.jpg)
Open Query from Twitter: What social system makes sense in a magical world where monsters are very real? Because feudalism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nor do castles.
If monsters that cannot be defeated by non-magical means are so prevalent, feudalism arguably makes more sense, but it will be based on the strength of magic, not the ability to afford armor / horses.
If wizards are rare, expect lots of Wizard Kings. If they’re common, perhaps magical oligarchies or you end up with Merlin’s Pentagrammic Table instead of Arthur’s Round as foundational myth.
If magical puissance is not inherited, expect lines of succession through Apprentices to become common and then heavily formalized to prevent constant succession crises. If the gift of magic is randomly bestowed, this will also create more social mobility than was true in historical feudalism, but it will be largely driven by chance.
Castles can also make sense in this setting of constant dragon-scale threats. But expect the walls to be magically warded and the construction of vast underground vaults to which people can flee from aerial assaults.
Oh! Hey! We just got dungeons under the castle!
As population centers grow beyond the point where everyone can run into the castle protection, expect the city walls to be larger and more elaborate. The distinction between “inside the walls” and “outside the walls” will be more sharply defined.
Cities will be protected by powerful artifacts or ancient protective rites like the Dragonstaff of Ahghairon, which keeps dragons out of Waterdeep, will also be common if they are possible in this cosmology. Warfare may almost require sending in small strike teams (i.e. PCs) to sabotage these wards.
In the absence of such wards — or perhaps to accent them — expect the construction of “fallout shelters” in various places around the city. One can easily imagine these excavations breaking through into natural caverns, abandoned mineworks, or even ancient tunnels of similar purpose left by some elder civilization, and thus ultimately ending up tangled together into a maze which most likely also connects to the dungeons beneath the castle. (More disturbing would be the possibility of running into something digging up from the other direction.)
Despite all these preparations, expect that humans will fail to maintain sovereignty in many places. Dragon Kings and Abolethic Collectives and Demonic Hegemonies provide alternatives, not all of them necessarily dark lords.
City-states ruled over by demigods may also be common, or were common before the gods withdrew from this world in accordance with the terms of the Godspeace.
Speaking of which, expect the balance of power between Church and State to look very different, with divine magic the only counterbalancing power to the Wizard Kings. The result, though, would be heavily dependent on the nature of the contract between spellcasting clerics and their gods.
The origins of magical power are somewhat relevant here, but less than might be expected. Knights were standard humans who had extremely expensive equipment and large amounts of combat training, which could not be matched in practice by any plausible number of normal people. Still, even without special abilities they were totally dominant in any form of pitched battle, and the feudal system existed mostly to maximize the number of knights in practice. (Poor communications of the era and a desire to reward good servants also helped, of course)
If magic is similarly open to all in principle but expensive and difficult to master in practice, I’d expect feudalism to operate basically unchanged, with mages and knights both being typical roles for the petty nobility. Magical duels would exist alongside knightly jousts, and so on. The nobility de facto perpetuates its power by taking the excess economic resources of the land and using them to produce as many skilled warriors as possible, and passes that along to their children just like parents in the modern era will try to help their kids with tutors and paying off student loans. Once the skill differential between trained and untrained troops was reduced somewhat by guns, and once societies got wealthy enough for the relevant training and equipment to be had by people other than nobles, feudalism was on a constant retreat until its ultimate demise.
This doesn’t change your overall point. Castles are key to a mundane medieval setting, and magical castles would serve the same role in a magical setting. This could easily include underground defences in a way that real-world castles didn’t – the defensive advantages are obvious, and magic would make it far easier to create them.
The question of divine power also plays a huge role in the setting, of course. Because it’s a real and tangible expression of the natural order, in a way that RL lacks, it’s going to have knock-on effects in how people see the world. That’ll depend heavily on the details of the setting, though, and I can’t think of anything both generic and useful to say about it.
I’d play a campaign in that setting.
If magic isn’t hereditary I imagine a medieval(esque) world would see it as god-given and mages would use that as justification for all sorts of social privileges. I’d expect close ties between wizards and the church and a cultural devaluation of brawny might. If there’s no such thing as divine magic I could see wizards forming the core of the clergy.
As for the impact of monsters, I think people would try to ally with the biggest local beastie.
Intelligent dragons might buy into the idea of low-effort farmed food and even fight each other to protect their serfs and conquer more land. From there you can get an arms race with armoured dragons.
