Forum:Noble Prize

Forums: Helping Hand > Noble Prize

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I suggest we make it policy that all noble families be referred to as "House _________". Currently, there seems to be no coherent format for referencing nobles. Using the "House" prefix immediately lets the reader know the family is nobility or else an extremely important family of commoners. The "House" prefix would also be appropriate for commoner houses that are explicitly referred to as a "House". Just my two coppers.
Boo Too - "Go for the eyes!" (talk) 00:11, June 20, 2013 (UTC)

Darkwynters and I discussed this not long ago at User talk:BadCatMan#Noble houses. My view was:

Unfortunately, noble families tend to have different names in different cultures. Some are "House Kardashian", others may be "Kardashian House", or "Clan Kardashian", or just "the Kardashians", and so on. For example, Clan Battlehammer and so on for the dwarves. Changing them to a certain style would lose the flavour.

So I think it would be best just to use the official names given in the sources, if they are given, or the standard format for the culture. Say if most drow noble families of Menzoberranzan are House Do'Urden and so on, then a new noble family called the McSweeneys ("very old established family") could safely be assumed to be called House McSweeney. If there's no official name given, then say "the Kardashians".

And so on. A lot of the noble families already have established name formats, varying by culture, and it would be inaccurate or confusing to try to make these uniform across-the-board. Like a House Battlehammer, for example. It should only be uniform by culture, like all nobles families of Cormyr have this name, and all nobles families of Menzoberranzan have that name. — BadCatMan (talk) 01:57, June 20, 2013 (UTC)

How about ALL human houses use House first... plus drow, for dwarves, we use clan, and if it is strange nation, they use the rest, but I agree with Boo, the Cormyrian nobles and Waterdeep should use House... I understand what you are saying BadCat, (plus, I like structure) but maybe at least a few rules would help with the organization of these... ahhh organizations aka houses :) Thoughts? Darkwynters (talk) 17:48, June 20, 2013 (UTC)

I think we should stick to the official names given in the sources and add REDIRECT pages as needed. Redirects show up in the search suggestions as target of the redirect, so users will learn the correct terms quickly and not be frustrated by an empty search result. Authors can use whatever designation they wish as long as it links to the correct page. What do you think, sirs?—Moviesign (talk) 18:15, June 20, 2013 (UTC)

My only concern is the categories created from the Organization infobox... such as Category:Members of House Kendrick... but I guess... Members of the Kendricks or Members of the Kendrick family (Would family be capitalized?) would be okay... redirects would be cool... but this will not help the organization categories... Overall, I just want wiki rules, which I will follow, even though I like uniformity... I am torn by official terms for these groups... AHHH :) Darkwynters (talk) 18:32, June 20, 2013 (UTC)

I don't really know much, or anything, about the noble families of Cormyr, Waterdeep, the Moonshaes, and so on. But whatever we use should accurately reflect the canon lore.

Okay, looking at Cormyr (sourcebook): there's no consistent name for the noble families. They're likely to be just "the Bleth family" or "the Crownsilvers". There's "House of Marliir" and "House of Obarskyr", nobles, but "House of Thond" and "House Misrim" are merchants. Names like "Illance House" are the names for the family buildings themselves. The Illance family is never called "House Illance". There's nothing consistent, and I think most of the old Cormyrean "House X" pages are either fanon or artifacts of the old Jerome Davis lists. In this case, for accuracy and consistency, I'd recommend just stripping out the "Houses" and calling them all by the family name: "Illance" rather than "House Illance", and "Members of the Illance family". Those specifically identified as House Whatever (the family, not a building), can be noted as such in the article itself.

Now, drow: Menzoberranzan (boxed set) makes it clear that all of Menzo's drow noble houses are in fact "houses" and are known properly by "House X", such as House Do'Urden. So these should all be called Houses and categorised as "Members of House X".

And so on. — BadCatMan (talk) 03:27, June 21, 2013 (UTC)

Okay... that sounds reasonable! Just to be precise... the page should be called Harpell, instead of House Harpell or Harpells... but the category should be: Members of the Harpells... so just add an S to the infobox... correct. If the source states Harpell family, we are just going to use the name, without family, second correct :) Darkwynters (talk) 17:06, June 21, 2013 (UTC)

Yeah. It's accurate and uniform without needlessly applying terms that don't appear in the lore. It could always be changed back or to something else if/when proper names become known. Individual pages can say, in text, "House Blah" or "House of Blah" or whatever, according to the lore.

I'd prefer "Members of the Harpell family", to make it clear from the categories that this is a family rather than some other kind of organization ("Members of the Harpells" versus "Members of the Harpers"). But that's just personal preference and no big deal. — BadCatMan (talk) 01:19, June 22, 2013 (UTC)

Okay, I've gone and practiced what I preach with the Bleth family of Cormyr, with an associated "Members of..." for all its members and ancestors, and generally avoided the word "house" in favour of the more general and applicable "family". — BadCatMan (talk) 10:03, July 5, 2013 (UTC)