The Duchess's Marshal is possessed of an iron fist and a slipping grasp on reality. Tasked with keeping order during a grain shortage in the countryside, he can't help but see malcontents everywhere, sowing the seeds of rebellion with their disobedience. How was he supposed to know that farmer boy would die when he had their whole family flogged for hoarding, why should the blame fall on him when they all broke the law? His men can deal with the resentful rabble but what happens when his liege finds out? Will she think he went too far in her name? What happens when they all discover that no matter how many guards or wards he puts on the granaries the rats always seem to get into them, rats who started the blight in the first place, along with those lazy tillers not pulling their weight since they were freed from serfdom, no better than the rats themselves...
On and on he spirals, as the hunger pangs grow.
Adventure Hooks:
Lean times are bad for everyone, most of all the common people, who always get the raw end of the deal despite putting in the most work keeping things from going lean in the first place. With the threat of famine looming, markets in a riot, and the powers that be more unhelpful than ever, the local people hire the heroes to be their champions. This mostly involves dealing with bandits pilfering supplies, keeping profiteers from strongarming the desperate, and fending off the monsters the local garrison can't be arsed to manage.
Their job might also involve going directly against that garrison when the Marshal's abuses get out of hand, whether by intervening in some act of jackbooted justice or stealing much needed provisions from fortified storehouses.
More than just petty and Paranoid, the Marshal is afflicted by the demon Vivvverrriiik, who stokes the embers of his hatred just as he piles on further crisis as kindling. Riot, starvation, and bloodshed are all the demon crave, and the party may not sense they're caught up in a supernatural scheme until it is too late.
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Apropos of nothing, what do you think of money in tabletop? Iâm interested in the very different ways people will pay for things, but I always go back to the old âgold/silver/copperâ standard even though thereâs a lot more interesting ways to set up an internal currency. Or to put it in a less asinine way, how does Dapper balance fluff vs crunch, and what are your thoughts on the two? I often seesaw between two extremes.
Heya!
Funnily enough I'm in a very interesting place regarding this: Medieval trade and economics was my bag during uni so I have a LOT to say about the worldbuilding of money and financial systems and how they cross with gameplay. I actually have been writing about this in a few different places including: Generating Better Loot and Managing the party's cash and wealth as two different mechanics
The main problem with adding too much "fluff" to monetary matters in d&d is that GP is fundamentally baked into the game's systems, and no party is going to want to sit around playing with currency conversions while there's actual adventure to be had. I've run into this problem plenty of times when I try to convince my party to go with a more realistic silver-piece standard and have had to convert everything from the books over to it. It's far easier to go with GP and just leave most of the details up to flavor.
That said, there' some very interesting things you can pull as story beats that let you show how emerging financial matters concern your heroes.
As the party moves from the adventure filled wilderness to the imperial core, they discover that the capital's markets will only accept imperial coin, forcing them to get their money exchanged and taking a 20% bite out of their hard earned wealth stores. Fucking with their loot gets your party resentful against the evil empire without having to jump straight to authoritarian genocide.
Among their many other crimes, the local bandits have have been on the hunt for silver to fund their counterfeiting operation after making an alliance with a shady transmuter who's managed to copy the royal coinpress. When the party eventually come knocking on the bandit's door, they'll eventually find a small fortune in counterfeit coins waiting to be spent, which just might get them in trouble with the law.
There's a manhunt out for an alchemist who's developed a process for making gold indistinguishable from that pulled from the earth and undetectable by magic, putting the fortunes of banks, kingdoms, and merchants into jeopardy. While she mainly did it following the directives of her patron and her own scientific curiosity, the powers that be argue that unless she's slain and the knowledge she holds stricken from the earth all of their holdings teeter on the edge of market collapse.
Wanna start this off by saying that your stuff is inspiring and I read and reread it all the time for help. So big thank you for that!
That being said, I was wondering if you could give any advice on building kingdoms/nations. Your advice on deities helped me to create the gods of my own original universe so I figured you'd have tips on other world building aspects.
Drafting the Adventure: Cities, Settlements, & Nations
Hey friend, I just so happened to be writing a DTA post that mapped onto your question, so I hope you don't mind if I start with the small scale and work up to the big stuff. I think you'll find my methodology works regardless of the size of polity you're creating.
Like any act of worldbuilding, creating an iconic settlement or realm to serve as the backdrop or hub for your adventures is a tricky process, in no small part because just like their IRL counterparts, thereâs a theoretically infinite amount of time and effort you as a creator could spend detailing the goings-on of the settlement and the histories of its inhabitants in the surrounding lands.  Too much detail and you risk choking on your own meticulously crafted set dressing, not enough and you risk your settlement being a generic placeholder that your audience canât get invested in.
The solution to this issue is figuring out what detail you need to prioritize when creating your settlement, and what you can leave as an inference. You want your settlement to both draw the party in, and to serve as a rich canvas with which you can paint the context of your stories. There are plenty of tutorials out there about how to generate street layouts or determine the demographics of your city, but this isnât one of them. as a story focused DM, my framework for building settlements only requires me to have an idea about three simple factors:
The Geography of where this settlement ( and surrounding ones) are located.
