Lex Axioms: Laws And Traditions And Polities

A proposal for emergent legal systems

Background And Integration

A major goal of the project of Axioms is to allow for the representation, primarily in scenarios, of the of historical polities. Especially relevant is the perenially popular state of Rome. I took roughly 5 years of Latin in highschool, mostly because that was the “prestigious” language available to “smart” students but I didn’t pursue it in any meaningful way and I am not what in the war game/strategy community would be termed a romanophile so you’ll have to excuse my lack of proper language usage. What I find more interesting is legal, economic, and military aspects of Rome.

Axioms is an emergent world fantasy geopolitics simulator. I sometimes refer to it as a DIP strategy game. [D]iplomacy, [I]ntrigue, and [P]olitics are the focus rather than war or economics. No need to make references to “fetch”, I know the genre name probably won’t catch on. I design the systems such that they *could* represent many historical polities in a uniquely effective way but of course the world generator doesn’t concern itself with that. It does provide some value, in my opinion, for modders.

Axioms is capable of simulating iconic Roman institutions such as the Senate, the Socii, the Auxilia, the Legion, and the Cursus Honorum in a, relatively, unique and detailed way. I worked on many systems with that a specific goal. I also did some research, even buying books like a backwards savage of pre-Eternal September times, to enable the theoretical portrayal of many other popular historical societies.

However as a fantasy game focused on emergent gameplay in a limitless array of procedurally generated worlds the normal gameplay involves unique and ahistorical magical worlds.

Polities

A “polity” is an identifiable political entity - a group of people with a collective identity, who are organized by some form of institutionalized social relations, and have a capacity to mobilize resources.

Polities in the game can have Laws applied to them through various methods based on their existing organization. For the purposes of this article Laws and Traditions are the same mechanic. The exact details will change somewhat during development and testing. However most people are aware of the real life distinction between these things.

A Roman tribe is a polity, as are the Roman citizens, as are all the people living under Roman rule. Additionally the Patricians and Plebeians are disinct sub-polities. Laws targeting “foreigners” in general can exist as well as laws targeting specific foreign polities. Polities are those who are bound by the law. The target of the law is discussed in the following section.

For the current default world generation Polities start off very simple. Typically Populations are divided into a generic freeman class, a generic potentate class, and a generic slave class. All the original Characters are part of the potentate class. From that point on the interactions of Characters and Populations will drive the differentiation of Polities. This is one reason that the game will ship with probably 3 game worlds that have progressed to the 2000th, 4000th, and 8000th year respectively.

Polity Structure

Complex Polities will be defined at their core by their Charter. A constitution from our world would be a kind of charter. A monarchic system typically wouldn’t have a fancy charter. Charters are essentially a set of Laws enshrined above regular laws.

I’m still fiddling with the exact nature of Charters vs Laws. Perhaps the Charter is just the set of laws that defines the sub-polities like classes.

Laws And Edicts

Picking a specific name for a mechanic is a bit complex since the game isn’t focused on any real period or place. Of course I am using real words but my goal is to pick popularly understood words. So “Imperium” is not a core mechanic while “Prestige” is. Similarly I am using “Laws” to define this concept. But you can replace text or even define new systems and mechanics in the mod capabilities.

A Law can be proposed by any character to the legislative entity of their Polity. So a king or a council or a popular assembly, or whatever else. Well perhaps a given character may have to induce a more appropriate character to actually propose the law. In any case *Laws* can be targeted at a wide variety of things in my conception. Programmatically the Laws Panel, for the player, looks quite similar to the Propaganda Panel which also applies to a large selection of entities and mechanics.

Many Laws function as Opinion Impacts. Typically modifying impacts. So you might create a law that defines a harsher or lighter impact for bribery. Bribery is a prviate action so the Secret related to that action would have to be brought to light. You could even specify that a bribe to a particular political position would have especially harsh penalties.

Laws can also define who has a right to commit specific actions. Imperium in the Roman Republic could be defined as a set of laws creating magistracies and defining who could be what kind of magistrate and what they could do. So Consuls, Praetors, Aediles, Legates, Tribunes, and so forth. Many more simplistic systems just allowed individual leaders, Characters in the game, to make these decisions. So a free noble in a feudal system can declare war, deliberate on treaties, levy taxes, and so forth.

Populations and Characters are an unfortunately necessary set of abstractions because of computer processing power. This imposes a small number of restrictions on political and social actions in Axioms. Populations are re-active not pro-active. They can’t take the same actions as characters. So the representation of a state like Rome actually poses some specific challenges that are less of a problem in a feudal state simulator.

Applications

I don’t currently plan a legal system with cases and lawyers and such, but perhaps in the sequel or the final expansion, if I get that far.

The Law/Polity system allows for quite a lot of variance in how different polities function. This is a key part of replicating “Citizenship” of the Roman or Greek forms or other forms. Which ties the system quite heavily into integration, assimilation, and stuff like that.

In Simple Tribal and Monarchic Polities something like a levy system is pretty basic whereas in a Complex Tribal Republic like Rome thinks get more involved. It should be possible to get extremely diverse systems of army raising in a way that, for the default game format, doesn’t really require me to do a lot. Of course for modders making Scenarios there is probably more work to get the best representation of a particular historical state.

Laws can impact things like marriages, armies, polity organization, magic, economic policy, and so forth. The Ideology system is a key system that interacts with Laws. It helps to create a drive to or away from specific systems. It combines well with the Personality system in that effort.

Legitimacy

Several mechanics in Axioms share the feature of Legitimacy. Basically it measures how long a thing has been a thing and gives bonuses for that. Potentially there will be an interaction based on the characters/s who made the thing a thing and their legitimacy to do so.