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ON THEME [PAGE 1]

ON THIS PAGE

ON THE MEANING OF THEME

ON SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN MARRIAGE

PAGE 2

ON THE MATTER OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYMENT
ON THE IC PENAL SYSTEM

PAGE 3

ON POLITICAL SCIENCE
ON INHERITANCE

PAGE 4

ON THE AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY

PAGE 5

ON THE PERILS OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

Send feedback on these pages HERE.

ON THE MEANING OF THEME

The Webster's New World College Dictionary provides several definitions of the word "theme," of which the most relevant is probably this: "A recurring, unifying subject or idea; motif, often one used decoratively."

However, this is not what mushers mean when they speak of the local mush's theme, or at least not entirely. The Musher's definition might be this:

With reference to a MUSH set in a world originally created for some other medium (Star Wars, Middle-Earth, World of Darkness, etc.) the theme is the world in general; saying that a world is "themed" after the Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan's superb fantasy series) is saying that "This MUSH is set on a map which has already been published; utilizing nationalities, proverbs, organizations, a magic system, an outline of history, and so forth, which are explained in detail in a set of books, and it is our desire to do nothing which would flagrantly contradict the continuity or general 'tone' of the series in question."

The people who create a mush do have the right to decide what their interpretation of "theme" is. Let us suppose that your mush is based on a popular fantasy series, a series which never mentions homosexuality in any context whatsoever. There may be readers who feel that this proves homosexual behavior simply does not exist in the author's imaginary world - period. Never has, never will. Another school of thought may hold that it COULD exist, the heroes of the original books simply never had occasion to worry about it. Which do you feel? Or if your mush has an original theme, what code of conduct does the dominant culture expect from its members as regards sexual behavior and other important issues? Take whatever position you like, but make sure to set it all down in black and white as quickly as possible before players start arguing in the streets about these things.

As long as I'm on a roll, I'll list a series of "theme" questions you probably ought to deal with before you open. If you are modeling your mush after a preexisting theme, most of these points should already be answered throughout the source material, and you just have to dig out the right answers, then ask yourself if any of them need to be modified for roleplay purposes. If you're creating a theme from scratch, the questions should help you organize your thoughts a little.

Subject Headings:

RELIGION

SPECIES

RACE

FAMILY LIFE AND RELATED ISSUES

SOCIAL STATUS

RELIGION

1. Is there a single common religion, or multiple religions in the region?
2. For each religion present in the area :
1. What is it called?
2. Is it monotheistic or polytheistic?
3. What are the names of the principal deities, mythical figures, etc., involved in it?
4. How long has it been around?
5. Is it true? For example, if everybody prays to a purple turtle named Morton, does Morton really exist, does he really hear their prayers, and does he have the power to work miracles and such if he feels like it?
6. How does this religion treat people who disagree with it? (If the official policy of the local government is to promote freedom of religion, this isn't too important. If one religion is the Official Religion, however, do they burn "heretics" at the stake?)
3. What religion, if any, do the VIPs (the Royal Family, for instance) follow?

SPECIES

1. Are there intelligent species other than homo sapiens in the known world of your mush? If so, name each one.
2. For each species: are they basically humanoid (such as Tolkien's Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits)?
3. Do they have any special, or even magical, abilities as a general rule? If so, what?
4. Do they have their own communities, even their own national boundaries, or are they "integrated" with humanity?
5. Describe the typical appearance of a member of this species.
6. Glance over the "Race" questions for more details. These were geared for subdivisions of the Human Race, but the questions apply to other sentient groups as well.

RACE

1. Are there numerous racial categories of humanity, or do you get a wide range of features, coloring, etc, within a single culture?
2. If there are races which exist as geographically distinct ethnic groups, work out a rough map of the position of each race's homeland relative to the others. Provide it online for the players.
3. Do any of them have a private language? If so, what is it called?
4. Do certain races tend to be almost uniformly of a certain religion, or is there a fairly even distribution?
5. What does each race look like, anyway?
6. Are there any naming conventions you want observed? For example, does one race tend to use French-sounding names, or another race tend to construct their names from ordinary words, such as Bright Water, Sitting Bull, Bone Breaker?
7. Are there any sharp cases of racial prejudice that we ought to know of (for example, are the green-skinned people contemptuous of their orange-colored neighbors)?
8. Do particular races actually tend to be more talented at particular thing (music, warfare, carpentry, working with animals, etc.)? Even if they aren't, are there common STEREOTYPES about each race?

