Nobles and smallfolk alike participate in a wide variety of pastimes for entertainment, leisure, and socialization. What a person does with their free time often reflects their station — a lord's pleasures are not a farmer's pleasures — but many pastimes cross the divide between highborn and low.
Children across the Seven Kingdoms play with toys and games regardless of birth. Common toys include puppets, barrel hoops, blocks, carved wooden figures, and dolls. Games played by Westerosi children include come-into-my-castle, monsters-and-maidens, hide-the-treasure, hopfrog, spin-the-sword, and rats and cats.
Noble-born children are expected to develop skills suited to their station from an early age. Both boys and girls learn to ride horses. Girls are taught the womanly arts — sewing, embroidering, dancing, singing, writing poetry, and playing musical instruments. Boys begin training in martial skills from a young age, starting with wooden swords before progressing to spear, sword, and shield. By the time a boy is twelve, he has often been training at arms for years.
Reading and Learning
Most nobles are literate, and reading is a common pastime among the highborn. Lords and ladies with access to libraries may spend considerable time with histories, genealogies, and accounts of distant lands. Maesters encourage the reading habit, and a well-read lord is generally considered more capable of ruling wisely.
Some nobles go further, studying languages, astronomy, history, or the healing arts as personal pursuits beyond what their education required. A noble who speaks High Valyrian or can read the old scripts of the Freehold is considered particularly learned.
Music and the Arts
Music is a fixture of noble life. Nobles are expected to appreciate and often to perform music themselves. Common instruments include the high harp, the bells, the lute, the flute, the pipes, the drums, and the horn. Ladies are more commonly expected to play than lords, though a lord who plays well is admired rather than mocked.
Singing is likewise valued. A noble with a fine voice may sing at feasts and intimate gatherings alike. Poetry is considered a refined accomplishment — writing verses for a lover or composing an elegy for the dead are both marks of education and feeling.
Household singers — singers retained in permanent service to a lord — are a mark of wealth and status. A great lord's hall may have several. They perform at feasts, entertain guests, and compose songs commemorating the house's deeds. The finest singers become famous across the realm, their songs spreading from castle to castle by way of wandering musicians who learn and carry them.
Wandering singers travel from place to place seeking coin, food, and shelter in exchange for their songs. They are welcomed at most inns and taverns and may be invited to perform at weddings, tourneys, and feasts. The best may find permanent service with a lord. The worst beg at gates and sing for copper.
Mummers and puppeteers travel in troupes, performing their acts wherever they go. Tourneys and weddings attract them in numbers. Some troupes prefer fixed locations — mummers' halls and playhouses where they perform written plays rather than improvised farce. Mummers in King's Landing can find audiences year-round given the size and wealth of the city.
Hunting
Hunting is one of the most favored pastimes of the nobility, combining physical skill, social bonding, and the practical outcome of fresh game.
Large game hunts pursue boar, aurochs, and deer. Boar hunting in particular is considered a test of courage — the animals are aggressive and dangerous, and a boarspear, horses, dogs, and beaters to flush the boar from its lair are all required. Accidents on the hunt are common enough that they are sometimes faked as cover for assassination.
Hawking — hunting with trained falcons, hawks, or eagles — is practiced by both men and women and is considered among the most refined of noble pursuits. A noble may own and train their own bird, which requires considerable patience and skill. Hawking is sociable and can be done in mixed company, unlike the more physically demanding boar hunt. It is not without its dangers — Lady Rhea Royce suffered a lethal injury when thrown from her horse while hawking, and Lord Luthor Tyrell rode off a cliff in the same pursuit.
Hunting hounds are prized possessions. Different breeds are kept for different purposes — scent hounds for tracking, sight hounds for speed, and large dogs for bringing down dangerous prey.
Riding and the Outdoors
Horse riding for pleasure — rather than travel or combat — is a common noble pastime. Nobles may ride simply to enjoy the countryside, to race one another informally, or to visit neighboring estates. Picking flowers, picnicking, and feasting outdoors are all favored warm-weather pursuits.
Swimming is enjoyed by nobles and smallfolk alike, in rivers, lakes, pools, and moats. Sailing for pleasure is practiced by those with access to the sea or large bodies of water, and is particularly favored by those of Velaryon or other seafaring heritage.
Tourneys
Tourneys are among the grandest social events in the Seven Kingdoms — part sporting competition, part political theater, part celebration. A lord who hosts a great tourney demonstrates wealth, generosity, and power. Those who attend demonstrate their allegiance, their skill, and their ambitions.
A tourney typically consists of some combination of the following events:
The Joust — two mounted knights charge one another with lances across a list, attempting to unhorse their opponent. The joust is the centerpiece of most tourneys and the event that draws the largest crowds. A knight who unhorses all opponents may be named champion. The champion typically crowns a queen of love and beauty from among the women present — a significant social gesture whose implications are closely watched.
