[TSoY 2nd] Free-ranging attributes of Near
Brand_Robins:
Eero,
After my last post I went and read the Qek playtest and laughed, thinking to myself "So I see Eero was already all over that."
Another development index that I'd like a sidebar about is centralization and legalization of authority. It makes a big different in a game if there are existing authority structures, and how much weight (both in terms of force and moral jurisdiction) those authorities have. Like, I've seen this go a bunch of different ways in TSOY games: from Ammenite games (yes, we play a lot of Ammenites) where there is a very powerful central authority, located in the houses, to Khale games with bardic lorespeakers and blood-price being the default of the law.
It often ends up being an important axis, because how much and how quickly the characters will take the law into their own hands, and what methods they have to use the law and the system to persecute each other, depends a lot on what the system is like. If you've got nothing but the strength of your sword arm and the swords of your brothers you'll end up with a very different game then one where you're a lesser member of a great house that jealously guards all control over crime and punishment.
The one game in Maldor I played (briefly) ended up hosed because we didn't communicate well about this. Two of the players built characters understanding the setting to be strongly feudal, with lesser justice belonging to the local nobility and greater justice belonging to the royalty (whoever happened to have the power to claim such title at the moment), and the other player built his character understanding the world to be survivalists in local bands eeking a lawless existence out of the wilderness. And while a setup like that doesn't have to go bad, in our case it did because as soon as things got out of scope of the immediate character group, there were endless frustrations over how the rest of the world should/could/would respond.
oliof:
Brand, Eero,
I get the impression that playing in Maldor is actually the hardest thing for all of us since there the free-ranging nature is expressed here most. "War-torn pseudo feudal society tries to resurrect itself, in danger of self destruction" is maybe just to broad a sketch to get people hooked on specifics as contrary to some of the very … tangible elements in Khale or Ammeni, and even Qek which, even if it is just more of a footnote in the original book, evokes some strong ideas with just a little prodding.
Maybe this needs a separate topic to discuss, but it ties in nicely in the aborted attempts of play I heard about, Daves questions about the validity of the myth of the maldorian empire, and my lack of vision for the maldor-based game I run (although we have a nice holiday-season cliffhanger right now).
shadowcourt:
I am *extremely* late to the party here (so much so that I'm almost as rudeness levels of topic-bumping, for which I apologize... it's been a crazy three months at work), but I thought I'd throw in my two cents, as this is a fairly interesting topic, and one my own house games have had fairly good success with.
First, in terms of the non-metallic nature of Ammeni, my own games have weighed heavily towards the spice-trade culture which Brand talks about, but have gone even further into the mercantile model. It's been a personal conceit of mine that Maldor and Ammeni were almost Renaissance cultures before the Skyfire, and are less medieval now than Renaissance-after-the-bomb as they try and resurrect themselves. As such, our Ammenite Houses have endorsed scrip in many occasions, as:
a.) plant matter is plentiful, and paper-making isn't really hard in marshy, lush Ammeni
b.) most people can't read, so forgery isn't an immediate threat to promissory notes and the like
c.) Ammenite culture is already highly procedural and invested in the idea of the relatively stability of the Houses and their trade relationships. As such, this faith in the Houses translates into a greater comfort with the idea that a House can back its own debts, or else will be likely cannibalized by the others. The cutthroat philosophy also ensures that a House is eager to collect on its own debts, and won't be stiffed by people without suitably mutilating or murdering the appropriate parties. When the tax collectors are also trained torturers, people don't shirk their obligations so easily.
We also played around with the idea of ceramic coinage which was more transferrable and floating in the open market. I think that as long as its backed by the Houses, and relatively hard to fabricate by your average joe, you've got a moderately stable economic choice for Ammeni.
Elsewhere, in Maldor, there's an odd mixture of ultra-poverty serfdom and the relative land-wealth and occasional metal-wealth of the Maldorite Lords. Your average village peasant engages in barter most often, and lives agriculturally. In places where there are large enough communities, Maldorite lords who have high pretensions of themselves as Absolonic figures sometimes strike their own coins, but the reality is that there's still a decent amount of coins from the Old Empire floating around, kept particularly valuable both by the fact that they're made of precious metals (silver, gold, etc.) and also by the Maldorite obsession with their own past and history, making them collector's items which sometimes exceed their own metal value. This results in a lopsided, quasi-stable economy at best, but that's not really a bad thing for a fractured Maldor.
I'm surprised to hear that people have a hard time playing in Maldor, though. Has there been much aborted play there? I've had pretty successful games set there, and I'm fairly keen on using it in the future, particularly grittier than I did it last time. My last Maldorite campaign was a port town which had a moderately high level of societal stratification, and I found myself missing peasant politics and the potential for a classic "Robin Hood" style game, with cruel lords taxing the common folk heartlessly and the constant fear of conscription against a neighboring Lord you couldn't care less about.
-shadowcourt (aka Josh)
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