# The Oil of Fantasy: Lubing Up Fantastic War and Culture tags: #thoughts/rpg-moment-of-inspiration  This is a really interesting thread and there are some really fascinating replies, so it's worth going through for the experience. I want to talk about it from a somewhat higher level perspective. The biggest natural resource that a fantasy kingdom would need to control — the equivalent of modern-day oil — is *always* something they don't have in great abundance. Some people are slapping their foreheads and giving me the *“Yes, that's obvious, you idiot,”* look, and they're probably right to, but it's worth saying up front that *scarcity and lack of locality* are key to answering this question. For instance, if your kingdom was established in what once was a green and verdant land which then suffered some sort of apocalyptic ecological change,^[See: **[Dark Sun](https://athas.org)**.] meaning that all the sources of clean water are several days, if not weeks, ride away from the remaining population, water becomes the oil of your fantasy world, at least for that kingdom. As long as they have the means to acquire it via cunning, conquest, or cruelty, they can then engage to seek it out. Once they have it, they must implement an infrastructure to transfer it, which requires *different* resources, which may be non-local. This may push alliances or warfare, more often the latter in the long term. (Why warfare in the long term? Because it's easy to forget love. But no one forgets being dead.) In a fantasy setting, physical labor itself can be the resource in short supply, but which can be acquired through underhanded tactics or military action. The obvious answer is slavery. Going to war to enslave your neighbors has a history longer than playing nice with them. In a fantasy world, you may not actually care if they survive the process. A necromantic empire may literally *prefer* that you die on the points of their spears because your resurrected corpse will be much easier to keep satisfied. At which point you have a small living or necromantically extended social elite commanding a literal army of slaves which will never have a slave uprising and will work until they fall apart. Such a social organization has obvious limitations on how much it can manage at the fringes, depending on how often or quickly the ruling elite to grow in an environment in which social infighting is extremely common and reproductive rates are low, you can certainly reach an efficient equilibrium where the Empire simply is unable to extend itself any further, given its infrastructure, and the elites don't see any need to do so, except in order to improve their position versus one another.^[For a modern example, see the UAE or Saudi Arabia, neither of which is in a particularly literal expansionist mode but instead are working to spread influence rather than their borders.] The obvious and extremely traditional answer to the question is *magic* and those who are capable of wielding it. The preeminent outstanding issue is determining whether magic users are the resource or are seeking the resource. If they themselves are the resource, then this is just a smaller population of slaves, except that your slaves wield a power directly which the controlling elites cannot, creating an inherently unstable situation which can very rapidly degenerate into a reversal of fortunes. If the magic users are instead the elites seeking the physical manifestation of magical power either as a material or as physical locations,^[See: **[[Ars Magica]]**.] then you have strong motivation for conquest using methodologies the other kingdoms in competition may not be able to bring to bear but in turn they also may not be concerned or interested in that resource because they are unable to use it. Much like in all other fiction, everything really comes down to two very simple questions: - **What is it that they want?** - **Why can't they have it?** If you can answer those two questions in regards to everything from individual characters to kingdoms, empires, and entire societies, you have the basis for a compelling narrative—a necessary but not sufficient condition. ## Post Scriptum Yes, this was going to be *another* long and intricate Twitter thread, but frankly, it's a lot more effective to just write this into the garden for future reference and because being stuck in the format of social media sucks. I long for the days when proper blogging was a thing. Oh, **[Project Xanadu](https://www.xanadu.net)**, how we have betrayed your memory.