Cities are for capital pt 1 – violence

Cities are a common place in a lot of roleplaying games, but what is actually the point of cities? I’d say that it differes a lot depending on what sort of world we are playing in. A feudal city does not have the same purpuse as a cyberpunk city, just as a modern city is not the same as a generic fantasy city. Common for all kinds of gatherings large enough are that they allow different kinds of capital to thrive. I like writing about cities, and societies, and thought I’d explore different kinds of cities in different eras and different parts of cities. In the texts I want to find out what kind of things a world builder might care about (or not, I’m not your mom) want to incorporate to make cities feel alive and reasonable.

Cities are for violent capital

In Political science class, we learned that the first nations formed from cities. Those cities formed from the need to protect yourself and your family from bands of raiding marauders. When someone with enough violence capital offered protection at the price of taxation, people gathered together in cities. A fun theory here is that marauding bands tired of marauding and saw the potential of just taxing the populace instead. These cities would then naturally have some sort of defenses, either at the center or surrounding the buildings. I guess it depended on how important it was to protect the populace vs protecting the person collecting the taxes.

Naturally, this sort of proto-cities couldn’t sustain a large population in isolation. There would be a limit to how much agriculture could be done close enough to be feasible, and would as such have a need to rely on trade to grow larger. Considering the state of agriculture at this time, it is unclear how much trade could be done, and how large a city could grow.

Most settings (to my knowledge, I’d love to be proved wrong in the comments or on social media) don’t have settings that are 10,000 or more years back in time. But if I were to use this kind of settlement, I’d make sure that it’s comparatively small and that most money is concentrated to the leader of the tax collecting protectors. Or, and this feels kinda improbable, a benevolent kind of chieftain that doesn’t prey on their subjects. But hey that could be interesting as well.

Having a setting with this sort of scattered villages with marauding bands could be an interesting way to play though. Lots of opportunity for fighting for those who desire it, diplomacy for others, or attempting to advance society. With most settlements probably having a limited knowledge of the geography further away than a couple of days, there is a lot of opportunity for exploration.

This was the first short post on Cities is for capital. The following ones will explore other kinds of cities, in other times and societies.