Sharrukin's Palace

I’ve gotten kind of stuck, and it’s affecting three separate projects at once. I suppose it’s another example of the world-building rabbit hole that I tend to fall into. Although in this case, if I may mix a metaphor, I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I dig deep into the second-draft rewrite of The Curse of Steel, I want to revise my earlier, rather sketchy, world-building work about Krava’s home society. That should help me ground the story better in the details of her situation: a noble warrior’s only child, who suddenly inherits his lands and possessions at the same moment that she becomes a leading figure in her tribe. There are a lot of moments in the story where Krava deals with money, with groups of warriors, with chains of command and fealty . . . and it would be good to have a better image of how her tribal society (the Tremara, or “Mighty Folk”) organize such things.

The more I think about that, the more time I’ve spent turning some of my previous bits of world-building and game design over in my head, most notably the analysis I did of ancient Greek society in GURPS terms. Earlier this month, I spent a week or so on a similar analysis of Tremara economics and social structure – how many peasant families are needed to support one chariot-driving warrior, and so on.

That did help me get a more realistic picture of population sizes and social stratification in Tremara culture, so that helped. But then, my mind tripped and fell down the rabbit hole. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about something for the EIDOLON project. (As a reminder, EIDOLON is the not-quite-a-full-RPG I’m designing, a universal character description system that should be easily convertible to any other published RPG rule-set, so I can publish world-building material in a game-agnostic manner.)

The idea is that an individual character isn’t just a collection of aptitudes and skills. She’s going to have a place in society, a role, a specific status in the social hierarchy. Most RPGs tend to gloss over this factor. Characters tend to be socially unpinned, wandering adventurers without ties to the community around them, even in settings that ostensibly involve dense social structures.

GURPS at least attempts to account for social standing, with a set of character traits like Wealth, Social Status, Rank, Social Regard, Social Stigma, and so on. It still tends to treat characters in isolation, each one’s place in society always independent of every other’s. For example, a GURPS character has a Cost of Living that’s tied to his Social Status, but that’s highly abstracted. A socially prominent character probably has many other characters working to support his rank and status, but GURPS just elides all that into a monthly expenditure.

So it occurred to me: why not have rules in EIDOLON to support the description of characters (or groups of characters) who have extensive social capital? Instead of just having a bare-bones “wealth” trait, or a simple ranking of social status, why not lay out exactly what that means?

So, for example, take a prominent noble warrior in Krava’s world, such as her father Derga at the beginning of The Curse of Steel. Considered as an adventurer, Derga has a lot of gear and equipment that go with him when he travels: fine clothes, some armor, weapons, a chariot and a team of ponies to draw it, all of the finest quality. Considered as a lord, however, Derga has a lot of things that wouldn’t go on a typical RPG’s character sheet: agricultural land, herds of cattle and horses, a fine mead-hall to live in. He also has the people that are loyal to him and are needed to support his assets and lifestyle: subordinate chariot warriors, spearmen, craftsmen to maintain all his goods, someone to manage his household while he’s away, all the peasant families who work his land, and so on. Meanwhile, Krava herself is Derga’s dependent – she gains benefit from all of his holdings and wealth, even if she doesn’t control them yet.

So I’m working on a set of rules and techniques that EIDOLON can use to describe a situation like that. Since EIDOLON is intended to be a “universal” system, of course, I’m hoping the framework will be extensible to cover a variety of situations: adventuring or mercenary companies, commercial starship crew, modern small businesses, and so on. Any situation in which characters have enough social status and wealth to have assets, property, and hirelings to help maintain it all.

I think I’m getting close to a first-draft design for all this. Once that’s done, I can do a lot of the detailed world-building for Krava’s setting, which in turn will give me material for the first EIDOLON “setting book,” and will also let me get started on the second draft for The Curse of Steel.

It’s annoying when my different projects get tangled up, as if I had discovered unexpected dependencies in an elaborate Gantt chart. Should be productive in the long run, though.