Should noble houses within the same nation be distinctive or blend together?

[Scalenex]

I have been watching Game of Thrones lore videos which go over all the distinctive houses.

I do not like everything GoT does, and I know they are not the only source of fantasy inspiration in town.

But I do like the distinct house characters. I haven't read the books, only watched the show and the DVD extra features.

Because of Covid I have a lot of time on my hand so I have been adding detail to nobles houses of the main setting of my RPG. I used a family tree writing program to start with the founding fathers of a nation and am working my way forward 325 years.

One thing I noticed in my world is that as the noble houses intermarry, the noble houses lose their distinctive flavor because they assimilate the values of the other houses. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It's kind of realistic, but it makes the characters less memorable.


Here's the nuts and bolts of how I am working the family trees.

D&D type world with somewhat reduced magic (no teleportation, raising the dead, nuking whole armies with a single spell).

So the main setting nation is a scrappy smaller nation surrounded by bigger nations. When the nation was first founded, it was not surrounded by larger nations. It was one of many small nations. It is essentially the last small nation in the region.

The land was intially practically a frontier. There were barbarian and orc raiders and petty warlords and petty kings. Most of the local rulers were jerks.

My RPG system uses points buy, not levels and classes, but most players still use that as a comparison. So 325ish years ago, a band of adventurers (essentially a fighter, fighter/rogue, fighter/wizard, and a fighter/cleric) tamed the land.

They got rid of most of the bad guys and monsters, but they realized that as soon as they left the bad guys and monsters would come back and they were getting older and kind of wanted to settle down. So they opted to make the highest charisma guy in the party king and the rest of them dukes.

In order to win the locals, they allied with the most powerful relatively non-evil warlord and made him a duke. They also had marry some of his daughters or pledge their sons to marry his granddaughters.


Then I started figuring out how many kids they had. I randomized each child as a boy girl. Then I used dice to ball park general questions. Did this son or daughter live long or die young?


I created base categories for lifespans., 0+1d10, 10+2d10, 30+2d10, 40+3d10, and 50+3d10 then I would make up why they died based on the personality I constructed for them.


Did this son or daughter get along well with his/her parents or rebel a lot. If I wasn't visited by a muse, I rolled a die to approximate.

Kids that got along with their parents generally tried to emulate the skill set of their parents. Kids that rebelled tried something else. Kids that fell in between obedient/rebellious caused me to randomize what their proficiency is.


I gave the nobles a basic archetype of warrior, manager, academic/wizard, man or woman of piety/possibly a spell casting cleric, or a hedonist. It's possible for a character to straddle categorization.

My world is a lot more egalitarian than the real medieval world but warrior is the default path for a nobleman and manager is the default path for a noblewoman but there are plenty of exceptions.

Sons that are late in birth order are less likely to inherit titles and daughters that are late in birth order are less likely to marry high status husbands, so they are more likely to become academics or pious people (though there are exceptions).

I would roll a die to gage on whether the character was good, bad, or mediocre at what they did. A good hedonist is one that is beloved by noble peers and commoners a like and brings joy to others. A bad hedonist wastes money and neglects noble responsibilities. A good or bad warrior, manager, or academic is pretty easy to understand.

Characters that are good at their job are more likely to impact house character over generations. Characters that live long are more likely to impact the house over generations. Characters that married someone with the same basic skill set are very likely to influence the house character.


Did this character get along well with his/her (probably arranged) spouse or did they not get along?
Did this marriage lead to a lot of children or few children?

Characters that don't die young tend to have more kids for obvious reasons. Characters that "got along" with their spouse tended to have more children.


None of this uses a static system. I fudge things and make up things a lot. If a character concept jumps out at me, I dispense with dice altogether.

But as I said the net effect seems to be that my five noble houses are more closely resembling each other with each new generation. I fear that the main thing that differentiates my houses at this point is the geography of the lands they rule and the foreign neighbors they have to deal with (dwarves, elves, orcs, sorcerous humans, etc)

[sandmote]

There is A Song of Fire Roleplaying system that might have an answer to this. Haven't read it myself, but I assume this was similarly a concern that was dealt with in the rules.

