An unexpected royal visitor brings his court to Camelot for a visit, but there's plenty of drama already playing out for the intrepid player-knights. The Age of Romance and Adventure has well and truly begun!
Featuring:
Dave S.
Jade
Jen
And…Edie the Dog
The campaign's wiki can be found here.
Regarding the Gift of a Journeyman, perhaps they come into your service and attempt to teach you some aspect of their craft they've spent years perfecting? You could make another table (more tables!), roll against it to pick one, and then the player knight gets an immediate skill check against that table? Failure means they haven't heard of this new and excited method of... I don't know, dancing,
ReplyDeleteI'd propose a d6 table of Boating, Dancing, Falconry, Orate, Play, and Singing since those are all the skills I see that I could see someone would spend a few years apprenticing to try and perfect. Get enough boating results and they'll be clamoring to go on an aquatic adventure!
I'm thinking along the same lines, although there's already another entry on the Good Fortune table that gives the PC free checks in a skill of their choice. (It's something like, "Hire a tutor in a skill for 1d6 years.")
DeleteMy idea is to take a list of medieval London guilds and make a few subtables out of that. Roll on the tables to find out what sort of gift you received (fine cloth, a tun of beer, etc.) and then something like 1d6 to determine the libra value of the gift.
Earning your E this week, I see. Moving on to the *clean* and *decent* topic of Irish pronunciation...
ReplyDeleteDisclaimer: I know a little about modern Irish, but I'm not an expert. Also, the pronunciation would be a little different in the Middle Ages (= Old Irish). The language was very different in the early 6th century (= Primitive Irish, of which very little survives), and Daig wouldn't be Daig if you pushed it that far back. (For that matter, none of the Cymric names in Pendragon would be in anything like as modern a form of Welsh.)
So with those provisos (especially the one about me not being an expert):-
The thing about Irish is that it has a very large number of distinct consonantal sounds, much more than can adequately be represented by the Roman alphabet. So the spelling system inserts vowels, not to represent sounds in their own right, but to indicate how the consonant next to them is to be pronounced. This is what makes so many of the words look so odd to an English speaker. The i in Daig is doing this - it's telling you how to pronounce the g.
The other thing that's worth mentioning is the good news that a d is only sometimes a j. D here is d.
So, pronouncing Daig as "Dag" would not actually be that far from the (Modern) Irish pronunciation. The tricky bit is the g. What you would want to try to do is to insert a sort of i glide before the g, a very insubstantial i as in fit. Not all the way to two syllables (not "da-ig"). What this does is change the position of your tongue as you pronounce the g, bringing it up to the roof of your mouth. This is heard as a different sound by an Irish speaker.
If you can't manage that, just "Dag" isn't too bad.
Thanks Voord. Trying to pronounce it as Ja-eeg was a travesty to both myself and whatever Irish heritage I have left that hasn't been diluted by my Filipino genes.
DeletePerhaps he'll live longer now, too.
Yes, many thanks for the guidelines! "Dag" works just fine for me.
DeleteAs for the "Explicit" nature of the content, well, that's just the nature of the courtly romance beast, I guess. And you thought they were just joking in Holy Grail with the bit about "and after the spanking, the oral sex"...
You know, it's no surprise to me that Arthur doesn't have an heir - I hear he's only just touching the inside of Guineviere's elbow this year.
ReplyDeleteBut ah, the Pageant. You can accumulate some pretty amazing pageantry glory if you're a beautiful lady in my experience. Almost to the point of outrunning the knights sometimes.
Also, when you were telling that story the poor northern woman was spinning about having to care for her old father, I was sure you were going to say that it was all because some rapscallion cut off his arm in his younger days.
Gah! There's got to be a GM equivalent of l'esprit d'escalier, where you (or a cagey commenter) suggests something you should have included if only you'd thought of it at the time. Ah well. That one-armed knight is probably long-dead by now anyway...yeah, that's it.