The Melee — a mass combat between teams or individual fighters, typically using blunted weapons. The melee tests endurance, strength, and tactical thinking as much as individual skill. Captured opponents may be ransomed even within the melee, adding a mercenary dimension to the chivalric spectacle.
Archery — competitions of skill with the bow. Less prestigious than the joust but popular with crowds and a genuine test of ability.
The format and rules of a tourney vary by host and region. The prizes — typically gold, arms, or horses — are determined by the hosting lord. Tourneys attract not only knights but merchants, mummers, singers, gamblers, and smallfolk from across the surrounding region. A great tourney can temporarily transform a castle's surroundings into something resembling a city.
Feasting
Feasting is both a formal obligation and a genuine pleasure for the nobility. A lord who keeps a good table — generous portions, fine wine, skilled cooks, good entertainment — earns loyalty and goodwill as surely as any political maneuver. A feast is also a social arena where alliances are displayed, grievances aired, and gossip exchanged.
The foods served reflect the wealth of the host and the season. Wine flows freely at noble feasts. Mead, ale, and cider are common. Music, mummers, and singers provide entertainment between courses. The placement of guests at table communicates the host's feelings about each of them — seating is never accidental.
Gambling
Gambling is a common pastime at all levels of society, frowned upon by the Faith but practiced openly regardless. Dice and tiles are the most common games of chance. Bets are placed on the outcomes of jousts, melees, and archery competitions at tourneys. Card games are also played. Stakes range from a few coppers among smallfolk to significant sums of gold among nobles and wealthy merchants.
Smallfolk have fewer hours of leisure and fewer resources to fill them, but they are no less creative in their entertainments.
Taverns are the primary social gathering place for commoners. Ale, food, gossip, dice, and the occasional singer or mummer troupe provide the evening's entertainment. Tavern brawls are common enough to be considered part of the atmosphere in rougher establishments.
Swimming, games, and music are enjoyed by smallfolk as much as by nobles, though on humbler terms. Children's games are played in streets and yards. Wandering singers and mummers are eagerly welcomed when they pass through.
Bear-baiting and boar-baiting are popular spectator sports among all classes. Rat pits — where dogs compete to kill the most rats in a set time — are particularly popular in the slum districts of cities like King's Landing and Oldtown. Bull and dog fights are also staged in the pits.
King's Landing offers entertainments unavailable elsewhere in the Seven Kingdoms by virtue of its size, wealth, and the diversity of its population.
Taverns and Inns
The city has taverns and inns in every district, ranging from respectable establishments near the better quarters to rough dockside alehouses where a man might drink himself to death cheaply and without anyone noticing. The better taverns near the Street of Steel and the wealthier districts serve fine food and wine and host singers and mummers regularly. The worse ones serve sour ale and host brawls.
The Street of Silk
The Street of Silk is King's Landing's most famous brothel district, though brothels can be found throughout the city. The Street of Silk itself houses establishments ranging from the luxurious to the squalid, catering to every taste and purse.
The finest brothels on the Street of Silk are palatial establishments — richly furnished, with experienced and well-kept workers who may specialize in particular pleasures, conversation, music, or companionship as much as physical intimacy. Wealthy lords and merchants patronize these establishments and may have favorites they visit regularly or retain for private use. Some of the most celebrated courtesans in King's Landing have made names for themselves through wit and beauty as much as their profession, and are received in polite society with something approaching respectability.
Mid-range establishments are clean and competently run, serving a clientele of merchants, prosperous tradesmen, household knights, and minor nobles. They offer a variety of workers of both sexes and multiple preferences. The cheapest establishments at the lower end of the district — and in the dockside and slum areas of the city — are rough places, sometimes little more than a room with a mattress. Workers in these establishments have little protection and hard lives.
The Faith considers prostitution a sin, but the Crown has never moved to suppress the trade. Brothels pay taxes. The Gold Cloaks maintain a minimal presence on the Street of Silk to prevent serious violence but otherwise leave the district to its own governance.
Gambling Dens
King's Landing has dedicated gambling establishments beyond the casual dice games found in taverns. Wealthy merchants and nobles may frequent private gambling houses where significant sums change hands over tiles, dice, and card games. These establishments often also serve food and wine and may provide musical entertainment. Some are fronts for money lending or other less legitimate business.
Mummers and Entertainment
King's Landing attracts the best wandering entertainers in the realm by virtue of its wealth and population. Mummer troupes perform in squares and marketplaces for coin from the crowd. Singers perform in taverns and inns. The city also has permanent entertainment venues — halls where mummers perform written plays for a paying audience, a more sophisticated entertainment than street performance.
For reference, as players may portray characters of Essosi origin or noble characters who have read accounts of foreign lands:
The Ghiscari cities of Slaver's Bay — Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen — favor gladiatorial combat in the fighting pits. Male and female pit fighters battle one another or wild animals, typically to the death. The pits attract large crowds and significant gambling. They are considered barbaric by most Westerosi who have read accounts of them.
The finger dance is a game of the ironborn, involving the throwing and catching of a hand axe without missing a step. It is named for the fingers its players frequently lose.