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When you are running your manor, you’ll be making a series of dice rolls. You’ll be rolling to see how many crops you plant or harvest. You roll to exploit your resources: cutting down trees and quarrying stone. You’ll roll to turn those extracted materials into structures like castles, bridges, and churches.

When you roll well and win successes, your manor is doing well. You are rewarded with more materials and better productivity.

When you roll poorly and fail, you don’t generate materials and you don’t produce. And to keep the manor system from being just a game of numbers, we ask ourselves why? What caused the loss of production that season? And we make up some fiction to explain the cause of the failure. You lost crops because there was a rash of crows that ravaged your fields or you couldn’t make progress on building the keep because of the terrible weather that kept everyone indoors.

We codify these explanations as something called a hardship. A hardship might be famine, disease, a rash of crows, tumultuous weather, something that is making life on your manor hard and miserable.

You generate a hardship when:

• You fail a roll.
• You push your tenants: either by asking for more week work or demand higher rents.
• You do not generate enough food to feed a population your are responsible for.

Hardships are a subtype of aspect: like a condition or injury. They are ranked and generally they will need to be endured the next time that population makes a roll. They sound like bad things, right? Well, they are bad things. Enduring hardships penalizes your dice rolls, leading to more failures, leading to worse hardships. But at the same time, hardships are good things in disguise. These are FATE mechanics. Aspects that work against you earn your manor Ardor points! Hardships are Ardor factories. Each time you endure a hardship, that’s an Ardor point you can use to invoke something later.

Besides being endured, hardships may also be compelled. This is one way in which we can transition from the manor system rules into the core role-playing rules. You have a hardship on the table: let’s say it’s a Terrible sickness that is rapidly spreading amongst your tenants. The GM can pay you an Ardor and compel the hardship to create an issue. The issue is some matter that has to be solved through role-playing; at the very least a conflict should be played out to resolve it. In this case, let’s say the GM compels the Terrible sickness hardship to create an issue in which neighboring merchants are reluctant to come to your town for a trade fair because they are fearful of catching the sickness. The protagonists must now convince the merchants to attend. Once the issue is resolved, the hardship goes away and we may return to normal manor rules play.

To summarize:

• Hardships are created as the explanation for failed rolls or inadequate food supplies.
• Hardships are endured, making future rolls harder. This earns you Ardor.
• Hardships may be compelled in order to create adventure hooks for role-playing sessions. This also earns you Ardor.

Tags: manor system

In Chronica Feudalis, you pick three mentors – three experts who help to define your protagonist. Likewise, when establishing a new manor, you will pick a selection of masters. Masters help to define what part of manor business you are good at. Master quarryman, master lumberers, and master miners can help you win resources. Master masons, master carpenters, and master smiths can help you build structures and equipment. A reeve is a master husband who manages the manor’s demesne. Other master’s can give your manor access to take on some more flavorful ventures: beekeeping and ale brewing, for example.

Each master comes with a special kind of aspect called a profession. A profession is freely defined like an aspect but is trained and advanced like a skill. You can take a master as one of your mentors during character creation. Each master trains you in two skills and one profession, which you add in addition to your standard three aspects at a starting rank of d6. With a d6 profession, you are an apprentice. Advancing it to a d8 makes you a journeyman and increasing it to a d10 would make you a master yourself. You can include your level of expertise in the profession’s description (Apprentice smith or Journeyman stone-cutter) or define them in as flavorful manner as you would your an aspect (Clumsy carpenter or Perfectionist mason).

The professions of resident masters are aspects that can be invoked in the endeavors of a manor. Invoke your reeve’s husbandry profession to help bring in a good harvest. Invoke you master mason’s profession to build that stone bridge faster and better. Professions not only represent the expertise of that one master, but indicate the ability of his apprentices and laborers in the village who have trained and work under him.

You’ll only have a limited number of masters with a new manor (maybe two or three), so you’ll need to choose carefully among the available choices and pick which of many endeavors you want your manor to excel at. As play goes on, you can woe additional masters through role-playing to join your village and expand your abilities.

Tags: manor system

Let’s start delving into some of the proposed mechanics for the manor system. The first step is step-dice. We’ll use the various die types – d4, d6, d8, d10, and 12 – to rank a few key facets of manors.

Holding size:

• d4 is a virgate of land, typical to a single peasant family
• d6 is a hide of land, the very minimum to support a lord and his immediate family.
• d8 is a vill. It’s the typical amount of land given to a knight as a fee for his services.
• d10 is a parish. Basically a larger version of a vill and a respectable size for a single manor.
• d12 is a hundred. A division of a county/shire. Generally only bishops and earls would hold this much continuous land.

If you have four of one particular rank of land, they can be combined together to form the next rank up. So four d4 vigrates makes a hide, four hides make a vill and so forth.

Population:

• d4 is a family – husband and wife, maybe a sibling or parent or two who lives with them and a few children.
• d6 is a large extended family or a group of neighbors.
• d8 is a small village worth of people.
• d10 is a largish village of people.
• d12 is the resident population of a town.

Like holding size, each rank is made up of four of the rank below it.

Tools:

Step-dice will also be used to rank the tools available to the manor. This works basically as a technology level. Each manor starts with d4 tools, but various implements will increase the rank by one step. These implements are: oxen (or work horses), a forge, and a mill.

Holding size is effectively a cap on how much population can work on the land. Various manor endeavors are resolved by rolling the die appropriate for the population working on the endeavor and including the tool die in the pool. So just like core CF resolution, but with population replacing skill. Various aspects can then be invoked to enhance your chances or endured to make things tough.

Tags: manor system

These are various elements of feudal and manor life that I’m interested in having some level of representation of in the system.

• The difference between free peasants and villeins. The first pays rent to the lord in goods, the second pays in work on the lord’s demesne.
• The manor calendar: plowing, sowing of spring crops, harvesting, more plowing, sowing fall crops, winter.
• Survival and condition of the villagers. Are harvests good enough to feed everyone?
• Who gets the surplus in the case of a good harvest?
• Lords being able to demand higher rents at the cost of peasants’ condition, or forgive rents to improve peasants’ condition.
• Employing laborers and experts. Quarrying, lumbering, and mining. Masons, carpenters, and smiths.
• The time and resources it takes to build important structures like castles and cathedrals.
• Being able to build structures out of different materials. Wood vs. stone, cost vs. strength.
• The size of your retinue is based on the number of people you can feed by the income of your holdings.
• Providing equipment for men-at-arms and knights.
• Granting holdings to vassals in exchange for their loyalty.
• Inheritance, marriage, and loyalty as means to gain land.
• Conquering and adventuring as a means to gain land.
• Battle on the open field as well as siege warfare.
• Generational play: former characters become mentors for future characters. Holdings and status are passed down.

Now the issue is how to incorporate all of those elements (and I am sure there are more) into a clean, elegant system.

Tags: manor system

These are the intentions and desires that I think are important goals for the design of the Chronica Feudalis Manor System.

1. Provide a fun, engaging set of rules to enhance strategic-level play of the core Chronica Feudalis system.
2. The system should feed into role-playing, providing story seeds and inform how various people are faring.
3. The system should be fed by role-playing. The rewards of personal quests should affect manor play.
4. Explore facets of feudal society in a tactile way: lord and vassal relationships, treatment of peasants.
5. Continued use of design elements from core Chronica Feudalis: step-dice and aspects especially.
6. Avoid using charts. The system should be procedural and performed with minimum references to the book.

What other high-level concepts do you feel are necessary in a strategic, resource-management system such as this?

Tags: manor system

I’m hard at work ironing out the mechanics and translating more scraps of Middle English scribbles for the as-of-yet untitled first supplement for Chronica Feudalis. This book will detail rules for ruling lands and people – a knight’s fiefdom, a monastery’s holdings, an earl’s county – and add themes of power and responsibility in a very tactile way to a CF campaign.

What our intrepid cellarer and brothers Adam, James, and William left us with is a very incomplete and contradictory set of notes for mechanics that resolve peasant husbandry, the building of cathedrals and castles, warfare, and leaving your holdings to your inheritors. This is not to say that they were not prolific: there are plenty of words. They paint a fairly clear picture of their intentions and the results, but the methods by which they implement this leave me with many questions. And the answers appear to have been lost to time.

So, as with Chronica Feudalis itself, I am being quite liberal with my translation and making up answers as I go along. This process – that is, what I am contributing to the design of the manor system – I will journal here. Feel free to read along and even comment and participate if you so desire. I will tag these posts with the acronym CFMS (which stands for Chronica Feudalis Manor System) until I devise a title for the new book.

Tags: manor system