"I don't know what the baseline looks like, since I'm from here. I can't think of anything immediately pressing locally."

"Any reason to think Tanree is better or worse than normal?"

"I dropped out of school when I was a kid, remember? I know some history but almost no current events."

"...fair point. Before I started interacting with kings and mafias in person I had no idea what they were doing either, let alone whether they were doing it well."

"I think if my satrap or country were very badly misgoverned I'd have a long list of complaints. But I don't know how it compares to the neighbors. I haven't even visited the neighboring sorcerer territories yet, which I really ought to do."

"Do sorceresses in general think the same? That does put a floor on how bad the place could be, if so."

"No, except in the obvious sense that you can't be a sorcerer without something resembling a work ethic - also, it's harder to do magic against opposition, so we try not to do things that people would object to."

"That makes sense. Are there many territories that aren't covered by a sorcerer? If some places have no magical assistance at all, that might be worth me taking a look."

"About half of the area of Tanree, which is probably about average, is not formally claimed territory. But there are nomadic sorcerers and people with ways to get ahold of the non-nomadic ones like me when things need sorcering."

"A good system. Not so much for my kind of business, mind, but good for a crisis-free world."

"Also, if everyone agrees about something their smaller-scale magic cooperates. If I wanted to, I don't know, pull a moon out of the sky, I'd be working against everybody in the world who likes the moons where they are. I don't know how many centuries of unbroken momentum that would take, but it would be huge."

"It depends on a few factors. Also, I'm not sure how you'd average sorcerers. I could make this rain hit carefully selected locations, or make all the raindrops hit the ground to a beat, but it's been long enough since there was rain that I think the local farmers could give me a hard time making it stop entirely. If I were forty, I could probably do it around a small town like this, but not a city; if I were a hundred I bet I could stop any rain that no weather specialist or sorcerer were opposing me about."

"Any rain, anywhere? That sounds like it'd allow undetectable mischief, and then the thing about not wanting other sorcerers angry at you stops applying."

"No, I'd have to be near it. Ish. Momentum also increases range, but you still need to be sort of generally near what you're doing."

"Even so. If some sorcerer hides out near a city they don't like for a while, they could stop the rain until someone restarts it, then maybe turn the soil to something more useless, and so on until they run out of ideas. If it's not obvious who did what, then the system is relying on all the powerful sorcerers being sane."

"Then everybody in the vicinity wants whoever is doing that to be really inconvenienced, and eventually they get a sorcerer to come want it really hard, and then the insane sorcerer falls asleep for three days and the problem is solved."

"It's pretty unlikely unless you go bothering people."

"If I do much of anything important, it'll probably bother someone. Ideally not in a way sorcerers would object to."

"Who are you intending on bothering?"

"Depends on what comes up. Someone asked me to interfere with the Mafia once; that bothered them quite a bit. If you have mafia here, or other perpetrators of nonmagical organized unpleasantness, I won't be overly concerned with their interests."

"My mother occasionally complains about the neighborhood association, but I don't think that's what you have in mind."

"Does the neighborhood association demand money while strongly implying nebulously defined consequences if they don't get it?"

"No, they demand things about the upkeep of her house. I upkeep her house for her, now, but keeping track of what they want annoys her."