Out of the seven people who've expressed an interest in this game, I've now heard back from five vis-a-vis the setting. All five expressed a preference for playing in Westeros. We are therefore playing in Westeros.
That means the next thing to do is create a house. There are rules for this in the game. I will outline the rules here. It is very important to note that each player has an equal say in the creation of the house. One of you may play the heir to the house, but that does not matter at this point: everyone's input is equal.
Step One: The Realm
This is where your house is located. You may choose any one realm or roll it randomly. Obviously, if it's a dieroll, I'll roll it. The possible choices, with the lieges that rule each area, are King’s Landing (Robert Baratheon); Dragonstone (Stannis Baratheon); The North (Eddard Stark); The Iron Islands (Balon Greyjoy); The Riverlands (Hoster Tully); The Mountains of the Moon (Jon Arryn); The Westerlands (Tywin Lannister); The Reach (Mace Tyrell); or The Stormlands (Renly Baratheon).
Your choice will affect your house's base stats. The different realms have different bonuses and penalties to the various stats. They are generally balanced, but if you want to play a rich house it's a lot easier to do that in the Westerlands than it is in the North. Conversely, if you want to play a house with a huge amount of land, it's easier to do that up north. If you have any questions about a particular realm's bonuses & penalties, ask them here.
All things being equal, I would prefer if you guys picked The Reach or Dorne. Those two areas have not factored significantly in the books (at least so far) and I have a lot of story ideas for them. Anything else is OK too, but if you guys pick the North or the Riverlands then I'll have to do a bit of juggling because those two areas appear in the books a whole lot. I should also note that I despite House Tully with a deep and abiding passion. King's Landing is in the books a lot too of course, but King's Landing is a rather big place and I can write a lot of stories that don't directly connect with the stories in the books, especially since I'm starting several years before the beginning of the books.
In conversations with people, I've learned that in the TV show (which I haven't seen) the ironmen do not play much of a role at all. They certainly do figure prominently in the books (although there aren't a lot of scenes that take place on the Iron Islands, the ironmen certainly do get around). If you think you'd like to try your hand at playing a servant of the Drowned God, then read the books, especially the fifth one. I've got nothing against them though.
Step Two: Starting Resources
As much as a house is defined by its place in the Seven Kingdoms, its history, deeds, and alliances, a house is essentially a collection of seven resources.
Each resource has a rating that varies greatly depending on the power of the House, with the higher number representing greater resources and smaller number representing fewer resources. These values will fluctuate during house creation and more during gameplay, rising and falling depending on how well you play the game of thrones.
Since resources are very much a part of the lands where your house resides, your starting kingdom helps determine your starting values. For each resource, roll 7d6 and sum the results, then apply the modifiers from your realm to each of your resources. Modifiers cannot reduce your resources below 1.
Defense
Defense describes fortifications, castles, keeps, towers, and other struc- tures that serve to protect your holdings. Defense also describes the presence and quality of roads, representing the ability to move troops and supplies to threatened areas.
Influence
Influence describes your presence in the Seven Kingdoms, how other houses see you, and the notoriety attached to your name. A high Influence resource typically describes one of the great houses or the royal family, while a low Influence resource would describe a house of little consequence, small and largely unknown beyond the lands of their liege.
Lands
Land resources describe the size of your House’s holdings and the extent of their influence over their region. A high score describes a house that controls an enormous stretch of terrain, such as Eddard Stark and the North, while a small score might represent control over a small town.
Law
Law encompasses two things: the extent to which the smallfolk respect and fear you and the threat of bandits, brigands, raiders, and other external and internal threats. Law is something your family must maintain, and if you don’t invest in keeping your realm safe, it could fall into chaos.
Population
Population addresses the sheer number of people living in the lands you control. The more people there are, the more mouths you have to feed. However, the more people there are, the more your lands produce. This abstract value describes the quantity of folks that live under your rule.
Power
Power describes your house’s military strength, the ability to muster troops and rouse banners sworn to you. Houses with low scores have few soldiers and no banners, while those with high scores may have a dozen or more banners and can rouse an entire region.