Less intelligent beasts could be effectively domesticated and even bred over long generations. Settlements might form alliances by breeding their respective monsters. Larger social organizations could revolve around villages with the same species of monsters. The towns could pay their feudal dues by providing the king with use of their monster or its pups. Towns themselves may be egalitarian.
Perhaps large scale politics are a matter of beast lords against dragon kings? Dragon dynasties vs monster confederations?
This is basically my world – Magi are not removed, misunderstood, feared or shunned but a respectable pillar of society with thousands of years of storied history. Taking the path of wizardry is akin to the profession of arms or taking the vows of clergy: an honorable and fitting vocation for gentleborn or wealthy children. In fact, since most institutions of higher learning are connected to great metropolitan centers of worship (similar to the Cathedral-Universities of the medieval world), wizard-magisters often hold some minor prebend in the religious hierarchy as well. However the power of magic has led to catastrophes and cataclysms in the past–so Wizards are restricted to a hierarchy apart, unable to hold a throne or major public office, or enter the battlefield in any conflict between princes or nations.
Even if there aren’t pre-existing caverns or construction under the city, it would make sense for the underground shelters to be connected by tunnels to form a network. Presto, instant dungeon! (Though you’d also want to rig the tunnels with deadfalls that can be triggered to seal off parts of the network in case it’s breached by invaders. Presto, rationale for traps in the dungeon!) Brings to mind how stations in the London Underground were used as bomb shelters during the Blitz.
Which raises another possibility; once you’ve built your underground network of emergency shelters, it’s only logical to use it as a way of traveling around the city. Though unless you have the means to build an actual rapid-transit system, it would be probably be restricted to couriers with official access, in order to prevent congestion. And maybe the thieves’ guild has discovered a way to bypass the wards and uses it as a covert means of getting around as well.
Addendum to the above: Of course, it needn’t be magical wards that regulate access to the tunnels; unless you have a very high-magic setting, it’s probably easier to just install locked gates. Makes it easier to contain intruders without permanently sealing the tunnels, and the thieves would just need to forge a copy of the passkey.
A world with monstrous sovereignty will have some very interesting royal marriages. Suddenly the prevalence of Tieflings and Dragonborn in the new editions makes a whole lot more sense. Taken to the furthest extreme you could end up with a world where a majority of noble families claim some sort of monstrous heritage as a source of prestige. Perhaps even replacing the real world claims of rule by divine right. Divine right is more complicated in D&D settings, where clerics can actually call up their gods to double check and dispute this claim. Monstrous or magical heritage is more intrinsic, hereditary and easier to fake if you have the right money or connections.
Though, my biggest question for fantasy world building isn’t about how the existence of magic and monsters in the world change how castles are built and how nobles rule. It’s how farms are run and protected. It could be done by villages paying tribute to some intelligent alpha-predator, like a young dragon or magical beast, to protect its territory from any threat greater than the mundane varmints and pack hunters that cause real world farmers trouble.
Though, what would make this protector any different from an actual lord? Well, lawmaking and enforcing justice I suppose. The creature in question would treasure food, gold, worship or knowledge. An occasional sacrifice for the evil ones, or perhaps all of the above. Most wouldn’t care about governing the residents of its territory (that would be work!) only their rivalries with other monsters. Feudal lords would have armies and deal with law and politics, occasionally dispatching adventurers to deal with creatures who grow too troublesome to the human population. Especially if the creature in question begins to think it might make a better sovereign that the current humanoid lords.
Well that was some fun brainstorm, I’d meant to just write that first sentence up there but it kept going. I’d better hit submit now.
Rob: I’ve heard it said that the Mafia got its start that way. Sicilian farms had a lot of bandit problems, so they hired people to watch their livestock and ensure it didn’t get stolen. They originally got their fearsome reputation because of how they’d punish the thieves they did catch(both because they were extralegal, and because they wanted to protect through intimidation).
No idea if it’s true, but it’s plausible, and for a setting like this that’s enough.
There are numerous literary examples of the strike team removing wards. During the Trojan War there were many small and a few such actions. Diomedes was charged by Athena to detect the gods Ares and Aphrodite who were aiding the Trojans and empowered by her to wound them and chace them from the battle. Also they Greeks had to fulfill several prophecies before troy could fall: capture a temple where the rituals kept Troy protected, find and wield the bow of Hercules, enlist the aid of Achilles son, and capture two relics including the Palladium which required Odysseus to sneak inside Troy and convince Helen to help him.
