In the Caliphate of Azithan, known to its neighbors as the Necromancer Kingdom ...
In this edition: What to expect when the Caliphate sends two nice young believers to your town?
The Caliphate does this two different ways, and your experience will be very different!
Either the Caliphate will send two highly competent missionaries, or two incredibly incompetent ones.
Why would they send incompetents? Either to get rid of them, or looking for an excuse to go to war. If your town kills our incompetent jerks who talk about what to do with your dead uncle? Yeah, that's a great excuse for war.
In the case of competent folks, at least one will be able to create Lifeless. The other needs a voice that everyone listens to. The first should either be a cleric or a wizard, and the second is best as a Paladin.
In my mind, this happens in Dungeon World. My standard go to high octane fantasy game.
The battle plan goes about like this:
-- Generate wealth through adventuring
-- Leverage that wealth for a base of operations, possibly removing a criminal element.
-- Raise lifeless from the bodies you murder through adventuring.
-- Use the lifeless to clean the streets, and feed the people who show to service.
-- Offer protection -- real protection -- services to those who need it.
-- Promote a few local parishoners into the minor secrets of the church, giving them basic lifeless commands.
That's pretty much how to do it! Spread out from there, building franchises and making it financially ruinous to not be in the church.
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So, here's the question that's been bumming around the back of my mind, as regards this "competent expansion" plan: How do you get around dirt-simple bigotry?
ReplyDeleteLike, "Feh ... you usin' those walkin' corpses to till your fields? Well, you won't find nobody wantin' your crops in this town, that's fer damn sure."
It seems like the whole "make it financially ruinous not to be in the church" depends on first avoiding people who make it financially ruinous to be in the church.
Its problematic, for sure. The church needs trade just like any society. But, they don't really trade grain -- they give it away in exchange for prayin'.
ReplyDeleteSince fewer people are needed in the fields, you've got more living people to do higher skill labor. And that's a key point I so often don't emphasize enough; with the same number of people, the Caliphate has more skilled labor.
Now, what's that mean for turning a society? That's harder, sure. Even then, you've got the Lifeless mostly cleaning and carting and powering treadmills; the skilled labor has to be done by the living.
How do you ever overcome bigotry?
I don't know! It seems like a very hard problem to address incrementally: The first people who take up the offer of zombie labor are going to face really extreme stigma ... enough that you've got a potentially lethal barrier to early adoption.
ReplyDeletePlus, I'm not sure it's bad bigotry.
After all, the farmer who says "Well hell, I don't want no grain ground by a mill-stone that was made by a stone-cutter what was powered by ZOMBIES ON THE TREADMILL ... it's all accursed, I tell ya!" is saying essentially the same as the learned scholar who says "I feel strongly that we should not, at any level, give economic support to the society you are trying to slip under us by stealth, because of our rejection of many of your basic premises." The smart play is to reject every result of any tainted production chain ... but people don't need to be smart to make that play.
To refuse the Caliphate, you've got to refuse:
ReplyDelete-- Nearly Free flour
-- Nearly unlimited manual labor
-- A whole lot of skilled labor.
And, sure, you can do that. But, refusing the skilled labor that exists due to a lack of humans needed in the fields looks a lot more like an embargo than refusing a particular commodity or labor practice.
Besides, when going into a new city, the missionaries don't start by making grain with lifeless. They use Lifeless to clean and carry, and give out grain and bread that maybe comes from lifeless or maybe they bought. And this is offered to everyone -- so, you start with the poor.
The truly desperate are unlikely to say no, and as they become less desperate, the price of their labor goes up.
Except, the thing up at the top is not the incrementalist view. Incrementally, to refuse the Caliphate you've got to refuse:
ReplyDelete- Zombies wandering your streets picking stuff up
- Creepy new neighbors saying "Come in poor people, there is nothing to fear here! We will feed you and give you candy! Don't mind the undead at the door!'
- The notion that you can get replaced by a corpse, and then somehow in the absence of the educational system the Caliphate takes for granted, you will retrain to be skilled labor.
Those seem a lot easier to say no to ... and saying "Well, we'll prey upon the desperate who have no choice but to say 'Yes'" starts to put the Caliphate much more squarely in "unalloyed villain" territory ... yes?
Tony Lower-Basch "Prey" is a bit strong, i think. The Church is open to everyone, and it is just my suspicion that the poor and desperate will be more likely to accept the benevolence of the Church.
ReplyDeleteAnd, really, the villain is the society that creates the poor & hungry & desperate and does not allow them to rise above their station. The society that needs them to be desperate in order to extract value from them.
That's what the church stands against: against using implied violence to keep people desperate.
Okay ... you've started speaking in character here, right?
ReplyDeleteBecause out of character I know that you would not say that the Caliphate is against using implied violence against less powerful peoples in order to further their own goals.
At least a little, yeah.
ReplyDeleteI think the word prey triggered something. But, yes, a society that demands people be poor in order for the society to thrive is, at least, problematic.
Sure ... but the Caliphate has the same dependency. They don't get anywhere unless people are so poor that they have no choice but to accept lifeless assistance.
ReplyDeleteThey're not doing the Star Trek Federation thing where they say "Oh hey, yeah, we totally get that you might not agree with our tenets. So we've established a whole supply chain that has nothing to do with the Lifeless, except inasmuch as they're the source of our overall societal surplus. And from that supply chain we are giving freely to your society, until you have no more poor people. Then, and only then, will we entertain the question of whether you want to adopt some of our ways ... but before then? Oh heck no. That would be coercing you through your own desperation. That would be wrong."
Mind you, they could do that. But they're not. They're saying "You're desperate, and we aren't, so accept our ways because you have no choice ... because we are (barely) the lesser of two evils."
I think that's an uncharitable view, and a very charitable reading of the federation. Also, there's an implicit assumption of having the same level of extra food and resources, which may be overestimating the excess provided by the Lifeless. Or, maybe not. That's hard to pin down.
ReplyDeleteIts debatable whether even the Federation does the Federation thing: I've read fan claims that the Federation is a protection racket to let the people of earth not work.
Ignoring that, look at how they treated Bajor: For 50 years, they allowed the Occupation. Then showed up with a skeleton crew and only a commander in charge. A doctor who'd just graduated, a science officer who was a personal friend of the commander, and the bajorans trusted them so minimally that they sent a terrorist to keep an eye on them. It wasn't until the wormhole was discovered that they got serious.
That being said: I don't think it is barely the lesser of two evils. Sure, you only get the blessings of the society through action, but the action is intentionally simple and frees you to do other things.
It'd be akin to the US sending a couple of operatives to China, and paying employees of Voxconn to show up and talk about their problems once a week. Those people could still work, and are not forced to attend. Would it be better still to simply end desperation without requiring action? Sure!
But, I know of no society that can actually do that.
My mistake. I'm yucking your yum. I'll stop.
ReplyDelete[ A bit, yes. Also, I think you are mistaken. But, you are probably right that disengaging on that is wise. ]
ReplyDelete