AK_Brickster wrote:I almost hate to jump in, seeing as how you two are having such a great dialogue on the subject. I also have to say that this topic is really my favorite one in the whole "LEGO Castle Sets" thread. It's so interesting to see other people's views on the matter.
All views are welcome. I intentionally phrased my post as an open question to the forum. I would never try to inflict any single viewpoint of how the factions must work; on the contrary, I wanted to see whether we
already agree on enough to find some sort of standard.
AK_Brickster wrote:Personally, I've always viewed the Black Falcons as good guys, although they don't seem quite "as good", if you will, as the various "Lion" factions for some reason. I also have a hard time deciding who is the "Boss" faction. Is it the Crownies, the Royal Knights, the "New Lions" from the Kingdoms line? All of them have "King" figures, if I recall correctly, so who's the top dog? Maybe they all rule different regions but are amicable to each other? If that's the case, maybe it would make sense to align the BF's with the Crownies, since they share a main color (blue).
I tend to agree that the Falcons are maybe not quite as by-the-book, knights-in-shining-armor "good". It could be that they're a little shady, it could be that they like to tweak the noses of the other factions, it could be that they're led by someone who's an unconventional knight or lord, but for whatever reason, they seem like the type to go take over the Crusader castle.
I don't think that there has to be a single "boss" faction. In fact, I would propose that it's better that there
not be one master faction, for a couple of reasons. From the standpoint of a story or a fantasy world, there are more interesting narratives to be written among multiple different characters and factions, each with their own agendas. (This, in my view, is what makes the Song of Ice and Fire world of Westeros so compelling.) From the standpoint of a backdrop for builders making their own castles and scenes, I'd like people to be able to contribute whether they started building in 1985, 1995, 2005, etc., and when you started collecting will greatly influence what sets were available to you and thus which factions predominate in your collection. I don't want to tell a kid who just bought his first set "sorry kid, your Lion Knights are subservient to my Crusaders" (or Falcons or Dragons or whatever).
As for the shared color, I tend to look on that as coincidence. If we assume that LEGO factions' symbols are patterned (loosely!) after medieval heraldry, lots of knights might happen to have blue in their coat of arms without being related; relationships would be more based on the animals and objects in the arms (and even those would have to be repeated somewhere, just because there was a small lexicon of symbols from which to draw).
AK_Brickster wrote:If we wanted to complicate the story a bit, I prefer to think of the Crownies as the least-liked faction among their respective peasantry. The crown logo screams "oppressive taxation" to me,
I love it!
AK_Brickster wrote:...so while they may be peaceable, I think their serfs have it just a little worse than those who serve below one of the more noble overlords. This view would also align with my previous feeling that the BF's aren't quite as "good", so their alignment with the Crowns would make sense.
Well, any alignments between factions could be temporary. The Falcons could be hired by the Crowns, or the two sides could be fighting a common enemy, or the Falcons' commander could be friendly with the Crowns' king, etc. But yeah, I can see those two sides working together.
AK_Brickster wrote:Depending on how nasty you wanted the Crowns to be, you could assign the Wolfpack as their greedy tax-collecting thugs (who obviously skim quite a bit off the top for themselves, adding to the burden on the common layperson).
Well, here again, I assume that the Wolves are out for their own ends, and thus could be hired be a less-than-sympathetic lord, but then again, I'd expect them to take more for themselves than they handed over to the lord, and thus probably wouldn't be the right guys for the job.
AK_Brickster wrote:Since I personally only have no more than about a dozen of any one faction, I usually end up making the Crowns as the ruling faction (because I have more of them than any other) and the lesser factions are small groups of foot-soldiers who support/serve a mounted knight/lord. This lines up nicely with my understanding of the actual situation during medieval times, where a King would have dozens or more knights and nobility who pledged their allegiance with various numbers of troops, depending on the level of wealth/power of the individual knight/lord.
Well, a lot depends on the era of history and the region that you look at. The truth is that the feudal system was not one system, and it evolved over time and was applied differently over different populations. But that's awesome for us, because it gives us lots of leeway in organizing our own factions for our own builds. For instance, I tend to work under the assumption that monarchs tended not to have standing armies of any significant size (though they would have house guards, and possibly city watch over a capital city), and in times of war they would levy troops from their vassal knights. But you can organize your factions into more late medieval standing armies and envision long-standing conflicts on the scale of the Hundred Years' War. The great thing here is that we're both right.
AK_Brickster wrote:My Forestmen don't take part in organized skirmishes between sides,
I agree. They inhabit the greenwood and hold up wealthy merchants, evade the local authorities, and generally make merry.
AK_Brickster wrote:...and the Orcs/Trolls don't fight alongside human "baddies". Their sort of universally evil, and don't ally themselves with anyone. Sort of like the polar-opposite of the Forestmen.
I agree. I look at them as even less civilized than the Wolfpack, and too volatile for most leaders to risk trying to deal with them or hire them. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past a really bad dude from enlisting their aid somehow. (If you think about it, one of the things that made a bad guy like Sauron in Lord of the Rings so bad was that he was enlisting all the worst factions in the region and binding them into his service.)
AK_Brickster wrote:As for wizards, things get a bit more complicated now that the current Dragon faction has their own, and there are quite a few other permutations out there.
Majesto usually ends up playing more of a "Merlin-esque" type roll in my world, usually taking up residence in a tall tower amongst the good guys. The new Dragon wizard plays the part of leader of the new Dragon faction, and Willa usually finds herself among the other "bad" factions, since I don't really have any Fright Knight contingent, to speak of. She also would be useful as the head of a large "undead" army, if I ever got around to making one.
Yeah, I think we can anticipate that the special characters are likely to find their way into multiple different roles in different people's collections. If you need a wizard, you're going to grab some parts that scream "wizard" and build one, and you may not be thinking specifically of Willa or Majisto or whoever when you do that. That's fine, and I don't think that it necessarily has to destroy our made-up world "continuity". In my book, if you call a character Willa, she's Willa, and if you call her Precilla, she's Precilla.