Worldbuilding 5d: Facilities

"Facilities" are spaces, stations and establishments that serve a particular purpose — that is, they facilitate a purpose.  This is done for clients, members, associates, supporters and investors, among others.  Facilities include taverns, inns, blacksmithies, guard houses, barracks, wet markets, stockyards, theatres, dockyards, auction houses, schools, law courts, arsenals, churches, gong pits and many, many other places.

On the whole, in the source material, these places are treated like convenience stores or background scenery.  Little or no attention is given to the underlying sense of such places or their fundamental place in the social strata.  Yet each of these places have to be supplied, staffed, protected, maintained, patronised and respected ... or else they cease to be, eliminated by competition or incompatibility.  None of these things are easy to achieve.  Proprietors keep these places alive through sweat and experience, or through the influence and goodwill they receive from locals.  Some facilities are merely a front for much larger organisations, starting with guilds and consortiums and reaching upwards through the upper classes and nobility.  Every person connected with a facility is someone's relative, someone's friend — and potentially someone's puppet.  All existing facilities trade on these relationships, and their presence in the community, to receive favours and influence decision-making, either on a local, regional or immeasurable scale.

By treating them as mere boxes with signs and faceless, nameless clerks who take the players' money and return goods like a medieval fantasy Starbucks, we divorce ourselves from understanding how the macro-society functions.  Each facility, after all, is a pool of money.  Some are small pools, some are large ... but every pool has its hold over some part of the game world.  By understanding how the pools work, and how the money is shared around, we see who are the masters in a community and who are the slaves.

This aspect of worldbuilding is kicked aside, however, because the players are viewed eternally on the "outside" of things.  They are foreigners, strangers in this town, without friends or allies, without the understanding of how things work around here or even the right clothes to wear.  Presumedly, the players will be here today and gone tomorrow, wisps of smoke without leaving even a memory behind.  That's how the game functions in the minds of many, many designers, writers, content creators and pundits.

As a result, whatever work we do to give the game world flesh on its bones, the face of the game world is empty and lifeless.  Every NPC is depicted as a cheat, a pawn or as chattel.  All NPCs serve only two purposes:  to facilitate the exposition or to block the player's purpose.  Anyone else can be discarded as decor, a pleasant collage of painted figures meant to decorate the scene.

In large part, this is understandable.  There are many difficulties to being a dungeon master.  Knowing what an innkeeper's life is like, or what matters to an apothecary with regards to business, or what palms must be crossed with money in order to maintain a functional brewery are not in the wheelhouse of the average 12-year-old DM — and since a 12-y.o. is the measure for what designs rise to the level of publication, the argument is eternally, keep it simple, stupid.  As such the main of us never paused to consider the deeper matrix underlying the daily happenings surrounding a keep, beyond the immediate flimsy woodenness of the characters with which the keep was stocked.  That was good enough.  Hell, it is good enough, for most people.

Conflict, however, is built from various starving factions competing for dwindling materials, which describes every aspect of a pre-industrial world.  "Dwindle" is the watchword for the region's food until the next harvest, which made harvest time very happy in the face of abundance.  Dwindle is the watchword for the small market when a counted-upon ship fails to come in because it was plundered by pirates, or the coin that's left to pay the soldiers when we're thousands of miles away from home and there are no ATMs.  No resource in a fantasy world ever achieves "enough" for very long ... and there's a serious group of serious people who are ready to use serious methods to keep what's left out of everyone else's hands.  No scheme or subterfuge is off the table.  So facilities getting what they have is only half the battle; the other half is keeping it out of the grasping hands of those who want and cannot pay.

This plays out in a continuous drama recognisable from 20th century gangster films ... only the  gangsters are dressed as city guards and church officials, high-minded nobles and as always, guildmembers and tradespersons.  Stealing off the carts of others is de rigueur; crippling an excellent silverworker's hand is perhaps a necessity of our staying in business.  This is why it's necessary not to stand alone, to have friends, to pay tithes and tribute: because if we pay it willingly, our enemies don't have to cut our hearts out to get it.

Some would rather believe the world was not like this once upon a time.  That, for example, the burning of witches, who happened to be recent widows of rich husbands, whose money went to the church responsible for describing them as witches, is an outlier.  Not business as usual.  Certainly not indicative of a general mindset.  No, the common people wore flowers in their hair, and played with animals, and sang nice madrigals together.  They weren't anything like those terrible people in Shakespeare, Chaucer or Grimm's Fairy Tales.  Those were just stories.

I don't ask the reader to undertake making this change in their game worlds ... but if a new angle on what the players can fight for is sought for, here it is.  Protection is a racket.  And everyone needs a little.