I need some help to understand Oeridian nobility better.
For instance, Suel nobility is very easy. Basically all of them are listed (see #1). They are great and powerful houses with very few members. Sometimes they are wealthy too. That's it.
But then we have the Oeridians. Very few houses are listed (#1). One of the houses has houses inside the houses (The Celestial Houses of Aerdi), meaning that Nyrond is a junior house of Rax-Nyrond which is one of the house of the Celestial Houses of Aerdi. Now this gets confusing. Do the rest of the Oeridian houses that are at the same 'root' level with Aerdi, such as Keogh, have such multitude of sub-houses? Or can we even say that they are sub-houses and sub-sub-houses and sub-sub-sub-houses?
In Keoland, the Court of the Land is dominated by the Oeridian nobility, but I only know two Oeridian houses there: Keogh and Skotti, but Skotti is not an Oeridian house per se, it belongs to the House Lizhal, which is a Suel house. So what to think, really?
I'm asking this because I was thinking about adding a notorious, mainly Lawful Evil, Oeridian house in Keoland. Does this mean that I have the following options at my disposal?
1. I can just add an Oeridian noble house that has no apparent connection to any of the other houses.
2. The Oeridian house can be a sub-house or a sub-sub-house of any of the major Oeridian tribes (#1), and since we are talking about Keoland, the house should belong to the House of Keogh.
3. The Oeridian house can belong to a Suel house, but it's still an Oeridian house.
4. There doesn't have to be any explanation. A person can be an Oeridian noble simply because he or she is an Oeridian noble. There doesn't have to any explanation for this as the reason has already faded into history.
P.S. After I started to watch Game of Thrones, I became really picky about these things. How nobility works should always be coherent.
I would disagree. While the system should not be totally incoherent, contradictions make a system more interesting and realistic.
First, I do not think any list of tribes/houses is exhaustive.
Second, we have a case of survivor bias, as we only see the houses that have survived into the present, or whose extinction is significant, in the published material. Other houses could have come about in other ways, appeared on the scene and then passed in between major events.
Further, comparing the nobility of the Great Kingdom (a purely Oeridian aristocracy) with that of the Suel-Oeridian (slightly Suel dominated) Keoland should provide significant contrasts. Personally, I consider the Suel a more evolved, urbanized society compared to the Aerdy. While in some sense they are more conservative, they are also more intellectually flexible. Thus, a small Oeridian group could have been granted noble status as either a splinter of a larger tribe or an independent band of wanderers.
I would go with four, unless lineage is important to the plot... the world should be as detailed as it has to be, but no more detailed.
The Suel-descended Keoish houses were noble houses in the Suel Imperium before its fall and once they had set themselves up in Keoland they went right back to being noble houses.
For the most part, these families are probably no longer purely Suloise. For political reasons many will have intermarried with Oeridian families. The Neheli have a little elven blood.
The Oeridian tribes—Aerdi, Ferroi, Keogh, Nehron, Vollar, etc.—aren't noble houses. They're tribes of horse-riding barbarians who later settled down and founded kingdoms and only then did their ruling families become noble houses. So there's no "House of Keogh," just Oeridians of the Keogh tribe—which was actually several allied tribes—who settled in Keoland and later founded noble houses.
So they aren't at all the same thing.
On the other hand, the Suel barbarian tribes—Fruztii, Cruzki, and Schnai—might have been similar to the Oeridian tribes, barbarians living on the fringes of the Suel lands near the Hellfurnaces. So they'd be a better comparison to the Oeridian tribes.
The Suel-descended Keoish houses were noble houses in the Suel Imperium before its fall and once they had set themselves up in Keoland they went right back to being noble houses.
For the most part, these families are probably no longer purely Suloise. For political reasons many will have intermarried with Oeridian families. The Neheli have a little elven blood.
The Oeridian tribes—Aerdi, Ferroi, Keogh, Nehron, Vollar, etc.—aren't noble houses. They're tribes of horse-riding barbarians who later settled down and founded kingdoms and only then did their ruling families become noble houses. So there's no "House of Keogh," just Oeridians of the Keogh tribe—which was actually several allied tribes—who settled in Keoland and later founded noble houses.
So they aren't at all the same thing.
On the other hand, the Suel barbarian tribes—Fruztii, Cruzki, and Schnai—might have been similar to the Oeridian tribes, barbarians living on the fringes of the Suel lands near the Hellfurnaces. So they'd be a better comparison to the Oeridian tribes.
I see. Well, that makes sense! It does say "Oeridian tribes" there in the link after all, not "Oeridian nobility". So there are actually several Oeridian nobles houses of the Keogh tribe in Keoland, and they may or may not be affiliated with some Suel house as it is with the House Skotti, right?
Sorry for the thread-raise...but figured I'd just make a quick comment. :)
I've always seen the 'pure' Oeridians as Celtic/Scottish sort of folk. For how they have their "nobility" I see it fairly similar to what you see in the Disney movie, "Brave", honestly. As others have said, they aren't really "noble houses" so much as "important clans". I see all the confusion in the way that I'd assume that alliances and rivalries in the Oeridian upper-eschelon are quickly made or broken...and nobody really has many outright hard-feelings towards one another. Exceptions, of course, but I can see one 'clan' allying with another one week, then, after some rather biting insult, they go to battle for a week or two, then someone who's friends with both clans offers a sit down between all three and after some heavy drinking and brawling all is forgiven.
In this way we would quickly see a rather convoluted mess of who is beneath/above who because that can all change in a couple months time. You'd have...well, what we have. "Houses" under "houses" that should be above the first "house" because of some alliance they had with another "house" last year but don't anymore. That kind of thing.
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