Séfora scowls. "You are very prepared." 

She gazes at Carlota, her still-human eyes incongrous in her brass face. "I say we start from empty paper. Prohibit lords from raising armies. Make justice not be a lord's whim." 

Her voice becomes a little gentler. "Many bandits come from runaways from evil lords. I have met some."

"Deny lords armies and every village will be wiped out by monsters within the decade. But the rebel isn't entirely wrong. It's optimistic to trust most petty lords to deal with bandits according to the law rather than their own convenience. Monsters, yes, anything which they can claim ambiguous no."

"Make villagers and farmers stronger. Every goodwife has a crossbow in the west hills. Arm them and train them. If we must, maybe bounties on monsters. Adventurers can go out and kill them. But don't give lords hired bullies."

"That is how the River Kingdoms do it. Six months later five men have made themselves the monster-hunting squads, and six months after that everyone in the village is calling them 'my lord', and no justice or superior exists to be appealed to. I assure you, you would not prefer it."

"I've got a crossbow, but I haven't got the time or the freedom to trek across the pastures hunting someone down who might have rustled my cows, nor the immunity if I guess wrong and get someone who merely looked like a cattle rustler."

Séfora smiles. "Good! Guards 'guessed' wrong a lot in the west hills. I make fewer mistakes. Blind horses make fewer mistakes. Let the village have a court, and a guard."

"Are you offering to pay for it?"

"We all pitch in, in the west hills. I paid for most of the crossbows."

He makes a coded note to investigate this woman and ensure her road home passes through a full hunter-squad of Knights of the Chain. The more she talks, the more certain he is she's a bandit of the worst kind.

"I see. I think 'instead of having local lords equipped to enforce the law, we should devolve it to the villages and the people should run their own courts' is an interesting idea but not in scope here. It might fit better under 'alternatives to the monarchy', despite it not particularly being the monarchy you're interested in alternatives to."

Séfora raises an eyebrow. 

"Lords and queens are different. You can have lords without queens and queens without lords. This committee and that committee are different. But here I am not saying, turn out the lords. I am saying, no more bullies in leather jerkins."

She sighs. "The name of the committee is safe villages. This makes villages safer. Village justice is in scope." 

"Fine. Séfora proposes that lords are released from all responsibilities related to providing for safety or justice in their realms, and that in their place farmers be given crossbows, and convene collectively to decide who to shoot with them. Is that a correct summary of the proposal?"

Sefora glares at her. "No. I'd say try again, or listen to me again. What would you prefer? You said it before, when you were not trying to be old regime. Devolve local justice, and to village councils. They can pay for adventurers, or arm goodwives. I would do both, because there's always a kobold stealing your pie, but sometimes there's a thing with tentacles too."

"Many peasants are trained to use bows where I come from, and some gain combat experience that equips them to defend the realm. I strongly recommend this. But bows are certainly not enough to keep the bulk of them alive against real monsters or experienced bandits, let alone overwhelming emergencies like the Tarrasque. Even if they could pay for sufficiently powerful adventurers in those cases - and they cannot, not right now, if ever - by the time peasants are able to hire them, hundreds of lives and farms may be lost."

"The entire purpose of a lord is to be an adventurer whose services have already been paid for, who knows the lands, can be reached nearby, and who loses all that he cares about if he utterly fails to defend his people. That many of them are scum does not mean that adventurers who are not tied to the lands that hire them are any better. They are merely preferable to death."

"That's how it's supposed to work. I think a lord shouldn't be able to get one damn cent - or the new kind either - out of a house that took damage from a monster since the last collection."

"Friend Llei- Lords are not their guards. Lord's guards are not adventurers. Mine I killed as easily as cutting dry wheat. They will not help against bandits. Perhaps this committee wants to keep their good adventurer lords-" her face shows what she thinks of this idea- "but don't give lords hired bullies."

"I think that you may, due to your unusual personal experiences, be seriously mistaken about the capabilities of the typical lord under a functional government. Certainly if it were the case that all lords and their bodyguards were incompetents useless against monsters and bandits then the case for their existence would be tenuous. Further, no one gives lords hired bodyguards or hired adventurers. They hire them, which is to say that they pay for them. 

Delegate Ginel proposes that it is forbidden to collect taxes from a house that took damage to monsters in the last year. I think that's an interesting proposal but I worry too broad. If someone has a flock of sheep, and doesn't round them all up, and one gets eaten, that shouldn't exempt them from taxes; if they have an idiot third son who wandered off into the forest, likewise. I also worry about faking monster attacks to evade taxes and therefore diverting the lord's attention from the real monsters trying to track down fake ones."

"I think Abadarans like to solve this kind of problem. For insurance purposes, but maybe they could also be enticed for taxation-limitation purposes."

"I don't think anyone's ever designed a monster-insurance scheme on Golarion that wasn't far more expensive than anyone involved could afford but they could be asked. ....Delegate Ginel, the first of my proposals is aimed at lords who are failing to protect their villages. It states that a villager in that situation can go to a neighboring lord or to a more powerful one and report the problem, and that this does not constitute disrespect of his lord. It is intended to ensure that someone who will fix the problem learns of it, and that no one is troubled for having told them."

"How's writing it down going to make sure that the lord's nastiest grandson doesn't pick a fight with my boy later and say it was over marbles, hm?"

"It's much easier to put something in the law than to make everyone do it. I still think it's usually worth putting in the law so people know what they're supposed to live up to, and so a judge or a priest will see the law's on your side."

"I concur. No one is perfectly Lawful, but we must still have law. And there are means for the crown and state to place independent checks on lawless lords."

"Friend Carlota, I see the purported purpose of the good adventurer lord. But what is the purpose of the baron's guards, who go down to one or two crossbow bolts, as a farmer would? Should they be adventurers as well? And if so, why can't the village council hire them, if adventurers are so cheap? Why can't the village hire and fire their lord, as a merchant fires their guard-captain?"

"Adventurers are very expensive, representative Séfora. I do not know of any law that prohibits a village from hiring some, but they are as a practical matter barred by the adventurers' fees. Why would a lord agree to leave if his villagers told him he was fired? Who are you asking to go to war with him and kill him when his villagers tell him to leave and he refuses?"

"You were just speaking of laws binding lords. Now you speak as if they don't. What war will happen, if the lord has no troops, but militia? Perhaps, as you say, speak to the greater lord, and ask him to fight our lord, as one woman fights another in the tavern for a man?"