The Economic engines that drive the cityâs growth
The Culture of the People who founded the city, and how the history of the settlement and surrounding lands have shaped the people who live there.
Once I have even a vague idea of those three things Iâm off to the races, as they let me extrapolate out any details I might need the same way that a few details about an NPC can provide the skeleton on which a real story can be built.
Below the cut Iâll go into detail about the three factors, how they interact with each other, and how you can use them to build out the local map of your settling.
Before we go on, I realized that thereâs a bit of information I have from previous editions of d&d that wasnât carried over into 5e, which is settlement sizes: a useful guide for how big a setting might be, and a benchmark for us going forward.
Thorp: 20-80
Hamlet:81-400
Village: 401-900
Small town: 901-2000
Large town: 2001-5000
Small city: 5001-12,000
Large city: 12,001-25,000
Metropolis: 25,001-
Likewise, anything in italic text is going to be purely optional advice that will help with your worldbuilding. Just being able to guess at a settlementâs four factors is enough, unless youâre someone who likes getting into the fine details.
Regional Geography:
The reason I start with geography is that itâs impossible to figure out the nature of a settlement without at least a vague understanding of the lands that surround it. This isnât to say you need to generate a whole worldmap and then work in to the fine details, but knowing what your party sees when they cast their gaze in the four cardinal directions is important when figuring out the basis of your settlement.
The one piece of advice youâre going to find in nearly every settlement creation guide is â Settlements are constructed near a source of fresh waterâ, which is universally true and a great jumping off point. That said, most guides Iâve seen stop there, and negate several other important concerns when it comes to deciding where a settlement might be placed.
Food: everybody needs food to live just as much as they need water, which means your settlement will be constructed with easy access to fertile land capable of sustaining it. A good rule of thumb is that a settlement is going to require one constant foodsource per size category, with a thorp requiring one, a small town requiring four, and a metropolis requiring at least eight. Hunting/gathering in the local wilderness is going to be able to sustain anything up to the size of a village, but beyond that, the land will need to be developed in order to sustain population size. A settlement can also count a neighboring settlement of two size categories or smaller as a food source, which will encourage the development of roads across the land.  You can use this system to build out a map of your campaign world, surrounding settlements with different kinds of farmland and connecting them with rivers and roads.
Natural Resources: People will set up camp anywhere, but what allows a settlement to grow and prosper is access to plentiful resources ( fertile land, building/crafting materials, luxury goods).  It will be a rare thing for a settlement to boast more than one material/luxury resource, so spread them out across your map. Small to medium settlements will be centered around the extraction/processing of these goods, while larger settlements will sit in a nexus of these smaller settlements, hosting the markets and trade ports.
Transportation: Unless it was founded by isolationists, your settlement will need avenues of supply and trade, which will also determine the limits of your local authority. A good adage that I learned from one of my favorite history professors is that an army can only march for seven days without breaking, which means the limits of your settlements and its hinterlands is seven days march/ride/sail away from the last point of resupply. This is why empires build roads, and cultures most often develop along rivers: theyâre both means of getting your troops from one end of your territory to the other so that you can project/consolidate power over a larger region.
Defense: Mostly an afterthought unless your settlement is near the border of whatever realm it happens to occupy. No one likes it when someone takes their stuff, so settlements will be built in a way that makes them difficult to attack, or with a large natural barrier (forest, mountains, swamps, wide or deep rivers, canyons) between them and their nearest enemy. These natural barriers end up creating the borders of nations as when it comes to founding a kingdom, neighbors with permeable borders quickly become subjects. That said, internal barriers will often define the settlement patterns of your surrounding region, and how that region will fair given the outbreak of civil or external conflict.
Ecconomic Engines:
âMoney makes the world go roundâ is an old adage, but when it comes to worldbuilding, itâs absolutely true. People move and settle into regions because the land there offers the promise of a better life, and the dynasties of the powerful live and die over the rights to who gets to exploit what.
Just like with food, every settlement above a certain size is going to need at least one economic engine to ensure the prosperity of its people, which will in turn give you as the worldbuilder a firm idea about the characteristics of your settlement, the lives of its people, and how it relates to its neighbors. (This time though, the count starts at 1 engine for a village, 2 for a small town, etc.)
Hereâs some ideas:
Food: While thereâs a baseline of food required to keep everyone alive, no one is going to say no to a more varied diet and the wealth that comes from exporting surplus to neighboring markets. Most feudal economies start as food economies, initially trying to ensure enough of a stockpile to get through winter/lean seasons but eventually self optimizing to produce wealth in vast excess of what any one population could consume.
Building Materials: An expanding populace is going to need wood, bricks, tile, and stone, to say nothing of timber for boats or the metal required for tools. Whole industries pop up around the gathering and transport of these goods.
Textiles; Never EVER discount the essential nature of textiles, whether it comes from rough homespun wool to luxury silk. In addition to providing clothing for the populace, crops like cotton and linen both have a myriad of side uses that end up forming the economic backbone of societies.
