Visualizing the politcal situation in my campaign setting, predictions?

[MonkeySage]

So in my campaign setting, there are three major powers.
The western empire, which my players have spent all their time in so far, is a hodge podge of warlord systems and aristocracies, ruled by an aristocrat, the emperor. Though only 200 years old, it covers a geographical range from northern snow capped mountains to southern jungles. the current emperor is a ruthless tyrant, an anti hero/villain who has been leading a subtle(sometimes overt) campaign of expansion so that he can prevent an impending apocalypse.
The confederacy is the second major power. it lies east of the western empire on a huge desert island. it is dotted with city states, and most of them are pretty small. One major powerhouse is the western port city Lavadieu. it is a sprawling metropolis ruled by 5 wizards, who have been using the power of an ancient mythal(stolen from the elves) to supply themselves with water. it is perhaps because of their abuse of the power of the mythal that the other city states throughout the confederacy have been suffering droughts. recently, with the assassinations of two of the head mages, compounded by the rampant droughts, both the western and eastern empires have set their sights on conquering the desert confederacy.
The eastern empire is a legalist regime. the current empress has recently successfully rested power from the feudal lords and abolished the aristocracy, claiming absolute power for the imperial throne. She is now on a similar path of conquest as that of the western emperor. Her dealings with the previous emperor of the western empire were amiable, and the two empires had a trade relation that she ended when the new emperor came to power. the two empires are currently at war(the fighting has not started yet, just a declaration of war so far), with the central confederacy between them.
Predictions anyone?

[Carl]

First and foremost what kind of tech level are we looking at, particularly what level of long range communications there are and how long they've been about.

The problem is there is no such thing as a true absolute ruler. The aristocracy is in very simple terms a huge personal loyalty buying scheme. It gives the people who run the day to day bits of the kingdom a means of earning money that lets them live in massive luxury. Wars can be popular, if they increase the lord-lings wealth faster than it drains it, but they become very unpopular if they start costing them too much for no gain. Given he's been successful to date your western guy is probably in a good place.

Your Eastern Empire has a problem though, you can't wield absolute power with very, very good long range com's because you rely too much on local governors to run the day to day affairs and in practice the populations they govern, because they're utterly reliant on them, are very loyal to them, so even if those governors aren't heredity title, they still exist and hold all the true power, they're effectively aristocrats in every respect except they're not inheriting their position's. If the communication ability exists your eastern empress can run her country from a small court she can more effectively control directly, but unless she can be very ruthless in keeping the same coms ability out of her citizen's hands she's still going to have issues because now if any significant percentage of her population are displeased they have the perfect means to cause the one thing that could topple her, a wide scale civil uprising. She just exchanges her governors for common people as a group she has to keep pleased.

The desert situation is interesting, the mages sound like they've made their city very, very prosperous, and they're very directly visible to their populous so the kind of personal loyalty they wield is going to give them a very determined population in any prospective war, but if the other city states are unwilling or unable to back them up they'd probably fall eventually even with an Arcamidies helping them. At that point i suspect whichever side gets the city will have the morale momentum unless the other side can successfully counter-attack rapidly. Which ever side picks up the momentum will probably win if they don't immediately attack the others mainland but instead let politics run it's course and a civil war topple the other sides leader.

[MonkeySage]

In practice, the Empress appoints a general to enforce her laws within each province she has control over. This system of hers hasn't been in place long enough for her to realize it's flaws. The political system there, the one she helped arrange, keeps the bulk of legislative power in her hands, at least on paper. But you are right, in practice she's just created a new type of aristocracy in the form of her generals and their subordinates. She believes she's eliminated her competition, but she's very used to assassination attempts at this point, has personally fought off most of them that she's aware of. She's incredibly paranoid, doesn't even trust her own cabinet. Under her regime, only those she personally issues a permit to are able to legally study magic.(Needless to say, there is a black market for this)
The eastern empire has a violent (and ancient) history, to say the least! That's why she was so insistent on getting rid of the feudal lords.

She's not very competent as a law maker. As a conqueror, she's very successful. So far, she's built up a regime based on fear, paranoia, and effective propaganda.(Her political system is based on the idea that the position of Emperor, or Empress, is sacred, and that the person holding that position has divine authority)

Technologically...

