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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 1710224" data-attributes="member: 22882">5) Adventurers are kings by their own hands Often, they wear their crowns upon troubled brows, probably because by the time they reached 15th level and carved out kingdoms by the strength of their blades, some other saps were reaching 14th level and becoming arch-dukes fit to challenge the present monarchs.  The world is awash with super-powered warrior-chieftains ever contesting for dominance, while the masses huddle in awe and fear before the power of their living gods.  A dark age, a harsh age, and age great and terrible, for Here There Be Dragons, and They Be Worth Darn Good XP.Personally, I find this one the most likely.  Unless so common and so mundane that ever kingdom expects to have a few dozen bands to call upon (Forgotten Realms) or so rare that the PCs are literally the only PC-race creatures of their level (Eberron), adventurers have the ultimate in force multiplication.Any sizable group of commoners *needs* an adventurer or party thereof to protect them from unsavory adventurers (and more powerful mosters), so they'll provide the adventurers with assorted and sundry services.  Commoners will gather in sufficient numbers to ply worthwhile goods to their adventurering lords - a lusty barbarian may settle for the favors of a few tavern wenches, but the most valuable protectors, mighty clerics and wizards, require more expensive services like building great temples or aiding in magical research.This develops into a kind of mini-nationalist situation.  It's not feudalism because the adventurer-barons, unlike feudal lords and their monarchs, don't need anything from the adventurer-kings - nor do the kings have much need of lesser adventurers.  Loose alliances of former party members form like the the treaty-bound great powers of 19th-century earth, save for the fact that, as soon as they settle down to rule, lower-level adventurers start to catch up with them.As the turnover in monarchs is likely to be very high, and not to impact the common folk much aside from having a succession of good and bad rulers, most of the actual management of these state-estates probably falls to stewards (the butler did it!).  These high-level experts or aristocrats wouldn't involve themselves in their masters' conflicts and would serve the territory, not the individual ruler.</blockquote>

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