Armor Advancements Chainmail – 485 (start of game) Real Life: ~900-1150 AD

Head Protection: Mail Coif, supplemented with a round or conical nasal helm. Torso Protection: Mail shirt; can be loose (earlier style) or tight-fitted (later style). Shoulder Protection: No separate shoulder protection exists. Arm Protection: Elbow-length mail sleeves (earlier), or wrist-length mail sleeves, often with mittens (later) Groin protection: Mail shirt hangs low and is divided for riding. Upper Leg protection: No specific protection (earlier), mail chausses (later) Lower Leg protection: No specific protection (earlier), mail chausses (later) Foot Protection: Leather turnshoe or boot (earlier), Mail sabaton (later)

Reinforced Chainmail w/closed helm – approx.. 510 Real Life: ~1200-1300 AD

Head Protection: Mail coif, topped with a rounded small helm and often covered with a closed helm. Torso Protection: Mail shirt, tight-fitted. Shoulder Protection: No separate shoulder protection (early), rare Ailettes exist (late) Arm Protection: wrist-length mail sleeves, often with mittens. Plate elbow cops are added very late in period. Groin protection: Mail shirt hangs low and is divided for riding. Upper Leg protection: Mail chausses, with plate knee cops added late in period. Lower Leg protection: Mail chausses, with rare “gutter” – style greaves added late in period. Foot Protection: Mail sabatons.

Partial Plate (aka Transitional Plate) – approx.. 531 Real Life: ~1325-1400

Probably the time of widest equipment variety, with lots of regional variation. Mail hauberks are still worn under.

Head Protection: Closed-face helm with slit oculars, often with a removable visor Torso Protection: Either simple breastplate or Brigandine Cuirass Shoulder Protection: Mail undershirt, or simple spaulders Arm Protection: Rerebrace, simple elbow cops with small fan plates, enclosed arm cannons of plate or splinted leather Groin protection: Mail shirt or Brigandine extends to cover groin Upper Leg protection: Unclosed plate cuisses or brigandine, plus simple (up to 3-lame) knee cops with small fan plates Lower Leg protection: Enclosed greaves, either from plate or brigandine or splinted leather Foot Protection: Leather footwear or plate sabatons.

Full Plate – 548 – 550 Real Life: ~1420-1480

Head Protection: Generally a closed-face, tighter-fitting helm with detachable visor Torso Protection: Smooth 2-piece Cuirass with high waist. Arming Doublet with mail gussets is worn underneath. Shoulder Protection: Spaulders with Besegews (early) or simple Pauldrons without internal articulation Arm Protection: Rerebrace and arm cannons. Interior elbow protection becomes much more complex and protective Groin protection: Faulds extend from waist of cuirass, can be extended with tassets. Mail skirt is worn underneath. Upper Leg protection: Cuisses with doors, more complex (3-5 lame) knee cops (true poleyns) Lower Leg protection: Enclosed plate greaves Foot Protection: Plate sabatons Gothic Plate – approx.. 558 – end of Arthur. Real Life: ~1490-1540

Design Note: This is essentially the same as full plate, but it has a greater degree of fluting to guide weapons off the surface, and a greater degree of articulation in places, particularly the shoulder. The primary differences between this and full plate is the fluting, the lames build into the pauldron (“great pauldrons”), the very thin padding worn underneath, and the near- universal lack of mail as a protective component.

Head Protection: Complex close helm, often with folds (such as bellowing) to increase its effective protection. Torso Protection: High-waisted 2-piece cuirass with fluting, cut inwards further at the shoulders Shoulder Protection: Complex and highly-articulate great pauldrons Arm Protection: Closed rerebraces, arm cannons, with complex couters at the elbows. Groin protection: Faulds and tassets, with no mail. Sometimes a codpiece is worn, or the groin is open for easier riding. Upper Leg protection: Cuisses with significant doors, sometimes with upper-thigh articulation, plus poleyns. Lower Leg protection: Enclosed greaves Foot Protection: Extra-articulate plate sabatons. CLOTHING

UTHER Period: 485 to ~500

Men and women both wore long tunics or tunic-like garments. A woman’s tunic could approach gown-length. Men wore trousers under their tunics (this is a major difference from eastern European and Roman fashions). The lower section of trousers was often wrapped in straps of cloth, leather, or even straw to protect the leg and trouser from damage. Tunics would get longer the less you worked in the fields; farmers wore quite short tunics. Shoulder capes closed with a brooch were common to men and women of all classes and occupations. Footwear was made of one or two pieces of stout cloth or leather, folded, then stitched. Woolen socks were extremely common. Headgear was less common than it was later-on. Women would wear more headgear “at home” than men, and women’s headgear would be relatively simple; a shawl held on with a headband, for example. Simple pocket hats were worn by men of the lower classes, merchants and rich men wore either no headgear or wore a cap of increasing stitch complexity in relation to their wealth. The difference in “rich vs poor” was largely in the materials used (more linen = richer), the quality of the fabric (higher thread count = richer), and the quantity of embroidery in the fabric.

