Feuding Families

Basic Information

Feuding Families is a trope that represents two or more large families, well, feuding. There might have been a recent initial cause for the feud, or the origin of the feud might be lost in the mist of time. Regardless, each time a member of one family attacks the other, the other side cries for revenge, and when the revenge is carried out the cycle is repeated and intensified.

Related Tropes

• Big Screwed-Up Family - when there's just one family a'feudin' with itself.
• Capulet Counterpart
• Cycle of Revenge
• Gray And Gray Morality
• Moral Myopia
• Revenge By Proxy
• Sins Of Our Fathers
• Star Crossed Lovers - they often occur between the two families
• The Clan
• The Mafia and The Syndicate - they often have family-based structures and live for violence, so this trope occurs often with them.

See Also

• Family Tropes
• Drama Tropes
• Military and Warfare Tropes
• Private War
• Revenge Tropes

Sources

Bibliography

1. TV Tropes Wiki entry

Game and Story Use

• These are always fun for the PCs to get into - there usually is no clear villain (or maybe both sides have them), and whenever they move against one side the entire family is likely to retaliate against them.
  • And the PCs might not find out about that detail until it is too late.
    • Perhaps that's why one side hired them in the first place - because no one in the area who knows the situation would be daft enough to get involved. But if the PCs are strangers, things might be different…
• Perhaps one or more of the PCs come from one family in such a feud. In that case, their own family will expect them to get involved while the other side will attack them whether they want to get involved or not.
  • Perhaps the party has representatives from both families. Do they attempt to make peace between the clans - or do they just want to get out of there and away from all this madness?
• Where political power is hereditary, this is where things like The Hundred Year's War come from. Where poverty is most of what you inherit, then feuding hillbillies are more the mark. Either can make an area dangerous to move through.