The case for democracy* in RPG settings

[Voadam]

I like the general setup of the Ulfen (fantasy Norse) Land of the Linnorm Kings from Golarion as conceptially a predominant democracy system in my mashup setting.

Culturally they have a tradition of if you want to be recognized as a local king you have to show you defeated a linnorm dragon, traditionally by bringing its head to a population center and be recognized as an individual badass who actually personally defeated the dragon. I think the sourcebook for them lists seven or so kings in the land.

In my game this does not mean the land is divided into seven kingdoms. It means there are very few local kings and most of the Ulfen population is in nonking areas or have been a lot of the time culturally. The Thing is the general form of government and there is scoffing at inheriting kingships.

 

[Autumnal]

Thing-type gatherings are great. Who else until Charles Dickens wrote epics about lawsuits?

 

[Voadam]

My main area in my mashup setting is the Holy Lothian Empire from Ptolus with the religious civil succession war fully dynamically on. There are several factions struggling for power in different ways so it is theoretically possible for players to pick sides and make impacts.

The emperor died heirless and they had to search far for the closest legitimate claim under the rules of succession. The Church Emperor refused to confirm the new empress, declaring her an apostate for being a divine champion of a pagan non-Lothian God. The Steward declared the succession undecided and grabbed power in the capital. The Uncrowned Empress had a small power base on islands southwest of the core of the empire and managed to flee back their and escape the Church Emperor and rally her cause. The Elven province of Kyonin declared for the Uncrowned Empress while other provinces declared their independence. The Church Emperor declared a crusade on both western bishops who denied his authority and breakaway states with strong support from the East and the Steward. Other royalty with lesser ties pushed their claims for the Throne. Most prominent is the Prince of Ustalav, in good standing with the Lothianite church and a strong army of nights who moved to combat the breakaway now Bandit Kingdoms and Kyonin. The Church Emperor is now pushing forward plans to unify the empire's imperial and ecclesiastical roles into one, a state of affairs that has not been in play since the Second Emperor split the two roles. This may push the Prince into conflict with the Church Emperor.

But mostly it is just background in most of my campaigns to ground some plot elements, to riff off of, and provide reasons government is not sending in powers to deal with stuff the PCs are dealing with in the game, usually module and adventure path plots.

In my Iron Gods campaign Numeria is outside of the Empire but there is a Lothian crusader state to the North around the worldwound and the Lothian provinces of Usalav and the empire to the south border Numeria and the party spent a time in fantasy Amish town of Lothian frontiersmen who revere Lothian St. Erastil.

In my Carrion Crown campaign the Ustalav prince's military campaign and spending time in the capital working political angles was a big plot point of why the only local powers around were a called out of retirement 70 year old cleric and his two altar boys and it was really up to the PCs to handle the growing outbreak of a Haunted Prison.

In my Reign of Winter campaign it started in the Lothian breakawy province of Taldor then moved to Irrisen and other lands out of the empire.

In my Freeport trilogy campaign the Lothian civil war melded seamlessly with the module's Northern Empire civil war and the Sea Lord breaking old pacts and the privateer fleets being open to the highest bidders.

Edit: Some of my text got cut off by my phone so I re-added it here.

 

[Voadam]

Thing-type gatherings are great. Who else until Charles Dickens wrote epics about lawsuits?

I want to say maybe some Roman historians, though not exactly epics.

I vaguely remember reading about emperors claiming dead rich citizens left them huge amounts in wills and then enforcing them.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Thing-type gatherings are great. Who else until Charles Dickens wrote epics about lawsuits?

I was going to say "Maybe the Romans." But I was ninja'd by @Voadam .

 

[Aldarc]

Thing-type gatherings are great. Who else until Charles Dickens wrote epics about lawsuits?

It would not surprise me if the Sumerians and Babylonians did. We have a LOT of documents that are just complaint letters, lawsuits, and legal texts.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I want to say maybe some Roman historians, though not exactly epics.

I vaguely remember reading about emperors claiming dead rich citizens left them huge amounts in wills and then enforcing them.

