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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 1115985" data-attributes="member: 7177">Certainly. The vast majority of people are neutral. They won't go out of their way to help strangers, but they aren't vicious enough to qualify as Evil, either.Sure, you don't have to be actively evil to be in charge in Urbis. But the temptation is great.Much of society essentially mirrors the Industrial Age - rulers, merchant lords, and industry leaders see nothing wrong with exploiting the masses, and feeling that the masses should actually be grateful towards them. While social mobility is technically possible, the divide is great - the upper classes recieve the best education and comforts, and want nothing to do with "these dirty, smelly people" except for their cheap labor and the rent in the dirty, run-down tenements where the urban poor live. Many of the upper classes are sheltered from the realities of urban societies, but when it comes to the bosses who decide how to squeeze yet more profit from their workers... well, they certainly aren't going to be good-aligned. And really, those who "go soft" on their workers make much less profit, and thus sink in wealth and social status. In other words, the nasty ones rise to the top.Confounding this problem are the so-called "Nexus Towers", magical constructs that drain a small amount of life force (expressed in a loss of Charisma) from all who live nearby and convert it into magical energy that can be used to cast epic-level spells or create magical items.Most realms and city-states use Nexus Towers, even the good-aligned ones - they are vital to the defenses of a city. But good-aligned rulers will only want to draw a minimum of life force, which most people won't even notice missing. But for ruthless rulers, the temptation is big just to extract more "juice" from the slums so that they can produce and sell more magic items. And since the drain tends to make the victims more apathetic, they are less likely to rebel...</blockquote>

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