Feudal warfare, house guilds, and you

Argent Dawn
1

Yes, yes. I know what you’re thinking with the house guilds and stuff, but dude listen.

I’ve been playing the Warcraft mod for CK2 recently. Played as the Greymane family of the Kingdom of Gilneas. My vassals were a rowdy bunch. Constantly fighting each other for claims of land and plotting against each other. I thought, this sounds like a fun concept for RP.

Imagine, say, two of those house guilds doing actual house guild stuff. No, not standing in Stormwind doing nothing, but actually fighting each other and other things.

I know this realm has had a history of house guilds doing questionable stuff. I joined AD somewhere in 2017, and that was me mostly playing on Horde so I personally haven’t seen the ‘glory days’ of these guilds. Please tell me information about these guilds of the past, if you got any. I want to hear about them.

Often when I hear talk of these guilds, it’s not positive talk. I do understand why, but some of the stuff I’ve heard have sounded really FUN. Could it be possible to have house guilds, and actually have them good, fun, and lore friendly?

Does this work in the setting of Warcraft? Stormwind is an absolute monarchy, the nobility have almost no power there. So what if we look into some of the many defunct kingdoms?

Let’s take a look at Gilneas in WoW for example. (Gilneas is most likely at least partially controlled by the Grand Alliance, so this probably wouldn’t work, but this is just an example) So in Gilneas, there currently is no king to keep things in check. This would allow for some rival houses to do almost anything. It’s like a sandbox. Gilneas is a very big place, plenty of open and empty buildings occupied by no one, and also almost no other guilds. Plenty of land to fight over. Right, what if you add like 5 of those guilds to the mix Probably won’t work ever at all, but sounds fun.

There are currently still many house guilds, but from what I’ve seen they’re pretty much all just the same thing. Some just stand in Stormwind, have a chat, do nothing. Those that do stuff are allied to the Alliance and only fight enemies of the Alliance, which also sounds a bit boring.

Oh yeah, what if you combine the thing from my last post with this post? Have one of the guilds be some cheap baron who doesn’t supply the peasants he levies.

The structure of this post is bad because I did not have any direction when writing this. I just wrote what came to mind. I don’t remember what the key point to this was, or why I even made this post. I will post this anyway.

Also I don’t know anything about medieval feudal politics or levies so this post is probably completely wrong, but this just sounded like a fun idea.

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That has been tried multiple times (combining noble houses into a sort of progressive pinnacle of RP), and that ended as you could possibly imagine it would - with a messy bang and weird drama.

No matter how detailed structure or interesting concept you will make - it will last no longer than a few months and catch on fire due to unanimous reasons to create drama for the sake of self-sustaining because that’s how noble RP works.

9 Likes
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Well that sure is unfortunate. I’ll just forget this whole thing.

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Tried noble house RP on Horde side for the Blood Elves and honestly… it was a hot mess.

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I got a strange one, I was in a house guild once that said they weren’t part of the Alliance but were part of the Alliance… it was so confusing that GL never ever gave a straight answer.

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my plot power is at 342% but somehow my intended target for assassination lives because some drunkard blabbed about it.

There you go, there’s noble rp drama in a nutshell.

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Currently the only human nation with actual houses that have their own men like a sort of feudal society is Kul Tiras, with the Proudmoores, the Ashvanes, Stormsongs, and the Waycrests, though I do not think there are any other houses around there.

It’s also rather confusing since Kul Tiras is depicted as both the Houses having their own soldiers and personnel, yet on the other hand they’re also portrayed as having a professional standard army of their own the way Stormwind does ( The Navy and just general Kul Tiras Marines and soldiers).

Been here since 2013 and well, from what I remember is that I mostly steered clear from House guilds in general due to the often mentioned drama and weird rp they got up to.

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Oh please no let’s not do this again. Put on your surcoats everybody.

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It’s only fun when both sides accept that neither can, or should, win in the long term.

Spoilers: this never happened.

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Why? That’s really easy to accept. Like bro just accept it. EZ. Winning does not matter when we’re all here to have fun.

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bazinga⠀⠀⠀

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I don’t understand

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This is something that some people never really understood. People get very attached to their characters and don’t like others dictating what happens.

There’s some very rare cases where things are planned out beforehand and it all goes smoothly, but (by and large) this wasn’t the case before probably 2019 or later, and at this point House RP wasn’t really a thing.

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It sounds like a fun idea, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work if everyone is on same board. I think the crux of these things often comes down to the particular players RPing as the nobles.

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More like homeless guilds, amirite.

Imagine being a noble that shares the census bureau with other “Nobles”.

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The people claiming power proved to everyone else why no one should.

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House guilds have a notorious history of poor behaviour and imposing themselves onto others.

The first issue is that they claim power but forget that for power to have any meaning in RP the other party must be ok with you having that power. And with the way house guilds historically behaved nobody was ok with them having power. And because of that it often turned into rivalries and arguments between house guilds because they couldn’t get the gratification elsewhere. Which really put a damper on that whole cooperation thing that RP is all about.

They were also incredibly annoying to many because the standard recruitment behaviour was to walk around Stormwind pestering everyone who wasn’t in their guild about the lack of a surcoat on their chest. Despite the fact that some people did wear tabards.

“No good sir I don’t have a surcoat but can’t you see the giant Lorewalker crest on my chest? Leave me alone this is the fith day in a row you’ve asked me.”

Also landed nobility in Azeroth is rather vague and weird. We know there’s counts and barons. So I’ll go ahead and assume the concept of counties and such exists on Azeroth as well. But most other noble characters just go by “lord” or “lady”, which doesn’t actually mean anything. And contrary to their historical counterparts they don’t posess much power over anything due to the house of nobles being rather neutered after the last time they got a bit too uppity and the Wrynn family centralizing a lot of rule. So people often look at this and become a bit weirded out by nobles trying to, well, lord over them.

So it is very hard to be a noble with any power in RP. There is a lot working against you.

Lastly a couple of them just became harem RP and that is creepy and made people real real suspicious of other house guilds. It just became this whole thing where every now and then a new one sprang up with the promise of “No we’re different!”, and then they inevitably were not different. And now the whole concept is just a joke too many. If it wasn’t already due to the previous issues.

RP whatever you want. But house guilds will inevitably be in a bubble of their own making, due to how house guilds behaved themselves people are just not interested anymore by and large.

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Factually what you (OP) mentioned happened specifically in Gilneas. Between House of Tarsias and House of Strathmore.

They had a long winded feud - in another era and age of World of Warcraft that is not plighted by present day roleplay limits and issues. Due premise is that for such ‘feud’ to have its unfolding both the parties involved had a solid connection at guild management level. (As per, being IC enemies, but OOC friends and able to communicate).

Both guilds are not here anymore for all I know but they ran their show, provided roleplay for their guildies which I believe had their fun for the duration.

But in present WoW times players bring in real life, themselves, modern / present times ways of thinking into Warcraft - so a ‘border strife’ between guilds is alien, the term ‘levy’ causes skin allergic reaction, etcetera.

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Most people want peace rp these days so I dont think the idea would get a lot of love

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Provincial guards? Since I don’t think we really see many members of either the Waycrest or Proudmoore, or even the Tideguard ((assuming they are the Stormsong equivalent)) outside of their areas controlled by their respective houses.

There’s also a lot of nobilities in Kul Tiras, particularly around Boralus. Presumably they would have their own houses, albeit probably owing fealty to one of the four major houses.