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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Mopman43 said:
I mean, it's so deeply ingrained that it's stated that a women caught naked would sooner cover their hair with a towel than anything else.

I don't see any statement to the effect of "this is the latest trend" or similar.
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The exact words were "should a Bretonnian woman be discovered bathing, the first thing she would try to cover with her towel would be her hair", I believe.

But yes, given that even peasant women specifically cut their hair short to keep it from slipping out from under their cloaks, it would seem to be something more deeply set than just the latest noble fashion.
 
Sir_Travelsalot said:
The exact words were "should a Bretonnian woman be discovered bathing, the first thing she would try to cover with her towel would be her hair", I believe.
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Look, if we're getting into exact words, I'll give you the exact words.

This is so ingrained that a Bretonnian woman caught naked holding a towel would use it to cover her head.
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I don't think I'm misrepresenting anything.
 
Honestly, this is exactly the sort of fact that would be better dropped than the "only three peasants ever made noble". It's got real world analogues, but dwelling on it is kinda icky, in the way that discussing which real-world objectifying invasion of privacy is worse in this theoretical culture.

For the other discussion, I would imagine that Chaucer from A Knight's Tale would be an entire profession in Brettonia. Scavenge armor and a horse, buy a fake patent of nobility, and voila! It's not like good cross-referenced records are kept in a country where the only two institutions of learning are foreign cults. How are people from a duchy over ever going to know? There are thousands of knights in each duchy, after all.
 
Glau said:
Honestly, this is exactly the sort of fact that would be better dropped than the "only three peasants ever made noble". It's got real world analogues, but dwelling on it is kinda icky, in the way that discussing which real-world objectifying invasion of privacy is worse in this theoretical culture.

For the other discussion, I would imagine that Chaucer from A Knight's Tale would be an entire profession in Brettonia. Scavenge armor and a horse, buy a fake patent of nobility, and voila! It's not like good cross-referenced records are kept in a country where the only two institutions of learning are foreign cults. How are people from a duchy over ever going to know? There are thousands of knights in each duchy, after all.
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Or stealing the identity of the Knight Errant that just failed to kill the local gribbly, and moving to the duchy in the opposite direction of his origin.
 
Glau said:
For the other discussion, I would imagine that Chaucer from A Knight's Tale would be an entire profession in Brettonia. Scavenge armor and a horse, buy a fake patent of nobility, and voila! It's not like good cross-referenced records are kept in a country where the only two institutions of learning are foreign cults. How are people from a duchy over ever going to know? There are thousands of knights in each duchy, after all.
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This happens quite a lot. It would be dishonourable to question the word of a knight, after all.
It's also a common tactic for noble daughters who aren't big fans of embroidery and swooning.
 
DragonParadox said:
@Boney has the Empire ever observed a single Damsel cast spells from more than one lore? I figured that unlike the sword thing this might actually have been noticed from afar.
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There are vague records of second-hand accounts that seem to indicate that some might be able to, but between widespread magical ignorance and the confusion of battle it's far from indisputable.

Alratan said:
The female knights in question may have to pretend very hard to be men as well.
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It is all but impossible to fail at pretending to be a man in Bretonnia.

Alratan said:
Only you assume strict monogamy or that having small numbers of children is the norm. I just assume that either many Knight of the Realm have several (noble) mistresses simultaneously in the tradition of the stereotypical French aristocracy, or that they practice serial monogamy, running through wives as their fertility declines/they die in childbirth from frequent pregnancies, so that while most Knights Errant die before becoming a Knight of the Realm and marrying, Knight of the Realm have even more proportionately large numbers of children. You can maintain a large and indeed growing population this way.

In many ways, the institution of Errantry, and the declaring of occasional Errantry Wars is a social repsonse ot the problem of elite overproduction. It's a way of avoiding the historical French issue of the nobility getting too big.
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If your theory requires the land of courtly love to routinely practice divorce and the legitimization of bastards, it might not be the best theory.

Redshirt Army said:
I personally tend towards the view that "all the Lady's blessings, both in their direct effect of making superhuman hero units, and in their indirect effect of having the ruling class somewhat select for good intentions, almost but not quite make up for the absolutely massive disadvantage that is being shackled to a feudal system".

