Fictional Governments

I downloaded the demo for Unicorn Overlord on Switch and the brief introduction portrays a military coup in which a general attempts to take political control from the “rightful” queen. As someone who is pretty skeptical of monarchy in general and finds “they’re too violent” to be a very lazy way to make an ideology villainous, I was inspired to write about a few different forms of government that would be appropriate to a medieval fantasy setting. I may or may not use these for anything in the future, in their current or different form, but I enjoyed writing them so I wanted to share.

The One True King

The One True King (or Queen) is an inherited family line of monarchs, renowned for their personal virtues, clear writing, and good judgment. The current monarch governs as an absolute monarch/dictator, able to adjust laws and decisions on a whim bound only by the constraints of actually having good judgment and a profound desire for their rule to be successful.

The monarch tends to be occupied primarily by training and selecting from among their heirs, generally having around a dozen children of very close ages; this is much more convenient for male monarchs via mistresses, though a few True Queens have maintained similar sets of heirs by including nieces and nephews. If one ‘crop’ of heirs is not sufficiently promising, they may end up replaced by a new crop of offspring. Those potential heirs who are not deemed fit to be the successor either swear fealty to the chosen heir, or are generally exiled to the Principalities. Exiled princeps often take political roles in the Principalities, creating another venue for family members to practice and demonstrate their acuity as rulers, and a small handful of particularly successful princeps have been recalled to take the throne over the course of history.

The current King has a policy of progressive taxation with a variety of nuances similar to a system of capital gains and losses to empower subjects to take appropriate financial risks. Social attitudes in the Kingdom are usually liberal, with the exception of unquestioning obedience to the King and His Laws.

Enforcement of current decrees tends to be harsh, with local governors having authority only to execute, and not to change or interpret laws. Though the King’s absolute power makes him able to adjust policies quickly, the adjustments all have to go through him personally, leading to a bit of a bottleneck in resolving complex issues. In addition, the King spends most of his energy on his heirs, though this often takes the form of holding court to assess and shape their judgment in practice.

Military service is viewed as honorable and co-equal with civil service and commercial work, and the kingdom is able to maintain a large army reserve with deep loyalty to the throne. This distribution of military power, the relatively flat hierarchy of absolute monarchy, and the lack of an ideology to coordinate around outside of loyalty to the King himself makes the threat of military coups rare.

The Rightful Principalities

Exiled members of the One True Royal Family don’t always agree that the best possible heir was chosen. However it is well established tradition that violent overthrow simply demonstrates one’s lack of fitness. As a result, many exiled princeps attempt to demonstrate their skill at leadership outside the Kingdom.

Most end up seeking support in an area of overlapping principalities. In this region, every citizen chooses which princep they will follow, swearing fealty to their chosen lord conditionally on that lord seeming to them to be the rightful one.

For the most part the notion that these princeps are “the Rightful Heir” is a polite and convenient fiction, though a handful of cases have seen particularly popular and wise princeps return to the One True Throne. In the most recent case the appointing monarch was in fact sterile due to a childhood accident, meaning that all his apparent “legitimate” heirs were actually the result of affairs, so that it was easier to find an appropriate successor from amongst his cousins. Despite the rarity and generally extreme circumstances of such cases, their existence both legitimates the principalities and provides a useful tool for the One True King in training and selecting heirs.

Though ostensibly each exiled princep rules independently and absolutely, in reality most share a large portion of policy and have many practices of extradition, mutual defense, and coordinated tax management.

Additionally, while in theory the potential for rulership comes from membership in the royal family, some Church of Governance Oathbreakers whose ideas diverge from Church doctrine get informally “adopted” and amass followings in that way.

The growth of each individual princep’s following is generally limited to the number of followers they are personally able to attend to, multiplied by the number of other princeps they can convince to serve them as adjutants (as non-royals are generally unwelcome and unwilling as civil servants).

About 70% of the population of the Principalities currently pledge fealty to a council of ten Princeps and their respective adjutants, whose laws differ only in small technicalities.

Law enforcement in the Principalities can be complex, especially in cases when complainants and defendants change loyalties during the hearing of a case. However, changing fealty to a Princep who gives a contingent legal advantage means exposing oneself to that Princep’s capriciousness in other ways, which makes this process too inconsistent for the establishment of large scale organized crime.

The broad base of nobility results in higher taxes, though social attitudes are perhaps the least restrictive of any polity as the core value of the Principalities is tolerating a fundamental disagreement with one’s closest neighbors.

The Church of Governance

In the domain of the Church, civil service is exclusively practices by ascetic devotees of the faith. These adherents obey strict religious rules including vows of poverty, honesty, and non-violence, and Oathbreakers, who are unable to hold to these vows, are barred from service with zero tolerance.

Joining the Church is easy, and Oathbreakers are not badly regarded outside the prohibition from making, interpreting, or enforcing the law. The civil service is viewed as an intense and demanding calling, and experiencing it briefly before turning to a different life path is encouraged. This creates transparency for the system while also reducing the workload of those few “lifers” who work for the Church their whole lives. In many families, even outside the Church’s formal territory, a one-to-five year “tour of duty” as a Church clerk is viewed as a mark of honor, distinction, and education.

The Church makes a special effort to recruit from many parts of society so that it can avoid conflicts of interest in having individuals involved in judgments or policies related to their friends or family outside the Church. This is impossible to accomplish perfectly, resulting in a variety of types of short-lived regulatory capture especially regarding new technological advances.

The military is run as a branch of the Church, though only officers are considered clergy and required to adhere to vows. Combat training takes the form of shaolin-style merging of martial arts with fitness regimen and meditation.

