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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fanboy2000" data-source="post: 5821428" data-attributes="member: 19998">This reminds me of a book I read recently, Sex with Kings. The book is about King's mistresses. I'm not a history buff, and most of the history buffs around me are into the war aspect. They know all about knights, armor, fire arms, famous battles, etc. As such, I don't hear a lot about anything else, so the book was a nice change of pace from the kind of history I'm normally served by my friends.But what really struck me while reading the book was how under-represented mistresses were in D&D setting material and fantasy books that I had read. I'm sure that somewhere out there there's a supplement with an NPC mistress, but I've yet to see it. Ditto with fantasy books.This caused me to use a mistress as a patron for my Eberron campaign. I said she was a mistress (all they knew is that they were being hired by a Dutchess who lived in the same castle as the King of Breland. They either never put it together, or they suspected but never voiced their suspicion.Anyways, reading the book made think about the kinds of power struggles that go on in a royal court that I hadn't seen D&D cover, but could be useful to PCs in an urban setting. In France, the king's mistresses was an official position. It came with prestige and power. It was a kind of institutional hypocrisy, The Church condemned adultery, but politics and diplomacy required the royalty marry other royalty even if they both hated each other. So, King's kept having mistresses. They were quite popular with members of the court as well, but not universally popular.So, I think there's room for multiple views on ethics in a given campaign world. PCs in particular, not necessarily having a real medieval counterpart, are, I think, ripe for having atypical views and opinions on the settings ethics. I wouldn't recommend books written recently about historical time periods, or fantasy books. Even the best modern authors have a tendency to gloss over important details of a time period or romanticize the periord. (E.g., Fantasy Gun Control.)Fiction written during the time most analogous to the campaign setting would, I think, be a lot better. (IIRC, you mentioned morality plays which I think is on the right track.)</blockquote>

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