It’s almost as if the stories of dragons were an allegory for the king or the one sin charge
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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I too have played the Shadowrun Returns series
The king answering with anything other than some variation of "Because I ordered you to" broke my immersion.
Ironically, this king was the one exception that was benevolent and fair. The knight, of course, was a member of MAGA - Make Arcadia Great Again.
One of the reasons I can never stomach Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon Tyrant because it depicts the idea of a stoic king who cares about his people.
(Also, glosses over completely how an ageless soceity would be stacked under feudal-capitalism)
Many powerful people like to make people believe (and possibly believe themselves) that they're just rulers. And it's just plainly more effective when your underlings are well-informed of your intentions (assuming you're not trying to set them up). e.g. imagine if the knight thinks that a dragon is a direct threat to the king and burns down the countryside to hunt it (any means necessary etc.), when in reality it's not a direct threat to the king at all and you were just supposed to keep the countryside safe from dragonfire.
Of course, the entire premise is that it's not obvious to the knight why a dragon must be killed and what are acceptable means to achieve that. e.g. in Faerun's Sword Coast, you'd expect that every knight is well-informed about this.
I wanna run an adventure where a dragon secretly runs a bank, and nobody can tell because it acts exactly like every other banker.
In Shadowrun universe, many corpos are run by dragons.
In actuality, most corpos are run by people. Lofwyr, whose corporate umbrella includes 4758 companies, is an outlier and should not have been counted. /s
But Lofwyr literally controls 95% of the GDP with those companies, who are run by his extended family!
No spoilers, but you should check out the Sword Interval webcomic.
A+ character concept.
Did kings hoard all the wealth? I thought kings had a monopoly on violence, not necessarily wealth
Under feudalism the king owned everything. He would delegate some rights to lesser nobles so they would hold and manage lands in his stead, but the king owned everything and everyone
You need massive amounts of wealth to gain and maintain a monopoly on violence. So they did both.
Also if you possess a monopoly on violence wealth is not difficult to obtain
And once you have that wealth you NEED a monopoly on violence to maintain it, which requires more wealth, and so on.
IIRC everything you had was considered to be used by permission of the king. Like, he ostensibly owned everything and was just letting you use it.
There have been various degrees of absolutely and constitutional monarchies throughout history. One famous example is the limits imposed by the Magna Carta, which only benefited nobles.
There has often been a distinction between royal property and the personal property of the royal family or members of the royal family.
For instance, many of the palaces of the British royal family are national property and Parliament has a say in their use and must provide a budget for their upkeep. The total family privately owns a significant percentage of the rented agricultural land in England, and vast amounts of residential rentals in London.
Armies are expensive, and war is REALLY expensive.
The wealth was needed to pay soldiers. You needed soldiers to make sure people did what the king wanted, such as people paying taxes to get wealth. The whole thing with taxes and needing gold as money was basically invented for supporting militia, according to some.
Here there be
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-d29z8G6U28 And here this exact post is, animated with the original voice acting!
Well
No
the voice acting comes from a different channel @ZacSpeaksGiant but the animator and him have a mutually beneficial relationship.
True, and he does link the source.
