Book 2 – Page 53

[Crarites]

I don't think it's a lie or an inconsistency. Vanna, right now, is Jillian's Turnamancer. She's not a unit of Faq, but she's a Turnamancer and she's working for Jillian. Saying that Unaroyal has a Thinkamancer might just have meant that they hired one. It makes sense for a side to hire a Thinkamancer for far-flung campaigns, where communication is otherwise very difficult. (This is probably how Charlie has his fingers in everything, incidentally.)

Seems a stretch to me. Why would that thinkamancer not be valuable after the loss at GK? It would seem retaining such a unit would have been a priority and at the very least Bea's wording would have been different in her letter to Don concerning the use of a thinkamancer.

[Freemage]

First off, remember that Trem tends to coat almost all of his interactions with others with a layer of banter--this keeps his real feelings concealed, and thus harder to manipulate. Yet he regards Ansom much the same way he regards Ossomer--an automaton under the domination of Wanda. Ask him how he feels about Wanda, at a time when he isn't playing his diplomatic games, and I suspect you'll get a fairly bloody answer.

And note--I'm not talking about a killing rage. With Trem, it's far more likely to be an icy cold hatred. My point is that he truly does have affection for his family (note his efforts to try to get one of the decrypted brothers to turn). If his father's death is directly attributed to Parson, then he's not going to be willing to ally with Parson in the future. And I think Slately is shrewd enough to understand this.

Point. This is one of several reasons that, I suspect, Parson is personally arriving in Spacerock with diplomacy in mind. He always uses diplomatic pauses to inflict damage, true - but that's always when things are horribly one-sided in some fashion (their current predicament, Bogroll on the tower, etc). GK's and Jetstone's forces within Spacerock might just be about equally matched, depending on how many top units Tramennis sends away with his father. That sounds like a much better time for actual, mutual diplomacy rather than by-the-balls threatening and posturing.

You may very well be right about this. My thinking is simply that Slately, who still retains his disgust at the notion of an alliance or parley with GK, might very well be willing to set his cleverest son up in a position of
1: Being in charge of Jetstone, and
2: Having a massive degree of personal hatred for Parson.
Even if it meant the cost of his own life at GK's hands. (Note--he wouldn't realize Parson was about to enter from the MK, but that could very well end up playing into his gambit even more, assuming that's what he has in mind in the first place.)

[Oberon]

I can think of no other excuse for 50,000 years of lack of significant progress, other than lack of curiosity, and a lot of cultural pressure to conform to the way things are, as opposed to a cultural impetus to make the way things are now, better. Belief in yourself, belief that change can be better, and the belief that curiosity and reason are good things, not bad habits that should be beat out of children.

I don't really have a horse in this race... I just thought I'd point out my own pet theory for why things didn't improve fast. A necessary focus on survival, and the lack of the spare cultural energy to spend on innovation. Deaths in childbirth, deaths by unknown diseases, death by toothache, deaths by fights with neighbors, death by environment. When you're spending all of your cultural energies just managing to not be wiped out, you don't have much free time to try a new arrowhead design. When the guy who makes the best arrowheads is killed by a trivial fall that breaks an arm that becomes infected and kills him, that knowledge is gone until someone else studies his work enough to get good at it again. And they don't try to make the arrowhead differently while trying to recreate poor dead Bob's designs.

This is completely different than the culture of Erfworld. We've seen no disease, there is no childbirth, there is no burden of raising and teaching children. There is no environmental death, unless you are mounted on a dwagon and promoted to heavy. There is still war, and skirmishes, but we know that Sides such as Jetstone and TV have the luxury of units designated "courtiers." This is an environment in which innovation could flourish.

Nice quote on the Vicker's gun. My first thought when I started reading that was, "How did they keep those guns cool?" I dunno that this is a good example though. A crew fed gun isn't really an example of two soldiers one gun since that gun is significantly more effective than two standard issue weapons. And many gun crews would still possess their personal weapon. But over 1million rounds and still kept on chugging, totally awesome.

Thanks. I was glad I finally found it. I read it in a historical treatise, the description was similar to that which Wikipedia quoted but with much more detail. Although I don't believe it was the same source they quote from. But yeah, 2 companies of men to carry ammo for 10 guns? Just a tiny bit out of scope for a discussion of "two men one gun." Although it was the unique situation which forced this amount of support. The gun was typically a 6-8 person weapon, according to Wikipedia. This still doesn't count as a "two men one gun" example, I think, because it was designed so, and I believe the "two men one gun" discussion was about a simple lack of ample weapons to equip all of the men appropriately.

