A friend of mine is starting up an 'A Song of Ice and Fire' steam roleplay in the not too distant future. Since most GoT rp's pretty much just shrug off money entirely, and my friend and I are both really into Pendragon, I was like 'hey , why don't we just use Estate/Warlord?' and he seemed to approve. So as the ooc master of coin I'm currenty in the middle of mapping out "holdfasts", sort of MEGA hundreds, about five times the size pendragon hundreds, accounting for roughly 10,000 people.

Basically the way the system works is that each holdfast renders 500 dragons (libra) to its lord. Like in Estate and Warlord, the apportionment of this money is fixed: 50% to the army, 40% to household upkeep and standard of living, and 10% discretionary.

The troop costs I'm working under right now are: .5D per footman/archer, 1D per garrison/household guard, and 3D per cavalrymen/knight. If we used the good ole Salisbury Servitum Debitum of 1K:1G:2F per manor (or every 10L of render) this would mean 200 soldiers per holdfast, 100 footmen, 50 garrison, 50 knights. Of course, the player can have any ratio they like, I personally would cut down the garrison to 25, and bump up the footmen to 150, for 225 total troops. So if i were playing as the starks for example, who I believe I gave 30 holdfasts, I would have a personal army of 6,750, or if i were playing the tullys, who i believe I gave 48 holdfasts, I would have a personal force of 10,800.

Anyway, I'll post the map when I've finished it, and I'll link the steam group once we start accepting players if anyone's interested.

Sure, why not? Pendragon does medieval knight play quite well, in my opinion, and a SoIaF conversion should be a breeze. Heck, I have even done the Lord of the Rings RP with it, and it worked quite nicely.

The Pedant in me wishes to note that in BotE/W:
0. All the D's in your costs should be £. (I assume this is a simple mistake, given the army numbers later?)
1. The garrison foot soldier is simply the same level of foot soldier as the field army foot soldier. You wouldn't be leaving your best troops (armored foot soldier equivalent) in a garrison post to twiddle their thumbs when you are marching off to war. If you go with this army structure, I'd recommend the field army being 1 armored spearman (£1) and 1 bowman (£0.5), with one foot soldier (£0.5, probably a majority of bowmen since they are more specialized for castle defense, like 10-20 spearmen and 30-40 bowmen per holdfast) in garrison.
2. The proportion spent on the army is 55%, not 50%.
3. The knight costs £4, not £3. (Assuming he has a squire, that is. Without a squire, you are correct at £3.)

Feel free to change those in your campaign, obviously. Personally, I'd be tempted to go with BotE/W default (since I am lazy like that) and let that armored foot soldier to become part of the Discretionary Funds, if one is wished. So the £500 holdfast (AKA the £500 honour in BotW terminology :P) has 50 knights, 50 garrison foot soldiers, 100 army foot soldiers and £50 left over, which the belligerent lord might spend on 50 armored foot soldiers for some more punch.

The advantage of using the BotW defaults is that you have everything there, without needing to reinvent the wheel. You can just skip to the Appendix D and interpolate what your £500 holdfast should look like.

Of course, if you will have regional differences, for instance the Starks certainly seemed to have a much 'leaner' court than what you'd expect the Tyrells to have, then that goes (a bit) out the window. Even then, you could just say that the Northerners have 20% to Court instead of 25%, and 15% Discretionary Funds, and then just scale the Court back by 20/25 = 80%: £500 northerner holdfast's court becomes equivalent to £400 honour court in BotW. So you can definitely do these kinds of adjustments even with your 50% army vs. 55% BotW army, but it is an extra hurdle to be jumped. And with the knights not having squires, some of the Book of Battle 2 assumptions might no longer be valid. (I am not an expert on that, though.)

0. All the D's in your costs should be £. (I assume this is a simple mistake, given the army numbers later?)

I'm pretty sure D = Gold Dragon = £.


...each holdfast renders 500 dragons (libra)

Sable Wyvern's got it right, The 'D' is short for 'Dragon', the gold coin of the westerosi economy that we've equated to Libra out of laziness, not 'd' for denarii.

I switched the 55% army to 50% just to make the numbers prettier. Remember I said 'Cavalry' not all of them are knights necessarily, so we've genericized the cost and battle effectiveness between knights and Men-at-Arms. Remember, some Lords are dealing with Dozens of holdfasts worth of troops, not counting vassal lords.

The garrison aren't -just- garrison, they're meant to represent household guards, more trusted, better trained, better equipped than 'levy footman' (Think Ned stark's men that he brought to kings landing, or Cersei's Red Cloaks. ), here levy footmen being the ones called in from the manor villages as part of the SD, as opposed to levy in the traditional sense (every man with a stick).

I've made an attempt to match the size of holdfasts to the geography of the area and what we know about the region and it's people from the source material. For example, despite accounting for 1/3rd of the landmass of Westeros, it only has a population of ~ 2,000,000, so the Holdfasts are comparatively larger than those in the southern kingdoms, whereas the holdfasts around say harenhall in the south riverlands are tiny, reflecting some of the richest soil in westeros.

