D&D Nationalism
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D&D Nationalism
If you have nationalism to be the dominant political philosophy in a D&D campaign setting, as opposed to the more typical feudal murderocracy, how metropolitan are these nations likely to be? What other elements need to be accounted for and included to foster the atmosphere for the patriotic spirit to take hold?
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The idea of nation-states is said to have some argued origin you can find out about here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_sta ... nd_origins
Pretty much instead of Iron Age rules you have the buds of imperialism, colonialism, and gorgeous prussian military uniforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_sta ... nd_origins
Pretty much instead of Iron Age rules you have the buds of imperialism, colonialism, and gorgeous prussian military uniforms.
love of your country?
the question is, do you have wars? what are they over? is it only land disputes as all wars have always been?
have a strong culture and then the rest should fall into place.
are you looking for world design ideas, or from a player standpoint of how to use it, or how to GET players to use it as a DM?
the question is, do you have wars? what are they over? is it only land disputes as all wars have always been?
have a strong culture and then the rest should fall into place.
are you looking for world design ideas, or from a player standpoint of how to use it, or how to GET players to use it as a DM?
Play the game, not the rules.
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Well, firstly, I don't think that nationalism would get very far until the local power structures are torn down. While there have been examples of countries that went hardline nationalist while still keeping the previous social and political hierarchies intact, it's much more common for the old regime to oppose and subsequently get torn down by a nationalist reorganization. For every Japan you get a France and an Italy.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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You also get halfways like england. Where the structure is torn down, but the figure head remains.Lago PARANOIA wrote:Well, firstly, I don't think that nationalism would get very far until the local power structures are torn down. While there have been examples of countries that went hardline nationalist while still keeping the previous social and political hierarchies intact, it's much more common for the old regime to oppose and subsequently get torn down by a nationalist reorganization. For every Japan you get a France and an Italy.
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It's difficult for modern people to even imagine life without the nation state, because that particular meme has so thoroughly taken over the planet that no one has seriously proposed an alternate way of doing things for nearly a hundred years. World War 1 saw the ultimate triumph of the nation state over the feudally owned region, and there hasn't been a serious proposal of what it could be replaced with since then. Even the Communist "international states" and North American "melting pot states" were simply built on the nation state template with "multiple ethnicities, common cultural ideals" written in for the "nation" they were to represent.
But it's also important to note that nation states or even proto-nation states are deeply anachronistic for any time period that D&D would normally be expected to be similar to. Really, there should just be variable densities of different tribes across areas and individual families, temples, and corporations should own various chunks of territory and thus have whatever tribes of people that happens to end them up with.
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But it's also important to note that nation states or even proto-nation states are deeply anachronistic for any time period that D&D would normally be expected to be similar to. Really, there should just be variable densities of different tribes across areas and individual families, temples, and corporations should own various chunks of territory and thus have whatever tribes of people that happens to end them up with.
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I can see nationalism existing in cases where the different nations are actually different species. "This is Elf land, this has always been Elf land, and you humans can fuck off out of it" is qualitatively no different from "this is Hungarian land, this has always been Hungarian land, and you Slovaks can fuck off out of it." Frank's point is a good one when it comes to nationalism within a species, but we've been doing it between different species a lot longer: witness all the Neanderthals that we homo sapiens wiped out way back in the day.
One of the most important tenets of romantic nationalism, as opposed to nationalism generally, is the identification of an ethnic group, a specific piece of geography and a mythos. This was often a bit of a stretch: look at American notions of "manifest destiny" or the concepts of "Greater Finland" and "Greater Israel" for examples where territory was claimed that was not populated by the ethnic group in question, and indeed had never been populated by them; or the case of the Afrikaners in the late 19th century where their mythos was cobbled together from Biblical, European, African and American sources to form a semi-cohesive myth of national self.
So in D&D land, you might get a community of Dwarves who live in a big city and send money home annually in order to help fund the ethnic cleansing of the Elves from the Western White Mountains, even though those Dwarves have never been to the Western White Mountains and never intend to go there, and indeed there aren't many Dwarves living there and never will be. It's enough that they can point at it on the map and say "this area belongs to us because we say it does, and has always belonged to us because like most people, we rewrite the past to serve the needs of the present."
