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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ย. 2021
- The land of coin, well more like the land of cash because they are replacing gold with folding money. Darokin is the economic blast furnace of the Known World, trading with anybody and everybody that will do business with them. Featuring a diplomatic corps tasked with keeping the markets open, the nation enjoys a strong work ethic and a solid grasp on the world's economy.
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It's like the fantasy equivalent of Switzerland, especially with how they handle banks.
So Darokin provides the Ikea furniture of the D&D world...
15:54 “ The Wells Fargo wagon is a comin’ down the street, oh I wish, I wish, I wish, what there could be??”
Due to the fact that Darokin wields so much economic power, and with the events of the Wrath timeline, they have to play some kind of role, albeit one in the background, depending upon how you play your game. The lack of inner tension has always bothered me.
These are the best. Thank you.
I’ve noticed a strong Libertarian leaning in a lot of old D&D lore, not surprising given Gygax was a libertarian. You have Darokin, the city of Greyhawk and Sembia in the forgotten realms being Libertarian paradises and I remember I moment in the Planescape adventure Faction War where, after (spoilers) all the factions get kicked out of Sigil by the Lady of Pain, no ones there to run the tax infrastructure but nothing happens and it turns out all the tax revenue had all along only gone to support the tax infrastructure and bureaucracy.
I don't know if it is just me, but I think libertarian societies work better for RPGs. Like, you need the right to own weapons and people willing to hire what are basically mercenaries/bounty hunter in order to have adventuring be a thing, otherwise you would be forced to play as a member of the city guard or a professional soldier.
You might be interested in reading In Nomine. It is fairly libertarian in some regards (though not at all in others, with GMs heavily encouraged to emphasize the aspects they personally enjoy) with both major factions having equal parts libertarian [left & right] and authoritarian [left & right] representations. The libertarian-center faction's leader acknowledges what you said (the game was written in 1994) and thus outright and explicitely recruits, among other things, Tabletop conventions.
It's a shockingly good game that somehow manages to allow near-total freedom for players despite the existence of objective cosmic good & evil.
@@unintentionallydramatic I've looked into it and damn, sounds like a pretty fun game - specially after hearing about the 666 dice rule 😂
@@falkyrie5228 Yeah it's got _style_ like crazy.
I mean on The Sigil example. That's supposed to be the "True Neutral" realm if I recall correctly and each of the Alignment realms pretty much run the way that works for them especially since their metaphysical afterlives more so than physical planes. I mean you don't get on Heavens case for having Utopian honor and justice 100% of the time or Hell for not having any change despite everyone in it being varying degrees of constantly miserable
Hayek did ..5 seconds later hear you say save it for philosophy class.
Do Slagovitch and the Savage Coast! WOOT!
So there is actually a Dollar General House? That's one way to make money.
So is there a Merchant Prince Microsoft that created an Excel spell?
It’s interesting how I’ve never before thought to pronounce the last part of “Mauntea” like the drink. 😳
Is the fireworks lady single? asking for a friend...
Are they akin to... fantasy Quakers to some extent?
Didn't this already get remastered and uploaded? Am I crazy?
I've been working on this for two weeks. It's been interrupted several times but finally got it finished
I feel a major problem with Darokin, both how its written and many propose solutions, is that it is trying to put capitalism in a time period where many of the ideas should not exist and the systems that make it work are not present at all. It is a larger problem of introducing modern ideas and knowledge into a medieval setting that causes all sorts of problems and plot holes.
My answer to how to make Darokin more flawed (without making the government completely evil) is to remembered that wealth back then came much more from land and in the case of a fantasy setting magic, with merchants often being considered a lowish class of people in many societies, especially those without long coast lines allowing for easier trade like Darokin. We already have Minrothad, we dont need another merchant based nation.
Now we can still have Darokin still be a merchant power, however unlike Minrothad it is not what the government is built upon or where many of its voters source of wealth is from. So the republic runs a narrow beam of using merchants to increase their nations power, while at the same time preventing the merchants from gaining power in the republic, creating tension between the two groups. Especially now as merchants start to covert their wealth into property and influence and thus threaten the landowners hegemony. The merchants in contrast want to turn Darokin into a mercantile state, where they lead the way to greater profits and treasures, at the cost of the long term planning associated with Darokin decisions (thanks in part to elvish advisers), and finally getting the elves of Alfheim under their control.
Not helping with the internal strife is the external strife it has with the other major powers of the known world. The Mercantile deadlock with Minrothad, Thyatis trying to break Darokins circle of influence so it can expand its own circle of influence, The broken lands and the ethengar khanate raiding their boarders, and Glantrians just being a pain across its north western boarder pretending that's their land.
You know, on the whole philosophy class subject, I still think that Darokin's lore works great as the propaganda they tell themselves. That Darokin is a nation of contradictions that nobody in Darokin likes to talk about, and they point to the same handful of Wealthy Philanthropists that live in Darokin when they get confronted with them, but they mostly do so as conversation stoppers. How does this help the game?
Maybe Darokin seriously depends on internal colonies and debt slaves to prop up their economy, and this leads to a bunch of down-trodden people reacing out to the PCs to act like Shadowrunners against the medieval version of Megacorps. Or something.
