My Liege, is meant to sit comfortably on top of any six-ability, procedure-focused game (OSR games, basically). To that end, it is essentially a new type of turn, familiar to people already used to wilderness turns, dungeon turns, combat turns, etc.
The My Liege, Court Turn occurs twice a year, and flows in this wise:
- Hear reports of the previous season’s orders.
- Hear petitions of those seeking an audience with the Court
- Single-season duties
- Campaign: Decide which, if any, Vassals will produce luxuries. Return ransomed captives.
- Harvest: Collect and pay taxes.
- Issue orders to the Court’s Vassals to carry out for that season
The petition table is really the engine that drives this all forward. It includes chance events, misfortunes, and fortunes that trigger based on decisions the PCs have made, and actions of rival Courts. Essentially, it's the equivalent of Court-level random encounters.
One of my main design goals was low Referee overhead, and this table helps accomplish that by making sure all the other actors stay busy even if the Ref doesn’t spend much time scheming for them (though, of course, they’re free to scheme to their heart’s content). I defined these common orders for the players: assassinate, bribe, build, campaign, muster, negotiate, scout, and spy. Therefore, there are results on the table for the other courts to do similar things.
There are also results for feasts, deaths (sometimes with succession crises), marriages, revolts, famines, monsters, religious complications, luxury trade, and more.
For espionage-style results, they might remain secret if the vassal carrying it out succeeds.
The rule of thumb I've been using is to let the table results stand as long as they don't directly contradict something that's already been established or a plan I already have running in the background.
And finally this is a sliding table - it's a d100 roll, plus the number of vassals loyal to the PCs' Court and all the Favours owed by other Courts. All the most chaotic results are at the bottom of the table, and results above 100 are things that would only happen to a Court with a bit of a reputation. The intent is to inject some dynamism, making it feel like the world is reacting to the Court's power.
My main outstanding question with this is how many petitions to roll for each Court Turn. Right now, it stands at 4, with a chance for more with particularly powerful Courts.
