ON THEME [PAGE 3]

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ON THE MEANING OF THEME
ON SPECIAL PROBLEMS IN MARRIAGE

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ON THE MATTER OF EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYMENT
ON THE IC PENAL SYSTEM

THIS PAGE

ON POLITICAL SCIENCE

ON INHERITANCE

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ON THE AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY

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ON THE PERILS OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

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ON POLITICAL SCIENCE

Don't forget to tell your players what basic political setup your IC society (or societies) has at the moment.

You probably already have a strong, clear vision of what the answer to that question will be on your own mush, especially if you're basing it closely on a well-documented historical or fictional milieu where you just have to glance through a book to find the right answer, but the important thing is to make sure your players are well aware of what they're getting into.

You should also take the trouble to clarify any overlap between IC and OOC powers, i.e. does the IC King of Mordant necessarily have any special OOC Authority and/or Responsibilities of which other Players should be aware, or is his power purely a matter of acting domineering in RP scenes?

On the off chance that you really haven't decided how your IC political setup is going to work in one or more "nations" found on the map of your IC world, I'll just take the time to define a few of the basic possibilities for you to peruse in search of inspiration. In alphabetical order, we find that some of the basic categories include:

ANARCHY
AUTOCRACY
CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY
DEMOCRACY
FEUDALISM
PLUTOCRACY
THEOCRACY

ANARCHY

Anarchy, of course, means an absence of authority. In other words, there's no commonly accepted IC political leadership, onstage or offstage, in theory or in practice. The only example of this which I have personally observed was found in the early days of the now-defunct Riverworld MUSH, where it was presumed for thematic reasons that every inhabitant of our earth who had ever died in or prior to AD 2008 after achieving an age of at least 5 years (approx. 36,000,000,000 people, according to the original novels) had just recently awakened in a youthful body in a strange new world - apparently uninhabited except by the resurectees - without knowing how he got there. Obviously, there were no preexisting political structures to incorporate these new citizens, and any governments would have to be set up by the PCs themselves in due time.

AUTOCRACY

An autocrat is an absolute ruler, a man who can make or break anybody else with a snap of his fingers. Often called a dictator. In the cases of such prominent twentieth-century autocrats as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, it was often observed that any other high government official's practical power did NOT depend upon what the "laws" or "constitution" said his job description was supposed to be, but was ultimately determined by how much power the Autocrat in question seemed to THINK the official should have - and this could change at any time in accordance with the Autocrat's whims. If Hitler (for example) suddenly preferred to deal directly with a Deputy Minister instead of his boss the Minister of Whatever, in short order that Deputy was virtually the ruler of the entire Ministry and his nominal boss ended up feeling like a useless figurehead. This is the sort of environment where a man skilled at flattery and bootlicking (but not, perhaps, at anything else) can find his fortunes advancing very rapidly indeed as long he has access to the Big Man and always tells the Big Man exactly what he wants to hear ("You're absolutely right, Mein Fuhrer! Fighting the British, the Soviets, and the Americans simultaneously is BRILLIANT strategy! Never mind what your generals say about it! What do they know?").

Of course, a purist might argue that I wasn't really being fair to the concept of autocracy when I only named Hitler and Stalin, since not ALL autocrats have been responsible for tens of millions of deaths in their day. It is alleged that "benevolent dictators" have existed in history, and they are certainly encountered in popular fiction (over and over and over), so I will concede that your IC culture can be an "autocracy" without necessarily being a morbid place where simply seeing a soldier or policeman knocking at the door sends chills down the spine of the common citizen.

CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY

The United Kingdom is sometimes called a constitutional monarchy, even though it's gradually evolved to the point where the "monarch" is a decorative figurehead rather than a maker of policy, an institution preserved mainly for sentimental reasons. A better example of a constitutional monarchy where the Monarch still has some teeth might be found in the nation of Jordan.

There is no hard-and-fast blueprint for "exactly" how a constitutional monarchy must be organized, but I interpret it to mean that some of the politically powerful positions are hereditary (including the job of Chief Executive, or else it's not really a monarchy at all), and some of them are elective, meaning that part of the government (a House of Parliament, for example) is elected by the people rather than inheriting their positions from their ancestors or being appointed to the job by someone else who inherited HIS right to do so.

DEMOCRACY

"Rule by the people." In the purest form, democracy would mean that EVERY proposed law, every national policy decision (such as declaring war, raising taxes, passing a new law), had to be put up to a popular vote by the people before it could be enacted. However, the democratic ideal is more commonly transmuted into a "representative democracy," or republic, where the people merely get to elect legislators and executives who will presumably have everybody's best interests at heart in the laws and policies they hammer out.

FEUDALISM

Autocracies can be hereditary (witness Saudi Arabia, where the King theoretically has the final word over EVERYTHING), but not all hereditary governments are autocratic. Feudalism is a system where not just the top job, but many lower levels of authorityas well, are gained by heredity. As a result, the people at the lower levels (serfs and yeomen and knights and so forth) tend to do whatever the local nobility tells them to, rather than what the King sitting on a throne wants them to do, if any conflict between the two arises. In theory, everybody in the system is usually sworn to obey the orders of his liege (the aristocrat one step higher up in the chain) without question (a knight might swear fealty to his Baron, and the Baron to his Count, and the Count to his Duke, and the Duke to his King). If everybody keeps his oaths all the time, everybody will end up doing what the King wants done. The problem was, powerful and ambitious noblemen who thought they could get away with it often tossed their oaths out the window without a qualm, and if the Count chose to support a challenger in a war against the current King, it was a good bet that all the knights and lesser nobility under his rule would carry out their oaths to obey HIM instead of running over to the King's side, because that was where their loyalty belonged (as they saw it).

