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An exercise using Tony Bath’s Rules for creating characters for fantasy campaigns such as his Hyborian Campaign.
Introduction
This is an exercise to try out Tony Baths Rules to establish a full family tree for a Noble House in a
WFRP Campaign. In this case, I have chosen House von Midwald the ruling house of the Duchy of
Midwald as the family having recently decided that the most likely head of the this family is Gravina
the Dowager Duchess Elena von Midwald the High Lord Treasurer of the Reikland mentioned on page
22 of the source-book WFRP 4th Altdorf Crown Of The Empire. The duchess seems the most likely
ruler of the Duchy of Midwald simply because of her rank and title, but nothing is know of her family
or personality.
So, this exercise it intended to fill in some of the blanks and provide a more useful description of her
and her family.
All we are told in Altdorf Crown of the Empire is that the Dowager Duchess is an elderly woman who
has served as High Lord Treasurer for nearly four decades and has a good command of mathematics
and rhetoric.
We are also told that she has an appreciation of strong wine and young companions which is a source
of gossip and concern amongst her peers, who think the behaviour unbecoming for a lady of her years.
So, we can assume that the Duchess Elena is an elderly woman, probably in her sixties, who may have
a drink problem and a lustful nature. It would certainly seem that she enjoys her personal pleasures.
The first stage in creating her family is to decide its size. This is done by a simple roll of two normal
D6 dice, giving a potential family size of between 2 and 12, with the most likely size being around 7.
As you can see I rolled a 9. So the House von Midwald currently has nine living member, an above
average family size under these rules.
The next step is to decide the gender of the nine family members. Although we already know that the
duchess is female, so in fact, we only need to decide the gender of the other eight.
This is done with another simple die roll. One die for each of the remaining eight members of the
family with odd numbers resulting in a female and even numbers a male. So a 50% chance of male or
female for each character.
So here we have the eight dice rolls for gender showing that the House von Midwald consists of three
male and five female members (Six if you include the Duchess herself)
This gives us our initial family table and I have added the Dowager Duchess to the top of the family
tree.
The next step is to determine the age of each family member. This is done by rolling 1 x D6 and 1d10.
You could of course simply roll a percentile dice but it really hinges upon what age range one
considers useful and in this case as the Dowager Duchess is assumed to be around sixty I don’t want
to risk any of her family being older than her. I’ve also rolled a single d10 to give us an exact age for
the duchess.
The first thing to notice about the results above is that this is quite an elderly family with only one
female child. If this was an issue for your game you could arbitrarily decide to reduce everyones age
by ten years or perhaps use a D5 or D4 dice instead of a D6. But we will stick with the numbers we
have been given for this exercise.
The next step is to sort the family members into local generations e.g. Elderly, Middle Aged, Young,
and children. This is really just a case of comparing ages and deciding who could potentially be the
child or whom in the list. Though we don’t need to decide that precisely at this stage.
This gives us our first glimpse of the structure of the Von Midwald family and allowx us to begin to
speculate about relationship between them such as ‘Who is the mother of the child?’, ‘Who is its
father?’ and thus who is married to whom and this gives us our basic family tree.
I’m also getting fed up with referring to the family by number so it time to give them all names. How
you do this is up to you. Personally I tend to use a random name generator but choose the names
that catch my eye.
Family Relationships can now be decided and here we need some rules.
1. All Males must be family descendants otherwise they would have a different family name.
2. Females might be family descendants or wives from other families.
3. Everyone must have parents, but some may already be dead.
So, young Salina needs a mother and father, and I’m going to assume for the sake of simplicity that
they are both still alive. Which means that her father could in theory be either Heidric, Heinz or
Jurgen. Though Jurgen is possibly the most likely candidate. Likewise, women are assumed to be
capable of childbirth up to the age of 40. So, in theory Salina’s mother could be Elisinda, Freidhilda. Or
Theodora. But not Marietta who would have been 41 when Salina was born.
So, a random selection from the available candidates decides that Selina’s parents are Heidric and
Theodora.
This of course means that Theodora is the wife of Heidric and thus from a different family. As ones
family database grows it may become apparent which family Theodora belonged to before she
married Heidric, but for the time being we have no obvious candidates. In an ideal world I would be
searching my database of eligible females for an unmarried woman of 41 years of age to to make this
family connection. But at the moment I have no other families defined.
In theory, Elisinda could be the daughter of Marietta though that would make her very old to remain
unmarried and given that she is the only female in the family of child-bearing age I’m inclined to
marry her off to one of the men in the hope that she can produce an heir before she turns forty.
Jurgen would be the most likely pairing in terms of age.
This would leave Freidhilda to be the childless wife of Heinz and Marietta either a childless spinster or
a widowed and sister to the Duchess.
Almost immediately one can see that House von Midwald has a succession problem.
The Dowager Duchess only has one surviving son (Jurgen) who has an aging wife Elisinda and no
children. In four years time unless Elisinda gives birth the hereditary line of the Duchess will be
extinct.
Her brother Heinz next in line of succession also has an ageing wife and no children and Heidric has
only managed to sire one daughter, whilst Marietta if she married at all has no surviving children.
I’m using Tony Bath’s playing card system for determining the character and personality of each of
the Midwald family members. This doesn’t preclude the use of the standard character creation rules
for WFRP, indeed one can give each of these characters a standard profile for a Noble NPC if they
become active in your game.
However, the WFRP profile doesn’t really consider the personality and character of the NPC merely its
attributes and skills. Whereas, Tony Bath’s system is designed for creating the ruling houses of
factions in a wargame campaign and so is intimately interested in what makes each character tick
with a view to that information being used to colour their decisions and behaviour at a political and
diplomatic level.
Which is more in keeping with the goals of this exercise as the characters we are creating here are
essentially the ‘Movers and Shakers’ of our fictional worlds.
