Brooklyn Bridge by freeimages.com / Piotr Bizior

When I started writing this article, it was expected to be another short one. I had only 3 or 4 impacts in mind… deeper analysis when I started detailed planning soon dispelled that expectation. Of necessity, I’ve had to break it into smaller pieces…

Being close to the population / administration / social center of a nation has great social impact. In the course of this article, I will list and analyze no less than 23 consequences, both for good and ill.

And when that’s done, I have a similar list of consequences of being remote from the center of power. There’s a lot to do, so let’s get busy…

1. Proximity To Power

Being located close to the central power base means that you are squarely in the gaze of that power base. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, or even both in different respects at the same time. Local problems come to the attention of power quickly, and they are predisposed to resolve those problems expeditiously because of the proximity to themselves. Which can be either good or bad, depending on the fastest way to solve the problem!

2. Proximity To Authority

The converse is that the local community are going to be amongst the first to experience the impact of any decisions made by the power-base, usually with no regard of that local community.

3. Proximity To News

One of the consequences of proximity to a central population base is that there is a steady stream of traffic both to the population center and from it, and travelers carry news. The local community will be amongst the first to learn of events within the population center and will often learn of events in the outlands even before the central bureaucracy.

4. Access To Communications

Clever people will always recognize the potential in the proximity to news to shape the narrative of events in a manner that they can exploit. Actually being located in the central power-base is often considered the ideal placement for such purposes, but being on the fringes of it can be almost as good if not better. That’s because, despite the proximity to it, the local community is not the central base, and no matter how closely scrutinized that local community might be, it is not going to be as closely analyzed as the residents and important visitors of the population center itself. If you want to operate from the shadows, it can be helpful to take a small step away from the light.

But there is also a legitimate impact: access to communications helps keep families and friends united despite any separation between them. The consequence is that key families will be distributed across key areas of the nation and nevertheless present a relatively unified family structure. That positions them as movers and shakers, able to wield considerable influence from behind the scenes while rarely being noticed. Once again, if you want to operate from the shadows….

5. Proximity To Trade

It’s incredibly rare for a central population base to be self-sufficient. Food and resources almost always have to be brought in from the outside. Where commodities are perishable, the source needs to nevertheless be as close as possible to the central population. That makes the local communities with physical proximity to the central population the primary suppliers, as well as funnel points for other commodities passing through en route to the capital. On top of that, the proximity means that exotic supplies from elsewhere are either continuously passing through (and accessible) or not far away. All this presents ready-made opportunities for trade.

What’s more, a central bureaucracy always carries an overhead cost. The hope is always that buying in bulk and creating favorable regulations counterbalance that cost and keeps trade with the central community attractive to merchants. Canny local traders can sometimes intercept products bound for the central market when demand is higher than the merchants expect, undercutting the central economy to make a profit. This is an example of employing the proximity to news and their physical position as a gate-keeper to the central authority to achieve a trade advantage – a scenario whose prospects are only enhanced by the second impact of the access to communications impact. This combination means that many of the financial and trade leaders of the nation, the equivalent of “the titans of industry”, will emerge from the local communities close to the central population base.

The faster and more secure bulk transport and communications are, the farther these entrepreneurs origin points can be from the central authority, because the liabilities of remoteness are minimized.

6. Proximity To Opportunity

There will always be more opportunities generated in a major population center than in any other single location in a nation. But life in the population center is often so much of a struggle that it can be difficult to take advantage of those opportunities. It is often the case that those best positioned to do so are on the fringes of that population center. At least, many of them will think so, anyway.

The reality is slightly different. While there are always some who are consumed with their existing lives in the population center, there are still many more people where they came from; the reality is that there is almost always someone in a position to recognize and take up the opportunity within the dominant population center.