Off the top of my head, two fixes that help with better stories over the realistic impact that your noble families will slowly blend together:

Maybe certain members of the noble houses become adventurers, and come back with new principles that are injected into the house? This should also help keep a house's principles from being completely static even if they don't blend.

Second, add a penalty to the number of offspring produced. Then when a duke dies with no heirs, the title passes to another branch of the family that was presumably mixing with differnet nobles of lower status, meaning the family's initial traits were blended with a different group from the more powerful family branch that has died out.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Having lines that die out or end with an outmarriage (traditionally a woman joining her husband's family, but not inherently) and new ones formed makes a large difference. And is very historically apt. Very few noble lines have been noble for more than a few generations in a row. Just look at the history of the kings of europe.

But having too much diversity is also unrealistic--cultures do tend to drift and combine (and then fragment again later).

[Yanagi]

Hm.

So the problem is that noble houses exist as part of a political power structure that has to perpetuate itself through strategic marriage because they're the biggest landlords of the nation. Feudal-esque hierarchy--with the dukes and lords and baronets and whatnot--is just landlords stacked on landlords. Their job is (1) be either sufficient ruthless or sufficiently competent at landlording to not end up dead, (2) have good enough relations with the king to not get wacked, (3) crap out enough kids that you have an heir, a spare that can be chucked into the military, and maybe a girl that can be used as a poker chip, (4) if possible have some fight power and some peasants to levy.

"Specialization" doesn't really make sense because each landlord wants to be a bigger landlord and not overrun by a small or equal-sized landlord, and all the landlords collectively have a shared interest in not being set on fire and eaten by starving peasants. Hogwarts-style tomfoolery like multiclassing to landlord/wizard is just money spent on not acquiring new stuff that makes even more money: do that and John of Gaunt steals all your ****. Takeda Shingen will not stop burning down your castle long enough to evaluate your Myers-Briggs scores.

In Game of Thrones the distinctive character of the houses amounts to management style, but the management style has been tooled over generations to attune both the regional cultural understandings of power and pre-existing power structures (small lords, religions, merchants). The North has a particular picture of power that places a lot of value on tradition, personal honor and duty, and a shared identity directly contrasted to Southron values...and over a bajillion generations the Starks have operated within that system and understand its rules such that they've mostly retained power (the past and present Boltons being a great example of how the rules aren't ironclad, and there's always people who are so culturally in their own thing that all you can manage is detente). To the extent this is fleshed out, it's clearly that "the North" works this way because it's a large area with very few capital assets, and thus the ruling system has to incorporate a fair degree of autonomy and reciprocity between the nominal central-leader and the distal lords.

In each GoT region there's a different feedback-loop relationship between the physical resources of the land, the culture, and the hegemons. It takes the force majeure of dragons to impose a common cultural framework on these people, and throughout the books it's pretty clear that the Tagaryens have to do a lot of hustling...particularly through strategic marriage...to stay on top. If you want your own ducal states to have different feels, then the most important part isn't going to be out-marriages between ducal families, but the hypogamous in-marriages with subordinates as well as the general structure of who's assigned how much responsibility and how much advantage.

If you have a monarchic line and four/five ducal lines in your setting...325 years is the time period over which those families embed into the regions they've taken over, and the question is how much change can they enforce on the power system already present, versus how much will they have to operate in a manner that local power frameworks understand and thus don't reflexively resist. That's...hard to do, and tends to take a lot of time and strategizing. A big part of the strategizing is creating dynasty continuity not just through inheritance, but a durable web of effective courtiers and appointed positions that can be trusted--this is a major reason that strategic marriage matters, because it's bluntly biological way to weld whole families together.

Over the same period of time, individuals individuality isn't going to matter very much unless one invents a narrative in which someone pulls a Tsar Pyotr Alekseevich and imposes drastic changes...and then overcomes the reaction...or is just a bit too Ludwig II: the durable institution softens the blow from the prodigies, but also sustains the mediocre. The institution of rulership--including all the rituals and costumes and court nonsense--is a giant foam pad that accommodates the shape of the new ruler and hopefully gives them a chance to ease into the role.

