Fantasy Government, part 2: Weak Executive, Powerful Bureaucracy

Previously: Village Democracy 

What happens when a village is too big to manage through direct democracy? City-states and small nations need some kind of leadership, whether democratic, dynastic, or oligarchic. Regardless of the form, it's likely it will be characterized by the weakness of the executive and legislative (if any) bodies, and the power of the bureaucracy. The purpose of the bureaucracy is to buffer outside influence and reduce the leverage of anyone who wants to manipulate or overthrow the state.

Monsters (and other antagonistic NPCs) seek to either rule or ruin a civilization before adventurers show up. Bureaucracy is slow, but that's a feature, not a bug, in this system. It’s purpose is to buy time for someone to stop the conquest, subversion, or destruction of the state.

In a magical fantasy world, adventurers, ratcatchers, mercenaries, and wandering heroes shouldn't be treated as a narrative abstraction, but rather a known feature of the world. Intelligent monsters should assume that the clock is ticking, even when they have the upper hand. Adventurers are also generally regarded as a pro-civilization force. Like white blood cells, adventurers may cause short-term harm or attack the wrong targets, but they are vital to society's long-term survival. Our posts on Stability and Security covers/will cover the murderhobo exceptions to this rule.

Adventurers are important to civilization because they can move quickly and decisively. A common hook for adventure is that someone in a position of authority strongly suspects or knows something is afoot, but can't secure a fast response because the system they are part of is designed to never do anything quickly.

These bureaucratic societies respond with gradual, incremental action to external threats, even when a comparable nation in the real world might choose to act quickly. For example, if a government receives reports that a neighboring civilization has invaded their territory, do they immediately mobilize for war? Well, maybe, but they have to answer a lot of questions first. 

Is it even real? Were survivors on one or both sides of any battles charmed or tricked by illusions? How many internal and external entities might be involved and might benefit from the conflict? These civilizations are cautious and willing to stomach a lot of small-scale conflict and even the loss of territory or resources to avoid compromising their integrity as a state to a threat. This could be happening at a low level almost all the time, with a neighboring state (possibly one already ruled by a threat) that a civilization is diplomatically "at peace" with. Normalizing low-risk conflict makes it easier to avoid escalating to high-risk conflict.

Absent powerful magic, diplomacy and spycraft play an incredibly important role in such societies. Social events are also paramount, even between (particularly between) nations with low-level hostilities. The more face-to-face interaction neighbors have, the better. Elaborate festivals, tournaments, embassy visits, pilgrimages, and other cross-border travel will happen regularly to provide as many opportunities as possible for members of nearby states to meet personally, in hopes of detecting magical domination, replacement, or other infiltration by a monster or other bad actor. These events provide an ideal opportunity to frame adventures.

Next: Elven Gene Queens and Gnomish Merchant Princes

Fantasy Government, part 1: Village Democracy

Most fantasy roleplaying settings presuppose that magic and monsters exist alongside styles of government familiar from the real historical world. And this is fine for a lot of games. Not everything has to add up.

But it does invite further interrogation. How would government, law, popular culture, and other social structures be fundamentally different if they developed in a world where magic and monsters had always existed?

Let’s talk about governments. How would they actually work in medium- or high-fantasy campaign worlds, where magic and monsters are (relatively) common occurrences? 

A single NPC ruler with no class levels is easy to control or replace with magic; 200 commoners who collectively decide issues of governance are not. Many villages have some form of participatory democracy in place, simply to dilute the amount of power in any one person's hands, because increasing the number of targets is the easiest way for commoners to fight back against coercion and subversion by magic.

Characters visiting villages will not typically find a single chief or jarl ready to hand out quests, but rather a form of de facto democracy, possibly even formal, direct democracy. This doesn’t mean the community is particularly enlightened; conflict and disagreement are typical, and these communities usually only come into full agreement when the CR 3 threat rolls into town to wreck their stuff.

The drawback with this system is the same drawback participatory democracy has in the real world; it doesn't scale well. So a community’s desire to stay small (and manageably democratic) is pitted against the urge to grow big (and resilient enough to overcome – or at least endure – larger CR threats).

Next: Weak Executive, Powerful Bureaucracy

The Power of Names

What do your players remember from your game? What's memorable? In my experience, they don't remember the same things the DM remembers. It certainly isn't the best-designed elements, or for that matter whatever the DM spent the most time planning.

Two of the most well-remembered monsters from the past several years of my game are the Rattagator and the Doomcow. The Rattagator was just a re-skinned crocodile, deployed to provide some danger and tension while moving downstream in an underground waterway. It didn’t do anything particularly novel in combat, but the name and the image of a rat-alligator emerging from the underground river stuck with the players.

It was a similar story with the Doomcow. This monstrous hippo was just an aquatic ambush predator on a random encounter table. But it lived on in memory long after the characters defeated it.

These monsters were not complex. The fights were not the most dramatic or most tactically interesting  that the players experienced. But they felt cool and weird and fantastic, and the memorable name locked in that feeling. 

Names have that kind of power. In one session I introduced an unimportant slaad as an antagonist. The slaad died the same session that he first appeared in, and had little lasting impact on the game.

But his name was Johnny Satan, and the players remembered Johnny Satan for long after other NPCs were forgotten. His fire-resistant leather jacket was a signature garment for one of the players for a long time.

