Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

[Ancient History]

That's just the equivalent of making someone spend more money on a fancier printing press. There are magic items that give +10 bonuses to skills.

[Username17]

Whether or not arcane mark is literally forgeable, you could potentially use magic or trickery to get people to think that bills were legit. You could use legerdemain to show someone a real bill a slip them a piece of wax paper. You could use mind control to make someone think they were paid when they really weren't. Hell, you could just fucking steal shit.

Counterfeiting is basically just theft. It's weird theft where you don't actually know who ends up losing when you gain, but it's not in principle different from any of the other crap Thieves Guilds do.

From a world building standpoint, all you really have to is make sure that 1st level characters don't randomly have the ability to flood the market with fairy gold or something. As long as counterfeiting requires skills and investments and can potentially be fought, it's not world breaking.

-Username17

[Eikre]

What the Hell happened to it, though? I remember reading that rant, so it wasn't a thing where the forum swallowed it up upon hitting the "submit" button.

Not sure. It's possible the original author thought better of it on the grounds that there were a lot of passages that would be pretty ick out of context. But it brings up a larger point, which is that populations have traits. And some of those traits are cultural things that you can change, and some of those traits are absolute traits that you cannot change.

Yeah, that was something I bolted out in the evening and when I woke up it was with the decision that, for its level of detail, it failed to strongly connote certain underlying caveats. It seems like the audience here found it permissible, so I can reproduce it;

Sometimes you're going to have more than one ethnicity living on a particular set of tiles, and earning Legitimacy with one group will earn you animosity with the other. This is appropriate and can be useful for the game abstraction, which becomes less unwieldy if you define each tile with only one ethnic attribute. But it's also appropriate when you zoom down to the individual scale for your character to go among those societies, work out the conflicts personally, and get rewards at the kingdom management layer.

So it may be unreasonable, for example, to expect your civil administration to reform the relationship between your Drow vassals and their slaves, but it's not difficult to conceive of a campaign where you do exactly that:

-You have conquered a stretch of the Underdark and installed yourself as its legitimate leader. All the most popular Drow fall in line and you assassinate the ones that rebel.
-You accept Lolth as your personal deity and purchase, out of pocket and without any involvement with the Crown, a Drow plantation. You use the profits to start throwing high-society parties. All the most popular Drow appreciate that you're a respectable member of society, and you assassinate the ones that disagree.
-You adopt a radical doctrine of the Lolthine religion where the rites are mostly predicated on kinky masochistic sex. You bribe and coerce her clergy or just entreat with Lolth directly to accept this cult as a heterodox sect. All the most popular Drow think this makes perfect sense and totally matches their aesthetics, and you assassinate the ones who remain austere.
-You adventure for a hallucinogenic mushroom with absurd aphrodisiac properties and train your slaves at the plantation to start culturing it. You continue to mistreat them but use the opportunity to start moving them towards self-management. All the most popular Drow are pleased with the new luxury good and you assassinate the ones who try to box you out of the market.
-You surreptitiously groom one of your slaves as an Adept of Lolth and offer the others initiation to your sex cult. You incentivize them by feeding the converts well enough that they have the stamina to last through twelve-hour orgies and refrain from lashing them unless they're tripping literal balls on your fuckshrooms and are gagging for it anyway. Then you start including them in your high-society gatherings. The most popular Drow are impressed by the versatility of a fuckslave who also contributes prayer-power to Lolth, and you assassinate the ones who are outraged.
-You liberate your plantation. You turn it over to free management and demonstrate that there are sufficient profits from the landholdings alone to still enjoy a very comfortable life. The most popular Drow begin moving their own plantations to your model and you publicly execute the ones who refuse right in the fucking middle of town square because, surprise! You're a cultural hero among the Drown and have ample social cache to compel this behavior via an act of state without reducing your Legitimacy.

Now the freedman population regards you with equal Legitimacy and you may levy leatherclad Pain Maidens from this domain along with the Spider Riders that you've been entitled to all this time.

This is an illustration of certain principles: before you undertake any kind of reform you need to choose the society that elevates you to Legitimacy and then you need to work around their social traits instead of clashing with them outright. Clearly, I don't condone coercive sex as a method of social change, but it's notable that you can have an Evil campaign where you're still working towards social harmony and securing the common wealth.