(And if it can't bear a particular ruler...there's always a Henry Bolingbroke in the wings...which is another feature of the institution)

Early on, your dukes are going to have far stronger incentives to arrange marriages that don't interlink their houses...except to that one local dude that's sus...because the power players know and trust one another, and can probably socialize their kids to know and trust one another. It's only about generation 3 or 4 that some tentative cross-marriages might be proposed...but alliance marriages don't have to be marriage that impact ducal succession: spares marrying spares after succession is already solidified (the duke has a viable successor) keep the alliance maintained but doesn't have the same power-politics implications. Marriage with the monarchical line is going to be more fraught, since monarchies tend to have to keep open diplomatic marriage outside the kingdom, so I don't even know how to address that without getting into a bunch of stuff about inheritance law for both property and titles....

Indeed, it's worthwhile to think in historical terms. In three centuries of British history, at any given time most dukes were not memorable, with no notable characteristics that they pressed onto their domains. We remember only the exceptionally ineffective ones, the exceptionally ambitious ones, and the exceptionally weird ones. The character of the places they rule is more often set by systemic forces far beyond the control of a single ruler.

However, if you want there to be some kind of dynastic character that pass through over that much time...the thing that would make sense would be patronage of arts and scholarship rather than personal pursuit--building institutions that develop skills that have economic and political value, creating a new layer of specialists and skilled individuals that provide exactly what's needed for dynastic continuity and a healthy institutions that don't end up at the end of the people's razor. And if all the initial dukes are friends and actively trying to construct a whole nation, then the exchange of human resources--wizards from the wizard college in region A incorporated into the court and civil service of regions B thru E, clerics from the monastery in region...etc etc--creating a more unified national culture.

[Scalenex]

There is A Song of Fire Roleplaying system that might have an answer to this. Haven't read it myself, but I assume this was similarly a concern that was dealt with in the rules.

Off the top of my head, two fixes that help with better stories over the realistic impact that your noble families will slowly blend together:

Maybe certain members of the noble houses become adventurers, and come back with new principles that are injected into the house? This should also help keep a house's principles from being completely static even if they don't blend.

I haven't thought about adventurers coming back with their personality changed. I mostly use "adventurer" as a cause of early death. A few retired adventurer nobles have "adventurer as a cause of promotion, but not many.



Second, add a penalty to the number of offspring produced. Then when a duke dies with no heirs, the title passes to another branch of the family that was presumably mixing with differnet nobles of lower status, meaning the family's initial traits were blended with a different group from the more powerful family branch that has died out.

I haven't had any family lines die yet, but I have had a case or two where the third or fourth born son inherits against all odds because their father lived a long time and their older brothers died young without sons.


Having lines that die out or end with an outmarriage (traditionally a woman joining her husband's family, but not inherently) and new ones formed makes a large difference. And is very historically apt. Very few noble lines have been noble for more than a few generations in a row. Just look at the history of the kings of europe.

But having too much diversity is also unrealistic--cultures do tend to drift and combine (and then fragment again later).

Like most fantasy world building questions, I guess the Rule of Cool is fighting the Rule of Realism. In this case I think realism wins out.




Hm.

So the problem is that noble houses exist as part of a political power structure that has to perpetuate itself through strategic marriage because they're the biggest landlords of the nation. Feudal-esque hierarchy--with the dukes and lords and baronets and whatnot--is just landlords stacked on landlords. Their job is (1) be either sufficient ruthless or sufficiently competent at landlording to not end up dead, (2) have good enough relations with the king to not get wacked, (3) crap out enough kids that you have an heir, a spare that can be chucked into the military, and maybe a girl that can be used as a poker chip, (4) if possible have some fight power and some peasants to levy.

"Specialization" doesn't really make sense because each landlord wants to be a bigger landlord and not overrun by a small or equal-sized landlord, and all the landlords collectively have a shared interest in not being set on fire and eaten by starving peasants. Hogwarts-style tomfoolery like multiclassing to landlord/wizard is just money spent on not acquiring new stuff that makes even more money: do that and John of Gaunt steals all your ****. Takeda Shingen will not stop burning down your castle long enough to evaluate your Myers-Briggs scores.

