HOW TO CREATE A NEW NATION
MONAVIA’S TIPS FOR BUILDING YOUR NS NATION
FIRST EDITION
MONAVIA’S TIPS FOR BUILDING YOUR NS NATION
FIRST EDITION
CONTENTS
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Your First Steps
- Chapter 2: Creating Your Nation’s Political System
- Chapter 3: Creating Your Nation’s Population
- Chapter 4: Creating Your Nation’s Economy
- Chapter 5: Creating Your Nation’s History
- Chapter 6: Creating Your Nation’s Military
PREFACE
If you spent enough time playing NationStates to discover there is more to this game than answering issues and telegrams, posting on regional message boards, and participating in the World Assembly, then chances are that you have at least a few questions about other aspects of the game, especially the nuts and bolts of story-format roleplaying. The old saying you have to start somewhere applies here as much as anywhere else (especially if you are the kind of roleplayer who prefers to treat story-format RPGs like a hobby or a craft), so I created this guide to help you begin your journey. As great and wondrous as our NS RP community is, it cannot survive the constant turnover within its player base unless new players have a chance to learn how the game is played and enjoy it enough to stick around.
In an effort to make this guide thorough enough to serve as a one-stop resource, I made a point of cramming in a full range of topics, and while some of them might not be applicable to your specific needs at this particular moment, they might be of interest to someone else. As much as I used to enjoy writing long telegrams when people solicited my advice on nation creation, I eventually determined that rounding up the things I previously wrote and adapting them into a guide would be much more helpful. I am not, however, the first person to produce resources for new players and returning players wanting to make fresh starts since other roleplayers have been writing guides about getting started at NS RP since the game began in 2002. Some of these guides proved very helpful to me back when I was new to NationStates, so out of an abundance of gratitude for their generosity, I hereby publish this thread in their honor.
In an effort to make this guide thorough enough to serve as a one-stop resource, I made a point of cramming in a full range of topics, and while some of them might not be applicable to your specific needs at this particular moment, they might be of interest to someone else. As much as I used to enjoy writing long telegrams when people solicited my advice on nation creation, I eventually determined that rounding up the things I previously wrote and adapting them into a guide would be much more helpful. I am not, however, the first person to produce resources for new players and returning players wanting to make fresh starts since other roleplayers have been writing guides about getting started at NS RP since the game began in 2002. Some of these guides proved very helpful to me back when I was new to NationStates, so out of an abundance of gratitude for their generosity, I hereby publish this thread in their honor.
THE STATE OF MONAVIA
April 2023
April 2023
INTRODUCTION
This post will walk you through the various steps of getting your NS nation up and running, beginning with envisioning the basics and working your way up from there. I wrote these chapters using the assumptions that you are new to NationStates and starting to learn how NS roleplay works, but not so new that you have not had time to read and familiarize yourself with the NationStates FAQs and One Stop Rules Shop. Even if you are an experienced RPer looking to move on from an old NS nation and start something new, I hope my advice will still be useful for your purposes. As I usually do when writing player guides, I organize my work into chapters and follow a handful of authorial conventions for the convenience of my readers, such as using the shorthand phrase in-universe to mean “within the context of a fictive environment” and using boldface type to introduce critical terminology. Taken together, the chapters follow a logical progression from imagining the most basic rudiments of your nation concept to the parts that many new roleplayers can find complicated or difficult.
- Chapter 1 addresses basic items you will need to know in order to get started, especially if you are very “new” to NationStates or story-based roleplaying.
- Chapter 2 offers advice for coming up with the political details of your nation.
- Chapter 3 explains how to make up good stats for your population.
- Chapter 4 describes how you can determine various aspects of your nation’s economy.
- Chapter 5 explains the process for inventing a fictitious history for your NS nation.
- Chapter 6 contains some basic instructions for putting your NS nation’s military together.
CHAPTER 1
Your First Steps
Your First Steps
Different Ways to Get Started
My first point—which might seem obvious to some—is that there is much more to creating and developing an NS nation than starting a user account, answering some issues, and joining a region. For roleplaying purposes, an NS nation is not just a flag and some stats on a Web page, but a complete fictional civilization containing story elements like characters and settings. An NS nation has certain things like an economy, territory, laws, religions, and cultural practices, all of which you can use as building blocks for telling its story.
There are two main approaches towards the business of coming up with all these things. One is to determine the basic details needed to start your first RP thread and hold off on creating additional characters, settings, technologies, historical details, and other “lore” until it becomes necessary to keep the “story” moving forward. I call this method the “on-demand” approach. The other method is to take a big step (or two) back from whatever you are trying to do with your NS nation right now and try to imagine a bunch of these things for future reference, even if you have no plans to use them in your RP activities yet. I call this method the “big picture” approach.
The on-demand approach has the advantage of being very flexible and efficient because it keeps RPers from getting bogged down with endless brainstorming, so it is especially comfortable for newer (and younger) RPers. Its main disadvantage, at least from a creative perspective, is organizational. Unless you already settled on a bunch of your NS nation’s details before you RP them, chances are you will end up changing your mind about something “along the way” as you flesh out your NS nation over the course of one or more RP threads. The big picture approach avoids these problems, but at the potential cost of tempting you to bog yourself down in endless brainstorming that makes playing NS feel more like writing a book than playing an RPG (this is especially true given how much NS RP relies on writing).
Forming a Basic “Concept” for Your NS Nation
Regardless of your preferences, the old adage that starting off is always the hardest part is definitely applicable here because it can be difficult to determine the best place to begin, but you can make this creative process less intimidating by breaking it into smaller pieces and addressing them individually. Maybe you already have some idea what you want your nation to be “like” or you have a “theme” in mind for it. Perhaps you want to create a nation that embodies your own beliefs or parodies an ideology you dislike. Maybe you already have great character ideas and just need help crafting a setting to put them in, or you have a solid basic concept for your national culture or economy or political system and just need help fleshing out the details.
Another thing you need to think about early on is the sort of role you want your new nation to fill in the world around it (what you want to do with your nation once you have finished creating it). Start by asking yourself questions like these:
Perhaps you want to RP as a global superpower that mounts crusades to oust every foreign dictator who wears a military uniform and a funny hat. Perhaps you prefer to RP as an impoverished theocracy that controls part of the global slave trade. Maybe you want your nation to be recognized as major diplomatic broker that resolves international disputes in exchange for a bit of cash. Alternatively, perhaps you want to try your hand at engineering the worst dystopia you can imagine in a bid to one-up everyone else with the same idea. Regardless, your first goal is to come up with some sort of basic vision for where you want to take the new country you are creating. If you have already settled on enough basic ideas for your NS nation, the next step is to combine and develop those ideas into an overall “nation concept” that can begin taking on a life of its own within your imagination, and eventually, within the game too.
I can use my own NS nation as an example. When I began creating Monavia in the summer of 2006, I was a bored fourteen-year-old fresh out of middle school and spent considerable time lazily surfing the Internet in search of country simulators. When I came across NS for the first time, the basic premise that the game FAQs presented to me was that I could build a fictional country around my (real-life) beliefs (but set in a fictional world) and have fun interacting with other players doing the same thing. While I did not have loads of ideas to work with at the time, was growing into a news junkie and had already taken several online political tests, so I had a few solid starting points. I decided up front that I would create strongly religious (if not exactly fanatical) country that was socially conservative, ruled by a powerful constitutional monarchy, and inspired in various ways by the Eastern Roman Empire and medieval Serbia. Taken together, these creative decisions represented a form of worldbuilding—the technical term for creating the “lore” you RP with in a given environment.
Geography and Culture
If you are still undecided about what you want to do with your new nation, a good starting point is to begin by asking yourself what your people value and believe. I find that the best approach to this step is to imagine the sort of environment you want your RP characters to inhabit. For the purposes of this section, I will use the term environment to encompass both your NS nation’s physical environment (geography) and social environment (culture). If you already have some solid ideas for what you want your NS nation’s culture to be like, try to imagine the kind of physical environment that would influence people to create the culture you have in mind. If you have few cultural ideas in mind but have an easy time imagining maps, focus on developing your NS nation’s geography and then try to imagine the kind of culture that would emerge if a bunch of people migrated into the space you just imagined. (Please note that when I mention “culture” in this context, I am referring to your NS nation’s societal culture—things like whether it is more egalitarian or hierarchical, individualist or collectivist, present-focused versus future-focused, and so on—not its tastes in music, cuisine, architecture, literature, etc.)
