Caveat 1: I like having the SD at %50, it's just eminently more convenient to work with.

Caveat 2: I calculate standard of living as £3 + %30 of income, because with the fighting squires and extra spearmen I use, it makes sense to cut the number of manors in half and just have knights better off with less. For example, a £50 estate holder in my kookoo-verse is just slightly less powerful than a £100 estate in the published books.


On with the show. This is future me speaking. I never sit down with the intention of spending half the night prattling on things like this, but here I am.


I've been thinking of having a grade of maintenance between Poor and Ordinary, simply called "Basic" for lesser household knights and the holders of more meager manors, especially ever since I've started giving my ordinary players two squires each and doubling the foot soldiers. Two squires, added in with something like six or so household servants, in addition to 4 foot soldiers, in addition to a personal chaplain, is a bit more than a knight and his immediate family really *needs* to function, isn't it?

It also strikes me that a range of £3 to £5.99 is a nearly %100 margin, quite a broad stroke with which to handle player livelihood.

When you start thinking of the £1 peasant family as a *comfortable* peasant family, with non-raggedy clothes and enough food for a heavy laborer and a family of four to not want for nourishment, I think the estimation as to how richly a knight has to live to be 'knightly' decreases.


What I've struck upon is a bare-bones, lean, mean, adventuring machine of £4.5 per year.

I've re-evaluated my old "peasant wage" idea, from the 'Gradation of Income' thread I believe, thus: £0.2 food, £0.05 clothing, and am working with that now as a baseline.

Breakdown of the £6 ordinary upkeep, as I'm currently using it:


Note: that although normal knightly upkeep is £3 here, an Ordinary Mercenary Knight still costs £4, but the extra Librum is wage cost, not upkeep, since a mercenary can be dismissed at any, whereas a household knight is bound by mutual oaths to his lord. Same idea with the Squires. The actual upkeep is .6 and .4 respectively, but that's just pure upkeep, since the relationship is master apprentice instead of emloyer -> employee. You cannot take on more squires than suit your station, but you can hire commoners to do the same jobs, a £1 Hobilar/Coutiller and a £0.5 Valet respectively.


£6 - Total

£2 - Knight
.6 Food
.35 Clothing
.15 Gear
.6 Charger
.2 Rouncy
.1 Sumpter

£0.6 - Body Squire
.2 Rouncy
.05 Gear
.25 Food
.1 Clothing

£0.4 - Arming Squire
.1 Sumpter/Pony
.2 Food
.1 Clothing

£1 - Wife
.4 Food
.35 Clothing
.25 Palfrey

£0.4 - Lady's Maid
.2 Food
.1 Clothing
.1 Pony

£1.6 - Children/Siblings (up to four adults, or seven children)


And then a married Basic Knight with a £4.5 upkeep might look more like this:

£4.5 Total

£1.9 - Knight
.55 Food
.3 Clothing
.15 Gear
.6 Charger
.2 Rouncy
.1 Sumpter

£0.6 - Squire
.2 Rouncy
.05 Gear
.25 Food
.1 Clothing


£0.75 - Wife
.4 Food
.25 Clothing
.1 Pony

£0.25 - Maid/Nurse
.2 Food
.05 Clothing

£1 - Children (up to four)



What this allows is for an Ordinary (£3) Household Knight to start a family provided he can marry a (£1) Handmaiden, (handmatron?), is cut loose his second squire (£0.4), and take a very minor cut to his personal maintenance (£0.1), and voila, you have gone from an unwed ordinary knight, to a married basic knight without any subsidy from the Lord.

Consequently, a Rich household knight (£5) could live as a married Ordinary Knight by marrying a handmaiden (£1)


Even more interesting (to me at least, I don't know if anyone's still reading), a Basic Knight could theoretically live and supply his family and basic operating necessities from just a £5 manor, just scraping by. Hear me out.

