The goal here is not a "victorian romance game". The goal is a set of rules/mechanics/setting considerations that make genre emulation more possible within a larger game.
http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/01/romance-plots-in-rpgs.html
The Rake, the Heroine, the Wallflower --> strong archetypes- too heavy handed. wallflower class????
xp rewards the goal is to permit genre emulation, direct incentives hog too much space. there are no rewards for happily ever after. there are no rewards for decades of cold, loveless marriage
Secret Identities
Everyone has multiple names which together constitute their true name. If someone knows your true name, they can do wack shit to you, so some of these names have to be secret.
Idea #1: Your secret names are your secret identities. This makes them a limited resource - you can't make up a secret identity, you have eight identities at most
Idea #2: your names are magic. If you walk out of the room and re-enter under a different name, you'll be treated as a different person. You don't need a mask to do this, but you should at least muss up your hair or change your clothes - everyone's a bit faceblind, but they aren't stupid.
Rules of Engagement
Victorian romance is all about living in a society that tells you what to do, then choosing to defy or compromise with that society. It requires restrictions to fight against.
Players defy restrictions instinctually - without those restrictions, victorian romance has no stakes.
Idea #3: The primary means by which social norms are enforced among the elite is loss of inheritance. Your inheritance is your lifeline. In a game with such an absurd degree of wealth inequality*, losing your inheritance is game over. Social change is not possible so long as the same power structures that make the PCs important remain in place.
This doesn't work on players with nothing to lose, i.e. classic dungeon crawling types. It does work on the heiress NPC they are trying to woo, so that's something.
*by absurd wealth inequality, i mean you can commission a dress made of living moths or erect a giant statue of yourself on your private dressage course or buy a mansion and fill it with ghosts without too much thought. let them eat cake type beat
- All scions are expected to participate in the social season. This is also when all the politics and sports and shit happens.
- All scions are expected to debut by age 28 at the latest. It is typical to debut by age 22.
- All scions are expected to be married by age 35 at the latest. If you are not at least engaged by age 30, people will begin making arrangements for you.
- Bigamy is frowned upon unless you have high CHA.
- Divorce is frowned upon.
- Queerness, in all of its forms, is frowned upon.
- Courtship is formalized thru the exchange of letters. Failing to do so is tantamount to keeping your relationship secret, which is forbidden.
- Courtship outside of one's House is forbidden except as part of a political alliance.
- Courtship below one's social standing is extremely forbidden. You will lose your inheritance; your partner will lose everything.
- The Heads of House have the final say in your courtship, marriage, and sex life.
There's also House specific rules
- Scions of this House must marry outside of their House. They host debutante balls for foreign royalty.
- This House encourages bigamy. Their scions are expected to marry at least twice by 35.
Break enough of these rules and you become a failscion - no inheritance, no prospects, just a bunch of relatives who think you're a failure. Failscions play a very different kind of game - one where they crawl into a dungeon with nothing and try to claw their way back to wealth.
Idea #4: Domain management and dungeoncrawling are two very different game modes. The scion/failscion dichotomy matches nicely to it. A game where you oscillate in and out of social grace based on how well you can adapt to a restrictive social code(????)
Binaries
High society can tolerate queerness. What it cannot tolerate is a lapse in procedure.
Idea #5: In courtship, the feminine role is passive and the masculine is aggressive. If a man takes the feminine role in courtship, or a woman takes the masculine, they must overcompensate to better fit their courtship-gender --> if a woman makes the first move on a man, she must also: lead when dancing, drive, and duel any rivals with pistols at dawn. If they get married, she will be the groom.
[why bother? i think gray areas for queerness are good, but i want to make sure i replace any restriction i remove with one thats equally fun (by which i mean annoying). Not sure if this is the right solution]
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| may 👁cu🏠my🦌 |
Oh, I wrote an OSR compatible turnless social combat system at one point. I sold it, so I'm not sure I'm allowed to reprint it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, what about gender-specific titles? A title that can only be held by men, otherwise following primogeniture, we know well. But if you gender-flip it, I dunno, there's something there. You can also imagine alternating-gender titles, titles that can't be inherited by people without a degree in Literature from a respectable university, titles that pass to whoever wins a duel against the current holder, etc etc etc
I think that your core issue might be defining what the win condition of the game is (in D&D this is, I guess, ascending to godhood) -- does the game just end at 35? Roll for starting age?
Gendered titles are very good, thanks for the idea! Titles of all sorts, titles as loot, titles titles titles
DeleteWin conditions are always tricky, particularly so in a setting where one is systemically repressed and made to toe the status quo. None of the stuff in this post really points toward a complete game tbh - it's all background radiation and vibes for something with an actual objective.
Well, maybe titles-as-loot = titles-as-advancement = titles-as-character-sheet
Deletetitle rank = magnitude of bonus
title type (land, authority over a type of thing, courtesy, governmental, sincure, etc etc etc etc) = type of bonus
title modifier (marquis, eccelastical, entailment, etc etc etc) = modifier (possibly effecting other title bonuses)
Obviously, the PCs could purchase titles, be given titles by the monarch for services to the realm & crown, or inherit them -- equally obviously, this is an intergenerational game, with multiple years passing in a single session, and the detailed roleplaying taking place at specific decision points
this -- if we're keeping to the victorian era and *maybe* the surrounding eras that get lumped in with it -- means that the game could at most take place between fantasy 1760 and fantasy 1914. Or, if we're being absolutely maximalist about the game, it came take place between the start of the 1st Fantasy Industrial Revolution and when the Nth Fantasy Industrial Revolution ends in the 1st Fantasy Industrialized (aka World) War, which will (without a suitable allohistorical counterexplanation for why not) destroy the aristocracy and usher in a new era
If we take 1914-1760 = 145 as the mean time to happen of the event that ends the game (assuming a yearly events table copying off mechanics from the 1st Oriental Adventures -- yearly events and monthly events seem like a good fit for something like this) then
+ 145 is approximately 144, which is the square of 12, which is useful for 1d12 by 1d12 type of grid of events
+ if we assume that the event is "start of industrial war" then that has to be a progression of a '1st industrial revolution --> end of 1st industrial revolution --> ... --> start of nth industrial revolution --> nth industrial revolution ends in start of industrial war'
++ 1st industrial revolution lasts 1760 to 1840 -- 80 years
++ 2nd industrial revolution starts 1870 -- 30 years later
++ 2nd inudstrial revolution ends 1914 -- 44 years later
++ lets assume a 50/50 chance of peaceful or war end of an industrial revolution
++ 80, 44, 30 is a weird spread of numbers to make a probability distribution out of, but i'd want all 3 to be fairly likely (yes, I'm aware that I'm abstracting historical forces beyond the point of usefulness, but I'm assuming that the PCs are mostly focused on going to dance balls -- not on actually controlling not-britain's industrialization) -- so lets just say that it's a mean-time-to-happen of 50 years (average of 80 and 30 is 55, and 44 is pretty close to 50) which happens to be accomplishable on a 2-in-100 chance, which is great for a d100 yearly events table.
> Win conditions are always tricky, particularly so in a setting where one is systemically repressed and made to toe the status quo. None of the stuff in this post really points toward a complete game tbh - it's all background radiation and vibes for something with an actual objective.
do you know what that 'something with an actual objective' (the doggerland stuff?) is and can I please work on it with you. I've had a lot of victoriana ideas for a long while, and I'm a big fan of your blog