For a setting I'm making I have two nation states that are nominally and superfulously similar to the Union and the Confederacy in that one is a technological and industrial nation while the other is more agrarian and views itself as the old world nobility of the New World.
What I'm getting at is trying to nail down what Southern nobility would look like. In my mind they make allusions to being related to kings and nobles and act like it with certain appointments and offices having archaic names and titles such as knights and what not and very clearly there is a caste system of sorts in effect where your place in society is understood although it's not uncommon for commoners to become wealthy although that just leads to a divide between the "old" nobility and the "new" nobility
Lots of gaudy golden tassels on things. Girls like to wear tiaras and stuff. Robes.
Adam Price
Culturally, being polite and having good manners is more important than anything else. You could be the biggest cunt in the world, but if you follow the rules of etiquette you will be considered a gentleman.
Jacob Allen
The government would be primarily ran by the nobility as they would have the means to send their children to the colleges needed to learn and be groomed for their station. I imagine military service of some sort would be mandatory for me.
Beyond that, the land owning middle class would be the ones to have the most say in politics.
Jordan Cooper
>In my mind they make allusions to being related to kings and nobles and act like it with certain appointments and offices having archaic names and titles such as knights and what not and very clearly there is a caste system of sorts in effect where your place in society is understood although it's not uncommon for commoners to become wealthy although that just leads to a divide between the "old" nobility and the "new" nobility You're describing 18th and 19th UK high society when the power of the traditional aristocracy waned under industrialization and the rise of nouveau riche. Something you have to consider is that the in the North being a member of an old, prominent family was equally important to social standing, connections, and politics as was wealth.
If he wants to mirror the antebellum South then the land-owning middle class either needs to be co-opted or suppressed by a wealthy, mostly landed political elite either by a need to play into the existing system to survive or by simply being economically outpaced.
Chase Young
While it's true I suppose what I was going for was that this southern nation plays more at emulating some aspects of the old world nobility even though such titles no longer really mean anything in the more advanced industrial world.
Long story short, the !HRE has finally fallen apart but not before an expidetion into the New World was launched. many of the vassel families and lesser nobles jumped on board for a chance to gain station in a new world hence the current situation. The southern nobles are overly romantic overall while the northen nobles have a bit more puritan esque sensibility about them.
Blake Clark
Grooming schools and the like would be important, not just actual academics. For instance, Ole Miss was for most of its history considered THE place for rich southerners to send their daughters off in preparation of their MRS degrees. Think victorian-era finishing schools, a lot of antebellum southerner culture actually was modeled on their British counterparts.
Leo Wood
I almost forgot about victorian sensibilities. Social situations being all stuffy and what not while all the nasty shit goes on behind closed doors (not that it would be any different for their puritan northern neighbhors) although how much of this should extend to the none nobles? Obviously the middle class would try and do it because they want to be in those circles but then I imagine a country bumpkin giri isn't going to run into a plantation princess all that often.
Chase Butler
In that case I'd imagine that the Northern nobles are ones who were descended from a political group that didn't have much power or were losers in a power struggle. The Southern nobility would have come later, probably when the not!HRE was starting to collapse.
Henry Gutierrez
The south had a weird cultural double standard where it was expected the men were to have scored with multiple women, but all the women were expected to be virgins.
Of course you can say this is the case everywhere, but in the antebellum south it was a cultural game to be played.
Gavin Wilson
The realities of the antebellum South are a bit different than what is commonly portrayed. A plantation is essentially a very fancy, many historical examples aren't particularly large by modern standards, farm house. Even on the largest plantation it was still the epicenter of numerous interrelated businesses endeavors requiring large amounts of paid and unpaid workers in close proximity. Not only was it probable that a plantation princess would run into a country bumpkin girl regularly by virtue of her father's business interests, given the generally low population density and local social network centered around church, it would be pretty much a given that, particularly in her early years, her peer group would be entirely below her station and include slave children too young to effectively work.
