Scipion_Emilien wrote:Well, I agree it's debatable, but at the intell level I can see some advantages for the 4 towers countries.
[*]The autoritarian nature of the Falkovnia play against internal security. People are more likely to stab a harsh master than one that treat them well. Or in the case of Ravenloft, stab a really harsh master for a less harsher one.
This is definitely a valid point, but balance that against the
opportunity to do so. A significant portion of Falkovnian citizens probably hate their rulership and want to work against it... but if the state is as oppressive and totalitarian as the Gazetteers make it out to be, its security apparatus may make it impossible for a citizen to effectively act on that desire. Put crudely, if I hold your children captive and threaten to hurt them, you will likely hate me and want to do me harm. But you won't be able to, because I've got enough of a threat against you to prevent you from acting on your desires.
[*]The mythic, for a Falkovnian, Richemulot and Dementlieu must seem to be a dream place. Sure they all heard all theses bad things about those country, yet when they see one of their citizen, they are in rich clothes, articulate and with good manners.
The culture of those countries just have that attraction that make it even more interesting when someone propose to bribe you and allow to defect after.
Again, a valid point. But how many standard poor Falkovnians see the mythical rich Richemuloise? How many North Korean peasants have seen how Americans and Europeans live? You are correct that this sort of knowledge would greatly destabilize Drakov's power base, but in order to arrive at your conclusion, you must also rely on an assumption that Drakov cannot effectively restrict this knowledge.
That's fine, if that's the sort of campaign you want to run (after all, it's what led to the collapse of East Germany and eventually the Soviet Union), but bear in mind that the opposite assumption is perfectly valid too. Totalitarian governments can and do exercise profound control over public opinion and knowledge, and examples still exist today of regimes that have effectively solved the knowledge leak problem among their general citizenry. Mainland China's communist government still exercises considerable control internally over the political discourse, although it has relaxed controls over most non-political discussion (it still polices speech considered to be pornographic or violent). North Korea's Stalinist government has effectively absolute control over internal discourse of all topics, to the point where the general citizenry receives almost all of its public discourse from the government directly. Even the extinct Soviet and East German governments held power for decades before their eventual downfall.
When you factor in a pre-Industrial society without electronic communications, or arguably even a pre-printing-press society where the populace is mostly illiterate, then controlling the public discourse is even easier. From a sociological standpoint, this imbalance of access-to-information in pre-literate eras may have been the strongest single contributing factor to the relatively long period of effective despotism in human social history.
Even in today's modern world, where most nations are democratic to some degree (largely thanks to information availability), once the shooting starts, the first noncombat target is usually the communications and media infrastructure. NATO forces in Serbia and the Coalition forces in IraqII both targeted the opposing regime's TV stations and media centers as a key goal in removing their ability to coordinate their populace - as important as neutralizing enemy weapons and soldiers. If Drakov in your campaign is a canny soldier but a basically incompetent ruler, then maybe he might neglect this crucial dimension of national security. But if Drakov in your campaign is a canny soldier and a remotely self-interested ruler, then even a shred of competence would enable him fairly profound control over his nation, given the apparatus he already controls.
By actual canon text, he's already got a cowed populace, virtually no open opposition, and enforcers who are powerful enough to inflict public atrocities without fear of retaliation. I'd say these elements already put him well ahead in the basic elements of an effective police informant state.
