Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6750034" data-attributes="member: 6669384">Under Napoleonic law, and Japanese as well, all criminal cases begin with a Judge who works to "discover the law", as it applies to the case.For a CG ruler, written laws would be loose guidelines, to be interpreted on the fly by the police and judiciary.  The stated goal would be justice, rather than simply order.There was a Syfi book that described a future society that had only two laws.1:  Do not annoy other people unnecessarily.2: Do not allow yourself to become annoyed too easily.That would be the ultimate in "Chaotic Good" legal sets.In social terms, think about Elven society.  Elves are predominantly CG, yet they have kings and queens, and fairly decent social order.Their society is held together largely by tradition, rather than a strict rule of law.  Social order, the class structure if you will, may provide a framework.  This suggests a way for a CG free spirit to become a leader without being strangled by the responsibility:  Delegate.If you are the new King it pretty much means that the noble houses, who would normally have birthright claims on the throne, are either gone, or are for whatever reason abdicating the responsibility.  So your first order of business would be to consider what they'll do once you have the mess cleaned up.  Coup, anyone?  You do the work, then they point out that you are a commoner by birth, and that their family claim is supported by blood, marriage, and the other nobles.  So, as the saying goes, keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.  Call the surviving heirs of the noble houses "to court".  It's a tradition when a new ruler takes the throne that the nobles pay a formal visit, and (symbolically) give their lands to the crown.  The new ruler demonstrates his/her good faith by deeding the lands back, thus confirming their titles.Use this occasion to confer with them, and specifically to assign them duties in the new order.  Keep them busy helping with the clean up, in ways that encourage them to confer with you regularly.  It helps you keep an eye on them, while harnessing their experience and expertise at governance.Have a Cleric with you as an adviser, someone who can Detect Evil, to help you weed out the bad eggs.  That doesn't mean that you refuse to grant the lands back, but perhaps you renew the titles and deeds to a younger heir of the family line.Some of the noble houses will be in ruins.  No viable heirs, homes and farmlands burned, etc.  This grand gathering at Court is when you reclaim those lands for the crown itself.  That gives you some more responsibilities, but gives the crown long term viability as well.  The King needs an income, after all, and those lands will produce one as soon as you can get them back in production.It will also give you some titles you can hand out to friends and supporters.  In the end, you want a final roster of nobility that is a mix of the old and the new.  It leaves potential schemers off balance, with uncertain political ground and the potential of solid opposition to any takeover attempts.If you can manage it, financially, make a public proclamation canceling all tax collection on the next "quarter day" (Taxes and rents were due on the 15th of every third month, hence the infamous "Ides of March" line.)  That will help the economy recover, and will also garner support from the people.As far as laws are concerned, start with the existing laws of the old order.  Make a show of repealing or scaling back on the kind of draconian laws that failing kingdoms tend to impose as control slips away.  One big thing:  Food.  If the city has been at war, it means that reserves are low, and if fields were burned and/or livestock slaughtered or stolen, winter is going to be hard for the common man.  So take stock of what's left in the grainaries, both public and private.  Include an inventory of what's held by the nobles.There are magics that can create food, but most are relatively small scale, compared to a hungry city, without even counting the surrounding areas.  Even spells like Magnificent Mansion, which creates a feast for 12 people per caster level, pales beside the task of feeding a few thousand people, three meals a day, every day, through the winter and beyond.Here's an odd trick, if you have a caster in your party that can do it:  Polymorph Any Object can expand a food supply, massively.Let's presume a 20th level caster.  Take a small handful of grain.  Wrap it in a bit of burlap, and tie it on a tiny sliver of wood.  Treat that as a single object, a sack of grain bound to a platform.  Turn that into 2,000 cubic feet of the same:  A large platform loaded with many sacks of grain.The duration should be permanent.  I'll run the numbers:It's the same kingdom, in terms of animal/vegetable/mineral.  That's five points.It's the same class, for 2 points.Not the same size, so nothing there.Related: Grain to grain, wood to wood, cloth to cloth.   2 more points.Same or lower intelligence, for a very questionable +2.By my math, we're at 11, 9 if you Dispel BS on the Intelligence point.The same trick works for meat, cheese, wine, fruit, etc., and the result is a small shipping container's worth of foodstuffs, 10 feet wide by 10 feet high by 20 feet long.  Make up "care packages" with a mixture of things in a small basket and convert into a huge array of baskets with food for a family for a few days.That tops Magnificent Mansion by a factor of about 50.Now some raw materials can't be produced this way.  Salt, for example, is priced the same as silver, per pound, so it falls into that category of things of "great intrinsic value".For things like this, consider the spell, Transmute Flesh to Salt, from Sandstorm.  Create sides of beef using PAO, then turn them into salt.  Problem solved.It better be a player character throwing these transmutations, by the way. If you look at the table for spell casting services you'll see that, even with the mass of food involved, those will be the most expensive meals you've ever seen.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification