Plausible Social/Political Structures in D&D Land

[violence in the media]

Ok, like I mentioned in the Fantasy Economy thread, D&D Society is fairly nonsensical and many settings and adventures don't take into account the variety of wondrous things that exist in the game. Instead, we tend to get an anachronistic knock-off of medieval Europe with monsters and magic tacked on as an afterthought.

People mentally default to things like a racial-majority lord, knights on horses, monsters somewhere "over there," and a host of other mundane things because that's largely what they're presented with. Nobody thinks about the Hobgoblin settlements that probably exist until the MC sends them to burn one down. Heck, most campaign guides don't even put non-PC-race civilizations on the map. Any oracle the PCs might need to consult is likely a human or elf, even though a Sphinx or Elemental Weird is a more likely and capable candidate. You never run into a Griffon hatchery, despite the economics of their domestication being right there in the monster description.

I'd like to change this, even if it's only for my own personal enrichment and the improvement of games I run or play in.

That said, I'd like help coming up with some social/political structures that would logically arise given the realities of D&D land. We're obviously going to need to expand on, or change, some things in order to make sense of everything. We should also probably adhere to a few premises, like making sure the main PC races are playable or that all places on the material plane aren't under constant assault from endless Xill from the infinite depths of the Ethereal Plane.

So, let's be creative here. Where do various monsters live? What niches do they fill? What do monster communities look like? Will you ever run into a Storm Giant city with 1000+ inhabitants, or is the family structure in their monster entry the largest association you'll ever find? Why? How many Black Dragons probably exist in the world? Is it few enough to systematically murder all of them one at a time? How do monsters interact with humanoid communities? What do humanoid communities look like? Are they large and concentrated, or small and dispersed? Are there empires, or just city-states? Is the biggest badass in an area nearly always in charge, or is it possible for some level 1 shlub to be elected king? How common is Griffon air cavalry? What magic gets used in everyday life?

Let's see what we can do.

[Ancient History]

I'm going to bring this up once in the vain hope that'll be the end of it.

There will be rishathra. Hell, it won't even be limited to humanoids. Dragons are so fucking unpicky that anything remotely alive and with a discernible anatomy is fair game. And city or settlement on the border of two distinct racial cultures that can interbreed is going to start developing racial attitudes reminiscent of New Orleans or New Spain from the 1600s-1800s. You're not just going to have half-elves, you're going to have some highly specific nomenclature to explain how you're half-human, one-quarter elf and one-quarter orc. Every coastal city not inhabited by absolute racists is going start to get the Innsmouth look.

The Myconids are going to be led by a Chairman Mao or Stalin-esque elder fungus figure - possibly Zuggtmoy - and they are going to be a militant communist power. Why? Because mushrooms grow on dead things. These are mushrooms that can enter viking-esque berserker rages and reanimate corpses with their spores. The edges of their empire are probably a gigantic toadstool circle.

[tzor]

A lot of campaign worlds are humanoid centric generally concentrating on the player character races. But this is not the case for all campaign worlds. Many other campaign worlds are "novel" driven, so they cover only those races that the novels cover and only to the level of detail that is in the novels.

One important thing to note is that you don't always have to limit youselves to D&D to get inspiration for your D&D campaign world. There was a system that Gygax was helping out on before he died (brain fart, I can't remember it at the moment ... I have the books at home). One of the interesting things in that source material was Kobolds with a matriarchical heirarchy. These kobold matriarchs also practiced polyandry IIRC. (I'll look it up when I get home.)

[violence in the media]

Maybe better starting questions are:

Why are things the way they are, given what the books say?

Examples: Why doesn't the prime suffer constant raids by Xill? Why isn't the world constantly teetering on the edge of the inevitable conquest of one of the many varieties of self-replicating horrors? Why do I run into as many 15th level retired adventurer barkeeps as I do? What the hell is an 18th level expert?

and

Given the presense of immensely powerful and intelligent entities, what mechanism allows low power entities to function and gain power?

Examples: The dragon from the other thread--if gnolls are raiding "his" village, why not fly over to their encampment and just incinerate the lot of them? Basically the Forgotten Realms problem. How many issues can a powerful creature handle on their own before they have to delegate?

