House Creation Rules (Avalon)

Unlike character creation, house creation is a cooperative process in which each player has equal say about the salient features pertaining to the house. House creation involves making important decisions, rolling dice, and applying the results. Most importantly, you and your fellow players will work together to attach stories to mechanical developments in the house creation process. You will use the broad descriptions and details generated from these decisions and transform them into a living, breathing house with a history, future, and interesting family to engender the same sorts of investment that players have for their particular characters.

Step One: The Realm
Avalon is a vast land, having nearly every type of terrain and climate imaginable. From the arid plains of the Sarhep Marches to the idyllic grasslands of the Avalonian Heartlands, people carve out their homes in a variety of regions, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Step Two: Starting Resources
As much as a house is defined by its place in the Kingdom of Avalon, its history, deeds, and alliances, a house is essentially a collection of seven resources. Each resource, like a character’s abilities, describes aspects of your family’s holdings, such as the size of your Lands, your house’s Status, Wealth, and so on. For each resource, roll 7d6 and sum the results. Then find your realm on the Starting Realm table, and apply the modifiers as shown to each of your resources.

Defense
Defense describes fortifications, castles, keeps, towers, and other structures that serve to protect your holdings. Defense also describes the presence and quality of roads, representing the ability to move troops and supplies to threatened areas.

Influence
Influence describes your presence in Avalon, how other houses see you, and the notoriety attached to your name. A high Influence resource typically describes one of the great houses or the royal family, while a low Influence resource would describe a house of little consequence, small and largely unknown beyond the lands of their liege.

Lands
Land resources describe the size of your House’s holdings and the extent of their influence over their region. A high score describes a house that controls an enormous stretch of terrain, while a small score might represent control over a small town.

Law
Law encompasses two things: the extent to which the smallfolk respect and fear you and the threat of bandits, brigands, raiders, and other external and internal threats. Law is something your family must maintain, and if you don’t invest in keeping your realm safe, it could fall into chaos.

Population
Population addresses the sheer number of people living in the lands you control. The more people there are, the more mouths you have to feed. However, the more people there are, the more your lands produce. This abstract value describes the quantity of folks that live under your rule.

Power
Power describes your house’s military strength, the ability to muster troops and rouse banners sworn to you. Houses with low scores have few soldiers and no banners, while those with high scores may have a dozen or more banners and can rouse an entire region.

Wealth
Wealth covers everything from coin to cattle and everything in between. It represents your involvement and success in trade, your ability to fund improvements in your domain, hire mercenaries, and more.

Initial Modifications
Once the starting values for each resource are determined, each player gets to modify the values by rolling 1d6 and adding it to a resource of their choice. The immediate result is that larger groups of players have slightly more powerful houses because they have the benefit of more signature characters. Players may modify any resource they like, but no resource can benefit from more than two extra rolls.

Step Three: House History
The next step is to determine your house’s historical events, which is done by choosing or rolling for your First Founding as shown on the First Founding table. When your house was founded determines the number of historical events that can influence the final shape your house takes at the start of the game. Older houses have more historical events, while younger houses have fewer.

Each house has a history, a chronicle of deeds and crimes that shape its identity. Great deeds might elevate a house to greater heights, while scandal and tragedy can shatter a house’s foundation, forcing it to fall into obscurity. Historical events provide important developments in your family’s history, either adding to your fortunes or diminishing them. Each event modifies your resources, increasing or decreasing them by the indicated value. Roll 3d6 once for each historical event and compare the result to the Historical Events table. Record them in the order that you rolled them. Historical events can reduce a resource to 0 but no lower. The first historical event rolled describes the circumstances of your house’s origins, defining what sort of event elevated your family to nobility.

Step Four: Holdings
With your resources generated, it’s time to define your holdings. In a way, holdings are like investments in that you use your resources to select specific elements in the form of castles, towers, cities, towns, soldiers, mines, and more. When you define your holdings, you do not reduce the resource; instead, allocate those points to a specific expression of that resource. You don’t need to allocate all of your resources and may keep some in reserve to make other investments as your resources grow from renown or coin earned by the player characters or from House Fortunes. If your resources are later reduced, such as by a blight sweeping through your crops or losing a battle, you may lose your investment. Similarly, if an investment is destroyed, such as having an enemy burn your castle to the ground, you lose the resources you invested in that particular holding.

Influence Holdings
Influence represents your social power, your presence in your region and throughout all of Avalon. The primary investment for Influence is in heirs, the children of the house’s head. Heirs are valuable in that they extend the will and presence of the patriarch, but they also provide means to improving the house’s standing through deeds and marriage. Alternatively, you can reserve Influence to use as an expendable resource. You can reduce your family’s Influence to modify the outcomes of your House Fortunes roll. For every 5 points of Influence you spend, you can add 1d6 to your House Fortunes roll. Influence also establishes the highest Status attained by any member of the household. This character is always the head of the house (Lord or Lady). Limits on Status follow.