Historically, feudal systems have not done at all well when compared to more advanced forms of governance - just look at Russia and the Tsars.
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It's important to remember that governance is not one size fits all. Feudalism evolved out of the latifundia because of a breakdown of the centralized rule of Rome, and it allowed for 'civilized' but largely uneducated people to survive a period of enormous unrest and vast migrations of foreign and warlike peoples. The Empire is benefiting from a more 'advanced' form of government now, but if Luitpold dies tomorrow it could very easily go right back to the Time of Three Emperors. If Phillippe V died tomorrow, the direct result would be the most ambitious people would strap on their armour and go looking for monsters to kill in the hopes of being found worthy of the shiny hat. Bretonnia has devised a system that converts unrest into heroism. The Empire peaks higher in good times, but Bretonnia bounces back from damn near anything.

Glau said:
For the other discussion, I would imagine that Chaucer from A Knight's Tale would be an entire profession in Brettonia. Scavenge armor and a horse, buy a fake patent of nobility, and voila! It's not like good cross-referenced records are kept in a country where the only two institutions of learning are foreign cults. How are people from a duchy over ever going to know? There are thousands of knights in each duchy, after all.
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That movie even ends with the knight being 'discovered' to have been a noble the whole time. A Knight's Tale is one of my favourite movies, a lot of people overlook it as a silly movie with anachronisms for comedy, but I've always felt that the way it uses modern elements to bridge the gap between modern and medieval culture really elevates it.
 
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Boney said:
It is all but impossible to fail at pretending to be a woman in Bretonnia.
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Did you mean to say "man," or did you mean to say something that didn't directly address what @Alratan was saying about women having to try very hard to present as male to be seen as male knights?

If your theory requires the land of courtly love to routinely practice divorce and the legitimization of bastards, it might not be the best theory.
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Divorce not necessarily. Very high birth rates, combined with either serial monogamy for noblemen or (more in keeping with the spirit of high fantasy) a (literally) blessedly low rate of death in childbirth among the aristocracy... That would have the same effect.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Did you mean to say "man,"
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I did.

Simon_Jester said:
Divorce not necessarily. Very high birth rates, combined with either serial monogamy for noblemen or (more in keeping with the spirit of high fantasy) a (literally) blessedly low rate of death in childbirth among the aristocracy... That would have the same effect.
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Well yes, if you replace the post I was replying to with a completely different post, then indeed the reply I made doesn't fit.
 
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Boney said:
It's important to remember that governance is not one size fits all. Feudalism evolved out of the latifundia because of a breakdown of the centralized rule of Rome, and it allowed for 'civilized' but largely uneducated people to survive a period of enormous unrest and vast migrations of foreign and warlike peoples. The Empire is benefiting from a more 'advanced' form of government now, but if Luitpold dies tomorrow it could very easily go right back to the Time of Three Emperors. If Phillippe V died tomorrow, the direct result would be the most ambitious people would strap on their armour and go looking for monsters to kill in the hopes of being found worthy of the shiny hat. Bretonnia has devised a system that converts unrest into heroism. The Empire peaks higher in good times, but Bretonnia bounces back from damn near anything.
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Definitely, although as someone who agrees with Redshirt, the way I see the flaws in the Brettonian system isn't that it's really unstable, or unreliable, since the Lady's done a fucking fantastic job at selecting for 'being a good person' as you go higher and higher up the ranks of rulership, but that all Brettonia really does is take the individual spikes of heroism and, roughly speaking, arrange them in ascending order of coolness.

It bounces back because even if you kill off a lot of the big names of the society, the system's baseline is so low as to be rather easily self sustaining while all it needs to do is hold on for the next crop of outliers to show up and get blessed. It's a really effective system that can spike way above its on-paper specs, but lacks much in methods to improve its baseline, since in reality the system is more a guiding philosophy for countless semi-independent forces aided by the one woman in the pond distributing swords. The Empire at current times is a peer to Brettonia, but that's really almost a coincidence. The Empire could potentially one day surpass Brettonia as it advances technologically, or Brettonia could abruptly spawn a supersayian of a knight that kicks off another spike. Not counting what the Lady's probably holding in reserve, mind, but Brettonia's basically designed itself to handle crises after crises without considering much in the long-term.