The main reason why I emphasize brainstorming your NS nation’s geography and culture up front is that people are strongly influenced by the environments around them. Since much of the best NS roleplay is driven by (but does not have to focus on) the actions of your characters, one way to build solid, believable characters is to ask yourself, “What sort of culture do my characters come from, how has it shaped them in the past, and how does it influence them now?” The answers you determine will shape the way your characters live their lives and interpret the actions of characters from other NS nations. Furthermore, a population’s values, beliefs, and cultural traits determine how it approaches public policy questions, ranks its priorities, and decides what role government should play in everyday life. In turn, these factors will influence what kind of government your NS nation has, the kind of public programs it administers, and the way your NS nation’s leaders make decisions.
One popular approach for brainstorming your NS nation’s geography is to grab a sheet of paper and draw a simple map of its territory and include important physical features and major cities for future reference. If you plan to join a dedicated RP region that already has a map and want to claim a particular space, you can always refer to the maps of other NS nations you want to have as neighbors if you want to include shared borders in your map. Think of some ways that geographic constraints and nation size (both in terms of territory and population) shape the way you people live and what they come to value (e.g. a population that keeps growing on a small island and embraces high-density living arrangements is not going to value personal space and individual freedom as much as people who grow up in frontier society with lots of open territory). At this point, you may even want to start brainstorming a few basic details of your NS nation’s economy, such as the distribution of your country’s natural resources (this determines what its major industries are and where they are located) since cultures evolve in response to changing economic conditions (e.g. episodes of resource scarcity tend to make people live more frugally even after conditions have improved).
In my early NS days, I did not think a lot about geography and culture since I was more interested in brainstorming Monavia’s politics and laws at the time (for example, my first worldbuilding project consisted of writing a full-length constitution in December 2006, but this effort did not do me much good until I found ways to use it as a tool for RP writing a while later). Unfortunately, my lack of attention to crafting Monavia’s geography and culture put me in some awkward spots when I RPed with someone else who already had these things fleshed out and I had to invent stuff on the fly to keep RP threads rolling (yes, necessity is the mother of invention). I got around some of these issues by leaving certain details vague (such as Monavia’s location in the world and its distance from other countries) and having everything take place in just one city (the national capital) or settings controlled by other players. After I joined Nova in 2008, I made myself invest some time in drawing a map to scale and adding loads of natural features and cities so I could use it as a tool for framing future roleplay threads. You can view the most recent version here.
When it came to developing Monavia’s culture, I knew early on that I wanted Monavian society to draw certain inspirations from pre-1914 Europe, such as a prevalence of hereditary aristocrats with real power and respect for traditional customs being an important part of everyday life, but otherwise I put little effort into making Monavia much more than a simple in-universe extension of my own habits and beliefs. As with my mapmaking efforts, I did not muster the will to write down very much historical information until 2010, which often meant that I had very little “lore” to refer to while RPing for a few years. I did, however, make a smart worldbuilding move in electing to ignore gameside demographic and economic stats in favor of making up more stable numbers that would still seem “normal” in-universe but would also be “realistic” enough to achieve “suspension of disbelief” along the way. This creative decision made “detailing” various aspects of my NS nation easier down the road.
Starting a Factbook
The final step I recommend taking as you get started building your NS nation is to start writing a basic factbook—a general reference guide you can refer to when roleplaying with your nation and other players can use to learn more about your nation when they want to interact with it. Ideally, a factbook offers readers a concise series of stats, tables, and graphics that provide an overview of your NS nation’s people, geography, economy, government, military, and relationships with other NS nations. While it is possible to create a simple factbook very quickly, quality factbooks containing everything your readers might possibly want to know (and then some) can grow into ambitious projects over time. When in doubt, focus on making the basics available right away and add a little detail whenever new ideas come to mind.
At the time I began RPing on NS in the mid-2000s, most RPers based their factbook formats off the individual country pages on the CIA’s World Factbook site, which remains a convenient “gold standard” for formatting and organization to this day. My own factbook from 2008 used a modified version of this format. As a high school student with considerable spare time on my hands, I was able (over a number of weeks) to make up loads of stats and play around with formatting until I had produced something with enough depth to use for a variety of future RPs. (I also made a point of posting a new edition each year until 2013, when I got too busy and unmotivated to keep up my old habit.) For those who treat NS more like a hobby than a game, factbooks can become just as important as any story thread, as my factbook from 2020 easily demonstrates. I strongly suggest (especially if you are a beginner) that you keep things simple and hold off on writing “factbook” posts dedicated to specific topics until you have a basic overview in place and you have finished making your way through the next few chapters.
My first point—which might seem obvious to some—is that there is much more to creating and developing an NS nation than starting a user account, answering some issues, and joining a region. For roleplaying purposes, an NS nation is not just a flag and some stats on a Web page, but a complete fictional civilization containing story elements like characters and settings. An NS nation has certain things like an economy, territory, laws, religions, and cultural practices, all of which you can use as building blocks for telling its story.
There are two main approaches towards the business of coming up with all these things. One is to determine the basic details needed to start your first RP thread and hold off on creating additional characters, settings, technologies, historical details, and other “lore” until it becomes necessary to keep the “story” moving forward. I call this method the “on-demand” approach. The other method is to take a big step (or two) back from whatever you are trying to do with your NS nation right now and try to imagine a bunch of these things for future reference, even if you have no plans to use them in your RP activities yet. I call this method the “big picture” approach.
The on-demand approach has the advantage of being very flexible and efficient because it keeps RPers from getting bogged down with endless brainstorming, so it is especially comfortable for newer (and younger) RPers. Its main disadvantage, at least from a creative perspective, is organizational. Unless you already settled on a bunch of your NS nation’s details before you RP them, chances are you will end up changing your mind about something “along the way” as you flesh out your NS nation over the course of one or more RP threads. The big picture approach avoids these problems, but at the potential cost of tempting you to bog yourself down in endless brainstorming that makes playing NS feel more like writing a book than playing an RPG (this is especially true given how much NS RP relies on writing).
Forming a Basic “Concept” for Your NS Nation
Regardless of your preferences, the old adage that starting off is always the hardest part is definitely applicable here because it can be difficult to determine the best place to begin, but you can make this creative process less intimidating by breaking it into smaller pieces and addressing them individually. Maybe you already have some idea what you want your nation to be “like” or you have a “theme” in mind for it. Perhaps you want to create a nation that embodies your own beliefs or parodies an ideology you dislike. Maybe you already have great character ideas and just need help crafting a setting to put them in, or you have a solid basic concept for your national culture or economy or political system and just need help fleshing out the details.
Another thing you need to think about early on is the sort of role you want your new nation to fill in the world around it (what you want to do with your nation once you have finished creating it). Start by asking yourself questions like these:
- Do I intend to roleplay a quiet coastal state inhabited by a few million souls who farm and fish for a living, or would I prefer to run a wealthy microstate that houses my region’s largest stock market and earns shiploads of money as a trading hub?
- Do I prefer to roleplay a vast rural superpower bounded by two oceans and a mountain range, or a modestly-sized, densely populated, landlocked country that likes to feud with its neighbors?
Perhaps you want to RP as a global superpower that mounts crusades to oust every foreign dictator who wears a military uniform and a funny hat. Perhaps you prefer to RP as an impoverished theocracy that controls part of the global slave trade. Maybe you want your nation to be recognized as major diplomatic broker that resolves international disputes in exchange for a bit of cash. Alternatively, perhaps you want to try your hand at engineering the worst dystopia you can imagine in a bid to one-up everyone else with the same idea. Regardless, your first goal is to come up with some sort of basic vision for where you want to take the new country you are creating. If you have already settled on enough basic ideas for your NS nation, the next step is to combine and develop those ideas into an overall “nation concept” that can begin taking on a life of its own within your imagination, and eventually, within the game too.
I can use my own NS nation as an example. When I began creating Monavia in the summer of 2006, I was a bored fourteen-year-old fresh out of middle school and spent considerable time lazily surfing the Internet in search of country simulators. When I came across NS for the first time, the basic premise that the game FAQs presented to me was that I could build a fictional country around my (real-life) beliefs (but set in a fictional world) and have fun interacting with other players doing the same thing. While I did not have loads of ideas to work with at the time, was growing into a news junkie and had already taken several online political tests, so I had a few solid starting points. I decided up front that I would create strongly religious (if not exactly fanatical) country that was socially conservative, ruled by a powerful constitutional monarchy, and inspired in various ways by the Eastern Roman Empire and medieval Serbia. Taken together, these creative decisions represented a form of worldbuilding—the technical term for creating the “lore” you RP with in a given environment.