If reducing your Influence would lower the maximum Status, such characters suffer disadvantage on social rolls with Avalonian nobility until they raise their Influence back to its original level or higher. Your character can also expand your family’s Influence, expending 2 points of the Influence resource to gain advantage on any tests related to intrigues. Again, such expenditures reduce your family’s Influence. Resolve diminishing Influence as described earlier in the paragraph.

Land Holdings
Lands describe the terrain and extent of your actual holdings. Lands may be forests, lakes, hills, mountains, coastlines, and more, all based on where your house is situated and the terrain of your realm. Each Land investment is called a domain. Each domain is roughly a league (3 miles). Your domains reflect only those lands that are under your direct control and not under the control of your banners, sworn knights, and others in your service. Domains each have two components, features and terrain. A feature is something found on that land such as a town, river, woods, or coastline. A domain can have as many features as you’d like to invest. A domain without a feature is barren, being a desert, scrubland, or waste depending on the realm. Terrain specifically describes the lay of land, being mountainous, hilly, flat, or sunken. A domain must have terrain and may only have one type of terrain, even if it has elements of other terrain types.

Law Holdings
Unlike other resources, Law does not have holdings for investment. Instead, your Law resource describes the extent of your authority over your lands, specifically as it applies to drawing resources from your lands with minimal loss due to crime, banditry, and villainy. Maintaining a high Law resource helps reduce waste and loss, generating the full potential of Wealth and allowing your Population to grow. But if you let Law lapse, you derive less and less of your resources, and your Population growth shrinks until it can actually diminish. From the following, find your modifier to your House Fortunes roll.

Population Holdings
Like Law, you do not invest Population Holdings. Instead, your Population describes the density of people that live on your lands. The greater your Population, the more people occupy your lands. Population, again like Law, modifies the outcome of your House Fortunes; however, more people bring more opportunities for mishaps. Similarly, fewer people mean greater chances for trouble to brew in remote corners of your lands. From the following, find your modifier to your House Fortunes roll.

Power Holdings
From your Power resource, you derive your family’s military might, its sworn swords, knights, guardsmen, and banners that fight on your behalf. You can invest Power into banners, ships, or units. You do not have to invest all of your Power and can keep some or much of it in reserve to deal with Household Fortunes as they crop up.

Banner Houses
Banner houses are noble families and landed knights that have sworn vows of service and loyalty to your house in exchange for your house’s protection, support, and aid in times of trouble. While promises bind the banner house to your own, such vows can be tested when personal ambitions get in the way of honor and duty. Moreover, smaller houses often come to envy the power and influence of the larger houses to whom they are sworn, and betrayals, while uncommon since the consequences can be so severe, can and do occur

The relationship between you and your vassal is much the same as your relationship between you and your liege, meaning that as you are sworn to provide military and financial support to your lord, so, too, is your banner house. The benefit of a banner house is that they provide you with income each month and may be called to lend their military strength to your own. However, they are not blindly obedient, and though they are sworn to you, their interests usually come first. Furthermore, if you want to keep the loyalty of a banner house, you must also support them and their conflicts, even if doing so would interfere with your own plans.

Your banner house (or houses) begins loyal to your family, and their dispositions start at Friendly. As with all Narrator characters, developments in the campaign, you and your family’s choices, and reputation can improve or worsen a banner house’s disposition toward you. Should a banner’s disposition ever fall to Hostile, you lose them and the points you invested into this house

Creating Banner Houses
You create banner houses much in the same way as you create your own house, following the same procedures with the following exceptions:
 * Realm: The banner house’s realm must be the same as your own.
 * Starting Resources: Roll 5 dice for each resource instead of 7. Your banner house’s starting Influence cannot exceed your own.
 * First Founding: Your banner house’s first founding must be one “era” more recent than your house’s first founding.
 * House Fortunes: Your banner house does not roll for House Fortunes. Instead, your House Fortunes can modify your banner houses.

Your first banner house costs 20 power, 10 power for the second, and 5 for each additional house.

Units
Units are the most common investment for noble houses. They reflect the standing armies that support the household and can be called up to defend the family’s lands at a moment’s notice. Each unit consists of 100 men, 20 men and horses, or 5 warships.

Training
A unit’s level of training determines the cost of the investment. Training reflects experience, the skill of their masters-at-arms, and their time on the battlefield. Lesser-trained units are cheap but are less reliable and lack the durability of experienced units. Each level of training includes a base Discipline. This starting level of Discipline determines the troop type and sets the DC of Intimidation or Diplomacy checks to control these troops on the battlefield. The unit’s type modifies its Discipline (see Type). Units have all the same attributes and skills as characters. The base modifier for each skill is +2. Most of these attributes and skills never come into play in battle, so there’s no need to record them. The unit’s training determines the amount of Experience attached to each unit to improve its modifiers. To raise an ability modifier one point, it costs 20 Experience. The unit’s type determines which abilities can be improved with Experience.


