I'm tired of kings, princesses and all that crap.
How do I make a republic in a fantasy setting interesting?
How do I get my players involved on its politics? Should they be involved at all?
What could replace princess to do as romantic interest and plot point?
Republics in fantasy worlds
Sebastian Thomas
Other urls found in this thread:
en.m.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Jayden Sullivan
Each Merchant Republic has leading families, each headed by a Patrician, who vie for control and conduct trading throughout Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond. Each family builds Trade Posts and assembles Trade Zones to build income, and has a Family Palace as its base of operations, complete with levies and the ability to recruit their own retinues. Each Patrician is a vassal to the Merchant Republic, and can conduct warfare and plotting independently of the Doge as well as hold cities and baronies or even their own vassals.
If any one of the families ever dies out, another family will rise to take its place. This can happen for one of two reasons.
The last male member of the dynasty dies. The patrician ceases to be a vassal of the doge. This can happen if the patrician inherits a higher title than the doge, or if he holds a landed title other than his palace that is then vassalized by another ruler in a war.
Should a merchant house die out, its family palace will be destroyed, its trade posts will be distributed among the other families, and a courtier of the doge, selected according to open elective succession, will found a new family in its place. If playing as a patrician, it can be to your advantage to repeatedly kill off the other families in order to gradually gather the majority of the republic's trade posts to yourself.
Doges rule a republic, and since republics elect their leaders, the Doge must be elected. They are not so much elected as chosen, however, from one of the Patrician families.
Jack Moore
Understanding that totalitarianism in all of its forms is inferior to liberal democracy and republicanism is one of the signs of maturity.
Nathan Phillips
>senator wants to do X dirty work
>players do X or protect other senator from X
Trying to handle all the repercussions of their involvement could get dicey, but if you manage it it'll seem cool that they had a real effect on the world in the end.
Matthew Cruz
sounds more like an Oligarchy to me.
Kayden Butler
This man gets it.
Set it in the early years of the republic's founding. The first half a century after the US Constitution was ratified saw immense social and political strife culminating in an actual civil war.
As for replacing princesses, you do still have young rich socialites. In fact it would probably be easier to have adventures around rescuing them because daddy might just want to hire bounty hunters instead of petitioning Congress to send the army.
Joseph Cox
>How do I make a republic in a fantasy setting interesting?
Republics are honestly more interesting than monarchies to me. There's much more internal conflict, but at the same time, they tend to be very resilient. They also tend to be much more politically and culturally dynamic. Compare the Roman Republic to its neighbors, are the later monarchies that replaced it.
>How do I get my players involved on its politics? How do I get my players involved on its politics
With most groups, this is a bad idea. Politics take nuance, and you know most players will just hit whatever problem or annoyance they're having with a hammer rather than attempt to actually talk or compromise. If they do get involved, it's not directly, and is as somebody's mercenary or purely on accident.
Jaxson Williams
What do you think all these historical replics were? Peasants get no votes.
Brayden Powell
>What could replace princess to do as romantic interest and plot point?
Princesses. You can still have those.
Brody Sullivan
Republicanism is the most fragile form of liberal democracy. Constitutional monarchy/parliamentary democracy is far superior, a symbolic monarchy gives a safe ventilation for the desire for tradition and ritual in a society without wrapping it up in executive power.
Essentially a shiny toy to distract the conservatives and unite the bulk of the country under something separate from the comings and goings of politics and government.