50% Army - £2.5 (1.9 Knight .6 Squire)
30% Family - £1.5 + £0.5 (from discretionary) = £2
10% Church - £0.5 (chaplain)
10% Discretionary: £0.5 - £0.5 (gone to Family) = £0

Obviously the background manor staff is much less extensive, but I'm sure they'll live.

The Family would be JUST on the cusp of slipping into 'Poor' status, which makes this really really tempting to give to a starting PK.

In SD, every fifth Libra of CR (5, 15, 25...) would require a Basic Knight, and every tenth (10, 20, 30...) would require a "Lance" of [Ordinary Knight (with second squire) + 2 Archers + 2 Spearmen].


This is how the new Servitum Debitum would work out, with the 'Lance' system.

£1 One Royal Archer
£2 One Royal Archer, One Spearman
£3 Two Royal Archers, One Spearman
£4 Two Royal Archers, Two Spearmen

£5 One Basic Knight
£6 One Basic Knight, One Royal Archer
£7 One Basic Knight, One Royal Archer, One Spearman
£8 One Basic Knight, Two Royal Archers, One Spearmen
£9 One Basic Knight, Two Royal Archers, Two Spearmen

£10 One Lance
£11 One Lance, One Royal Archer
£12 One Lance, One Royal Archer, One Spearman
£13 One Lance, Two Royal Archers, One Spearman
£14 Once Lance, Two Royal Archers, Two Spearman

£15 Once Lance, One Basic Knight


I was never a big fan of the 'spearman for the garrison' thing, so I'm trying something different, mostly because "Royal Archers" sounds cooler. The soldiers paid for in the £10 manor are yours to bring to the battlefield, but the extra libra in render between the 0 and 5 increments are subject to royal supply orders, typically an Archer every 1st and 3rd Libra after a knight-fee. Understandably, the crown would rather just keep everything in clean £10 increments and use the remainder to hire its own soldiers wherever possible.

What I personally like about this setup when conjoined with the alteration to upkeep calculation (£3 + %30) is that it guaruntees that a Lord begins with a higher standard of living than is household knights. A £15 manor would supply the Lord as an Ordinary Knight, and his household knight at Basic level. A £20 manor would supply the Lord as rich, and his household knight as Ordinary.

One could stipulate that every £10 of household upkeep after Superlative (£23, £33, £43...) increases an Ordinary (£3) household knight to Rich (£5), and a Basic Knight (£2.5) to Ordinary (£3).

An £88 estate would have an army of
1 Superlative knight (The Lord)
1 Rich Knight (upgraded from ordinary)
7 Ordinary Knights (1 upgraded from Basic)
3 Mailled Squires // Better equipped Body Squires (2 for Lord, 1 for Rich Knight)
7 Body Squires // Light-Medium Cavalry, follow main charge in second line (1 for each Ordinary)
11 Arming Squires // Non-combatants (1 for each ordinary, 2 for rich and 2 for lord)
16 Archers
17 Spearmen

+2 Royal Archers


And then just for laughs, let's do something huge, £1,000
1 Superlative Knight
29 Rich Knights
70 Ordinary Knights
31 Mailled Squires
70 Body Squires
130 Arming Squires
200 Archers
200 Spearmen



What this is all building up to is the *echo-y voice* ROOOLLL....OOOOOF....FORTUUUNE for a really wacko range of starting Manors, which I think under these calculations are now viable.

My Play-By-Post is aaalmost at the knighting ceremony, and on top of that a friend of mine with a youtube channel wants me to GM a streamed Roll20 game for his subscribers, so lots of fruitful testing grounds coming up. What I'm thinking is providing both sets of players, upon receiving their manors, is a choice:


1.) Take the booooooring £10 Manor, all your needs will be met, four soldiers, £1 spending money, two squires, safest option, yada yada.

2.) ROLL 2d6+3, a range of £5 to £15, for aaadveentuuuuure!!!


If you've made it through all this, let me know if you think this is a catastrophically bad idea.

I've just had another thought.