I also have some other notions about how you could play an ethnic-tensions minigame at the kingdom management level that I'm still writing notes on.

Anyway, the term "Dark Ages" is disliked by scholars, but it was adopted for a reason.

Tangential anecdote: That reason is because Virgil, a resident of the medieval ages, started reading Roman letters and was distraught at how comparatively shitty his own era was by contrast.

[Blicero]

Tangential anecdote: That reason is because Virgil, a resident of the medieval ages, started reading Roman letters and was distraught at how comparatively shitty his own era was by contrast.

You mean Petrarch. Virgil is the one from Devil May Cry.

[Omegonthesane]

...you recalled DMC Virgil and not Dante's Divine Comedy Virgil?

[Eikre]

Tangential anecdote: That reason is because Virgil, a resident of the medieval ages, started reading Roman letters and was distraught at how comparatively shitty his own era was by contrast.

You mean Petrarch. Virgil is the one from Devil May Cry.

I stand corrected.

[Mord]

[spoilertext]

That was beautiful. This is why I continue to lurk the Den. Thank you for reposting.

On the subject of Legitimacy amongst diverse governed populations and resolutions to ethnic tensions that may or may not involve drugged-up rough sex, I think one does actually have to engage with the issue lest one embrace the problematic default resolution. If you say "I'm not dealing with issues of ethnic tensions and coexistence within any of the governable territorial units in my game" you implicitly create either a world of homogeneous ethnic blocs that mutually displace each other when borders change (that has horrible and fairly obvious implications) or a world where there is no such thing as ethnicity (which is boring and may also have the same implications as the former).

I support every would-be Evil Overlord's option to ethnically cleanse territory added to their Undying Empire Of Only Goblin Skeletons, but this should be one option of many - and should rightfully be portrayed as one of the most evil and despicable points on that spectrum.

A framework for resolving ethnic group conflicts can also be used to resolve any other internal group conflicts among people under the same government, be those class-based or based on competition for scarce resources. Speaking of the Dragon of the Black Marsh as someone who will show up to help you if you are sufficiently Legitimate is fine, but trying to navigate the needs of the Black Marsh Wyrmkind to eat cattle against the needs of the neighboring Halfling ranchers to have their cattle uneaten is the kind of interesting problem that you don't capture by ordering that the Cattle Pasture (10k GP, 2 turns to build) be constructed in Floodplain Hex #423 (10 fertility, Halfling settlement 4).

...you recalled DMC Virgil and not Dante's Divine Comedy Virgil?

...you recalled Dante fanfiction Virgil and not Aeneid Virgil?

[tussock]

A lot of diverse empires existed in the history of our world. Lots of people clearly didn't give a crap what ethnicity their subjects were, nor what language they spoke, nor even whose ally they were a few days previous so long as they surrendered in good order when the conquering army turned up and cooperated with the new trade network.

And right next door, genocide also existed. Often against minority groups with special legal powers or comprising recently deposed rulers. Most of the genocides were religious, so the economic part of society didn't really care for it (duh), and the military part was always easily swayed to promises of free land over there.

Like, the Halfling ranchers, they can just sell their cattle to the Wyrmkind, who, freed of the need for and cost of raiding parties can go produce some peat for trade, maybe corner the marsh orchid market. If you want a realistic solution to the problem, that is how the real world worked. People who didn't trade would eventually turn up to a war with some sharp rocks and be swiftly eliminated.

As for non-domestic animals, that's what the king's monster preserves are for. Hunting without a licence carries extensive penalties and there's plenty of Rangers keeping an eye out for XP poachers.

[kjdavies]

Rare resources and Evil Wonders sounds like the most promising path to me. It might be a bit narrow, but I think you could make a reasonably good game where unpopular tyrants are generally at a disadvantage but can really shake things up if their pyramid and volcano base gives a monster bonus to blood hunting.

I am reminded of the 'Wiz' books by Rick Cook. The League of the North had good, responsible wizards, the Dark League had the other ones. The League of the North was losing ground because there were things they would not do, while the Dark League didn't work under those constraints.

A bit of the "as long as it does what I want, I don't care what else it does" attitude. Quite a bit, actually: the south was a ruined wasteland full of misbegotten magic and volcanoes... but also able to gain ground against the north because of their No Fucks Given approach, despite their infighting.

I can see this translating to a domain-oriented game.