There were a fair number of feudalistic monarchs in Medieval Europe who really and truly believed, "I am the monarch of this nation, therefore my orders WILL be obeyed by every single human being in this nation, and I don't have to worry about pleasing people, I just have to bully them!" but it didn't always work that way. Just in British history, consider Queen Maude (daughter of Henry I) who thought everybody important had sworn to accept her as her father's chosen heir, but never actually ruled in London despite 20 years of warfare with her cousin Stephen. Consider Richard II, who was unseated by the Duke who proclaimed himself Henry IV. Consider Henry VI (Henry IV's grandson) who found half the nation turning against him when the Duke of York (a Plantagenet cousin) claimed the throne in competition to him (granted, the annoying fact that Henry VI had occasional fits of insanity was not exactly helpful in recruiting supporters). Consider Richard III (a son of the Duke of York, and the man who personally slaughtered Henry VI when the time came) who was himself overthrown by the Welsh rebel Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII. Consider Charles I, who thought reading speeches to Parliament concerning their moral obligation to do whatever he said was an effective way to rule (they finally cut his head off). Feudal politics were VERY messy at times (read up on the War of the Roses, sometime).

PLUTOCRACY

"Rule of the rich." Some say that Japan is already moving in this direction, with the biggest corporations often making the policies, and the elected legislators merely implementing them. The basic idea here is that the richest people, and/or the biggest corporations, have the most influence (if not virtually total influence) over the laws and policies of the entire nation. It doesn't matter here if a really rich man inherited his money from a noble ancestor, or worked his way up from the gutter; the point is that he has the economic clout to make his voice heard.

THEOCRACY

"Divine rule." Now, you can certainly have an IC deity giving daily orders on your mush if you really want to, but historically this sort of thing has more commonly meant rule by the mortal leaders of the local clergy, who swear that they really have no power except the authority to carry out the wishes of the God or Gods they claim to serve (whether or not there is any merit in this claim is for you to decide as you create such a culture). For a contemporary RL example, consider the Vatican City, which is officially ruled by the Pope of the Roman Catholic church. His demesne is undoubtedly a "theocracy" in the usual meaning of the term, regardless of whether or not you believe God speaks through him.

The next question is the Role of the IC Politics in the day-to-day affairs of your mush. In some cases, there is virtually no impact. For instance, I once RPed for awhile on a superhero mush set in an imaginary city somewhere in the United States. Presumably it had an elected mayor and town council, and was part of a state with an elected governor and legislature, but as near as I could tell NOBODY was Roleplaying any professional politicians whatsoever. Result : political intrigue did not really exist on that mush.

At the other extreme, I have seen mushes where virtually everybody had a pretty high IC status (Duke of This, Minister of That, Master of the Guild of Something Else) and political intrigue was supposedly the whole POINT of the regular RP sessions. Commoners were very far and few between indeed.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

ON INHERITANCE

Assuming that great political power frequently passes down within a family in your theme, just what is the pattern? If the Duke of Plaza-Toro is killed in RP, this becomes a very important issue. Several possibilities have raised their heads throughout history.

PRIMOGENITURE (inheritance of the eldest child of the parent)

Type One : Only one gender can inherit a title.

Type Two : Eldest child of either gender can inherit the title. The British have recently changed the rules of succession in their royal family to do it this way in the future, something which would be a lot more meaningful if King (or Queen) of England still meant "Chief Executive" instead of "Chief Figurehead."

Then there are intermediate positions . . . such as arose in England after the death of Henry VIII. At that time, he still had three living children whom he had at one point or another claimed were legitimate, and thus possible heirs (although in Mary's case, he had later changed his mind about the legitimacy of her birth BUT permitted her to be listed as a legal heir anyway). In order of birth, they were Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward. Under Primogeniture Type One, Edward was the heir and Mary and Elizabeth could NEVER inherit power. Under Type Two, they should have inherited in order of birth (but nobody suggested anything so radical at the time). But under the terms of Henry's will, a middle course was mandated : Edward had first claim on the throne (being male), but if he died childless then Mary got a crack at the throne, and if she also died childless, Elizabeth got her chance (and that's exactly how it happened - they eventually became Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I).

SPLIT THE LOOT

This is the approach that involves giving part of the estate to each child (or at least to each son). This was frequently done in Dark Ages Europe, and even in parts of Medieval Europe (Poland for example) for awhile after Primogeniture caught on elsewhere.

It made all of a nobleman's sons pretty happy, but it played hob with the idea of 'central power' if and when a war started.

NAMED HEIR

In this approach, the old landholder could make a will leaving his lands and title to any relative he pleased, regardless of seniority. The political maneuvering must have gotten pretty fierce, everybody trying to butter the old man up as he went to his deathbed . . .

ELECTIVE HEIR

Another approach is for all members of the aristocratic clan in question to get together and elect one of their own number to be the new ruler. The winner might be a third cousin twice removed of the previous bearer of the title, as long as he was part of the right clan. This, too, makes extra opportunities for political intrigue.

A side issue involves the question of illegitimacy. Can an illegitimate child inherit? If so, under what circumstances? And what if there's question as to whether or not he was legitimate? Who decides? (A war, maybe).