Geography and Culture
If you are still undecided about what you want to do with your new nation, a good starting point is to begin by asking yourself what your people value and believe. I find that the best approach to this step is to imagine the sort of environment you want your RP characters to inhabit. For the purposes of this section, I will use the term environment to encompass both your NS nation’s physical environment (geography) and social environment (culture). If you already have some solid ideas for what you want your NS nation’s culture to be like, try to imagine the kind of physical environment that would influence people to create the culture you have in mind. If you have few cultural ideas in mind but have an easy time imagining maps, focus on developing your NS nation’s geography and then try to imagine the kind of culture that would emerge if a bunch of people migrated into the space you just imagined. (Please note that when I mention “culture” in this context, I am referring to your NS nation’s societal culture—things like whether it is more egalitarian or hierarchical, individualist or collectivist, present-focused versus future-focused, and so on—not its tastes in music, cuisine, architecture, literature, etc.)
The main reason why I emphasize brainstorming your NS nation’s geography and culture up front is that people are strongly influenced by the environments around them. Since much of the best NS roleplay is driven by (but does not have to focus on) the actions of your characters, one way to build solid, believable characters is to ask yourself, “What sort of culture do my characters come from, how has it shaped them in the past, and how does it influence them now?” The answers you determine will shape the way your characters live their lives and interpret the actions of characters from other NS nations. Furthermore, a population’s values, beliefs, and cultural traits determine how it approaches public policy questions, ranks its priorities, and decides what role government should play in everyday life. In turn, these factors will influence what kind of government your NS nation has, the kind of public programs it administers, and the way your NS nation’s leaders make decisions.
One popular approach for brainstorming your NS nation’s geography is to grab a sheet of paper and draw a simple map of its territory and include important physical features and major cities for future reference. If you plan to join a dedicated RP region that already has a map and want to claim a particular space, you can always refer to the maps of other NS nations you want to have as neighbors if you want to include shared borders in your map. Think of some ways that geographic constraints and nation size (both in terms of territory and population) shape the way you people live and what they come to value (e.g. a population that keeps growing on a small island and embraces high-density living arrangements is not going to value personal space and individual freedom as much as people who grow up in frontier society with lots of open territory). At this point, you may even want to start brainstorming a few basic details of your NS nation’s economy, such as the distribution of your country’s natural resources (this determines what its major industries are and where they are located) since cultures evolve in response to changing economic conditions (e.g. episodes of resource scarcity tend to make people live more frugally even after conditions have improved).
In my early NS days, I did not think a lot about geography and culture since I was more interested in brainstorming Monavia’s politics and laws at the time (for example, my first worldbuilding project consisted of writing a full-length constitution in December 2006, but this effort did not do me much good until I found ways to use it as a tool for RP writing a while later). Unfortunately, my lack of attention to crafting Monavia’s geography and culture put me in some awkward spots when I RPed with someone else who already had these things fleshed out and I had to invent stuff on the fly to keep RP threads rolling (yes, necessity is the mother of invention). I got around some of these issues by leaving certain details vague (such as Monavia’s location in the world and its distance from other countries) and having everything take place in just one city (the national capital) or settings controlled by other players. After I joined Nova in 2008, I made myself invest some time in drawing a map to scale and adding loads of natural features and cities so I could use it as a tool for framing future roleplay threads. You can view the most recent version here.
When it came to developing Monavia’s culture, I knew early on that I wanted Monavian society to draw certain inspirations from pre-1914 Europe, such as a prevalence of hereditary aristocrats with real power and respect for traditional customs being an important part of everyday life, but otherwise I put little effort into making Monavia much more than a simple in-universe extension of my own habits and beliefs. As with my mapmaking efforts, I did not muster the will to write down very much historical information until 2010, which often meant that I had very little “lore” to refer to while RPing for a few years. I did, however, make a smart worldbuilding move in electing to ignore gameside demographic and economic stats in favor of making up more stable numbers that would still seem “normal” in-universe but would also be “realistic” enough to achieve “suspension of disbelief” along the way. This creative decision made “detailing” various aspects of my NS nation easier down the road.
Starting a Factbook
The final step I recommend taking as you get started building your NS nation is to start writing a basic factbook—a general reference guide you can refer to when roleplaying with your nation and other players can use to learn more about your nation when they want to interact with it. Ideally, a factbook offers readers a concise series of stats, tables, and graphics that provide an overview of your NS nation’s people, geography, economy, government, military, and relationships with other NS nations. While it is possible to create a simple factbook very quickly, quality factbooks containing everything your readers might possibly want to know (and then some) can grow into ambitious projects over time. When in doubt, focus on making the basics available right away and add a little detail whenever new ideas come to mind.
At the time I began RPing on NS in the mid-2000s, most RPers based their factbook formats off the individual country pages on the CIA’s World Factbook site, which remains a convenient “gold standard” for formatting and organization to this day. My own factbook from 2008 used a modified version of this format. As a high school student with considerable spare time on my hands, I was able (over a number of weeks) to make up loads of stats and play around with formatting until I had produced something with enough depth to use for a variety of future RPs. (I also made a point of posting a new edition each year until 2013, when I got too busy and unmotivated to keep up my old habit.) For those who treat NS more like a hobby than a game, factbooks can become just as important as any story thread, as my factbook from 2020 easily demonstrates. I strongly suggest (especially if you are a beginner) that you keep things simple and hold off on writing “factbook” posts dedicated to specific topics until you have a basic overview in place and you have finished making your way through the next few chapters.
CHAPTER 2
Creating Your NS Nation’s Political System
Creating Your NS Nation’s Political System
Creating Your Nation’s Leadership, One Character at a Time
Some players come into NS with the understanding that this game was designed, first and foremost, to be a country simulator where they make up fictional nations based on a set of political beliefs. If you happen to be an RPer who came into NS with loads of ideas about your NS nation’s laws, political system, dominant ideologies, etc. before you tried brainstorming anything else, chances are that you already know some things this chapter covers. Nevertheless, I have found that some approaches towards worldbuilding an NS nation’s politics are more fruitful and rewarding than others, hence the usefulness of this chapter. For the purposes of walking you through this chapter, I assume you stopped to read the previous chapter and sketch out a basic “nation concept” in your mind before you decided to get carried away with the political stuff.
A huge part of NS roleplay focuses on political themes and activities, especially in the realm of national and international statecraft. (In fact, I sometimes wonder why Max Barry did not simply name his site “World of Statecraft” or something similarly inspired; it would have been fitting.) In the general course of RPing political stuff, your NS nation’s leaders and governing institutions will drive much of the action that transpires in an RP thread. Many of your principal characters will be people who work in (or with) government organizations and can assume a multiplicity of forms, from heads of state and government to judges, legislators, diplomats, policy consultants, military commanders, administrative staff, lobbyists, activists, media figures, spies, and everyone in between. To help yourself (and the people you want to RP with) make sense of everything, you will want to spend some time defining the “roles” your main characters will fill and the relationships between them. I also strongly advise focusing on developing the characters who make up your NS nation’s governance structure before you flesh out the structure’s organization in detail.
My own approach to this process might be a bit illustrative, so let me take you on a short stroll down memory lane. When I first joined NS in June 2006, I had no idea how to use the forum, so I confined myself to answering issues and telegrams. The roleplay threads I read often set my imagination wandering through all sorts of fantastic places, so I decided to come up with something that went beyond the gameside part of NS and spent December 2006 writing a constitution to describe how I wanted the Monavian government to work (it was meant as an exact reflection of my political beliefs at that time). Later, once I bothered to figure out how the forum worked in September 2007, I used that constitution as a starting point and came up with a few characters, as the first post in this thread illustrates. I threw together a very basic background story about Monavia emerging from a generation-long period of “isolation” to explain in-character why Monavia had not been participating in global affairs prior to the point.
Once other players started responding to my IC declaration of emergence from deep-frozen isolationism, I came to the realization (as you will find if you scroll down a few posts in that thread) that I needed more characters! I quickly decided that I needed a minister of foreign affairs to respond to messages from other characters, and then another RPer asked for a trade agreement and I reflexively decided I needed a minister of commerce to negotiate that deal. At this point, I all but asked myself what functions the Monavian government performed, came up with a list of government departments, and hastily created a slate of characters to serve as the ministers in charge of those departments (along with a prime minister, chancellor, and a few others). I has very little talent at making up names for characters back then, but having poorly-named characters to RP with is often better than lacking characters altogether. If there is one major lesson you can learn from my early blunders, it is that you should take a little time to brainstorm your government departments and the characters who manage them before you charge off into the roleplaying arena.
Keep in mind that your characters (especially the ones in leadership positions) will want to use their authority to pursue the priorities they have come to value (e.g. leaders who grow up in a culture of self-reliance are unlikely to be interested in setting up a welfare state). Likewise, if you want to roleplay as a failed state run by feuding warlords, your central government might consist of nothing more than a leader who the warlords agree on to perform ceremonial functions like receiving foreign ambassadors but otherwise has no real power to do much. The ways in which your nation’s leaders obtain and use their power can also define how they go about their business. For an in-depth primer about creating “politician” characters in NS RPs, the go-to guide I recommend most is Jenrak’s short post titled The Politician of NationStates Roleplay.
