01-18-2021, 07:11 PM | #671 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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01-19-2021, 10:22 AM | #672 | ||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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The biggest issues I'm going to see in this is the manipulation of the sample population the answers come from. Its going to end up as this weird circular thing that ties itself in knots as the public opinion on public opinion starts to matter. The corruption of the whole thing will also be interesting to gauge.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
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02-16-2021, 09:49 AM | #673 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
Here's one that is a modification of a couple ideas that I thought of earlier.
Each citizen has one electoral vote, and seven legislative votes. The first decides who will actually serve on the legislature. The others are distributed to the various representatives the voter prefers. They remain with that representative until they are withdrawn and either given to another representative or declared to be in reserve.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
02-17-2021, 06:26 AM | #674 |
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
I'm running a DFRPG adventure (and hopefully extended campaign) in a setting where a populist rebellion about 150 years ago forcibly united a more traditional fantasy band of principalities.
They overthrew the landed gentry and aristocracy, as well as crushing non-human tribal resistance and assimilating everything into a racial melting-pot and meritocracy simply called The Union. Now there are two legislative chambers in the capital: the Chamber of Tribunes (local syndics and tribal leaders, nominally geographic) plus the Chamber of Guilds (tradesmen and nominally meritocratic) - both on rotating memberships. At the top is the Sovereign Council, also rotating, with a strong sense of rule by committee without the appearance of any single member as dominant or indispensable. Behind (or more specifically, underground below) the corridors of politics, a powerful lich sets most policy through a covert police. The lich is primarily concerned with magical advancement of the art, and sees the establishment of a utilitarian mercantile state as important to its goals. Its covert police have a mission primarily to keep the Sovereign Council in line, the tribunes and syndics weak enough so the aristocracy never reforms (meaning "never recovers from its dissolution"), and the guilds loyal and orderly. Last edited by SolemnGolem; 02-21-2021 at 10:25 AM. Reason: Edit: clarified meaning of "reforms" |
02-21-2021, 07:05 AM | #675 | |
Join Date: Jul 2005
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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They should have the protection either of a god who wants the truth brought to the surface or some innate protection (Luck and Magic Resistance perhaps) that means neither mundane nor magical attempts to rein them in work. EDITED TO ADD: And, of course, the noble young reformer should not have the slightest clue that they are anything special. The gods choose who they love but they don't always bother to tell the beloved how they feel.
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Michael Cule,
Genius for Hire, Gaming Dinosaur Second Class Last edited by Michael Cule; 02-21-2021 at 08:04 AM. |
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02-21-2021, 10:40 AM | #676 | ||
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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The lich is also very old - over a millennium in existence - and so it's had plenty of time to observe societies and dynasties around it. One possible intriguing plot hook is: not only is the Union its prized social-engineering project, but it's merely the latest such project. (The lich has been around for centuries longer than the mere 150 years of the Union.) Which brings up the interesting question of: "what was the lich doing before this latest experiment, and how did those turn out?" [Lich's notes: "Have completed preparations for departure, including removal of identifying features from all left-behind records. Note to self: have somebody go to Ozymandias statue and remove reference there before fleeing."] |
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02-21-2021, 04:18 PM | #677 | |
Join Date: Jul 2005
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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Just because the gods are no longer worshipped doesn't mean they aren't there. And can't reach down and bless someone who acts in a way they count as 'virtuous'. I think what I'm asking is: Are you going for a godless universe or a god-ignorant society? I can see the lich going to a great deal of trouble to set the second one up.
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Michael Cule,
Genius for Hire, Gaming Dinosaur Second Class |
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02-21-2021, 04:54 PM | #678 |
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: The Hall of Fallen Columns
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
I'm still working on that aspect of it, but I want deities (if they even exist) to be "superpowered beings understandable to mortals and which mortals can aspire to be". So any gods that exist, could have germinated from some proto-state as a mortal which then transcended into apotheosis.
