Debuts
Every family in the game features one or two young ladies and gentlemen making their debut this season.
Each debutante and debutant will be formally introduced to society at the Duchess’s Debut Ball at the start of the season and game (Thursday night). These characters will be expected to wear white (or mostly white) and encouraged to accessorise with a white feather to differentiate them from the more established members of society.
Debutant(e)s
Young ladies officially entering society are referred to as “debutantes.” Young gentlemen entering society are referred to as “debutants.”
Debutantes are typically eighteen years old at the time of their debut, while debutants are usually one-and-twenty or two-and-twenty and freshly returned from university. Exceptions to this rule are sometimes found in younger debutants without the patience or funds for a university education, as well as older debutantes who are entering the marriage market later due to familial or personal reluctance.
The Crown Jewel & the Catch of the Season
At the start of each season, Talk of the Ton publishes the Esteemed Chatterleigh (EC) and the Notorious Tattlesby’s (NT) respective choices for which dazzling debutante would be the season’s Crown Jewel. In the same issue, the covert co-authors announce their annual public wager on whose Crown Jewel would secure the finest match.
The stakes for the wager are arranged and agreed upon by the players of EC and NT, but the options are endless. The stakes can range from having to publicly declare the winner’s intellectual superiority to determining whose name is printed first on the byline for the following year to the loser being forced to reveal their identity to the public and relinquish all claim to the publication.
The two scandal writers likewise open the season by declaring which gentleman, emerging or established, is the Catch of the Season. More importantly, their predictions for which eligible bachelors might be brought to book by the season’s end.