But I want to share a story about keeping guns cool. Or guns getting hot, at least. So, guns get hot when fired. You obviously know this, and so does anyone with any experience firing a firearm, more than a few shots at a target range. They are called "fire" arms for a reason... I was in ROTC basic camp, sort of like a basic training light for those taking participating in ROTC. One of the advantages of ROTC: Girls. We were an integrated company, even if we (sadly) had separate barracks. One day we were transported over to a range where we got to fire various weapons. The 9mm, the SAW, and a .50 cal. The .50 was lined up roughly on a target a few hundred yards down range, and it was locked down tight. You could swing it maybe 2 inches off of downrange left or right, and it was set up on the ground. We all (in a squad of 9) got to fire a few seconds of sustained fire. And then the typical: We all got to police up the brass. One of the girls squats down to pick up brass, all of us were squatted down picking up brass. Then she decides she needs some support. And grabs.... The barrel of the .50. I yelled something that wasn't a word, but it was too late. The sizzle was audible. I grabbed her cap, stuffed her hand in it, and dumped her canteen on her hand. But she had already begun to blister.

[Lamech]

The bots have begun to attack again guys... maybe if we troll them they'll go away? BOTS DON'T HAVE BRAINS!
/pointless idiocy

I can think of no other excuse for 50,000 years of lack of significant progress, other than lack of curiosity, and a lot of cultural pressure to conform to the way things are, as opposed to a cultural impetus to make the way things are now, better. Belief in yourself, belief that change can be better, and the belief that curiosity and reason are good things, not bad habits that should be beat out of children.

I always assumed that technological innovation was slow do to the extreme difficulty of coming up with new technology. Especially when you lack good training to actually know what is already developed, especially when combined with the limited time available to innovate and low population. And the lack of training needed to innovate. The scientific method is HUGE. So are techniques like statistics.
Infrastructure is hugely important when coming up with inventions. You need education, and communication to understand what has been done before, otherwise what your doing is vane. Lets say you want to improve farming techniques. A person in the middle ages, even one with the best education possible, would probably screwed in this; they lack an understanding of the statistics and conformation bias. Even if they tried to experiment they wouldn't be able to interpret the result. And they probably lack enough of an understanding of the scientific method to experiment. And even further back for most of the 50,000 years? They won't have the knowledge stored to understand what has come before.
Then you further need infrastructure to have the spare time to innovate. If you are a hunter gatherer society? No one has time to even specialize in anything. Let alone learning. In a young farming society you still have little time, and until you invent education and writing no way of knowing what has come before. Oral history becomes corrupted too quickly.
Another problem with society for most of human existence is that they were tiny. We have billions of people, a far bigger portion avaiable to do SCIENCE!, but when you compare to a young society their populations are small, especially since you can't share info globally, and its further compounded by the fact most people need to work on getting food and survival. Innovation isn't something that happens because time passes. It happens because people spend time on it. And we are spending a LOT of time on it now.

[teratorn]

The key for sustained fast progress is huge amounts of cheap energy. Once that was available for exploitation our modern society was born. The equivalent in Erfworld is schmuckers since they can be converted into anything. The equivalent of oil fields on Earth are gem fields on Erf.

I should leave the off-topic part of the thread alone but oh well...

50,000 years and they had a few arrowhead types, some triangles, some ovals, some long pointy arrow heads. That's bad. Real, real bad.

Population densities would be a person for every few tens of square kilometers, humans are rare in hunter gatherer societies. About 50,000 years ago the population of humans in Europe (neandertals) is estimated at less than 70,000 people. Those people needed to be fed and clothed, and were managing that with their real real bad tools.

Sanitation for one. There's some technological progress for you. Toilets and sewers rather than throwing offal out on the streets.

Sanitation is a very bad example, since it existed in some of the earlier examples of urban civilization. There was simple plumbing with waste disposal 5000 years ago in Scotland, and 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia. 5000 years ago Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley had sanitation even in the non-wealthy homes. Homes had bathrooms connected to sewers, and washing facilities near latrines. Their street drains were remarkably modern, with manholes. Roughly 4000 years ago Minoans had systems for water transport, sewers, and even canals for waste transport during storms. They even had flushing toilets and central heating.

