San Francisco Skyline by freeimages.com / Gerd Marstedt

The examination of the consequences to a community being located close to the center of administrative, political, and economic power that is a national capital continues. To recap: So far, I have looked at:

1. Proximity To Power
2. Proximity To Authority
3. Proximity To News
4. Access To Communications
5. Proximity To Trade
6. Proximity To Opportunity
7. Proximity To Fashion
8. Proximity To Style
9. Proximity To Expertise
10. Proximity To Comfort
11. Protection From The Outside (“Monsters”/Aliens in D&D terms)
12. Protection From Foreigners

Twelve down, eleven to go….

13. Shelter From Disruption

Civil disruptions are always a headache for the authorities based in the primary population center. They, quite understandably, do everything they can to prevent or minimize these problems, but their reach is both limited and grows weaker with increasing distance from the seat of authority.

Such disruptions are also a problem for ordinary people because they are often accompanied by violence. People die in such human disasters. That means that the steps authorities take to prevent or stop these disruptions have the side effect of protecting those living near the authority center from the incidental consequences of the disruption.

14. Protection From Disaster

Note that this is true of every type of disruption that I can think of, from revolution to slave revolt to famine, with the possible exception (depending the actions of the authority) of plagues.

There are a couple of special cases that need to be considered.

Earthquakes can strike anywhere, though mountainous terrain is more likely to experience this type of distaste, mainly because the same forces that cause earthquakes also build mountains. However, it’s relatively rare for central governments to be located in such terrain. Because they are often amongst the oldest settlements within the nation, they tend to be located in places where civilizations get a leg up on survival – relatively flat land, good for crops, and with at least one and possibly two rivers in the vicinity. Coastal areas also gain access to the sea as a food source, providing a further advantage. While it’s possible to have a major settlement with one of these factors being absent, any more would place the community at such a competitive disadvantage that better-situated populations will soon outstrip the deficient one in terms of growth, preventing it from ever becoming the administrative center of a nation.

More mature cultures are a somewhat different story; as they become more adept at transport of goods and managing resources, defense comes to assume a more dominant role in the selection of a central point of authority; while defensibility might well have been an additional factor in early settlement locations (especially in a D&D-type world with lots of wild creatures posing extreme dangers to the populace), they are a remote consideration compared to the other necessities for life and growth.

So, both the central point of authority and the surrounding local communities are equally at risk from Earthquakes. However, if one does happen to strike, the expertise and manpower needed for a quick recovery from the event are more readily available in the primary population base than anywhere else in the nation. So the principle of Protection From Disaster still applies.

The other special case is that of a Flood. Remember the terrain description offered when discussing earthquakes – mostly flat, with one or more rivers (in fact, often where a fork in a river provides protection on multiple sides)? This is terrain that is acutely and regularly susceptible to Flooding.

Under some circumstances, that’s not a bad thing. Annual flooding by the Nile was what made the Ancient Egyptian civilization possible. If flooding can be contained and controlled, it poses little threat. When that’s not the case, floods can do a LOT of indiscriminate and widespread damage to infrastructure.

Flooding is one of those events that are vaguely cyclic in statistical intensity. Once a year, you will have a ‘typical’ flood, give or take a margin of error, and most years, that’s that. But the longer you make that time period, the more scope you have for a flood of greater destructive power to materialize. A ten-year flood is the average of the worst flood over multiple ten-year time-spans; once a decade, you can expect a flood of that power to eventuate and have to be dealt with. Once every 25 years, there will be a still-worse flood, because there’s more time for the long-odds to show up. Almost all cities will have protections in place sufficient to cope with a once-a-decade flood event; many will have invested the time, money, labor, and engineering expertise that will enable them to cope with a once-in-a-generation (i.e. 25 year) flood. But each time you extend the time period, the costs of the required engineering go up, and the return on investment grows proportionately smaller. Only key areas and buildings within a city will usually be engineered to survive a once-in-a-century event, if that. A once-in-a-millennium flood event? Not a chance.

There’s a simple mechanism by which the statistics of floods and similar recurring disasters (hurricanes, etc) can be examined – all you need is a die. The optimum choice is somewhere around the d12 mark. Each year, you roll for the intensity of the flooding, but if you roll an eleven or twelve, you roll again and add 10 to the result.