Instead of mandating the HK's an upgrade of Ordinary to Rich for every £10 past Superlative, one could give a choice:

a) Upgrade 1 Ordinary to Rich, and 1 Basic to Ordinary, for an additional 15 points of glory per year, or

b) Take on 1 additional Basic Knight.

What I'm thinking is providing both sets of players, upon receiving their manors, is a choice:

1.) Take the booooooring £10 Manor, all your needs will be met, four soldiers, £1 spending money, two squires, safest option, yada yada.

2.) ROLL 2d6+3, a range of £5 to £15, for aaadveentuuuuure!!!

If you've made it through all this, let me know if you think this is a catastrophically bad idea.


I'd worry a bit about the large variance between the £5 manor knight and a £15 manor knight. Granted, both are still knights, but usually, the x3 difference in lands is earned in game, not based on a simple 2d6+3 roll at the start. Furthermore, as we all know, wealth begets wealth: The £15 manor knight has more muscle (military force) to be more worth cultivating (such as a potential son-in-law for a well-endowed daughter) and rewarding for his efforts, not to mention that he has more discretionary funds and more space to build improvements on. In short, you potentially risk setting the players on quite different levels from the get go, one with a golden spoon in his mouth, the other having to do with mere silver. :P

Of course, it depends a lot if your game is heavily focused on knight errantry adventuring (in which your landholdings pretty much count for naught, save when the villain asks you how much you are worth ransoming), or if it is more in the 'base-building' and politicking, in which your holdings matter a lot. But something to keep in mind.

If you want to have variance in the starting manors, I would prefer rolling like 1d6+7, for a spread from 8 to 13 libra. Here, the difference between the 'low roller' knight and the 'high roller' knight is just a bit more than 50%, rather than triple. Additional benefit: Compared to £10 manor, you can at worst do just -20% and at best just +30%, so neither extremity is not that far off from the ones who chose not to roll. Comparing the probabilities between 1d6+7 and 2d6+3, we can see that 2d6+3 gives 8-13 result 75% of the time. So if you have 4 players, one of the players would have been wealthier (or more likely) poorer than this with 2d6+7. But since we are talking about small number statistics, here, you could end up with a situation where one player is near the bottom of the distribution and the other near the top.

EDIT: Just to add quickly, the difference in the Discretionary Funds would be £0 (since it goes to feeding the family) and £1.5, between the £5 and £15 manor knights.

I think all this (which, yes, I read entirely--good job!) helps quite a bit coloring in the gap between Poor and Ordinary--one of your goals. I've been bothered as well by how precipitously the drop was from "doing A-OK" to "my kids and horses are being put at risk of malnutrition and death!"

It's extreme, and I'm sure knights and their ladies, if put into a position of scarcity, would be able to get by through squeezing themselves down a bit, still eat enough, yet impress nobody with their financial stature. The key point being that the knight could both feed his (small) crucial staff AND fulfill his military obligations.

I think his lord would expect him to energetically attempt to drag himself out of one-step-above cavalry status, however. There might be glory implications, such that you would effectively lose those 5 points/year. I'd have to go back and check if the precedent is there.

Interesting work, and I'm also kinda fond of the idea of twice as many knights and soldiers running around. It's danger. And fodder....

--Khanwulf

Of course, if all you are after is a smoother penalties, then that is easy to do in basic KAP.

Poor is stated to give -3 in Stable and Child Survival rolls (cumulative over the years) and -5 to Childbirth. You can easily make this:
-1 to Stable & Child Survival and -2 to Childbirth per £1 less than £6, down to -3/-6 at £3.

Thus, if you are just scraping by with £5, you get just -1 per year, rather than crashing instantly to -3.

