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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5125719" data-attributes="member: 4937">And in my response I meant that, given nothing more of a starting place than 'magic exists' I'm not sure we can gaurantee the development of government, much less authoritarian conquerers, much less castles.  To provide an example, published D&D modules are filled with examples of the sort of fairy tale magic where curses take root in responce to some evil or calamity.  Generally speaking, its the rare published module that limits its imagination to what is strictly allowed by the rules made available to PC's, and this was especially true of earlier editions before 3e generalized item construction and made it more accessible.  So, if we take this general account, and that the magic of 'D&D' generally follows the description of mythic magic, its not clear at all if we don't also constrain the rest of the world to also resemble or own mythic history and traditions, that even government would exist.  The reason being, in a world were widows and children can smite you with their death curses and the evil that you do comes back to haunt you, its not at all clear that any king or tyrant can long survive if hundreds or thousands of individuals blame them (fairly or unfairly) for their misfortunes.  If every one you treat unjustly (or worse yet, which thinks you've treated them unjustly), can toss a curse your way, its not at all clear that government is functional or would ever develop.Now, certainly you might argue that Kings and Emperors might have the resources to fortify themselves against the curses of widows and mothers who've lost their sons and daughters, and so become more or less proof against such events, but this argument presumes the existance of kings in the first place.  It imagines a world were kings are a given and then magic comes into existance, not a world of fairy tale magic from first principles. In this world, perhaps heirarchal leadership paralleling the military command chain never develops, because it has no utility.  Perhaps in this world fame is greatly to be feared, and people spend most of their time trying to hide their identity and name from everyone else.  Large associations rarely exist, except in the form of loosely governed secret societies.  The notion of leadership as we know it isn't highly prized, structures larger than tribes, clans, or villages are unknown and the deadliest part of war is its supernatural aftermath.  If you protest and say, "Well by magic I obviously mean only the magic in the rules of D&D as written and not every fanciful idea every module writer has ever come up with.", my first complaint against that is that no published setting has ever conformed strictly to the rules as written.  For example, no edition of D&D truly explains the abundance of magic items that is observed in the game from the rules of magic item creation nor the existance of high level NPC's from the rules on character advancement.  So, it's not even clear that D&D follows from D&D, much less castles.  And my second complaint is that even then there really isn't enough information to judge what the outcome will be, even just going by the rules as written.  The open nature of D&D's magic system is such that it can never be completely described, so we don't know what can happen the way we might be able to describe completely society given a system of clearly defined enumerable powers.</blockquote>

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