Random Worldbuilding Questions (Biology, Geography, Society, etc.)

[Admiral Squish]

So, has anyone ever made a world from the ground up? Like, literally. Start with geology, then geography, then natural history, then humanoid prehistory, then early history, then eventually 'modern' times.

Magic dinosaurs? AWESOME.

[Jacob.Tyr]

So, has anyone ever made a world from the ground up? Like, literally. Start with geology, then geography, then natural history, then humanoid prehistory, then early history, then eventually 'modern' times.

Magic dinosaurs? AWESOME.

There's a game for that and I've always wanted to use it as the basis for a campaign world. Have the players start out as gods and shape the world, then make set a campaign in that world afterwards. http://www.clanwebsite.org/games/rpg...e_1_0Final.pdf

[Admiral Squish]

There's a game for that and I've always wanted to use it as the basis for a campaign world. Have the players start out as gods and shape the world, then make set a campaign in that world afterwards. http://www.clanwebsite.org/games/rpg...e_1_0Final.pdf

Hmm. Interesting, but not quite what I meant.

I'm talking about creating a fantasy world with the maximum degree of realism in terms of the world itself. Realistic geological formations, realistic cultural interaction, realistic (albeit magical) flora and fauna, and such.

[Ormur]

So, has anyone ever made a world from the ground up? Like, literally. Start with geology, then geography, then natural history, then humanoid prehistory, then early history, then eventually 'modern' times.

Magic dinosaurs? AWESOME.

That's what I aim for in world building but I can't say I go through the whole of natural history.

My first setting was just a continent but thought about tectonics, latitude and oceanic currents before drawing the map and let the geography dictate the climate. Then I skipped to the history of humanoid populations and how it interacted with the geography to produce the political situation and culture of the continent.

Now I'm trying that approach with a whole planet.

[Conners]

On the subject, anyone know of any other good resources for world building? I know of this one, which is pretty good: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-...ing-questions/



For another topic: Have been thinking of how much a space economy might suck, lately. If you live on the colony world, first you need to adjust yourselves or the planet to try and get it to a decent level of liveability. Even when you get things survivable... how do you play a part of a inter planetary economy, realistically?

To elaborate... first we should assume that space travel - even if it improves to the extent where we can reach other planets in less than a decade - is likely to be very expensive. If we continue with that assumption... any form of trade between planets becomes far less economically favourable than trade within one system.

Relying on other planets for agricultural needs would, therefore, get prohibitively expensive from the logistics. If it was necessary to transport food, this would be prohibitive on expansion into space in general. Unless the colonies have something worth exporting, then no one is going to bother trading with them, making industrialization of the planet difficult, and causing poverty of colonies to be the norm--perhaps even to terrifying degrees.
Outsourcing labour to such places might be worth while, but the goods would have to be worth the required transport to richer planets.

The way around this is if outlying planets do have something people want, like unobtainium. This would also be the main drive for exploring/colonizing space. The only other method I see would be if space travel was oddly convenient/easy, which is hard to justify.

Stuff like being able to shrink food and preserve it forever would also make trade journeys more applicable, with "harvests" involving enormously ridiculous amounts of food being taken from planets, every decade or so. But of course, this'd make the price of food plummet. Unless they totally outsources food manufacture to colonies, this development wouldn't change the wealth. Heck, even if they outsource food production, the colonies might might still get shafted, considering the way things normally work.


Anyone else put some thought into this subject?

[Storm Bringer]

On the subject, anyone know of any other good resources for world building? I know of this one, which is pretty good: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-...ing-questions/



For another topic: Have been thinking of how much a space economy might suck, lately. If you live on the colony world, first you need to adjust yourselves or the planet to try and get it to a decent level of liveability. Even when you get things survivable... how do you play a part of a inter planetary economy, realistically?

To elaborate... first we should assume that space travel - even if it improves to the extent where we can reach other planets in less than a decade - is likely to be very expensive. If we continue with that assumption... any form of trade between planets becomes far less economically favourable than trade within one system.

Relying on other planets for agricultural needs would, therefore, get prohibitively expensive from the logistics. If it was necessary to transport food, this would be prohibitive on expansion into space in general. Unless the colonies have something worth exporting, then no one is going to bother trading with them, making industrialization of the planet difficult, and causing poverty of colonies to be the norm--perhaps even to terrifying degrees.
Outsourcing labour to such places might be worth while, but the goods would have to be worth the required transport to richer planets.

