Today, we are taking a break from an endless queue of stat-blocks. Recently, I ran into an old background idea of mine that I wrote elsewhere, so I decided to post it here (with a few sentences polished here and there and a few new paragraphs added).
The Green Compromise
A sect of benevolent (or at least staying away from bloodthirsty might-makes-right, eat-or-be-eaten, you-are-either-hunter-or-prey mentality) druids came to a conclusion that further development and expansion of civilization is impossible to stop without resorting to cataclysmic solutions which they wanted to avoid for various reasons (ranging from compassion for other living beings that would be annihilated, through the fact that power needed might exceed their means, and last, but not least, they might destroy themselves as well). Instead, they decided to influence the civilization development, hoping to shape it into a more acceptable form.
They noted that the horizontal and numeric spread of civilization is primarily driven by need for agricultural lands, and at the same time new agricultural lands lead to further increase in population which drives further territorial expansion. This lead them to conclusion, that the territorial spread could be reduced by either preventing or at least reducing population growth or by increasing efficiency of food production.
One of the factions decided that preventing population growth is not feasible solution so they choose the second solution: they harnessed their earth, water, weather, and plant magic to increase soil fertility, provide water and sun in right proportions, enhanced the plants, and multiplied the crops by orders of magnitude. As intended, this slowed but not completely stopped cultivation of new lands for farming, allowing to sustain much bigger urban populations without need for corresponding increase in rural population.
Their assistance came at certain conditions, giving the druids political voice in settlements, important advisory role in matters related to necessary expansion, a degree of sovereignty over wilderness, and some degree of control over population growth and expansion.
However, constantly growing population increases demand for mineral resources, which can't be solved that easily. While some druids have ideas for promoting safe and stable mining practices, even they know it might be a road to nowhere. Unlike plants and animals, minerals can't really be tended to grow in sustainable way... And the process of transporting them alone is a huge issue that requires building roads, reshaping the land, and seeking more and more deposits before the old ones are depleted.
The Green Compromise has to deal with other issues as well. Many forces subtly or not so subtly work to undermine it from all the sides—those who want the expand the untamed wild lands and diminish the civilization, the apologists of unrestricted urban growth, the free farmers who detest the organized, strictly controlled agriculture, and even darker groups scheming to undermine the very balance of the world, destroy the civilization and corrupt the nature. Various druidic factions and wildland communities view the Green Compromise with suspicion, contempt, or outright hatred. Arcane colleges are slowly developing their own alternatives to druidic magic, intending to replace village druids with agricultural magicians. Priests of both rural and urban cults envy the good old times, when they did not have to share their spiritual authority with uncouth animists. Common folk, mercantile organizations, and nobility alike rarely understand the intricacies of equilibrium needed for the system to work, responding to stable supply with increased consumption. Many would like to turn all the wilderness, which was supposed to be preserved by the Green Compromise, into more and more cities and estates.
Can the Green Compromise survive? Will it quickly collapse under onslaught from all the sides or slowly fade away, hacked away piece by piece? Who will come on the top after all is said and done?
Campaign Idea: Rise Of The Green Compromise
The Green Compromise is an idea, a proposal brought by groups of druids before the monarch of a young kingdom surrounded by deep forests and high mountains. They offer to aid the realms with their magic—blessing crops, warding off pests, and mitigating unpredictability of weather—asking in return for restrictions on expansion of settlements, lumbering, and mining.
The court is intrigued but not yet sold on their ideas, and various factions push for and against committing the kingdom to the compromise. Aristocrats holding a lot of agricultural land already, are favorable toward having stable, secure harvests, as do yeoman farmers tending their own farms—while those who hold fiefs which are more forested and would like to expand further, and landless farmers, whose only hope for prosperity is to be settled on newly cleared areas are less swayed by the ideas of lumbering and settlement restrictions. The merchants worry about securing suitable routes through the forests and mountain passes, the priesthoods preach both for or against the idea, as directed by their deities dogmas.
Are the PCs agents of one of the factions working to fulfill their goals (druids, royal court, a magnate or an alliance of many)? Envoys of the court whose role is to examine the possibility of proposed coexistence in practice (or secretly investigate if the druids are trustworthy and honest in their proposals, and not having a secret hostile agenda)? Assembly of representatives of various factions designated to deal with issues that could undermine the Compromise in its infancy?
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