Before I shift gears, I want to remind you that the same principles of character development that apply to writing in any other genre are applicable to play-by-text RP. Your characters exist in particular contexts. They are affected by the events they live through and the consequences of their choices. As they accumulate knowledge, power, and resources, they can exert more control over the people and events around them. They have opinions, motivations, personalities, and emotions. All of these factors (and more) play some part or another in determining how your characters will act or react in given circumstances. While you should keep these points in mind when creating and developing your characters, you do not need to “go all out” and create D&D-style “character sheets” that go on for pages and pages each time you add a new player to the stage.
Moving From the Micro View to the Macro View
When coming up with a list of departments and characters to run them, it helps to remember that a government’s form follows its functions, so it is best to think about what responsibilities it chooses to fulfill in order to think about how it is organized. A libertarian state committed to minimizing the role of government in everyday life might have only a few departments because it performs a limited number of functions, while a totalitarian state that wants to regulate everything in sight might have agencies and personnel dedication to every function imaginable. If your NS nation has lots of state-owned industries, chances are that it has people to run each of them. If your NS nation is a theocracy, it might have religious police or a ministry in charge of secular-religious relations. A multicultural country with strict laws regarding racial mixing might have a eugenics agency to keep everyone in line. If your people are insular and think locally more than anything else, chances are most critical government function will be decentralized and handled locally. As a general rule, the more authoritarian a government is, the more centralized much of its functions are (though this rule has its exceptions). Again, your NS nation’s culture, ideology, and values will have a lot to do with the kind of government it has, the things its government does, and the way its government works.
Here is where I may get a little “esoteric” with regard to this topic. An institution, custom, law norm, or procedure that produces or directs political power is a form of “social technology” in the same way an electric generator is a form of scientific technology. The flow of power in and around a government has a lot to do with how it is designed to function, and the motives of the designers often have a lot to do with whatever beliefs they hold. Culture and values lay upstream from power; in turn, factors such as religion, philosophy, personal experiences, personal upbringing, etc. shape an individual leader’s culture and values. Just as the “Framers” of the U.S. Constitution designed the structure of the U.S. government to follow a specific form because they entertained certain beliefs about how governments should function, the people who created your NS nation’s government probably had certain motives for doing whatever they did in-universe. Your job as a worldbuilder is to brainstorm that stuff in whatever level of detail you need to make your NS nation understandable to others who want to RP with you. I am not claiming you have to write a detailed constitution like the revised one Monavia has now or flesh out your political system in the sort of excruciating detail that I did in this factbook post unless this sort of thing really tickles your fancy, but this is one area where the rewards you get out of the worldbuilding process increase as you put in more effort.
I can easily use Monavia as an example to illustrate the foregoing points. I RP Monavia as a monarchy with the in-universe explanation that it was founded as one and has never been anything else. The country’s power structure is federal, with many powers being exercised by provincial or local governments, as a result of its size and internal diversity making centralized unitary government impractical. The judiciary is almost fully independent from electoral processes to keep it as non-ideological as possible while the Imperial Parliament is made up of elected officials. The Crown used to be a lot more autocratic than it is now, but ceded certain powers to other institutions for a variety of administrative and practical reasons when the current constitution was first drawn up in the eighteenth century. While one of my history factbooks offers a detailed in-universe explanation for many of these things, for direct RP purposes, I usually only need to note a few brief details in passing when they become relevant to a particular section of narration or dialogue. Much like an emergency toolkit, most of the worldbuilding I write down may never get mentioned in character during an RP thread, but it is there in case I might need it.
Some players come into NS with the understanding that this game was designed, first and foremost, to be a country simulator where they make up fictional nations based on a set of political beliefs. If you happen to be an RPer who came into NS with loads of ideas about your NS nation’s laws, political system, dominant ideologies, etc. before you tried brainstorming anything else, chances are that you already know some things this chapter covers. Nevertheless, I have found that some approaches towards worldbuilding an NS nation’s politics are more fruitful and rewarding than others, hence the usefulness of this chapter. For the purposes of walking you through this chapter, I assume you stopped to read the previous chapter and sketch out a basic “nation concept” in your mind before you decided to get carried away with the political stuff.
A huge part of NS roleplay focuses on political themes and activities, especially in the realm of national and international statecraft. (In fact, I sometimes wonder why Max Barry did not simply name his site “World of Statecraft” or something similarly inspired; it would have been fitting.) In the general course of RPing political stuff, your NS nation’s leaders and governing institutions will drive much of the action that transpires in an RP thread. Many of your principal characters will be people who work in (or with) government organizations and can assume a multiplicity of forms, from heads of state and government to judges, legislators, diplomats, policy consultants, military commanders, administrative staff, lobbyists, activists, media figures, spies, and everyone in between. To help yourself (and the people you want to RP with) make sense of everything, you will want to spend some time defining the “roles” your main characters will fill and the relationships between them. I also strongly advise focusing on developing the characters who make up your NS nation’s governance structure before you flesh out the structure’s organization in detail.
My own approach to this process might be a bit illustrative, so let me take you on a short stroll down memory lane. When I first joined NS in June 2006, I had no idea how to use the forum, so I confined myself to answering issues and telegrams. The roleplay threads I read often set my imagination wandering through all sorts of fantastic places, so I decided to come up with something that went beyond the gameside part of NS and spent December 2006 writing a constitution to describe how I wanted the Monavian government to work (it was meant as an exact reflection of my political beliefs at that time). Later, once I bothered to figure out how the forum worked in September 2007, I used that constitution as a starting point and came up with a few characters, as the first post in this thread illustrates. I threw together a very basic background story about Monavia emerging from a generation-long period of “isolation” to explain in-character why Monavia had not been participating in global affairs prior to the point.
Once other players started responding to my IC declaration of emergence from deep-frozen isolationism, I came to the realization (as you will find if you scroll down a few posts in that thread) that I needed more characters! I quickly decided that I needed a minister of foreign affairs to respond to messages from other characters, and then another RPer asked for a trade agreement and I reflexively decided I needed a minister of commerce to negotiate that deal. At this point, I all but asked myself what functions the Monavian government performed, came up with a list of government departments, and hastily created a slate of characters to serve as the ministers in charge of those departments (along with a prime minister, chancellor, and a few others). I has very little talent at making up names for characters back then, but having poorly-named characters to RP with is often better than lacking characters altogether. If there is one major lesson you can learn from my early blunders, it is that you should take a little time to brainstorm your government departments and the characters who manage them before you charge off into the roleplaying arena.
Keep in mind that your characters (especially the ones in leadership positions) will want to use their authority to pursue the priorities they have come to value (e.g. leaders who grow up in a culture of self-reliance are unlikely to be interested in setting up a welfare state). Likewise, if you want to roleplay as a failed state run by feuding warlords, your central government might consist of nothing more than a leader who the warlords agree on to perform ceremonial functions like receiving foreign ambassadors but otherwise has no real power to do much. The ways in which your nation’s leaders obtain and use their power can also define how they go about their business. For an in-depth primer about creating “politician” characters in NS RPs, the go-to guide I recommend most is Jenrak’s short post titled The Politician of NationStates Roleplay.
Before I shift gears, I want to remind you that the same principles of character development that apply to writing in any other genre are applicable to play-by-text RP. Your characters exist in particular contexts. They are affected by the events they live through and the consequences of their choices. As they accumulate knowledge, power, and resources, they can exert more control over the people and events around them. They have opinions, motivations, personalities, and emotions. All of these factors (and more) play some part or another in determining how your characters will act or react in given circumstances. While you should keep these points in mind when creating and developing your characters, you do not need to “go all out” and create D&D-style “character sheets” that go on for pages and pages each time you add a new player to the stage.
Moving From the Micro View to the Macro View
When coming up with a list of departments and characters to run them, it helps to remember that a government’s form follows its functions, so it is best to think about what responsibilities it chooses to fulfill in order to think about how it is organized. A libertarian state committed to minimizing the role of government in everyday life might have only a few departments because it performs a limited number of functions, while a totalitarian state that wants to regulate everything in sight might have agencies and personnel dedication to every function imaginable. If your NS nation has lots of state-owned industries, chances are that it has people to run each of them. If your NS nation is a theocracy, it might have religious police or a ministry in charge of secular-religious relations. A multicultural country with strict laws regarding racial mixing might have a eugenics agency to keep everyone in line. If your people are insular and think locally more than anything else, chances are most critical government function will be decentralized and handled locally. As a general rule, the more authoritarian a government is, the more centralized much of its functions are (though this rule has its exceptions). Again, your NS nation’s culture, ideology, and values will have a lot to do with the kind of government it has, the things its government does, and the way its government works.
