BATTLELUST:
Criticisms

Like the rest of you, I got BattleLust a while ago and looked through it, but then got sidetracked trying to work out some of the details of the muster and kingdom tables. Still, there are a few things I wanted to point out because I haven't seen anyone else say them, Columbia should hear them.

1. The morale rules look like a quick and dirty expansion of Quick Combat from HarnMaster. They still require GM decisions when most of us, I think, want a wargame/miniatures system featuring automatic/randomized response. I would much prefer a morale system something like Advanced Squad Leader with individual morales, battlefield integrity, and individual modifiers for wounds, fatigue, leadership/heros, etc.

2. There is no provision for fatigue. Enough said.

3. The section on Harnic geography and culture is slightly changed from what has been published before (p. 38-45). At first glance it appeared to be just a compilation of stuff pulled from various sources, but that's not really so. The changes may be subtle, but they are there and can be significant if you are working out whole villages, shires or feudal armies. (I hope somebody else is interested in this sort of stuff since I am.)

4. The Feudal Muster Table Example on page 50 is wrong in two ways. First, 33.6 does not round to 37. Second, and more importantly, you should multiply the figure given for scutage by the total number of manors in the fief, not the number paying scutage (that's why the amounts change!).

5. The bit about a two-month campaign season starting in spring and the feudal levy serving (only) during the campaign season does not entirely square with what has been written (especially about Skorkyne) and what happened during the Terran medieval ages.

6. Unarmored shortbowmen (foot) are listed in the tables on page 51 but nowhere else. There are no costs for them, no cards, no nothing, not even in the tribal nations section! (I have given them a cost of 3s/month for the calculations below.)

7. If you total up the value/cost of the knight equivalents and the knights themselves (still on page 51), each KE is worth 26.75 shillings/month but each knight is worth either 35.7525 s/month during peacetime or 38.9625 s/month during wartime. Granted that the KEs have numbers on their side, but it still seems like a raw deal to get KEs instead of knights. And I do not understand what all the (superficial?) detail about knightly retinues is about. It creates a lot of extra work and previous rules have just talked about squires and pages (LH) accompanying knights, OR mention that knights bring some yeomen with them (which is already covered by the separate 1/600 acres rule, right?). If the whole idea here is to generate the total feudal muster, why not just use the KEs as they are, realizing that the numbers generated do not reflect any particular manor but rather the whole fief's average (or sum) muster.

8. Moving to the other side of page 51, the Wartime Muster section states that the formula for yeoman (Acres*LQ/2400) produces one yeoman per four manors. Incorrect. It produces one yeoman per manor and a half (at 1600 acres/manor and an LQ of 1.00). That formula would produce one yeoman per four manors only if manors average 600 acres each. What's going on here? Is it perhaps that only 1/4th of all yeoman (who exist at the rate of 1/600 acres) volunteer for the wartime muster?

9. Consideration of the peasant volunteers suggests that this is so. They show up for the muster at the rate of 1/300 acres which is about 1/6th the rate at which feudal militia occurs (1/household at 50 acres/household). Thus half the knights, 1/4th the yeomen, and 1/6th the peasant militia volunteer for service in the wartime muster. Makes good sense; I just wish Columbia would spell it out more clearly. BTW, unarmored shortbowmen pop up again here too.

10. Finally, last thing on page 51: the aid formula. Like some of the other formulas, I think that there are superfluous or incorrectly used parentheses here. As written it yields just a little more than 1d/acre which is equal to the fief's "net revenue" (except for cities which don't really yield all that much; e.g. Tashal pays just 570d or about the same as a small village does on its acreage). It would seem about right for the 0.25 multiplier to be applied to the acreage (yielding an effective tax rate of 25% on fief "income"?) and taxing households at the full 1d/each, or perhaps even more. Shorkyne cities pay 100 pounds (24,000d) a year in aids/taxes which works out to about 10-20+ d/HH. Surely Harnic cities can and do pay more than 1d/HH in taxes, and to make the effective aid rate about 25% (and thus equal to the rural rate) would require a city aid to be about 3-6d/HH.

Comparison of the Kingdom of Kaldor summary on page 52 with the figures given in the Kaldor module's infeudation list shows several mistakes:

• Kobing has 14 manors not 10.
• Shebra's acreage is 48580 not 48450.
• Gardiren's acreage is 34925 not 34930.
• Kolorn has 16 manors not 10.
• Kolorn's acreage is 32760 not 25290.
• Kolorn's LQ is 1.18 not 1.20.
• Kolorn's holds equal 618 not 462.

At a rate of 5 people/HH this means that there are at least 127,840 people in Kaldor compared the given figure of 105,000 (22% over). A spot check with the old EH figures shows several adjustments (BTW, it gives average HH size as 4.5 people): Tashal goes from 430 acres to "n/a" and from 2467 holds to 2280, and several of the other keeps/castles also change the number of HHs they have. (Tashal's change in HHs makes it given population of 11,400 equal exactly 5 people/HH whereas the population and hold figures for the keep/castle settlements do not match up.) In total, 194 holds were added to the keeps and castles of Kaldor between EH and the Kaldor module.