Edit: which I should specify is pretty smart in Fantasy! S'just definitely limited.
 
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Boney said:
I did.

Well yes, if you replace the post I was replying to with a completely different post, then indeed the reply I made doesn't fit.
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I think you may have focused in too much on a single clause of what @Alratan said.

To quote Alratan:

"Only you assume strict monogamy or that having small numbers of children is the norm. I just assume that either many Knight of the Realm have several (noble) mistresses simultaneously in the tradition of the stereotypical French aristocracy, or that they practice serial monogamy, running through wives as their fertility declines/they die in childbirth from frequent pregnancies, so that while most Knights Errant die before becoming a Knight of the Realm and marrying, Knight of the Realm have even more proportionately large numbers of children. You can maintain a large and indeed growing population this way."

You zoomed in on the bolded/underlined passage.

But if we apply a strategically placed 'snip...'

"Only you assume strict monogamy or that having small numbers of children is the norm. I just assume that either [snip deprecated possibility], or that [Knights of the Realm] practice serial monogamy, running through wives as their fertility declines/they die in childbirth from frequent pregnancies, so that while most Knights Errant die before becoming a Knight of the Realm and marrying, Knight of the Realm have even more proportionately large numbers of children. You can maintain a large and indeed growing population this way."

This version requires no legitimization of bastards. It could be interpreted to require extensive divorces, or then again, it could not, because the key focus is on the idea that the average successful Knight of the Realm has several children, including enough sons to replace all the Knights Errant who never made it that far. There are several ways to ensure that this happens, depending on parameters like the fertility rate (which can be tweaked by magic) and the rate of death in childbirth.

It's at least plausible that the typical Knight of the Realm's life story is one of lifelong monogamy with eight children unless his wife dies in childbirth or of other causes before getting that far, in which case he remarries as a matter of course and the courtly love narrative just rolls right over the tragedy and moves on.
 
The other noteworthy thing about Bretonnia is that straight up, it's actually genuinely a really really good system at dealing with the more regular dangers of the warhammer world. A bunch of decentralized individual badasses is actually basically exactly what you want for dealing with the various gribblies that don't organize themselves into massive armies. Even as the empire advances technologically it's still probably going to be more dangerous in the Imperial countryside than the Bretonnian countryside for as long as remains uneconomical to clearcut entire forests. And also basically the same applies to snipping small problems in the bud before they become big problems.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
I think you may have focused in too much on a single clause of what @Alratan said.

To quote Alratan:

"Only you assume strict monogamy or that having small numbers of children is the norm. I just assume that either many Knight of the Realm have several (noble) mistresses simultaneously in the tradition of the stereotypical French aristocracy, or that they practice serial monogamy, running through wives as their fertility declines/they die in childbirth from frequent pregnancies, so that while most Knights Errant die before becoming a Knight of the Realm and marrying, Knight of the Realm have even more proportionately large numbers of children. You can maintain a large and indeed growing population this way."

You zoomed in on the bolded/underlined passage.

But if we apply a strategically placed 'snip...'

"Only you assume strict monogamy or that having small numbers of children is the norm. I just assume that either [snip deprecated possibility], or that [Knights of the Realm] practice serial monogamy, running through wives as their fertility declines/they die in childbirth from frequent pregnancies, so that while most Knights Errant die before becoming a Knight of the Realm and marrying, Knight of the Realm have even more proportionately large numbers of children. You can maintain a large and indeed growing population this way."

This version requires no legitimization of bastards. It could be interpreted to require extensive divorces, or then again, it could not, because the key focus is on the idea that the average successful Knight of the Realm has several children, including enough sons to replace all the Knights Errant who never made it that far. There are several ways to ensure that this happens, depending on parameters like the fertility rate (which can be tweaked by magic) and the rate of death in childbirth.

