No, not desert planets and magical immortality drugs. No, not magical chosen ones and riding giant worms. Not even flying fat men and dervish duelist ladybois.
I need ideas on how to go about incorporating noble lineages into galactic government and some ideas for how to go about making noble houses distinct and yet parts of an overall culture.
Bonus points for 40k relating, because this is intended to be part and parcel of Dark Heresy shenannigains.
>incorporating noble lineages into galactic government Just do the space feudalism thing many works of fiction have done already
Zachary Bennett
Well, that's the plan. I'm just a little iffy on how best to end up setting up my own houses without either leaning towards making them into reflections of nations that could totally be autonomous or having really sharp divides between the house and its holdings in terms of behavior and culture.
How exotic is too exotic; how mundane is too mundane?
Hunter Sanchez
If you want noble houses in space, steal some notes from a really bad anime called Aldnoah.Zero that nevertheless STARTS with some pretty neat ideas.
In the show, humanity discovered an alien device on the moon that acts as a gateway to a vast underground city on Mars, which is long abandoned and largely dormant. The exploration mission to figure out these ruins gets sidetracked when one of the researchers accidentally discovered an ancient device that modifies his DNA, imprinting him with an activation marker that allows him to turn on and control Martian tech.
He immediately uses his new sysadmin privileges to turn off that device so no one else can ever use it, declares himself Emperor of Mars, and starts turning on supertech left and right. He grants limited user access to those that are loyal to him, and everyone else gets enslaved.
Since the control markers are gene-based, its hereditary. This turns into a royal family that is the key to controlling all supertech, and what develop into noble houses descended from those people who the Emperor has granted some amount of user rights to. Anyone without even basic user access is a serf, unable to get any of the machines to listen to them and totally at the mercy of those that can.
Because there are a relatively small number of nobles, this turns into the bulk of their (fairly small, because Mars has sustainability problems) army using guns and shit, but the nobles driving around unique mecha-knights supped up with bullshit hax tech, anywhere from teleporting to erasing anything it touches to becoming literally invulnerable for short periods of time.
They also have Landing Castles, which is basically a spaceship designed to act as one giant drop pod so you can colony drop a city and them immediately unload an army into the middle of that destroyed enemy territory.
Jason Ortiz
For the purposes of 40k, you can make it archeotech rather than xenotech in origin. At the very least, they will CLAIM it is archeotech.
The fact is that they have all of these cool tools laying around from the good old days, and using those tools they wield a lot of power, but because its 40k they don't know how to make more of them AND the tools only use for specific genetic lines, so while individually powerful they are essentially worthless to the Imperium at large. The Admech can't even get them to power up, and all attempts to do so have just resulted in the techpriests breaking their toy beyond repair.
Different noble houses probably have access to tools and tech unique to their line, with one line of kings that can control all of it. Say that despite their power, they still got conquered by the Emperor and were forced to bend the knee, so they don't CALL the local sysadmin King anymore but for the purposes of regional politics that's still essentially what he is. He can shut down the entire sector with a wave of his hand.
Justin Adams
Never watched it but that's actually a decently interesting idea.
I wasn't talking as much about how to establish a feudalistic spacefuture as much as how to make the individual noble houses distinct and worth paying attention to, but I'll definitely keep this in my back pocket for future reference.
Have a Ladyboi for your troubles.
Gavin Nguyen
>dervish duelist ladybois
...which book are those in? I only read the first two.
Brayden Mitchell
Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the younger nephew of Vladimir Harkonnen, was a master bloodsport duelist at 17-18, and ethereally adrogynous.
It was also heavily implied that Vladimir was going to get that ass, if he wasn't already frequently doing so.
William Moore
Sauce pls? I really need it ... for a friend.
Jacob Reed
konno tohiro
Christian Jenkins
>so they don't CALL the local sysadmin King anymore He'll still be called king as well as be a king or whatever else he prefers if he pays his Tithes on time.
Chase Richardson
people don't put noble houses and monarchist governments in science fiction because IT DOESNT MAKE ANY GOD DAMN SENSE
Stop trying to drag us backward, you fucking ape.
Luis Price
No.