I, Claudius does a good job of dramatizing the intrigue behind the will thing (and it is mostly drawn from Roman historians)

 

[TwoSix]

I think the simple explanation is that D&D has been, at its core, a medieval fantasy game, and a background of monarchy, aristocracy, and feudalism simply feels more medieval; we tend to associate the transition to democracies with the Industrial Revolution. (Yes, I know it's much more complicated than that, but those grade-school historical concepts tend to linger.)

Additionally, D&D has generally been a pastiche of medieval European tropes, and for those of us in the New World, kings and dukes and knighthoods emphasize the European feel.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I found this blog post to be really compelling and a great argument as to why RPG settings shouldn't include hereditary monarchies or empires.


Shifting the government from, effectively, an almost-unchangeable background element to something that motivated player characters (or NPCs) can influence is great, especially since, as noted, you can have monarchs chosen by lords, etc., and still have most of the trappings of traditional fantasy RPGs while still including dials and knobs for the players to get involved with.

And if the players don't want to get involved in all of this? No harm, no foul, games can run as they are right now. But the option is now on the table, where it wouldn't have been previously.

I normally shy away from anything that might resemble the real world (ugh, gross) too much in my fantasy games, but this actually has me thinking about the possibilities of ripped-from-the-headlines elements possibly showing up in a fantasy world, although obscured under rubber foreheads and such.

This is something I've idly thought before but never really engaged deeply with like this article does.

I completely agree though - democracies or quasi-democracies like tanistry are way more gameable and more prone to intervention from the players than most monarchical systems. They're potentially a lot more long-term interesting as they require more "maintenance" as it were.

Palace intrigue only really works as a plotline with unstable or vulnerable monarchies, which is not typically how they're presented in fantasy. Sure, if there's a council or parliament almost as strong as the monarch (or stronger!), or if the monarch is sick, or really hated by the people, or a child and there's a regency or the like, palace intrigue and palace politics can be cool. But so many just simply aren't presented that way. Indeed I think it's common for monarchies in fantasy settings to actively be written as not having intrigue of that kind, especially in RPG setting books.

Contrary to @Snarf Zagyg I don't think the main reason monarchies are so prevalent in fantasy RPGs is to give a specific person to conflicts and the like (though they can be used that way), as in fact many settings have distant and poorly-detailed monarchies in very stable and largely conflict-free situations, where the monarch (usually a king) is at most a quest-giver. I think it's mostly lack of imagination/lack of research/lack of knowledge and the sheer cultural inertia of the Americanocentric idea that in Ye Olde Dayes we had monarchs, and in Modern T1m3z we have democracy, when in fact democracy and quasi-democracy and council electing people and so on goes back to practically the dawn of time and probably far beyond recorded history.

I actually wonder if the issue isn't worth now than it was say, 30 years ago, fantasy setting-wise. 30+ years ago fantasy settings more often tended to be built on interest in and knowledge of actual history/historical cultures, but now we see a fair number of fantasy settings and campaigns which are sort of, built on top of fantasy tropes rather than history, and seem to be far less interested in the rulers of societies, who tend to break down to good kings, evil kings, and useless councils and not much else. If you're real lucky there might be like one "good council" in some notably progressive protagonist-nation.

 

[John Dallman]

30+ years ago fantasy settings more often tended to be built on interest in and knowledge of actual history/historical cultures, but now we see a fair number of fantasy settings and campaigns which are sort of, built on top of fantasy tropes rather than history, and seem to be far less interested in the rulers of societies, who tend to break down to good kings, evil kings, and useless councils and not much else.

Some of us try to create governmental structures that are influenced by the actual distribution of power, and the interest in using it, in the societies we imagine.

In my long-running AD&D campaign, there are a couple of small monarchies, both of who have rulers who are accepted because they're effective and don't repress their populations.

There is a larger state which used to be a military dictatorship, but that ruler left when the priests, magicians and thieves united against him, and it became clear that he couldn't win a civil wat against those groups.

Nowadays, that state is run by a fairly efficient bureaucracy that grew out of the thieves guild and maintains its public approval by controlling crime (I used this concept before Pratchett published it). If they were to become oppressive, the priests would raise the people against them, and the magicians would take unpredictable but likely deadly action against them. There's lots of unsettled land, so there is no shortage of resources. Most of the gaming in that setting recently has been in the police force of the capital city.