DeleteI smell a ret-con...
DeleteMaybe The Hammer could stay at Newtontony Abbey with Sir Aeron? I really like all the reminiscing and sense of connection to the past adventures, and a brand new knight can't tell old war stories. I mean with his hilarious success-failures acting as bait means he'll fit right in with the family!
ReplyDeleteI really don't know what I hope will happen next session. I want more heckling of Guenevere's Agony Aunting of her confusing new Romance rules, more Jade being the best husband/wife pair ever, more quest for the mysterious rabbit nun or more Dave thinking he's going to fail, and then succeeding in a way that is so much worse than failing.
Hey, I kind of like the idea of Daig becoming a household knight at Newton Tony! S'up to Dave, ultimately. I wouldn't blame him if he wanted to cut ties entirely and start fresh.
DeleteOh, and speaking of Daig, his fascinating combination of hideous appearance and undeniable gift for entertaining calls to mind a perfect bit of casting...
http://willhodgkinson.turnpiece.net/images/178/main/042104_shane.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF9dHxbDa5w
Done and done. If he survives next week I'll post him on Obsidian Portal. Eh, I'll post it even if he doesn't survive.
DeleteThat said, I suppose hiring him on at Newton Tony wouldn't be that unusual. Brother Aeron is an APP 7, after all, and at the end of things Tathan was an APP 6.
I will bow to the wishes of the community, because they make our memes, and minigames, and generally have good ideas.
We all love you Dave, and would want you to save if you didn't make your failures so amazing to listen to!
DeleteI think any GM automatically loves a player who confesses to "reverse min-maxing" their character.
"Newton Tony? Why, sir, everyone in these parts knows where that is. Just go that way there, and keep on going. You'll come to a place where everyone has a face that would curdle milk. That'll be Newton Tony. You can't miss it."
DeleteMaybe Sir Daig could somehow earn his place at Newton Tony? I mean, it's Mr. Schimpff's other character's manor - he can impose whatever conditions on himself he likes before he accepts himself as his man. But it's his business, of course.
Daig does make for a change from the run of landed and rich Cymric vassal knights from Logres that the GPC tends to lock PCs into being. Story-wise, he should damn well go on to being one of the greatest heroes in the land, starting off this way.
Sigebryht and Sawel (is Sawel the son of an earlier character?) are also a little different, in their own ways. I get the sense that the players may have been looking to freshen things up a bit.
Perhaps I should listen again to last week's episode for the answer to this, but how exactly did Sigebryht's marriage to Seren come about? In particular, unless it's gone down in his old age, Cynrain is absolutely fanatical in his hatred of Saxons. What is his attitude to his grand-daughter marrying even a self-hating Saxon, especially since - judging from the wiki - his ancestral manor in Salisbury seems to go along with her?
https://a-matter-of-britain.obsidianportal.com/wikis/newton-tony
DeleteI, uh, made a quick change to the wiki page after this utterly golden comment.
You should definitely listen to last week's episode, but the thought of Cynrain approving this marriage was brought up when Sir "I Can Solo This" Jarradan mentioned the thought of Cynrain's granddaughter marrying a Saxon would have him rolling in his grave... before remembering that Cynrain was still alive.
DeleteThe party is kind of a Who's Who of "Who Does Cynrain Hate?". Saxons, Irishmen, Frenchmen and Christians - though I imagine he couldn't hate Sir Sawel that much since he is a devotee of Wulfram's.
Yes, Jade and I did discuss the match of Lady Seren to a Saxon. It was a match made by Duke Morvid, and I'm sure much against Cynrain's wishes. Seren brought with her a dowry of lands acquired from Edern's estate, so they're all outside of Salisbury. I think one of Cynrain's sons is currently master of Pitton, but it could be one of his grandsons. Sheesh, what a complicated family! Jade even made a family tree on one of those websites, and it's NUTS.
Delete