GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
According to the current Traveller Map listings, Efate has its own Duke as well as a Count. Norris' offices may handle the administrative side for Regina and Jewell, but there is a Duke on the spot for troubleshooting already.
Sector Duke Warship
- Thread starter Travellerspud
- Start date
According to the current Traveller Map listings, Efate has its own Duke as well as a Count. Norris' offices may handle the administrative side for Regina and Jewell, but there is a Duke on the spot for troubleshooting already.
And a Count. :rofl:
It's really hard to say if these people are hanging out on Efate or leaving it in the competent hands of local officials and the Navy.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Given the criteria T5 uses for assigning Nobles, the Count is there because of the world's characteristics, and the Duke is there because Efate is a border world with the aggressors of the last four wars. The Count's "pull" with the Navy is likely specific to the Efate system only unless the Duke is away. The Duke of Efate's most likely reasons for being there mean he won't be away often.
The term Duke arises from Dux Belorum - who was almost always a count in his own right. Leader of Battles - The early dukes were all war-leaders, appointed by the crowns to supervise the other counts.
salochin999
SOC-13
I'm thinking the old game Kingmaker might provide a potential model.
youtube vid for any who don't know it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URKlXEaVack#t=37
In that game you have nobles, nobles with permanent titles, titles that can be assigned to nobles who don't have one and offices. Nobles without titles can be assigned titles and only noble with titles can be appointed to offices.
Example
Cochrane joins the navy and rises to Captain, automatically knighted (not hereditary though) rises to Admiral, automatically ennobled entailing made hereditary knight and given a fiefdom like a hereditary pension (a knight's fiefdom could be something like a percentage of the local star port's revenue). This brings him and his descendants into the noble class.
Once a noble Cochrane can be given a title and an office that requires that level of nobility e.g. Baron and Governor of Barbados, or Baron and Baron-Commander of the Regina x-boat service, or Count and Count-Commander of the Deneb sector Scout service.
Cochrane's offspring start off as knights but won't get titles unless they prove themselves. Say the first and second generations also enlist in the navy but don't make it to Captain. The third generation does and gets a knight level office e.g. Knight-Commander of a space station somewhere. The fourth generation makes it to admiral again and the family get a second fiefdom and the 4th gen dude serves a term as Knight-Commander of Gash, then gets a Baron title and office of Baron-Commander of a colonization project for a term, a count title and office of Count-Ambassador to Fornice for a term and finally a duke title and office as Duke of a sub-sector.
A bit like the Roman Cursus honorum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum
Initially the specific titles and offices might have been kept separate from membership of the noble class but over time elements of heredity start creeping into the system so it becomes more jumbled like Kingmaker with occasional rebellion-causing attempts by the Emperor to reverse it.
Unless all these extra dukes are honor nobles. We'll have to wait and see until MM can get around to providing us with the T5 version of the Nobles Essay.
Hans
Senatorial rank, not class. There were plebian senators too. Indeed, towards the end of the Republic, they were heavily outnumbering the patrician senatorial families.
I suspect dukes with military service would be rare. The heir would be raised to take over as ruler of the duchy. It would be younger children who made a career in the navy.
Connect how? Efate is a world in his duchy. What other sort of connection are you thinking of?
Hans
You won't be waiting long. Marc's working on an article on Nobles right now.
Having mulled it over for a bit, it strikes me that extra dukes in a subsector is rather like extra kings in a kingdom and extra emperors in empires.
We'll have to start distinguishing between subsector dukes and cluster dukes (and possibly even system dukes). In which case Wil's objection to the use of 'duchy' as synonymous with '(political) subsector' becomes a lot more cogent.
The objection to using 'subsector' for the political territory ruled by a subsector duke remains, but we'd have to come up with a different term to distinguish the political sort.
Province, perhaps?
Hans
"Cluster Dukes" sounds like a very um descriptive name :smirk:
I'm looking forward to seeing Marc's T5 Nobles article. At the moment I see two streams of nobles in T5; "Career Nobles" who are active in politics and active in the apparatus of government and the rest of the "Imperial Peerage".
I'm looking forward to seeing Marc's T5 Nobles article. At the moment I see two streams of nobles in T5; "Career Nobles" who are active in politics and active in the apparatus of government and the rest of the "Imperial Peerage".
Star clusters. Those that were formerly counties.
In the pre-T5 Third Imperium there seems to be two kinds too: high nobles, whose titles have a built-in function, and honor nobles, who constitute a 'labor pool' from which the top levels of the Imperial services are drawn. Rank nobles are really a variant of that: commoners who are appointed to posts that there are no suitable honor nobles to fill and who get titles (often just lifetime peerages) to allow them to fill their positions.
Hans
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Are all these extra counts and dukes a result of the T5 kickstarter handing noble titles to people here in the real world? If so they should not exist in the setting.
On the other hand, and duke of Tenalphi you had better start worrying....
On the other hand, and duke of Tenalphi you had better start worrying....
I don't think this has changed as much as people worry, though functions of certain levels have been specified. It's more a matter of digging into the "working nobles" versus the "honor nobles." It also looks to some of the interesting edges of the "Honor Nobility," retainers and important assistants of Dukes. What has been done by T5's system, as I understand it, is a more systematic way of assigning the appropriate levels of the nobility to various worlds.
Not precisely my department.
Possibly. There are a number of dynamic scenarios. Nobility in Traveller has needed a lot of work for a long time. GT started that but didn't complete it.
I recall Kingmaker. It's been a long time. I think there are probably a number of example systems. RPGs, games in general borrowed from each other frequently.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
One of the GT developments around Nobles has also been changed by Marc since it was written. Unfortunately, Behind the Claw and MGT Spinward Marches were written with that previous assumption in place. The noble you'll find present on and assigned to every member world is now the Knight, not the Baron as previously written. There are still a lot of Barons "of", but now backwaters with 60 people and a sinus problem no longer rate a Baron of their own.
One model I've been toying with since the T5 change is to treat the "Duchy" in a given subsector as those worlds that do not rate nobles other than Knights. The worlds with Baronets, Barons, etc have a voice in the Moot, in theory (practice is too political to make sweeping statements about) via those nobles. The local Duke or Dukes (in the regions that have a lot of them) are the Imperial voice for the rest. Those Dukes derive influence and power from the worlds overseen by the lower Nobles and their own capital seat, of course, but the "space between" the developed worlds is their responsibility.
Last edited:
I'm looking forward to seeing it (With trepidation, but still...).
Imperiallines #7 just posted on DriveThru RPG:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/142375&affiliate_rem=4209
salochin999
SOC-13
True, my main point regarding Kingmaker is the system presented in it is a jumble which is how I imagine the OTU might be i.e. there might be a "system" at base but over the years lots of individual exceptions developed on top.
