Tag: worldbuilding

If there’s one thing that can kick me out of a story — Oh, who am I kidding. There are many things that can kick

Warning: this essay will contain all manner of creepy-crawly critters. Most of us live remarkably vermin-free lives. Sure, my household did extended battle with the

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the mentality behind what sometimes get called “ugly laws”: if you don’t have to see a thing, then

If you’re living on the precipice of poverty — but haven’t yet fallen over it into outright begging — how do you make ends meet?

The practice of begging came up in passing back in Year Four, when we discussed charity. I want to loop back around, though, and look

Servants and aristocrats: wildly different on the social scale, yet often found together.

Ah, aristocracy. It would be the best form of government . . . if only it were humanly possible to implement as originally conceived, instead

When talking about the divisions within a society, we tend to toss around terminology with a lamentable lack of precision. But it’s useful to pay

If I followed the general pattern of this Patreon, I would write an essay that gives an overview of different basic economic systems. But as

If you’ve ever taken an economics class — or possibly even if you haven’t — you’ve probably encountered the notion of the “invisible hand” that

“It’s mine!” All of us probably uttered that sentence at some point in our childhood — probably many, many times. One of the jobs of