Dynasty & Decadence/House Rules

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1) Collated and final Stats, with huge apologies for jerking people around -

• 19 Attribute Points to spend as you like
• 48 Ability Points (20 from Aspect or Favoured; Dynastic minimums apply)
• 25 Charms (loose 1 charm for every 4 CMA charms)
• 18 Background Points (updated backgrounds below, no family background).
• 7 Virtues, 3 Essence.
• 45 Bonus Points.

2) The Host’s Hierarch of Nobility, determining the lowness of bows, honourifics and general matters of prestige and obedience are complex. Compared with, say, English feudalism, the Realm uses this system to finely nuance it’s hierarchy instead of using levelled titles and ranks like Duke, Count, Prince, Lord, Knight. Every citizen of the Realm who can pass a difficulty 2 Socialize or better can do the mental calculations to determine where people fit on this scale and how to act in their presence. For guidelines, I’ve made a system using a scoring method:

• Backgrounds: Reputation, Backing, Breeding, dignified Connections, Resources and Command all gain points.
• Traits: Points to the score for Essence above 2, being female, having a higher place in the order of inheritance, having attested fertility, accomplished children and Appearances over 3. Penalties for negative reputations, resources 0, every 50 years childless or being a sorcerer.
• Skills: The minimum spread of Archery 1, Lore 2, Martial Arts 1, Melee 1, Performance 1, Presence 1, Ride 1, Socialize 2 and War 1 is indeed an absolute minimum.
  • For Dynasts of your age and accomplishment, expectations are much closer to Archery 2, Lore 3, Martial Arts 2 and Melee 2 (and one of them at 3), Performance 2 and Presence 2 (one of them at 3), Ride 2, Socialize 3, Bureaucracy 2, Occult 1 and War 2. Matching this spread enhances your standing as accomplished.
  • Having these skills at 4 or 5 notably enhances standing. Other skills at 4 or 5 enhances standing at a lesser rate.

Once your sheets are created, I’ll arrange you all in a rough hierarchy. Note that from a design perspective, this system ha little mechanical meight. It is instead meant to give weight to the abstract qualities like Reputation and Connections, so as to fully integrate their worth, and isn’t meant to be fair so much as to model the unfairness inherent to the system. Please use this system is guiding your OOC understandings of your relative prestige and importance.

3) Imperial Resources: I’ve realised I am generally unhappy with the scale of the Resources Background for use in DB games. It seems to me to work much better for Solars or Infernals, abstracting the range of wealth for all Creation. For Dynasts, the fluff never speaks of having difficulty buying a meal or even living in a bedsit worrying over the price of a sword. And with only 10,000 Dynasts divvying the loot of the Realm, who is picking up less than a shekel a year? The range is clearly intended to be narrower and differently focused, and I’d rather be able to finely delineate, especially if you go off the 2nd Edition book. And ‘12 or more talents’ is usually fine for Resources 5, but when your buying and selling manses, nations and favour, the difference between 12 talents and 30 talents is notable. Ultimately, money is also a soft power for Dynasts as well as hard – “The richest in all Lord’s Crossing, I say. 10,000 a year, all up!”

The descriptions below should give a rough feel and I’ve included median annual incomes for each level:

• X Resource: Anything between disgraceful bankruptcy, itinerant monkhood and strange principled poverty.
• • Resource: Half a talent of jade in annual income. This is pretty on par for a parent’s stipend for an unmarried child out adventuring – spending money to see the Threshold, or enough to rent a modest but not utterly shameful apartment in the Imperial City. For an adult, however, this is low indeed –an amount far too quickly eaten by the costs of not quite maintaining appearances. If an adult receives such a small stipend, they are retired without much respect, distant from the controllers of their House’s finances or being taught a lesson. It may well be time to start looking at marrying a patrician with a substantive trade!
• •• Resource: 2 ½ talents. On paper, the ‘average’ Dynastic income. This is a very respectable familial stipend for their most useful and favoured scions. More often, it covers stipend plus a few source of earned income - an officer’s share from the Legions, or the legitimate income from a senior position in the Thousand Scales would cover most of the deficit. Enough to maintain a proper household, including carriage and a pair of slaves, eat red meat on a weekly basis, contribute slaves to the maintenance of the family manse, wear acceptable jade armour and pay for your children’s education.
• ••• Resource: 7 talents. No job pays this well and even Dynasts only reach this height through easy access to vast property and large-scale investment. Rents from around tens of thousands of rice farmers, shipping of cattle from Harbourhead, that sort of thing. At this stage, you can own the townhouse in the Lord’s Crossing, the sprawling country estate on the Isle and a personal apartment in the Imperial City, all while throwing galas. Your personal slaves go from a handful of lifelong all-rounders to a small army of talented specialists. Buying admiralties or prefectures become a large but reasonable investments.
• •••• Resource: 18 talents. Setting up simhata-breeding country estates, buying lands for your favoured veterans, hiring undead assassins and antiquing for First Age daiklaives become routine expenditures. Day-to-day existence poses no financial limits. Client fees from dozens of patrician families. The family starts looking at you to pay rather than receive stipends.
• ••••• Resource: 45 talents. A financial pillar of Creation, an Exalted Rothschilde or Crosseus. Donating a new wing for Great House’s Imperial Manse or sponsoring a dozen studio of godblooded artificers is a minor investment. Building a new city in your favourite Satrapy is a medium-term project.

