Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="big dummy" data-source="post: 2883818" data-attributes="member: 41052">Interesting conversation.  Heres my $.02.In the historical Medieval World, you had Monarchies, both weak and strong, you had Empires, mostly weak (like the HRE), and you had free cities, and republics and confederacies, some weak, a few very strong like Venice or the Swiss Confederacy.The two biggest differences would be polytheistic religion and magic.As had been mentioned, many polytheistic systems don't do nearly as good a job at supporting monarchy as monotheistic churches do.  I think there would be more of a trend toward decentralization and democracy for this and some other cultural reasons (illiteracy and poverty don't seem to be nearly as widespread or extreme in any D&D world I've seen, Disease would be much more controlled by magic)Magic is really the key difference though.To be a monarch in a typical high magic D&D world, you would have to have very powerful wizards on your staff and / or a very strong allied church.  The biggest danger would come from rogue Wizards (assuming they are randomly distributed in the population) and rival churches.  In order to remain stable any kingdom or empire would have to have a strong magical secret police to root out rival religions and track down promising young wizards.  The former would have to be immediately crushed, the latter would have to be either recruited or liquidated before they gained any power.So I would see most big kingdoms or empires as lawful neutral or lawful evil working hand in hand with similarly aligned monotheistic relgious institutions..One other major factor is the existence of monsters and evil / anti-human forces.  Few D&D worlds seem to be completely stable or human dominant.  Some huge external threat of nightmarish enemies on the border could be a very unifiying element and could trump other poilitical tendancies...BD</blockquote>

Verification