One of the most important tenets of romantic nationalism, as opposed to nationalism generally, is the identification of an ethnic group, a specific piece of geography and a mythos. This was often a bit of a stretch: look at American notions of "manifest destiny" or the concepts of "Greater Finland" and "Greater Israel" for examples where territory was claimed that was not populated by the ethnic group in question, and indeed had never been populated by them; or the case of the Afrikaners in the late 19th century where their mythos was cobbled together from Biblical, European, African and American sources to form a semi-cohesive myth of national self.
So in D&D land, you might get a community of Dwarves who live in a big city and send money home annually in order to help fund the ethnic cleansing of the Elves from the Western White Mountains, even though those Dwarves have never been to the Western White Mountains and never intend to go there, and indeed there aren't many Dwarves living there and never will be. It's enough that they can point at it on the map and say "this area belongs to us because we say it does, and has always belonged to us because like most people, we rewrite the past to serve the needs of the present."
Last edited by Laertes on Sun Jun 08, 2014 8:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Well, what you're describing is simple tribalism. And while I agree that if people from different tribes were literally different species rather than just people wearing different hats, that you might see a lot more tribalism - that isn't the same thing as nationalism in the modern sense. Athens managed to rally its people behind a lot of wars based on the idea that such and such a group of people were "basically Greeks" while their opponents were not. Splitting the world into completely arbitrary in-groups and out-groups is something that people do and have done for longer than records have been kept.
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...and in the same way you can have a Dwarf saying, "Hey, we need to unite the Dwarven peoples, but not include those guys over there because they're Gnomes and fuck Gnomes."FrankTrollman wrote:Well, what you're describing is simple tribalism. And while I agree that if people from different tribes were literally different species rather than just people wearing different hats, that you might see a lot more tribalism - that isn't the same thing as nationalism in the modern sense. Athens managed to rally its people behind a lot of wars based on the idea that such and such a group of people were "basically Greeks" while their opponents were not. Splitting the world into completely arbitrary in-groups and out-groups is something that people do and have done for longer than records have been kept.
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What you can't have, sadly, is issues like the "Are Czechs German or Slavic?" debate which happened in the 1840s during the Liberal Revolution, or the "Are Russians asian or European?" debate in Russia in the 1900s. Being a Slav or a Greek or whatever is a very fuzzy thing, whereas being an Elf is cut-and-dried.
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You could do it, but it would require a national mythos, which is somewhat scarce in fantasy. For example, in Tir na nOg in Shadowrun, humans were assumed to be the lowest level of the Elven spiritual cycle, who could eventually reincarnate into elves. It's not a great basis for a national ethos, but it lets them both consider the other Irish.
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Hrm? D&D, controlling for the Law of Conservation of Detail, has a lot of mythology in it that you could organize and a government or ethos around. The obstacle for nationalism is that these animating impulses encourage tribalism or more rarely a proto-humanism (for the lack of a better word). Pelor encourages charity and the butt-kicking of evil without regards to tribe or ethnicity -- which is dicey in a world with races that are uniformly evil, but it's there. If a reformed mind-flayer or beholder became Bahamut's number two (or even if such evil races completely replaced the upper command structure) people would find it unusual but not threatening to the doctrine. By contrast, Gruumsh's theology instigates a tribal blood oath. So does Tiamat. Yolanda doesn't directly encourage halfling supremacy but her religion shows an inordinate fondness towards it.
If you want nationalism to flourish then you not only need to do something about the mythologies that encourage various tribal impulses but you also need to do something about the mythologies that encourage universalism and ecumenicalism. Your goal is to bring about a very specific level of organizational anachronism, in other words.
If you want nationalism to flourish then you not only need to do something about the mythologies that encourage various tribal impulses but you also need to do something about the mythologies that encourage universalism and ecumenicalism. Your goal is to bring about a very specific level of organizational anachronism, in other words.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Well, you can have a lot of discussion of whether the Drow belong in Elflandia or not. Heck, the Kleindwarfen/Großdwarfen arguments are going to be intense. All the Hill Dwarf majority regions "clearly" belong in Dwarfia. But what about areas where the majority is only Dwarven if you include Mountain Dwarves? Or Deep Dwarves? Duergar? Derro? There's a polity with a Durzagon leader, is that Dwarven? What about the non-Dwarf but Dwarf-like races? Does it make sense for Dwarfland to try to annex Azer or Fire Giant baronies?
