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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jgbrowning" data-source="post: 800306" data-attributes="member: 5724">We'll historically laborer's guilds etc are definitly not a medieval thing so it would be a little anacronistic.  Laborers were generally abused and had no real social status. Craftsmen and merchants belonged to guilds almost universally, because it was a social safty net, and way of setting themselves apart from others, and a way of talking shop with people of similiar interests.Laborers were abused because cities had big negative growth rates due to high mortality rates. Cities only grew because of the constant influx of immigrents from the countryside. Generally most of the people showing up in a city looking for work don't have any craft knowledges and have to be simple laborers, so there's a lot of competition for what few jobs a city has to offer. Without governmental or social protection, the laborers suffer mightily.But if you want to keep running with the idea, i'd reccomend something similiar to a peasant riot building in the city. You have a few agitators stirring up the generally apathetic labor populace. This was very hard to do historically because it was difficult to prevent people from "scabbing" over to the other side. (When so many people are on the verge of starvation, its hard to make them not work on moral principle). But magic would provide all sorts of ways of convincing people.Of course it will be terribly violent and the end result (even if successful, which given the concentration of magic in the hands of the wealthy) would probably fall apart, but it is a pretty unique plot idea.  If you played it with fusangite's idea of two competative "merchant guilds" (ie the "laborers" gain benefits from one guild by hurting the other guild) you could have the laborers double deal both sides to their benefit.just my .002$joe b.</blockquote>

Verification