I'm currently building a campaign setting and I'm trying to develop it as much as I can. So far, it's looking pretty good, but I'm having troubles figuring out how nations and people can interact with each other.
One thing I'm having trouble with is politics. I chose a pretty complex political system for the country my players start the campaign in : it's a republic called Orsay. In Orsay, one councilor is elected for every thousand citizen, so twelve councilors are elected in a city of 12 000 inhabitants. These councilors then report every two months to the provincial council, in which the affairs concerning the province are debated.
Among the members of the provincial council, ten councilors per province (there are four provinces in Orsay) will be elected to the Grand Council of the city of Vicci, making these people "Viccians". These people are the most influential people of the republic, as they have power over their city, province and republic. However, since power is split between many people (the Grand Council has 40 members, after all!), a councilor who desires power needs to find allies and to knock his enemies out of the way.
I know this political structure feels complicated, but I wanted to try something different from the usual monarchy / feudalism. Still, I've never been really good at creating political intrigue, so I wanted to know if anyone had advice for me.
What I've started doing right now is writing down a few important political figures' names with their location. I gave each of those people an objective (getting richer, eliminating a rival, helping the poor, rooting out bandits in a given region, etc.) and a way that they were using to try and meet this objective. I tried to see how these objectives could interact.
Example : Ordo Montalban (from Vicci), Grand Councilor of Justice of the Sarta province - Wants to throw his rival, Alonzo Cabrian, out of the council - Will try placing incriminating evidence (hiring experts in stealth and subtlety) that will get Cabrian arrested, leaving him a chance to seize Cabrian's assets in the process.
Any other tips to create believable political intrigue?
What your talking about is essentially a democratic Republic, so you really need to look no further than American politics for examples of political intrigue. In our own system we have problems with voter fraud, politicians taking bribes/gifts for favors, political pressure from corporations that provide funds for campaigns and reelection, sex scandals, and more. Typing in "political scandal" into a search engine should probably pave the way for numerous ideas. All sorts of intrigue can arise with the right catalysts (money, blackmail, etc.)
To think the answers were so close, and yet I hadn't thought about that! Thanks a lot, I'll look into it.
It's worth taking a look at the Roman Republic in which there were many elected offices. Things get pretty complicated there pretty quickly, and the system of patronage allowed rich people to effectively buy the votes of poorer people.
In general, RPGs tend to wildly oversimplify political structures. The European system of feudalism was incredibly complicated and you typically ended up with people owing fealty to a number of overlords, which obviously caused complications if the overlords in question were to end up fighting a war against each other. In addition to the purely feudal relationship, there are also the alliances created by marriages, which add another layer to things.
If you want to see something REALLY complicated, consider the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. Germany) in its later stages (1700s). There you have monarchies, city-states, religious states, not to mention a variety of more exotic legal statuses, all interacting with each other.
I've often considered running a game in something like that structure, because it's so varied and diverse. I would definitely recommend reading more about it, and about the feudal structure of France (say in the 14th century), if you really want to make things more believable (and interesting).
I think that a system of such... structured democratic representation is unlikely to spontaneously appear in a society. It's worth thinking about how the present-day structure (i.e. how things look when the players enter the scene) came about. And the Holy Roman Empire is a fantastic example of this, having evolved slowly over the course of centuries.
Another cool side effect is that you get a ton of castles, because every prince has to have one :)
Returning to your idea of a republic, the greatest potential for corruption and subversion of power is probably through electoral rolls. If a city of 12,000 get 12 councilors, what happens when the populations change? How often is a census performed? Is it even realistic to assume that a census can be performed?
The way these things normally worked is that you would have a councilor for a given district, and your city of 12,000 would then contain 12 districts. But there would generally not be any good system for changing the boundary lines between districts, or indeed to deal with issues arising from the population of a given city increasing or decreasing.
This is going to be particularly relevant in the case of largely agricultural populations (which is invariably the case in quasi-medieval states).
In England in the 1700s (quite late, and well after the revolutionary concept occurred to have members of the house of commons elected rather than simply chosen by officials), there were numerous 'rotten boroughs'. These were constituencies (equivalent to a US Congressional district) which were represented in parliament despite the fact that only one or two people lived there. Compare this to the fact that recently expanding cities didn't have any representation, and you have a system ripe for corruption and abuse :)
This whole topic (i.e. political history and philosophy) is one I'm quite interested in, and so I spend significant amounts of time studying it. The way things are normally portrayed in fantasy settings is fairly ridiculous, but to get it anywhere near realistic is very challenging.
I'd recommend looking at GURPS supplements for Rome, or medieval settings. Those tend to be incredibly well researched.
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Returning to your idea of a republic, the greatest potential for corruption and subversion of power is probably through electoral rolls. If a city of 12,000 get 12 councilors, what happens when the populations change? How often is a census performed? Is it even realistic to assume that a census can be performed?
The way these things normally worked is that you would have a councilor for a given district, and your city of 12,000 would then contain 12 districts. But there would generally not be any good system for changing the boundary lines between districts, or indeed to deal with issues arising from the population of a given city increasing or decreasing.
This is going to be particularly relevant in the case of largely agricultural populations (which is invariably the case in quasi-medieval states).In England in the 1700s (quite late, and well after the revolutionary concept occurred to have members of the house of commons elected rather than simply chosen by officials), there were numerous 'rotten boroughs'. These were constituencies (equivalent to a US Congressional district) which were represented in parliament despite the fact that only one or two people lived there. Compare this to the fact that recently expanding cities didn't have any representation, and you have a system ripe for corruption and abuse :)
Political subjects interest me as well, and I thought I would point out that if you're looking for a source of political intrigue and you are going to do a population based Republic then districting and census work are probably a great area to mine ideas from. Even now, in the US, setting districts is probably one of the biggest political fights.
For example, let's say that I have a city with 120 people in one party and 80 people in the other. Each district will be 20 people. Depending on how the districts are drawn you can change significantly how a vote will turn out. If I draw each district as 12 from one and 8 from the other, the majority will take all of the districts. But if I draw four districts with 20 from the majority and then split the others evenly I've given the majority 4 districts, but cost them every other district (the other party should have a 2 to 1 advantage in the other 6 districts). And that's with just a two party system in the US. The real gold mine to look at would be probably Britain because they did a lot of shenanigans with dead people counting against population rolls and such.
Also remember that if it's based on population, like Elrostar said, someone has to count all those people. And that's a pretty powerful position, if the person who heads that effort isn't the most honest, that's a pretty good hook there as well.