Personally, I do feel that those penalties are somewhat too harsh, especially combined with vanilla KAP's murderous child survival rolls: 10% chance of death over 15 years will leave you with about 20% survivors, which is much too low. I mean, how are the peasant children surviving if this is the death rate amongst the well-fed nobility??? (Easy Fix, just roll until they are past their 5th birthday, and that helps a lot.) Thus, I would not make the poor modifiers cumulative. I'd probably even allow them to shave the first £1 off simply by tightening the belt, using older clothing even if it is a bit more threadbare, etc. Lose the landholding Glory or something as 'Penalty' for not keeping up the appearances, but then just start giving penalties for dropping to £4 or £3, and not make the yearly malus cumulative. It is already that in effect, without making it downright murderous: Living on £3 would double the chance of child dying (-2, non-cumulative), meaning that over 5 years the survivor rate collapses from 59% to 33%. If the -2 would be cumulative, the chance of survival would be mere 6.7%, a death sentence. But if the -2 is just for one year, the difference is 59% vs. 52%; still there but probably not critical.

I'd worry a bit about the large variance between the £5 manor knight and a £15 manor knight. Granted, both are still knights, but usually, the x3 difference in lands is earned in game, not based on a simple 2d6+3 roll at the start. Furthermore, as we all know, wealth begets wealth: The £15 manor knight has more muscle (military force) to be more worth cultivating (such as a potential son-in-law for a well-endowed daughter) and rewarding for his efforts, not to mention that he has more discretionary funds and more space to build improvements on. In short, you potentially risk setting the players on quite different levels from the get go, one with a golden spoon in his mouth, the other having to do with mere silver. :P

While true that a wealthier knight would have an easier time finding good alliances and rich dowries, I would think that a liegelord would rather seek to reward a meagre knight than one who is already well off, since greater loyalty can be more readily obtained for a lesser ammount. If you award a £5 with a £5 gift-parcel (or the heiress of a £5 parcel), you've elevated his status %100, for which I imagine he would be monumentally grateful, whereas doing the same for a £15 knight would only be a %33 increase, nothing to sneeze at, but hardly as cost-effective as far as loyalty goes.

Also if you're talking about making alliances with the rich and powerful, it seems to me that anyone rich enough to endow land in their daughter's dowry is so powerful that, if they were in the market for marrying 1-manor vassal knights rather than other estate holders or barons, the size of the one knight's manor isn't going to make THAT much difference to them, muscle-wise.

A poorer knight is also much easier to control with gifts, they take much less to ransom, and much less to rebuild damaged manors and whatnot. Many may tend to go with the powerful son-in-law, but powerful sons-in-law aren't nearly so malleable to your purposes as a poorer one.




Of course, it depends a lot if your game is heavily focused on knight errantry adventuring (in which your landholdings pretty much count for naught, save when the villain asks you how much you are worth ransoming), or if it is more in the 'base-building' and politicking, in which your holdings matter a lot. But something to keep in mind.

Of course :) Although randomness seems to be a big part of character creation in general. One Player might have just 1 other knight in his family, whereas another could have as many as 11. If you ant to talk about a worthy suitor, talk about the ludicrously well-connected one with 11 knights as relatives. Family characteristics can be a crap-shoot as well, between something as eminently useful as +5 horsemanship to something as patently useless as +10 gaming. Family history can run the gammut for glory and passions. Heirlooms aren't fair either, you can get a magical weapon or an armband worth £8, or a second Charger!, or you can get a measly 3 denarii.


If you want to have variance in the starting manors, I would prefer rolling like 1d6+7, for a spread from 8 to 13 libra. Here, the difference between the 'low roller' knight and the 'high roller' knight is just a bit more than 50%, rather than triple. Additional benefit: Compared to £10 manor, you can at worst do just -20% and at best just +30%, so neither extremity is not that far off from the ones who chose not to roll. Comparing the probabilities between 1d6+7 and 2d6+3, we can see that 2d6+3 gives 8-13 result 75% of the time. So if you have 4 players, one of the players would have been wealthier (or more likely) poorer than this with 2d6+7. But since we are talking about small number statistics, here, you could end up with a situation where one player is near the bottom of the distribution and the other near the top.

One could also pull out the old classic houserule for rolling attributes: If you don't like your roll, you can have 1 do-over, but you have to keep whatever you get. This would, I imagine, keep the amounts in the middle-range with psychological warfare, while still allowing the full range between basic and rich-achievable.