The way around this is if outlying planets do have something people want, like unobtainium. This would also be the main drive for exploring/colonizing space. The only other method I see would be if space travel was oddly convenient/easy, which is hard to justify.

Stuff like being able to shrink food and preserve it forever would also make trade journeys more applicable, with "harvests" involving enormously ridiculous amounts of food being taken from planets, every decade or so. But of course, this'd make the price of food plummet. Unless they totally outsources food manufacture to colonies, this development wouldn't change the wealth. Heck, even if they outsource food production, the colonies might might still get shafted, considering the way things normally work.


Anyone else put some thought into this subject?

the short answer is your right. without something very expensive and desireable to drive the colony effort, then the costs of doing so are too much to justify. creating a self substaining colony on another planet would be a MASSIVE undertaking, far beyond anything ever attempted in real life in terms of scale and commitment.

lets take a look at history:

the european efforts to explore and colonize the world were, at the start, driven mainly by a desire for certian luxury goods, namely spices and sliks, which were produced in the Far East, and were traded in small amounts overland via the Silk Road, with a fantastic markup (on the order of a 1,000% the price in china). These explorers were looking for a direct route to the spice and slik, so they could then trade it back in europe at european prices and make a LOT of money. Christopher Colombas went west looking for the east coast of china (he knew the earth was round, but it screwed up it's size and thought that china was roughly were america is. he thought he was in indonesia, hence, why the islands he landed on are still called the West Indies)

once they landed and discovered goods worth exporting (coffee, spices, peppers, gold, slaves, whatever) it was those goods that drove the colonisation of the new lands. it took a LONG time before these colonies were self suffcient, on the order of 100 years, i'd say.


thus, any extra-planetary colony is going to need:

1) a rescouce with enough value to make a colony effort with a budget the size of the U.S goverments a profitable venture. this good needs to be available to exploit in an industrial scale.

2) that the rescouce is something that cannot be created on earth. this means that it's either an mineral or element that doesn't occur on earth, or some form of life that is impossiable to transplant.

3) the valueable good continues to have it's high value long enough for the colony to grow and establish its roots and become self substianing (ie grows it's own food, collects it's own raw materials, and makes it;s own manufactured goods at a cheaper cost than importing them form earth costs)


in short, yhea, for "realistic" colonisation, you need something like Avatars unobtainium to justify it as a serious venture, rather than a small reshearch post. inter plantery trade will only really be in things can cannot be produced locally unless the costs of space travel drop to levels on par with, say, mordern air transport or 15th sea transport..

[awa]

the resource doesn't need to not exist on earth just be sufficiently more common that its extraction is cost effective. i suspect that any colony would start out as just a mining out post launching stuff back at earth before eventually growing into a real colony.

Note im talking about sol system colonization not going to alpha centuria or what ever

[Yora]

The main factor is not extraction costs, but transportation costs. Faster than light travel needs to be extremely cheap to make it economic. Star systems are composed of pretty much the same elements everywhere and there shouldn't be anything that could not be found in every system in some quantities. And even if it's rare stuff like iridium or paladium, synthetic production might still be a lot cheaper than importing them from other systems some dozen lightyears away where they are more common.
Complex organic compounds would be significantly more rare, but also a lot easier to synthezise, as that requires only traditional chemisty and not fusing of atoms.

[Storm Bringer]

the resource doesn't need to not exist on earth just be sufficiently more common that its extraction is cost effective. i suspect that any colony would start out as just a mining out post launching stuff back at earth before eventually growing into a real colony.

Note im talking about sol system colonization not going to alpha centuria or what ever

like yora said, the major cost is getting the goods back to earth, so whatever your are shipping back has to be worth several times it's weight in gold to pay for itself.

[awa]

I specified non faster then light, no farther out then Pluto.

[Yora]

I think the most valuable natural resource in space are breathable atmospheres. Places where you can survive without perfectly sealed living space are an extremely rare comodity and a very valuable asset.
Warmth, water, and food are mid-term concerns and something that can be fixed within some hours or a few days before equipment failure becomes lethal. But when the air supply breaks down or air escapes outside of the craft of facility, it can take minutes or even seconds before it's too late to fix the problem. If you can breath the atmopshere safely for a few hours before toxicity becomes a problem, you have much greater options for improvisation in case something doesn't go as planned. You can't just get everyone out the door and move over to another building on Mars without space suits for everyone.
And if you can grow food without the need for special buildings, that's a huge added bonus. In that case you may be able to survive indefinatel even when all electronic equipment is lost and you can't get supplies back from home.