It's not that there are right and wrong answers to these questions, though there are better and worse answers, it's that a lot of time there are simply no answers available beyond what someone comes up with on the spot. In my experience, those answers are usually unsatisfying and spawn a lot of unintended consequences.

[BearsAreBrown]

I think a lot of the really high level stuff can be dealt with by recognizing that the Prime isn't special. The worst of the dangers in the 'verse are planar and have little reason to come to the Prime.

[souran]

Sounds to me like the OP wants to play in the world of warcraft.

The world has domesticated flying creatures used for buisness purposes, it assumes a lot of magic is applied to doing STUFF in the world, all its humanoids are given equal face time,

seriously, the assumptions of the denizens of the world of warcraft seem more in line with what you want.

[Red_Rob]

Why are things the way they are, given what the books say?

Basically, do you want to explore this question, or do you want to ask the related but very different question What would the resultant world look like if you worked backwards from the rules?

One gives you reasons that people live in medieval society in D&D land, the other gives you a world run by Dragon overlords where Barbarians jump off cliffs to determine seniority and people seek out increasingly powerful challenges to power their "divine spark" and gain levels.

[MGuy]

I remember their being guides to various monsters and how they should work some long time ago. I don't know whether I remember the name right but I think they were "Slayer's Guide to X". I don't remember if they were any good.

In either case I handled a thing about giant persecution not too long ago. Giants and other large creatures take up resources. Various smaller races developed lore, cultures, etc aimed at taking them out. Large creatures live in fear of the day short creatures jump them. That's the short hadn of what was going on anyway.

[TheFlatline]

There will be rishathra. Hell, it won't even be limited to humanoids. Dragons are so fucking unpicky that anything remotely alive and with a discernible anatomy is fair game. And city or settlement on the border of two distinct racial cultures that can interbreed is going to start developing racial attitudes reminiscent of New Orleans or New Spain from the 1600s-1800s. You're not just going to have half-elves, you're going to have some highly specific nomenclature to explain how you're half-human, one-quarter elf and one-quarter orc. Every coastal city not inhabited by absolute racists is going start to get the Innsmouth look.

Also look at TunFaire in the Garrett PI series.

Some of the minor characters in that novel are cross breeds of like troll, centaur, and pixie. It's kind of insane.

[violence in the media]

Why are things the way they are, given what the books say?

Basically, do you want to explore this question, or do you want to ask the related but very different question What would the resultant world look like if you worked backwards from the rules?

One gives you reasons that people live in medieval society in D&D land, the other gives you a world run by Dragon overlords where Barbarians jump off cliffs to determine seniority and people seek out increasingly powerful challenges to power their "divine spark" and gain levels.

That's a good question, and I guess the answer is somewhere between the results of those two questions.

In some instances, I think it would be better to change the default euro-fantasy to include reasonable exploits of available fantasy elements. Major temples, at least of gods of healing and such, should probably make use of the wondrous architecture rules to create hospitals that automagically heal wounds and diseases. Permanent gates, portals, and teleportation circles between major cities should probably be more common than they are. Though those should be constructed in ways that answer concerns about moving armies through and such. Maybe controlling the weather to improve crops is something that happens fairly regularly for any region with the capacity to do so. Sizeable non-human majority settlements should exist, be marked on the map, and detailed to similar extent. This isn't the racist old days where we pretend that tens of thousands of intelligent creatures living together in a location isn't a major settlement simply because they aren't pale or "civilized" enough.

Basically, the world shouldn't feel like the PCs are the first ones to invent the wheel or discover fire.

In other instances, I think what's written should be changed to prevent the logical conclusions of a world populated only by incorporeal undead, or an unstoppable global tyranny of some mega-powerful individual or creature type that the PCs aren't allowed to be/play. It's one thing to have mindflayers rule everything if the PCs can be, or overthrow, the mindflayers. It's another thing to write yourself into a corner where the PCs are slaves with no possibility of freedom. Maybe dragons can only give birth to a single clutch of eggs once every 100 years. Maybe wraiths and shadows are tied to a certain distance of the spot they died. Maybe problematic magical powers can be fixed.