The Process
The process itself is pretty simple.
1. Each character is dealt seven playing cards.
2. The first card dealt is that character primary motivation or personality trait.
3. The next six cards dealt provide more aspects on that persons character.
4. Traits that contradict each other are ignored.
The only slight modification I am considering is some sort of ‘Family Trait’ adjustment to try and give
each family some sort of inherited continuity. E.g. If your mother and father are both physically
attractive there is a genetic probability that you will be too.
I’m just not sure how best to put this into practice and it may just be as simple a rolling a dice for each
card dealt for mothers and fathers and passing that card down to their child. Thus a child inherits a
random mix of the fourteen cards that had a role in their conception.
This could be quite an interesting game mechanic in a long game as it creates a keen motivation for
the selection of mates for families who wish to improve, protect or enhance that family line.
The only thing I’m not sure about is what probability I should place on inherited generic traits. One
would not want to create total certainty, but at the same time if its too random it becomes pointless
as a strategic consideration when arranging a marriage.
I’m going to ignore the 1% gender difference and go with the concept that a Child’s character and
personality will be a random combination of the cards dealt to their parents. My concern is that this
Example: If the childs father is handsome and its mother ugly, the child will be two cards short of the
seven and those will be dealt randomly from the deck.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that any of this is scientifically sound, but it does add interest to the
game at a number of levels.
Also to give this New Modification some legitimacy I have dealt a ‘Ghost Hand’ (pun intended) for
Jurgen’s father even though he is dead and used that to provide 50% of Jurgen’s character traits.
These are the default values given to the cards by Tony Bath. But obviously we could choose to
change their meaning if we wished and even include WFRP specific means such as ‘Worshipper of
Chaos’ Heart: Slaanesh. Diamond: Tzeentch. Spade: Nurgle. Club: Khorne.
Lets see what the cards have in store for the House of Midwald.
Interesting! Given that this lady is Lord High Treasurer of The Reikland Council the fact that she is
both stupid and lazy seems odd. Although it does say in her background that some of her schemes
are controversial. Perhaps she has just been lucky, or maybe up to now her beauty and willingness to
do anything to please her masters has kept her from censure. Whilst her courage and cruelty would
obviously support her willingness to do whatever it takes for herself and her friends.
So, almost instantly one cane see an interesting trend developing in the Midwald family line as both
the Graf and Gavina have drawn ‘Great Lover’ as their primary character trait. This of course ties in
perfectly with the description of the Gravina on page 22 of Altdorf Crown of the Empire. But was
pure chance. They are also both cruel though it looks as though the Graf had all the energy, whilst
the Gravina was merely brave and stupid enough to tolerate it. The Gravina certainly has the looks
for her amorous pursuits even at this late stage of her life, although the Graf was obviously the one
with the main personality and drive when he was alive.
Reasonably Loyal, Strong Personality, Great Lover(again), Cruelty, Energy, Energy (Again)
It would appear that the former Graf von Midwald was quite a memorable character extremely
energetic with an enormous sex drive and a memorable personality but prone to be cruel and
unfeeling.
The first step then was to flip a coin for each of Jurgens parents traits and see which ones he inherited.
This shows that Jurgen has inherited his fathers sex drive and cruelty and his mothers good looks,
If Heinz has taken a mistress to compensate for his failed marriage then lets hope Freidhilda never
finds out who she is because with that level of cruelty and her obsession with protecting her family
honour I would not want to be the object of her husbands affections.
I’m still wondering whether it might have been better from a continuity point of view to have created
‘Ghost Parents’ for the entire family. This would have given Elena, Heinz, Heidric and Marietta an
increased probability of shared similar traits. But it’s too late now and so I’m going to rely on the luck
of the draw to provide some common traits for Heidric and Marietta.
Salina’s hand will be created using the same process as we used for Jurgen and so her basic
character will draw upon the traits she has inherited from her mother and father. Not the
most hopeful start in life but perhaps with luck she will rise above the shortcomings of her
parents and make something of it.
However, as you can see, Salina inherits most of her traits from her parents.
The only fresh card Salina gets to draw merely adds a tendency to be jealous of her families
honour a trait perhaps learnt from her aunt Freidhilda. Overall a not very inspiring
personality for a young child. But one that she will have to live with after all we cannot
choose our parents.
Having establish the basic family tree and given everyone and name an personality the final stage of
this exercise for me is to insert this family into my world and give them some purpose in life.
On that basis I decided to give Jurgen an honorary title even though he may not deserve one. So, lets
call him Count Jurgen from now on, and of course that makes his wife Countess Elisinda.
I’m going to arbitrarily decide that Duchess Elena partly in order to get her ugly bad-tempered sister-
in-law out of her hair has gifted the ageing noble-woman the manor and village of Sanktwiller. It
doesn’t come with a title and is not a heredity estate but she can live out her days pottering about
and abusing the peasants without becoming an annoyance.
Conclusion
So, there we have it a full noble family all described and ready to play their part in the history of the
Reikland and the Empire.
Will Baron Heinz von Havelfurt have any more children?
His wife Baroness Elisinda has four more years to do so, which gives them a better than
average chance to do so as each married woman has a 50% chance of bearing a child every
year.
Baron von Kreiger has no chance of further children, which might be a blessing in disguise
given his wife lack of loyalty and salacious nature might be a blessing in disguise. In fact,
given the level of his paranoia he probably has doubts that Salina is really his daughter.
Whilst Lady Marietta doesn’t have much to look forward too although she may find some
solace by keeping herself active and entertaining the young men of Sanktwiller.
All that remains for me to do is copy all this information into my Campaign World on World Anvil and
see what use I can make of the Midwald family as my campaign unfolds.
Sources