Setting

In 1880 a wonderful tradition was formed. The four old friends, John, Edward, Mary and Alice went to the Astly’ hunting estate Almerton in central Norfolk. The first trip was just those four, their personal servants, the cabin's gamekeeper and the aunts of John and Louise to make sure the young people didn’t do anything they were not supposed to do. It was a most perfect trip and the year after they repeated it and a tradition was born. Over the years the four became eight yet later again twenty, but the yearly trip to Almerton continued. Now, app 30 years later, they are still going every year. But this time it is a special occasion, because the 1st generation has planned to arrange for the marriages between the young. But maybe the young have other plans?

Playstyle

The game is a relational drama inspired by works such as Downton Abbey and Upstairs & Downstairs. We are playing realistic characters with realistic hopes, dreams, ambitions, and problems.

The game is set in upper-class England where civility is upheld and a somewhat stiff upper lip. This means we will have drama: joy, excitement, desire and maybe tears, but the biggest emotions are shown in private. In public, these emotions can be displayed more subtly through looks and cleverly concealed insults presented as compliments. Do feel welcome to cry your heart out or fight with your husband, but please do not do it in public and make sure to be at dinner when it is expected of you.

Please remember that we are all family and friends, so even though you might fight and disagree profoundly with someone, and no matter how tough your relations might get, and how much your character wishes and dreams of something else, it still takes a lot to break with family. Getting into a fight with friends or family resulting in an unmending break is really not something we see happening, at least nobody would ever find out, if that happened. It would reflect very badly on everyone involved.

Upstairs everyone is a person of quality and good upbringing. But even among the top of society there are differences amongst and within families. To represent status in the game you can decode this from the first letter in family names. A is grander than Z. (Note: this is for upstairs characters, not downstairs).

The house is a hunting estate and therefore its not filled with the staff you would normally find in a grand estate. Instead the four families have brought their personal staff along with them.
This means that there are no lower servants in the game except the ones played by organizers.

The family owning the hunting estate will bring a butler and housekeeper to run the household and bring the different servants together as one unit. There is of course a hierarchy among the servants, but these are more blurry than the ones you find in grand estate households.

You will play an integral part of the families and have
an extra group among the servants.

Charaters

All characters and family description are prewritten and visible for all and with room for interpretation of your character within the frame of the overall theme.You will get you character after paying the fee.

We are rewriting some of the charaters from Winter Tradition 1, to better fit the location and to uptimise the game.

Your character comes with some main relations.

These are part of the design to ensure that all players have enough to play on. So if one or more of these relations does not fit you, let us know and we’ll fix it.

Do not choose to ignore a relationship, as this will lower the quality of the game for the involved players.

You are free to create new relations beyond the pre-written ones, but make sure to leave enough room in your “play-time-budget” to your main relations.

It is up to the player to define their character's sexuality. All characters are written as heterosexuals, but feel free to change this if you feel like it.

But please inform us if you do.

This is so we can help fix any of the relations that character might have, that no longer work with the new sexuality. This is so we ensure enough play for everybody.

Even though the characters are open, three sets of eyes are better than one set. We’ll be portraying two genders in the game, as was the norm in that time period. Any player can play any gender. This will be handled in sign up. You’ll just have to make sure that your costume reflects the gender of your character.

Relations

Gender and sexuality