Law, Authority & Government

Law is your world's answer to: who decides, who enforces, and what happens to those who break the shared rules.

What to define

Who holds legal authority, and over whom. What acts count as serious wrongs. How accusations are heard — courts, assemblies, lords, guilds, households. What punishments, restitution, or compensation follow. How offices are granted and what powers each carries. How taxes, service, and obligations are levied.

Keep the core separations: nobility is not automatic jurisdiction; office is not rank; authority must come from established structure. A title alone commands nothing. An office commands exactly what your law gives it.

Crime and consequence

An act is criminal only where your law makes it so. Accusation never proves guilt; guilt never dictates its own punishment. Punishment follows from law, authority, evidence, and circumstance — fines, restitution, dismissal, imprisonment, seizure, service — each a real event, none automatic.

Government

Define the polity that governs play: its form, its ruler, its heir where one is recognized, its stability, its demands. The ruler, the ruling family, and the heir are three different facts. Succession follows your custom — never a universal formula.

Good builder question

If someone steals a horse in the starting village, what actually happens — who hears it, who decides, what follows? If you can answer that, your law is ready for play.

You usually do not need...

...a complete code, appellate procedure, or distant jurisdictions. Establish foreseeable justice; defer the rest.