 * Green: Green troops are soldiers with little or no experience on the battlefield and may include extremely old veterans well past their primes. Green troops are raw recruits, fresh-faced boys, smallfolk levies, or old men called out of retirement.
 * Trained: Being professional soldiers, trained troops have spent some time with masters-at-arms and received sufficient instruction to fight competently on the battlefield. Trained troops include household soldiers, garrisons, hedge knights, sworn swords, and the like.
 * Veteran: Veteran units are trained units that have seen extensive action. Battle-scarred and competent, they are reliable and a valued component of any fighting force. These troops may include established mercenary companies, experienced rangers, anointed knights, and so on.
 * Elite: Exceptionally rare and expensive, elite units have the benefit of extensive training, vast experience, and an identity that invokes fear in those who must face them

Type
Each unit has a broadly defined type, a role it plays in battle. Type describes how the unit operates and describes the abilities you can improve with the unit’s Experience. In addition, type also modifies a unit’s Discipline, increasing or reducing the Difficulty to control the unit in battle. For example, cavalry modifies Discipline by –3, so trained cavalry would have a DC 12 Discipline (15–3 = 3). After all modifications from type, the unit’s final Discipline cannot be lower than Automatic.

Most units have just one type, but it’s possible to build units with two or more types. Obviously, units with multiple types are more valuable and, thus, more expensive. A unit may spend its upgrades on any abilities available to all types. Discipline modifiers are cumulative. So green (base 17) cavalry (–3) raiders (+6) would have a Hard (20) Discipline test.

Mercenaries
Mercenaries are soldiers hired to wage war, protect a fortification or community, or escort troops. While mercenary units are better trained, they are more expensive to field and can be unreliable in larger engagements. Mercenaries tend to fight better when they outnumber their foes.

Special: Mercenaries are cheap to field in terms of Power, but they cost you in Wealth. Each unit of a particular training as shown on the following chart reduces your Wealth. Thus, if you field two green units, reduce your Wealth by –2.

Peasants
Peasant levies are the rabble rounded up from your hamlets and towns. Each unit of Peasant Levies you field reduces your Population resource by –2.

Wealth Holdings
Wealth describes your family’s soluble resources, explaining how they generate their income. You can invest Wealth into specific holdings, which grant specific benefits, or keep it free to spend in other areas as needed. It’s often best to keep some of your Wealth free for problems that might crop up during gameplay.

Step Five: The Household
The final step in house creation is describing the household, those individuals who constitute the most important family members and retainers that make up the noble house. Most important are the lord and lady, but there are also the heirs, the court mage and cleric (if you have them), master-at-arms, castellan, steward, and anyone else who is more than just a common servant. Some of the characters may be player characters under your group’s control, while the rest are NPCs.

Lord
The lord (or lady if you like) is the most important character your group will define. As this is your house, the particulars of the lord’s life and his deeds are up to you. When defining this character, carefully consider your house’s history and the political developments on the broader scale.

Lady
The lady, the wife and mother, is often an equally important part of the household. While she must defer to the lord in much of Avalon, she is still a valued advisor, instructor, and agent on behalf of the house.

Heirs
Most houses have at least one offspring, one heir to carry the line forward. If you invested your Influence in at least one heir, this character must be defined. In most cases, players take the roles of the house’s heirs but not always—and usually not all of the heirs, either.

Retainers, Servants & Household Knights
The remaining characters in your house can be defined, or they can be left vague for the DM to establish in the unfolding story. Generally, you should at least name the most important servants in your house. Again, some of these characters may be played by the players, and so more detail arises during the standard methods of character creation. Common retainers follow:

Castellan
An individual who oversees the defense of the house. Generally, a castellan only serves when the lord is away or otherwise unable to see to this task himself

Steward
An individual who cares for the family’s financial concerns. Often, a court mage handles this business.

Court Mage
Instructor, and advisor, the court mage is a valued member of the lord’s court. You only have a court mage if you invest in one.

Cleric
Intermediaries between the mortal world and the distant planes of the gods, clerics act as spiritual advisors and mentors. You only have a cleric if you invested in a temple.

Master-at-Arms
The individual who oversees the household guard. Generally, this role exists only if your family invested in a Garrison. The master commands any household guards and your garrison. A master-at-arms also often instructs the boys and young men of the household in fighting and leads weapons drills.

Master-of-Horse
The individual in charge of the care, training, and acquisition of steeds. This master commands a number of stableboys and grooms.

Master-of-the-Hunt
An individual who oversees hunting expeditions. Sometimes filled by the same individual who maintains the hounds.

Kennelmaster
The person who trains, cares for, and feeds the hounds.

Vassal Knights
Swords sworn to the lord. These may be hedge knights, but they can also be landed knights who have come to serve the lord and advance their own renown.

Others
Servants, blacksmiths, heralds, pages, squires, cooks, scullions, messengers, scouts, wards, children of servants, and more round out your household. Most of these characters are “invisible” and work behind the scenes to ensure your household functions.