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This leads us to possibly the best party concept of all time: a small group of Elven scholars travelling around between the various Elven folk, recording their folk tales and songs, developing a unified national culture and a unified dictionary of the language.
Or, riffing off Frank's idea, a group of Dwarves travelling around Azer-populated areas, distributing pamphlets and sanctimoniously trying to teach them "proper Dwarven culture" rather than the "degenerated form they now practise."
Or, riffing off Frank's idea, a group of Dwarves travelling around Azer-populated areas, distributing pamphlets and sanctimoniously trying to teach them "proper Dwarven culture" rather than the "degenerated form they now practise."
Last edited by Laertes on Sun Jun 08, 2014 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Yes... best party concept of all time.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Pretty sure current theory on Homosapien v Neanderthal falls in line with disappearance via breeding. Neanderthals settled Europe before Homosapien and when Homosapien came along they started to mingle and interbreed. This allowed the newcomers, homosapiens, to pick up survival traits, disease resistance, from the neanderthals.
Back to nationalism.
What about the Roman empire. From how I understand it they had a pretty ingrained national pride. Or were they just largely considered an occupying force their whole reign?
Back to nationalism.
What about the Roman empire. From how I understand it they had a pretty ingrained national pride. Or were they just largely considered an occupying force their whole reign?
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Roman Empire is complicated. In the beginning, Rome didn't have much of a national or ethnic identity because they were the literal scum of the region who accepted everyone in a multiethnic stewpot (up to and including the rape of the Sabines). Let that percolate for a while and they did develop an ethnic identity, although it was somewhat complicated because there were old tribal and gens divisions internally. But even then, the people living in Rome considered themselves more Romans than any of the bastards out in the colonies. When the Romans conquered, they did try to impress some of their culture - and it worked, in places, to a degree - but by and large they were the conquerors and were ethnic blending happened. It still wasn't a nation state as we think of it today: remember, the Byzantines didn't give much of a fuck about the Western Empire when the barbarians came, even though they used the excuse of being "Romans" to keep some influence on the Italian peninsula for centuries.
Does nationalism not count if it has to compete with other identity loyalties or something (bringing to question places like Texas)?Ancient History wrote:Let that percolate for a while and they did develop an ethnic identity, although it was somewhat complicated because there were old tribal and gens divisions internally. But even then, the people living in Rome considered themselves more Romans than any of the bastards out in the colonies.
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I don't see much nationalism in D&D. D&D isn't medieval europe, because it's not about who can raise armies, it's about who is the biggest baddest superhero. The common people are living in effectively a tyranny. It can be a benevolent tyrant, but nonetheless, the common people don't get a hell of a lot of say in what goes on. If Elminster wants to burn their farms down and kill them, he can and nobody is going to stop him.
There's just not a hell of a lot of incentive for a nationalistic ideal where people are encouraged to do their part to help nation X defeat nation Y. Largely the common man just puts his faith in superheroes, and if Superman and Wonder Woman fail to save their city, they're basically hosed. And people put their faith behind those heroes/kings/whatever. Often times you may see heroes not rule directly, because they prefer to leave the bureaucracy to other people better at it. But nobody really questions that Superman isn't the real power in the region.
So the end result is most people don't particularly care about changes in small time rulers. They just care about whether the superhero types rise or fall.
There's just not a hell of a lot of incentive for a nationalistic ideal where people are encouraged to do their part to help nation X defeat nation Y. Largely the common man just puts his faith in superheroes, and if Superman and Wonder Woman fail to save their city, they're basically hosed. And people put their faith behind those heroes/kings/whatever. Often times you may see heroes not rule directly, because they prefer to leave the bureaucracy to other people better at it. But nobody really questions that Superman isn't the real power in the region.
So the end result is most people don't particularly care about changes in small time rulers. They just care about whether the superhero types rise or fall.
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Well, the United States is an interesting thing because whatever your ethnicity, there is a distinct American identity which is separate and all-inclusive beyond ethnic concerns. That said, the individual states have not generally had a strong national identity since the Civil War; Texas is sort of the exception, because it has retained a sort of internal mythos of independence (where places like Vermont have not). Texas has that, but it's not anywhere near as unified or universal as the idea of being American. The closest comparison I could draw to American nationalism in that respect would be how peoples in Europe would declare themselves Christian (and later, Protestant or Catholic) as an umbrella term which could unite Frank and Swiss, Austrian and English. (cf. American secular religion.)virgil wrote:Does nationalism not count if it has to compete with other identity loyalties or something (bringing to question places like Texas)?Ancient History wrote:Let that percolate for a while and they did develop an ethnic identity, although it was somewhat complicated because there were old tribal and gens divisions internally. But even then, the people living in Rome considered themselves more Romans than any of the bastards out in the colonies.
