Initial Disclaimer: I have zero practical knowledge about city planning and population center dynamics. At the same time, the same can be said for most people in Shadgard who are essentially a rag-tag bunch of apocalypse survivors playing it by ear.
saladbowl wrote: ↑Mon Jun 20, 2022 4:50 pm
Shadgard feels to me like it's straddling the line between 'too large to care' and 'small enough for everyone to care,' flipping between the two as necessity demands. It's an outpost where everyone has everyone's back and it's a tight-knit community. It's also a large city where people might slip through the cracks and monitoring everyone isn't possible. Overall room count / descriptions and perhaps travel time add to the dichotomy. IIRC there's one description of a home, no poor district, and no rich district.
I'd describe Shadgard as the infrastructure of a small town being increasingly crammed over its ideal population capacity. People can't just (safely) pick up and move elsewhere, nor can they go outside the canyon and start settling/expanding to new areas.
I'd never refer to Shadgard as a city. It's small enough to know many of your neighbors and get acquainted with your town officials and feel you have a voice, but full enough of people contained in that tight canyon space that things can still get lost in the crowd at times. I don't know that any rooms specifically mention homes (ah, I do see one), but plenty refer to "buildings" which can include homes. Shadgard is rather haphazard and not everything built therein is easily identifiable.
Being an overpopulated and geographically small Lost Lands survivor outpost, I don't think there's much in the way of rich or poor districts. People mostly just put things wherever there's available room at the moment, and there's not much left at this point so they've had to start building upward. Maybe rich individuals will eventually start congregating at the newer upper areas to feel more securely "above" everyone else, but that also invites the danger of coming off as smug and superior which the majority of Shadgardians don't appreciate. There's no intricate and bureaucratic law system or powerful unified police force for the rich to hide behind in Shadgard, so that's not going to go over as well as it would in other more "civilized" places. None of this is to say there aren't nicer and poorer areas that have naturally formed over time - I imagine the northwest corner is on the whole one of the nicer areas while the southeast is one of the slummier. But again - being in the circumstances they're in, Shadgard hasn't exactly had the luxury of developing zoning practices and the like. Stuff has been built on demand as needs have arisen, wherever was handy and available at the time the particular need arose.
It's difficult believing law enforcement would welcome people who openly worship XYZ no-no Immortals ...
This is essentially in a "suspension of disbelief" state until we have a viable place for said characters to call home. I apologize for the wait and the stretched believability the situation has caused.
... or people who talk about killing XYZ residents outside the walls (and might later attempt that), but raise the hue and cry if someone kills within walls. [...] Maybe because it'd take away player agency and possible builds if law enforcement took care of everything, in a world where dead people can resurrect to testify against their killers?
If a killing (or a threat of such) happens within town walls, that means there's jurisdiction, potential local witnesses, immediate effects and perceptions influencing the town, etc. Most things happening outside town walls essentially boil down to unverifiable claims. Shadgard just doesn't have the ability to police every report of every bad thing that happens to people outside their town and beyond their resources of eyes and ears. If things eventually boil down to "Bob says Mary killed him out near New Emberlight, but Bob is also apparently Undying and is fine now," should Shadgard law throw Mary in jail? Should they be policing every violent incident that occurs throughout the lands so long as one of the affected parties is capable of walking into Shadgard and filing a complaint? The way I have it imagined, it's going to differ based on the situation. A murder of a non-Undying individual is always going to be treated more seriously. A single instance on an Undying getting ganked out beyond the walls and popping back up to complain about it? Probably going to note it but not do much else - Undying are always doing horrible things to each other because they have lost their concept of meaningful fear of death or consequence, and Shadgard has neither the ability nor the desire to police the Undying across the entirety of the Lost Lands. If someone becomes known for committing multiple killings beyond the canyon and hiding behind the "well it was outside the town walls so there's nothing you can do!" argument, the town is probably going to remind them that Shadgard isn't the type of place to get too hung up over laws or guidelines if they (particulary the Town Council) deem something to be clearly out of hand.
Of course, reactions are also going to vary based on the individual filing the complaint. There's going to be a difference in reaction between attacking a town official and attacking some Undying adventurer that lives out of the Hearth & Home. A local miner complaining that Jasper picked their pocket while walking through Timberpine Forest? We'll note the complaint, but there's not much we can do. The mayor reporting that Jasper cut her son's coin pouch out in the same place? We'll get on it right away, Madam Mayor. This kind of varying/preferential treatment is there for practical believability reasons - Shadgard is not intended to have a justice system of perfect purity, equality, and fairness (I would find that stretching my own limits of believability).
Getting more meta about things: The GM team doesn't have the bandwidth to handle every negative incident between PCs via NPC justice/reputation/reactions. Having the more hard rule of "if it happens in town then the justice system will get involved" is about helping players feel they can play safely within towns, not so much about making players feel like they can get away with literally anything with no fear of any consequence ever as long as it's outside town. Towns are considered likely-consequence-zones where people should feel they need to behave within certain guidelines. Out in the wilderness, such things are far less certain but by no means guaranteed to be consequence-free, and I hope that's understandable both on an IC level and an OOC level.
Militia members materialize from air the nanosecond an NPC cries thief. And probably if someone channels sorcery. They're lurking everywhere, always on patrol.
The militia are essentially just armed citizens who are going about doing their thing like everyone else, only they've volunteered to intervene if such situations occur nearby rather than stand milling about as bystanders or run away. So they are indeed pretty much all around town all the time.
Mechanically, once an event causes the "summon militia" function to be called, there's a chance every second for a militia member to spawn until a max number of militia have arrived. That initial chance to summon the first ones may well need to be turned down so they don't nearly always show up virtually instantly. On the other hand, I'm not overly broken up about the low chance for people to circumvent militia intervention by just walking away immediately after performing the act.
Why do they care about some crimes but not others?
Because some situations are easy to code in as obvious illegal activities. Stealing from or attacking an NPC? Obvious situation for having the NPCs call for help. Channeling sorcery? As far as Shadgard is concerned, there is never a situation where doing this should not be considered illegal. (No, it's not meant to be an objectively reasonable stance for them to take - it's a deliberate lore prejudice.) Two PCs attacking or stealing from each other? Maybe they're just sparring or roughhousing or messing with a friend. This seems to be the case the majority of the time, and we haven't come up with a good way to handle these situations code-wise.
How large is Shadgard, numerically?
I honestly don't have specific numbers. If there's anything that requires more specific detail beyond the above the first response at the top of this post, let me know and I'll try to get you the details you need.