In Game of Thrones the distinctive character of the houses amounts to management style, but the management style has been tooled over generations to attune both the regional cultural understandings of power and pre-existing power structures (small lords, religions, merchants). The North has a particular picture of power that places a lot of value on tradition, personal honor and duty, and a shared identity directly contrasted to Southron values...and over a bajillion generations the Starks have operated within that system and understand its rules such that they've mostly retained power (the past and present Boltons being a great example of how the rules aren't ironclad, and there's always people who are so culturally in their own thing that all you can manage is detente). To the extent this is fleshed out, it's clearly that "the North" works this way because it's a large area with very few capital assets, and thus the ruling system has to incorporate a fair degree of autonomy and reciprocity between the nominal central-leader and the distal lords.

In each GoT region there's a different feedback-loop relationship between the physical resources of the land, the culture, and the hegemons. It takes the force majeure of dragons to impose a common cultural framework on these people, and throughout the books it's pretty clear that the Tagaryens have to do a lot of hustling...particularly through strategic marriage...to stay on top. If you want your own ducal states to have different feels, then the most important part isn't going to be out-marriages between ducal families, but the hypogamous in-marriages with subordinates as well as the general structure of who's assigned how much responsibility and how much advantage.

If you have a monarchic line and four/five ducal lines in your setting...325 years is the time period over which those families embed into the regions they've taken over, and the question is how much change can they enforce on the power system already present, versus how much will they have to operate in a manner that local power frameworks understand and thus don't reflexively resist. That's...hard to do, and tends to take a lot of time and strategizing. A big part of the strategizing is creating dynasty continuity not just through inheritance, but a durable web of effective courtiers and appointed positions that can be trusted--this is a major reason that strategic marriage matters, because it's bluntly biological way to weld whole families together.

Over the same period of time, individuals individuality isn't going to matter very much unless one invents a narrative in which someone pulls a Tsar Pyotr Alekseevich and imposes drastic changes...and then overcomes the reaction...or is just a bit too Ludwig II: the durable institution softens the blow from the prodigies, but also sustains the mediocre. The institution of rulership--including all the rituals and costumes and court nonsense--is a giant foam pad that accommodates the shape of the new ruler and hopefully gives them a chance to ease into the role.

(And if it can't bear a particular ruler...there's always a Henry Bolingbroke in the wings...which is another feature of the institution)

Early on, your dukes are going to have far stronger incentives to arrange marriages that don't interlink their houses...except to that one local dude that's sus...because the power players know and trust one another, and can probably socialize their kids to know and trust one another. It's only about generation 3 or 4 that some tentative cross-marriages might be proposed...but alliance marriages don't have to be marriage that impact ducal succession: spares marrying spares after succession is already solidified (the duke has a viable successor) keep the alliance maintained but doesn't have the same power-politics implications. Marriage with the monarchical line is going to be more fraught, since monarchies tend to have to keep open diplomatic marriage outside the kingdom, so I don't even know how to address that without getting into a bunch of stuff about inheritance law for both property and titles....

Indeed, it's worthwhile to think in historical terms. In three centuries of British history, at any given time most dukes were not memorable, with no notable characteristics that they pressed onto their domains. We remember only the exceptionally ineffective ones, the exceptionally ambitious ones, and the exceptionally weird ones. The character of the places they rule is more often set by systemic forces far beyond the control of a single ruler.

However, if you want there to be some kind of dynastic character that pass through over that much time...the thing that would make sense would be patronage of arts and scholarship rather than personal pursuit--building institutions that develop skills that have economic and political value, creating a new layer of specialists and skilled individuals that provide exactly what's needed for dynastic continuity and a healthy institutions that don't end up at the end of the people's razor. And if all the initial dukes are friends and actively trying to construct a whole nation, then the exchange of human resources--wizards from the wizard college in region A incorporated into the court and civil service of regions B thru E, clerics from the monastery in region...etc etc--creating a more unified national culture.

Based on me milling over this post, I think my nation probably would create a fairly unified culture. The initial dukes were friends, the lands have mostly the same problems and comparing my nation to Westeros, my nation of Fumaya is much much smaller than Westeros. Since it is a lot easier to travel between regions in Fumaya than Westeros there would logically be more cultural mixing.

My nation of Fumaya is kind of shaped like a boot or a sock. And the players have nicknamed the Duchies "Toe, Heel, Arch, Lower Ankle, and Upper Ankle" which is okay I guess.

I got the founding fathers set, whom their kids married and what kind of people the founding father's grand children were, though I haven't paired many of them off. Roughly 1500-1620.