Sable Wyvern's got it right, The 'D' is short for 'Dragon', the gold coin of the westerosi economy that we've equated to Libra out of laziness, not 'd' for denarii.

Doh. Yes, that is obvious now. Thanks Sable Wyvern and Mr.47 for the explanation. :) The use of "10L of render" later on threw me off the scent.



I switched the 55% army to 50% just to make the numbers prettier. Remember I said 'Cavalry' not all of them are knights necessarily, so we've genericized the cost and battle effectiveness between knights and Men-at-Arms. Remember, some Lords are dealing with Dozens of holdfasts worth of troops, not counting vassal lords.


As an average between a cavalryman and a knight it works, yes. And believe me, I was trying to get rid of that 5% too, but couldn't, since I was constrained by 1 knight + 3 foot soldiers servitium debitum that had been established earlier. In your case, if you are only considering barony/holdfast level stuff and assume that 50 'knights' is actually 25 knights and 25 cavalry, yes, it works. Especially given the context of the SoIaF, where knights seems to be somewhat rarer (especially in the North) than in Pendragon.



The garrison aren't -just- garrison, they're meant to represent household guards, more trusted, better trained, better equipped than 'levy footman' (Think Ned stark's men that he brought to kings landing, or Cersei's Red Cloaks. ), here levy footmen being the ones called in from the manor villages as part of the SD, as opposed to levy in the traditional sense (every man with a stick).

I'd recommend naming them "household guards", rather than "garrison foot soldiers", which has a totally different context (at least in BotW). I forget how hand-picked Ned's men in King's Landing were, but again, as far as the Pendragon terminology goes, the foot soldiers do act as a knight's/lord's household guards, too. They are not part-time peasant-soldiers but full-time soldiers, at the knight's beck and call 24/7. (Also, note that in Pendragon terminology, 'guardsmen' are elite infantry in heavy armor, costing £1.5.) The "better trained, better equipped" sounds exactly like the armored foot soldiers at £1 each in Book of the Entourage. :P


The above caveats said... I can see how it could work out. If you are a knight, you can still use that £1 Discretionary Fund to pay for your squire. I suspect that the Stark system is slightly different than what is being used in the South, though. Seems to me that there is much more emphasis on freemen and yeomanry, if you will, rather than hosts of knights supported by serfs. We don't really have a troop type for a "levy foot soldier" in Pendragon, and frankly, with the War of the Five Kings, that infantry sure looks like it is fighting for long term, not just for a season, like you would expect from part-time peasants. In the Hundred Years' War, you had companies of longbowmen and other soldiers being hired as essentially mercenaries for the campaigns. It might be a bit of a combination of both... At least in same cases, 'fresh levy of men' is mentioned, which to me implies the raising of new forces rather than old ones that have been farming the land. This would imply a more contractual, temporary arrangement rather than a constant upkeep throughout the years.

Looking at some of the battles of the War of the Five Kings, it seems that 1 cavalryman per 2 infantry is not a bad estimation of the Lannister forces at the Battle of the Fords, but Tullys' seem to be more 1:3. Renly's (mainly Tyrell) forces at Bitterbridge seem to be 1:4 (20000 cavalry, 80000 infantry). 1:3 seems to work pretty well as an average, though; Robb's splitting the army into two after the Twins has around 6000 cavalry and 18000 infantry contingents, or 1:3. Actual knights seem to be just a small fraction of the forces, not 1 in 3 as is the case in Pendragon. For instance, of the around 1500 Manderly men who joined Robb at Moat Caelin, only 20 were knights (with squires), and around 200 other mounted men, ranging from 'lancers' (heavy cavalry?) to 'swordsmen' and 'freeriders' (hobilars?). The rest 1250 or so men were infantry, so in Manderly's case, the ratio of cavalry is even worse, 1:5, and in the case of heavy cavalry, we can only guess, but probably 1:10 or so. Of course, it needs to be added that as was historically the case, too, 'knight' is also a noble title; many of the man-at-arms were actually not knights, even thought they were armed similarly and fought in the same manner.

The point about calling them Levy Footman was to denote that they generally are bound to their local manors and holdfasts, and have to be specifically called up, I was not implying that GoT foot soldiers are armed seasonal peasants. As for different styles depending on the region, that's accounted for. The point of giving players a budget of 250 dragons per holdfast is that they can construct their own army composition. Hodlfasts vary on size depending on the geography, for example there are a few giant ones covering the mountains of the vale, while the fertile valleys are packed with tiny ones, accordingly the north despite it's monstrous size, has a very spread out population and accordingly the holdfasts are larger than in other kingdoms, in fact I think you could fit five or six south riverlands holdfasts into a northern one. The Westerlands is hilly and mountainous in parts, and they are actually one of the smaller kingdoms, so they're population is only a bit higher than Dorne's, but thanks to the mines the houses that control them basically get free money, in total about 150 holdfasts worth (at the moment, though this will probably change), and can raise the second largest army in the seven kingdoms (after the Reach of course, whose wealth is almost entirely land-based).

As for the household guard, that is what I was planning to refer to them as.