However, that still leaves the question why you would want to travel outside of your own solar system in the first place. Because if there's nothing to do out there, having a colony is nothing but a vanity project. Which if given enough progress in FTL travel would eventually be enough reason to do it anyway, but that does not make for a good setting to tell stories.
A reason I could think of would be supply and repair stations for travel between inhabited planets. If we could contact other inhabited planets and had an affordable way to travel there, we would totally do it. Just because. But the trip might be a very long one and require several points to refuel and the like. For that purpose, colonies in other star systems would be perfect. And these would have to be able to sustain themselves and for them building mines on their moons could be a very smart economic descision.

I specified non faster then light, no farther out then Pluto.

In that case we get to another very interesting factor: Earths Gravity.

The biggest obstacle in getting anything do in space is getting the equipment off Earth and into space. Once it's up there, everything else is relatively easy.
Just look at the old Saturn V rockets that were needed to get the astronauts and their moon lander into space. And compare that to the tiny crafts they used to leave the moon and make it back to Earth.
If you want to have serious space industry, you have to get as much material as possible from places that are not Earth. Human personell and advanced electronics might still have to be lifted up from Earth, but all the big metal parts and fuel should be mined, processed, and assembled in space. Could even be on the surface of the moon. Been some years since I read it up, but I think the moon is essentialy made out of space fuel. And I think there are huge quantities of water and metal in the asteroid belt.

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This is a solid chunk of iron, and there should be millions of these out there, ready to be dusted off and picked up. Getting a little tug from the moon to the asteroid belt and dragging it back might take a couple of years, but the equipment and energy required for it would be much cheaper than to get that amount of iron from Earth into space.
If it does not absulutely have to be made on Earth, everything should be made in space if you want to use it in space.

[hymer]

Living space, as Yora touched on, could be the reason to go on (could call it vanity, I guess, since you could control birth rates instead). It's part of our biology to spread, but with the population explosion this needs to happen fast. Suppose we find a cure for aging (not unreasonable to think we do that before interstellar travel become feasible), someone is going to have to boldly settle where noone's split infitives before, at least if we still want to have kids and stuff.

Interstellar travel need not be terribly expensive if we can harness wormholes, though. That would open up for interstellar trade being much more profitable and practical.

Edit: Maybe wormhole generators need to be at either end for a wormhole to be made, so someone has to go forth and set one up at the target destination. That way, at least, instant transportation to anywhere becomes less of an issue.
Or take a page from, what's-its-name, that movie with Sam Neil, where going through a wormhole is bad for living things, so you can only send mats.

[Admiral Squish]

Magic. It's a powerful force, that allows those gifted with control over it incredible power and a degree of control over their environment. The question is, in a worldbuilding sense, why haven't magically-gifted creatures, such as magical beasts and dragons, completely replaced nonmagical species? I mean, a wolf can't really compete with a blink dog in terms of hunting efficiency.

[Chilingsworth]

Magic. It's a powerful force, that allows those gifted with control over it incredible power and a degree of control over their environment. The question is, in a worldbuilding sense, why haven't magically-gifted creatures, such as magical beasts and dragons, completely replaced nonmagical species? I mean, a wolf can't really compete with a blink dog in terms of hunting efficiency.

I'm not sure, but the only things I can think of to explain that:

Differences in reproduction rate and/or
the magical species haven't been around long enough yet.

Of course, your specific example, the blink dog, is usually Lawful Good and sentient, so they might delibriately chose not to outcompete normal animals.

[headwarpage]

Yeah, there's really no good reason for magical beasts not to outcompete mundane animals. If you have two creatures trying to fill the same ecological niche, and one is way better at it (and will win in a fight), the second one isn't going to stay around for too long. I suppose if you could come up with some way that the magical beasts weren't in direct competition with normal animals, that might justify them existing side by side, though.

Or, as Chillingsworth said, the magical beasts didn't evolve alongside the normal animals. If they are late additions, that's enough to justify limited numbers. Or if there's some stage of the life cycle where they're unusually vulnerable.

[hymer]

Intelligent beings will have reasons not to kill off other beings. The blink dog's been mentioned. Dragons like shinies, so letting some humanoids live to produce them is good. Dragons also kill each other a lot, and think of many other beings like we do ants: Who cares, as long as they don't get inside the house. Then they get killed off en masse.
There's also terrain that matters. Most magical beings don't inhabit natural outdoor terrain. When they do, pesky bands of humanoids come and kill them off before they manage to become too much of a threat.
Finally, nature's stepped up the the magical plate and has druids to watch over it.