My game is set in 1837, I have basic concepts for the dukes in 1837, though few things are set in stone. The PCs have allied themselves with the Duke of Upper Ankle essentially because the PCs have solved a lot of the Duke's problems just by doing random adventurer stuff, and the Duke rewarded them generously.

The PCs helped the king out once by busting a crime lord in the capital. They helped out the Duke out a bunch by helping solve his goblin problem, his monster problem, and helping him secure a bunch of mundane supplies which mostly solved his money problem.

The PCs do not know this, but the Duke Upper Ankle's son was moonlighting as a brigand raiding the Duke Lower Ankle's caravans to help pay his father's debts. But the PCs involvement have convinced him that A) brigandry is no longer necessary and B) brigandry is no longer safe because the PCs might bust him, so the PCs solved this problem without realizing it.

The PCs chose not to work for the Duke of Lower Ankle when he tried to hire them because they decided he is a pompous jerk. They haven't met any of other dukes. The Duke of Lower Ankle is the only duke that is not
dealing with monsters or an enemy nation massing troops at the border. the other dukes (and the king) are kind of irked that he is not being a team player and rendering assistance.

The Duke of Lower Ankle borders relatively friendly dwarves to the west and relatively friendly elves to the east. The elves and dwarves do not like each other much but they covet the goods of the other, so Duke Lower Ankle is making a lot of money acting as a middleman. Money he is not sharing with the other dukes.

That's why the son of Duke Upper Ankle felt justified robbing him though he stopped robbing him, he still has a spy in Duke Lower Ankle's court reporting caravan movements and Duke Lower Ankle is still unpopular.

The other Dukes have their own challenges and issues, but the PCs haven't met them yet so it's not set in stone. I try to give all the dukes at least one major internal problem and one major external problem. Though I guess with Covid going on I'm running a solo adventure for a new guy who will eventually join the other PCs when we are all vaccinated and schedules clear up.

Solo adventure is dealing with the fact that the Duke of Arch has an evil cult that infilitrated his castle staff. The cultists have debaucherous parties where they murder peasants for the sick thrill of it.

Maybe it's a little cliched but the Duke of Arch's firstborn daughter married the King of Sock. He is very proud of being the king's father-in-law and the prince's grandfather, but this caused him to neglect his other children.

His son and heir is a lazy loser. His second born son is a ruthless Machiavellian schemer, and his second born daughter is a spoiled brat who fell in with the "wrong crowd." She is in fact leading the cult that infiltrated the castle staff.

The Duchies of Heel, Arch, and Toe all border a Hostile Human Nation to the south but the Duchy of Archy has the least natural defenses, so they are probably where the enemy would invade first.


The Duke of Heel has the internal problem that his vassals are fighting each other. A lot of the Duke of Heel's vassals are refugee nobles that fled Hostile Human's Nation last conquest. Half of them are hungry for blood and are plotting to provoke war with Hostile Human Nation. Half of them are scared out of their wits and plotting an early surrender or flight attempt.

His external problem is that since he is harboring nobles Hostile Human Nation wants dead, he is likely to face the nastiest part of the invasion


The Duke of Toe has the internal problem stolen from the Lion King. Duke Mufasa's younger brother Lord Scar arranged "a hunting accident" and is now plotting to arrange a plausible unfortunate death for the 15 year old Duke Simba.

Uncle Scar is a primary advisor to Duke Simba and he is trying to fill his head with heroic nonsense to convince him to take to the front lines against Hostile Human Nation. The latter of which provides an external threat. While Toe has a lot of easily defendable forest, Hostile Human Nation really wants Toe because Toe controls rare magical resources that Hostile Human Nation covet highly.


But by the time I complete my 325 family tree, Heel, Arch, Toe, Lower Ankle, and Upper Ankle are probably all going to be cousins for good or ill.

[Martin Greywolf]

Because of Covid I have a lot of time on my hand so I have been adding detail to nobles houses of the main setting of my RPG. I used a family tree writing program to start with the founding fathers of a nation and am working my way forward 325 years.

One thing I noticed in my world is that as the noble houses intermarry, the noble houses lose their distinctive flavor because they assimilate the values of the other houses. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It's kind of realistic, but it makes the characters less memorable.