Here is where I may get a little “esoteric” with regard to this topic. An institution, custom, law norm, or procedure that produces or directs political power is a form of “social technology” in the same way an electric generator is a form of scientific technology. The flow of power in and around a government has a lot to do with how it is designed to function, and the motives of the designers often have a lot to do with whatever beliefs they hold. Culture and values lay upstream from power; in turn, factors such as religion, philosophy, personal experiences, personal upbringing, etc. shape an individual leader’s culture and values. Just as the “Framers” of the U.S. Constitution designed the structure of the U.S. government to follow a specific form because they entertained certain beliefs about how governments should function, the people who created your NS nation’s government probably had certain motives for doing whatever they did in-universe. Your job as a worldbuilder is to brainstorm that stuff in whatever level of detail you need to make your NS nation understandable to others who want to RP with you. I am not claiming you have to write a detailed constitution like the revised one Monavia has now or flesh out your political system in the sort of excruciating detail that I did in this factbook post unless this sort of thing really tickles your fancy, but this is one area where the rewards you get out of the worldbuilding process increase as you put in more effort.
I can easily use Monavia as an example to illustrate the foregoing points. I RP Monavia as a monarchy with the in-universe explanation that it was founded as one and has never been anything else. The country’s power structure is federal, with many powers being exercised by provincial or local governments, as a result of its size and internal diversity making centralized unitary government impractical. The judiciary is almost fully independent from electoral processes to keep it as non-ideological as possible while the Imperial Parliament is made up of elected officials. The Crown used to be a lot more autocratic than it is now, but ceded certain powers to other institutions for a variety of administrative and practical reasons when the current constitution was first drawn up in the eighteenth century. While one of my history factbooks offers a detailed in-universe explanation for many of these things, for direct RP purposes, I usually only need to note a few brief details in passing when they become relevant to a particular section of narration or dialogue. Much like an emergency toolkit, most of the worldbuilding I write down may never get mentioned in character during an RP thread, but it is there in case I might need it.
CHAPTER 3
Creating Your Nation’s Population
Creating Your Nation’s Population
The Basic Setup
While the first two chapters of this guide have avoided stuff that has anything to do with math, the time has finally come to enter a realm where numbers play a major part. Unless you want to roleplay the “people” of your NS nation as nothing more than self-aware computer programs living in a virtual environment, you are very likely planning to RP your NS nation as a country inhabited by various individuals. Taken together as a group, these individuals constitute the in-universe population of your NS nation, and this chapter is meant to help you determine what you want this population to be like for RP purposes.
The first (and most basic) question that you need to address in this department is the scaling question (i.e. determining the population “size” that will best serve your RP purposes). There are no ironclad rules for approaching this question other than an expectation that you will exercise your best individual judgment. Game stats are a convenient “starting point” for new RPers because they have the advantage of reducing guesswork by automatically providing numbers, but they have three major drawbacks that can make them unsuitable for some RP purposes:
Some players use game stats an RP with “unlocked” populations for general purposes, but then agree to pretend they are using “locked” ones for story purposes (e.g. scaling down the size of military deployments against an NS nation with a tiny in-game population so they can maintain a desired “balance” in an RP thread).
Once you have tackled the scaling issue, you can begin wading into the weeds with more quantitative stuff. Some RPers (and writers generally) enjoy using exact numbers as a worldbuilding aid the way I do while others prefer to avoid putting in extra effort to settle on exact numbers unless it is truly necessary for telling a story. How far you feel comfortable taking this part is up to you. If you are fine with crunching some numbers, you will probably want to use a pencil, paper, and a calculator (unless you are a spreadsheet junkie with an accounting career like I am). Two factors you may want to look at before beginning this exercise are your IC geography and economy (especially the distribution and relative scarcity of natural resources) since they will determine where your major cities are located and how many of them exist, as well as determine your export and import options. If you already made a scale map of your territory, the first step in the process will be a lot easier.
Raw Population
To begin computing your desired RP population, I suggest finding your country’s land area on a scale map and then plugging in population density statistics for an RL country that is demographically and geographically similar to yours (not necessarily similar area-wise but having analogous terrain). If you cannot find any particularly good approximate matches in terms of population density, visit this Wikipedia page, take two or three RL countries that come close and average them. The portal at the bottom of the page may also prove helpful in later tasks. In my own case, I arbitrarily set my NS nation’s population at 448,924,379 (a totally made up number) back in 2008 and then came up with a way to make it grow by a few million each year. While this process was pretty arbitrary at first (often just making up plausible numbers via guesswork), I eventually came up with a more organized method (see next section).
Population Change
Once you have calculated the overall population you want to RP with, your next step is to determine its growth rate (populations are not static, so yours should not be unless you want to RP that to make things intentionally weird). This process has two components:
A country’s social policies are a result of its society’s values, so pick one or more countries that are ethnically, culturally, and politically similar to your own for this step. If you cannot find any RL analogues that appear to match your IC socio-political environment well (especially if you are trying to create something especially original), you may need to identify the “sources” of each component in your “blend” and average them together. For instance, Monavia’s culture is based on Slavic and Byzantine Europe, hence my first instinct is to use some data from different Balkan countries and average them together. Unfortunately, the universal contemporary “replacement fertility rate” required to sustain a population is 2.11 births/woman, so if you choose to get your birth rates from countries with lower rates, you will either have to fudge the numbers upward or roleplay a naturally shrinking base population that has to be sustained via immigration. This meant that I had to avoid modeling Monavia’s demography off of Eastern Bloc countries since the RL Eastern Bloc fell under communism and its social policies for decades and now face demographic crises. Instead, I picked out religious countries with conservative social policies and higher birth rates (e.g. India) to include in my modeling.
To calculate death rates, simply follow the same system I explained above for birth rates. Of course, death rates are more readily affected by your country’s HDI, so you will want to calculate it. You have three options here: use the formula on Wikipedia (this required you to make up some numbers to plug into it), have another player on the forums calculate it for you (there used to be a FNI thread for that), or go with NS stats (which are volatile, ever-changing estimates I do not recommend using in the long run). The net rate of natural change is the difference between your birth and death rates. Your immigration policies are yours to work out. When it comes to finding out this part, simply ask your region mates how many of their citizens they can see leaving for your country in a given (last) year and then assume that they make up, say, half or more of the total immigrants your country took in (the rest came from other parts of the world). Once you have computed your birth and death rates, simply apply them against your base population to find total births and total deaths. Take the net of the two, and the net migration rate (same process), and you have your total population change! In general, you do not want factbook maintenance and updates to take away too much time from RPing, which I why I used to make this an annual process.
Cultural Demographics
Most RPers whose factbooks contain detailed demographic information have sections covering topics like the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious makeup of their NS nations. There are no hard-and-fast rules for how best to handle the creative process for these topics, but I am willing to offer a few simple pointers:
While the first two chapters of this guide have avoided stuff that has anything to do with math, the time has finally come to enter a realm where numbers play a major part. Unless you want to roleplay the “people” of your NS nation as nothing more than self-aware computer programs living in a virtual environment, you are very likely planning to RP your NS nation as a country inhabited by various individuals. Taken together as a group, these individuals constitute the in-universe population of your NS nation, and this chapter is meant to help you determine what you want this population to be like for RP purposes.
The first (and most basic) question that you need to address in this department is the scaling question (i.e. determining the population “size” that will best serve your RP purposes). There are no ironclad rules for approaching this question other than an expectation that you will exercise your best individual judgment. Game stats are a convenient “starting point” for new RPers because they have the advantage of reducing guesswork by automatically providing numbers, but they have three major drawbacks that can make them unsuitable for some RP purposes:
- They change daily, which means the game stats you mentioned in character yesterday are out-of-date tomorrow. This can complicate worldbuilding for some RPers.
- They incentivize a culture of “powergaming” among new RPers who have slightly more seniority than other new RPers. Back when I began RPing, this usually took the form of some RPer who have been on NS for a few months (or longer) telling the player behind an account founded the previous week that “your NS nation cannot win a war with mine because my military is bigger than your whole population” or something similar.
- They render in-character events meaningless. No matter how many of your NS nation’s citizens die in a nuclear exchange, alien invasion, or global plague, your NS account home page will display a population that goes up, up, and up without skipping a beat as if nothing ever happened.
Some players use game stats an RP with “unlocked” populations for general purposes, but then agree to pretend they are using “locked” ones for story purposes (e.g. scaling down the size of military deployments against an NS nation with a tiny in-game population so they can maintain a desired “balance” in an RP thread).