Wealth
Wealth covers everything from coin to cattle and everything in between. It represents your involvement and success in trade, your ability to fund improvements in your domain, hire mercenaries, and more.
Initial Modifications
Once the starting values for each resource are determined, each player gets to modify the values by rolling 1d6 and adding it to a resource of their choice. The immediate result is that larger groups of players have slightly more powerful houses because they have the benefit of more signature characters. Players may modify any resource they like, but no resource can benefit from more than two extra rolls.
Note that it doesn't matter if you're playing the bastard daughter of a serving wench. You are still a signature character, and you give the house an extra roll. Same if you're going to play the heir to the house.
Step Three: House History
The next step is to determine your house’s historical events, which is done by choosing or rolling for your First Founding. This is when your house was first born. The possibilities are Ancient (during the Age of Heroes); Very Old (around the time of the Andal invasion); Old (around the time of the Rhoynar Invasion); Established (around the time of Aegon’s Conquest); Recent (perhaps during the Blackfyre Rebellion); or New (sometime in the last fifty years or thereabouts).
After you choose the age of your house, then I start rolling for historical events. The older your house is, the more events it is likely to have. There is always at least one historical event, and for an Ancient house there may be as many as nine. Then, I roll to find out what each event is. Some events are good, others bad; generally they average out. Good events represent successes in your house's history, bad events represent problems. Each event will affect two or more of your house resources, usually not very much. Some may affect all seven. A few events may give bonuses to some resources while reducing others. As I roll the events, we will work together to work out the details of what happened in the time of each event.
The first event is the most important one. This event is what happened when your house was founded.
Step Four: Holdings
With your resources generated, it’s time to define your holdings. In a way, holdings are like investments in that you use your resources to select specific elements in the form of castles, towers, cities, towns, soldiers, mines, and more. When you define your holdings, you do not reduce the resource; instead, allocate those points to a specific expression of that resource. You don’t need to allocate all of your resources and may keep some in reserve to make other investments as your resources grow during play.
I will do most of this step myself. The Holdings step allows you to invest points from Defense, Influence, Land, and Power to buy (respectively) fortifications, PC heirs, territory and military units. There are quite a lot of options, especially in the military units. I will try and come up with something that seems reasonable and if you guys like it, we'll just move on.
Step Five: Motto & Arms
All noble families have mottos and arms, and your noble house should be no different. Both of these devices are purely descriptive and do not affect game play in any way at all; instead, they help to unify your group and define your house’s place and purpose in the world.
The motto is the house words. For Stark, it's Winter is Coming. For Baratheon, it's Ours is the Fury. You guys should try to agree on something.
This may not seem very important, but for me, the poor guy who's running the game 
it gives me a bit of insight into what you guys want to get out of the game. Also it gives you some RP stuff to use.
The game has a detailed description of heraldic arms. I am not going to inflict it on you. I am a recovered heraldry nerd myself so I actually kinda know all that stuff, but I understand that most people aren't like that lol. Just try and work out a basic description of what sort of thing you guys want on a shield (lions and direwolves are out), and I'll work out the heraldry for it.
Step Six: The Household
The final step in house creation is describing the household, those individuals who constitute the most important family members and retainers that make up the noble house. Most important are the lord and lady, but there are also the heirs, the maester and septon (if you have them), master-at-arms, castellan, steward, and anyone else who is more than just a common servant. Some of the characters may be player characters under your group’s control, while the rest are Narrator characters.
If you guys want to give me ideas about the household, this is fine. Go ahead. I get the final say on the Narrator characters of course.
If you guys don't have ideas, you can leave me to handle this part completely. I'm pretty good at inventing people to fit roles, and I'll use the motto as a guide to try and help flesh out their personalities.
That's it, the outline of the whole house creation system. You should have a message in your inbox asking you about what you think about the first step. Once we're done with this mess, then we can move on to individual character creation, which in a way is more involved but can be done with each of you separately, so it should be a whole lot easier.
) The one restriction I should mention here is that you will not be permitted to play adult Faceless Men. (Trainees are possible.)
