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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6749048" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a chaotic good individual, you trust your ability to make decisions on your behalf, but distrust your ability to decide for others (something of the opposite of a lawful).  So your government should reflect that.  It should be based on personal relationships more than formal laws or roles, and should receive input from the bottom up.  You believe you rule through the consent of those you rule over, so your government should if it formalizes anything formalize that consent.  You should seek to decentralize power, not because you distrust yourself, but because you distrust whoever is to come after you.The particular solution would logically be drawn from what you saw as the flaws of the society that has just collapsed.  Why did it collapse?  What institutionalized weaknesses did it have?  What made it weak (and importantly to a chaotic) and inflexible and unable to adapt?  Your solution should directly address those problems.I would expect to see one or more of the following:1) Decentralized feudalism:  Power is shared between multiple popular leaders who stature rose during the revolution.  Each lord is aligned with the others by contracts of some sort, forming a pseudo constitution.  Affirming the contracts publically is how rule is established and continued.  Each leader has relatively large leeway to organize his portion of the confederation according to his own desires, and no portion of the confederation necessarily resembles the other.  Laws and customs therefore diverge and continually mutate.2) Republicanism:  You consider yourself an elected leader, and you don't wish to establish hereditary rule.  You want elections held on a regular basis to choose a replacement.3) Parliamentary Monarch: You are willing to accept the burden of being head of state and government, but you wish to rule with the help and advice of a body of elected advisors who have considerable sway over public policy.4) Appointed Monarch: You are willing to accept the burden of being head of state and government, but do not believe you have the right to choose your successor.  Instead, when leaving the throne, the rulers of the various city states should meet and hold a council to appoint the best candidate. 5) Oligarchy: Somewhere between Republicanism and Decentralized Feudalism.  Power is held in the hands of a large number of important families, which collectively vote on laws.  Membership can fluctuate, and by custom a franchise might be something you can purchase.  This starts to veer off into CN territory though, as would Informal Fuedalism where literally everything is government by highly individualized private contracts (which would be a chaotic society with lots and lots of lawyers).Regardless of the form of government, I'd expect it to put a great emphasis on protecting the rights of the individual, and on equality, and on deciding what to do on a case by case basis.  All of the above systems probably would work on a day to day basis through a system of appointed or elected judicial officials.  Towns and cities would have a lot of freedom to govern themselves provided they contributed to whatever limited centralized government was necessary.   Your role as leader (if it exists) in practice might be as the highest appellate judge, chief tax assessor, or as an auditor of the acts of the parliament to exercise a veto when you detect corruption.  Conversely though, the ruler might have rather broad latitude to choose when or when not to act, and to enforce his wishes, particularly at first before any sorts of traditions are established.  Government will tend to be highly discretionary and based on individual judgment.The most serious question is probably going to be, "Who controls the military?"  Chaotic nations tend to want the military to be highly decentralized so that no single individual can control it.  Actually, in truth it tends to end up that way whether they want it or not.  Having most of the armed force of the nation be a leveed militia or collection of local militias is pretty typical.  Having a very large number of lords each control one tiny aspect of it, often only themselves, which can then only be called up contractually by a higher power for limited periods - ei true feudalism - is another way to go about it.  Ancient Greece and Rome mitigated their authoritarian leanings by requiring each citizen responsible for equipping themselves according to their station, meaning that the military was effectively in citizen hands and if you wanted military power you had to sway the bulk of the citizens.  There isn't one single right answer here, and remember as a chaotic there need not be any one way things are done.  You could have multiple different militaries each with their own system of command and control and mustered through different agencies.  Who do you think the smuggler/pirate is most likely to trust with control of the military?  One possibility here is an army that is largely contracted out to wealthy private citizens, with the King in the role as the distributer of official licenses.  Thus, you have official bandits and pirates who have economic incentive to suppress any of the banned and unofficial ones.   This however makes for a really weak King, and a national defense that is largely reliant on a spirit of national will and national pride.</blockquote>

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