Once you have tackled the scaling issue, you can begin wading into the weeds with more quantitative stuff. Some RPers (and writers generally) enjoy using exact numbers as a worldbuilding aid the way I do while others prefer to avoid putting in extra effort to settle on exact numbers unless it is truly necessary for telling a story. How far you feel comfortable taking this part is up to you. If you are fine with crunching some numbers, you will probably want to use a pencil, paper, and a calculator (unless you are a spreadsheet junkie with an accounting career like I am). Two factors you may want to look at before beginning this exercise are your IC geography and economy (especially the distribution and relative scarcity of natural resources) since they will determine where your major cities are located and how many of them exist, as well as determine your export and import options. If you already made a scale map of your territory, the first step in the process will be a lot easier.
Raw Population
To begin computing your desired RP population, I suggest finding your country’s land area on a scale map and then plugging in population density statistics for an RL country that is demographically and geographically similar to yours (not necessarily similar area-wise but having analogous terrain). If you cannot find any particularly good approximate matches in terms of population density, visit this Wikipedia page, take two or three RL countries that come close and average them. The portal at the bottom of the page may also prove helpful in later tasks. In my own case, I arbitrarily set my NS nation’s population at 448,924,379 (a totally made up number) back in 2008 and then came up with a way to make it grow by a few million each year. While this process was pretty arbitrary at first (often just making up plausible numbers via guesswork), I eventually came up with a more organized method (see next section).
Population Change
Once you have calculated the overall population you want to RP with, your next step is to determine its growth rate (populations are not static, so yours should not be unless you want to RP that to make things intentionally weird). This process has two components:
- A natural rate of change caused by births and deaths: Your NS nation’s policies on a host of issues affect these numbers. Everything from tax breaks for having kids to contraception bans play a part in this area. If your population breeds a lot but suffers a high rate of childhood mortality, you are going to have very little natural population increases. The same goes for having very low birth and death rates at the same time. Developing countries (i.e. countries undergoing a lot of economic and technological modernization) usually have birth rates that are much higher than their death rates so their populations tend to increase quickly. Once again, Wikipedia’s country lists are your best friend.
- Net migration rate (a function of immigration and emigration): Your NS nation’s immigration policies and enforcement régime will matter a lot here. Look up immigration rates for real-life countries with similar immigration laws if you need some numbers to use to make ballpark estimates. The condition of your NS nation’s economic system, the population’s overall quality of life, technology, and social policies will also play a part in determining how strongly your NS nation can attract immigrants or drive citizens to leave for other countries.
A country’s social policies are a result of its society’s values, so pick one or more countries that are ethnically, culturally, and politically similar to your own for this step. If you cannot find any RL analogues that appear to match your IC socio-political environment well (especially if you are trying to create something especially original), you may need to identify the “sources” of each component in your “blend” and average them together. For instance, Monavia’s culture is based on Slavic and Byzantine Europe, hence my first instinct is to use some data from different Balkan countries and average them together. Unfortunately, the universal contemporary “replacement fertility rate” required to sustain a population is 2.11 births/woman, so if you choose to get your birth rates from countries with lower rates, you will either have to fudge the numbers upward or roleplay a naturally shrinking base population that has to be sustained via immigration. This meant that I had to avoid modeling Monavia’s demography off of Eastern Bloc countries since the RL Eastern Bloc fell under communism and its social policies for decades and now face demographic crises. Instead, I picked out religious countries with conservative social policies and higher birth rates (e.g. India) to include in my modeling.
To calculate death rates, simply follow the same system I explained above for birth rates. Of course, death rates are more readily affected by your country’s HDI, so you will want to calculate it. You have three options here: use the formula on Wikipedia (this required you to make up some numbers to plug into it), have another player on the forums calculate it for you (there used to be a FNI thread for that), or go with NS stats (which are volatile, ever-changing estimates I do not recommend using in the long run). The net rate of natural change is the difference between your birth and death rates. Your immigration policies are yours to work out. When it comes to finding out this part, simply ask your region mates how many of their citizens they can see leaving for your country in a given (last) year and then assume that they make up, say, half or more of the total immigrants your country took in (the rest came from other parts of the world). Once you have computed your birth and death rates, simply apply them against your base population to find total births and total deaths. Take the net of the two, and the net migration rate (same process), and you have your total population change! In general, you do not want factbook maintenance and updates to take away too much time from RPing, which I why I used to make this an annual process.
Cultural Demographics
Most RPers whose factbooks contain detailed demographic information have sections covering topics like the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious makeup of their NS nations. There are no hard-and-fast rules for how best to handle the creative process for these topics, but I am willing to offer a few simple pointers:
- Your NS nation’s culture is a major factor here. If you want to create a nation inspired by a particular real-life analogue, consider researching the analogue’s cultural makeup as part of your process for generating new ideas.
- Consider presenting data in a tabular format to keep everything organized and easy to follow. If you need help creating a table, copy the code below as an example:
- Code: Select all
[box][table][tr][td][align=center]Main Language Spoken[/align][/td][td][align=center]% of Total[/align][/td][td][align=center]Speakers[/align][/td][/tr][/table][/box]
CHAPTER 4
Creating Your Nation’s Economy
Creating Your Nation’s Economy
Introduction
Your nation’s economy is a serious matter since it relevant for roleplaying trade and also plays a big part in other aspects of your nation’s interactions with others. As you will see in Chapter 6, militaries do not win wars—economies do, since your economy is what produces your military in the first place. Your economy is also relevant in diplomatic RPs (especially trade negotiations) because your economy is a major factor in how powerful your country is and thus determines how much leverage it has in negotiations.
While there are a number of ways to create a plausible IC economy, the method I recommend begins with returning to the ideas you came up with regarding which resources your NS nation trades and how its geography affects its economic activities and influences the people’s way of life. Use Wikipedia to research RL nations that have something in common with your new nation and use their production and consumption data (or scaled variations thereof) to make up numbers that realistically relate to your population data. I recommend tackling the task of brainstorming your demographics before you address your economy, as the latter is a product of the former.
Basic Economic Attributes
Budgets
Budgets are a little more complicated, albeit less open-ended. Your overall national government budget is a percentage of your GDP. NS stats are volatile and change at the drop of a hat, so they are crap (as businessman Guy Kawasaki says). You are better off using this page as a guide.
Once you know how much money your central government plans to spend in the current year, you can divvy it up by department. Before undertaking this step, do some research to determine how many departments and independent agencies your country has at the national level. If you want to RP a confederation in which the central government only handles tariff collection, diplomacy, defense, and ceremonial functions, this is really easy. If you want to RP as a federation or as a unitary state (like most countries in Europe are at the moment), you will have a U. S.-style federal budget with at least twenty or more departments and independent agencies worth listing. The widths of the slices of your budgetary pie are a product of your leaders’ values and priorities, which in turn reflect the wants of their constituents.
Your nation’s economy is a serious matter since it relevant for roleplaying trade and also plays a big part in other aspects of your nation’s interactions with others. As you will see in Chapter 6, militaries do not win wars—economies do, since your economy is what produces your military in the first place. Your economy is also relevant in diplomatic RPs (especially trade negotiations) because your economy is a major factor in how powerful your country is and thus determines how much leverage it has in negotiations.
While there are a number of ways to create a plausible IC economy, the method I recommend begins with returning to the ideas you came up with regarding which resources your NS nation trades and how its geography affects its economic activities and influences the people’s way of life. Use Wikipedia to research RL nations that have something in common with your new nation and use their production and consumption data (or scaled variations thereof) to make up numbers that realistically relate to your population data. I recommend tackling the task of brainstorming your demographics before you address your economy, as the latter is a product of the former.
Basic Economic Attributes
- Economy Size: The scale of your NS nation’s economy has a lot to do with the “role” you want your NS nation to play in the world, so setting the right scale is pretty important. While many roleplayers use popular NS calculators, if you want to avoid using NS stats for scaling reasons, creative reasons, or no reasons in particular, there are alternative methods for coming up with believable numbers. One is to take the per capita income your NS stats give you and multiply it by your RP population instead of your gameside population. Another is to divide your NS stat population by your RP population to obtain a “conversion factor” and then divide your gameside GDP by this factor.
- Per Capita Income: You will need to use your knowledge of economics to determine how well-off your citizens are realistically likely to be and then generate an appropriate per capita income level (again, RL analogues might be useful). Simply multiply this amount by your base population and you will have a crude (but effective) GDP estimate for the current year. Rinse and repeat each year as needed. I strongly recommend using a spreadsheet file to calculate your data. Not only is it convenient, but automatic recalculation is a very helpful tool whenever you want to experiment with adjusting different variables.
- Trading Partners: Your NS nation’s biggest trading partners will be the countries located closest to yours unless its political system has trade policies that would make this unlikely.
- Trade Goods: As I stated earlier, try to use information about geography and natural resources to determine what sort of commodities and finished goods your nation imports and exports.