Trade: Commerce can be itâs own economic engine, as towns with markets and Foreign ports boast those whoâve grown skilled at hawking goods and directing the flow of mercantalistic investment where it needs to go.
Industry: some things are better done in bulk, and when it comes to trades that require something to be smelted, dyed, or produced en-masse, you can expect people to double down. Only available to settlements of small town size or lager.
Tourism: It may seem like a modern concept, but people have been traveling for education and pleasure for as long as thereâs been the capability to travel. Pilgrimage sites, cultural monuments, and natural wonders can all provide a destination, as well as numerous amenities for travelers along the way.
Conflict: Grim to say, but economies run as well on blood as they do on anything else, and plenty of cultures will boast mercenaries, pirates, or slavers as central pillars of their economy
Luxury goods: Art, Spices, Drugs, Precious stones, these things provide enrichment at all walks of life while giving the rich something to pour their wealth back into the economy.
Culture & History:
Culture provides the pallet with which you paint the character of your settlement, and while it might be easy enough to say that a settlement was founded by halfling clans or by a feudalistic human monarchy, no society stays static as it is put through the rigors of growth and survival. What happens when a group that was a bit player in the social hierarchy unexpectedly accrues power? What happens when a city is conquered by an outside culture, and how do they end up integrating? These changes end up having knock on effects that define how your settlement operates, the ways in which it might differ from the âdefaultâ fantasy backdrop which will in turn help it stand out in your playerâs minds.
One of the best ways to detail a settlement is through an understanding of Crisis and Power. Innumerable crises affect the world at any given time, and by virtue of living in both a medeival-ish, fantasy-ish world these disasters can be quite dramatic. Invading armies, marauding monsters, plagues, the death/birth/whims of gods, famines, financial crashes, wizard fuckery, all of them can spell death or doom for a culture.
I talked here about the best way to set up the power structures for a courtly drama was to understand the most recent crisis faced by the kingdom, and how those in power dealt with it. As it turns out, the method is much the same for doing the groundwork on your settlement's history, instead focusing on the BIGGEST disaster that would've affected your populace in the last 200 years, rather than the most recent. As a student of history, it's bad form for me to set any hard and fast rules, but 200 years (or a proportional chunk of time for longer lived peoples) is a good meterstick to see a culture totally reinvent itself, bearing only passing similarities to what it was before.
Mapping a Kingdom: Before you go mapping out your entire fantasy world, remember that such a exercise is mostly a time sync that is irrelevant to most campaigns. The stories of 90% of adventuring groups take place in the same general area, with brief forays into other dimensions or vacation length visits to foreign lands. You'd be best served by keeping things vague, focusing your detail work on the local area and having only a vague idea what's going on in the rest of the world. If your campaign revolves around borders and the play between cities/provinces/kingdoms, a map might be important, so consider my earlier advice regarding settlement founding and defense. The boundaries of nations form along natural barriers that makes it easier for the defender to hold the territory. Fights are most often over areas that have a lot of economic engines, and the very worst fighting comes in prosperous areas that don't have a lot of natural barriers between them. Small states are frequently absorbed into larger ones, and large ones frequently fracture into competing states, each centered around a cluster of economic engines.
Economists are increasingly relied upon by businesses and organisations to understand market conditions and economic developments. Like Jeremy Thomas Rothfield, a well-known economist. With a focus on the debt markets, fixed income assets, infrastructure, and utilities, Jeremy Rothfield explored the relationship between debt and equity return. This high-paying, high-growth business is likely to require more and more workers over the next several years, so here are some tips on how to best position yourself for success.
To improve your abilities, practise.
There are a number of particular and practical abilities that are necessary to succeed in your chosen economics career. Critical thinking and analytical abilities may be required for success in some situations. You may opt to pursue appropriate internships and other chances to hone your skills as you begin your career in the sector.
Try to find teaching opportunities.
In addition to their research and consulting employment, some economists with postgraduate degrees teach part-time or full-time. An economics teaching position could be available in a university, community college, or high school.
Independent thinker
Curiosity can help you learn about other economists' work and theories, but in order to be a great economist, you must also be able to come up with original ideas and discoveries. An economist who is able to think for himself and challenge what he or she knows is more likely to come up with fresh ideas and unique research. The ability to think for yourself will come in handy in conferences, seminars, and lectures, too.
 Acquirement in the field of mathematics
Economists need to be able to read and write numbers. You'll need to be able to cope with massive datasets and analyse visual data such as graphs. As a result, many economists begin their careers or studies in economics by taking math preparation classes before doing so.
Communication Skills
Communication Skills In addition, they may provide clients with economic advice, clarify reports, and conduct presentations. The ability to convey economic concepts to non-economists is critical since it is sometimes required to interact with colleagues from other disciplines.
Writing Skills
Economists must be able to properly communicate their results in their writing. It is very uncommon for a significant portion of the labour to be spent on creating specialised reports for use by coworkers and clients. Economists must be able to explain their ideas in a clear and concise manner. In addition, they may write for the media or for academic journals.
The fundamental principle of the classical theory is that the economy is selfâregulating. Classical economists maintain that the economy is always capable of ac
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