FAMILY LIFE AND RELATED ISSUES

The family is the basic socioeconomic unit of a good culture. So let's discuss marriage patterns, defining marriage as a legal bond involving at least one man and one woman, sharing a legal residence, usually with the nominal intention of bearing and raising children as part of their household. I'm not interested in what are called "same-sex marriages," but you can worry about them too if you want to.

Questions to answer:

1. There are four basic ways that male/female relationships could be combined into a family.
1. Monogamy (one male married to one female at a time).
2. Polygyny (one male can be married to two or more females at a time).
3. Polyandry (one female can be married to two or more males at a time).
4. Group Marriage (A single marriage may legally contain two or more wives, and two or more husbands, as part of a single unit).

Note that some legal/religious systems may permit plural marriages, but still set an upper limit somewhere - for instance, Islam permits a man to have up to, but no more than, four wives at once.

Which of the above is common in your culture? Is it merely the most common pattern, or is it downright mandatory? For example, if your culture is monogamous, does it have a crime called "bigamy" which declares that any marriage entered when the subject's first marriage is still in existence is invalid AND a felony to boot? Or do people just shake their heads and say, "He has two wives? That's pretty weird, huh?"

1. The death of a spouse presumably terminates a marriage (unless there are still other spouses of the opposite sex to consider). Are there other ways to dissolve a marriage according to the local legal system? If so, what are considered suitable grounds for divorce? Suggestions:
1. Proof of adultery.
2. Proof of infertility, a marriage theoretically being intended to have children.
3. Proof of the spouse's attempt to murder the person suing for divorce.
4. Proof of bigamy.
5. Annulment based on the grounds that the marriage was never consummated (this means that the people in question never had sexual intercourse after the wedding ceremony).
6. Annulment based on the grounds that the marriage was never totally "legal" in the first place. Possibly because one of the principals used a phony name in the ceremony, or because one of the principals was still a minor and didn't have permission from the necessary parent or legal guardian, or simply because the priest or magistrate or whoever did the marriage was an impostor without the proper authority to make it legally binding.
7. Abandonment. Given that mushers come and go without warning, there ought to be some proviso for ending a marriage after one member of it has been offline for a long time (a month or more, say, without explanation) and probably isn't coming back.
2. How is the marriage arranged? How much choice do the principal parties have in the matter? Options include:
1. A person cannot marry while still a legal minor (under 21, for example).
2. A person cannot marry while still a legal minor unless at least one parent gives consent to the match.
3. A person can be married while still a legal minor by order of the parent, with the child having absolutely no power to reject the idea. However, if the child reaches the age of majority while still single, he or she cannot now be forced into a marriage.
4. A person can only be married by parental consent and/or parental order, no matter what the person's age.

I used "person" to keep it gender-neutral, but interesting variations of the rules would include having one set of rules apply to men and another to women. There have been RL cultures where a woman was ALWAYS considered to be the property of a man - usually her father while he was alive and she was unwed; if he died first, her oldest brother, father's brother, or some other male relative became head of the family and in charge of her - call him the legal guardian. Her father or guardian had to approve any marriage offer at ANY time of her life, after which she came under her husband's authority.

1. The Actual Marriage Ceremony : Who is authorized to perform a legally binding marriage? Believe it or not, I've seen a couple get engaged IC, and then suddenly realize that there's no hard-and-fast policy on that mush on who can or cannot perform the marriage. So they frantically have to invent something . . . give them a break! Have a file called "News Marriage" all set up before this problem arises. Suggestions (based on RL precedents) include any or all of the following as acceptable (remember, if no such PC is available at the time and place of the marriage, a puppet may be constructed to suit the occasion).
1. A local judge/magistrate.
2. A Priest of the single dominant religion in this area (or Rabbi, or Medicine Man, or Pastor, or Shaman, or whatever they call their clergy, if they have clergy at all).
3. A Clergyman of any of several "officially recognized" religions in the Area.
4. The Captain of a ship at sea.
5. The local chief executive of a community (Tribal Chief, Mayor, Headman, whatever).
2. Premarital Sex : What is the local religion's and/or government's official attitude towards premarital sex? If they are opposed to it, how nasty about it are they when they discover a case?
3. Extramarital Sex : It's my understanding that marriage vows usually involve an agreement that sexual intercourse will only occur between husband and wife from now on; therefore, any married man or woman who indulges in extramarital sex (aka adultery) is clearly an oathbreaker. What is the local legal/religious viewpoint towards adultery? Towards breaking oaths in general? (Most religions with which I am familiar officially take a VERY dim view of oathbreaking, but unfortunately the theory and the practice are sometimes miles apart). What do they do to you if they catch you? Does it depend on how big a bribe you offer the cops and/or the judge and/or the local religious authorities?
4. What is the local religious/legal position on homosexuality? If the powers that be are officially opposed, what do they actually do when they discover some? (Answers could range all the way from closing their eyes and ignoring it, to the death penalty. Pick one)

