Since then, I’ve had several people ask me for a more generalized version of the political system, especially in regards to lower-tech settings, such as fantasy worlds, so I offered it as a General Topic Patreon Poll option for January, and it won quite handily!
Before I dive too deeply into this post, I want to highlight what it is and what it isn’t. First, “politics” can have many meanings. People sometimes use it to mean the manipulation of mass populations to persuade them to your course (covered by the GURPS skill of Propaganda); some people use it to mean drama and the accumulation or destruction of influence in a courtly/governmental setting (covered by the GURPS skill of Politics); and sometimes, we mean the management of a population or a domain (covered by the GURPS skill of Administration). This post is primarily about the last, about administrating a domain. Politics as manipulation of courtly settings is mostly handled by GURPS SocialEngineering, and perhaps I’ll go into it more at a later date. It’s also more of a “player vs player,” social-combat sort of situation, which is fine, but Orphans of the Star was designed for cooperative play, where characters controlled different aspects of the government, sort of like playing Civilization except you each control one arm of the domain, instead of the whole of the domain yourself.