BOY KING Period ~510 to ~520

CONQUEST Period

ROMANCE Period

TOURNAMENT Period

GRAIL QUEST Period

TWILIGHT Period

HORSES

An important note is that the difference between Rouncies and Chargers (and to a lesser extent, Coursers) isn’t always their breed, but their qualities. A horse of “Breed A” which is a pretty calm and which can run for an unusually long time is a Courser, while another Horse of “Breed A” which is slightly stronger and very angry could be a Charger. Your Manor

Each Manor, unless very unusual, will include all of the following:

YOUR HALL: This is a fine house for the knight and his family. What sets it apart is the “great hall”, a large room capable of seating and feeding between 50 and 100 people. The knight’s squire and and a few of the manor’s chief servants (baliff, steward, head cook) generally live in the hall along with the knight and his family. Other servants live in the buildings in which they work, or in a few very immediately-accessible outbuildings. YOUR LANDS: Your lands are divided into Manorial Land, Settlements, Plow Land, Fallow Land, and Wasteland.

MANORIAL LAND: This is land which you own directly, and is divided into strips of land nearby or adjacent to the strips of plowland which are worked by your peasants. The land is divided into strips in this way because it increases community cooperation and cohesion. Some small sections of land may be wooded, but large expanses of woods are generally the province of higher nobles; wooded terrain mostly serves to break up sections of land, or to lie along waterways.

SETTLEMENTS: Your manor includes a Village, and three Hamlets The Village: The town is the local market where craftsmen (smiths, carpenters, cooper, etc) can be found, and where itinerant peddlers meet about once a week to set up a market. There are a few nice houses for richer famers here, but most buildings are peasant shacks and huts. The Village is almost always located near (within a ~15 minute walk) of the Hall, if not immediately adjacent. The total population is between 150 and 200, including the residents of the Hall. The Village always includes at least one Church. The Church is a small, poor building, though aside from your Hall it is likely the largest building around. The priest is almost always illiterate. The Church is sometimes called the “Baptistry”, as baptisms, marriages, and funerals are performed here. If there is a graveyard, it is behind the church, and no peasants will build nearby. The Hamlets There are three Hamlets, each about 1 mile away from the Town. Each has roughly 100 residents, who are all farmers. They come to the town for church , festivals, and to work their share for you. Each hamlet might have a dilapidated shrine (a church with no priest), but the other buildings are entirely huts, sheds, and storage buildings. The Mills: Somewhere near the Town there is a large mill on a waterway. The largest mill on your land is directly owned by you; all townsmen must grind their grain there and you collect a percentage. Each village has 1 or 2 smaller mills; you collect a tax on this service.

PLOW LANDS: Plow lands are usually crowded into the quarter-mile around a village or town; much more distance away than that and the work day becomes too short once you account for bringing beasts of burden to the work site. Most fields grow barely, which makes the bread and ale of daily life. Oats are a secondary crop; wheat is a luxury crop.

FALLOW LANDS: Half the fields are plowed each year. The other half are left fallow and used to graze livestock.

WASTELANDS: Between the plowed fields of each village, there are lands which are not cultivated (roughly half a mile across, given the 1 mile distance between villages and a quarter-mile of cultivated land). These instead supply wood, occasional wild fruit, and are the place where pigs eat. Hunting is not allowed to the peasants, though trapping small game (coneys and birds) is almost always overlooked by the wise landowner. Knights may hunt in their own lands, but may not take large game even in un-owned land, as unless it is assigned to a vassal, all land is assumed to be Royally-owned. As a practical matter, nobody will take umbrage with knightly persons on a journey who take the very occasional deer in wildlands.

ANIMALS: Each manor has a breeding herd of about 10 horses (producing new Chargers is rare and often a Knight must ask his lord for a Charger) in additional to the 5 working horses a knight’s retinue requires. There are also about 20 cattle, 20 sheep, and 36 pigs on a manor at a given time (a manor slaughters about 3 cattle, 6 sheep, and 30 pigs each year). The County

The ideal County distribution is described below. Note that this is the ideal, very often there are less villages than are required. It is also important to recall that not every village is owned by a Knight. The majority of villages are owned by Lords, such as Earl Roderick.

It requires roughly 6 Villages to support a normal Town (and since each Manor is based on a Village, thusly, there is a Town or equivalent for every 6 Manors). It takes roughly 6 Towns to support a Large Town (or equivalent – such as a Castle), and 6 Large Towns to support a city (such as Sarum). Large Towns and Cities will also have about 6 villages immediately nearby solely to support them.

In theory, there are roughly 20 miles between two Cities, producing an ideal road-based travel experience as follows:

Geography constrains this theory badly, however. The real upshot is that you should expect to pass a village roughly every mile of populated road, and come across large towns once or twice a day. Basic market town (T) are not generally shown on County-scale maps; a town shown on a map (Tilshead, Wilton, etc) is always a Large Town unless specifically noted. Castles can stand in for either large or small towns, situationally-depending. Finally, the small cart paths and minor roads which connect villages to Towns are also not described on maps; only major roads (Roman roads, usually) will show up. Within a mile or so of a Roman Road, there will be many small unmarked branches which will take one to a Market Town, and paths from there which may lead to Villages.