For fleshing out the narrative details, selecting a historical parallel
is a time-honoured technique used by SF writers. The advantage of using
historical examples is that the interactions and influences between the
states are clearly documented to far greater detail than a GM will ever
need.

Renaissance Italy, the Warring States period of China, South Pacific
cultures (Papua New Guinea was particularly strange with one
thousand-odd *languages*) and pre-Shogunate Japan are all rich sources
of inspiration.

Ancient Greece was heavily balkanised before Rome helped them out of the
situation (permanently). Consider the social and governmental difference
between (kinda democratic) Athens, (seriously twisted) Sparta,
(tyrannic) Syracuse, Thebes and Corinth in various combinations taking
turns as major powers over several centuries -- with diverse smaller
city-states in between, shifting allegiances constantly.

Two of my favourite and most readable sources are Herodotus' *Histories*
and Thucydides' *History of the Peloponnesian War*, with both widely
available in Penguin paperback.

A little later, (Philip and Alexander's) Macedon and Ancient Persia make
a great contrast for superpower politics. Medieval Europe was balkanised
down to the provincial level (Duchy of Burgundy, anyone?).
Early-Medieval Britain was an unholy mess before the Norman invasion in
1066 (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Viking settlements, even if
we don't consider civil wars) and there is of course all colours of
weird in the idea of Popes leading armies of conquest.

Africa and the Americas are outside my expertise, but historically those
continents hosted a similarly rich array of cultures.

Regards
Michael Barry

On 2/05/2014 9:40 PM, Carlos wrote:
> Has anyone developed rules for generating gov-law-tech-pop codes for
> multiple states in balkanized worlds, given the world UWP? I seem to
> remember some discussions in the list and even somebody writing on
> this at some point, but after some quick searches I came away
> empty-handed.
>
> One could just generate several UWPs with fixed physical data, and
> also use the "Governments" article on Freelance Traveller for more
> detail. I was thinking of rules which do not treat each government
> independently, but rather determine whether there are dominant powers
> and how many, then flesh them out. There are global constraints to
> consider. For instance, total world population needs to be split up
> among countries, law level needs to be somewhat consistent with that
> of the countries (A pop-weighted average? That of the largest country?
> That of the country hosting the main starport?). Also, if there are
> exactly two dominant countries/blocks in a planet, it is unlikely that
> one is hi-tech, hi-pop and the other one low-tech, low-pop, so there
> ought to be modifiers.
>
> A different (and easier) problem is to generate balkanized worlds from
> scratch, aggregating the individual countries to a world UWP
> afterwards. I am looking at the inverse problem, but any info on the
> topic is welcome. I might have missed published sources, I owe a lot
> of MT material and some Gurps but have mostly missed new developments
> as Mongoose.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Carlos Alos-Ferrer
> Professor of Economics, University of Cologne
> http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de
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