Tag: knightly orders

A world building question in regards to your knightly orders. Would each of these orders having an valyrian steel weapon passed down from each grand master to the next work?

So with my knightly orders I tried as much as possible to make them different from each other as opposed to just “reskins” to use a video game term. 

Having each order with a Valyrian blade feels a bit too samey – that they all were rich enough to buy one in the first place, that they had the same access to merchants from the great empire to the east, and so on. 

Moreover, I think there’s something about the way that Valyrian blades work ini the setting, the way that they engender this obsession to have them, to take them, to never sell them, to pine after their loss, that would make it extremely difficult for a corporate body to own one. The temptation would be too strong for each man to try to claim the blade for their own House rather than let it pass later into the hands of a man from another House. 

How closely is the Faith Militant (and in particular the Warrior’s Sons) based on the historic Christian knightly orders (Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Order, Knights of Santiago, and so on)?

The Faith Militant is a pretty close Expy for the monastic orders, with some differences. For one thing, the Poor Fellows are more reminiscent of the Peasant’s Crusade, with a strong dash of the peasant revolts of the 14th century.

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The Warrior’s Sons are a lot closer to the literary imagination’s version of the monastic knightly orders – they’re knights, they protect pilgrims and holy sites, etc. The main difference, I would argue, is that (compared to the Warrior’s Sons who seem to answer directly to the High Sparrow) the historical orders were a bit more loosely affiliated with the church and more responsive to their own elected leadership, although there are some substantial exceptions where popes got more directly involved in their activity.