Fallen City States of the Coastal Forests of Kaendor

[Yora]

Scarcity

The fundamental source of almost all conflicts is scarcity. Something is needed by mainy, but not available in the amounts that everyone wants. There are disagreements over who gets how much, and you have a conflict. Kaendor is for most intents and purposes a frontier setting, even though there isn't really much in the way of heartlands. In such settings it's often not about what people would like to have, but what they absolutely need to survive. This provides rooms for conflicts in which all sides can be reasonable and mean well, but stepping back to keep the peace is not an option either. Scarcity makes people do things they don't want to do and which they are not proud of. Scarcity also raises the stakes and urgency and makes people fight harder. All things that are great for building settings that are inherently prone to causing fights.

However, nailing down the main scarcities in a temperate forest setting isn't as easy and takes somr additional thought. The main concern that people always have is access to sufficient food and water. But beyond that, the big idea behind Kaendor is that people are permanently at danger of natural disasters caused by spirits. Keeping the spirits of the land happy and keeping their protection from monsters is the other primary concern.

So the first scarcity is farmland. Even though almost all land is forest, most of the land near the coast is pretty uneven rock with little soil above it. The only good places for grain fields are the lower valleys of major rivers. Since these are quite isolated from each other and barbarians are not interested in farming, having neighbours encroach on the borders and claiming land is not usually a problem. But once a city starts growing, all the possible farmland is pretty quickly claimed. The only way for farmers to get more land is to get it from other farmers.
I don't have any desires to make a big deal about land disputes, but this makes a good reason why various leaders of the community are hostile towards each other. It's a source of infighting that causes complications for other more dramatic things the players can be doing that regard their home settlement. And NPCs might do all kinds of things that cause trouble because of hostilities that started as fights over land.

The second scarcity is lifestock. While you can't get more fields to grow crops, you can get additional food by grazing goats and drohas in the hills of the forest. These can be really very valuable and you can never have enough of them, you always want more if you can somehow get them. And they have the wonderful drawback of being possible to kill and steal. This invites raiders and wild beasts to come from the wilderness and cause trouble for the settlement as they attempt to use the herders' resources for themselves. Herders also go outside the area that is explicity given to the people, which offers the potential to accidentally disturb spirits that then cause trouble for the settlement.

The usual way to keep spirits happy is through offerings. Which means the third scarcity is offerings to the spirits. Though here I am admitedly still very uncertain what thia could mean in practice. Spirits don't really need stuff, but I think what mostly matters to them is the attention and respect they gain when people give them things that they could really use very much themselves. It's the fact that people put their respect for the spirits above their own immediate needs and comfort that really matters. But offerings of crops and goats wouldn't actually add anything new here. To get a next harvest you have to keep some grains to put in the ground and some to give to the spirits that you can't eat yourself. And the spirits probably don't care for huge amounts of foodstuff. It's just a part of economics, not really a different scarcity.
Now with animals it can be a bit different. The specific individual to be offered can be selected long before the sacrifice. In the meantime it can be stolen, get lost, or fall victim to a disease, and it's impossible to get a replacement instead. If you can't get it ready for the scheduled time, the settlement is in huge trouble. And if you want to hurt your enemies, going for their sacred animal is a great option.

(Very much related to this, the fourth scarcity is relics. Relics are unique objects with a significant history that are used in rituals and kept in shrines as tribute to its spirits. Offering the spirits a new relic greatly increases their favor, but failure to properly guard them is a grave negligence of respect. Stealing relics from other settlements is probably not something players would commonly do. But claming a new one to increase the failing favor of a spirit or retrieving a stolen one to regain it are worthy heroic tasks. However, when an enemy is actively threatening their settlement, then stealing their relics is a great way to tip the scales in their own favor and it isn't like they are preying on innocents for their own gain.

There is also another scarcity, but I don't know what to do with it. The fifth scarcity is magical knowledge. Abandoned ruins oftenn contain lost pieces of knowledge and there are secret scrolls kept by priests and sorcerers, and there is also always the ancient knowledge possessed by spirits in the wilderness. All priests and sorcerers would want as much of it as they can get, and it could be useful to keeping their cities protected. And any resources that your enemies don't have makes them less of a threat to you, so there is a reason to keep it to yourself.
The problem is that you can't simply treat a scroll or tablet as just a piece of treasure. Then it would only be a MacGuffin, a thing that characters treat as super umportant but that doesn't actually do anything. But on the other hand, when you spell out clearly what it says and what it can be used for, you kind of have to use it and can't store it away for safekeeping. And I don't think you can use an important magical ritual more then one or two times, otherwise it wouldn't feel like a rare treasure but a plot device. Ancient scrolls don't really appear to be a good form of underlying scarcity for a setting.)