Governing in Magical Fantasy World: Thrones

Like many (most?) medium-magic settings, the 5E D&D game I wrapped up last year assumed that artifacts and powerful magic items were mostly created in the distant past. Some of these supremely powerful items are essentially canned versions of adventuring magic. A Holy Avenger or Staff of the Magi was created for adventurers to use to fight monsters, or otherwise pursue adventurer-type goals.

But many other powerful items were created to solve more quotidian problems, or deal with day-to-day concerns. And that includes the problem of leadership and building stable societies in a world of chaos, magic, and monsters.

Consider, for example, Lunar Thrones.

Lunar Thrones are stationary artifacts that bestow a range of always-on spell-like abilities to an attuned ruler. Each Throne possesses different characteristics; abjuration and divination are common, including spells like Zone of Truth, Anti-Magic Aura, Planar Binding, Dimensional Anchor, and Hallow. The throne grants a spellcasting DC ranging from 15 to 20 depending on its potency, unless the attuned ruler already has a higher DC from class levels.

There are serious drawbacks to ruling from a Throne. It takes weeks to attune to a Throne. The attuned ruler also may not leave the vicinity of the throne without de-attuning from it; de-attuning causes a “hangover” effect, depending on the Throne, similar to the final clause in Raise Dead, or the last paragraph in Wish. The precise range one can travel while maintaining attunement varies from Throne to Throne, but is never greater than about a mile, and in many instances, is much smaller. Thrones also produce low-level side effects that are deleterious to the ruler's physical or mental well-being (for example, see the Minor Detrimental Properties table from 2014 DMG, pg. 220).

The Thrones provide significant magical protection, but were not designed to protect against physical force or other non-magical intervention, and they do not have offensive powers of any kind. Because the ruler can't retreat, relocate, or go into exile without losing control of the Throne, they are as vulnerable as an ordinary ruler to conventional takeover by force of arms, poisoning, or other tactics. So a Throne ruler is usually still reliant on a conventional military force and methods of projecting political and economic power to protect themselves. Scholars theorize that this is a feature, not a bug, in the eyes of whoever created the Thrones; to ensure there are ways to dethrone a ruler who becomes a tyrant.

Some societies have decided that the Thrones are worse than the problems they were meant to address, and have hidden their Thrones, buried them, or moved en masse away from them, to escape the succession of conquerors warring over them. Thrones are as resilient as other artifacts, and can only be destroyed through extreme and unusual measures.

Humans as the Oldest Ancestry

Most fantasy fiction -- from folklore to Tolkien to D&D -- frames elves and dwarves as the older peoples, and humans as (relatively) recent arrivals. The very first sentence of the “human” description in the 2014 5E player's handbook says as much, calling them “the youngest of the common races.” But what if the opposite is true?

Suppose that the other humanoid ancestries are derived from the common baseline of humanity. This explains the many creatures who are very clearly “human crossed with something else.” Obvious examples are merfolk (human and fish), lizardfolk (human and lizard), and aarakocra (human and bird). Long ago humans were changed by some kind of magic, and those changes persisted through generations. 

Consider the 2014 5E Monster Manual's half dragon: a first generation product of such a union. After many generations, the result is dragonborn. And the same is true for the dwarves, elves, and other more common ancestries; perhaps elves originated with fey magic, and dwarves with earthen elemental influences. 

For example, many humanoid creatures can procreate together either as a matter of course, or with the aid of trade magic (facilitating inter-ancestry procreation is a common services trade magicians supply). Take this to its logical conclusion, and dwarvish traits only persist as long as dwarves continue to have children with other dwarves, generation after generation. If a group of dwarves moves to a human city and intermarries with humans, their offspring will be more and more human-like by the generation. This is already implicit in the game’s treatment of half-elves and half-orcs, taxonomic categories that I strongly dislike. “Humans as the Oldest Ancestry” fixes those problems.

Yes, this kind of thinking can be taken too far. Genealogy and trait inheritance is going to be vague in a world where “a wizard did it” can answer such a broad range of questions. But a little goes a long way in creating a more interesting world. 

Three-Fourths of a World

I’m a big believer in addition by subtraction. So what happens to the common fantasy vernacular when we take the four broad class archetypes of fantasy – rogue, fighter, cleric, and wizard – and consider four worlds, each distinguished by the absence of one core class?

A World Without Clerics

The gods aren’t acting on the prayers of mortals, if they exist at all. Magic is the sole provenance of wizards. Healing magic is rare. The undead are that much more terrifying. 

A World Without Rogues 

A world without thieves could be a world with nothing worth stealing. Perhaps a utopia that has solved material problems, threatened only by some cosmic force? Or the opposite – the world of OD&D, a world desperate enough that every adventurer is a thief.

A World Without Wizards

Magic in the mortal world exists at the discretion of the gods. It doesn’t matter whether someone is called a wizard, druid, sorcerer, warlock, witch, or cleric. All magic comes from a divine power of one kind or another.

A World Without Fighters

A world without fighters is a world of truly terrible monsters. Swords and chain mail are fine for standing armies, but they’re a joke against the terrors of the dungeon. If you want to adventure down there, you need the power of the gods, the reality-warping magic of the arcane, or the wits and skills of the stealthy trap-finding rogue – weapons and armor will do you little good. 

Mysteries in the Fuzzy Distance

I’m a start-small, prep-what-you-need, play-to-find-out DM. Minimize plot, lore, and history. The best stuff doesn’t come from elaborate DM plans unfolding before the players’ eyes, but rather the unexpected alchemy of the game sessions themselves.

So I had a challenge to confront when my players selected, as our next game, Strangers on a Train, which includes in its premise a central mystery – the characters have all awoken without memories on a moving locomotive. An implicit (but not obligatory) goal in the game is to figure out how and why this has happened.

A mystery, by its nature, suggests that there is an answer that can be learned. Things that are set up early should pay off later. The mystery has to be real and it has to be discoverable.

Unless we are running a game like Brindlewood Bay, which explicitly presupposes that the mystery is quantum, we want the mystery to be a fixed, concrete thing. The DM should not just listen to the players’ theories in the last session and pick whichever sounds coolest.

So how do we build a fixed mystery without constraining our prep and locking ourselves out of useful player input? I have attempted to do it through compartmentalization into three categories. 

The Big Far-Off Ideas 

The big ideas are fixed. These are the truths of the mystery. They are like Mount Everest, or the moon -- always visible, clearly important, but far away, and not well understood and truly known until after a difficult journey of discovery.

Close and In-Focus Details

The details of the present scenario are fixed. These are the NPCs the PCs meet, the clues they find, the places they visit. These are the ordinary things we create during prep for each session. We constantly keep the big ideas in mind as we create them. 

The Fuzzy Distance

Imagine the space between an object at hand and a distant mountain, across an open plain or desert. The middle distance is fuzzy and indistinct. We know even less about what is there than either what is close at hand, or what is on that distant mountain.

This intentional fuzziness means we can find a lot of different paths between the close details and the big ideas. We can incorporate player ideas. We can respond organically to developments in play. We don’t need to decide until it comes into focus.

As the players unravel the mystery, more and more fuzzy details will gradually come into focus and become fixed details. The fuzzy distance can never conflict with or change the Big Ideas. As the campaign nears an end, the fuzzy distance will disappear completely, as the players confront or understand the big ideas at the end of their journey.