[Conners]

With magical animals:

First of all, we have to accept that DnD never really put thought into how their creatures would work as an ecosystem, so there's probably no reason to assume it will work.

After that, there could still be reasons for magical animals not being the norm. Generally, aren't magical creatures few in number due to low breeding rates or the like? If so, it makes sense that a pack of forty wolves could kill a pack of ten blink dogs?




Loving the space discussion, hope it keeps on going.

Also, if you want to have space wars, you really do need something worth fighting for out there. Wars are expensive, space wars are ludicrously expensive, no doubt.

Vanity can be enough of a reason, of course... If you had two Earths, and someone got control of one of them, there's a good chance they or one of their successors would think, "I want it all!". The output of two Earths won't necessarily improve your lifestyle or empire particularly, but I think someone would still do it.

Still, you need to "Earths"--you can't have one Earth and one cluster of ugly rocks--no one wants to invade the latter. Unless the guys on the cluster of rocks were jealous and somehow able to raise a space army (doubtful), you aren't going to see a lot of conflict (unless those rocks are worth fortunes).

Realistically, what could be something worth fighting a space war for? Could there simply be materials we haven't discovered yet which is of extreme value (a kind of super-nuclear energy)? Could it be even more sci-fi, like magnetic fields you can feed off of which only appear in certain places?

Perhaps purely military reason for space expansion and preparation, because there's another sentient species out there that might nuke you from the stars? So, you have to fund outposts for defence and reconnaissance around the wormholes or what-have-you?

[awa]

brains are caloricly expensive the amount of meat to sustain a blink dog would logically be vastly higher then that of a wolf.

also a blink dog is not that much better then a wolf its not as strong, healthy good at tracking or as fast.

[hymer]

Could there simply be materials we haven't discovered yet which is of extreme value (a kind of super-nuclear energy)?

Spice. Spice controls the empire. Whoever controls Dune controls the spice. The house who harvests the most spice will control Dune. Vast armies have arrived.
The best thing about that is that it gives a wonderfully political climate to play this out in, so you can turn intensity up and down, and with mutiple sides to the conflict there's a danger in being too succesful.

And yes, pure militarism/survival-of-the-succesfully-aggressive is probably the obvious reason to fight an interstellar war, at least if your neighbour is a being you can't communicate with (or maybe even comprehend). If they're humans (or something close enough), things could be more complicated. Wars to exterminate the opposition are actually fairly rare, as they tend to force the opponent to give all they have (and tends to erode support in your own populace), and even if you win you've just put a huge bullseye on your own planets for any other beings out there.

[Coidzor]

Hmm. Interesting, but not quite what I meant.

I'm talking about creating a fantasy world with the maximum degree of realism in terms of the world itself. Realistic geological formations, realistic cultural interaction, realistic (albeit magical) flora and fauna, and such.

I've tried bits and pieces of things in that vein, but never a whole world. I suspect that I don't really have the anthropological or psychological background to really do it justice. I think I could probably hack it enough to increase my knowledge of biology and chemistry if I made a serious effort though, but the societies, especially for very non-human entities? :/

[Ormur]

There's a pretty big difference between colonization of the solar system and those of other solar systems.

I think the solar system would mostly be harvested for resources and given enough technology and enough scarcity that might well be economical. A space elevator from Earth might lower costs into orbit a lot and you wouldn't need to actually load the stuff you mine onto spaceships and carry them to Earth. You'd derail asteroids so they'd drift towards Earth or use mass drivers from the surface of bodies with much less gravity than Earth's to overcome.
A resources that might be useful, appart from mundane stuff scarce in the future are isotopes like He3 found on the moon and useful for fusion. I imagine fusion would be neccesary to support any sort of a serious interplanetary economy anyway, to power the ships and mass drivers.

Terraforming Mars could be a centuries long vanity project to make it eventually self-sufficient. If there are hydrothermal vents colonies under the ice on Europa might be self-sufficient, but there's no real need for total self-sufficiency really. Just automation and limited maintanence resource extraction plus a few science projects. All staffed by so few people that they could grow food in greenhouses or caves.

