1), Other Family Members. I'd use 1d6-1, to give a chance of a parent being the only child. However, I dislike the official family history that has the PK's father marrying an heiress, rather than inheriting the family manor from his father. Since it means that there CANNOT be any legitimate brothers and sisters from the mother's side, or she wouldn't be the single heiress anymore. Also, it causes some issues about keeping the manor in the family. I might post about this more later.

You can then continue to roll to see if the uncles and aunts were ever married (about 50% chance), and if they were, maybe roll 1d6-1 again to see how many children they had? And these would be the cousins, who might be very useful as future squires your PK might have (or get his other PK friends to take on) and to sponsor into family knights and household knights, or take on as stewards. This is much more interesting (to me at least) than having 6 family knights sitting in a cupboard waiting until I remember about them.

1d6-1 for aunts and uncles results in about 3 from father's and 3 from mother's side (assuming she is not an heiress, or if these are from the grandma's second marriage or something), and since 50% of them never married, this leaves 3 rolls for cousins, on average. So you are probably going to end up with like 8 cousins, half of whom are female, so 4 male cousins. This is a small enough number that you can actually influence what will happen to them, rather than treating the whole family as one big amorphous mass of Nth cousins. And now, by sponsoring even ONE of them to knighthood, you have doubled the number of family knights in the family! How cool is that? :)

I'd keep track of those knighted branches at least to the 2nd cousins, so that your son gets the benefit from it, too. Of course, it is even better to get your PK's younger brothers knighted, since they are your spare characters until your PK's son is of age. Which is also why I heartily recommend giving each PK a couple of younger brothers to ensure that there are those spare characters to fall back on, if the primary PK manages to get himself killed. Especially if you pace them out, say, 7 year intervals, you will in principle be putting one of them out as a squire as your main character becomes a knight, and a second one becomes a squire when the first one graduates. And hopefully, the main PK's son is soon to become a squire as the second brother becomes a knight. Just something to keep in mind when you are starting a new campaign.