"Joy Nicholson" <joyjnicholson at gmail.com> Sent by: dragaera-bounces at dragaera.info 06/16/06 06:37 AM To "Jon Lincicum" <lincicum at comcast.net> cc Dragaera List <dragaera at dragaera.info> Subject Re: Multi-jointed fingers (and houses) > I don't think it's possible to be a Jhereg without having a title. (Same > with any noble house. They've all got titles of some form or other. > That's what makes them "nobility".) >I'm not sure on that. We have the title DragonLord or HawkLord, but >not all members of those houses are refered to as such. Take, for >example, the foot soldiers in Dragon. I don't think that any of them >were ever refered to as a DragonLord, suggesting to me that they may >not have any titles. Interesting points. As a counter example, look at the Orca. All Orca on ships in the Empire are given titles commesurate with their ranks, so that a Duke never ends up serving under a Baron. It follows that all Orca (except perhaps the lowest level of deckhands) have titles of some kind to indicate their superiority over someone else onboard ship. Since all Orca serve on ships for some part of the year as a service to their House, this means that almost all Orca will have titles of some kind. If the Orca can do this, why can't the other Houses? >Also, consider Khavren (in TPG). His family has a traditional title, >but they had lost their lands and their titles, as best I remember. Khaavren continued to use "Marquis" since (as Aerich pointed out) despite the land being sold back to the Empire, it was still vacant, thus he was still entitled to use it. This does, however, imply that if the title was NOT vacant, that he wouldn't have a title to use. Which I suppose would indeed make him a title-less Tiassa. >It seems to me that being a Noble House means that the house has some >nobility, not that every member of the house is a noble. I'm nearly convinced this is possible. It still remains an open question as to how common a situation this is, however. (Especially with all the invented empty titles that are floating around...) Majikjon