I like it.

Also, is there space to play in your PbP? ^^

For me the best part of a 5-15£ is that it would provide different RP choices. The lower income knight is incentivised to be more daring because his ransom is lower and if he holds his lord's favor then the Lord ought to be willing to pay it compared to a knight who has 3x the grants and really ought to be able to pay his own ransom. That's what the granted lands are for after all. The poorer knight is also more likely to be selected for officerships for the exact reason stated: more loyalty per librum.

Of course :) Although randomness seems to be a big part of character creation in general. One Player might have just 1 other knight in his family, whereas another could have as many as 11. If you ant to talk about a worthy suitor, talk about the ludicrously well-connected one with 11 knights as relatives. Family characteristics can be a crap-shoot as well, between something as eminently useful as +5 horsemanship to something as patently useless as +10 gaming. Family history can run the gammut for glory and passions. Heirlooms aren't fair either, you can get a magical weapon or an armband worth £8, or a second Charger!, or you can get a measly 3 denarii.


Well, I for one find many of the BoK&L heirlooms way too overpowered. I prefer to hand out magical stuff out only when you have earned it in a quest, rather than 'oh, my dad, the regular vassal knight, gave it to me'.

As for the family knights, Greg has stated on these forums that he regrets introducing them. They distract from the specialness that being a vassal knight has for the PK. Secondly, knights are not that common. If you have 5 players and each have, say, 7 family knights, that is a total of 40 knights. If all of them are Salisbury knights, that is half of all the knights of Salisbury, from a set of only 5 paternal grandfathers. Even if you do allow them, it is explicitly stated that the PK is the head of the family, and presumably its wealthiest representative. The other family knights would presumably be household knights and mercenary knights, meaning that the former would be 24/7 at the service of whichever lord they serve, unavailable for the PK's personal projects, and the mercenaries would likely be travelling far and wide after employment, similarly unavailable most of the time. Really, the only knights the PK can trust are his vassal knight friends (other PKs, hopefully, included) and his own household knights (if he is wealthy enough).

Now if you let the PKs roll up their family knights and use them as their own personal army at their beck and call, then no wonder that you feel that the character generation is very random when it comes to the power level! And yes, I would be a mite miffed if thanks to my rotten dice luck, I am relegated at the bottom of the pile simply because someone rolled high on a 1d6, and I rolled low. In general, I resent chargen systems which introduce a significant imbalance between the player characters based on a single roll. But hey, your campaign, your rules. :)

Family characteristics can be a crap-shoot as well, between something as eminently useful as +5 horsemanship to something as patently useless as +10 gaming.

I'm am genuinely curious as to why you think gaming is useless. Or is it just the +10 to the skill?

As for the family knights, Greg has stated on these forums that he regrets introducing them. They distract from the specialness that being a vassal knight has for the PK. Secondly, knights are not that common. If you have 5 players and each have, say, 7 family knights, that is a total of 40 knights. If all of them are Salisbury knights, that is half of all the knights of Salisbury, from a set of only 5 paternal grandfathers.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure family knights come from both the paternal relatives AND the maternal relatives. If the average player rolls 5 or so Family Knights, that's 3 total from the father's side and 3 from the mother's side. The player is supposed to be the only landed knight in their own dynasty, but maternal relatives aren't part of your dynasty, they're more like noodle-loose allies. You could imagine that your father, as a landed knight, would have married a daughter of a landed knight under most circumstances, so on the paternal side you have 1 landed knight [the player] and an average of 2 household knights [Uncle and cousin or younger sibling or older bastard sibling], and on the maternal side 1 landed knight (uncle or cousin) and 2 household knights (uncles or cousins).

I think the only fix you really need if you need to make it crystal clear the Player knight is the most important is roll only for paternal relatives: 1d6-5 Old knights, 1d3-1 Middle Aged Knights, 1d3 Young knights. This would also reduce a lot of work for players who want to have their characters related.