It had not to do with curiosity or the lack of it, humans thought about plumbing almost as soon as they started building cities and had the technology (pottery) to make pipes. The problem is that these are somewhat expensive things, requiring you to divert resources that could be used for other purposes like having a better army to attack your neighbors, enslave them, and have them carry the water and garbage for you,

I can think of no other excuse for 50,000 years of lack of significant progress, other than lack of curiosity, and a lot of cultural pressure to conform to the way things are, as opposed to a cultural impetus to make the way things are now, better.

Nonsense, 50,000 years is something like 2500 generations. You can't keep a consistent culture along that time, particularly when only oral tradition is involved and there are no political entities bigger than bands of around 100 people. Any particular behavior that allowed a group to out-compete others in the short term would spread. The simple act of maintaining technology in hunter gatherer societies is impressive and there have to be good practical reasons for why paleolithic toolkits were so conservative.

2500 generations sample periods of famine and turmoil, widely differing climates, very low population density, hostility between human groups with different languages and traditions. If manufacturing a given tool is something available to only a small segment of the population knowledge will eventually be lost if by some reason all those people die. Discoveries would be made and lost all the time. It's likely that technologies that lasted were the ones that could be easily rediscovered from a rudimentary level of prior knowledge and that could be managed even by someone that wasn't particularly gifted as a tool-maker.

[justamessenger]

@teratorn:

Fantastic post!

To all: If you have not yet read Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs & Steel, I would highly recommend it. It is a wonderful summation of several different schools of thought regarding human development around the world and the impact made by climate, availability of game and domesticable plant species. It goes on to discuss how domestication of plants and animals led to sedentary societies, and the concomitant advancement of technology.

Of course, writing had a huge impact on the retention and dissemination of information, and in areas such as China, India and Europe, the population density spawned numerous techonological advances, which, in turn, spread rapidly and were improved upon by others, etc. Of course, many advances were discovered as ancillaries to warfare and militarization, or were co-opted for warfare.

Erf suffers from a lack of innovation, I will not make the statement that there are *no* innovators, but they seem to be few and far between. This may be a result of factors already discussed, such as a lack of childhood and being born with the knowledge needed to fulfill one's duties, it may be to a lack of dissemination of information. Who knows?

What remains to be seen is how Parson's stratagems are viewed, and whether they are adopted by others. Just as the introduction of gunpowder triggered (forgive the pun) a massive investment in adoption and improvement of guns and firearms in Europe, perhaps Parson will be the harbinger of similarly frenetic changes in the doctrine of warfare espoused by the various Erfworld sides.

Tramennis may be a key litmus test, as he seems to be one of the more adaptable and intellectually gifted characters we have seen thus far.

Edit: Food for thought: How old is Erf, anyway? How many turns have elapsed since its creation?

Another question: Innovation often relies upon new technologies being made available and putting them to use. In Erf, to the best of my knowledge, a side has a limited number of unit types at its disposal. This would tend to retard growth in tactics, as the tools with which a warlord has to work are limited. It may be that the Arkenpliers are, in and of themselves, a game changer as they allow access to a variety of unit types (read: all encountered) upon decryption, which gives Parson and GK a huge advantage in being able to use tactics heretofore unavailable due to the lack of access to various abilities.

[fjolnir]

Here is the problem with Erf, The majority of the people we see are born into a role they will play for the rest of their lives. The few people with actual free will (overlords, unaffiliated casters) either are too hung up on maintaining the status quo(overlords) or sitting in on a magic island someplace with their thumbs up their asses (unaffiliated casters). That being said we've seen some innovation from native(?) erfers Charlie and his business model, Tremennis with his attempt to top gk and his grasp of the situation needed to at least ensure his side's survival(ford at the bridge fits here too), Issac's thinkamancy playground. Also remember we have yet to see ANY detailed writing besides stupid meals and Parson/Charlie banter. libraries on Erf pop fully stocked with shorthand battle stats from other wars. The fact is that Erf IS more static and not prone to innovation....

[multilis]

"Seems a stretch to me. Why would that thinkamancer not be valuable after the loss at GK? "

Jill can barely afford her turnomancer... needed help from Charlie, then needed to do a little plundering.

