Ennoblement

Burning Wheel Subsystem Advice and Guidance
1

Have any of you worked ennoblement into a game or thought about cool ways to handle it?

Say you’re top dog (or close to it) and a commoner family provides a valuable service or sacrifice and you want to honor them, or say you want to give a little more heft and legal protection to commoner you intend to marry.

You can have a nice ceremony and do the vow of fealty & homage bit to formalizes responsibilities to each other.

But it would be cool to give that a touch of mechanical heft, like a die trait that includes a 1D affiliation with nobility or something.

The existing traits in the book (unless I missed something) all nod towards someone who has already been born into nobility. We could do a custom trait and reword Sworn Homage a bit, I suppose.

Any other ideas? Cool stories from your own games where ennoblement happened?

2

Give 'em a custom trait that grants them an afilliation with their liege’s house, and an ob penalty to any test that required nobles to take them seriously as anything but upstart commoners who don’t know their place.

3

This is what the rules for buying an affiliation are for. The ennobling party might have to provide loans and help to get you through the test, though!

Otherwise it’s a trait, but yes, it’s quite possibly an empty trait. Nobles might dislike you for being a jumped-up peasant and entirely lacking in the manner born. Heck, peasants might detest you for getting above your raising.