Oh from the Rules we know it costs two Librium for a Ordinary Knight to keep his wife, but what of "Advangersom Maidens"? the type who follow around Knights Errant or engage in Diplomacy & Intrigue on behalf of their Families and/or lords? you know Female PC's

now I'm thinking 2 Librium to keep an "Ordinary Lady" a "Companion" and perhaps a "modest" stable (1-3 non-warhorses).

4 Librium for a "Rich Lady" with 2-3 "Companions" and a not so modest stable (up to 6 horses with up to 2 war trained but unlikely to be war ready).

a "Superlative" Lady from 6-12 Librium that would be the Lady, up to 6 companions, perhaps a Retainer Knight (kept as an Ordinary Knight with Squire, but only likely at the high end of expense) and a full stable equal to a Rich Knight (or Superlative Knight at the high end).

What constitutes a "Companion"? this would be a Nurse/Matron, a Maid Servant of Yeoman Stock, a Page, a Man-at-Arms Bodyguard, a Squire or Lady in Waiting. With Bodyguards, Squires and Lady's in waiting counting as two Companions.

so what do folks think?

From Book of the Entourage:

A Lady and a riding horse: £1 per year as Ordinary. (Probably £2 and £3 for higher personal maintenance.)
+£0.5 for a commoner maid-servant without a horse, or a groom with a riding horse
+£1 for a noble maid-in-waiting and a riding horse
+£1 for a professional like a hairdresser etc.
+£2 for a bodyguard on a (cheap) warhorse (mounted sergeant)

Warhorses cost a lot of upkeep. A knight's charger is probably around £1+ in upkeep. So if you are not a knight or a mounted sergeant, you probably wouldn't want to pay that expense. Besides, warhorses, especially in earlier periods (pre-530, I think), cost a lot, so why would you even want to buy some really expensive horses you can't really use and which might die during the adventuring? Better use the more replaceable rouncies and such.

Here are some suggestions:

£2:
Lady (£1) + commoner maid-servant (£0.5) + a riding horse (£0.25) for the maid-servant + a sumpter for stuff (£0.25). The Squires of the knights would help with looking after the horses and setting up the camp; she definitely wouldn't be travelling on her own!

£4:
As above, but add +£0.5 for Lady's personal upkeep + a groom (£0.5, with his own horse) + Lady-in-waiting (£1, with a horse). Still, the lack of security means that she is still part of a bigger group, rather than travels 'alone' with her entourage.

£6:
As above, but add a mounted sergeant (£2). Now her entourage starts to be borderline adequate for traveling 'alone'.

my group is mostly working out of 4th ed with access to 3rd & the 5th core book, we so far are being suitably vague on hard numbers, but given we generally have a lady in the party we cooked up something along the lines of the stuff in the core book applying the K.I.S.S. principle, that's what we've come up with

we mentioned Warhorses since some ladies can inherit them or may wish to acquire them as part of their Dowry.

we mentioned Warhorses since some ladies can inherit them or may wish to acquire them as part of their Dowry.


Your Pendragon May Vary and all that. Not like there is just one way of playing the game. :)

That being said, Ladies in Pendragon tend to have their guardians (father, brother, liege, husband), whose responsibility it is to support the Lady, but also to look after the Lady's inheritance. Hence, the warhorse would not be trotting along the Lady wherever the Lady goes, but stay on the guardian's pasture.

Horses as inheritance are especially problematic in Pendragon, since the horses are very likely to die within a decade. So if the father died and the heir is a mere boy/girl, the chances are that the horse will be dead long before they will inherit. In our campaign, we have circumvented this by decreeing that the liege (the usual guardian) will take the horse for his own use (for his household knights, more often than not), and when the heir comes of age (if boy) or marries (if girl), then the liege will take a similar horse out of his herd and gives it as a replacement. This way, we sidestep the dead horse problem.

Other way of handling it would be to sell the expensive, fragile thing and just keep the money as inheritance: a charger costs £10 (£20 in early periods) and eats like £1+ in a year. If you are keeping a 'useless' warhorse around for 10 years, it is probably dead during those ten years and costing you £1+ per year to feed. So instead of having a horse as your inheritance, you have -£10 spent on the dead horse. Better to sell it for £5 (£10 in early periods), and just keep that money in a chest until the kid grows up.

The third method is simply totally ignoring the horse survival for horses in not active play. The whole 'replacement charger' in Winter Phase is intended to ensure that the knights do not have to worry about having a warhorse at the start of the next game year. And you can ignore the maintenance as well, at which point it is functionally equivalent to the Liege option we use, just that you don't bother explaining what is happening to the horse and who is paying for it.