#dandies and dandyzettes
I see Tumblr is cropping long posts now, so -
The Kickstarter is live!
Let me show off some of the beautiful art by @suburbanbeatnik:
These miniature portraits will be appearing in the book alongside the discussion of different social classes - aristocracy, landed gentry, military, clergy, and trade.
The Kickstarter is actually fully funded, but now we’re looking at hitting the first stretch goal to have these each paired with another of a different gender!
So please do check it out - there are lots of rewards at various price points, from the digital copy at $7 to the opportunity to put yourself into an illustration at $500 (and beyond)!
I explained something about Dandies & Dandyzettes yesterday on Twitter, and I thought I should explain it here as well.
The title card says “Roleplaying Game”, and it is a roleplaying game, but I want to stress that the emphasis is on “roleplaying” more than “game”. If you’re not into very complicated game mechanics or competing for a win, this will be a great game for you! I have some instructions for using dice to determine success, character traits, action, romance, and so on, but they’re totally optional.
It does open with a very gamey directive - you need to choose a theme so that everyone’s on the same page as to the story that’s going to collaboratively unroll. Austen, Heyer, Bronte, Wollstonecraft,* Clarke … the information that you’re going to need will depend on the type of story you’re telling and where you set it. So 95% (or more) of the book is an in-depth guide to English life, politics, and culture in the 1810s.
So it goes into:
- The nuances of the class system, including not just how aristocratic titles work but the relative social standing of different professions and the rank systems within the military and clergy
- The details of different neighborhoods/parishes of London at the time, whether fashionable, middle-class, or working-class
- How pre-decimal currency worked (bizarrely, I’ll tell you that for free)
- The rules of attending court, the etiquette of the ballroom, and the code of dueling - and in all three cases, more of the culture surrounding these than just “be announced and bow to the king,” “ladies may decline a request to dance but not ask a man,” and so on
- How local authorities dealt with crime, and what exactly “quarter sessions” and “assizes” are
- and a whole lot more!
And as a result, it works equally well as a guide to the period for anyone who wants to write a novel set in the Regency. It’s multi-purpose!
While the history is in some cases given in brief (there’s a large appendix with further reading at the end for anyone who wants to learn more about the press, Brighton, Catholic emancipation, the Black population of the time, etc.), it isn’t sensationalized or simplified for gaming purposes. GMs and players can decide to simplify or ignore some of the history, as can authors, but it is up to them to choose what to include and what not to! If you like the information about how holidays affected hiring and renting but want divorces to be easier to get, go ahead with that. If you want divorce to still be a complicated and difficult process but want to ignore the rules of paying calls on your entry into a neighborhood, that’s easily done (as long as everyone else in the game is aware, of course).
Sign up here to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live
* Mary Wollstonecraft was not advocating for complete gender equality so this isn’t quite accurate, but her name seemed like the best choice for a theme where you tell all gender roles to suck it
The Kickstarter is now live!
Let me show off some of the beautiful art by @suburbanbeatnik:
These miniature portraits will be appearing in the book alongside the discussion of different social classes - aristocracy, landed gentry, military, clergy, and trade.
The Kickstarter is actually fully funded, but now we’re looking at hitting the first stretch goal to have these each paired with another of a different gender!
This is crazy, but the Kickstarter is nearly over - nine hours left! If you want to get in on the preorders for Dandies & Dandyzettes, you’ll need to act fast!
We are also about $300 away from the last stretch goal, and it would be amazing if we could get it! It’s for a second large-scale illustration by @suburbanbeatnik - the sketch for the first is below:
Please help me afford another!
We can do it, guys! We’re so close!
We’ve hit the first stretch goal! Now the previously planned portrait miniatures representing different classes will all be paired.
We already have the first pendant - the very handsome aristocrat pictured above! I cannot wait to see what @suburbanbeatnik comes up with for the other four.
If you haven’t joined in on the Kickstarter for Dandies & Dandyzettesyet,it’s right here! The book will be available in a bunch of different formats and different price points, so it works for any budget.
The next stretch goal, which we’ll be reaching soon, will be a detail map of the city of Bath to facilitate games or stories set there. Can’t wait!
There he is! Isn’t he dashing? I modeled him on Benjamin Bathurst!
I explained something about Dandies & Dandyzettes yesterday on Twitter, and I thought I should explain it here as well.
The title card says “Roleplaying Game”, and it is a roleplaying game, but I want to stress that the emphasis is on “roleplaying” more than “game”. If you’re not into very complicated game mechanics or competing for a win, this will be a great game for you! I have some instructions for using dice to determine success, character traits, action, romance, and so on, but they’re totally optional.
It does open with a very gamey directive - you need to choose a theme so that everyone’s on the same page as to the story that’s going to collaboratively unroll. Austen, Heyer, Bronte, Wollstonecraft,* Clarke … the information that you’re going to need will depend on the type of story you’re telling and where you set it. So 95% (or more) of the book is an in-depth guide to English life, politics, and culture in the 1810s.
