forum Tips on how to create a military system for a royal guard?

Started September 22, 2023 by @Purple-Cat location_cityThe Worldbuilder

tune

I want to create a royal guard for my world but i don’t what to just copy real life army ranks the whole time. I need some ideas

Have you decided how big you want this rank structure to be? For instance, US military has 26 different ranks, though the names change according to branch. Do you want that many different ranks? Or fewer, maybe?
When you say you dont want to copy real life army ranks, do you mean the structure, or the names of each rank?

I mostly don't what to copy the structure but i want to keep rank titles such as captain, general, lieutenant and maybe sargent because those ranks make sense to me. I havent thought about how many ranks i want there to be but i do know that i want it so there are different jobs but the only one I’ve thought of that isn’t the typical ‘guard the royal family’ is law enforcement.

Oh ok. That helps (I've been brainstorming entirely new names for the ranks, but captain and lieutenant are just so good XD ).
So Royal Guards.
Law Enforcement.
You'll want City Guards of some sort, less specific than Royal Guards, maybe.
Perhaps some kind of Expeditionary Force? Focused on exploration?
Do you want a regular military to fight your wars?
Within those, you'll have the actual combat roles, as well as supply chain, clerical corps (clerks, not religious clerics) and military intelligence.

Any of that sounding helpful? (I can elaborate on it if yes, or go back to the drawing board if not)

That does help. Exploration is a cool idea, I’ve been brainstorming a group that would be focused on restoration of towns, reasources or land that have been damaged due to war of natural disasters.

You said you were brainstorming names for ranks, did you come up with any you want to share? I’m always stumped when i want to come up with names for things that kinda already exist but not really, if that makes sense?

Search and Rescue might be an idea, similar to Coast Guard.
And the Infrastructure Restoration sounds cool :)

Not really :/ most of them are used in places.
Words I like to use for my ranks are Sentinel, Marshal, and Specialist, but I think those all get used somehwere in rank structure (maybe not Sentinel).

It does make sense. That's why I was struggling so much. I looked up a bunch of reddit pages about this and there were some cool ideas but. A lot of them had to do with creating a language and just putting the ranks, or the idea of the rank, in that language. For instance, instead of a Private, you might call a low ranking enlisted a "Bershma", which translates to 'Beginner'. Which. Is kinda cool? but also right on the nose, sorta.

maybe another approach could be to dig into how and why might develop a certain way. From what I can tell, historically it often had to do with aggregating authority - this person has command over 10 people, the next person has command over 100 people, etc; designating someone's role (this guy carries the insignia so we'll call him ensign), as well as designating where someone's authority came from (in an army where some are commissioned by the king and other's aren't, non-commissioned officers might only attain the rank of sergeant).

you could then kind of reverse-engineer this as you worldbuild - different titles might come from different priorities of how the roles were developed over time, and might reveal different relationships between those who carry those roles, if that makes sense.

so for example, in the case of a restoration squad, you might ask questions like 'what kind of roles do we need to carry out restoration work?' (say, engineer), then 'who would give someone the authority to carry out this role?' (for simplicity, let's say there's a king), and 'who do they answer to, and how many degrees of hierarchy are there?' (let's say there's a bunch of 10 engineers who answer to one Main Engineer who in turn answers to an architect or something). smash that all together in fun ways, relevant to your context. suddenly you have a title like 'Chief Royal Machinist' who commands a squad of Royal Machinists and who has constant beef with the 'Scrappers' who are also engineers but they get hired by the army instead of the king so they get looked down on