Post by ripx187 on May 8, 2019 18:59:31 GMT -5
I want to create the illusion of a living world and be able to keep my facts straight. One thing that can get weird is the lords and their realm. Lord is not a good term, as anybody who owns a house or a hotel is also a lord, so go with Baron or Duke or whatever. If the land marked out serves a defensive position only, it will be run by a knight, so Sir would be appropriate. Your king's kingdom should be properly laid out and cut into sections. Each section will have somebody in charge of it. If it is a border town this lord may be interested in taking out the neighboring lord, especially if this is a hostile nation. Of course, this goes both ways 
This work is heavily based on the work of Tony Bath which you can read in his book "Setting Up A Wargame". I'm not going to run traditional Bath-Style wargames, but his opinions on the subject are definitely valuable. For each of the domains within the Kingdom, we must generate a last name for the lord. Powerful families will have more land and may have multiple domains within the Kingdom. The King will prefer to keep as much power within his own family as he can, but he can't be seen denying a wealthy family their privilege either. Once you know what family owns what, we assign first names to the males, paying particular attention to where the head of a family house is. He should be an older gentleman who knows what he is doing and family comes first to him. The head of a family may be in the capital, keeping the king honest and being where he is most needed. It just depends upon the lord.
To generate ages I used a d6 for decade and a d10 for year, this gave me results between 69 and 11. If you don't like a result then fudge it, or allow a story to be told. Once we have the Males named and know their ages and ranks within the family, we can add their wives, including maiden names so we know where each Lady came from. The folks like to keep wealth in the family, and these marriages will tell a story of their own. A Lady may come from another Kingdom. She may be a political prisoner, the joining of two noble houses, a reward to someone or just getting a hungry mouth out of one's own house and into another. Noble marriages weren't about love, it was about political maneuvering, so all of those house names you came up with can be reused.
We can save all of that story for later, or note any ideas you have. I found it a bit easier to roll a 1d8 for each of these lords, and a result of a 1 meant that something is different from the norm. You can come up with something now, such as this lord is a leveled class of some kind, or just mark it with an astrix and go back to it later.
Bath had something like seven characteristics per lord and lady, this is too much. We can generate their personality later if we need to, but we should figure out what kind of person this is. Tony used playing cards, I reduced this down to a major motivation.
HEARTS means Well Balanced
Diamonds means focus on money
Clubs means focus on military
Spades means ambition to further the power of oneself or one's house.
This system could be strengthened, but it does give you enough information to judge what a lord may or might not do, and allow you to figure out how a domain is managed.
This next part is tricky. It is assigning children, if the person is too young this could mean a brother or sister. Bath rolled a 1d6 to determine the number of children. For each child roll that number of d6s, a special die should represent the eldest child. If the number rolled is even, the child is a boy, if odd it's a girl. In my own game I rolled way to many girls so had to fudge some stuff here and there. If we can, we can name children who are already on our list due to marriage or stations. For me personally, I had to read into the results. If a lord who is 22 comes up with 5 children, I reduce this down to 1 or 2 and have 3 or 4 other family members be present to aid them, or this could be the max number of kids that they could ever have, but that would force me to name them all and I don't want to. Things can get really bizarre here and there are only so many times that a child can manage a domain because everybody else died in some war that you just found out about. Try to make the stories different but not so well structured that it will form an actual story. We could spend years working on this system if you let it take over your life, so don't do it. Who cares if something doesn't make sense, we can always change it or figure it out later if we get called upon to do it.
Hopefully, this list of people and places will provide you with movement and generating news. Bath checked for changes on an annual basis. Perhaps the Lord dies, has a child, goes to open war with a rival, or whatever. If a lord dies that game year it gave him time to set it up through gossip and/or adventure.
I'll have to come up with a few random events tables, but right now this planning stage is moving faster than I thought that it would.
This work is heavily based on the work of Tony Bath which you can read in his book "Setting Up A Wargame". I'm not going to run traditional Bath-Style wargames, but his opinions on the subject are definitely valuable. For each of the domains within the Kingdom, we must generate a last name for the lord. Powerful families will have more land and may have multiple domains within the Kingdom. The King will prefer to keep as much power within his own family as he can, but he can't be seen denying a wealthy family their privilege either. Once you know what family owns what, we assign first names to the males, paying particular attention to where the head of a family house is. He should be an older gentleman who knows what he is doing and family comes first to him. The head of a family may be in the capital, keeping the king honest and being where he is most needed. It just depends upon the lord.
To generate ages I used a d6 for decade and a d10 for year, this gave me results between 69 and 11. If you don't like a result then fudge it, or allow a story to be told. Once we have the Males named and know their ages and ranks within the family, we can add their wives, including maiden names so we know where each Lady came from. The folks like to keep wealth in the family, and these marriages will tell a story of their own. A Lady may come from another Kingdom. She may be a political prisoner, the joining of two noble houses, a reward to someone or just getting a hungry mouth out of one's own house and into another. Noble marriages weren't about love, it was about political maneuvering, so all of those house names you came up with can be reused.
We can save all of that story for later, or note any ideas you have. I found it a bit easier to roll a 1d8 for each of these lords, and a result of a 1 meant that something is different from the norm. You can come up with something now, such as this lord is a leveled class of some kind, or just mark it with an astrix and go back to it later.
Bath had something like seven characteristics per lord and lady, this is too much. We can generate their personality later if we need to, but we should figure out what kind of person this is. Tony used playing cards, I reduced this down to a major motivation.
HEARTS means Well Balanced
Diamonds means focus on money
Clubs means focus on military
Spades means ambition to further the power of oneself or one's house.
This system could be strengthened, but it does give you enough information to judge what a lord may or might not do, and allow you to figure out how a domain is managed.
This next part is tricky. It is assigning children, if the person is too young this could mean a brother or sister. Bath rolled a 1d6 to determine the number of children. For each child roll that number of d6s, a special die should represent the eldest child. If the number rolled is even, the child is a boy, if odd it's a girl. In my own game I rolled way to many girls so had to fudge some stuff here and there. If we can, we can name children who are already on our list due to marriage or stations. For me personally, I had to read into the results. If a lord who is 22 comes up with 5 children, I reduce this down to 1 or 2 and have 3 or 4 other family members be present to aid them, or this could be the max number of kids that they could ever have, but that would force me to name them all and I don't want to. Things can get really bizarre here and there are only so many times that a child can manage a domain because everybody else died in some war that you just found out about. Try to make the stories different but not so well structured that it will form an actual story. We could spend years working on this system if you let it take over your life, so don't do it. Who cares if something doesn't make sense, we can always change it or figure it out later if we get called upon to do it.
Hopefully, this list of people and places will provide you with movement and generating news. Bath checked for changes on an annual basis. Perhaps the Lord dies, has a child, goes to open war with a rival, or whatever. If a lord dies that game year it gave him time to set it up through gossip and/or adventure.
I'll have to come up with a few random events tables, but right now this planning stage is moving faster than I thought that it would.