If we're talking about going to other solar systems and colonizing them we can essentially forget any sort of trade without magical FTL drives. A future civilization capable of building interstellar vessles that could carry settlers would probably be so advanced they could make them self-sufficient from the get-go. Von-Neuman probes, nanotechnology that creates manufactured goods from thin air plus the destinations would probably be pretty hospitable to begin with if we're bothering to send people there. The biggest problem might be if some high tech stuff couldn't be made on site and that low population and decades of travel meant they'd fall behind the mother system. I can imagine there'd be high tech self-sufficient colonies that might still be regarded as third-world like by Earth. On the other hand resource scarcity might be a problem back home by then.

In the far future of that civilization when the colonies had become not only self-sufficient but thriving civilizations on their own regular near-lightspeed travel between them might mean some trade in technology prototypes, cultural artefacts, new scientific discoveries and so forth spread over decades. I can't imagine raw resources would ever be traded between system though. On a timescale of centuries or millennia it might make sense to nudge extra-solar asteroids towards Sol at tiny fractions of light speed by turning them into rockets if we'd totally exhaust everything here.

I'm getting into some seriously powerful and resource intensive civilizations here though, like two on the Kardashev scale.

[Geostationary]

Magic. It's a powerful force, that allows those gifted with control over it incredible power and a degree of control over their environment. The question is, in a worldbuilding sense, why haven't magically-gifted creatures, such as magical beasts and dragons, completely replaced nonmagical species? I mean, a wolf can't really compete with a blink dog in terms of hunting efficiency.

If you're playing things more or less straight, and all the critters developed alongside each other, a better question is why are there mundane animals to begin with? Unless the magic has some major detrimental impact on fitness (or the mundane is just that good), wolf v. magic wolf favors the magic one. Besides, if magic is a natural force in the world, why wouldn't it influence everything to begin with- you don't expect animals to develop completely devoid of magnetism or electricity, so why is magic any different? You'd think eveything would have at least low levels of magic where it woulds actually help, and be mundanely specialized in areas where magic isn't that helpful.

[awa]

ive actually ran a setting like that (every thing has some form of magic) it honestly did not end up affecting the game that much

[Clawhound]

I've done world building from the ground up. That's the easy part. The HARD part of world building is looking at the implications of what you created. That's also the part where, if you do your thinking right, you get some very cool and unexpected results.

For example, one of my dwarf races got the ability to "create food and water" once per day by growing it. How imbalancing can that be? Well, in an agricultural society, that hugely affects what they grow and how much of it that they grow. They are at early modern agriculture returns. They can support a much larger city population. Given that there was great turmoil around this dwarven kingdom, they would attract refugees looking for safety and food. Suddenly, my nice "dwarf only" kingdom had a huge refugee camp and a humanitarian crisis. And that, my friends, is where everything gets VERY INTERESTING. Factions, grievances, human rights abuses, lawlessness, ethnic cleansing, and other wonderful things for adventures.

[hymer]

Looking for ideas, so I turn to you guys.

Suppose seven merchant houses in a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world are in control of a city government. Each house has a representative and thus vote in the governing council. Each of five or so nobles have votes too. The nobles, however, tend to align with houses that favour or outright bribe them, so they don't lay much of a line - it's up to the schemes of the merchant houses.
The government as such is entirely laissez-faire in just about every aspect, since the only real object of the merchant houses is to keep their trade free of restrictions and all taxation to an absolute minimum.
The nobles own the lands around the town and as such manage its defences, which frees the merchant houses from worying about stuff (and expenses) of that sort. The merchant houses tend to consider certain areas of the city 'theirs', and have private guards patrol them. There is no independent city watch, leaving portions of the city fairly lawless, and the courts are basically a sham, devoted to maintaining status quo rather than dispensing justice.
The city is founded on trade, and is potentially enormously rich.

So how would the merchant houses fight each other, assuming none of them want actual street fighting (which would disrupt trade)?

[Chilingsworth]

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Looking for ideas, so I turn to you guys.

Suppose seven merchant houses in a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world are in control of a city government. Each house has a representative and thus vote in the governing council. Each of five or so nobles have votes too. The nobles, however, tend to align with houses that favour or outright bribe them, so they don't lay much of a line - it's up to the schemes of the merchant houses.
The government as such is entirely laissez-faire in just about every aspect, since the only real object of the merchant houses is to keep their trade free of restrictions and all taxation to an absolute minimum.
The nobles own the lands around the town and as such manage its defences, which frees the merchant houses from worying about stuff (and expenses) of that sort. The merchant houses tend to consider certain areas of the city 'theirs', and have private guards patrol them. There is no independent city watch, leaving portions of the city fairly lawless, and the courts are basically a sham, devoted to maintaining status quo rather than dispensing justice.
The city is founded on trade, and is potentially enormously rich.