It's at least plausible that the typical Knight of the Realm's life story is one of lifelong monogamy with eight children unless his wife dies in childbirth or of other causes before getting that far, in which case he remarries as a matter of course and the courtly love narrative just rolls right over the tragedy and moves on.
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Do we really need to be inventing a bunch of new ways for Bretonnia to be even more astonishingly misogynist than it already is?
 

(Blond character is a pathfinder character of mine I comm a lot. I am as they say, a student in the thought of 'manly' and insufferably smug knights.)
 
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@Boney Out of total curiousity, is Marshal Gustav von Jungfreud of Stirland, the guy who taught Mathilde pistoliering, from the Ubersreik Jungfreuds?
 
zxzx24 said:
I will say that issues aside Bretonnia sounds like an extremely fun place to be. Sometimes.
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It's a great place if you're the kind of person talented, determined, and/or lucky enough to start kicking ass and then never really stop, and are clever enough to catch onto the whole theme everybody's got going on. As long as you consistently survive your battles against terrible monsters and impossible odds, you get some great benefits! Admittedly a lot of said benefits are buffs so you can go fight even nastier monsters and more impossible odds, but hey, that's hero-dom for you.
 
Boney said:
Pretty sure I got the surname from the Reikland gazetteer, so yes.
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Great! I've actually been compiling a small simple list of Imperial families to keep an eye on, and I came across the Jungfreuds as a result. In case you're curious:

Averland: Leitdorfs (current Elector Count family), Alptraum (former Elector Count family, rivalry with Leitdorfs, probably trying to regain power).

Wissenland: Von Liebwitz (current Elector Counts, also the Counts of Meissen and Nuln, have control over Wissenland), Toppenheimer (Control over Pfeildorf and significant chunks of former Solland, strong family. Also control Hornau in Southern Stirland), Pfeifraucher (control over Kreutzhofen, which is a crossroad between the Empire, Tilea, Border Princes and Bretonnia all at the same tme).

Stirland: Van Hal (current Elector Count family), Krebs (Barons of Marburg, Headmaster of University of Nuln is a Krebs), Halstedt (Counts of Halstedt, control over the Moot Road, Magistrate of Nuln is a Halstedt).

Reikland: Holswig-Schliestein or whatever (Emperors, Counts of Reikland, Princes of Altdorf), Gruber (own and manage Weissbruck, known for its wine, produces a lot of money), Jungfreud (Counts of Ubersreik, not yet a Free Town but it's very powerful), Wallenstein (somehow they're both the Barons of Wurzen in Ostland and the Grafs of the Free Town of Auerswald, which is a county in its own right), Saponatheim (Grafs of the Free Town of Bogenhafen, strong trade presence).

Ostland: Konigswald (current Elector Count, control over Wulfenburg), Von Raukov (Counts of Ferlangen, become Elector Counts in canon), Von Wolder (Barons of Salkalten), Wallenstein.

Nordland: Nikse (current Elector Counts, control over Salzenmund), Gausser (Theoderic takes over in canon, nothing about his family is ever elaborated), Kohler (Counts of Dietershafen, the Baron's son is the Sea Lord of the Second Imperial Navy in canon), Neurath (Barons of Norden, secretly plotting to build Norden into a base to conquer Lustria).

Middenland: Todbringer (Elector Counts of Middenland, Counts of Middenheim and Delberz, great power and control), Bildhofen (Magnus the Pious' relatives, biggest competitors to the Todbringers, Counts of Carroburg, Leopold Von Bildhofen thinks Middenheim is a leech on Middenland).

Ostermark: Hertwig (Elector Counts of Ostermark), Husserl (Landlocked Barons), Mach (Margraves of Eisental), Shurz (Margraves of Essen), Rontgen (Margraves of Fortenhaf).

Hochland: Ludenhof (Elector Counts of Hochland, almost completely dominates Hochland's power structure. It's a small place).

Talabecland: Feurbach (Elector Counts of Talabecland, Counts of Kusel, technically control Talabheim), Krieglitz-Untern (Great power and influence over Talabheim, took control when Feurbach disappears in canon), Donn and Bruckner (Barons of Lieske and Ossino respectively, EIC should maintain good relations with them).