- Economy Structure: This category refers to the way your economy breaks down between agriculture, industry, and services. Research real-life countries that have similar economies to your NS nation’s economy to get some numbers you can play around with here.
- Energy: How does your NS nation generate its electricity?
- Transportation: What is your NS nation’s transportation infrastructure like?
- Communications: What are your NS nation’s communication systems like?
Budgets
Budgets are a little more complicated, albeit less open-ended. Your overall national government budget is a percentage of your GDP. NS stats are volatile and change at the drop of a hat, so they are crap (as businessman Guy Kawasaki says). You are better off using this page as a guide.
Once you know how much money your central government plans to spend in the current year, you can divvy it up by department. Before undertaking this step, do some research to determine how many departments and independent agencies your country has at the national level. If you want to RP a confederation in which the central government only handles tariff collection, diplomacy, defense, and ceremonial functions, this is really easy. If you want to RP as a federation or as a unitary state (like most countries in Europe are at the moment), you will have a U. S.-style federal budget with at least twenty or more departments and independent agencies worth listing. The widths of the slices of your budgetary pie are a product of your leaders’ values and priorities, which in turn reflect the wants of their constituents.
CHAPTER 5
Creating Your Nation’s History
Creating Your Nation’s History
Getting Started
Your country’s history serves as a background story for your characters, institutions, etc. and thus needs to be thorough enough to explain why they are the way they are. Your principal objective in writing a history is to explain to others how your country came to become what it is today and how it has shaped your characters. In my own experience, the most effective way to accomplish this is to make sure your history answers the following general questions:
1. Population: Where did my nation’s people come from? Are they indigenous or did they immigrate here from somewhere else? When did they arrive? How did they decide where to settle?
2. Politics and society: What kind of society did my nation’s people originally have? How did it evolve over time? What factors influenced it to change? How did the country govern itself? Was my country originally under somebody else’s control?
3. Economics: How did my new nation’s people live? What did they trade? When did they discover various resources? How do they view their resources and make use of opportunities to exploit them?
4. Military matters: What causes did my NS nation’s people fight over in the past and why? What wars did they win and lose? How did they fight?
Regardless of whatever specific details you come up with to answer the preceding questions, you core goal is to address this question: How did my nation start out, what is it like now, and what kinds of events had to happen in between to make my nation get from where it started off to where it is now? As with brainstorming your economy and demographic data, there are no fixed rules or right and wrong ways of doing this, so you will need to rely on your judgment and sense of good taste. Just please avoid making your new nation something unoriginal or too heavily based off of RL; the whole point of NS is to come up with new things that have not been done before.
Your NS Nation’s Origin
Every NS nation comes from somewhere other than a vacuum, so the first step in fleshing out your NS nation’s origin is to settle on a starting point. This usually consists of brainstorming a few things about the founding population (the group of people who get your NS nation started). Perhaps they are migratory nomads who eventually found a place where they could get comfortable. Perhaps they started off as an established city-state that started expanding into the surrounding countryside once their economy got strong enough to support a growing population. Maybe your NS nation began as a colony founded by settlers from somewhere else. Maybe your nation was created by the survivors of the destruction of the nation that was there before it.
Once you have a firm idea regarding your NS nation’s beginnings, your next task is to develop that idea into the story of its birth. This means fleshing out details regarding the people who got everything started and how they made their decisions. Once again, I can use Monavia as an example. The background story I imagined featured a predecessor civilization, the Vendian Empire, that collapsed in AD 454 following decades of economic decline due to plagues and foreign invasions. The Vendian Empire then fell apart into a dozen or more independent countries, some of which were ruled by Vendians while the others were established by the invaders. After nearly two centuries of this state of affairs, the rulers governing two of these states formed a marriage alliance and merged their realms into one country—the Monavian Empire—in AD 718. The NS RP environment abounds with other examples, ranging from an assortment of refugees colonizing an empty continent to build a new nation to a computer program taking over an existing country and remaking it into something else.
Your NS Nation’s Journey
No country remains frozen in time forever. Even deeply conservative and traditionalistic societies undergo some measure of change over time due to technological developments, wars, natural disasters, and so on. Unless you want to RP your NS nation as being founded very recently, it is likely to have had some time to move beyond its origins. If you NS nation is not merely old but ancient, it may be so different from what it began as that it would not be recognizable to its founders beyond a certain point. An NS nation’s “journey” might consist of long periods of stability punctuated by occasional interruptions, or it might consist of frequent and prolonged chaos. Sometimes the best way to explain how an NS nation avoids changing a lot over time is to make it an isolationist society (e.g. China under the late Ming Dynasty) or have it occupy a continent or archipelago all by itself while undergoing minimal contact with outsiders (e.g. indigenous cultures before European colonists showed up). Conversely, a country located in an area that nomads or foreign invaders have to pass through to get where they want to go will be a site of frequent upheaval and cultural mingling (e.g. Central Europe during the Middle Ages).
Again, take Monavia as an example. The early Monavian Empire started off being surrounded by other Vendian successor states and competed with them for power. Over the course of several hundred years, the Monavians unified multiple rival states under their banner and expanded into some of the lands inhabited by the same people who invaded and destroyed the Vendian Empire earlier. During the medieval period, Monavia’s borders expanded until they made contact with colonies being planted on their continent’s eastern coastal region and eventually conquered the colonies after fighting multiple wars with them over trade and religious differences. While the “power couple” who founded the Monavian Empire might have dreamed of reunifying the Vendian lands into one country, these other developments were not part of their plans and ambitions.
Using Your Nation’s History in RP Threads
Figuring out where your NS nation has gone can be very useful for determining where it is going—in other words, if you take some time to think about how your NS nation’s history has shaped its society and culture, you can use that information to decide how your characters think about the world and perspectives they entertain. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, RP characters who grow up in a certain environment are going to have their thinking shaped by the culture around them and the education system that schooled them. If a character “deviates from the norm” in any significant way, chances are that that character had specific experiences that the others did not. Sometimes these difference have a lot to do with a character’s position in relation to past historical events. For instance, the “insiders” whose decisions shaped the nation during a period of crisis will probably view their actions and the impacts they made differently than the average citizen who did not have a say in whatever happened.
In an RP context, any roleplay threads that you and your RP partners formally adopt as “canon” will have implications for future RP threads. Did your NS nation just lose some territory in a war? Perhaps your characters are going to bitter about the loss (especially when these losses entail friends dying or property being destroyed) and so they will want to avenge it at some point in the future. Perhaps your NS nation’s defeat caused its leader and his or her ruling party to lose the next set of elections to an opposition coalition that used its power to make domestic policy changes. For instance, your nation’s government just created a public pension system, but only because the party that was against it got blamed for losing the war and thrown out of office so the people who were for the pension system got a chance to be in power. My main point here is that you can (and should) use historical events like any other plot points to tell your NS nation’s story.
Your country’s history serves as a background story for your characters, institutions, etc. and thus needs to be thorough enough to explain why they are the way they are. Your principal objective in writing a history is to explain to others how your country came to become what it is today and how it has shaped your characters. In my own experience, the most effective way to accomplish this is to make sure your history answers the following general questions:
1. Population: Where did my nation’s people come from? Are they indigenous or did they immigrate here from somewhere else? When did they arrive? How did they decide where to settle?
2. Politics and society: What kind of society did my nation’s people originally have? How did it evolve over time? What factors influenced it to change? How did the country govern itself? Was my country originally under somebody else’s control?
3. Economics: How did my new nation’s people live? What did they trade? When did they discover various resources? How do they view their resources and make use of opportunities to exploit them?
4. Military matters: What causes did my NS nation’s people fight over in the past and why? What wars did they win and lose? How did they fight?
Regardless of whatever specific details you come up with to answer the preceding questions, you core goal is to address this question: How did my nation start out, what is it like now, and what kinds of events had to happen in between to make my nation get from where it started off to where it is now? As with brainstorming your economy and demographic data, there are no fixed rules or right and wrong ways of doing this, so you will need to rely on your judgment and sense of good taste. Just please avoid making your new nation something unoriginal or too heavily based off of RL; the whole point of NS is to come up with new things that have not been done before.
Your NS Nation’s Origin
Every NS nation comes from somewhere other than a vacuum, so the first step in fleshing out your NS nation’s origin is to settle on a starting point. This usually consists of brainstorming a few things about the founding population (the group of people who get your NS nation started). Perhaps they are migratory nomads who eventually found a place where they could get comfortable. Perhaps they started off as an established city-state that started expanding into the surrounding countryside once their economy got strong enough to support a growing population. Maybe your NS nation began as a colony founded by settlers from somewhere else. Maybe your nation was created by the survivors of the destruction of the nation that was there before it.
