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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nameless" data-source="post: 3198981" data-attributes="member: 1543">I think this is the biggest strength of the dragonmarked houses as far as political motivation. Each house has a fairly limited scope with its official guilds and dragonmark powers. But each house has unlimited ambition, and more resources than most. What does a monarch have that a house Baron does not? Very little. A house's power isn't derived primarily from its craft monopoly, it's derived from the same complex social, political, economic, and philosophical sources as real life power. They all have spies, they all have trackers and artificers and soldiers, because those things are useful to a powerful organization.Because the houses do have a legitimate public face, they can't just outright have armies and annex territory, but the individuals running the houses have their aspirations, and will work within their limits to achieve them. In a Machiavellian sense, the houses are each aspiring to dominate each other.From a plot design perspective, you can do a lot with the varied houses. For any given plot, a couple of houses will be the straight shooter. A plot might be well served by having Cannith predictably lose control of a new golem. A different set of houses will still have a peripheral connection, predictable but unlikely. It's not Lyrandar who's altering the weather locally, it's Vadalis who is breeding climate-sensitive animals. And a different set of houses will have a connection that reverses expectations. A magical prison is built in secret, but it's house Orien who built it, with the intention of binding new types of creatures to dragonshards for transportation. You can weave the exact level of complexity you want into your plots to make them sensible enough to create immersion, but obtuse enough that the players have to work to get through them.</blockquote>

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