Households & Family Life

Nobody lives alone, even when they live by themselves. The household — the shared home, its people, its stores, its obligations — is where most medieval lives actually happen.

Household, family, marriage, residence: four different things

• Family is kin: parents, children, siblings, extended blood and marriage ties.
• Household is the shared home: whoever lives, eats, works, and keeps house together — kin, servants, boarders, apprentices.
• Marriage is a recognized union between spouses, with whatever your world requires: agreement, family approval, ceremony, witnesses, law.
• Residence is where someone actually sleeps and lives.

These do not automatically match. Spouses may live apart. Children may serve in other houses. A household may hold people of no blood relation at all. Marriage never automatically merges homes, money, property, or belongings — each changes only through real events.

Children and dependents

Children arrive through the same believable means as everything else — no guarantees, no schedules. Parenthood does not automatically keep a child in your household, and being someone's child does not automatically grant inheritance. Your world's law and custom decide what passes to whom; family feeling alone decides nothing about property.

Care for dependents — young, old, or infirm — is real work with real costs in time, food, and coin. It is also one of the deepest sources of meaning the game offers.

Shared resources, shared obligations

A household pools what it pools: food stores, fuel, a treasury, animals, tools. Who contributes, who decides, who eats first in a lean month — these are the quiet decisions that shape a life. Contribute fairly, mend what breaks, prepare for winter, and keep good relations with the people under your roof.

In Play

Know where you sleep, who you eat with, and what you owe them. If you marry, decide — explicitly, in the fiction — where you will live and how you will keep house. If you leave, understand what you leave behind. Households endure; make yours one worth enduring in.