Once you have a firm idea regarding your NS nation’s beginnings, your next task is to develop that idea into the story of its birth. This means fleshing out details regarding the people who got everything started and how they made their decisions. Once again, I can use Monavia as an example. The background story I imagined featured a predecessor civilization, the Vendian Empire, that collapsed in AD 454 following decades of economic decline due to plagues and foreign invasions. The Vendian Empire then fell apart into a dozen or more independent countries, some of which were ruled by Vendians while the others were established by the invaders. After nearly two centuries of this state of affairs, the rulers governing two of these states formed a marriage alliance and merged their realms into one country—the Monavian Empire—in AD 718. The NS RP environment abounds with other examples, ranging from an assortment of refugees colonizing an empty continent to build a new nation to a computer program taking over an existing country and remaking it into something else.
Your NS Nation’s Journey
No country remains frozen in time forever. Even deeply conservative and traditionalistic societies undergo some measure of change over time due to technological developments, wars, natural disasters, and so on. Unless you want to RP your NS nation as being founded very recently, it is likely to have had some time to move beyond its origins. If you NS nation is not merely old but ancient, it may be so different from what it began as that it would not be recognizable to its founders beyond a certain point. An NS nation’s “journey” might consist of long periods of stability punctuated by occasional interruptions, or it might consist of frequent and prolonged chaos. Sometimes the best way to explain how an NS nation avoids changing a lot over time is to make it an isolationist society (e.g. China under the late Ming Dynasty) or have it occupy a continent or archipelago all by itself while undergoing minimal contact with outsiders (e.g. indigenous cultures before European colonists showed up). Conversely, a country located in an area that nomads or foreign invaders have to pass through to get where they want to go will be a site of frequent upheaval and cultural mingling (e.g. Central Europe during the Middle Ages).
Again, take Monavia as an example. The early Monavian Empire started off being surrounded by other Vendian successor states and competed with them for power. Over the course of several hundred years, the Monavians unified multiple rival states under their banner and expanded into some of the lands inhabited by the same people who invaded and destroyed the Vendian Empire earlier. During the medieval period, Monavia’s borders expanded until they made contact with colonies being planted on their continent’s eastern coastal region and eventually conquered the colonies after fighting multiple wars with them over trade and religious differences. While the “power couple” who founded the Monavian Empire might have dreamed of reunifying the Vendian lands into one country, these other developments were not part of their plans and ambitions.
Using Your Nation’s History in RP Threads
Figuring out where your NS nation has gone can be very useful for determining where it is going—in other words, if you take some time to think about how your NS nation’s history has shaped its society and culture, you can use that information to decide how your characters think about the world and perspectives they entertain. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, RP characters who grow up in a certain environment are going to have their thinking shaped by the culture around them and the education system that schooled them. If a character “deviates from the norm” in any significant way, chances are that that character had specific experiences that the others did not. Sometimes these difference have a lot to do with a character’s position in relation to past historical events. For instance, the “insiders” whose decisions shaped the nation during a period of crisis will probably view their actions and the impacts they made differently than the average citizen who did not have a say in whatever happened.
In an RP context, any roleplay threads that you and your RP partners formally adopt as “canon” will have implications for future RP threads. Did your NS nation just lose some territory in a war? Perhaps your characters are going to bitter about the loss (especially when these losses entail friends dying or property being destroyed) and so they will want to avenge it at some point in the future. Perhaps your NS nation’s defeat caused its leader and his or her ruling party to lose the next set of elections to an opposition coalition that used its power to make domestic policy changes. For instance, your nation’s government just created a public pension system, but only because the party that was against it got blamed for losing the war and thrown out of office so the people who were for the pension system got a chance to be in power. My main point here is that you can (and should) use historical events like any other plot points to tell your NS nation’s story.
CHAPTER 6
Creating Your Nation’s Military
Creating Your Nation’s Military
Introduction
Every country’s population has material needs that it must meet to function. To secure their means of meeting those needs and resist potential interference with their efforts, a nation will produce or acquire for itself a supply of weapons and train individual to use them. Unless you plan to RP your NS nation as a microstate depending on its neighbors for protection, chances are it will have some sort of organized armed forces for the reasons I just articulated. This chapter is aimed at helping you worldbuild the military component of your NS nation.
Your Main Considerations
Several factors can affect your NS nation’s military forces. These include:
Creating Your Nation’s Armed Forces
Once you have a basic understanding of your NS nation’s security needs and other relevant considerations, you can begin putting various ideas together to create a fictional military. If you still need help with specific items, other RPers have written at least two dozen guides on roleplaying war and any number of them may be helpful to you. While I am not an expert on this topic like those other guide authors, I can still offer a few pieces of advice:
Every country’s population has material needs that it must meet to function. To secure their means of meeting those needs and resist potential interference with their efforts, a nation will produce or acquire for itself a supply of weapons and train individual to use them. Unless you plan to RP your NS nation as a microstate depending on its neighbors for protection, chances are it will have some sort of organized armed forces for the reasons I just articulated. This chapter is aimed at helping you worldbuild the military component of your NS nation.
Your Main Considerations
Several factors can affect your NS nation’s military forces. These include:
- Security Needs: Your NS nation’s security needs are a product of several related factors. The most critical of these is the threat environment in which it exists. If you RP a country that has big, aggressive neighbors, your NS nation will have different security needs than one that faces little danger. Another major consideration is geography. An island nation’s primary vector of force projection is the ocean, so its navy is going to be its main military focus, while a landlocked country surrounded by many neighbors will prioritize its ground forces. A coastal nation with several neighbors and an economy dependent on trade will take a more balanced approach.
- Economic Factors: What does the adage “militaries do not win wars, economies do” really mean? A country’s economic capabilities have big implications for its capacity to make war. A country that can grow a lot of food can feed vast bodies of troops, but if it cannot manufacture its own weapons, it will need to buy them. Imagine going to war with another NS nation that has to import all its weapons from overseas. Your NS nation can defeat its opponent just by cutting off its trade while it uses up its supplies of bombs, shells, and bullets until it runs out. A country that makes the bulk of its money off just one or two main resources can be defeated if those specific resources are compromised (e.g. taking out the main oil refinery of a country that makes most of its money off oil sales).
- Culture: Your NS nation’s culture has an impact on the way its people view warfare and military service. A feudal society is going to be a much more suitable place for large numbers of people to make a living as warriors than a technocratic republic. A nation that looks down on war as barbaric may not care to fund its armed forces much and veterans get stuck with low social status, thus discouraging recruitment among the upper classes. A nation that associates military service with patriotism or that sees itself as having a duty to “civilize” or “liberate” other parts of the world at the point of a bayonet may reward veterans with high social status. The examples are endless.
- Geography: Your NS nation’s terrain matters a lot in combat. Perhaps it contains vast plains where whole armies of tanks have room to maneuver, or perhaps it has so many mountains that nimble motorized vehicles are a better fit. Maybe it has loads of coastal areas but just a few good spots to build ports and harbors. Rivers can serve as highways for boat fleets to move men and materiel around, but can also serve as obstacles an enemy has to cross. Just remember not to turn every inch of your NS nation into an impassible natural fortress as nobody wants to RP with a nation that has totally unconquerable geography.
- Politics: Political factors include things like mandatory service obligations, the government’s view of war as a policy tool, the military’s role in government, and the population’s general preference for either militarism or pacifism. On a less abstract level, political factors can include a politician’s desire to start a war to further specific goals or personal ambitions.
- Doctrines: A military doctrine is a set of ideas and principles a military follows when it has to make war decisions. Leaders typically use the other bullet points in this list to determine what they want their military’s doctrines to be. For an in-depth guide on this topic, please read this thread.
Creating Your Nation’s Armed Forces
Once you have a basic understanding of your NS nation’s security needs and other relevant considerations, you can begin putting various ideas together to create a fictional military. If you still need help with specific items, other RPers have written at least two dozen guides on roleplaying war and any number of them may be helpful to you. While I am not an expert on this topic like those other guide authors, I can still offer a few pieces of advice:
- First, have patience when undertaking this part of creating your NS nation. Depending on how deeply you “wade into the weeds” on this topic, you may find yourself changing your mind about various details and taking a while to settle on a “winning formula.”
- Second, if you want to focus on roleplaying war, then try not to let yourself get sidetracked by projects like designing original equipment in excruciating detail or operating a storefront thread. While these can be worthy endeavors, they can also be very time consuming.
- Third, consider creating separate military factbooks if you want to flesh out your armed forces in detail. Having separate factbooks will enable you to keep large amounts of information organized.
- Fourth, consider using spreadsheets to keep track of all your military stuff. This can be especially useful if you are trying to track casualties during a war RP.
- Fifth, take a moment to create a list of military characters who might be relevant for RP purposes.
- Sixth, take some time to work out how you want your armed forces to be organized (e.g. branches of service) and deployed geographically.