Uniroyal *didn't* plunder, instead they lost even more sources of income while withdrawing armies. Parson has already hinted that sides need to win at war in order to survive financially. (In his klog about self-sufficiency hack attempts)

So while thinkomancer would still be valuable, possible they could no longer afford.

(In most games mercenaries cost more upkeep than regular units to compensate for not having to pop them)

[barawn]

Infrastructure--Labs, libraries, factories, power, are not required to improve technology in a Middle-ages period. The water wheel. The Printing press, the scientific method, improved casting techniques, universal literacy, schools that go beyond the three Rs then kick the children back out to go farm, a belief that the common man can make a difference, that people are not just victims. I thought that was what we were discussing, not...

If you think that you could implement any of those in periods without significant infrastructure, I really think you're wrong. The printing press is useless without enough people who can read. Improved schooling is useless unless you have enough infrastructure that the kids are not required to work to help everyone survive. There are a few things you could teach that would help a lot - sanitation, mainly - but probably everything else would require a lot of time to build the infrastructure to have an effect.

And the water wheel and the scientific method have been around looong before the middle ages.

I can think of no other excuse for 50,000 years of lack of significant progress, other than lack of curiosity

Really? You don't think http://www.susps.org/overview/numbers.html is a much, much, much more obvious answer?

In the past 100 years, we've probably accumulated more "adult-hours" than in the entirety of human history beforehand. This isn't too much of a stretch, considering we have around 1/15th of everyone who has ever lived right now, and "adult-hours/person" is significantly higher.

I'd actually say that we might be progressing slower now than previously. If you took a random person from today and dropped them 2000 years ago, I'd think there's a good chance they could have less of an impact than if you grabbed a random person from 100 years ago. The development that's occurred in the past 100 years is almost entirely dependent upon modern infrastructure. I mean, most people don't know how to cure meat to preserve it, or why there's niacin and folic acid in their bread and iodine in their salt - it's just there, thanks to modern infrastructure. But a lot of those tricks were common knowledge a hundred years ago or so. Note that I said "random" - if you grabbed the right person, of course, they'd have a huge impact.

Oh, and on the silly question (building a refrigerator on a desert island): it's not that hard. Build something that can hold vacuum (a ceramic would probably work well), make a few valves (tanned hide of some sort), and add a water wheel to pump down the pressure, and you've got the beginnings of a fridge. A better working fluid than water would be ideal, but if the container was strong enough, you might be able to get ice directly this way.

[atalex]

Another reason for the "lack of curiosity" which I haven't seen mentioned: the existing social structures may discourage it, possibly quite forcefully. Consider, at some point, long ago and likely long before the popping of any existing Erfworld unit, the Titanic Mandate was granted to the first Royals. With Royal status comes enormous mental influence through Duty over one's subjects, up to and including the ability to kill (disband) any subject literally with a thought. Now consider that the majority of Royals we've seen (which admittedly may not be representative) seem hidebound and reactionary. So much so that Ace, who apparently does want to innovate, is actively prevented from doing so by his own ruler solely because said ruler aesthetically prefers the traditionalist designs of Ace's predecessor. That same ruler has consistently passed over his only son who actually thinks outside the box in favor of others who are more in keeping with his own approach to royalty. Can the apparent lack of curiosity on the part of Erfworlders be attributed to the fact that Royal rulers are generally averse to and even frightened of change?

[Ansan Gotti]

I think the "lack of free will for all but the highest" is a huge factor in Erf's lack of creativity and progress. We've also seen a model of what happens when a leader DOES do something which is creative and out-of-the-ordinary: a gigantic coalition forms to crush that leader. With as many sides are on Erf, balance of power diplomacy is probably going to be the norm.

Charlie appears to be the one innovator who has managed some level of success and prosperity, and he does it through a very non-traditional (and creative) route that minimizes his threat profile to other kingdoms. The fact that he's becoming as heavy-handed as he has in recent engagements (with Haggar in particular, and don't think that plot point won't come back to bite Charlie at some point, the King just lost his son and heir and a ton of troops in a gigantic blackmail scheme, there is definitely going to be a piper to pay) is a sign of his desperate recognition that Parson is Something Different.

The Janis/Marie plan, IMO, was to find an innovator who innovates SO well that the traditional "gigantic coalition" won't be able to stop him. We saw something like that on our planet with Genghis Khan. There are theories that if he hadn't died when he did, all of Europe would have fallen under his sway. Even as it was, the fact that he ravaged so many civilizations EXCEPT Western Europe had a huge impact on how Western Europe went on to much greater prominence after Genghis Khan's era.

