DeadDMWalking wrote:Maybe I'm dense, but it still isn't making sense to me. If I don't owe fealty to anyone in my clan, why do they owe fealty to me? If I'm not expected to be part of an army sometimes, how come the other members of the clan are expected to fill out my army when I need them?
Every time we talk about "other Wasp Clan people" think "your cousins." They aren't inherently your boss, and you aren't inherently their boss. But you do have a persistent social connection to them and you always have a reason to go work for them and they always have a reason to go work for you. But that doesn't mean that you or they
don't also have reasons to work for other people. It's just that whatever else you are doing or have done, you still always have those family connections because factually your dad's sister had three kids and you used to play with them during the honey festival every year.
From the standpoint of a player character, the fact that you're Wasp Clan means that regardless of what else you do or have done, you have some Wasp Clan contacts. And those contacts can be sources of information, or they can also be quest givers, just like Shadowrun contacts. Obviously you're never going to go join the army of a Wasp Clan Lord and fight as spear catcher #3,784, but that's because you're a
player character and are only going to take jobs like "supernatural event investigator" and "monster hunter" that can be performed by a small ensemble of skilled protagonists. You might very well get the mystery of the week by being told about rumors of a monster threatening a mountain village through one of your Wasp Clan contacts.
Further, once you become powerful enough that you start hiring your own staff, some number of your minions are going to be from your immediate area or attracted specifically from whatever adventures you happened to have. Maybe you conquered a Bakemono village from its oppressive Oni leadership and now you have a bunch of goblin minions. Maybe you did something else entirely and have different quest related minions. But some of your minions are going to be various Wasp Clan people that come to work for you.
DeadDMWalking wrote:Either clans are insular and you get a group of clan warriors from your clan or clans aren't insular and you become a duke and you get warriors from a bunch of clans. I don't understand how they're both supposed to work at the same time.
Imagine that when you get a bunch of warriors you buy them with prestige points from the available marketplace. Because game mechanically, it might literally work like that and it's not a terrible metaphor. What's available on the marketplace is going to be:
- Whatever is in the province you happen to be in (hope you like the taste of MC's cock).
- Whatever was unlocked by previous missions (hope the other players agreed with you to go do favors for the northern eagle riders).
- Whatever is available through family connections (which is 100% under your control since you selected your own clan during character generation).
Yes, obviously you're going to end up with some special troops related to earlier major missions - or at least the opportunity to hire some. But the troops you can get through family connections are the ones that as a player you have full control over. The MC can't tell you that you can't hire Wasp Riders because there aren't any Wasp Riders in the province. You're fucking Wasp Clan, and you can hire Wasp Riders rom another fucking province by writing a letter to your cousin.
-Username17