NOTE: Remember that if you are the one making policy on these issues for a mush, you are perfectly free to avoid future problems with Questions 5, 6, and 7 by declaring, "In our understanding of the theme, everybody in this culture is so moral, so faithful to their promises, so conservative in their behaviors, that premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual activity simply do NOT occur. Period! Therefore any character who tries to do any of these things IC is being unthematic and his actions Officially Did Not Happen." If you don't want to go that far, but want minors to be able to stroll around without being exposed to dangerous influences (there are laws about these things, sometimes), an alternative practiced by some mushes is to post notices saying something like this : "Any TinySex fanatics out there - keep it in private bedrooms, please. This MUSH intends to maintain a PG rating in public areas."

1. As an afterthought, what is the minimum age of consent on your mush? "Age of consent" as I choose to use it means A) The lowest IC age at which a character can get married, and B) The lowest IC age at which a character can voluntarily participate in sexual activity without having the older participant (especially if male) accused of "statutory rape." A strict reading of a medieval theme might well permit marriages to occur in the early teens, but many modern-day mushers are NOT going to feel very comfortable with that idea.

SOCIAL STATUS

On the off chance that you're looking at a feudal setup, either in a "medieval" world or elsewhere, here's a sample of the pecking order of an real old-fashioned European aristocracy. In England, the ranks of the aristocrats go like this (in descending order):

TITLE (Male / Female)	NOTES
EMPEROR / EMPRESS	In theory, an Emperor could have one or more Kings and Queens and their kingdoms under his thumb as part of an Empire. In practice, the British have never had much use for these titles, even when they ruled approximately one seventh of the earth's dry land.
KING / QUEEN
PRINCE / PRINCESS (OF THE ROYAL BLOOD)
PRINCE / PRINCESS (NOT OF THE BLOOD)
DUKE / DUCHESS
MARQUIS / MARCHIONESS	Marquis is sometimes spelled as Marquess, and Marchioness is sometimes spelled as Marquise. Don't ask me why.
COUNT / COUNTESS or EARL / COUNTESS	The British have no Counts, but consider Counts of other nations to be the social equivalent of their own Earls.
VISCOUNT / VISCOUNTESS
BARON / BARONESS
BARONET / BARONETESS
KNIGHT / DAME	Unlike all of the above, this rank is not hereditary but is theoretically earned on sheer merit. Also, knighting a man does not make his wife a Dame, and vice versa.
COMMONERS

If you like the trappings of feudal courts, with all that "Milord" and "Your Highness" and "Sir Lancelot!" and so forth, just use any or all of the above, and you might want to mix-and-match with equivalent ranks from other languages (Graf is the German for Count; Doge is the Italian for Duke; Chevalier is the French for Knight - you get the idea).

If your characters are likely to be gathered together into some other sort of IC organization, work out the basic ranks and compile a table similar to the above for online publication so everybody knows at a glance where they stand in the pecking order. Granted, you can easily have a Baron who's got more soldiers available than a Count, and an Earl who has more influence with his old friend the King than most Dukes, but in theory the pecking order is inviolable.

ON SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN MARRIAGE

Possibly I should have spliced this into the Family Life section of the preceding chapter, but that chapter was getting too long anyway :) This chapter calls your attention to two special sorts of problems that might arise in connection with a proposed marriage in your mush's culture : the marriage which the local rules FORBID to occur, no matter how enthusiastic the young lovers are about the idea, and the marriage which the local rules REQUIRE to occur, no matter how reluctant the principals are about it.

Forbidden Marriages

Mandatory Marriages

FORBIDDEN MARRIAGES

NOTE : For the time being, I will restrict my comments here to the subject of possible marriages that are forbidden by reason of the "incest" laws, even if the man and woman are not closely related by blood. I may expand this with other reasons for "forbidden marriages" by and by.

"Incest" rules have been invoked for three different types of pre-existing relationships between a man and a woman. They are : a high degree of biological consanguinity, a relationship as a result of somebody's previous marriage, and relationship as the result of adoption.

CONSANGUINITY

Consanguinity relates to how much "blood" two people have in common. Since modern genetics tells us that any individual should have 1/2 of his genes in common with each parent, 1/4 with each grandparent, etc., we find the following table illustrates how much consanguinity a character called Subject should have with any given relative.