[effataigus]

Anyone know what that line on the ground is in panel 3?

[Zeku]

Too many posters are assuming that 'maintaining' Erf's perpetual conflict is on anyone's mind. With the possible exception of Charlie and the conspiracy within the MK, every ruler, and every unit is legitimately trying to win. Remember, these are people who live by turns.

I'm just concerned that your reasoning is going to get so far ahead of the narrative, that when it is (gasp) revealed what's really going on, (whatever that happens to be) many of you will say, "Uh, we knew that?" An important point is that most of the characters do not know anything. They're just trying to win. The story is about these individual characters within their situation, and not just about the big politics behind the scenery. I'm hoping for personal drama, and not an editorial on warfare or goodness. It's fine in small doses and when it develops a character, like at the end of book 1. But it's not really interesting storytelling, and it isn't what drew me to Erfworld originally.

I remember early in the comic's life, when people were still saying 'what the boop is this boop.' I was enjoying the fact that both groups in the conflict were interesting. The good guys and the bad guys weren't sharply defined. It felt like anyone could win, and it felt like victory would be awarded to the smartest side, with no moral authority interfering. This is the kind of stark backdrop upon which a great story could be told.

[Ansan Gotti]

Too many posters are assuming that 'maintaining' Erf's perpetual conflict is on anyone's mind. With the possible exception of Charlie and the conspiracy within the MK, every ruler, and every unit is legitimately trying to win. Remember, these are people who live by turns.

I agree with this. The only person who seems to be specifically interested in maintaining the status quo of perpetual warfare is Charlie. And he might be doing this with a mindset of still trying to "win" as well. (To the extent that a shadowy organization can amass enough power behind the scenes to swoop in and crush everyone in a carefully orchestrated doomsday plan, hey, he might be able to do it, too.)

[BakaGrappler]

I think a main reason there is no advancement in Erf World is because there is no such thing as "Extra People." Everyone is popped with a job to do, and so their Duty is to do that job. There are no extra people hanging around the world saying, "I wanna be a scientist when I grow up!" And so we don't get any scientists.

There is also the fact that everyone, everyone, is popped with full knowledge of the world in so far as they need to know of it. Since there is no need to teach someone their jobs, tasks, or the world at large, then when is there ever a need to ask questions? And when no one needs to ask questions, there is never a need to question anything. And thus, there is no thought process leading to advancement.

The world has magic and Start of Turn healing, so there is no need for medical technology, or pathology. There go medical sciences and biology.

Siege units and cities are made from thin air? No need for engineers, carpenters, or architects.

Farms are completely self sufficient and mounts pop under a person when they come into existence? No animal husbandry or crop rotation.

The world is so streamlined that everything required to MAKE a civilization is already in place before the civilizations were even made. There was no need for the cultures to advance to the point of having a civilization, since they were popped as civilizations. As such, there was never a history of people actually needing to ask questions and seek answers in order to advance technologically. Since there was never a need to ask questions, no one ever has. Except for a few bored mages in the Magic Kingdom, and those locations are the only ones that have ever asked "Why is it like this?" and "What is magic?" as Sizemore so pointed out. There is no precedence, no scientific procedure, in Erf World for the searching of answers, and so they cannot find them. Sizemore also noticed that unlike the Mages, Parson is good at questioning and finding answers.

I think the reason Parson is so good, is because he looks at stuff, and then tries things. Sometimes it even works. Who else in Erf World does that?

[GaryThunder]

Baka Grappler, you have summed it up perfectly. Erfworld is built in such a way as to not even allow for advancement, in general. Might as well ask the peons in Warcraft III to form a worker's collective and tell the blacksmith in Age of Empires to start designing automobiles.

I'm just concerned that your reasoning is going to get so far ahead of the narrative, that when it is (gasp) revealed what's really going on, (whatever that happens to be) many of you will say, "Uh, we knew that?" An important point is that most of the characters do not know anything. They're just trying to win. The story is about these individual characters within their situation, and not just about the big politics behind the scenery. I'm hoping for personal drama, and not an editorial on warfare or goodness. It's fine in small doses and when it develops a character, like at the end of book 1. But it's not really interesting storytelling, and it isn't what drew me to Erfworld originally.