Using anydice, I rolled 200 of them, and here are the results (where a result exploded, the original result and the additional die roll results are shown bold in brackets before the actual result): 3, 3, 2, 4, 6, 10, 4, 4, 9, 3, 3, 4, 9, 2, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 2, 3, (11. 2) 12, 6, 4, 3, 6, 4, (12, 4) 14, 7, 8, 4, 7, (12, 3) 13, (12, 8) 18, 3, 12, 4, 5, 7, 4, 4, (11, 10) 20, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 10, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8, 8, 6, 2, 7, 9, (12, 9) 19, 10, (11, 8) 18, 10, 10, (12, 10) 20, 8, 5, 2, 4, 4, 3, 2, (11, 10) 20, 12, 12, 9, 7, (11, 2) 12, 6, 9, (12, 7) 17, 9, 6, 5, 4, 7, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 8, (12, 7) 17, 4, 2, 7, 1, 5, 10, 7, (12, 9) 19, 2, 6, 2, 4, 2, 10, 4, 12, 2, 10, (11, 6) 16, 4, 9, 2, 5, 6, 6, 5, 2, 1, (11, 1) 11, 5, 6, 10, 10, 9, 6, 1, (12, 4) 14, 8, 9, (11, 9) 19, (11, 3) 13, 3, 2, (12, 8) 18, 7, 6, 3, (12, 11, 9) 29, 1, 2, 8, 3, 2, 3, (12, 6) 16, (12, 5) 15, 2, 6, 8, 3, 1, 9, 7, 2, 5, 9, 7, 2, 6, 1, 9, 8, 8, 5, 4, 3, 2, 6, 8, 6, 1, 4, 1, 1, (12, 11, 4) 24, 4, (11, 6) 16, 4, 10, 1, (12, 12, 3) 23, 8, 1, 4, 5, 4, 10, 7, 5, 9, 9, (11, 1) 11, 2, 2, 5, 6.

Ignoring all those numbers that ‘exploded’, I get an average of 5.135 from 170 results. If I average all 200, I get an average of 6.825. Since 30 of the results exploded, that means that the average interval between these results is 200/30 = 6-and-2/3rds years. Call it seven years. So, once every 7 years (on average) flooding will be worse than usual. How much worse? Well, the average of those 30 results is 16.4, and 16.4 is .almost 3.2 × 5.135 – so about 320% of the average ‘good’ year.

This is all rather arbitrary, the real thing wouldn’t be so linear, it would be a dumbbell curve of some sort with one side distorted – the sort of thing that you get from divided and multiplied die rolls. Something like [1d6 + (2d6 × d12)] / d6, round down, for example – which gives a result of 1 to 150, so we would then apply a numerical factor to get a more convenient scale. Which scale you use would depend on the number of results that were acceptable over the defining threshold value (the threshold in the simpler experiment was 10, and it gave us a once-in-seven years cycle; by choosing the number of results above “statistical normal” relative to the total number that you roll, you can define whether or not you’re scaling to get once-in-a-decade results or whatever). (If you use the averages of the individual die rolls, you can work out the mean result – [3.5 + (7×6.5)] / 3.5 = 14. On which basis, I would suggest that 28 is a natural threshold value. (Another big advantage of this approach is that there are a lot of results that will yield the minimum, effectively “no floods this year” – which is a lot more realistic).

Proximity here is the enemy of the neighboring community. What affects the population center also affects it, but it’s far less likely to be as well-resourced for recovery. So flooding is one case in which the protection of proximity fails, and in fact the opposite is true. But it’s very much the exception.

15. Exposure To Crime

Cities are notorious for crime. When I was growing up, in a small country town, we only locked the front door if we were all going away for some period of time. Going out for the day, or for an evening? No chance. We usually locked the door only when we went to bed for the night. I’m told that things have degenerate somewhat since, but it’s still a very safe community relative to the city in which I now live.

Being close to the population center means that you are also close to its vices, and that unfortunately includes crime.

16. Sensitivity To Disruption

There’s been a gradual general shift in emphasis from the positive to the negative in terms of characterizing the impact of proximity. That’s not entirely an accident. Back in item 13, I argued that a community in close proximity to the central authority was largely protected against the disruptions of chaos and anarchy that all human societies experience from time to time by the same mechanisms that the central authority uses to protect itself. But there’s a flip side to that coin, a converse case: if, despite their best efforts, the central authority is convulsed with some form of civil disruption, the impact on their regional neighbors will be almost as great. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the central authority is the target of such unrest, and therefore a magnet for it, it would arguably be worse for the surrounding communities who don’t enjoy quite the same level of resources as the central authority. The only reason it’s worse for the central authority is because they are the natural target.

17. The Splash Effect

In fact, any measure aimed at the central authority is likely to hit the regional communities with a “splash effect”. This is to the benefit of the central authority, because it means that the neighboring regional communities have more in common with the central authority than they have differences, helping the central authority cement the loyalty of those from whom it would otherwise be in the greatest danger.

18. Conservatism

In modern times, it’s the populations farthest removed from central authority – “out in the sticks with the hicks” – that are notoriously conservative, while the relative luxury and leisure time afforded urban populations and exposure to foreign ideas permits the formulation of progressive, even radical, ideas. Things would not be so clear-cut in substantially different time periods. Protection and Shelter from so many potential dangers encourages support for the political power that provides that protection. The farther away you get, the looser the grip of that central authority, and the greater the self-reliance and likelihood of coming into contact with new ideas – so it is the areas closest to the major population bases that would be the most politically and ideologically conservative, and those remote that were the most progressive, independent of thought, and radical.

