Abstraction in My Liege,

I think the aspect of My Liege, that could potentially put off the most people is its lack of accounting granularity. It does not track Court wealth in gold pieces, but rather in Crowns - the average amount of annual tax drawn from a six-mile hex. It isn't much interested in extracting more value from each hex - mostly because it doesn't seem like the medieval nobility was overly interested in this either (with exceptions, of course).

I don't think it's even necessary to "convert" between Crowns and gp either, in no small part because the majority of medieval taxes were never collected in specie currency, but rather in goods and services. To me, it's easier and more realistic to assume that, once PCs have this much power, they no longer need to worry about personal expenses. No more haggling at market stalls for 50 feet of rope. Furthermore, I don't want PCs to be able to level up through collecting taxes. They must still go out and adventure to do that.

Crowns are a good example of the philosophy of abstraction that I took when working on My Liege,. That is, I wouldn't be afraid to abstract things in order to serve the purpose of getting right to the political machinations. However, I was comfortable with abstracting units, but less comfortable abstracting concepts. The value of 1 Crown is not precisely defined, but it represents a combination of goods, services, and money that is real in the fiction of the setting.

For a while, I was calling the other currency that Courts track "Favour." While it represents a feeling that would be real to the characters, it was a little too wishy-washy for my taste. Then, during one late-night design session, I had the epiphany to add an 's.' Favours feel far more concrete and comprehensible than the nebulous feeling of favour. Everyone has owed or been owed a favor before. It's already a currency in real life, even if we don't track it as strictly as we would in a game.

Abstraction also allows ease of adaptation of the My Liege, system to different settings and genres. To make it work for your game, you would only have to change a few entries in the Petitions table, the terrain features, and the different types of companies available for warbands.

I could easily imagine adapting My Liege, to space-feudalism, for example, by reskinning the monsters in the Petition table as alien invasions, changing terrain types to planet types with exotic luxuries (Spice, anyone?), and reimagining warbands as "fleets" with different ship types mustered from, say, exploration outpost worlds, industrial worlds, etc. The rest of the rules would scale easily due to the abstraction of units.

Road to Petition

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:

1. Hear reports of the previous season’s orders.
2. Hear petitions of those seeking an audience with the Court
3. Single-season duties
1. Campaign: Decide which, if any, Vassals will produce luxuries. Return ransomed captives.
2. Harvest: Collect and pay taxes.
4. 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.