Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings

Ominous

@squirreltalk said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

@ominous I'd assume they'd inherit the title of whichever person involved in their procreation had the title, and marriage would still be important, but admittedly I haven't thought through the gritty details.

What if both individuals have titles? Does the offspring get claims to both titles?

SquirrelTalk

@ominous shrug! I didn't think people with important titles married each other, generally. Just hadn't thought about it much.

Ominous

@insomniac7809 said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."

Oh absolutely. Cyberpunk is essentialism feudalism in the future with the focus of the story being on the everyman rather than the "peerage."

il-volpe

Witch-Kings / Witch-Queens. Family has nothing to do with it, you rule if you can cast Edward's Sparkling Testicles, or you rule if you can keep your hand in this Box of Pain longer than anybody else, or, etc.

Arkandel

In terms of gaming in general I look for gameplay.

What will characters do? What challenges are they set up against? How does the setting itself help facilitate such goals? What is staff's role? Which positions are NPC only? How much power are PCs allowed to have over the course of how the game evolves?

In my opinion whatever the IC succession rules are and wherever power lies those answers still should take priority.

Now I'm no expert in L&L but for example what would the difference be between what is being discussed here and what's already the system on Arx? Gender or sexual preference don't make a difference (but please correct me if I'm wrong) in who wields political power there either.

Ominous

@arkandel said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Now I'm no expert in L&L but for example what would the difference be between what is being discussed here and what's already the system on Arx? Gender or sexual preference don't have a difference (but please correct me if I'm wrong) there either.

alt text

Go read the last 22 pages over the past two days of The Arx Peeve Thread. It starts here: https://musoapbox.net/topic/2381/the-arx-peeve-thread/26035?page=1302

Arkandel

@ominous said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Go read the last 22 pages <snip>

I will concede any point I've ever made or considered debating before I subject myself to that.

Ominous

@arkandel

Thank you. I'd rather not derail the thread with a redundant discussion of something that's already being hashed out elsewhere.

To address the other half of your first post, simply put this thread is focused less on game mechanics and more on setting. Fluff not crunch.

Jennkryst

@ominous said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Authority equals ass-kicking.

So I mentioned this... uh... somewhere, (the search function here is all but unusable, so fuck I remember where), but! There is a show on Netflix called 3%... it's from Brazil, I think? It's definitely in Portuguese, not Spanish...

***Spoilers for a 6 year old series on Netflix, I guess?***

click to show

So like... I'm not saying the whole setting is a great idea for a MU. BUT! Themes can be taken and run with.

Edit to mention the name of the show outside of the hidden quote box

Ganymede

@insomniac7809 said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Real life nobility tended to get messy. Really messy, with the titles and ownership always disputed and shifting. Less "I own this contiguous area of territory, handed down by my forefathers into my care, to be passed down intact" and more like the portfolio of a major corporation--"I have the three core territories, some holdings on the border that are contested, have my eyes on some acquisitions I'm looking to make, and a couple things I wound up with that are frankly too far away to be worth their while so I'm just hoping to trade them off for something I can use."

For the sake of stability on a game, I think that a "generally-accepted form of succession" ought to exist. That said, though, history tells us that there are exceptions to the general rules that have been accepted.

mietze

@jennkryst Yes! We saw that one too, fantastic! Even if it's not a fantasy setting per se, it could be done with a walled city or whatnot in a fantasy setting.

mietze

I think it is also possible to narrow the scope of an L&L setting so that it doesn't focus on nobility (though they could be part of the setting, and be done in ways that clearly are not m/f biological heir dynasties). Guilds struggling for power/influence (also involving some nepotism, either adopted, romantic, or biological), ect. It may mean the people who MUST have a royal/noble title vs the titles associated within the guild may not have interest, but it also eliminates people who will focus on that and have to be explained over and over again that the setting isn't the one they are familiar with in movies/storybook lore, and that might be worthwhile if you do not want to have to do a lot of pruning all the time.

I did run an online TTesque but using a mush server Fading Suns campaign that had no nobility at all but focused on competition and onesupmanship with a few guilds, on a frontier type of planet. It was super fun (I made the nobility into obstacles to be dodged or overcome), but again, I know that if I were to do a FS games without nobility I would have to do a LOT of handholding/pruning/dealing with people loudly complaining on ooc for awhile (or here).

Ominous

To go down a L&L setting without bloodlines mattering, this idea combines some fairy tale-esque ideas with a little Mandate of Heaven. The title-holders of a piece of land are literally chosen by that land. Somehow a person becomes imbued with the trust of the genius loci of that place and becomes the noble of that place. It could follow a family line for a while before jumping to someone outside that family. A person could become entrusted by many lands, growing in power.

However, the land is influenced by the virtues and moral failings of its chosen paragon and each land has expects different things from its holder. If a noble lives up to the proper virtues, the land flourishes, crops grow two, three, fourfold in abundance, rivers and streams fill with fish, wild fruits and vegetables are practically tripped over with every step through the woods, every day seems brighter, the colors more vivid, and every night is peaceful. If a noble fails to meet the land's expectations, colors grow duller, the fields harder to plow, crops shrink in size, the streams become muddy sludge flows, and the rivers choppy and treacherous, the woods fill with thorns and poisonous plants, and the nights filled with fear.

I would probably use something like Pendragon's personality traits for this and give each land a selection of traits it cares about that are tied to the feel of that particular place. A wild, verdant rainforest might prefer Energetic, Indulgent, Arbitrary, Lustful, and Suspicious. A desert could prefer Cruel, Modest, Prudent, Honest, and Temperate. A noble who tries to hold the titles for many different lands will have to juggle the traits those lands desire of their title holder.

Macha

@ominous You say "Mandate of Heaven" and my brain goes to a 20 year old Video Game "Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven." ... and now I have to find it somewhere, download it, and play it.

Three-Eyed Crow

@macha said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

@ominous You say "Mandate of Heaven" and my brain goes to a 20 year old Video Game "Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven." ... and now I have to find it somewhere, download it, and play it.

GoG has versions of all those games that run quite well! They are one of my mindless blisses, though I'm more for the Heroes series because I relax via base building mechanics.

surpriseparty

All babies are grown in a cabbage patch, and adopted when they're ready to pick. No one is related by blood nor does anyone care which garden you were planted in and by who. Everyone picks their own title, gender and partner(s) when they're mature enough to do so.

Religion, war, politics and magic are never invented, and everyone can exist quite comfortably by absorbing sunshine and drinking water alone so nobody wants for anything.

Peace reigns eternal. There is no conflict in the Cabbage Kingdom.

Wretched

Erry time I consider L&L games all I think of is Guillotines.

Solstice

@surpriseparty

But all that changed when the melon lords attacked.

Pacha

Before I came up with the Crystal Springs idea I was heavily considering a modern-day Lords and Ladies game. I had been binging the CW reboot of Dynasty and the idea of these ultra-rich pseudo aritocratic families that are effectively a law unto themselves is pretty fascinating.

Seraphim73

@pacha There's a book series out about that (I'm sure there are many, this is just the one I read the first book of) called American Royals. As I was reading the first book, I kept thinking, "Holy crap, this is straight up MU* drama."