The Confederacy has the weakest military, but it's an effective one- they've had to fight off both empires for decades. Lavadieu, and lavadieu only, has the most advanced magic of all three powers.

The Western Empire is recovering from a dark age. They are not very advanced, technologically, and the emperor has passed a law restricting access to magic(though not nearly to the degree that the eastern empire has). Militaristically speaking, they are stronger than the confederacy, both in terms of training and manpower.

The Eastern Empire is the strongest in terms of military power. While the Western Empire's military is loosely organized and in many areas poorly trained and structured, the Eastern Empire's military is highly trained, full of career soldiers(a conquering army), highly structured, and simply bigger than both the western and confederate armies combined. For every 1 Western Imperial Soldier, the Eastern Empire has 50, and they're better trained. The Empress herself commands a huge elite force.

All three powers have access to magical communication at the highest levels, and the lead for long range communication is the Eastern Empire, with Western Empire taking second place.

[Carl]

All right been a while getting back to you.

My first really big issue is your comment on the size of the eastern army. When she went after the old nobles they would have fought to the last ditch to stop her given their lives where doubtless on the line. Given they would have had de-facto control of the provincial armies she would have had to wreak them, and thus most of the able bodied fighting age population of her country to get rid of them. Hell even getting a force together to pull it off must have taken a political masterstroke. Regardless she might have a tech advantage, but her army could never hope to match the west's in size for a generation unless her empire is so massively larger, (i'm talking ancient china vs same era England for example), that she can roll over anything and everything she meets.

And if it's that big, (and even if it isn't if it's big enough), there's no way she could have started the aristocratic purge and finished it in her own lifetime, even if she started as a teenager and is now an old grey haired woman. Not accounting for potential Portal Networks or other magical transport mediums ofc.

The idea of her as a goddess like figure is interesting as a political tool, but she'd have to be able to back that yup in some way, her conquest along would probably do it mind, but she probably wouldn't have been able to use that to her advantage in the start and middle of her conquest campaign. Not enough time or epic deeds to build the necessary reputation to make that believable. Also what about existing religion's. If she suppressed or coerced them she's going to have huge unrest issues from that alone and any would be traitor governor would do best to just help such unrest along rather than use an assassin.

The Magic thing could also be a huge issue, i'd guess from their smaller size and not being super well trained that the island's military has only really done so well though a combination of terrain and it's magic so magic is apparently a powerful combat effector. In that case limiting it like that is going to devastate her war-fighting capability in a major way. There's simply no way i can't see that kind of draconian policy surviving contact with the enemy, it's baddness would be so glaringly obvious and the issues it causes even more so that she'd be forced to change it in some way.

The western Empires backwardness isn't the big handicap your making it out to be, whilst there where major developments in metallurgy, weaponry, and armor, but there weren't any massive paradigm shifts that completely rendered even the oldest styles of army obsolete or non-competitive. They would necessarily be the monsters of their heydey, but they would have been very respectable all the same. Basically the training will make a much bigger difference than the tech level and their less draconian magic limitation may be the perfect counterbalance for them between the eastern empire and total freedom in not hobbling them much in warfare whilst keeping a tight rein on the mages.

[MonkeySage]

There are certainly holes in the story so far, but then again, that's why I brought it here. Thanks so far, you've been a real help putting it all together...

Hers is quite large, yes, perhaps not as big as I made it out to be but still pretty large. In a competition based purely on numbers, the east could dominate the other powers, but clearly there are other factors involved. not the least of which is that the other two powers have the advantage of a sea. They had a dark age, but it was much earlier, and they pulled out of it... sort of. I'm thinking, based on what you said about the time it would have taken her to set it up on her own, that perhaps even if she was the one who put it in place, it was not her idea. That the emperor and the feudal lords have been playing a game of tug of war for centuries, and she's just on the winning side this time. It may have been her predecessor or predecessors who started the campaign to get rid of the aristocracy.

If the idea that emperors are a gift from heaven is nothing new, do you think it might grant her more legitimacy in the eyes of her people? Most of the religions in this empire are not necessarily at each other's throats, and some even tend to springboard off of each other.