But not everybody in Texas thinks of themselves as Texans (or Texicans, or Tejans) first, Americans second-or-optional. Nor do many people these days think of themselves in terms of their state as their native country in the same terms as a nation state.
I think the best way to illustrate how weird and recent nationalism is would be to look at Italy - which even during the height of the Roman Empire had profound regional differences which become pronounced ethnicities. No one really thought of themselves as Italian in the sense of nationality until rather quite late in the game, and most of Italy was divided into city-states and competing kingdoms right through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It's probably a truism that in addition to a national mythos, for a national identity to coalesce you really do need a very strong centralization of power that comes with an empire or absolute monarchy, and the Italians just didn't have that. Consider again Belgium, which is split between two populations that have so far strongly resisted a joint national identity.
Counterargument: the Spring of Nations (or, if you're German, the Liberal Revolution.) If that isn't nationalist then nationalism has no meaning; and it was most definitely not steered by any centralised power (hell, the kings were mostly terrified of it) and the boundaries of the nationalist polities did not adhere to any existing empires. Hell, the Poles were split between two empires and the Romanians between three, and they still kept a national identity and a myth of self.Ancient History wrote:It's probably a truism that in addition to a national mythos, for a national identity to coalesce you really do need a very strong centralization of power that comes with an empire or absolute monarchy, and the Italians just didn't have that.
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One thing that D&D people have as a "shared national experience" that people in Earth's history do not have... is Dark Lords. That works on two levels. The first is that the area conquered by the Necromancer Shaltigor have a shared experience of what it was like to be forced to dig up their relatives for skeletons for the Dark Legion. But when groups of free people ally themselves to stop Shaltigor, they have a shared history of integration during the conflict.
Think of it like the unification of Germany. The first one, under Bismarck. Once the region's Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Giant Eagles, and whatever else band together to defeat Shaltigor, they're going to integrate their economies and war efforts and create a shared bureaucracy and defer to common central leadership... and that sounds suspiciously like the creation of a functioning multi-ethnic state. If the war with Shaltigor goes on long enough and is big enough in scope, the opposing "alliance" will actually be a "country" by the time the conflict has ended.
If the anti-Shaltigor Alliance doesn't disband itself, it will simply persist. After all, what we know from Earth's history is that the nation state is the most powerful meme we know of, able to conquer almost every corner of the world (Saudi Arabia being the only counter example I can think of off the top of my head, and that's a very special case and unlikely to successfully spread its meme anywhere). Once cities start flying the Anti-Shaltigor Alliance flag, I don't know that there's really anything that can take it down save for another memetic state.
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Think of it like the unification of Germany. The first one, under Bismarck. Once the region's Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Giant Eagles, and whatever else band together to defeat Shaltigor, they're going to integrate their economies and war efforts and create a shared bureaucracy and defer to common central leadership... and that sounds suspiciously like the creation of a functioning multi-ethnic state. If the war with Shaltigor goes on long enough and is big enough in scope, the opposing "alliance" will actually be a "country" by the time the conflict has ended.
If the anti-Shaltigor Alliance doesn't disband itself, it will simply persist. After all, what we know from Earth's history is that the nation state is the most powerful meme we know of, able to conquer almost every corner of the world (Saudi Arabia being the only counter example I can think of off the top of my head, and that's a very special case and unlikely to successfully spread its meme anywhere). Once cities start flying the Anti-Shaltigor Alliance flag, I don't know that there's really anything that can take it down save for another memetic state.
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It's a beautiful vision and I endorse it, but I wouldn't say it's a universal thing. After all, you don't live in the Warsaw Pact or the state of Czechoslovakia, do you? These things don't just fail because of other states rising, they also fail because people start to say you know those guys over there? Yeah, them. I don't actually want to be in the same clade as them. Let's have our own country instead, with beer and hookers.FrankTrollman wrote:Once cities start flying the Anti-Shaltigor Alliance flag, I don't know that there's really anything that can take it down save for another memetic state.
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