The other family knights would presumably be household knights and mercenary knights, meaning that the former would be 24/7 at the service of whichever lord they serve, unavailable for the PK's personal projects, and the mercenaries would likely be travelling far and wide after employment, similarly unavailable most of the time.

True, you wouldn't be able to rely on them for most things, but I thought the point of them was for extra help when in dire straights, for example another family launches a blood feud against you, or your wife is kidnapped or something like that.

A household knight doesn't really have 'wandering around' time like a vassal knight does, but unless the lord is right in the middle of a personal war or the conroi is being called to battle, I don't think it would be out of the ordinary for a household knight to request a couple weeks leave every once in a blue moon to deal with a family matter.

As for mercenary knights, I can't back it up, but I have the feeling that in the early phases, Mercenary Knights are quite rare. It seems to me that, with the exception of rare battlefield promotions, you wouldn't go through the cost and trouble of knighting a cavalryman or the son of a household knight if you weren't going to then turn around and offer them a position, and if the brother or son of a landed knight can't get a few strings pulled in that regard upon being knighted, I think hope would be pretty dim for any other category of candidate for Household Knight. I imagine it would be something like this:

All Knights in Logres: %100 : ~3,000
Landed Knights : %15 : ~450
Household Knights : %75 : ~2,250
Mercenary Knights : %10 : ~300

~2,700 knights accounted for in the Servitum Debitum of the realm as per BoU (ok it's supposed to be 2,610 sue me), and about 15 mercenary knights per county.

Granted, this will change drastically in later periods, but starting out in Uther, I think there's no more than a 1-2 on 1d20 chance of those first family knights living as a mercenaries. I think the first uptick of this would probably be anarchy, with robber-knights galore, and then a major uptick again in conquest period with Scutage being implemented.

In fact, let's make a table along those lines.

1d20
1-2 Mercenary Knight, roll 1d20 yearly for current location.
3 Household Knight, Distant County
4-6 Household Knight, Nearby County
7-10 Household Knight, Same County
11-20 Household Knight, Same Liegelord




Now if you let the PKs roll up their family knights and use them as their own personal army at their beck and call, then no wonder that you feel that the character generation is very random when it comes to the power level! And yes, I would be a mite miffed if thanks to my rotten dice luck, I am relegated at the bottom of the pile simply because someone rolled high on a 1d6, and I rolled low. In general, I resent chargen systems which introduce a significant imbalance between the player characters based on a single roll. But hey, your campaign, your rules.


Oh, heavens no, I most certainly do not treat family knights like free soldiers! I'm not a *complete* numpty. My point was that being closely related to 11 different knights has a lot of perqs not enjoyed by someone only related to 1 other knight. For example every family knight is potential for an inside connection with a particular Lord's household, Roderick's or otherwise, an extra reason for your liege-lord not to punish you unjustly or else sow discontent within his own household, and extra good reason for a hostile family not initiate a blood feud against you, or else receive the ire of the entire family, and by that same token, an extra good reason to favor you as a suitor, given your connections.

Mechanics-wise, it makes no difference, but story-wise it is quite significant.


I do however remember playing in a campaign run by a friend of mine where Family Knights WERE free muscle that lived with you and did what you told them. I think I've regaled this forum with the story of how in a campaign I ran, the players raised an army and sacked Levcomagus in like 490.

Well, this campaign was even more ridiculous than that, I mean peak ridiculous, very fun, but not quite what I think Greg had in mind, looking back on it now.

There were something like 12 players, and most of the PK's hated eachother's guts. Constant dueling, court accusation, raiding of eachothers manors, and one player betrayed the entire rest of the party to the saxons at one point, leading to all of us being captured, tortured, and mutilated. Before then, I was Sir Laingren Lightfoot, renowned dancer. Afterwards, I was Sir Laingren Legless.