This is sure to be the cause for extremely bitterness to those residents of the neighboring local populations of entrepreneurial bent, who would feel that at best, they got the dregs of what the main population center left behind, the crumbs from their tables. Still others would live in perpetual expectation that one day, the stars would align and they would be in the right place at the right time. And a few, fueled by jealousy, would be determined to make their mark and force their way into the prosperity that was “up for grabs if you wanted it badly enough”.

Proximity To Opportunity would be a key factor in shaping the hopes and aspirations of many of those living near the central community.

7. Proximity To Fashion

One of the deepest insults that can be offered to a local community is to describe the citizenry as “quaint”, because while this is a polite phraseology, it implies that the community are out-of-touch, behind-the-times, and – in a word – uncool, just as “queer” was analogous to “strange” until the mid-twentieth century came along.

The closer one gets to the center of power in a nation, the more deeply this insult bites, because they are in close proximity to the latest fashions and trends. Indeed, many will be prone to taking this aspect of their social lives far more seriously than those who actually set those trends in the urban capital itself, who can approach the subject far more casually, almost as a byproduct of life in a contemporary metropolis.

Those living near to the population center will be amongst the first to learn – and the first to actively seek to learn – of the latest trends and stylings. This is not a superficiality to them; it is a key element not in an appearance of sophistication so much as avoiding the appearance of a lack of sophistication and culture.

8. Proximity To Style

That goes for every other form of cultural expression, not just clothing styles and hairdos and the like. There is often a slight cultural arrogance that results, a sense that the surrounding communities are adopting and expressing the latest styles in their most pure sense, of taking the melange of cultural influences at work in the central population and distilling out the ones that matter, that are important.

To those outside the immediate proximity, and any of those in the urban center itself, these cultural elements are trivial and pretentious, the farthest thing from important that you could get, which only serves to underscore the impact that Proximity To Fashion has on those surrounding communities.

9. Proximity To Expertise

There are all sorts of reasons for expertise to gravitate to the central community. That’s where the patrons are who value the service that they provide to the community and can afford to underwrite it. That’s where the customers are for the goods and services that they have to offer. That’s where decisions are made that will affect them, and where they have the opportunity to shape those decisions, or at least have their voices heard.

One result is that the local communities closest to the central community will know that any expertise that they happen to need is only a day or two’s travel away. This tends to downplay any independent creativity and raw resourcefulness; there is less of a “make do” attitude. Instead, the local communities become accustomed to paying for things instead of making something that’s “close enough” for themselves.

10. Proximity To Comfort

Another impact on the local communities is that they have easy access to luxuries. Expectations of comfort will be higher as a base-line and exceptions to that base-line will tend to be in the direction of greater luxury, overall. As with several of these impacts, you can even get a rough indication of distance from the population nexus by charting the minimum standards of luxury expected across a consistent measure, for example in a prosperous home.

11. Protection From The Outside

While this effect is true for all nations regardless of genre, it is most clearly explained by translating it into it’s interpretation in one specific game/genre: D&D/Pathfinder, where it would be described as “Protection From Monsters”. Because the lands around the central authority are going to be the most “pacified” of the entire nation, the best-cleared, few monsters will trouble them in comparison to communities in the outlands. What’s more, this is where the nation is militarily strongest, and best able to respond to those incidents that do occur.

If Dragons were as fearsome as they are in a Tolkien novel, there would be times when that would not mean very much, but most such creatures, though both tough and dangerous, can be driven off by military force; enough archers pose a definite threat to such creatures.

12. Protection From Foreigners

The same principle applies to other nations (including armies of more socially-organized creatures like Orcs). Before they can pose a direct threat to the administrative center of the nation, they will have had to bypass or batter their way through layer after layer of defenses. The surrounding local communities will also lie within virtually all these layers of protection. From the point of view of external threats, the regional communities that lie just outside the central authority are almost as well protected as the central authority itself.

Twelve down, and so far, they have all been decidedly beneficial for the neighboring communities. That leaves eleven more to be covered in part 2, where it’s not all such good news…