Can someone please direct me to where it explains the use(s) for the family knights you generate for the PK's during character generation? Are they simply meant to be the manor staff for your new holding? Or it's defenders when you serve your 40 days every year? Or are they capable of being the foundation of your own formation for BoB2E escapades?

Can someone please direct me to where it explains the use(s) for the family knights you generate for the PK's during character generation? Are they simply meant to be the manor staff for your new holding? Or it's defenders when you serve your 40 days every year? Or are they capable of being the foundation of your own formation for BoB2E escapades?

No*, No, No and No.

Just drop them altogether, like Greg says here:
http://nocturnalmediaforum.com/iecarus/forum/showthread.php?2474-Family-Knights&p=21134&viewfull=1#post21134

This accomplishes many things:

1) It elevates the PKs, since now they are the only knights in the family, and hence any additional knights they sponsor is a HUGE DEAL.

2) It saves you a lot of GMing headaches about where these guys are and what they are doing.

3) Without the family to turn to, the PKs will have to turn to their liege and their friends and allies, rather than assembling a mighty host just from the family knights.

4) It prevents the players from abusing the family knights, using them essentially as free mercenaries (I have seen this done by some campaigns).

You can still keep track of the family members, like I explain in that above thread, just that they are not knights without the PKs doing something about it.


* = I don't think it is ever explained anywhere in the books how they should be used. There have been Forum threads, though, which you could look for. If I were to allow Family Knights in my game**, they obviously need to get their upkeep from somewhere, i.e. they are household knights wherever they found a place and/or mercenary knights, going from one short-term hire to the other, wandering around. In neither case are they ready at the drop of the hat to assist the PK in his schemes.Even ignoring the travel time, they would need to get permission from their lieges/employers if they can take some time off and go deal with a family matter. And it would have to be a family matter, not simply the PK wanting some extra knights to hang around with, like someone kidnapping/abusing/murdering a family member and now the family is getting together to exact some justice/revenge.

** = Actually, I do allow Family Knights, now that I think about it. Assuming that the PKs are vassal knights and that their fathers and grandfathers were ones too, then the chances are that in each generation, there might have been a daughter who was married off to another vassal knight and they would have had vassal knight son. Furthermore, it is likely that the 2nd son in each generation would have become a household knight with Dad's old equipment. So, once it comes time for the PK:
- Granddad's generation: Great-Uncle-in-law, Great-Uncle (both of these guys are probably already dead)
- Dad's generation: Uncle-in-law, Uncle, 2 Dad's-Cousins (1 vassal, 1 hh)
- PK's generation: Brother-in-law (if he has an old enough sister), Brother (if he is old enough), 2 cousins (if Uncle-in-law is dead), 2 other cousins (if Uncle and Great-Uncle had some progeny and/or kept their stuff in the family), 2 further cousins (if Dad's vassal knight cousin is dead and his sons are knighted).
- Furthermore, you could argue the same from the maternal side, so chances are that there would be a lot of knights who are related to you.

However, notice how many of these people are via marriage, i.e. they have their own (paternal) family lines to consider, too. The actual, paternal line knights would be:
- Grand-Uncle's line: 1 knight (old if himself, likely young if his son, since he probably married late in life, if at all, unlike his vassal knight brother; could be middle-aged if he sponsored his nephew, i.e. one of the PK's Uncles.)
- Uncle's line: 1 knight (middle-aged, probably unmarried still)
- Dad's line: 1 knight (the PK), with the younger brother waiting in the wings to become a household knight with dad's equipment when he grows up

And all of the above assumes that the knights would actually survive long enough, and that the married ones would have at least one girl and two sons who'd survive. That might not always happen, either. Also, equipment gets lost/destroyed on the battlefields, too, which might cause a big enough financial hurdle that those second sons won't get a chance to become knights, or the hhks can't will their equipment down the line. This can drastically cut down the number of family knights by the PK's generation.


IN CONCLUSION:
If Family Knights would be recast as 'here are all the knights related to you by blood or marriage'***, rather than 'here is your private army of knights from your paternal line', I would have less problems with it. Naturally, the former would mean changing the family member rolls, too. But those are out of whack anyway, giving out brothers when the default starting character is the eldest son and just knighted, or maternal uncles when the family history had the mother as an heiress (which I am also against, by the way, preferring the paternal inheritance all the way to keep the manor in the family). Our solution for those brothers and maternal uncles had been to make them illegitimate, which led to some joking around the table as one guy ended up with 4 illegitimate brothers. "Dad was a bit of a horndog, I see."