William King
While the reality is not always how it is portrayed commonly, to be fair, sometimes a GM or writer might want to deliberately go with what is commonly portrayed unless they're consciously attempting to subvert expectations in that regard or show that "reality is unrealistic."
Christopher Price
For the analogy you'd want a brutally-oppressed underclass (commoner, servant, peasant, slave, etc) whose labor both creates and maintains the wealth of the nobility, and provides a foil for the nobility to contrast themselves against. It's not good enough to have more money and power than others; you have to convince yourself that you deserve it somehow, and in the long-term on a national scale that results in a culture of class oppression.
The manner in which nobles and even middle-class (if such a thing exists) deal with or ignore their lessers should be an important part of the culture; being too cozy with them or allowing them tools for self-autonomy (education, social access, money beyond subsistence-level) could threaten the social hierarchy after all. Such transgressions would not be taken lightly.
Nathan Perez
The problem is that it's kinda lazy and cuts off potential avenues for plots. Unless you're going for a full "moonlight and magnolias" style story, there is no real reason why you shouldn't.
Landon Perry
Brettonia
Gabriel Green
To give an idea of what this place is like. Imagine the southern states from maryland to florida but spread out west until you butt against where Texas would be (in it's place is part of a mountain range that cuts across both countries).
It's for 5th edition so harpies, swamp creatures, hags, all sorts of voodoo shit and what not are at play.
Jaxson Carter
it's got a strong Deadlands vibe, i dig.
>until texas... so Arkansas and Louisiana
Dylan Gonzalez
Literally pre-revolutionary France. Old sword nobles were poor as fuck but had privelidges. Wealthy new nobles could buy titles but could never get the privelidges of the old nobles. Both resented each other. Only the commoners could be taxed despite having less wealth than both groups combined. The burgeoning middle class was wierd and mired in archaeic guild systems and dues. High ranking political offices were restricted to the old nobles even though often times they were entirely supported financially by the lower ranked new nobles
Juan Butler
Yes, the settings history is some like 700 years (arbitrary number) most of the advances have taken place before the settling of the new world which takes place over the course of like 150 years or so but it's something like late 1890's level of tech without going steam punk aesthetics
It would be less about old noble titles and more about military and civil service titles. Like that old saw about Colonel Sanders - he was never in the military, Kentucky Colonel was a purely honorific title, similar to knighting in England today. Great emphasis is placed on whose blood you have and where your family comes from
Angel Barnes
Oh shit, OP, if you're willing to do an archive trawl a couple years back there were several threads about a fantasy version of The South that eventually spawned a decently fleshed out setting. I could only find the first thread though.
>superfulously similar to the Union and the Confederacy >In my mind they make allusions to being related to kings and nobles This is actually kinda close to the real US. The two ethnic groups that populated the American Interior South (so we're excluding Louisiana and Florida) were the Borderers and the Cavaliers. The Borderers are known today as the Scots Irish and were boorish folks, most of whose descendants are rednecks today, and the Cavaliers were the descendants of knights and gentry who had lost in the English Civil War. So there was a natural hierarchy that was replicated in the antebellum period where the Cavalier descendants owned manors and the Borderer descendants naturally fell into a social role as laborers or servants. tl;dr You'd more closely approximate the US South by making them appeal to military/knightly titles, rather than stuffy, blue-blooded nobility.
Xavier Wood
The southern gentlemen certainly had pretentions towards being new nobility yes, and their land empires were a wierd mix of capitalism and brutal serfdom
Isaac Bennett
I havn't quit nailed down who'd be the "slaves" My thought would mostly be indentureds who came to the new world as a way of paying off their debts along with criminals and the like and having families inhereit debt or be so closely invovled with their former masters they might as well stay because the little shitty farm plot you work is owned by them anyways.
Evan Watson
>Of course you can say this is the case everywhere, well yeah, but maybe not as openly
Brody Lewis
If you don't want to do outright slavery, then debt bondage and sharecropping would be good substitutes. You could also do prison labor. Indentured servitude would probably be best left for more specialized occupations.
