House creation in A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying
A few weeks ago my long running gaming group sat down with the new Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying rules to make a House and characters. I had read the rules, but not actually put them into play yet so was really looking forward to how this very collaborative part of the game panned out.
To start with the World this house is going to inhabit is not George R R Martin’s Westeros. I’d decided a while ago that as two of the players hadn’t read the books and as I wanted them to have as much freedom as they wanted to mess up the world that I’d make my own setting, which borrows very heavily from George R R Martin’s masterwork. So I filled the players in a little on what to expect, and then we lept straight in with total random rolls to let the dice decide the history of the House.
It’s a very simple system which has a huge amount of depth in it’s small series of tables. Essentially each house is created much like characters. Players or the GM roll 7d6 and that decides the house ‘stats’. Each house is made up of Defense, Influence, Lands, Law, Population, Power and Wealth. The result of each 7d6 gives your house their starting values. These are then adjusted depending on the realm the house is located in. Finally you decide on your house’s history.
I think this is the element of house creation I like the most. You roll 3d6 this time and it gives you a broad event type that happened to the house. Things like Glory or Favour or even Madness. These give you ideas on how to develop your house and if you’re the GM gives you good story seeds to add flavour.
Most interestingly, to me at least, is that this whole process is deeply collaborative. The night that we rolled up the house I was expecting it to take an hour or so. It took 3 hours and all three of us were rivited the whole time coming up with reasons and stories. This whole section of the game is extremely easy to use and I expect will help hugely when developing other NPC houses.
Here is the coat of arms on of the other players created for House Argent, their house. If you want to see more about how the House turned out, feel free to download the pdf I prepared for the players.
