Power and the People: Government in Fantasyland, Part II

If you've decided to ditch monarchy as the go-to government style for your fantasy world, you've opened up a plethora of possibilities. Because you're constructing a world from scratch, you get to decide every detail about the history, culture, economy, and demographics of your setting.

Once you've figured some of these things out, you can decide what form of government best fits the fictional society you've built. 'Government' might actually be a misleading term at this point, since people organise themselves in a diverse number of ways. Maybe your fictional society has never had a need for centralised leadership, and instead groups themselves by extended family. Or maybe they have travelling elders who stop at different towns and mediate disputes. Or a world with very low population density is full of roving nuclear families and singletons.

If they do have a central government, it could be anything from a dictatorship to a representative democracy. Your world might be run by whoever controls the water supply or the distribution mechanism for some other critical resource. At the other extreme, people could take turns being on a decision-making council. Or everyone might get involved voting for their leaders.

All of these systems of social organisation and government have their own inherent problems and potential for grand drama. The key is that the system you choose for your story makes sense in the fictional society you've created and seems like an organic part of the world.