Wiseman wrote:This intrigues me. How would all this work in a world like D&D where the high ups have magic? I'm thinking of designing a setting around this.
darkmaster wrote:It probably wouldn't work in D&D because the only way to prevent people from being able to usurp your rule is to keep them personally from being able to stab you in your face so you'd have prevent people from getting military training which is fine until you remember that you need an army because no matter how bad ass you personally are so you need an army, you could try to prevent soldiers from leveling up but good luck keeping people from deserting and possibly going on adventures to kill you once people figure out you send any unit you deem too seasoned into the meat grinder. And of course if any of your neighbors decide having more high level people is worth the risk then you're screwed because that neighbor becomes a meat grinder that can plow through your armies by opening a portal to an erupting volcano on the elemental plane of fire under your castle.
There's a technical term for this:
bastard feudalism.
Normal feudalism is really just an abstracted, ritualised form of mugging. You agree to give someone more powerful than you all your goods in exchange for him not stabbing you in the face. Then he agrees to leave you with just enough to survive on the conditions that he can come back and do it again next payday.
This has positive feedback connotations, because the "more powerful" part of that largely comes from how many other people this person is mugging, and therefore having vassals leads to having more vassals. However, it also has negative feedback connotations because the more vassals he has, the less attention he can spend on checking up on each one, and so they can do under-the-table things to make themselves powerful enough to not be mugged. There's an equilibrium state here, and while it varies between historical periods, most people find it pretty quickly. In England in the late 12th century, for example, it was about five manors (roughly 1500 peasants) per landed knight.
You can get around this by having a hierarchy of vassals, but since you have no way of ensuring *their* loyalty these things tend to get very unstable indeed.
By contrast, in bastard feudalism there is no mugging because you have nothing that the mugger cares about enough to take. He doesn't need you to farm for him and he doesn't need you to fight for him. He would be just as happy if you weren't here at all. Therefore, the main thing he wants is for you to
fuck off so he can concentrate on doing whatever it is that he does.
Good examples of bastard feudalism are eastern England in the early 13th century and modern-day Saudi Arabia.
England in the 13th century was in the grip of a wool price bubble. Wool is shorn from sheep who graze on grass which grows naturally, thus it requires massively less labour than medieval agriculture does. A typical half-manor which formerly needed about 100-200 peasants and produced about £10 annually now needed less than 10 peasants and also produced about £10 annually. Those few people could be employed by the lord directly as retainers, and could be hired from wherever labour is cheap and can be fired as easily. More importantly, they could be liveried (meaning in this context that their employer pays all their expenses and in return owned all their labour) so the lord didn't actually have to give a damn about local conditions. He usually didn't live on the manor, and quite frequently would go his entire life without visiting. He'd live in the town where there was nicer food and prettier tavern wenches.
Coincidentally, England in the 13th century was also awash with peasants who had been dispossessed because their lord had smashed up the villages, sowed grass in the fields and told them to fuck off because he was now going to run sheep.
Modern Saudi Arabia (and I write as one who's lived in the Gulf as child) consists of a king who owns all the oil wells, some foreign contractors who run the oil wells, and a large population who are totally insulated from that source of income. Their taxes are low because the king doesn't need them, they have almost no rights because the king doesn't need to listen to them, and their educational and economic development can be totally neglected because it doesn't contribute in any real way to the king's well being.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, the king chooses to spend vast sums on the country, but he doesn't need to. He chooses to. In a very real sense he's keeping the country as his own personal hobby, the same way that I work as an analyst and then go home and spend my money on gaming books. If he died and the next king decided that he didn't give a damn about the population, then he could quite happily let them starve without it impacting his oil revenue. If they attempted to resist, then he could hire mercenaries to kill them, much as is happening in Syria presently.
This leads to the modern concept of the "resource curse"; that is, that the discovery of easily-extracted natural resources is actually really bad for the local population because of the incentives that it gives the elites. See the Niger Delta for a good example of this.
What does this mean in D&D land? It means that the wizard overlord is going to be sitting in his tower reading books, he'll have some hired minions to go out and gather mana crystals or whatever else he can't just Wish for, and everybody else in the country
just isn't necessary.
If he's a soft-hearted dude or there's a strong religious code restricting him, he may look after them to the extent that it doesn't meaningfully impact on his wizarding, bearing in mind that "look after" might mean something very different to him than it does to them. Model this after modern-day Saudi Arabia.
If he generally doesn't care one way or another, then they'll probably be driven away from any resource that he might plausibly need, and allowed to scratch a living in the remaining area. If he ever decides that he does need somewhere they live, then off they fuck. Model this after the Native Americans in the mid 19th century US and the First Nations in late 19th century Canada.
If he's an asshole or they dared lift a hand in defiance to the point where it actually impeded him, then the people will only survive to the extent that they can flee to somewhere they can hide or where he can't be bothered to chase them. Model this after the fate of indigenous tribes of Australia.
In all three cases, there will be a small population who work directly for the wizard, providing to his needs. If he chooses to live luxuriously, this might be thousands of people; however it will probably not be a self-sustaining population since he'll want more attractive young people, fit soldierly types and intelligent managers than exist in a normal population. These may be hired from far afield, or they may simply be summoned magically.
That's what D&D would be like, if wizards ran the world. Which brings me back to my original thesis: feudalism fucking sucks.