Editing A Song of Ice and Fire (section)

==GRRM and [[Your Dudes]]==
Want to make your own ASoIF setting for a role-playing game? Well, readers have enough room to fantasize about their own minor noble House (or kingdom during the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms).

A good example of what you could do is the House from the old [[/v/|"Telltale Game of Thrones"]], House Forrester. Their relationship to the canon is as follows:

House Forrester (lords of someplace in the Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Glover (overall lords of the entire Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Stark (rulers of the North).

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] had a very brief tie-in making those annoying attention-sucking Facebook games, way back when FFG did that sort of thing. Just goes to show how even the other guys [[Games Workshop|will do anything for money]]. 

There's also an actual tie-in tabletop RPG now, which uses its own system and looks kind of like [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] with a heavy helping of resource-management strategy feel. 
Players are assuming the role of a minor House to guide to glory, or, more accurately given the setting we're in, NOT to ruin utterly in a season or two, which would still be more than many A-list players mustered in canon. Each PC has a specific position within said House, and only the role of official Head is mandatory; the rest could be wife/children/brothers and sisters/all other kinds of siblings, bastards (with rules for obtaining the legitimate recognition), maesters, sworn/subservient knights, or most of anybody else. This naturally opens up near-infinite possibilities for families screwed up seven ways to high heavens, which would make Lannister's brand of infighting-slash-inbreeding look as sane as the High Septon.

The setting is also ill-suited for "adventures in Westeros" style of gaming for two reasons: 
#In the grim darkness of low fantasy, a roaming nobody with no banner to talk about, no House allegiance, no nothing isn't generally treated to a Tavern With Quest Givers, but rather more to a Tavern Where You Are Shanked For Your Sword And Boots And Dumped At The Nearest Forest. Heck, even the big wheelers and dealers are routinely seen invited to the latter when they are slow to properly introduce themselves.
#Working on your initially-puny House will quite realistically involve thy neighbours first and foremost, then liege lords from the higher House yours is sworn to, and on occasion shopping around for an advantageous marriage - there simply ain't gonna be that much spare time to "travel to see places". Both of these are also why tourism wasn't a very popular pastime in medieval Europe (aside from Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Cologne and Santiago de Compostela) and why those who were "living on the road" usually enjoyed the lowest social standing.

A note to aspiring Lords: do NOT, under any circumstances, allow your "combat-optimized" siblings an unsupervised minute in a social setting. Game's "social combat" system is a thing more brutal than the physical one, and it takes a socially-optimized character all of a few minutes to mindfuck one who is not (read: everyone but dedicated diplomats and Heads of the Houses, and not every one of the latter, to boot, as illustrated by several amazing boneheads in canon) into believing pretty much anything short of Grumpkins and Snarks. Stupid NPCs or a stupid GM will make said mindfuck obvious, allowing you to "mindfuck 'em back" without abuse of OOC info; cunning ones will not.

On a side-note; GRRM is said to take a dim view of fanfiction, saying it kills creative ability. This is kind of a double-edged statement, since a lot of George's characters here are either rehashes of his characters from previous works, references to other fictional characters (like Littlefinger and Samwell being based on Jay Gatsby and [[The Lord of the Rings|Samwise Gamgee]]), walking tropes (such as Ned Stark and Robb Stark being the "[[TVTropes|Honor Before ]] [[Lawful Stupid|Reason]]" characters) or historical references (such House Lannister ripping off House Lancaster and House Tyrell being totally-not-House-Tudor - to the point that Margaery Tyrell is played by Natalie Dormer from "The Tudors" TV show).  While this makes everything he wrote just another...fanfiction, and his disapproval hypocritical. Still, given the "creative" output of the average neckbeard, he's perhaps not entirely wrong. For another layer of irony/hypocrisy, he sold the rights to make a TV series of the books to HBO, who's adaptation would eventually devolve into a glorified fanfic.