Marriages versus love/sex, and not really QQing about Sex Moves

I was just watching the Tudors, which is certainly an entertaining show. And I know certain pieces of AW don't come over to AW:DA, for various reasons. "Sex Move" just sounds kind of dumb to apply to a Dark Ages setting because we all can't play Henry VIII. At the same time, there has to be a middle ground somewhere.

I also play a lot of Paradox's Crusader Kings 2 with various mods (including the Westeros mod on occasion... and we all know what the "R.R." stands for in G.R.R. Martin). Marriage is an incredibly important part of that game... along with your ruler's bedroom habits. I had one ruler in Crusader Kings who had a political marriage with a neighboring sovereign's sister (who happened to be a lesbian). In spite of whatever incompatibilities in private, they declared a public mutual love for one another... for the good of the realm. It was one of the more interesting rulers that I played. Marrying & having children in that game are incredibly important, as are generational politics & the struggles relating to inheritance.

I guess I'm saying that I don't need a "Sex Move", but I'd like something about Marriage, as well as something about inheritance in the Dark Ages. (Crusader Kings 2 does this in a delicious way... including various traditions of Catholics & Orthodox folk, as well as Muslims & others. Ideas around inheritance were hardly confined to Salic law.)

And I'm not just talking about whatever the "Princess" playbook might bring, but across all of the characters. What does it mean to be married, and how does it point you towards screwing over the current Dominus that rules your little geographic setting? Courtly love (like the romanticized Camelot) would be nice... but then we'd be getting further afield from Westeros, especially when all I'd truly want is crap around Marriage & Power.

Yeah, I guess I can just take up Marriage as a story-hammer (if your dude marries the chick from the Bad-Wrong family, then all heck will break lose because Hard Move... or if someone marries the Hardholder's Sister, and has a Son by her, he's got every reason to depose the current Hardholder & murder all the offspring of the Hardholder...)... but it would be cool to have more stuff around it than the b.s. in my head if I'm MCing.

And, yeah, Gender has come up on this board in a way that it doesn't have to in other Apocalyptic settings... but the politics of Gender are so much more vital to the Dark Ages (as stated previously by others). I just wish Gender-stuff were more prominent in this because of the setting, even if we in our modernity should not be so judgmental about this stuff. The character sheets are just awfully quiet about Gender & Marriage, and I wish they weren't.

If anyone has advice on this topic or ways they've worked it in, I'd be interested in reading it. And I haven't playtested this yet, so I'm just spouting off at this point.

(Sorry if this is covered by other topics. I did a quick search on Marriage & didn't get back a ton.)

Since I got nothing to add I d just like to thank you for expressing my own sentiments on this one Cheese. Do you think there is a relation between this post of yours and the one for the lack of A church?

Since I got nothing to add I d just like to thank you for expressing my own sentiments on this one Cheese. Do you think there is a relation between this post of yours and the one for the lack of A church?

There's a lot of relation between the two posts, I think. It was all kind of stream of consciousness, though.

Apocalypse World might be about a total collapse of order, but that's through our modern lens... and we don't understand how much we'd carry with us into the after-world, you know? How much law and order and society will keep going on when central authority stops? And in spite of that, you have the hard stops with Sex Move, and with the Hx ratings - these force you to establish a social order in your game.

With the fall of Rome, the barbarians loved the shit out of Roman ideals... so when they destroyed Rome, Roman traditions still went on. Barbarians converted, took up Roman names and titles, took up Roman customs. There was degeneracy, but it wasn't a total vacuum like post-human Atlanta in the Walking Dead.

So, the lack of Church (as in, "Roman Social Order") in the present AW:DA rules is a lot tied to this.

I set up the Roman Priest with a marriage rite that's directly pointed at this, even if that right/rite is over-the-top in a few ways. Marriage, as a means to bring the outsider within the clan, was a big deal... and, yeah, this will bring up issues like women-as-property & all sorts of bad gender inequality issues (that are supported by some parts of our history, and not supported by others (like the Celts)). Even if I don't know if the Priest is balanced or makes sense with what they want to write into AW:DA, I know I'll need something like it as an option in the current state of the rules.

Nobody has to be a Roman or a post-Roman in this game, I don't think... but the lack of social boundaries (Sex Move and Hx in AW) is very strange in AW:DA, especially because it shouldn't have backslid so far as to not need some sort of boundaries.

Maybe I'll post my post-apocalyptic hierarchy of needs next... partly because I like to b.s.