It's not comprehensive, but I just kept track of the families that I think would be relevant in the politics of DL. I kept track of Eisental and Essen because of the Ostermark Canal being in their territory, Fortenhaf because Shirokij forest, where Ostermark is deploying its army, is close to it. I also kept track of Husserl because we met them, Kreutzhofen because it was used in the bombing plot, and I think Bildhofen, Gausser and Kohler might become relevant.
 
Codex said:
Reikland: Holswig-Schliestein or whatever (Emperors, Counts of Reikland, Princes of Altdorf), Gruber (own and manage Weissbruck, known for its wine, produces a lot of money), Jungfreud (Counts of Ubersreik, not yet a Free Town but it's very powerful), Wallenstein (somehow they're both the Barons of Wurzen in Ostland and the Grafs of the Free Town of Auerswald, which is a county in its own right), Saponatheim (Grafs of the Free Town of Bogenhafen, strong trade presence).
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Hey cool if Gustav is from the Ubersreik Jungfreuds we indirectly got his family an undercity by accident.
Boney said:
"You know Reicthard." The dragon snorts, and dives back down into the tunnel it had emerged from. "Good day's work, this," he says to you, spinning the projection as he considers it from multiple angles. "Ubersreik isn't as strategically important as Helmgart, but an enormous amount of trade goes through Grey Lady Pass and on up the Teufel. They build down, properly seal it off, and they can treble granary space and build a proper cistern and still have enough room left over that they can build residential down there and properly ban people from building outside the walls, and it can ride out the usual trouble from next time Drachenfels or the Bretonnians or the Grey Mountain greenskins cause a ruckus."

"Will they, though?"

He snorts. "Of course not. The Guildmasters will say they'll consider it and as soon as the Emperor's attention turns away they'll just keep pocketing their profits. So we fall back on something more ephemeral than gold - we take those promises your King has been throwing around of late and call in the assistance of Karak Azgaraz. Ubersreik owes the Emperor, the Emperor owes the Colleges, your King probably ends up owing Karak Norn, and everyone's better off except the Skaven."
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VillaininGlasses said:
Hey cool if Gustav is from the Ubersreik Jungfreuds we indirectly got his family an undercity by accident.
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While it's nice that Gustav is from the Ubersreik Jungfreuds, I should note something. Pistoliers are typically sons of nobility who are young and impetous, having lots of energy but lacking discipline and experience, which generally means they're not likely to get accepted in the Knightly Orders. As a starting trial and process of training these sons of nobility, the Pistolkorps was formed to train them to be pistoliers, fast cavalry focused on hit and run with pistols.

The Pistolkorps is funded partially by the Emperor, partially by the Imperial School of Engineers and partially by several Knightly Orders (as a program to train prospective knights). The Pistolkorps consist of these young nobles who become Pistoliers, and the instructors who are veteran, experienced Outriders who have been doing this for a while. Outriders are grizzled veterans and rarely Nobility, because most older Pistoliers who become veterans try to join the Knightly Orders. When you join a Knightly Order you also typically cast away your feudal obligations and often don't inherit/own land, which is why inheriting nobles rarely join them. It's mostly second, third, fourth etc. sons who do it.

Why did I go on this tangent? While it's neat that Gustav is from the Ubersreik Jungfreuds, the fact that he's an Outrider and a Marshal in Stirland seems to indicate to me that he's not particularly interested in the proceedings of his home county. My guess is that he's a non inheriting noble (or at least he gave up his inheritance) who joined the Pistolkorps and instead of joining a Knightly Order once he became experienced, he liked his job so much he upgraded into an Outrider and is trying to expand the Pistolkorps further to places where they didn't use to exist. This is probably why he went to Stirland and why he's so enthusiastic to expand the ranks of the Pistoliers. This is supported by his general enthusiasm when it comes to guns and fast cavalry.

Why have I constructed this elaborate headcanon over the characterisation of a minor character we haven't interacted with in years? I don't know.
 
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