Overview

Every year we carry out a review of some part of the game looking to see what we improve. In the past we've looked at the game rules, as well as the political structures of the Empire, but over winter of 2018/2019 we've been focusing on some important elements of the campaign setting itself. As a result of that review we're implementing some changes to the published setting. This page summarizes and explains the changes so that players can identify and understand the changes easily.

We try to include a section after each update to explain the reasoning behind the change, as well as providing a in-character rationale for what has changed.

Matrilineality in the Brass Coast

We have carried out a significant overhaul of the Brass Coast background elements to effectively remove the core element of matrilineality and also looked to try and replace that idea with something more enjoyable and engaging. As a result of that we've made some important changes to several Brass Coast wiki pages, and we've released some significant additional content - the Brass Coast history page for example is now much more thorough.

The key change is, effectively, to drop matrilineality from the brief. This means that the Freeborn no longer insist that every member of the nation must either be married to a Freeborn character or be able to trace a line from the person who gave birth to them back to one of the three founders. Any human character can join now the Brass Coast and be regarded as every bit as Freeborn as any other citizen of the nation.

It's in place we've chosen to emphasize the spiritual and cultural link with the three Founders of the Brass Coast. We've completely overhauled the scant information that has been released previously in game regarding the Founders and presented something that is explicitly designed to enrich the Freeborn brief and make playing a Brass Coast character more enjoyable.

The new pages we've added to the wiki are:

  • Tribe details the role and significance of the tribe in Freeborn life
  • Riqueza, Erigo, and Guerra covering the history of the three Founders.
  • The Brass Coast history has been significantly expanded
  • While only slightly related to the new material, we've also added a page about the Zemress islanders, and expanded on the role of the Kohan with its own page.

Several other pages will receive minor updates to help integrate the new material.

Reasoning

When you design a setting for a roleplaying game, many elements are included with an explicit design ethic for what they are trying to achieve. But inevitably, when trying to create an entire world, many elements get included simply because someone thought they were a good idea at the time. We included matrilineality in the brief simply because - on the face of it - it made the Coast a little more interesting and unusual - it helped to give it a point of difference between the Brass Coast and other nations.

As the game developed it became clear that the concept was really quite problematic. Although it was only ever intended to be an idea about tracing a bloodline through the physical parent who gave birth to you - it was impossible to untangle that from issues of gender itself. The logical consequence - that men could marry into the Freeborn without any problem but women couldn't because that would break the matrilineal line - was at odds with the gender blind goals of the setting. It wasn't remotely clear to anyone what happened if you didn't identify as male or female, something that only further highlighted the problematic nature of that element of the setting.

More crucially, there simply wasn't any sign that it was any fun to actually play. The value of an element in any setting - especially in a roleplaying setting - is the potential for characterisation and enjoyable interactions that it brings to the game. It's easy to get hung up on the artistic merits of these points when trying to defend a creative work - but in a live roleplaying game the only merit something has is for the fun it creates in game. On that point, as time went on, we increasingly felt the idea had utterly failed.

This isn't surprising in hindsight - live roleplaying is often at its best when it's focused on the choices that you make as your character, not the choices you make about your character. Certainly our goal for Empire is to create a game that is focused on the decisions you make as your character. You can choose to create a Freeborn character or not - but because of matrilineality you couldn't choose to become a Freeborn character - not if you were portraying a female character. For most players the only real impact appeared to be as a bar to the decisions your character could make.

In taking it out, we wanted to have something to replace it with. We engaged in a number of conversations with Brass Coast players where it was clear that while the concept of your tribe was nice, it wasn't really having the positive impact anyone hoped for. The sad truth was that the concept that was presented as being the single most important part of your Freeborn identity - was largely irrelevant. The contrast with elements like your city in the League or your tradition in Wintermark could not have been more stark.

So we decided to rewrite the nature of the link between characters and the founders - to bring out social and cultural links between the characters and the three different Founders, and to gloss over any further mention of a biological link. To do that we needed to go back and write a detailed history of the Founders, along with a full character biopsy and a set of agendas for them. While we kept continuity where we could, our primary goal was to present something that would be fun to play with as a Freeborn character. We wanted players to identify with one of the Founders - and achieving that was more important than ensuring everything that had been said previously about the Founders was maintained.

IC Reasoning

We looked at some options to let the players change the Brass Coast setting, by actions taken in game in response to plots that have been ongoing this year. That didn't happen - and in discussion with our team and with some Brass Coast players it seemed that although the obvious outcome of dropping matrilineality was desirable from the player's perspective, many of them were playing very conservative characters - and so they weren't interested in roleplaying their characters pursuing social change. In simple terms, the message was "Yes, please change this element - but can PD do it OOC please." We were happy to support that and set about making the appropriate changes - with the knowledge that we could simply create an IC justification later.

In this case, our justification is that the recent fighting around Free Landing has brought a trove of new historical documents to light. These documents reveal extensive details about the lives of the three Founders, who they were and what they were trying to accomplish by founding the Coast. Those documents have made clear that most of the people who founded the Coast were not related to the Founders - and that many new people joined the Brass Coast during that period. The overwhelming evidence now suggests that the majority of Freeborn citizens cannot trace a direct matrilineal line back to one of the Founders. Individual PCs are free to roleplay that their characters can still trace a line back - but the majority of Freeborn citizens have accepted that they cannot.

Ever pragmatic, in the face of those facts, the Freeborn nation has embraced a new definition of their identity - one in which they define themselves not by a blood line but by identifying the Founder whose ideology they feel closest to - and by attempting to emulate that ideology in their life. Obviously this is new material - it is not the case that "the Coast has always been this way" - so we don't expect existing characters to change if players don't want them to. However the ideas presented for the Founders clearly draw on core elements of the Freeborn brief - so everyone who is playing a Freeborn character by the brief is already emulating the Founders. We hope that people will find the new material sufficiently appealing that they will be able to pick a Founder that resonates with them and that that will give them more opportunities to roleplay at the events.

That process is now happening all across the Brass Coast over this downtime period. Freeborn citizens are eagerly reading about their Founders - and those that feel a personal connection are adopting that name as a way to try and emulate the ideology and the successes of that particular Founder. Some are doing it more than others, and as the new practice has been accepted and encouraged by the Freeborn egregores then over time it will become the new normal for the Coast. Characters won't suddenly forget that the Brass Coast had a long tradition of matrilineality - but the common Freeborn attitude is that that is simply a mistake people used to make - something superceded by the new ideas.

Any factual inconsistencies between the new material and previously information about Freeborn history or the lives of the Founders that was released in game should be read within the context of historical revisionism. Extensive new documents have been discovered - they incontrovertibly establish important facts and that provides a new understanding of who the Founders were and of the history behind the Founding of the Brass Coast. Everything on the wiki should be taken as the new canon, something that all normal characters would accept as superseding any previous understanding of the world.

Further Reading