ROMANCE IN YOUR TTRPG ADVENTURES?
LET GOOD SOCIETY TTRPG HELP YOU OUT!
So Game Masters, your players want romantic entanglements, suitable marriage partners, and to restore their family reputation. How do you do that without things getting awkward, falling into the gutter, or quickly going to a fade-to-black? Let your players further their characters’ romances, reputation, financial risk, ruin, or other dramatics. Let the romance, rivals, and social intrigues spice up your campaigns. Your players choosing to navigate, or avoid, them will liven up any social encounter.
The best way I have found is Good Society - A Jane Austen Roleplaying Game (not Sponsored). It won the 2019 Indie Game Developer Network award for “Best Rules” and even had a very successful Kickstarter campaign to reprint it in 2022! Inspired by the Jane Austen novels and set in the 1700s, this game can easily be blended into any other game system. Use it to widen the social encounters for your players.
One thing this TTRPG helped me realize was the potency of rumors and reputation. Spread some rumors about the characters, good or bad. Are they true or false? Who is spreading them and why? Let your players trade rumors with their social betters or even wistful glances with their heart desires. How do these rumors affect the players? A scandal coming to light at the worst possible time will mar a reputation. There are reputation markers as well as a reputation economy in Good Society that is fun and easy to insert into any other game.
Letter-writing is a great way to continue the plots of the player characters’ lives even as they adventure about the world. When they stop to camp, encourage them to write letters to send with the next courier service they come across, and have such services deliver replies. There can even be invites to some social event, or a letter telling them not to dare and come to such-and-such event, you dirty rascals!
If you want to see a great example, watch A Court of Fey & Flowers in which they did a mashup of DND and Good Society in a fey realm. Iyengar is the DM and all the players are fairy folk. They start at the celebration of the Bloom, an event that fills the Feywild with magical energy. A mysterious threat emerges and the players have to sort things out while navigating their budding relationships. The Court of Fey & Flowers is a series of ten e[isodes with the first one foreshadowing the remaining nine.
There is also a two-part series featuring a play-through of Good Society on One Shot Podcast Network’s actual play podcast, 295. The Good Society Part 1 – The One Shot Podcast Network. This is hosted by James D’Amato, author of the “Ultimate RPG” books, and is a fun listen as well.
For other inspiration, look to Bridgerton. It’s a show about a noble family navigating London society in search of love with plenty of friends and rivals to get in the way.
An inspiration that is more of a tangent, there is Our Flag Means Death. This is a comedy about a gentleman turned pirate with a different sort of society. Pirate society!
What’s your favorite source of romantic inspiration? Let us know on our socials!