*** = This can still be pretty interesting, as it kinda signals how well-connected the PK's family is socially. Given how few vassal knight families there would be in Salisbury (10-ish or so), the chances are that these families would already overlap some and would have to marry to/from outside, too. But you almost certainly would have connections between the PKs of someone's brother-in-law being another's cousin or some such.

This is how I dealt with them:
- During character generation (first time) they were integrated in the family trees, as both maternal as patrernal uncles or great uncles.
- They were not treated as a personal army, but as knights that could be called upon when the family was in danger. These knights had their own lords (although some were from Salisbury as well). they were not an army that could be summoned for a raid or something (although they may come anyway, they were not obliged to come).
- This was all before I heard about the switch from many vassals, to far less vassals.
- One of the first steps they did was to intermarry between the families. One PK had 3 marriagable sisters who married 3 other PK and he himself married a sister of one of the other PKs. So now they are all family.;)
- Now that we have played years and the sons are coming of age. Each PK was able to knight at least 2 of their sons. Also some of the uncles and great uncles died the last few years. So the totals did not change much.

BTW. In my KAP game I (as GM) keep track of all the NPC characters and check if they died, but also some of the related families if there are children born. So I keep track of about 400+ NPC. ;)

BTW. In my KAP game I (as GM) keep track of all the NPC characters and check if they died, but also some of the related families if there are children born. So I keep track of about 400+ NPC. ;)
Firstly: Applause. I aspire to that level of background integrity and maintenance in my games.
Secondly: Please offer some advice on how you make that work... it's a *lot* of aging/birth rolls... :) I'd tend to think about building a database...

Secondly: Please offer some advice on how you make that work... it's a *lot* of aging/birth rolls... :) I'd tend to think about building a database...

400 is a bit too much for my tastes, too, but something like tenth of that is still manageable. I used to do that in the first GPC playthrough, just to see how the liege and cousins were doing. Basically, the NPCs that the PKs had a stake in.

Of course it helps that I use an online roller... it was easy enough to just toss blocks of 10d20 and see if any number was interesting enough to check if something would happen, and then read who it was in the correct row of an excel sheet.

What I am actually inclined to do (when I have the time and energy to implement it), is the idea of a family sheet that one poster here in the forum suggested (I need to try to find that post again). Basically, you write the family members on a sheet, numbered 1 to 20, and then just roll from that list when something happens. But you could also use it to quickly roll over each one to see if they survive or have kids, or anything else. If you have the players do that for their families, it is much less work for the GM.

Edit: Here it is:
http://nocturnalmediaforum.com/iecarus/forum/showthread.php?2955-family-record-sheet&p=24553&viewfull=1#post24553
The poster was rcvan.

Thanks everyone for the quick, detailed responses and the official Greg Stafford link. After seeing everything here, I think I will create a spreadsheet to track them as NPC's and use them as plot tools and story drivers. At least one of the players will be very interested in helping curate this every winter phase so it should be entertaining side work.

Sharing that spreadsheet would be a wonderful thing to do as well. GMs have enough on their plate.

Firstly: Applause. I aspire to that level of background integrity and maintenance in my games.
Secondly: Please offer some advice on how you make that work... it's a *lot* of aging/birth rolls... :) I'd tend to think about building a database...

I use Realmworks as a database to keep track of the NPCs. It gives me the ability to link them to others as needed and I can write down what happens to them each year (if something happens). I have about a 100-150 changes each year. Realmworks also gives me the ability to mark those that are still alive. that shortens the list a bit and I am not going through all the dead ones as well. The best part is that I also can see where the PKs have dealt with a NPC before and what happened. and a way to reintroduce them if need be.
Close relatives I keep track of births and deaths and other events (like illnesses or accidents). Those they have met during the game I usually only track if they died.
I also sometimes just kill off some NPCs to keep the number down a bit.

This is a lot of work, yeas so I sometimes need to catch up a bit. But we do not do the 1 adventure per year so it is not every other session I need to adjust the list.
The fun part is that I have a lot of recurring NPCs to choose from when making an adventure. So sometimes they meet them over the course of several years.