The lich overthrew the various powerful tribes in this realm, burning their temples and burying their faiths - which also resulted in the deaths of their religions and the gods themselves fading away. Whether a god can truly die or not may be open to debate, but I favor the option presented in GURPS Fantasy (or maybe Discworld, I can't recall which one) which implies that when their last worshippers die, the gods are reduced to just a sighing whisper in the wind that may try to persuade madmen and hermits to believe in them once again. One of my PCs wants to be a half elf who worships an elven deity, which I'm allowing on the understanding that he has to hide his faith and practices from the Union, since it will at the very least want to put him under observation and containment. (Imagine if radioactive people walked the earth in 1870 and were apparently purged - and then in 2021 the governments discovered another one was spontaneously walking around. Even assuming the gov't has no personal animosity against the outlier, its very likely response would mean imprisonment and curtailing freedoms.) One secret, end-of-campaign, über-powered final mission would be for the PCs to uncover an accidental case of theogenesis, where the lich's mumbo-jumbo fake-religious propaganda accidentally created a death tulpa god (in D&D terms, an Atropal Scion) and it started granting certain prayers addressed to it. The lich is equal parts intrigued and deeply concerned about this, and is both containing it zealously in an extraplanar dungeon, while also studying its habits. If the lich can complete its studies, then it can unlock the secrets of apotheosis - with potentially questionable concerns about how it intends to use this power. Healing stuff would indeed need a workaround, since healing spells are usually the realm of faiths and clerical magic in DFRPG and That Other Dungeon Crawl RPG. In my Gothic horror campaign I replicated this with a faith that claims falsely to heal people, but its magic is actually only able to "wound Peter to heal Paul" so to speak. Maybe something similar could be the case for my DFRPG-adapted setting. Priests could channel human sacrifices (or perhaps sacrifice their own blood and suffering) in order to provide modest healing for supplicants. |
02-23-2021, 12:02 AM | #679 |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
Imagine a republic (loosely defined) emerging from a beginning a little like the Roman Republic, but in a Western cultural pattern.
The founders of the state were all males and heads of extrended families, and they designed the state's constitution partly around a concept a bit like the early-Roman 'gens'. The mature Republic has a three-chamber legislature: 1. The popular chamber is elected by the general public along traditional Western lines, i.e. the U.S. House of Representatives or the House of Commons. 2. This chamber is made up of appointed members, along the lines of the UK House of Lords (life peers) or the Canadian Senate. If the Republic is federal in nature, this chamber might instead or also be made up of representatives of the federal components, like the original form of the U.S. Senate. The existence of the second house might be optional, there might be no second house unless a specific purpose for it existed. 3. This is the exotic chamber. Each of the founders of the state also founded a 'gens', the blood-line descendants (presumably patrilineal but other arrangements could exist), and all the direct descendants make up that gens. The head (laird, chief, whatever) of the gens/clan sits in the third house and casts the vote for his gens. The headship might be transmitted by primogeniture, but it might possibly more likely go to the oldest member of the gens. Either way, it's passed down within the family. The head of state has to be chosen from among the heads of the clans in the third house, though most likely with the approval of the two lower chambers. Where it gets really complicated and exotic is that the voting power of a clan head depends on the size of his clan. So if Clan A, descended from Founder A, has twenty million people, and Clan B descended from Founder B has 90 million, the clan head B has 9 votes (say) to Clan head A's 2 votes. Or something along those lines, the bigger the clan, the more voting power in the third house. Which in turn means that rules about who qualifies as being part of what 'gens' are absolutely critical! For ex, can you be 'adopted' into a gens? If so, that gives the great clans a huge incentive to adopt new members. If a member of clan A marries a member of Clan B, which Clan are they part of, and which Clan are their kids part of? I suspect that marriage rules would require that inter-clan marriage means that one of the spouses leaves their native clan to join the other. This could work several ways. It could be that the couple chooses which clan, or maybe the wife always joins the husband's clan, or vice versa. This rule would have a huge effect on the popularity of inter-clan marriage. For ex, say the wife leaves the native clan to joint the husband's clan, and the kids belong to the father's clan. In that case, small clans have a vested interest in their males marrying out, but in their women marrying within the clan. Big clans have the same interest but with far less intensity. OTOH, if a couple chooses which Clan they are part of, then Clans might compete to be the 'preferred' clan, while individual families might put tremendous pressure on their young people to only marry out-clan if they can find a mate that will join their native clan. The permutations are almost endless. What is the clan-status of 'illegitimate' offspring? What does divorce do in inter-clan marriages? Is there any acknowledged divorce? It also means that there's a strong political pressure toward big families, since the bigger the clan, the more voting power in the third house. There might be all sorts of official and unofficial incentives toward large families. Political parties of the traditional sort might well exist in the first house, with the traditional franchise, and might cut across Clan lines, since it would be elected 'normally'. The third house might have parties within the clans, but would seem to serve little function across Clan lines for the third house. There would probably be some legal (and probably more unofficial) powers of the elders of the Clan over the general membership. Exactly what those would be could vary, and would have a significant effect on how the whole system operated.
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02-23-2021, 02:30 AM | #680 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
Traditional rules for which clan the couple counts as and what happens at divorce with the kids clan etc. But pre-nuptial contracts can change that. Maybe with the head of clan approval which is one of their powers.
Is everyone in a clan or are their people that are not represented in the third house? If so their Romeo/Juliet story is about a couple that runs off to be together and pretends to be clanless. |
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