Pendragon 1st Edition as a Supplement for Runequest 2nd Edition - Adjustments

When I made an analysis of Pendragon 1^st Edition as a sort of domain-level sourcebook for Runequest 2^nd Edition, I assumed that each hide had to be producing £2 to equally split it between landlord (the knight or professional warrior) and the tenant. Since there was a floor to the amount a tenant could be earning before they couldn’t even afford gruel and beer around 500L. As gruel and beer were sold in Pavis for 2c each and should make a profit of 50% and so cost a household 1c to make each. And therefore, £1 was 500L.

But what I hadn’t accounted for was the lands worked in Pendragon would be the private demesne of the lord, with the tenants working their own strips of land as well independent of the lord’s hides and so the £1 per hide was not being split. And the single mention in the money section that a family eats about £1 in food per year.

This threw out the calculations, but I still had the floor since a family getting 50% of the produce in the Orlanthi system, would need around 500L. If that’s 50% of a hide, I was back to £1 being 1000L.

But a peasant family eats 2 ½ d every week and eats well. The amount eaten is either 10L (if 500L) or 20L (if 1000) depending on which value, because in Pendragon 1^st Edition, £1 is equal to 125d (1d equalling 4L or 8L respectively). 2 ½ d every week comes 42 x 10 or 42 x 20, 420L or 840L.

Both don’t work with £1 being a nice round number like because they can’t take into account the 20% of taxes paid to the Earth/Air temple, which match well to Church/Liege taxes and fees and pushes then to 504L and 1008L.

But, 2 1/2d x 52 gets 130d, which is 5d over £1. Meaning there’s some extra money for food coming in that Pendragon is not accounted for and we can simply ignore the same for RQ. Maybe Easter/Sacred Time has a collective pooling of resources from the rich to the poor or something.

Household Knights sustain themselves on £1 as unmarried warriors living on their lord’s largess. The price list lists 125d (£1) for staples for peasants and another £1 as annual cost of living for Peasants. It seems obvious these are the same as no where else does a Knight have to buy their own staples unless buying more than what their estates give them.

Going back to the Pavis food price lists, and assuming a family of farmers can make the food and drink at half cost, 6c is a Cheap Wholesome Meal and a Mug of Ale is 4c, total of 10c per member per day. Half that, is 5c per family member for 7 days, to get us 17.5L, or just enough to be covered by 20L with 2.5L summed up for feasts or buying meat animals. Which means 2 1/2d is 8L and so £1 is 1000L.

A farming family in Glorantha makes 1000L in a year, eats or trades 840L (105 being used for purchasing) and pays 160L in tax.

We must reevaluate how each culture handles land ownership and their warrior class. This supplants the specifics in the previous blogpost.

Now an Ordinary Knight requires £2 per year to maintain himself and his family for his station. That’s still 2000L per year.

Western Culture works exactly like the default culture of Pendragon, Prince Valient- esque. The lord has his fields, the peasants have theirs and work his as well.

Orlanthi Culture needs to split the farmland up more. Since each knight is getting only 50% for each hide. But fits more

An adventurer in Orlanthi culture can farm their own land of 1 hide and get £1/1000L per year from it, but they can only train for a maximum of 2 hours a day, 4 hours daily during Dark and Storm Seasons. These people are called Carls, and if they are called to fight, they fight as Poor Knights. Carls do not have a penalty to Horse Survival Rolls but also only own 1 horse, if they own more they start rolling with a penalty for being Poor Knights.

As Orlanthi need twice as many Hides or (x2 -1 Hides if also self-farming) to support themselves as a knight, each Tenant family must be working half a hide or 40-60 acres on their own. This is reasoned by the notion in pendragon 1^st Edition that a Landed Knight lives on a simple homestead with two hides and 1 hide supports 1 family. So, there are probably two other peasant in the Western tradition farming their own two hides and coming to do the extra labour. But for Orlanthi, the ownership of all four are split between the lord and the tenants.

Any odd Hydes or Hyrds (Pendragon 1^st Edition) must be passed off to Carls, who do count towards the minimum number of Knights for higher ranks.

So, each Hide split with a tenant also produces 1 Footman/Man At Arms free of charge. But Orlanthi must pay for any extra. Those coming out of the Cottars class, who form the basic labour pool for the Carls and landed warriors. This does incentivise the Orlanthi to either raid to obtain the £s needed to maintain extra warriors like Humakti and warbands of Household Knights, or to invest into more rules-ethereal money-generating ventures that produce Goods and Tolls.

Praxian Culture is fine as it is, if a little one note for how much they care about their herds.

Pelorian Culture, I wrote that the landlords own all the land and hand it out to the Knights and farmers as non-hereditary grants or pay them wages. This statement means that each landlord must have a lot of land available and a lot of wealth. Based on what I wrote before, each rank needs twice the minimum requirements of wealth to count. But half goes to the peasants, so it is immaterial except for advancement/bookkeeping purposes.