So how would the merchant houses fight each other, assuming none of them want actual street fighting (which would disrupt trade)?

Some ideas, off the top of my head:

1: by trying to outbid eachother for the nobles' votes in the council.

2: by blackmailing varrious agents (clerks, guards, up to more important individuals) of other houses to get favors ranging from intelligence gathering to sabotoge.

3: by planting spies and other agents of their own in other houses' organizations.

4: covert assassinations, though those would probably only be used in desperate situations, or when they were very confidient in their ability to maintain deniability.

5: paying pirates and bandits to target other houses' shipments (and using some of the intel they gathered to help those pirates and bandits find those shipments.)

6: attempting to gain control over materials other houses need for their buisnesses.

7: by using the sham courts to levy trumped up (or outright false) charges against rivals, thus inflicting setbacks on them, if not banishing them or getting them executed outright.

Oh, and almost forgot:

8: Good old fashioned price wars

[fusilier]

Looking for ideas, so I turn to you guys.

Suppose seven merchant houses in a fairly standard pseudo-medieval world are in control of a city government. Each house has a representative and thus vote in the governing council.
. . .
The government as such is entirely laissez-faire in just about every aspect, since the only real object of the merchant houses is to keep their trade free of restrictions and all taxation to an absolute minimum.

I wanted to briefly address this comment, as it borders on being non-sequitur. Historically, when a handful of businesses control government, government is slanted toward those particular businesses. So it would be far from laissez-faire. Instead the government would grant all sorts of benefits (effectively monopolies or oligopolies) to those merchants' businesses, and put all sorts of regulations in the way of any "outsider" encroaching on their businesses. Taxation could be very high, as long as it didn't negatively affect the merchants in control of the government: i.e. the major merchant houses would be exempt taxes.

So, for example, a well-disciplined, tax-funded police force could certainly exist -- but it would probably only patrol the areas that the merchants controlled. That way, they don't hurt their bottom line (by directly paying for guards) and they get protection. [Note: I'm not saying that you have to have a police force, it's just an example of how businesses could use such a government to their advantage]

This would actually be another way in which the merchants could compete, trying to pass regulations to hurt one group or the other. Although some sort of legal "compromise" may have developed to prevent such actions (mainly out of tradition) -- or the government could have been formed by the merchant houses (however many generations ago) and the constitution protects their interests. In the police example above, controlling the (corrupt) police force could also be an area for conflict.

Getting back to your original question, they could sponsor piracy and banditry to disrupt their opponents trade (Chillingworth's 5th suggestion), which may take on the character of out-and-out war.

[hymer]

@ Chil: Thanks! I'll read that wiki article when I've slept.

@ fusi: Thanks, and you're right. Maybe I should've specified: They've collectively decided they have plenty of competition in each other, so you're disallowed from doing any sort of business if you're not attached somehow to one of the houses. So there's really not much of anything to tax but their own businesses, so they want that tax kept as low as possible. They're ok with having a force of thugs private guards, as these serve multiple purposes besides acting as local city guards.

[Beleriphon]

Magic. It's a powerful force, that allows those gifted with control over it incredible power and a degree of control over their environment. The question is, in a worldbuilding sense, why haven't magically-gifted creatures, such as magical beasts and dragons, completely replaced nonmagical species? I mean, a wolf can't really compete with a blink dog in terms of hunting efficiency.

Because magical beasts like blink dogs require normal dogs or wolves to breed with to produce more.

[Storm Bringer]

one area would be trying to sieze control of vairous organs of goverment that they can then use to influence the other houses.

for example, if you could bring the harbour master and all the dockworkers under your control, you can effectivly control the vast majority of imports and exports (as moving goods overland in medieval times is prohibitaly expensive).

Another example would be bribing the gate guards, either to ignore a certian law (for example, not enforce a curfew) or to enforce a law that is normally not enforced ("i'm sorry, sir, but article 17 clearly states you cannot sell animal stock within 100 yards of a chruch of palor, and your just too close. you;ll have to move")


also, given the distriubstion of voting power, i'd expect the nobles to form a voting block of thier own over certian issues. they can't stop a simple majority vote agianst all 7 houses, but they can stop a 2/3rds majority vote (which would need 8 votes to pass). As such, depending on what the constitution, they may be able to enforce thier will on certian issues (like, for example, ensuring they have voting rights, or that the cost of policing the city does not fall purely on the nobles). they may not have a consistant policy, but they can defend thier rights.