With this case, you don't want to be forced to rely on MAD or some complicated web of creatures in a bizarre Mexican standoff. As you add more agents to those situations, the likelihood of introducing a lunatic increases. You don't want to find yourself in a position where individuals won't destroy the world, but rather one where an individual can't destroy the world.

As far as the inter-species fucking goes, if someone wants to come up with a rationale behind half-elves that excludes (or allows for) half-dwarves and elforcs and accounts for half-dragon anythings, be my guest. Who was the comedian that said something to the effect that we'd all be brownish half-asians in the next century?

[Zinegata]

I've always rationalized half-elves as an indication that elves and humans are in fact the same species. And that elves / humans view themselves as a completely different race serves to highlight either elvish snobishness or human racism.

That being said, are you now going for the top-down approach?

[Anguirus]

For me, there are two major issues that need to be dealt with before anything approaching a coherent world can be built. In the first place there is the question of how "enlightened" you want your world to be and in the second there is the question of how globalized you want your world to be.

In maintaining a cultural (if not game mechanical) distinction between Wizards, Clerics and Druids, the source material would indicate an extremely post-enlightenment world view. This is to say that an understanding of the world as being divisible into natural and supernatural realms is very much a product of the scientific revolution such that natural scientists (i.e. Wizards) and scholarly institutions devoted to those sciences (i.e. wizard academies) could not reasonably be separate from supernatural vocationalists (i.e. Clerics) and their institutions (churches and the like) unless you set your world somewhere after (I would argue) 1800 or so. This isn't even getting into the constructedness of understandings of "religion" that post-colonial scholars like Tala Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa talk about. All told, in standard D&D we see a world view that doesn't really take hold (in Europe or North America) until roughly 1930 or so, if not later.

As for the globalization question, you have, on the one hand, racial and cultural tribalism and, on the other, a tremendously integrated social network and the transportation and communication magi-technological infrastructures necessary to maintain such a network. We have world spanning conspiracies that cold war era superpowers would be jealous of and we also have hobbits who are unaware of a world outside of the shire. This is clearly incoherent. You can choose to have discrete empires of the sort where inhabitants of any "civilized" nation pretty much think that the world ends at their borders (and, at least socially, it does); colonialism of the sort that we attribute to the British empire; or post-colonialism of the sort seen in contemporary American interventionalism but you can not have all three working side by side one another.

I would like to see these issues resolved by having magics of all kinds consolidated on the person of "educated dude" who is educated in philosophy, theology (such as it is) and natural science in "religious" (that is, sacred but not explicit or articulatably religious) halls of learning (monasteries and the like) and by having each nation being its own campaign setting with its own economies, societies, technologies and norms. Other people might want to resolve these issues in other ways and I would be interested in helping with that, too, if y'all will have me.

[Fuchs]

I'd rather go Iron Age, Greek mythology style.

[Vebyast]

My explanation is always that The Deities Did It.

As people have pointed out, the magic item system in D&D is powerful enough to fuel an entire early-information-age society. They have typewriter equivalents (Amanuensis, they have telephone equivalents (Sending) and TV equivalents (Crystal Balls), they have near-modern industrial technology (constructs sub for steam engines and robots, refrigeration, air condition and central heating, and so on), and, most of all, they have permanent conflict to drive constant innovation (random spawns, magical natural disasters).

So, why haven't these things appeared yet? Answer: for some reason, they aren't being developed or distributed. Well, one guy in his garage could easily develop and mass-produce any of them, so what would prevent every single sapient in the entire planescape from having a single technological idea? Answer: some kind of planescape-wide conspiracy that can simultaneously observe the thoughts of every caster in the multiverse and crush their inspiration without them even knowing it. In other words, every god in existence is actively suppressing innovation.

</early morning rant>

[virgil]

One very important thing in order to uplift D&D society is to do more than make magic items, but to train the population to become spellcasters themselves. Things will advance more slowly if you can't maintain the same percentage of high-level spellcasters.

I've oft-wondered how things would change in the face of resource scarcity. We're not told what the ingredients are to make a magic item, but what if all magic items have a common component in their construction, and the volume of permanent magic items to advance culture actually runs into physical limits of this resource? Sure, it'd be fine to install decanters in every couple city blocks, but what if there just aren't enough blue sapphires to make that many eternal water sources?

