Fantasy Societies

[deleted]

You're forgetting magocracy. In the homebrew campaign one of my past groups played in for about 5 years, the Roman Empire analogue was officiall run by a (psionic) emperor/royal family, but they took orders frequently from the mages of the university.

I've always wanted to run a game with a city/state based on Bureaucracy. (Well, a highly-bureaucratic magocracy, really.)

Imagine the Vogon homeworld from the H2G2 movie and the Central Bureaucracy from Futurama combined:

The entire capital city is laid out on a square grid. Streets are all numbered and addresses are given as X,Y,Z coordinates from the central point. "Can you deliver this stack of forms to Professor Heimerdinger at (45, -3, 5), room 3? Don't forget to take your Proof of Delivery form and have him sign, date, and stamp it."

Everything requires forms, signatures, stamps, seals, and permits to complete. Navigating the nightmare of red tape without a well-trained guide is a nightmare for outsiders. Those who can figure out the labyrinth of forms and procedures find a wealth of ancient knowledge and artifacts, meticulously cataloged and studied.

The mages in the upper levels the bureaucracy have access to libraries of powerful spells born of the most meticulous research and practice. Instantaneous communication with distant lands, powerful teleportation spells, teleportation-interdiction fields, wards powerful enough to protect cities from scrying, passphrases and rituals to open ancient gates and awaken sleeping gods...

Histories of cultures since recorded time and prophecies both great and small fill entire libraries around the city.

There are those who say there exists a secret, chaotic under-city society filled with thieves, criminals, and other unsavory types. For the most part, those rumors are dismissed as stories that bureaucrats tell children in order to scare them into trying harder at school.

Except... there are those doors around town that you catch out of the corner of your eye. Shadowy figures slip into and out of them and when you snap your head around to look, the door and the figure are gone, leaving you with a feeling of dread and uncertainty in this otherwise perfectly logical city.