Perhaps, while the west views magic as something to restrict, something you need to prove loyalty to the empire in order to legally use... the East might instead make it necessary that aspiring mages be employed by the empire in some way, as advisors or living weapons, etc. So Making the east's policy a little more lenient, that studying magic is grounds for conscription(not entirely out of the question here, the eastern empire has a history of mandatory military service for any able bodied adult). Maybe magic using soldiers are better paid, so that they can afford the materials they need.

The western empire is only 200 years old, but their dark age ended 400 years ago. For the longest time, within the western empire, you'd have local feuds between counts and dukes and barons and lords, really tough fighters with followers, and so on, who'd fight each other over small pieces of land, maybe the size of a small town and it's environs at most. New economic ideas, among other things, have lead to areas like the town my players are currently in, which is a large city born from the collaboration of 5-7 different noble families. Some villages were even born around travelling merchants and their guilds. When one king managed to take hold of a nearby kingdom, he declared himself an emperor, announced his intent to unify the west... That process is still going on, but it's been going well for the current emperor(mostly because he's made a deal with a goblin, and now whenever goblin raids start to really hurt a major hub, the empire steps in to save the day. To the locals, they look like heroes, and the goblin in charge of the rest of the hordes grows more powerful).

[VoxRationis]

Absolutism doesn't happen overnight, at least not if it's to be stable. I personally disagree about governors simply replacing the nobility—governors can be rotated periodically, as can generals, in order to reduce the ties they have to their subjects and prevent them from accumulating the power that comes with stability. That said, some degree of decentralization is inherent to the fact that authority comes from people being willing to obey you.

That Lavadieu's prosperity comes at the expense of the other cities in the confederation is a major destabilizing factor. Confederacies don't last long when one group has a disproportional benefit; think of the Delian League or the Triple Alliance. They fell apart when they came under external pressure from militarily powerful enemies, because the lesser members didn't have any reason to risk their necks for a system that wasn't good for them. I'd expect there to be major diplomatic problems with the other city-states, and the other factions could use that weakness against them.

Also regarding Lavadieu: I'm not sure what the elves are like in your setting, or how much power and influence they have, but the elves in my settings would be very, very angry at an upstart human city's abuse of an elven relic, and they would take a ruinous and patient revenge. Wizards aren't a stable source of secular power (since the power comes from individuals rather than the system itself), and there are ways of weakening or interrupting the line of succession—the elves might work to hamper the magical studies of the next generation of archmages-in-training in any number of subtle ways, producing a weak series of rulers in a few decades. Alternatively, they could foment dissatisfaction among the other city-states of the confederation (see above), planting the seeds of a conflict between the city-states which would bring Lavadieu to its knees.

[Carl]

Apologies for not getting back sooner.

First the important thing i think you missed here in my last post. The whole size thing boils down to this:

A) Despite general quantity scale inefficiencies at this level of tech, (that is the advantage of numbers isn't as big as it would be today because of worse logistich's and command and control capability on the strategic level, though your magicoms alleviate the latter a lot), having a larger able bodied population than your opponent is an advantage.

B) If the population disparity reaches a certain critical number despite point A it becomes overwhelming, only a tech difference as large as Machine Guns vs bolt action rifle infantry, or the like will allow a smaller force to offset the numbers edge and industrial edge.

C) Whilst it would not be as bad as say WW1 or WW2 the kind of very intense fighting that would be involved in destroying an aristocracy would severely deplete the population of able bodied combatants, (presumably males), and mandatory military service would only make that more true as it would have increased the practical size of armies that could be raised in a hurry. A normal levy would likely only grab a percentage of the able bodied males. But if every male over X age was in the military at the start, and the rest have the training to be called up a major war is going to decimate the general population. AFAIK the Spartan's had exactly this issue. They had series of bad military defeats that ultimately shattered the core population of their civilization and destroyed them. That's obviously not happened here. But it is going to mean that relative to their overall population size there's going to be significantly fewer able bodied males available for service with a correspondingly low army size to population ratio.

D) What point C means is that if they have a serious numerical advantage, but not a crushing one, (a la point B), at the current time. Give them a generation or two of low intensity or nearly non-existent conflict and you'll find that they do have such a crushing unstoppable advantage. And i find it unlikely either of their opponents will be able to launch the kind of crushing land based invasion required to force the kind of conflict required to keep them from recovering, (sea based combat is going to be heavily influenced by available resources and non-military manpower available to build ships).