Before I go on, I want to share a few facts I gleaned from the computerized infeudation list I have created. Out of the 604 total manors and fiefs in Kaldor 228 are managed by bailiffs, 25 by Bailiffs of the Hundred, 24 by Reblenas, and 28 by religious officials, leaving about 299 (49.5%) in secular hands (mostly landed knights?). Like many of you, I have always appreciated the detail in Harn, but never noticed that there exist 6 clans that hold two fiefs each: Claune, Curo, Ercamber, Heberon, Lartyne, and Scaundy. In addition, 10 other clans have very similar names: Kobarn and Kobarney, Walorn and Walorne, Dariune and Darjuin (?), and Dracayne, Dracyne, Dracyme, and Draugyn. (More detail is available if you want it.)

Unfortunately, there also exist several classes of people whom I have difficulty accounting for:

1. The households of the holders of these fiefs. The figures given in Kaldor are for households "on the fief" and has never included the holder of the fief. Assuming that the liege's household is included in this number is possible, but goes against what has been already published and screws up the social breakdown. There are 634 such HHs in Kaldor for 3170 total people.

2. The population living in Forest Hundreds. EH said that there were settlements of less than 10 people (20 for the new listings?) not shown on the map or listed, and that they were already included in those that were listed. Presumably, they were included in the closest settlement or the one in which they were legally resident/paid taxes. Forest hundreds, however, have few settlements in which to find a few extra HHs. Indeed, many have no settlements and NO fiefs for the Bailiffs/Foresters of such hundreds are shown on the map (Melderyn is a semi-exception). How many people this involves depends on what you think forest hundreds (and wilderness areas in general) are like. Kaldor has 18 Forest hundreds and each may have 10 to a few hundred people not listed anywhere else for a total of 200 to a few thousand total.

3. The Royal Guard (6 companies) and the march armies (4 companies each). These 14 companies would equal 280 men at full strength. Some of them would be supporting families while most would probably be single men who could be grouped into HHs (a manus equals 5 men equals an average HH). At the minimum these men represent 56 HHs and probably something like 100 in total given that they are more likely to be at full strength and better paid than average.

   The same problem occurs with the garrisons of the 5 castles (2 companies each) and 24 keeps (1 company each). These 34 companies equate to maybe 200 households or so. Altogether then, standing military units need about 300 HHs and equal 960 men at paper strength (Tashal's town guard can come out of its 2280 HHs).

   I also find it troublesome that these standing forces as well as the considerable forces of the Laranians (especially the fighting orders with their "twice-the-average" number of troops) were left out of the national muster lists (page 52-55).

4. Guildmaster/mining settlements are not included in the Kaldor infeudation. There are about 30-40 mines in Kaldor with about 10-15 HHs each for approximately 450 HHs total (according to EH figures).

To close out this review of BattleLust (which has turned into a critique of Kaldoran demography), two comments. First, Tashal itself is a dynamic place especially during the trading season when hundreds to thousands (?) of people and caravans congregate there. Households and individuals will be constantly coming and going, being started and ending, and it makes little sense to try to keep a precise count. The structure of the city -- it's physical layout and components plus the social and economic structures (franchises, temples, traditions, common knowledge, etc.) -- and its key players are what is important. Thus, it should be and has been treated differently than the rest of the kingdom which is predominantly rural and more staid.

Second, it might make sense for rural households to have a greater average size than urban ones. Medieval terran cities only existed through constant immigration from the countryside, and Harn's urban populace seems to have pretty grim living conditions. As consistent as such a change would be with terran history and culture, it would require careful thinking because of the extra complications it would generate, and Harnic cities aren't all that urban anyway.

After thinking about it for a while, it seems to me that nobility on Harn is getting taxed/levied at twice the rate of their Shorkyni counterparts. What follows is a theoretical basis for a Harnic equivalent of California's Proposition 13.

As it stands now, scutage is L10 per manor on Harn and in Shorkyne. Unfortunately for Harnic nobility not all fiefs are created equal. Shorkyni ones are twice as big and should thus net (roughly) twice the revenue. This is nicely represented by the fact that Shorkyni spears owe service for 90 days and Harnic feudal service averages 45 days. This is if anything a slight break for Harnians since the average 1500 acre manor only owes 2.5 yeoman compared to the 3 commoners (LI, MI, and archer) present in Shorkyni spears.

Shorkyne	1 HC, 1 LC, 1 LI, 1 MI, 1 archer	for 90 days/3000 acres
Harn	1 HC, 1 LC, 2.5 yeomen	for 45 days/1500 acres

Now this all suggests that when feudal dues are rendered in military service there exists a fundamentally similar tax/levy rate. But since the total scutage amounts are the same, it means that the effective rate for Harnians is double that of the Shorkyni (or double what it would be if service were actually rendered). Thus average scutage on Harn should be L5 or 1200d per manor.

I find it interesting that Columbia has backed off of some of the kind of detail it used to provide. Gone are villages held by reeves and mining settlements held directly from the king. In EH7 the infeudation given clearly calculated the number of days service a knight owed as 1 day per 25 acres (scutable at 12-24d/day). Rural revenue to a lord worked out to an average of 2d/acre whereas urban households yielded 88d yearly. Garrisons are expressed in terms of men-at-arms and common soldiers and sheriffs clearly have more men-at-arms than earls or barons (they're the ones doing the policing, after all).