[Anguirus]

I'd rather go Iron Age, Greek mythology style.

This has tremendous implications on what spells can reasonably exist, how world spanning (to say nothing of plane-spanning) your campaigns can be, literacy and how "free" you might expect your average dude to be. I would like to see what you are left with when you work from standard D&D and consider each of those points (and probably far more).

I would imagine that you would have to get rid of a huge number of the higher level spells, institute some sort of class or caste system, leave huge huge portions of the world as unimaginably remote if not wholly unknown, get rid of the wizard / cleric distinction (perhaps replace wizards with something like a diplomat or man-at-court type class), disintegrate the standard D&D economy and set up some empires (or leagues of sovereign but mutually dependent city states, depending on the Greek mythology you're going for). You would also expect a marginally chirographic society with a tremendous amount of secondary orality such that massive record keeping would be impossible and Socratic "rhetoric" is an emerging but not yet established practice.

[Fuchs]

I'd rather go Iron Age, Greek mythology style.

This has tremendous implications on what spells can reasonably exist, how world spanning (to say nothing of plane-spanning) your campaigns can be, literacy and how "free" you might expect your average dude to be. I would like to see what you are left with when you work from standard D&D and consider each of those points (and probably far more).

I would imagine that you would have to get rid of a huge number of the higher level spells, institute some sort of class or caste system, leave huge huge portions of the world as unimaginably remote if not wholly unknown, get rid of the wizard / cleric distinction (perhaps replace wizards with something like a diplomat or man-at-court type class), disintegrate the standard D&D economy and set up some empires (or leagues of sovereign but mutually dependent city states, depending on the Greek mythology you're going for). You would also expect a marginally chirographic society with a tremendous amount of secondary orality such that massive record keeping would be impossible and Socratic "rhetoric" is an emerging but not yet established practice.

No, I meant the society, not the technology. Meaning, it's hero-driven. Heroes are the kings, or topple weak kings. Heroes are the wizards and priests. Gods are modelled after the greek pantheon, and are not omniscient or potent, but meddle for selfish reasons. If you're a wizard or cleric or some very high level fighter with a few magic artifacts and divine favor (or a demi-god), you're top dog. And there's not too many of those heroes around.

[Anguirus]

No, I meant the society, not the technology. Meaning, it's hero-driven. Heroes are the kings, or topple weak kings. Heroes are the wizards and priests. Gods are modelled after the greek pantheon, and are not omniscient or potent, but meddle for selfish reasons. If you're a wizard or cleric or some very high level fighter with a few magic artifacts and divine favor (or a demi-god), you're top dog. And there's not too many of those heroes around.

And what I'm saying is that you can't divorce social structure from available technologies. "We have the ability to create extremely complicated and mutually beneficial global integrated economies but we choose not to because we're really really dumb" does not fly. "We have a globally integrated economy which is necessarily dependent on specialization and cooperation but life is still cheap" doesn't work. "Life is not cheap but we still believe that might makes right" doesn't fly. Disruptive battles of succession are bad for business and, in an integrated global economy everybody (including the standing armies of the bigger and badder nations of the world) has a vested interest in seeing that you don't see that kind of chest beating bullshit. There is a reason that the U.S. maintains a military presence 135 nations and it isn't because we're concerned that they constitute a threat the survival of our nation or because we're really nice guys interesting in protecting freedom abroad. Plainly, we have economic interests there. Unless you can come up with a reason why you would have the ability to create massive social infrastructures and you would choose not to, having D&D technologies and Greek Mythology societies exist side by side makes absolutely no sense. And if you tell me "the gods willed it so" you are actively choosing not to engage with the problem that I thought this thread was devoted to addressing.

[MGuy]

You know... I made the same argument that Magic = Technology and that naturally people would gravitate toward using it to improve their economies by leaps and strides. I made that suggestion in the Economy Thread a whiles back. However Frank heatedly insisted that magic =/= technology and that it was instead an art that so few people mastered that they were not willing/able to spread it. And because their time was too valuable to waste doing so they'd make no effort to try and improve the quality of people's lives with their ultramagic. Mostly because, apparently, after you reach a certain power scale you won't/can't interfere or change the lives of dirt farmers.