In India the Mahabharata and Ramayana both have similar stories where a team had to stop one enemy general (Indrajit) from performing a daily ritual that made him unbeatable. So they first convinced his uncle to switch sides and tell them where his secret temple was, and snuch inside to interrupt him before the ritual was finished.
There is Great potential for this sort of scene in a dnd game. Especially how many of them involve both combat and social actions.
I did two things: XP is tangible and the amount for each level doubles at every step.
This means: peasants produce a fixed amount of xp (as for a 1/2 CR creature). Nobles collect this XP when their peasants die of old age and buy levels, which they use to protect their peasants from monsters.
Fuedalism works out great in this system. A few high-level people are the best defense against monsters; a baron and his personal court magician, priest, and spy-master are the optimal ruling class. Through in a handful of low-ranks for support (and training for the next generation) and some 0th level soldiers for mundane tasks, and a good stone castle to hold off the mundane monsters like orcs, and feudalism fist in very naturally.
Because the average level is fairly low, Fighters predominate among the nobility: they are hard to kill but easy to qualify for, so there are more of them to start and more of them survive to higher ranks. You can have also mageocracies, where the best and brightest are elevated by state-owned XP, though theocracies are more common.
I even wrote a program (Sandbox World Generator) that creates kingdoms based off of this, with 4 layers of encounters: groups, states, regional overlords like werewolf lords, and domain overlords like dragons. It even creates occasional kingdoms ruled by monsters (monsters collect XP to either increase in size or reproduce).
It really works quite well.
Very coherent, intelligent thoughts of the day.
This is actually something I’ve thought about, and I’ve come to the conclusion that D&D actually almost inevitably produces a feudalistic society.
At its core, the feudal system was essentially a bargain whereby the peasantry supported the lord and his handful of men-at-arms so they could train in battle, and the lord and his retainers in turn defended the peasantry from bandits and other lords. Now, in D&D a single high-level character or monster can take on dozens or hundreds of low-level mooks and win, forcing a situation where power rests in the hands of a relatively small elite. Low-level NPCs submit to powerful PCs because they are the only ones who can fight powerful monsters and have a chance of survival, and the personal allegiance of adventurers becomes the determiner of political power. And suddenly you have a situation very similar to the Middle Ages, where kings tentatively rule a network of nobles, each of whom is a power in their own right, through a constantly shifting matrix of personal alliances, incentives, and counterbalances.
There are two interlinked questions here: first, how does human civilization adapt to not being the apex predator in its ecosystem, and second, how does the existence of levels and classes affect human society? Answering the first depends a lot on the nature of the other predators in the ecosystem, as well as their goals and intelligence. Are dragons just akin to natural disasters? Does the illithid empire rule over human lands by proxy? Do trolls present a constant, omnipresent threat in the wilderness?
“The castles will be bigger, and stronger” is an answer that presumes that the threat posed is no different than a sieging army, and can be beaten by the same method–outlasting it. But if the problem is “the trolls have shown up, have eaten all the crops, and are building dens in the countryside,” then eventually you’re just going to run out of food. A bigger castle doesn’t solve that problem. Instead, herding may predominate over farming, and thus completely change the social structure. There are no castles and no fiefs, but tribes that move according to where the grazing is best and the trolls are least numerous.
Whether levels comport with feudalism is likewise an interesting question. Feudalism is in some ways an artifact of a low-bureaucracy, low-coinage society, where all ties are personal and most debts are paid in labor and service rather than money. How classes factor in depends on what classes we’re talking about, and how they’re balanced. If we’re in a land of linear warriors and quadratic wizards, then we should–as you say–expect a lot of wizards very close to the center of power. But that’s as compatible with a Roman Empire where wizard=patrician as it is with a feudal patchwork where wizard=local lord.
Instead, the existence of levels seems to most closely bear on the question of military tactics. If an entire squad of knights can get stomped by a single wizard, there’s no real point in investing that much in arms, armor, and training (it’s hard to overstate how much productive capacity a single knight’s training, armor, and horses ate up). We’d expect to see more fighters without much in the way of capital investment; any fighters walking around with plate likely are the personal retainers of a wizard.
ANYWAYS. It’s an interesting question! These questions don’t have a single set answer; rather, they offer the opportunity for novel worldbuilding!