4) Retainers and Resources always seemed a silly fine line – who has 20 talents of jade but doesn’t have whatever servants and slaves they want? Where does the social context arise for someone to makes less than a peasant but have 20-something loyal retainers? The idea of the background seems to give a sense of Imperial grandeur and establish your relation with the world. So lets keep that, but change to a more Roman client / Japanese feudality sort of effect. This system already seems to be in place by the books, but it is currently only represented by a vague use of Influence. So this also makes up for the lack of the grandeur of Followers for anyone who wants to rule men in a non-military way. So, a retainer is an unExalted Dynast, citizen or patrician client of the Realm who owes you their service, allegiance and obedience, and who you owe protection and favouritism. It is informal rather than feudal, but is recognised by law. The Retainer Background covers many members of Realm society are your retainers. It counts how many free citizens of the Realm have sworn on as your retainer, including both free servants (who are retainers who stay with you and perform tasks for you), civilians and patricians. In short, it describes your degree of ‘lordliness’, your impact on townships, civilians, peasants and Realm society.

• X Retainers: You are outside of the client system. No Imperial obligations flow up to you. This is pretty common for Dynasts who spend their lives overseas.
• • Retainers: You have taken the deliberate step to become the patron benefactor of one or two specific individuals, be it because you believe in them or because they were inherited from the wider family. They could serve you directly, and you can rely on their services.
• •• Retainers: You have drawn to you a couple of dozen citizens. Five direct retainers, including bodyguards and councillors, and maybe a single patrician or unExalted Dynast striking out on their own to manage your estate and speak with the lower orders. This is the most common ratio for Dynasts through their lives who don’t wish to be bogged down with the minutia of politics, trade or property such as sorcerers or sailors.
• ••• Retainers: Your clients hve grown beyond the point where you can easily track them. 100 to 200 retainers. You might effectively run the handful of towns nearest your Estate, or have real influence over the political life of a city allied with your Great House. A patrician family has your support, and you their service, creating a body of allies who can interface with the Dynastic bureaucratic and social scenes.
• •••• Retainers: Not a day goes by when some citizen doesn’t visit the Estate to leave a gift and their compliments. Even a couple of notable patricians support your endeavours, and lend their weight from the Lesser House of the Deliberative down to their instructions to their peasants.
• ••••• Retainers: Thousands of citizens call you ‘dominus’. You can request favours from almost all trained professions, and have clients in multiple prefectures. A dozen respected patrician families walk in your shadow, incorporating your colours in their House livery. Among these, twenty to fifty retainers are in your direct service at all times, including at least a couple of unExalted dynasts. Often these are second sons and daughters of the families most loyal to you.

5) And to make a full run at it, lets go for Craft as well. I have how hard it is to make a Dynastic da Vinci! So here is an ad-hoc hodegepodge for this game. Craft is now technically one single Ability. The first dot in Craft you take is assigned to a discipline (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Wood). As you raise the skill, that dot goes up to the new level and you gain a new discipline at the next rung down. i.e Craft 5 (Air 5, Earth 4, Wood 3, Fire 2, Water 1) or Craft 3 (Earth 3, Wood 2, Water 1). For lower tier crafts, specialties can be purchased in the disciplines to raise them to equal your highest discipline, and the usual cap of 3 specialties does not apply for this purpose.

Questions

1. ) Why are you devoted to keeping this sub-House alive against all odds? What makes it a better choice than the common sense option many of your siblings and cousins have taken and returning to House Peleps or marrying into another House or whatnot.
2. ) The Dynasty isn't all about family. What loyalties and causes compete with your loyalty to House Peleps Taric?
3. ) In what ways are you products of the Dynasty? As with question 4, a clear pitch here is that the entire life of Dynasts from cradle to grae has been constrained by the work of the best sociological and psychological minds Creation ever produced to, broadly speaking, make Dynasts believe the same things and act in the same ways. Some high-level notes about the degree to which you are a product of that environment.
4. ) What have you openly achieved in the past century that makes you a worthy subject for historians of the next Age to investigate thoroughly? Afterall, there are 10,000 Exalted Dynasts. You are, by my calculations, in the top tenth of those in power. That makes you one of the top thousand defenders of Creation against the millions or billions of nobodies - as I said in the start, not just a family drama, but a transhuman family drama.
5. ) What weaknesses do you possess that aren't just personal failings, but could be exploited by your enemies to cost you the Game of Thrones? What are the fields of engagement where you can't just apply Game Theory analysis, but instead will act against your own interests?