D&D Campaign World: The Utopian Divide

[spongeknight]

This is hopefully the start of a campaign world that I'm working on, which is basically Dungeons and Dragons but with way less shit-covered farmers and way more awesomeness. With that said, let's get on with the setting concepts:

Mana
In order to make permanent magic items you need mana. You can fire off your wizard spells with your personal power just fine, but actually infusing magical power into objects permanently requires a resource arbitrarily named mana. Mana is produced by living creatures with souls- so a lion or a human produce mana, but a rock or zombie don't. Intelligent creatures produce far more than mindless creatures, and healthy, strong creatures provide more mana than sickly ones.

Acquiring Mana
There are two ways to get your hands on mana- the Utopian method and the Distopian method. Both have pros and cons, for the people extracting the mana and the people/monsters having the mana extracted.

The Utopian Extraction
Living beings with souls produce mana naturally over time, though the amount is minuscule at any given moment. The trick, then, is to gather the mana they produce all the time. Giant magical circles are erected that catch all the mana being radiated off the people and monsters nearby constantly, which adds up over time into usable amounts. Because the amount of mana is increased by intelligent, healthy people instead of stupid sickly ones, a great deal of care is taken to provide the citizens of these lands with proper care. Food is provided by spells like Heroes' Feast or Create Food and Water with Prestidigitation added for flavor, or other similar spells, cast out of unlimited use wondrous items. This allows the people to get proper nutrition and save them from backbreaking farm labor every day. Items necessary for life, like clothing or tools, are also created magically from publicly usable magical devices. Intellectual pursuits are encouraged, with literacy being at pretty much 100%. This creates a population that is (mostly) free to do whatever the fuck they want for most of the day, since their very existence is beneficial to those in power and almost all of their daily needs are free to have. In turn, these citizens stick around the giant magic circles that collect their mana to build more magic items and such.

Pros: The mana you collect goes up every year due to increasing populations and your material resources don't shrink due to infinite magical production, so over the long haul you get super powerful. Your citizens are happy, healthy, and eager to help the government. Barring crazy disasters you can easily project your mana intake into the future, making it easy to plan projects.

Cons: It takes a long time to save up mana. There are problems deciding just who gets the mana after it's collected, since you presumably have bunches of casters working together in this society. Disasters, monsters, or invading armies can fuck up your ability to gather mana to fight back. Population may get slovenly or depressed unless social values are carefully calculated, reducing mana intake.

The Distopian Extraction
Conversely, you can just rip all the mana out of a person/monster in one go and pocket all that sweet power immediately. This obviously kills the person/monster, and not as obviously but arguably worse you completely destroy their soul in the process, meaning they can't go to their (hopefully) awesome afterlife or get resurrected. A distopian society is one where people are regularly sacrificed to obtain their mana, and their needs are neglected because it's easier, faster and cheaper to get a new person than to carefully nurture them if you're just going to kill them when they hit 16. Slavers, raiders, monster hunters and more are employed to go out and find whatever things with mana they can, and to bring them back for sacrifice or breeding. They frequently start wars, try to capture entire cities, and other atrocities on grand scales for that sweet sweet mana. The people ruling have absolutely no regard for the lives of others, seeing them as resources to collect and dissolve into a better resource.

Pros: You can gather an insane amount of mana quickly with this method, and you can "snowball" your power by using that mana to build magic items to kill other people for their mana. Start-up costs are tiny and immediately available if you have any personal power. There are plenty of terrible things you can do to get people quickly- deals with devils, invading defenseless villages, slaying monsters. You can use all that mana for yourself, since you're an evil overlord.

Cons: Everyone wants to kill you because you're an evil overlord. You can "run out" of available mana sources instantly. Trade might be a problem.

Why?
The obvious question- why set things up this way? Well, there's a few reasons. First, it gives players the actual moral justification to go around murdering people and taking their stuff if those people are working for an evil society and they are working for a good one. Second, it allows us to eliminate racial alignments, since the alignments are social now. Third, it sets up a system of constant good vs. evil warfare, where evil kingdoms spring up suddenly and powerfully enough to threaten the entrenched good kingdoms. It also provides obvious reasons for there to be ruins all over the place with powerful magic items inside them. Fourth, it eliminates the wealth to magical power aspect, and replaces that with a system that lets the players either murder for power or rule for power, both much more fun substitutes.

Any thoughts/comments so far?

[FatR]

This allows the people to get proper nutrition and save them from backbreaking farm labor every day. Items necessary for life, like clothing or tools, are also created magically from publicly usable magical devices. Intellectual pursuits are encouraged, with literacy being at pretty much 100%. This creates a population that is (mostly) free to do whatever the fuck they want for most of the day, since their very existence is beneficial to those in power and almost all of their daily needs are free to have.

Welcome to the Brave New World.

That is, until some wizard finds a way to make a Matrix instead.

Also.

almost all of their daily needs are free to have.

in no way leads to

intelligent, healthy people instead of stupid sickly ones,

In fact, quite the opposite happened every time a civilization grew affluent enough to provide a significant strata of people with bread and circuses just for being born in the right place. Starting from the civilization which coined the expression.