E) In line with point C) for them to have a serious numbers advantage now, (even without being unstoppable), because of point C requires them to be a LOT larger, than their opposition in terms of land area unless one of the other two has a serious ability to get more food per man producing it. Even then because of point C you can't really have their average populations be too far out of equality with each other even without the war losses to date.



As far as your magic idea goes. That would work a lot better. I'd almost go for a whole imperial collage of mages who answer directly to the Imperial Majesty. This would also explain how the aristocratic purge happened, because unfortunately at the start the throne would not have had more than a couple of times the military of any of the other lords, so if they'd got their act together and united they should have crushed the attempt handily. But if Mages are a huge power factor as i've summarized, having them directly under the imperial thumb, raised from the earliest age their discovered at and trained to be totally loyal to the seat of power. You could even integrate this into why the lords had to go. The Imperial Line are the most powerful mage line around and they wanted to have only mages ruling. Of course how that would work with any nobles who where mages is debatable. They could have been secretly killed. Forced into some kind of service, or they could have used their powers to escape and join one of the other two sides. O the mages could have been in on it.

Regarding the whole divine thing. The biggest issue is that the divine thing is usually predicted on the "specialness" of nobility, by tearing down the aristocracy that's been undermined. That's actually why i suggested the mage line above, it actually reinforces things. Especially if no publicly magic using nobles got whacked or disappeared en pessant. You could even go a step further and have all mages bar the royal line in the east exhibit a clear physical frailness, with the royal line being unique in not having this, (meaning they can get really good martial warriors with mage capabilities). Would clearly differentiate the royal line in a way no one could miss. And make finding mages young easier as you'd start by examining the frail children.




Regarding the west, the biggest issue here is that eventually that deal is going to run dry for the goblin and then he's going to have to find somthing as it where. That could lead to an epic backstab at the worst possible moment. Other than that the biggest issue i see is that manufactured good, particularly complex one's are hugely reliant on trade for a wide variety of material's, and for the ability of large rich states to produce wealthy tinkerer's who can afford to not really do anything to support themselves whilst perusing the sciences. They probably wouldn't even have got out of the bronze age by now i don;t think. That could be a real issue if the east and the island states are starting to produce mid quality steels as they are so much better than Bronze, (low quality steel and raw iron is another matter entirely). Likewise without that complex trade system that comes with large affluent population centers with many complex manufactured goods you won't get enough cross trade to get enough merchants to get guilds or many/any dedicated hubs or anything.

That's not to say you will get absolutely none of the above, tech advances in the early bronze and throughout the stone age happened despite this, but the tech advances would be much, much slower.

Regarding the future combat, the availability of boat building materials is going to be crucial to the outcome, the desert environment really creates a huge issue here. Workforce is another factor, with their larger populations the east and west will have an advantage as well, but construction techniques and general design will likely be better for the islanders as will on water tactics and strategy, as well as general combat performance. The east sucking up so many ale bodied males for the military will really hamper their workforce numbers however.


@VoxRations: Whilst it's true you can rotate, you can still get people becoming loyal to the position, which allows the person occupying it to misuse it against you. You can only really avoid this if you have really advanced basic level comms allowing the ruler to appear, (even if it's only in print), on a very regular basis to the population in a very direct manner that addresses the specific segment being address's concerns of the moment, (which requires much speedier communications than horseback). Basically you have to make the imperial position as visible as the local governor or more so.

This is what most dictators are really bad at, they don't give the people anything likable to be loyal to, which makes it very easy for resistance movements, and charismatic coup attempters to co-op and harness that loyalty.

Your point about the city states is well made, (see pint A below), but there are a few factors in there.

A) I hadn't thought of that because i as initially thinking of them as a bunch of individual countries, medieval Germanic states style. I hadn't really considered the implications of the correction properly.

B) Depends very much how much they're suffering, if it's more they're all prospering but one more than the other, the discontent will be much lower than if the rest are suffering.

C) it also depends how the other factions approach this. If they try punching out the little guys first or make it clear they will be next they're likely to band together regardless of differences against a common enemy.

D) We don;t know if mages have longer lifespans or are immortal, i get them impression they may be from past statements. Still your right once anything happens to the mags it's a bit of an issue.