So it goes into:
- The nuances of the class system, including not just how aristocratic titles work but the relative social standing of different professions and the rank systems within the military and clergy
- The details of different neighborhoods/parishes of London at the time, whether fashionable, middle-class, or working-class
- How pre-decimal currency worked (bizarrely, I’ll tell you that for free)
- The rules of attending court, the etiquette of the ballroom, and the code of dueling - and in all three cases, more of the culture surrounding these than just “be announced and bow to the king,” “ladies may decline a request to dance but not ask a man,” and so on
- How local authorities dealt with crime, and what exactly “quarter sessions” and “assizes” are
- and a whole lot more!
And as a result, it works equally well as a guide to the period for anyone who wants to write a novel set in the Regency. It’s multi-purpose!
While the history is in some cases given in brief (there’s a large appendix with further reading at the end for anyone who wants to learn more about the press, Brighton, Catholic emancipation, the Black population of the time, etc.), it isn’t sensationalized or simplified for gaming purposes. GMs and players can decide to simplify or ignore some of the history, as can authors, but it is up to them to choose what to include and what not to! If you like the information about how holidays affected hiring and renting but want divorces to be easier to get, go ahead with that. If you want divorce to still be a complicated and difficult process but want to ignore the rules of paying calls on your entry into a neighborhood, that’s easily done (as long as everyone else in the game is aware, of course).
Sign up here to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live
* Mary Wollstonecraft was not advocating for complete gender equality so this isn’t quite accurate, but her name seemed like the best choice for a theme where you tell all gender roles to suck it
The Kickstarter is now live!
Let me show off some of the beautiful art by @suburbanbeatnik:
These miniature portraits will be appearing in the book alongside the discussion of different social classes - aristocracy, landed gentry, military, clergy, and trade.
The Kickstarter is actually fully funded, but now we’re looking at hitting the first stretch goal to have these each paired with another of a different gender!
Here’s almost all of my artwork I did for Dandies and Dandyzettes!
In Regency England, where does a gentleman’s income come from?
It depends on the gentleman, but in general, the majority of his income would derive from interest on invested wealth: the family money would be invested in the government funds, which delivered varying amounts of interest ranging from 3% to 5%. This interest would be held separate from the capital, and the responsible gentleman would consider that account of collecting interest his income, only drawing from that rather than uninvesting capital; in the case of an entailed property, he might legally only be allowed to access the interest. A gentleman’s wife would typically bring her own capital sum to the marriage, invested similarly to bring a yearly income that was her husband’s property, and the marriage contract usually stipulated that some amount of invested capital and its interest would devolve back to her when she was widowed, and/or to her children when she died, which is how even a younger son could have a small income.
However, yes, rents played a part. Many farms around a country estate would be rented from the landowner, as would homes in the villages. These rents were typically monetary, and were collected by the landowner’s agent on a quarterly basis - March 25 (Lady Day), June 24 (Midsummer), September 29 (Michaelmas), and Christmas.
The clergy, on the other hand, got paid a little more creatively. While they might have one of those younger-son inheritances mentioned above - this was a common career path for sons who weren’t going to inherit the main estate, like Edmund Bertram or Henry Tilney - they were also sustained by the parish, which is why there was a lot of competition for lucrative livings in prosperous villages and towns. Basically, every parish had greater and lesser tithes: the former was 10% of all the wheat produced, and the latter was 10% of all the non-wheat crops and livestock. If the local living was a rectory, the appointed clergyman would get both of these, and if it were a vicarage, the vicar would get the lesser tithes while the landowner got the greater ones. Vicars and rectors also had a “glebe”, a piece of land to farm, which they could either use for their own produce or rent out to earn more money.
(Another AskHistorians answer, one that’s a lot like Dandies & Dandyzettes!)
Dandies & Dandyzettes relevant!
Taking a break from writing Dandies & Dandyzettes to tell you all about Dandies & Dandyzettes…
So, a couple of years ago when I was trying to be more active as a #brand on social media, I was doing a “Satire Saturdays” thing, and one weekend I posted this on Twitter:
Someone responded with a joke about that sounding like a great RPG, and after a bit I went, hey, that would be a great RPG. To cut a long story short, @suburbanbeatnik agreed and we planned on adding her gorgeous historical illustrations to my sourcebook. I absolutely dropped the project for ages, but with judicious prodding I got back into it and have made tremendous progress.
There are two very cool things about the book that’s taking shape. The first is that it’s also very much usable as a guide to the period for the purpose of writing fiction, if that’s what you want. It contains tons of detail on everyday life, etiquette, politics, religion, and so on, from actual Regency England - it’s not a simplified fictional setting, it’s a research-based description of the actual time and place. It doesn’t need fictionalizing, it’s so interesting as it is! The second is that (as I mentioned in an earlier post) there is a very easy and very fun way to play with it on your own, so if you don’t have a group who wants to pretend to be Austen characters, you can still have all the enjoyment.
I’m going to be posting about it a lot more down the road - I am planning a Kickstarter campaign to finance the printing, which will launch in March - but I wanted to let you all know about it ahead of time! So that I will feel less stupid when I refer to it out of the blue.
Today’s areas of focus: dueling and dinner manners!
I would like to announce that I am the illustrator on @mimicofmodes‘s new RPG, DANDIES AND DANDYZETTES! I am very excited to be brought on, and expect more Regency artwork in the near future!