Core Concepts -- Houses and Marriage

So first, I should explain the base concepts of Sovereign.

The idea behind the game is that each player controls a House, which is made up of several characters. At its core, a House is a single family, but it might also contain allies, hostages and mercenaries. Regardless of who is in a House, the common factor between each member is that they are all striving for the same goal.

The House that a player controls is designed by that player in that they get to create its name, decide on its heraldry symbol, and name every character born into that House. For example, in playtests so far, some of the names have been House Stormebreaker, House Icebrand, House Whitehart, House Crownguard, etc. The names of the Houses do not necessarily have to be the same as the family name of the characters in the Houses, but it's usually fun to reflect the same theme. For example, members of House Stormebreaker bore the last name of "Storm" while members of House Icebrand bore the last name of "Winterheart".

Which brings me to another aspect of Sovereign: marriage.

In the context of the game, marriage is done for political gain and not for love. Which is not to say that the people getting married won't love each other! This distinction is why marriage in Sovereign is always between a man and a woman, because the point is to have children for the future. I, personally, am completely for gay marriage in the future and there is nothing stopping a group of players from nixing this rule entirely. If nothing else, the rule is implemented for narrative purposes more than technical ones. In fact, the rule has proven to be somewhat problematic in the past. What happens when, for example, there are nothing but girls or nothing but boys in the game? Everyone loses?

One potential solution I had was to eradicate the notion of gender entirely, where characters are just names with implied genders, but could be anything they needed to be as the situation demanded. I think, in the end, the game will come with a default standard and a set of optional rules the players can adapt according to their preferences.

 Anyway, technical complications aside, marriage is a very important aspect of the game. The way it works in-game is that when you write up a marriage contract, you decide (between players) who moves into whose House and the player obtaining the new character decides on whether or not the newcomer keeps their last name. In a playtesting session, for example, we had one player decide that the women were the ones keeping the last names, making his House one of an amalgamtion of last names.

After a game is complete, there's a post-game phase where children are born and characters age (and a bunch of other stuff happens, but I'll get to that some other time). The rules for childbirth are currently being revisited, but one thing remains the same: children will be your greatest source of new characters.

So that's it for now. Next time I'll talk about combat and war since this is, after all, a war game!