Besides all that, manors were handed out as reward like they were skittles, and wives would have several each. Household knights didn't exist (in fact the first post I ever made on these forums was asking about them, the GM had this weird idea that only the king or a baron was prestigious enough for a knight to serve without land), which meant that extra manors were free money and the only way to get more knights was to enfoeff them out, the manor levy was an actual force of spear-wielding peasants the knights could summon and use at-will, because of this the players had ginormous personal armies and their own castles. When we went raiding, it wasn't a dozen fighters and two dozen peasants, it was 60 knights (10 PK + 50 FK) and 500 levy.

In the defense of the GM, the only book any one of us had at the time was KAP 5.0, and none of us, including the GM, had even heard of Pendragon before picking it up.

The most memorable adventure we went on, since we didn't have the GPC we had to improvise, was when Earl Roderick had us sent on a diplomatic mission to Rome to meet with the pope, at which juncture someone set the vatican library on fire, and one stood up in a busy street, crit rolled an orate, and sparked a revolt that overthrew the Lombards and re-instituted the roman republic, and got himself named consul and given a harness of gold-plated lorica segmentata with purple trim.

As I said, very fun, but not quite Pendragon :)

I'm happy to report that's not how I'm currently running my game.

I'm am genuinely curious as to why you think gaming is useless. Or is it just the +10 to the skill?

It just never seems to come up. Falconry gets you glory. Intrigue is useful for information. Dancing can get you somewhere with the ladies, so can Sing, Play, and Compose. But Gaming? Other than making a little money gambling, I can't think of any meaningful application the skill could have. It doesn't make people like you more, if anything beating people in games all the time, especially with money involved, is a good way to earn resentment.

If you're trying to get on someone's good side, the usual protocol is to let them win, which doesn't take any skill at all.

I can perhaps envision a magical dwarf guarding a bridge who demands you beat him at hnaeftafl before you can cross, or playing a game of chess with a fay knight for some grand stakes like your life or the fate of a village, but that's really something you can only do once.

I like it.

Also, is there space to play in your PbP? ^^



There most certainly is! I'll PM you a link, should be able to squeeze you in for the knighting ceremony.

It just never seems to come up. Falconry gets you glory. Intrigue is useful for information. Dancing can get you somewhere with the ladies, so can Sing, Play, and Compose. But Gaming? Other than making a little money gambling, I can't think of any meaningful application the skill could have. It doesn't make people like you more, if anything beating people in games all the time, especially with money involved, is a good way to earn resentment.

Well, in my book, winning at a Gaming contest gives you as much Glory (and makes people like you as much) as winning a Play, Sing or Compose contest. Why not? It may not be mentioned as often in published scenarios, but the player and the GM should find plenty of occasions to use the Skill during courtly sessions.

Moreover, Gaming is one of the important courtly skills, so I think that it could very well get you somewhere with the ladies! At least as much as Sing, Play and Compose. A tabletop game gives two persons a lot of time to chat, to look at each other, to smile even when you are supposed to be angry for losing, and so on... Also, plenty of occasions for double-entendres while you eat each other's pawns...



If you're trying to get on someone's good side, the usual protocol is to let them win, which doesn't take any skill at all.

It depends. What is winning worth, if the opponents is obviously a newbie? So, you should first establish your reputation as a shrewd, expert player (which definitely takes skill) AND THEN let your opponent win. Also, you must let the opponent win without letting him/her know and without making things too easy, and this needs some skill as well.

Fair enough.


And now something completely different, here's how I'd convert the rulebook heiresses into this system:

~~~LADY ADWEN~~~
Total Lands: £25
Demesne: 1 Rich Manor, £15
Enfoeffed: 2 'fee' manors, £5 + £5 = £10

+ PK =
Total: £35
Demesne: £25
Waste: 15 slots
Standard of Living = 25(0.3) + 3 = £10.5 = Rich
Army: 2 Lances, 3 basic knights.

Rich upkeep and minimum number of subservient knights to be an eschille commander in one's own right, fits the description in the book.

~~~LADY ELAINE~~~
Lands: 1 Rich Manor £14 + 1 fee manor £6 = £20

+ PK =
Upkeep: £12, Rich, within close reach of Superlative
Army: 3 Lances + 2 Extra Spearmen, supplies 3 Royal Archers.

