There don't seem to be any codified, official rules for this, so I'm wondering how other groups go about generating PK heirs. Do you allow any and all passions and traits to be carried over from father to son? Any upper limit on a transferred value? If a son gets 5 famous traits from his father, can he pick an additional famous trait to distinguish the character?

I've got some ideas about how I want to handle all this, but I'd be interested to hear from others with more experience before I present a formal system to my group.

We felt that a straight-up carbon copy would be:
a) a bit too much, and
b) boring.

So instead, we opted for these houserules:

1) For Traits, you get one Famous (16+) trait, Valorous 15, Religious Traits at 13 and the rest at 10. You then get 6 points to distribute to the traits (hold over from 4th edition); however, if the trait you are spending these points was a trait your father was famous for (16+), then raising it costs only 0.5 point / +1 up to the Father's level.
Example: Father had Just 16 and Modest 16. The Heir starts with Just 10, Modest 13. He wants just 16, so that costs 3 points (since Father had it at 16+), and another 1.5 points would bring Modest to 16, too. If he wants either at 17, that costs a full point, since it is over his Father's value.

2) For Passions, we roll all of them (2d6+6 except Hate which is 3d6). If your Father had a Famous (16+) passion, you get +2 to the roll, up to his value. In addition, you get 3 points to assign to Passions.
Example: Father had Loyalty (Pendragon) 17. The Heir gets lucky and rolls 16 for Loyalty (Pendragon). The +2 bonus from Father raises this to 17, since that is the Father's value. If the Heir wants higher Loyalty, he has to use the 3 points.

For Father, you can alternatively read Mother, if the player character parent happened to be female. In the case of two player character parents, choose one.


We have been thinking about a variant that your passions actually would get a bonus not from your parents, but from your trainer knight. This would make the 'squire game' a bit more interesting, as you would have an incentive to try and get your son to be a squire to a knight whose passions you admire. You want your son to have high Honor? Try to get him to be a squire to a high Honor knight. We haven't done this, so far, but it is a nice idea, I think.

I've always done it by the book, i.e. take it all or start from scratch. Works for me. Sure, I can understand that some players think that's boring, and my answer is: "Well, no-one forced you to spend 20+ session building an extreme personalty." And besides, given some 10 sessions of game-play, a characters Tratis and Passions can have changed dramatically.

I did not have to think on this until recently. I used the following rules:
All traits and passions are rolled as normal (we use BoK&L), but you may take one trait and one passion of 16+ from your parent (or previous PK).
also all Hate passions may be taken as well from the parent (or previous PK).
furthermore I look at the circumstances of the death of the parent (or previous PK) and the traits rolled for the new character

In the case I had the next knight the player plays is not his son (he is only 11 years old yet) so he opted to play the brother.
the new PK had a high Vengeful and his brother was killed by Saxons in a battle. So I gave him the option to roll for Hate Saxons. His brother had no Hate Saxons passion.

Interesting.

I think I'm leaning towards Morien's trait system. However, since beginning PK's aren't getting any bonus points for traits in my game, I'll probably make it 12 points that can only be spent to emulate the father.

For Passions, I'm leaning towards 15 in each of Loyalty, Honour, Hospitality and Love (Family), with the option to replace one of these with the father's value. Any other Passion would be inherited from the father, with the possibility of rolling an addition Passion that has relevance to the manner of his death.