These examples are mostly humorous, but they don’t have to be – epic or fantastic names can work too. Magic: The Gathering has a great style for naming monsters and NPCs. Because MtG has to work with limited space on a playing card, they have to imply a lot of story in just a few words. “NAME COMMA TITLE” is a great way to do this. Kozilek, Butcher of Truth tells a story even before they know anything else about the monster. Alesha, Who Smiles at Death is much more memorable than “Alesha the Brave.”

I use this kind of construction all the time. When playing online it’s particularly useful, as characters will see this “formal name” when the creature is added to an initiative order. 

The next time you prep a game, spend a little less time tinkering with the fine mechanics of encounters, or writing detailed backstory and lore, and a bit more time just thinking of some memorable names.

Civilization and its Monsters, Part 2: Rule and Ruin

Previously: Civilization and its Monsters, Part 1: CRs and CIV Scores

Civilizations overcome by monsters are ruled or ruined by them, and both of these conditions provide good base states for adventure. The monster’s success should in some way express its driving desires and compulsions, which the Monster Manual is typically pretty good about spelling out in each monster's description.

Ruined civilizations should be everywhere in D&D. Abandoned villages are extremely common; when a small community is overcome by a monster, survivors scatter, either seeking new communities to take them in, or searching for an unsettled place where they can start again. Cities are fueled by various mass migrations (often caused by the destruction of other cities or many smaller communities), and those cities either grow from villages or are founded in the ruins of older civilizations that were abandoned for good (but now forgotten) reasons. Fantasy adventure world always has a frontier, where civilization is always (re-)settling the wild, and that frontier can mutate and re-emerge even in long-settled, peaceful areas.

Kingdoms might have long histories, but not peaceful or well-recorded ones; assume that they have conquered and been conquered multiple times. A consistent dynasty that has ruled for thousands of years like the Yamato dynasty of Japan should be exceedingly rare in a D&D world. More common would be overlapping, warring, culturally intermingling states, like the warring dynasties of China.

Every civilization should have signs of this cultural trauma. The PCs should meet refugees or first-generation immigrants raised on stories of their former home. In some communities these people will be viewed sympathetically, while in others they may be stigmatized; but they should almost always be there. Again, civilizations with long histories and stable immigration and emigration should be exceedingly rare in a world of monsters and magic.

Civilizations that endure monsters are at an equilibrium, and also can serve as great adventure base states. The civilization and the threat(s) it faces both want to tip the scales and prevail. The village either will survive or it will not, but right now it is at equilibrium with the bullywugs. It is ripe for PC intervention.

Civilizations that overcome threats usually grow. When several villages unite into a city-state and drive back the minotaur king’s army, they've figuratively leveled up to the point where they will face greater challenges. Note that civilizations that overcome threats rarely eliminate them; usually only PCs will do that. Civilizations are much more likely to drive monsters away, either into the wilderness and the dungeons, or into neighboring civilizations that represent softer targets. And of course, these civilizations themselves are not inherently good, and could become monster-equivalent threats themselves. Thinking about these questions also opens a door for high-level PCs to domain-level play.

Civilization and its Monsters, Part 1: CRs and CIV Scores

Monsters exist in fantasy adventure world, and everyone knows it. The average commoner may not know the finer points of specter vs. wraith or the save modifiers of a troll, but they have a general idea of how dangerous a creature is (i.e., it’s challenge rating), and the monsters, in turn, have a sense of how much danger a village, town, kingdom, or nation can tolerate (it’s civilization rating or “CIV rating,” I suppose?). Civilizations overcome lesser monsters, endure equal ones, and are themselves overcome by greater monsters. This applies to communities and nations, and the civilized areas they control, at a macro level. The wilderness, the dungeon, and the other planes of existence follow adventuring logic at a micro level.

Civilization rating grows by size. A village’s rating might be around CIV 1. They can deal with a few threats of CR 1 or less, but CR 2+ threats will usually overcome them. In mechanical terms, this is a question of what kind of monster a few dozen commoners with short bows and spears could deal with. 

A large village or small city might have CIV 5, able to manage a small group of CR 5 threats. A city-state or small nation with CIV 10 could tolerate a CR 10 threat, plus its minions and associated dangers. A very large and powerful nation or a confederation of nations might have a CIV in the mid- to high-teens. Only interplanar civilizations or cosmic organizations could hope to endure or overcome CR 20+ threats; these are generally things capable of ruling or ending the world, should they wish to do so. Adventuring tiers conform to these expectations. The classic high fantasy adventuring party that saves the village at 3rd level, the kingdom at 9th level, and the world at 18th level fits this scaling system.

Just as adventurers in a typical scene-based (e.g. non-dungeoncrawl-oriented) game may seek out monsters with a broadly applicable challenge rating, so monsters come into conflict with civilizations with CIV scores that would rival their CR. An adult dragon is generally going to find a city to be beneath its interest unless it's the capital of a kingdom, fabulously rich, or otherwise special; but a young dragon would find that same city an ideal target. 

A small number of 5E's standard monsters do better or worse than their CR alone would suggest. Low-CR shapeshifters and charmers like cambions, doppelgangers, jackalweres, hags, incubuses, and lamias punch above their weight, because they can influence or control others' behavior. Conversely, some double-digit CR brutes without a lot of mobility or special attacks can't threaten too big of a civilization simply because attacking individuals one at a time only goes so far.

Next: Civilization and its Monsters, Part 2: Rule and Ruin