The speculation is fun. And it's a mark of Rob's brilliant writing that he's able to create a world that contains both gripping character-based drama and is expansive and thematic enough to foment speculation and discussion on its base principles and the social mores within it.

[GaryThunder]

Also, there's a key concept I believe many people here are missing: Property rights.

No, seriously.

There is no such thing as private land ownership. Every single hex is either wild, in which case nobody owns it (but somebody may control it), or it's owned by a side or a coalition, in which case the Ruler directly owns the land. There are exactly as many landholders in Erfworld as there are sides, and those numbers will always be equal, barring an upset to the system by someone like Parson. The closest we've seen to any kind of even leasehold property interests is Transylvito's practice of "retiring" warlords to semi-permanent city manager duties; and even then, most of the property rights are still vested in Don King. (A city manager warlord could not, for instance, gain ownership over the goods and units the city produces, nor could he transfer his property interest to someone else.)

Personal property ownership doesn't really exist, either. Some units have items, like Ansom's carpet and Parson's bracer, but those items aren't really "theirs," seeing as the Ruler could at any time take the item and give it to another unit, and there would be nothing that could be done about it.

What does this mean? It means the vast, vast majority of people in Erfworld have no incentive to improve land, create new items, or pretty much do anything but what they're ordered. Profit is impossible, personal ownership of items is largely impossible. A smith in Stupidworld wants to come up with new smithing techniques so everyone will buy from his smithy and he'll make a tremendous profit. Remind me exactly what part of that motive is shared by the Twoll armorers in GK, even assuming they were bright enough to innovate. No property rights means no personal profit means no incentive to improve beyond what Duty calls, and Duty tends to only call for doing what you've always done very well because there's no basis for any other course of action.

Yes, I'm taking a Property class right now, why do you ask?

[Sylvan]

Excellent post BakaGrappler. That is basically what I have been trying to say every time I've tried to argue that Erfworlders are not naturally incurious, they just lack the idea of science or much of an incentive towards it.

You just did it more eloquently =P

[Oberon]

The world has magic and Start of Turn healing, so there is no need for medical technology, or pathology. There go medical sciences and biology.

And yet someone took the time to figure out how to make a healing scroll and many other magic items, just for examples we've seen.

Siege units and cities are made from thin air? No need for engineers, carpenters, or architects.

And yet twolls can make highchairs for short people, picnic baskets, and armor, just for examples we've seen.

Farms are completely self sufficient and mounts pop under a person when they come into existence? No animal husbandry or crop rotation.

I think, although I can't provide a reference at this time, that it takes some resources invested to get the benefit out of the special terrain or areas. Sizemore spends juice or gobwins mine for the gems, marbits mine for gems, farms need to be "worked" (even if this means just standing there looking at them) in order to provide free or reduced cost rations, Parson has to walk the rounds of the city to reduce its upkeep cost and to make the empty buildings serve their purposes, and Sizemore and Maggie had to link and work together to create GK the city as they wished rather than presumably rather randomly. Again, just for examples we've seen, and all examples of how putting forth effort has a benefit. That natural cost-to-benefit relationship should encourage experimentation and effort being spent on many things, looking for the best benefit for the least cost, or looking to discover a heretofore unknown benefit. It should drive discovery, as the Side which makes the most efficient use out of its units will have a tendency to survive and prosper over its neighbors.

Your argument seems to be the reverse of mine: I argued that with the entire bottom row and much of the second row of the hierarchy of needs provided seemingly without effort (popping at dawn), that Erfworld inhabitants have many hours freed up to seek out the remainder of the higher rows. In other words, to pursue hobbies, experiment, screw, and innovate.

You appear to be arguing that because these things are provided without effort, that the inhabitants of Erfworld have become jaded and would see no need to try to, for example, build a better catapult. I don't buy that, especially when constant warfare is the norm. Warfare drove much of our own world's innovation, and I see no reason why it would not have the same driving effect on Erfworld.

[atalex]

Also, there's a key concept I believe many people here are missing: Property rights.

Interesting. I had never thought of it, but I suppose Erfworld would be a Libertarian's worst nightmare: a world where the power of the state is so all-encompassing that obedience from the citizenry is enforced by supernatural Duty and disobedience by any individual can be punished with instant death without the authorities ever even knowing that the disobedience took place. Erfworld is Atlas Shrugged if it had been well-written.