Realistically, noble houses don't have much diversity among themselves, you have to go to duchy vs duchy levels to really see any of it, sometimes even to kingdom vs kingdom. Bottom line is that a noble house in one area will usually have the same culture and religion to another house.

Westeros is kinda dumb in that the noble houses you see aren't really noble houses, but independent kingdoms in their own right, notionally under the command of an emperor. Once you replace Lord Stark with King Stark and King Robert with Emperor Robert, you get a more realistic power structure, not that dissimilar to early medieval Europe under Charlemagne.

If you start to look at the smaller houses, even in GoT, they are much more similar to the ruling house of one of the 7 kingdoms, because again, same culture.



But as I said the net effect seems to be that my five noble houses are more closely resembling each other with each new generation. I fear that the main thing that differentiates my houses at this point is the geography of the lands they rule and the foreign neighbors they have to deal with (dwarves, elves, orcs, sorcerous humans, etc)

Some houses, usually the smaller ones, will merge and disappear quickly, others will remain. More on this below.


Having lines that die out or end with an outmarriage (traditionally a woman joining her husband's family, but not inherently) and new ones formed makes a large difference. And is very historically apt. Very few noble lines have been noble for more than a few generations in a row. Just look at the history of the kings of europe.

Not really. You have a pretty even distribution of long lasting dynasties and those that had one or two kings/dukes among themselves.

As a case study, taking kings of Hungary, gets us 9 ruling dynasties (I'm counting Habsburg and Habsburg-Lorraine as one in this case):


House of Árpád (895–1301)
House of Přemyslid (1301–1305)
House of Wittelsbach (1305–1307)
House of Anjou (1308–1395)
House of Luxembourg (1387–1437)
House of Habsburg (1437–1457)
House of Jagiellon (1440–1444)
House of Hunyadi (1458–1490)
House of Jagiellon (1490–1526)
House of Zápolya (1526–1570)
House of Habsburg (1526–1780)
House of Habsburg-Lorraine (1780–1918)


Of these 9, Arpad and Habsburg are the main ones, Premyslid and Wittelsbach barely count (they come from Arpad interregnum when there were 3 people claiming the title at the same time), Anjou are somewhere in the middle with less that 10 kings and the rest have one or two kings to their name. That gets us 29 Arpad kings, 19 Habsburg kings and 14 other. You could argue that 2 out of 9 houses is not a lot, but you could also argue that a given random king is more likely to be from a long-running house.

You see similar pattern in ducal families, some are there for only two or three generations, others are there to stay - Hont-Poznan house lasted for 600 years, house Fugger managed to go international and last for 500. The usual determining factor is how quickly a given dynasty arose, if they rise meteorically, they tend to not last that long, a slower rise over a few generations tends to last.

How to keep big time houses distinct

The answer is kind of easy. Noble houses are, by definition, tied to certain geographic areas. That means there are certain things they can exploit better - coastal houses will have naval culture, houses in the mountains will have mining income, plains houses can have horsemanship, houses on the frontier areas of a kingdom will be more martially minded and so on. This sort of identity extends beyond a given house, to the people they rule, or rather, this identity is spread from the ruled people to their rulers. You can't effectively administer a cluster of mining towns without learning a lot about how mines work.

This will be reflected in everything from armaments to dress to priorities of a given house, and will drive their politics. House Horse pastures would very much like trade relations with the nomadic Khagan, to get new horses and export theirs, but house Frontier Territories knows all too well that khagan doesn't control all the nomads and would like license to shoot first and ask questions later.

If a given house gains too wide a territory, well, they are likely to split, at first into two branches, possibly completely. This is kind of necessary for important decisions to be made in a timely manner - a message from Berlin to Budapest will likely travel for a week or two, and that is often too long of a delay.

Two houses in the same area

Making these distinct is harder, and the answer is that they will likely focus on a specific aspect of a given specialization. House Coastal Trade vs House Really Good Marines, House Knightly Horses vs House Horse Archer Horses and so on.

Small time houses

These are a welcome source of important people to influence and marry to the long running houses. They may last long, or they may peter out quickly, but that says nothing about how powerful they are in their time. Houses Csak and de Stiboricz in Hungary lasted two generations, but their heads were the most powerful people in the kingdom, in case of Csak arguably more powerful then the king.