Maybe things really do work out in Darokin, but part of what makes that possible is heavy use of Elven artifact magic, because Darokin secretly is a puppet government that serves as a buffer state between Alfheim and the rest of the world. Similar to Bretonnia and Athel Loren in Warhammer Fantasy.
"We make all of your philosophical ideals become reality within your borders, and you make sure the outside world has to go through you to get to us. Deal? Deal." It partially explains why Darokin gets so thoroughly wrecked in your 1005 timeline....
@Titan360 Personally, I’ve begun to start to look at Darokin as more like the current USA. And not in a good way. All their Rah, rah, we’re so rich and awesome, anyone can get rich through hard work is just propaganda. The system is actually rigged in favor of the “Real Darokinians”, foreigners are only tolerated if they too are wealthy, or from the “good “ countries, racism is systemic, and corruption? That’s what’s for dinner! For me, that solves the rather vanilla culture and frankly, wildly unrealistic (even for a fantasy setting), idea of how a Plutocracy could work so harmoniously. It’s just a thought. Have a nice day.
H
Any plutocracy is the rule of the worst by definition. It's selecting for greed, dishonesty, ruthlessness and willingness to break laws and corrupt law enforcement. So they will get virtual absence of community spirit, civic mindedness, noblesse oblige and concern for public welfare. The plutocrats will have group or class solidarity with each other at the level of international competition or challenge to their banking and trade practices and monopolies, but that'll be it. And they'll either starve the military into inability to guarantee territorial integrity, as with Rome, or turn it into a privatised cash-cow for their own mercenary companies and private armies, prefiguring feudalism, achieving both poor performance, massive overspending and an easy opportunities for coups and splitting up the country into fiefdoms. Or they'll be driven to try to conquer and enslave others to maintain growth rates and profits against the economy-shrinking effects of immiserating the non-rich.
As written, Darokin is both ideological idiocy and too much like the modern day to be interesting to play in.
Darokin, for me, was always the most ridiculous fantasy of Mystara. Destroying it is probably a better idea than ignoring it - as I always did. Reworking it may also possible, but I could never use it as written.
There's a level of willful ignorance generally only seen in adverts, propaganda or Disney (etc) cartoons.
The idea that a nation could exist in that way, in a world of high magic, supernatural monsters, and bounded by feudal cultures drawn from bronze-age thru renaissance Europe… it's just way too ridiculous for the suspension of disbelief.
In order to believe it could exist, one would have to ignore the reality, the only way the vast wealth (they are said to possess) came about in our real world societies, was through slavery and the exploitation of extremely impoverished labour creating goods and feeding markets on an industrial scale. For such a nation to exist, they would have vast slave holdings (or globalised factories in impoverished nations - maybe the Atruaghin plateau could be their sugar plantations, Mexican maquiladoras, or South East Asian sweat shops).
Yeah, it all gets a bit REAL and stops being a fun game of D&D.
But there is some mileage if you've time to rewrite them as the nastiest, most brutally repressive nation in Mystara!
@@Wraithing Absolutely. My feeling is that they would either be in the process of launching imperialism to colonialise their neighbours, or a few years away from civil war with the various plutocrats building up their private armies and local feifdoms, and most of the poulation living in dire poverty as contractually enslaved, debt-ridden indentured workers or unemployed, elderly and disabled beggars, and you can either take part in the espionage between the commercial houses which are about to become feudal mini-states or the militarism preparing wars against the neighbours, or maybe social banditry on behalf of the poor like with the Local Heroes in Red Steel, being Zorro but with more Anglo-Saxon names. If you go with the Darokin plan to take over the world, then you can also have the military planning to coup the commercial houses and impose the Napoleonic Emperorhood required to keep the army and the state intact. There's campaign ideas, but as you say it requires a major re-write.
Awesome stuff, and makes so much more sense!
Of course - by reframing Darokin with this verisimilitude - the truth of coffeehouse capitalism, modernity and gritty realpolitik could absolutely kill a lot of the whimsy expressed in so much of the Mystaran milieu.
But if you used this version of Darokin as an alternative future to the one in Wrath of the Immortals - maybe as an Enervation of the Immortals!! And it could be pushed a couple of centuries into the future.
Flippin' 'eck that could be a great dystopian future for a time travelling Mystara/Blackmoor campaign.
Sounds good to me, anyway. 👍 😁
😎
I must say that I officially 😍 this thread, and was thinking pretty much the same things the longer the video went on.
It seems like the writer(s) created a nation straight out of an Ayn Rand novel, but where the uber rich are nice for reasons that directly contradict human nature. It's a depressing reminder of the real-life trend towards forcing every nation to adopt the worst aspects of both capitalism and communism, and is enough to make one root for The Master's forces when they invade in X12.
@@DolFan316 The Master has been much maligned by eastern propaganda no doubt. But X - 10 Red Arrow, Black Shield with the War Machine rules is a fantastic game and campaign, if you've got the table space and can exactly record the location of all pieces in between sessions, so you can't change the narrative too much. But the kind of self-sabotaged, corrupt and divided Darokin that the Merchant Houses would actually produce would make it that much more challenging, with weaker units with lower morale.