Creating laws for a kingdom

[Drkman]

Hello Pathfinder Community I need your help. My pathfinder group is currently trying to create their own kingdom and we're having a big argument over what it's law should be. What I would like to ask you the community is if you could point me to any books Pathfinder, other game, even historical references to laws and their punishments for breaking said laws.

[Thunderlord]

I think the laws are tied to the Kingdom alignment. A lawful evil kingdom would have very strict laws and punishments while a chaotic good kingdom would have few laws and enforcement. The alignment also has kingdom benefits. The LE gets +4 economy so the people are just greedy. The CG gets +4 Loyalty or everyone trusts the king. These aren't official by any means and in my kingmaker game we just adopted the laws of the river kingdoms or Brestov

[Dave Justus]

If you want some idea of how historical laws worked, a wikipedia search on legal history will get you started.

Going into details of x crime = y punishment is usually too granular for a role-playing game. It would typically be quite a long list. Historically punishment and often even crime depended a lot on social status as well, a master killing as slave is not at all the same as a slave killing a master as one example, but even smaller gradients could be significant (landed freeman vs. noble, christian vs. jew, male vs. female) in ways that we find horrible today. How much of this sort of thing you want in your game (if any) is probably a group decision.

[Coidzor]

It's generally better to think about the broad strokes of what kind of society your characters want to bring about than to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of laws.

Even when it comes to things like being staunchly anti-slavery or being on one side of some specific hot button issue in-universe.

That said, the Napoleonic Code is, arguably, a legal code that was made during a portion of Earth's history that is at least somewhat similar to the current state of the Inner Sea region, what with Galt being a Revolutionary France expy and various other reflections of Enlightenment ideas being somewhat filtered through to varying extents in the more settled regions.

I believe the Code of Hammurabi is probably the simplest real world example of laws people lived under, IIRC, and consists of a few hundred individual laws.

[Drkman]

Well the kingdom is supposed to be good aligned. The main reason I am looking at historical laws is one of the players made a snarky comment on how a lot of the common sense laws we see used for places in RPGs are a modern concept so I want to find examples of historical laws to show the group so they can see what kind of laws existed good and bad.

[Ryze Kuja]

Create a Kingdom based on the 4 universal ethics: Murder, Assault, Rape, and Theft. No person wants any of these things to happen to them unwillingly, that's why they are universal ethics. If for some reason a given person does actually want one of these things to happen to them, it becomes Euthanasia, contact sports, really weird sex, and gift (willing transfer of property).

[Thunderlord]

Drkman wrote:

Well the kingdom is supposed to be good aligned. The main reason I am looking at historical laws is one of the players made a snarky comment on how a lot of the common sense laws we see used for places in RPGs are a modern concept so I want to find examples of historical laws to show the group so they can see what kind of laws existed good and bad.

I mean Pathfinder is more fantasy than historical most of the time. Women seem to have rights and are respected and everyone seems to be generally tolerant. In my experience, Pathfinder settings are pretty modern with a medieval/fantasy look. Sources like adventure paths might say a particular dwarf is racist which would imply most dwarves aren't but then again dwarves the hatred trait. If your players want a more realistic fantasy they can do so but I think sources are vague on this subject for a reason.

[Ring_of_Gyges]

Medieval Europe didn't have what modern people think of when they think of laws.

The modern world is run on statutes and the rule of law. What that means is some competent authority (generally some sort of body like a parliament, Congress, or council) makes *and writes down* rules ("pay these taxes", "don't stab your neighbors", etc...), a police force enforce arrest troublemakers, and an independent judiciary interpret the written rules to resolve disputes. Various actors in the process may not like the rules, but everyone basically agrees to be bound by the legal decisions of the courts.

Medieval law didn't have most of that. They had customary law, not statutory, meaning they didn't write much down. The law was the magistrate's judgment of what custom dictated. If you were arrested for murder they didn't consult a written rule that said no murder, the magistrate just announced that common sense tells us that our custom in these parts is to hang murderers. The magistrate was incredibly powerful, basically free to come up with whatever resolution made sense to him and which he thought would fly with the community.

There also wasn't an impartial judiciary interpreting written law. The people making the law, the people enforcing it, and the people interpreting it were all the same people. In US political terms it would be as if there was only the executive branch, everyone works at the pleasure of the King and is supposed to be ultimately loyal to him (not to an abstraction like "the law").

If you want a medieval feel, you don't need a series of statutes. You need a group of heavily armed sociopaths making it up as they go along.

Suppose the PCs are the lords of some new kingdom they've founded. A peasant mob comes to them saying "We're dragging Tom the weaver along for judgment because he killed Frank the Baker!" some questioning later we discover that Tom's kid had been stealing from the bakery at night and Frank had gotten sick of it. To stop thieves the baker left out a bear trap, Tom's kid broke in, got caught in it, and bled to death. Discovering his kid's death, Tom went ballistic over his son dying over some cakes and stabbed Frank to death for leaving the trap out that killed his son.

In the modern world we have written rules about whether you can set potentially lethal traps to protect property (you can't), whether killing someone is justified if they murdered your kid (it isn't), and so on. Medieval societies wouldn't have any of that codified, they would have some sort of general sense of justice and tradition but ultimately the PCs have to look at the facts, decide what is fair, and render a judgment while trying to prevent the two families from settling into a blood feud.