[Anguirus]

How did Frank convince you that interacting with the physics of your world in a calculated fashion to produce a known result is not technological?

[MGuy]

He didn't. Like most arguments I have with Frank he eventually refused to respond to what I was typing or lorded his "I am right so suck it" cock all over any point that I made. So I just gave up.

[Fuchs]

If you are one of the top dogs, the typical D&D hero, what is your motivation to advance the world instead of your family? Why would you spread the wealth?

[jadagul]

Anquirus: from an economist's point of view, the defining feature of "technology," roughly speaking, is extensibility: technology is the knowledge that society accumulates that people in general can use to be more productive. So, e.g. inventing the moldboard plough or the stirrup is a gain to everyone's productivity, because this is knowledge that everyone can take advantage of.

In contrast, human capital is the result of a specific person developing skills, which more or less affect the productivity only of the person who develops those skills. So if I learn to ride a horse so well I don't need stirrups, that's not technology--even though it's a real skill that interacts with real-world physics, and for that matter I can probably teach someone else to do it, it's not technology because it doesn't spread to everyone really easily.

The big difference between the two is that the former tends to drive prices down and the latter really doesn't. If I come up with a new way of moving packages around that makes it easier for any random person to do rapid deliveries, I create FedEx and make it cheap and easy for everyone to engage in fast package delivery. If I learn to run at lightspeed so I can deliver packages to everyone, then I can charge exorbitant amounts of money for people who really need packages delivered fast, but I can't scale it up. We wind up in the situation where my ability to run at lightspeed is only used by people who actually need that--no one takes advantage of it to speed up shipping stuff from Amazon.

On the thread in question, Frank was pointing out that magical knowledge works more like human capital than like technology. The fact that I've learned to cast "wall of stone" or whatever doesn't make producing stone really cheap and widely available, because my ability to do that doesn't make anyone else able to do that. Learning to cast a fifth level spell is a huge and time-intensive process that doesn't scale to other people easily.

And further, anyone who can do it can also do a lot of other really important stuff that can't be done by the team of fifty miners or whatever you'd need to employ to produce an equivalent amount of stone. So despite the fact that one guy casting "wall of stone" produces a lot more rock than one guy in a mine, we still get our stone from mines because that's not the tradeoff we're actually looking at.

In contrast, things like "teleport" really will change the world. But they won't mean that Grandma uses teleportation for her summer vacation, because that shit is still expensive. You don't use it when you could get whatever you're working for with a horse and three weeks of travelling. Teleport changes the world because it allows very high-powered people to move around quickly, and so facilitates trade in extreme luxury goods (e.g. magic items/crystals) and diplomacy.

The important thing is to figure out which applications of the human capital involved in spell-casting will actually be worth implementing, and which just aren't worth anyone's time.

[Vebyast]

I should have phrased my argument better: magic items and their combinations are technology, especially when the DM rules that common sense applies, and even more when you realize that magic items are permanent. Sure, you can't scale up horizontally, building a thousand items of something all at the same time and instantly revolutionizing an industry. However, you can have a wizard slowly build those thousand items of something one at a time, and the end result is the same. It may take him fifteen years to produce those ten items that repeatedly cast Wall of Iron and Heat Metal, but once he's done, you'll never need to buy an iron smelter or open another iron mine ever again.

Magical items are just as extensible as our own technology. To be cliche and wrong, it's that they extend in the time direction instead of the space direction.

[jadagul]

Vebyast: except even that's wrong. You're saying that a wizard can use his human capital to produce physical capital. Which is of course true. And it's actually really cool if the capital he creates doesn't depreciate. But it's still just capital. Technology is stuff that improves productivity by being known, rather than being a physical infrastructure that exists somewhere.

Another way of looking at it is the old line that "information wants to be free." And it does; sharing information is free. In contrast, sharing a wand of "wall of stone", or a plow, is expensive; if I give you mine then I don't have one any more. Technology is "productivity-enhancing stuff that wants to be free," and capital is "productivity-enhancing stuff that doesn't want to be free." For gamist reasons, D&D has basically no technology, because they don't want your characters getting anything for free. And that makes sense. But it makes the whole setting kind of anti-technological.