Dominic Carter
Militias would almost certainly be a massive thing, even if there is no underclass to brutally oppress. Rather than a regular army, the south tended to have more irregular militias that reacted to nearby threats more or less autonomously. Even while the civil war was going on, the people who were for whatever reason exempt from military service(which was mandatory both legally and socially), there were unpaid militias around to capture deserters and ambush union troops that came too close. There were also a lot of cases where a wealthy individual might buy a command for their favored sons, since going to war and commanding troops was seen as the manly, noble thing to do. The south also really, really liked knights.
Anthony Cook
Ilmater, don't you call me, 'cuz I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.
Cameron Reyes
>The southern gentlemen certainly had pretentions towards being new nobility yes Because they were descendants of people who would have been nobility if they had won the English Civil War. But the way that they ran their manors, the brutality of it, was much closer to what you would expect from a knight than from a refined gentleman. I don't have a good pdf to post, but there is very detailed historiography of this by David Hackett Fischer in "Albion's Seeds."
Oliver Collins
It's not that i'm opposed to it, I just havn't gotten that far into my world building yet to figure out who the slaves would be.
As it stands, the New World has a native population consisting of Native American Gnomes who are none to happy about being pushed out of their ancestral lands but have pretty much halted any major westard advances by becoming something like the Sioux Nation even though the tribes never really liked each other before then and most other pockets of civilization are Free men who have nothing to do with the two major nation states but tend to be either small independent villages or major city states on the west coast.
Jayden Stewart
>There were also a lot of cases where a wealthy individual might buy a command for their favored sons, since going to war and commanding troops was seen as the manly, noble thing to do. That was prevalent in the North too. Often times you didn't even need to buy a command, just rounding up enough guys and being able to afford to equip them was enough to grab yourself a commission.
Colton Walker
Here's a link to a brief overview slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ but some interesting notes include >Virginian recreation mostly revolved around hunting and bloodsports. Great lords hunted deer, lesser gentry hunted foxes, indentured servants had a weird game in which they essentially draw-and-quartered geese, young children “killed and tortured songbirds”, and “at the bottom of this hierarchy of bloody games were male infants who prepared themselves for the larger pleasures of maturity by torturing snakes, maiming frogs, and pulling the wings off butterflies. Thus, every red-blooded male in Virginia was permitted to slaughter some animal or other, and the size of his victim was proportioned to his social rank.” >Our word “condescension” comes from a ritual attitude that leading Virginians were supposed to display to their inferiors. Originally condescension was supposed to be a polite way of showing respect those who were socially inferior to you; our modern use of the term probably says a lot about what Virginians actually did with it.
Parker Bell
That's bullshit. Condescension is a middle English word that was derived from French, which was in turn borrowed from Latin.
Christian Flores
>Southern setting >everybody ends every sentence with "I do declare"
I think that's the point. The way they acted towards altered our understanding of its meaning. Like how tyrant as a greek word for ruler is different from tyrant today, even though a tyrant today is still a ruler.
Connor King
What kind of species do you have available in your setting? Having a distinct Species taking one of the available social castes is a big deal
That wouldn't explain the alteration of the word across the entire English language nor the similar shift in the word meaning of the word "patronize" in the same time period.
Gavin Thompson
I'm not the historian, take it up with them. I only recommended it because it's one of the most well regarded histories of early American ethnic groups.
Christian Price
Goblins and harpies (as PCs) they were taken in and basically domesticated by humans and essentially form the bulk of the lower castes. the Goblins were used as servents and are present in various hospitality services and harpies were messengers and scouts.
I'm trying to be careful with having too many races and especially avoiding mono race kingdoms and such. For instance, my !Russia is primarily comprised of Elves and Dwarves
Liam Bell
This is pretty much how the military worked before the Advent of professional soldiers in Europe too, like the New Army in the English Civil War. Every area would have it's disparate militias and troops you'd call on and it was kind of a clusterfuck because of no standardization and everyone having different contracts
Gabriel Nguyen
Something a bit more usable, when your'e going to be condescending to someone, you start with "Bless your/his/her heart..."
