As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been working on a way to not just model individual characters in the EIDOLON ruleset, but to model their social connections. The idea is to have a simple set of rules that I can use to describe the intricate web of relationships that any character will have, as a member of a complex society.

I think I may be getting close to what I want. Consider the following diagram:

You’ll notice a certain confusion of vocabulary here; I’m not sure yet what words would be best to describe the various components of this model. Here’s the idea, though.

At the top, we have the extended character itself. Perhaps this is a single individual, perhaps it includes that person and some of her partners and dependents. Or perhaps it’s a group of unrelated characters who have agreed to throw in their fortunes together: an adventuring party, the officers of a mercenary band, the crew of a privately held starship, und so weiter. In any case, all the Members (or Household, or Company, or whatever term makes sense in the setting) will share their finances equally, sharing the same social standing score once the model is complete.

On the left, we have various forms of Income. Some of this may be External Income – simple pay for the professional occupations of the Members, say. On the other hand, the Members may also own certain Assets, pieces of wealth-producing property. Most likely these Assets will require some kind of labor to actually produce their own Income. A medieval lord will need peasants to farm his land, an ancient tycoon needs slaves to operate his mines, a starship captain needs crewmen to run his ship. These workers, employees, or vassals will be paid for their labor, but by working on the Assets they produce Income for the owners, in the form of profit.

Income is on the left, outgo on the right. The Members will probably spend some of their resources on simple consumption – food, clothing, housing, luxury goods, entertainment, all at whatever level they can afford. They may also have people hired to provide them with personal service: a wealthy woman’s impeccable butler, a warlord’s kept courtesan, a personal clerk or physician, whatever might be available and appropriate in the setting. These hirelings or henchmen are also paid, but they produce no Income or Profit, they simply work to improve the quality of life for the Members.

The Members have to make sure the books balance – they can’t spend more on luxuries and personal service than they bring in! Any given setting book written under EIDOLON would lay out various structures like this, with rules for various Assets and how they would have to be worked, and lists of available workers and henchmen.

Here’s one simple result of this system: the Social Standing score of all the Members depends solely on the amount spent on Consumption and Staff. I’m taking an almost Veblenist approach here, claiming that status in almost any society is strongly correlated to the level of conspicuous consumption. Not a bad assumption, I think, for most RPG worlds and fictional universes.

There’s one more neat feature of this model: it’s possible to nest it. The character(s) who make up one set of Members may be getting paid for their services by someone higher up. Likewise, each of the workers or henchmen that one character pays may be keeping her own Household at a lower level.

For example, I’ve started to work out the details here using features of Tremara society, the setting of The Curse of Steel. A given Tremara chariot-warrior will own many hundreds of acres of cleared land, with peasants to manage his herds of cattle and horses and raise an annual crop of barley. If we wanted to zoom in on those peasants, then each peasant household could be described at finer detail using this same model. Meanwhile, the spearmen, bards, and other specialists who live in the lord’s hall and provide service for him could also have families, dependents, or property of their own.

This is a model I think I can use extensively in worldbuilding work, in a variety of settings; it should make an interesting innovation for the EIDOLON ruleset. Progress!