Just about worth the near inevitable infidelity.

~~~LADY GWIONA~~~
Land: 1 Manor, £10

+ PK =
Upkeep: £9, Rich
Army: 2 Lances

~~~LADY INDEG~~~
Honestly, I have no idea what to do with this broad's land. I honestly think I'll keep her landholdings vague and have her flittering around from affair to affair, giving out the occasional gifts to her current lover, without ever tying another knot. It's not like she has pregnancy to worry about.

I'm stealing that for Indeg next time I run through the early years. ^^

For Elaine I believe GS changed her to be the daughter of the adulter/murder-ess which seems to make sense. Its hard to see how Roderick wouldn't simply send such a woman to a convent and hold her lands until her children come of age or she dies without heirs and they revert to him anyway.

In my latest game I made the story false and went with the old 'evil sheriff' angle. Her PK husband recently threw said sheriff off the top of his tower and took his castle. Gotta love the Anarchy.

In my latest game I made the story false and went with the old 'evil sheriff' angle. Her PK husband recently threw said sheriff off the top of his tower and took his castle. Gotta love the Anarchy.

Reminds me of Merlin's hilarious deadpan in the move Excalibur: "You betrayed the duke. You stole his wife. You took his castle; now no one trusts you."

For Elaine I believe GS changed her to be the daughter of the adulter/murder-ess which seems to make sense. Its hard to see how Roderick wouldn't simply send such a woman to a convent and hold her lands until her children come of age or she dies without heirs and they revert to him anyway.



That actually does beg the question why the lands weren't simply confiscated if Elaine was behind the murder, seeing as a felony crime is sufficient to issue attainder.

Reminds me of Merlin's hilarious deadpan in the move Excalibur: "You betrayed the duke. You stole his wife. You took his castle; now no one trusts you."

I love Merlin in that movie.


That actually does beg the question why the lands weren't simply confiscated if Elaine was behind the murder, seeing as a felony crime is sufficient to issue attainder.

In the altered scenario its because the daughter is believed to be the murdered knight and Elaine's legal heir and so the mother can be put aside to allow her to inherit.

In the RAW version it requires some extenuating circumstances. The Earl could simply not believe she was the cause and lay it all on the commoner. Or she could have powerful relatives or some other relationship that protects her. If she is the Earl's relative that would make sense as why she is hated but yet not cast out.

Ah right, the altered scenario actually does make sense then, Elaine inherited her father's land, her mother didn't enter into it, although I could definitely see the widow's portion being issued attainder, and then possibly given to Elaine or kept by the king while her mother rots in an oubliette or a nunnery or something.

Ah right, the altered scenario actually does make sense then, Elaine inherited her father's land, her mother didn't enter into it, although I could definitely see the widow's portion being issued attainder, and then possibly given to Elaine or kept by the king while her mother rots in an oubliette or a nunnery or something.

I agree with the idea that it works much better with Elaine's mother being the adulteress, and Elaine being blameless (albeit 'blood will tell', people might whisper behind her back). Widow's portion isn't the widow's property, just hers to enjoy until her death, although I agree that the adulteress would forfeit her right to it (and hence it would go back into the inheritance, not to the liege, as the actual holder/heiress has not done anything wrong). Attainder is probably the wrong word for it, since at least to me, that invokes charges of treason against the king and the like.

I agree with the idea that it works much better with Elaine's mother being the adulteress, and Elaine being blameless (albeit 'blood will tell', people might whisper behind her back). Widow's portion isn't the widow's property, just hers to enjoy until her death, although I agree that the adulteress would forfeit her right to it (and hence it would go back into the inheritance, not to the liege, as the actual holder/heiress has not done anything wrong). Attainder is probably the wrong word for it, since at least to me, that invokes charges of treason against the king and the like.

Quick google search proves you right, Attainder was only on perpetrators of capital crimes, in addition to the execution.