Jaxon Wilson
Noble houses are contingent on noble bloodlines meaning anything intrinsically. It's not enough that your ancestors have a great history, simply being born a Waddington or whatever needs to intrinsically set you above the peasantry in a big way. Further, marriages between houses need to matter hugely in a practical rather than sociopolitical way too. That mingling of blood needs to be something that you weigh up carefully versus curating the unique abilities of your line.
In space, social fluidity and the ability to live without support networks is greatly improved, so if your nobles mean nothing, people will just fuck off, build up a huge force elsewhere, then steamroll your shitty, inefficient feudal civilisation. You need something like Aldnoah.Zero as per . But there are other options than control of tech.
In a broader, non-40k setting you have way more freedom on this note and I actually have quite a develop setting utilising that, but in 40k it mainly means stuff like navigators and psykers in general.
Psychic ability is a highly hereditary trait in 40k. Not just that, but *type* of psychic ability is a very hereditary trait. Two pyrokinetics beget a pyrokinetic. By extension, two psykers who are powerful and mentally stable will beget others. To breed outside their line heavily endangers the likelihood that their family of psykers will avoid falling victim to the notionally 'normal' fates of psykers in the setting (Provoking daemonic activity, getting eaten by the Emperor for being too weak, etc.)
The Navigators actually have exactly the kind of noble house shitfights OP seems to want, because they breed for psychic abilities.
*Normally*, psykers outside of that banner do not get to have whole dynasties because the black ships don't necessarily return sanctioned psykers where they found them, they're kind of the property of the Imperium after that. And unsanctioned psykers are targets.
Chase Flores
I guess my point is that a society that has figured out how to make sure that the psykers the Imperium takes away from them are the same ones it gets back is a society that will over a couple of centuries develop a pretty involved system of noble houses centred around the cultivation, application, and support of psychic abilities.
Hell, the Emperor is even doing the job of weeding out the weak-minded children for them, so their bloodlines are only getting stronger with time, they just need to worry about weeding out the bad eggs and managing the people they have. As time drags on they could even start to have affairs with non-psykers to produce weaker half-nobles with some plausible deniability (possibly to the point of being unsanctioned and instructed by the sanctioned of the main family), who, if successful become retainer families a generation or two later.
Landon Bailey
Spacemaster does a nice job of noble houses in the Dune style. I would just use it as is.
Hudson Smith
If you live in burger land, feudal government isn't too far off from the familiar federal government we know. Granted, it's not a different shade of pink, but it's an arguable point.
Besides, just because dirty french men ruined it for everyone doesn't mean it's an inherently inferior system of governance.
Colton Hall
David Weber's Honorverse did it in a pretty reasonable way, with the "kingdom" started as the corporation that surveyed the planet and chartered the colony ship. The head of the company and largest investor became the royal family, while the other investors (and the trust holders on earth that secures the planet's future relations when it's set up, and in the event of decent FTL) become the noble families with a seat in a British-style House of Lords, to get full value from the investment. The monarchy can make people lords, but the sitting house votes if they can join the house and enter parliament. People with less to invest still got a birth on the colony ship, but no special privileges other than a small land guarantee. Still more land (and not fucked up) than would be available on earth, and it helped fund the colony
Also notable that crown and noble estates includes things like asteroid belts (and mining rights) and various wavelengths for broadcasting
Aaron Bailey
Broadcasting wars would be something to behold.
Battle for Frequency Supremacy 24/7 rolling shitposting to pollute your enemy's stream. Memetic riders and subliminal transmissions to sow dissent against the opposing bougies Triple layered false flags, trolls trolling trolls trolling fake shills Payola accusations leading to ritual duels Pirate radio being contracted by noble houses to spread propaganda and take down other small antennas, essentially becoming privateer radio
Liam Sanchez
Kek, but it is a resource, and potentially a pretty valuable one.
Trade rights and 'supplier to the crown' contracts would probably also be on the table
Carter Young
And Harrenhal?
Ryder Bailey
...
Nolan Kelly
I'd say that there should be a central "imperial" culture, seen on the throneworld and in the upper courts of systems/planets, and it degenerates/diverges/evolves the further you get from the throne politically, but in different ways in different places.