RELATIONSHIP TO SUBJECT	DEGREE OF CONSANGUINITY
Sibling (brother or sister)	1/2
Parent	1/2
Half-Sibling	1/4
Grandparent	1/4
Sibling of parent (aunt or uncle)	1/4
Sibling of Grandparent (greataunt or greatuncle)	1/8
Half-sibling of Parent	1/8
Child of sibling of parent (first cousin)	1/8
Great-grandparent	1/16
Half-sibling of Grandparent	1/16
Child of sibling of grandparent (first cousin once removed)	1/16
Child of half-sibling of parent	1/16
Grandchild of sibling of grandparent (second cousin)	1/32
NOTES : Aside from "second cousin," there are of course numerous other possible relationships which would include 1/32 of consanguinity, but I felt that was enough to make the point. I do not believe there are many jurisdictions in this day and age that explicitly forbit marriages of second cousins (possibly none at all), so we'll stick to the 1/16 relationships or closer for purposes of discussion.

Of course, you needn't give a Yes or No to each of those possible combinations if you're trying to define what your IC Culture considers Incest to be. What you want to say can probably be summed up in a few general rules, such as, "No mating with your own ancestors, or with any descendant of either of your own parents, nor with any sibling of your own parents," which statement would be sufficient to exclude parents, grandparents, and any living ancestors further back; siblings and half-siblings, children of siblings and half-siblings, and any other descendants of Subject's parents; uncles and aunts (including half-uncles and half-aunts, probably). If you want to specifically exclude first cousins as well (probably a good idea genetically, given that great big 1/8 of consanguinity), that could be arranged by adding a few words at the end.

RELATIONSHIP AS A RESULT OF SOMEBODY'S PREVIOUS MARRIAGE

This one can get tricky. Would you consider it "appropriate" for a man to marry his brother's widow? What about his father's widow? (Assuming she was not his biological mother). His son's widow? His uncle's widow? Or some but not all of the above? If so, which ones?

There is no reason to believe that there is a higher-than-normal chance for a pair of defective genes to manifest themselves in any subsequent offspring of any such marriage, since the man and woman in each case presumably have no close genetic relationship, but somehow it "feels" wrong to many people to consider such a union. Like poaching on the dead relative's territory, or something.

If, for whatever reason, you feel any or all of these should be legally prohibited as part of your theme, you have an obligation to say exactly what you are prohibiting in clear terms BEFORE it happens, or someday you may see a recently married couple saying, "You're accusing us of deliberate incest? Yes, we saw your rules stating that incest is prohibited by the IC Culture, but what's that got to do with us? We're not even IC fifth cousins, biologically! I just happened to be married to his brother previously, but that's got nothing to do with the genetic hazards of incest, right?"

ADOPTION

It's my understanding that in cultures where legal adoption is permitted, it is implicitly assumed that upon being adopted into a family, the Subject now fits into exactly the same place in the incest taboos that he would have occupied if he had been BORN to his new "foster parents." In other words, Subject shouldn't even THINK (as society sees it) about mating with his sister-by-adoption or aunt-by-adoption or any other near relative, even though there isn't really any special genetic hazard there. This strikes me as a perfectly logical approach to take, to maintain tranquility and a feeling of "blood unity" within the family. I think this much is understood automatically by virtually everyone, so it shouldn't be necessary to spell it out in your online files (I hope. Let me know if I prove to be wrong).

MANDATORY MARRIAGES

In the ancient Law of Moses (if you have a Bible, look it up in Deuteronomy 25:5-6, and btw I'm using the King James Version) we find the following rule : "If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her. And it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not put out of Israel."

So in this special case, the marriage was virtually mandatory (the following verses mention actions to be taken against the dead man's brother if he refuses to do his duty, by the way). It certainly would not be a love match, but it was considered unavoidable. Does your Mush need any such rules?

Aside from a general rule such as this one, there could be specific families who had "mandatory marriages" required of them. For example, in David Eddings' Belgariad series, it had been agreed several hundred years earlier that if and when the Rivan King returned (the Rivan royal family hadn't been heard from in centuries, and most people thought they wouldn't be coming back) he would HAVE to marry an Imperial Princess of the Tolnedran Empire. No excuses. Both the Rivan King (when he returned) and the only Imperial Princess alive at the time thought this was ridiculous, but there was no way out of it.

Anyway, if your Players are in any danger of suddenly finding themselves "obligated" to marry someone they had no intention of marrying, warn them right up front in the online rules.