And yet, that’s not going to be true of all conservative values. Close to the central population bases, the economic pressured and opportunities are going to be disruptive to nuclear families to some extent. Those disruptive forces would also attenuate with distance, at least to some extent. That means that in terms of anything with a cause rooted in economics and opportunity, the neighboring communities are going to be more like the central urban population and less like the more remote rural communities.

19. Dependence

Another definite downside to derive from the close relationship between central authority and neighboring communities is also implied by the above section. More remote communities are generally accustomed to making what they need or doing without. But when any product you can afford is just a day or two away, the capacity to be self-reliant tends to be lost very quickly. It’s easier to go out and buy something than it is to learn how to do it yourself; and the work tends to be of a more professional standard.

All of which adds up to a growing dependence on the central authority. Farmers will start planting the crops that offer the greatest financial return, enabling them to trade their wares for goods and services, gradually becoming more of a suburban offshoot of the central population than an independent community.

The trend is for the residents to become, and to willfully aspire to become, more like their more urban neighbors.

20. Exposure To Inequality

There are a number of downsides to being closer to the main population base. One of them is that social and economic inequalities are going to be greater in frequency, in numbers affected, and in intensity, simply because the wealthy and connected can afford to gravitate toward that population base because they are amongst the few who can afford to do so. “Splash effect” then means that all the resulting social, political, and economic baggage that comes with such inequalities will spread out to affect the neighboring communities. Perhaps not to the same extent as the urban population, but to a nevertheless significant level.

The first consequence is that these inequalities will be replicated in smaller scale in the surrounding communities. Proximity to wealth and power always makes a lesser standard of wealth and power seem more inequitable. This only grows worse with increasing industrialization, because progress perpetually offers new pathways to wealth and power.

21. Exposure To Poverty

In particular, the gap between the richest members of the community and the poorest members of the community gets wider with every step toward the center of population. This, of course, is one of the reasons behind the increased exposure to crime (item 15 above) – you have a combination of inequity and a large amount of wealth in the form of the rich, the privileged, taxes, tithes, merchants and trade goods all funneling through these areas. It’s a combination that can’t help but attract criminals.

22. Exposure To Disease

With poverty typically comes disease, and disease is a great leveler in many societies. Anyone can become ill, and while the wealthy and privileged might be able to obtain better care, there are always limits to medical knowledge. In particular, many popular remedies are now recognized as having been worse than the disease. There have been times, for example, in which lead was in a great many products for the whitening properties of it’s compounds; there was a time when radium was in everything (including toothpaste!) because it’s glow was thought to symbolize vitality and energy; there was a time when arsenic compounds were all over the place because people liked the many hues of green that they contained (arsenic-colored wallpaper was especially popular and the rich green of Victorian times is still associated with that era)…. the list goes on and on.

And that’s before you even get to things like asbestos, considered a miracle material in its heyday. Then you throw in bloodletting, leeches, trepanning, electroshock, and prefrontal lobotomies, all accepted and recommended medical practices in their eras. So greater access to the medical profession is not necessarily a good thing! While many home remedies have been shown to be of dubious effectiveness, if not discredited entirely, for the most part, they at least did little or no harm….

23. Restriction Of Opportunity

I made a fuss in item 6 about residents having “access to opportunity”, and stand by it. But it is also true that opportunities are more easily lost or stifled, or appropriated by someone more wealthy or powerful. Many games are set in times and places where there was no protection of intellectual property, where you could come up with a good idea in the morning, develop it into profitability in the afternoon, and have better-resourced and opportunistic entrepreneurs move in on the idea in the evening.

The greater your proximity to those with the capacity to steal an innovation, the more likely someone of dubious morality will have the opportunity to do so.

The other form of opportunity is by way of discovery and exploration. In the capital, missions of exploration may be underwritten; in the fringes, one can go prospecting simply by keeping your eyes open and your wits about you as you go about your daily life. Opportunity is always somewhat stifled and restricted for those stuck in the middle.

The Reality Of Proximity

I can’t think of a single aspect of life that is not influenced, for good or ill (or both) by proximity to a major population center. It’s a factor that must be taken into account in assessing every creative decision you make. By shaping the external circumstances from which they derive, the effects on NPCs (and PCs) who were born or who reside in such locations are affected no less profoundly.

To some extent, both these truths reinforce each other; social circumstances are ultimately driven by people just as much as people are shaped by the environment around them.

And finally, any of these circumstances and effects can lie at the heart of an adventure, shaping it and the people encountered within it.

Part 3 of this series will follow in a week or two, in which the spotlight shifts to the remote fringes of a nation…