A primary duty of service is producing consistent legal scriptures that are easy to understand and interpret in all common conflicts. The doctrines of the Church as a whole are centered on a minimalist core scripture similar to the Tao Te Ching, outlining principles and methods rather that specific policies. These are refined at a local level with various pamphlets which are published regularly to cover the specifics of contemporary and regional rules.

The asceticism of all civil servants means that tax levels tend to be quite low, except in times of exceptional windfall, funds from which are generally used to help in disasters or with economic displacements.

While Church doctrine does not ascribe any detailed requirements for the lives of citizens outside the clergy, anyone having any kind of popular following is suspicious as a potential source of conflict for the religious monopoly on power. This has a dampening effect on non-religious art, and artists are often persecuted or looked down on if they do not join the clergy.

Religious and bureaucratically useful arts are well funded, however, with portraiture, spatial design similar to Feng Shui, historical drama, and mnemonic poetry and song being especially common and viewed as a natural part of an upright life.

Constitutional Conquerors

A variety of military leaders establish territory through shows of force in this region, maintaining that territory and the loyalty of those within it by yoking themselves to written constitutions. These constitutions are varyingly democratic, though having a sufficiently broad base of support creates a competitive advantage, especially in getting honest property assessments for tax collection. Since maintaining a territory requires military force, military service tends to be lucrative and meritocratic, and taxes tend to be higher as a result.

Artists are highly valued here, especially those who can create propaganda and coordinate military support, but even artists who have more provocative, anti-establishment takes tend to be valued as heroes of the people and are respected lest they become focal points for new warlords to threaten existing generals.

Legal rules are much less stable in this region than others, however transitions often paradoxically involve less bloodshed. Because the mandate of rulers derives directly from their military capability, forces who are outmatched will readily surrender or negotiate minor adjustments to new constitutions, rather than forcing actual combat due to ideological conviction.

Since farms and families tend to live under several different written constitutions within a lifetime, having a legal scholar is an important practice for most families. Doing a “study abroad” year in the Church of Governance is a common practice, especially on the borders of Church territory which may fluctuate between being too far for the Church to enforce or not as individual clergy members join or retire near the border.

Most constitutions have little to say about social order, especially around coastal trade hubs which are just as cosmopolitan as the Principalities, however there are exceptions, especially near the border with the more socially conformist People’s Collective Interest. That border holds a few tight knit fighting communities that are the most socially strict of any region in the world.

The People’s Collective Interest, or, derisively, “the Mob”

Most outsiders refer to this area of direct democracy as “the Mob,” a region whose directness of democracy would give Plato chills.

All disputes are handled at near-constantly-running, highly belligerent town hall meetings, at which all issues are decided by majority popular vote of anyone who decides to show up that day.

Many citizens of PCI have a fervent, almost feral devotion to democracy. While there is no formal military in the territory to speak of, the individual and collective dedication that so many citizens hold makes it almost impossible for any outside force to hold power in any meaningful way.

Local demagogues hold power across much of PCI territory, however it is nearly impossible to hold influence beyond the radius of a day’s travel, because the fierce independence of each town hall means a “leader” needs to be present at essentially every meeting to hold any sway.

In theory, no town hall collects taxes of any kind, however anyone who contributes too little to their neighbors may find themself suddenly stripped of all possessions in one day’s vote. Similarly, social rules and roles tend to be strict, as being in your neighbor’s good graces is the only guarantee of stability in life.

On the other hand, the exact nature of these social roles varies wildly by locale, so many town halls exist that are intensely supportive of dissenting voices or single-minded weirdos. In these halls, the strict social order can be inverted, such that anyone trying to enforce norms of any kind, even as simple as consistent penalties for theft or assault, can be effectively thrown out of society.

Equilibrium

Thousands of years ago, at the same period in history during which the True Royal Family was established and its first monarch wrote the original scriptures of the Church of Governance, a wizard completed a different project to implement his own vision of the ideal ruler.

The result of that project was Equilibrium, a magical golem with near-omnipotence bound to the task of ruling territory with Absolute Perfection.

Equilibrium is able to create Homonculi who can take time for every one of its territory’s citizens, each giving the best possible advice and making the best possible decisions… according to one specific wizard who died thousands of years ago.

Taxes in Equilibrium (a name used both for the golem itself and its territory) are close to the lowest rates of any nation, however no public project in Equilibrium has ever experienced a budget shortfall. Border disputes are met with the exact amounts of force needed for a peaceful resolution. No citizen of Equilibrium has ever gone to bed hungry—including during a brutal incident during which the golem force-fed a dissident attempting a hunger strike.

Equilibrium has no concern for loyalty, but has no tolerance for willful violation of laws, and unceremoniously escorts or even teleports anyone who breaks its laws to the border of its territory. Technology in Equilibrium includes fantastic inventions and prosthetics that make every citizen as productive as the most elite member of any other polity, however none of the technology has ever been successful analyzed or operated outside the borders of Equilibrium.

Members of the Church of Governance tend to find Equilibrium’s actions alarmingly heretical, but there is no widespread agreement about what specific actions or values lead to that belief.

At the center of Equilibrium stand a cluster of thousand foot high towers, each filled with a city’s worth of people. On those rare occasions that tower-city dwellers travel outside the territory, they seem happy and well adjusted, in addition to almost universally being talented magewrights, who describe long, healthy, and satisfying lives.

A new tower has risen in the cluster every ten years for the past five thousand years and change, making it the largest and densest city in the region by a wide margin. Occasional Church scholars have expressed concern that this linear expansion will eventually cover the entire planet, but the size of the towers mean it will take another ten thousand years before the towers reach the current border of Equilibrium, no one outside of academic research has given it any real consideration.