Any thoughts/comments so far?

I thought that the only possible way to turn DnD even grimdarker was making EXP into a measurable in-setting substance which you can harvest from anyone and not only foes that can provide a challenge.

Well, my imagination was simply too poor.

[Mechalich]

Any world in which doing 'the evulz' transforms directly into 'the powerz' is going to be grimdark as all get out. It is also likely to embark on a downward spiral almost immediately after the key discovery of this process as a series of evil overlords compete with each other to see who can strip-mine the populace faster in order to try and come out on top. Possibly you pass a point of no return and end up with a blasted empty wasteland. In the interest of playability, your overlords may collectively realize what is happening and stabilize the ashes of their world.

D&D actually did this already, albeit at once remove - harvesting power from the living environment instead of people directly - and called it Dark Sun.

Also note that, this scenario is completely incompatible with the extant D&D planar cosmology, since that setup provides you with infinite life force to harvest for mana.

[Rasumichin]

Your premise doesn't favor a utopian post-scarcity society, but one where traditional labor is merely replaced by permanent self-optimization for the sake of mana mining. People aren't freed from a struggle for ressources, they literally become the ressource even in your "utopian" societies.

[spongeknight]

Your premise doesn't favor a utopian post-scarcity society, but one where traditional labor is merely replaced by permanent self-optimization for the sake of mana mining. People aren't freed from a struggle for ressources, they literally become the ressource even in your "utopian" societies.

That sounds like an amazing world, actually. Your entire purpose in life is to become smarter, more fit, and longer living? I mean, theoretically you could try to institute forced bodybuilding routines and mandatory 8 hour studying, but I'm pretty sure it's actually really hard to fuck over an intelligent, educated, buff populace who can just leave and deprive you of your national power that way, assuming literally anyone else offers them a better deal for their mana.

[Orca]

You'd need mana from humans to be much, much more efficient than that from animals if you don't want kingdoms recreating the Moo-trix. Sheep & cattle rarely revolt effectively even when being strip-mined for their death-mana.

If the unlimited use wondrous items supporting the utopian populace are destroyed or stolen you need a Plan B which works quickly enough that people don't leave or just starve to death.

If a leadership coup can easily take over ownership of the magical circles then there isn't a clear divide between murder for power/rule for power.

None of those are game breakers, just things you might want to address.

[RobbyPants]

How much mana do you get from different species?

It would seem that even a Utopian society could utilize the dystopian method. In the really real world, we already have farms where animals are bred just to be killed, and you said that pulling all the mana kills the creatures. So, as long as we're already harvesting all that chicken, beef, and pork anyway...

[Omegonthesane]

How much mana do you get from different species?

It would seem that even a Utopian society could utilize the dystopian method. In the really real world, we already have farms where animals are bred just to be killed, and you said that pulling all the mana kills the creatures. So, as long as we're already harvesting all that chicken, beef, and pork anyway...

You probably wouldn't have farms as a primary food source if you have enough net mana coming in to rely instead on Create Food and Water, as described in the scenario.

Which isn't to say you couldn't have some market for "real" food, or that utopia zones wouldn't want a "backup generator" for times when their magic circles have been disrupted.

[RobbyPants]

Why spend mana on Create Food and Water if your mana source is already creating you food? Why not spend that mana on something else?

...Unless you were going with the Utopia method and everyone was vegan, or something.

[Rasumichin]

Your premise doesn't favor a utopian post-scarcity society, but one where traditional labor is merely replaced by permanent self-optimization for the sake of mana mining. People aren't freed from a struggle for ressources, they literally become the ressource even in your "utopian" societies.

That sounds like an amazing world, actually. Your entire purpose in life is to become smarter, more fit, and longer living? I mean, theoretically you could try to institute forced bodybuilding routines and mandatory 8 hour studying, but I'm pretty sure it's actually really hard to fuck over an intelligent, educated, buff populace who can just leave and deprive you of your national power that way, assuming literally anyone else offers them a better deal for their mana.

The question is: does literally anyone else offer them a better deal? Particularly when you can verify by planar travel that your comparatively short mortal existence of being a straight edge yoga scholar gets rewarded by an eternity in an afterlife of your choice, and that not supporting the LOHAS treadmill of self-optimization may lead to the entire populace of your city state suffering a sudden, final death in the soul incinerators of the arch tyrants?

As long as the soul incinerator is a viable route to power, there will be regimes using it on enemy populations and dissenters. Which will create a bogeyman that less brutal regimes can instrumentalize to uphold their status quo of drudgery on the mortail coil for heavenly rewards.

[Ghremdal]

You gotta eyeball some numbers at the least.

First what does mana do in number terms. How many years of Mana Mooching of a Healthy Young Adult (MMHYA) does it take to make a +1 sword, or decanter of endless water. How much do you get from killing said HYA. How much do you get from a cow, or a elephant or a anthil?

[Krusk]

If im on my deathbed, do i provide full mana when sacced? If so do hospitals have a furnace in the basement for anyone they think is about to die? Is that utopian? Sorry grandma, youre 98, time to go into the furnace. I need a new magic hat.