All in all, they serve as an excellent wild card to throw in and mix things up for your players. Hell, some of them could very well be your players.

[sandmote]

I haven't thought about adventurers coming back with their personality changed. I mostly use "adventurer" as a cause of early death. A few retired adventurer nobles have "adventurer as a cause of promotion, but not many. There's nothing stopping you from doubling them up. If they got a promotion by being an adventurer, they could have also picked up new principles as part of their "character arc" while adventuring.


But by the time I complete my 325 family tree, Heel, Arch, Toe, Lower Ankle, and Upper Ankle are probably all going to be cousins for good or ill. That is, in fact, very much the realistic option.

But something you do seem to be missing is intermarriage between your dukes and foreign houses. "Everyone is everyone else's cousin" extended pretty much across the houses of Europe.


So 325ish years ago, a band of adventurers (essentially a fighter, fighter/rogue, fighter/wizard, and a fighter/cleric) tamed the land... they opted to make the highest charisma guy in the party king and the rest of them dukes.... they allied with the most powerful relatively non-evil warlord and made him a duke.


And the players have nicknamed the Duchies "Toe, Heel, Arch, Lower Ankle, and Upper Ankle" which is okay I guess.

... Duke of Upper Ankle ... The PCs helped the king ... Duke Lower Ankle... Duke of Arch's firstborn daughter married the King of Sock... Duke of Heel ... Duke of Toe.

Something's off. I count 4 party members and 1 NPC duke at the start. That's 5 duchies, and 4 explicitly swearing featly to the 5th (as makes sense for a feudal system). Then by the present you have 5 dukes each ruling a duchy, and a king of sock, who you talk about as his own person. Where did that distinction come from, and where is the king's demesne relative to the duchies?

[Scalenex]

There's nothing stopping you from doubling them up. If they got a promotion by being an adventurer, they could have also picked up new principles as part of their "character arc" while adventuring.

Good point.


That is, i fact, very much the realistic option.

But something you do seem to be missing is intermarriage between your dukes and foreign houses. "Everyone is everyone else's cousin" extended pretty much across the houses of Europe

I guess I only covered the first 100 years of their 325 year history. Initially, their neighboring nations didn't think Fumaya would last long, so no one was eager to intermarry with them. In one case the daughter of the Fumaya king married a the son of a lowly count in a neighboring nation.

I guess as time passes, they will get more legitimacy to intermarry with other nations. Though one of their neighboring nations is elves and another is dwarves. Neither are going to want to intermarry with them. Another nation ONLY allows sorcerers to inherit titles. So there is limited options. To intermarry with another royal family, they have to intermarry with a distant royal family (though I do know that did happen historically).


Something's off. I count 4 party members and 1 NPC duke at the start. That's 5 duchies, and 4 explicitly swearing featly to the 5th (as makes sense for a feudal system). Then by the present you have 5 dukes each ruling a duchy, and a king of sock, who you talk about as his own person. Where did that distinction come from, and where is the king's demesne relative to the duchies?

You are right, I did not mention the king. I did not forget the king. I just didn't think it was super important for the purpose of this thread.

I guess the king also has a noble family. Originally the king was also a duke. Whatever the part of the foot where the foot touches the ankle. The smallest but richest part of the sock because it is at a junction of two rivers (for trade) and a lake full of tasty fish (food and irrigation), and some valuable clay (the only export Fumaya has besides beer).

So I guess the King is technically King of Fumaya and Duke of Linijka though I'm not sure if one of the King's less forward thinking ancestors sliced up the duchy of Linijka so all his sons could get a piece of land or not.

In addition to all the dukes, there is also a count that owes fealty directly to the king without an intermediate duke and a bishopric dedicated to the nature god that also owes fealty to the king (on paper, in reality the king lets the bishopric do whatever it wants in exchange for the occasional nature cleric/druid intervening magically whenever the crops are facing a blight.)

I figured these lands were too small to matter for the purpose of this thread.

The count controls the rim of the Sock, where the land is barely suitable for farming. It was basically set up a mere 80 years ago to create a buffer zone against barbarian raiders from the north. It seemed like a good idea at the time because the newly promoted Count was a legendary warrior and shrewd tactician. His grandson, the current Count, is not very good at either fighting or leading.