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).
It seems like a sort of representative authoritative government might work as well. A large enough body of beings (nobles, oligarchs, senators) who rule over the mass of the people but elect or are dominated by a "first among equals" So you have a big ruler but they are part of an elite, who can control enough of the populace that they masses are stripped of their power. Even if the big cheese gets popped, a new one can take their place.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely -- it's a weird balancing act between making the leader powerful enough that they can govern effectively, but ensuring the replacement mechanism is strong enough to remove them when needed. There may be a real world oligarchy that is an even better historical comparison. I have one more post in this series a week from today, and may come back to it in the future.
DeleteOverall, I do think it drives at the idea that one of the most common governmental structures deployed in TTRPG settings -- hereditary royalty -- is particularly weak in a magical/monstrous world, and would probably give way to more decentralized or dynamic power structures.