Half of those are antisocial practices and the other half might well also be, she doesn't know what the Worldwound is or what the mercenaries are doing. Well, that's what you get for not cracking down on otherwise-incentivized murder and banditry. It makes sense that a lot of ne'er-do-wells would gather in an island kingdom (Tanya predicts high-seas piracy is involved). Absalom probably takes the position that it's not officially their responsibility to police actions outside their borders and then levies taxes (or extorts bribes) from these 'adventurers' for the privilege of a safe haven.

Is Belmarniss saying that with so many different factions and private interests all mixed up it's actually a safer place to be, like a thieves' code of honor? She should aim higher!! Unfortunately, Tanya has no idea where, if anywhere, in this world to recommend as being better. 

"It sounds rather - lawless. I take your point that if they tolerate all those people and manage to keep the peace between them then they ought to tolerate a drow, and I obviously don't have any better alternatives to recommend." It's not as if Tanya can build up a better state all by herself, even the locals can't do it. Great individual lawgivers are probably a myth anyway.

"I believe they in fact have laws in Absalom! More than downstairs, anyway!"

"...everywhere in my experience has some laws, the question is do they have good and consistently enforced laws. If their laws permit or even encourage mercenaries, smugglers, looters and semi-deniable murderers to be publicly based out of their city - as long as they only break laws when they're outside it - it makes the larger international situation more chaotic and lawless, and I imagine it attracts very some unsavory characters. Maybe Absalom itself is an island of calm, since it's rationally in the adventurers' interests for it to be, but violent people who make 'law-breaking elsewhere' their business tend in my experience to be irrational. They probably attract enemies to strike at individuals based there, too, and risk other states banding together to suppress them, although I suppose that's less of a concern for you personally."

"...I think there is some concept you're missing that at least in principle distinguishes adventuring-with-a-sapient-body-count from classic murder or indeed lawbreaking in general but I'm not sure what that concept is. I wouldn't necessarily have heard of it if other countries were banding together to sanction Absalom but the thing you just speculated about doesn't sound likely to me."

"One obvious equilibrium that could obtain is everyone agreeing on legitimate targets. Or everyone powerful, everyone in part of the world, et cetera. For example, granting no rights to people of some races, making war on some nation, declaring that some occupation or action makes people into outlaws. That doesn't seem to be the case. Drow enslave humans and vice versa and you think drow would be welcome in Absalom, and meanwhile Andoran sanctions killing slavers presumably of both races. 'Dragonslaying' is common enough to deserve a name, are all dragons outlaws to be killed on sight when possible? Maybe there's a distinction to be found, people normally have some distinction between what is and isn't socially acceptable even if it's not literally a law, but I don't know what it is."

"I don't actually think there are humans enslaving drow, at least not in large numbers. I think there's, like... the assumption that certain kinds of people and certain kinds of activities that those or other kinds of people might get up to makes them, not necessarily universally agreed upon as legitimate targets, but they're not... civilians? With some fuzziness. I think of my mom as a civilian and an Andoren raider might not. But there's a sort of a spectrum there. A Good person is going to object to going around slaying a Good dragon but not in the same way they object to, like, sacrificing a bunch of kids to daemons, or something, both acts are Evil but even if the dragon is strictly speaking an innocent they're not a civilian innocent."

"Because the dragon is individually powerful enough that it might protect itself, even if it lives a completely civilian life?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Tanya works this out. "So the tacit understanding is that people who avoid fighting and risk-taking - and don't learn magic, and aren't trained soldiers, and probably other things I'm not thinking of - and who are consequently unable to defend themselves from random assaults are deemed civilians. Some entire races, like dragons, are innately powerful enough not to count as civilians. Some people, like those practicing slavery or maybe just living in states where slavery is legal at all, are sometimes considered legitimate targets by nationals of some other states. And these limits are enough for states to decide they're alright with this?! Doesn't this end with heads of state being the most legitimate targets of all, or does only personal strength count?"

This sounds like some horrible barbarian saga where honor and glory and all that is good in life come from war, private individuals conduct endless raids on each other with kings being merely the most powerful, and the greatest chieftain is he who slew the neighboring tribe's chieftain with all his retainers in glorious battle and stole all their stuff and probably enslaved all their civilians. Which... might well describe Noctimar, to hear Belmarniss tell of it, but is the entire rest of the world really like that? Isn't it more probably that Belmarniss, for all her learning, either doesn't understand or doesn't believe stories of places that are different, even if Taldor and Andoran and Absalom aren't among those places?

"...heads of state probably usually have a fair whack of personal power on top of that or they'll get enchanted sooner or later. And there's probably all kinds of jockeying between countries about each other's adventurers; maybe Andorens like to come bother drow about slaves downstairs specifically because we aren't organized enough to hit back in a coordinated fashion and don't have existing trade relations with them, or something, and for these reasons they mostly leave Taldor's citizens with a bunch of halflings alone. I think people can have a little magic and still mostly be counted as civilians, like, a laundry wizard is pretty much a civilian."

"...but that's a terrible drag on the economy? Mages are enormously valuable workers, and you have a method that anyone smart enough can learn - something that would have been counted among history's greatest inventions if made on Earth - and then you disincentivize it by saying if you learn more than the basics, you might be randomly murdered with tacit social or even legal approval? A state that broke ranks and ensured the safety of its mage population would grow wealthier and eventually have a stronger army! That's just - the basic principle of safety in numbers, banding together against outsiders is mutually beneficial! I expect even drow society couldn't function like it does if drow treated each other the way they do humans. There must be something else to the picture, because what you've described just isn't stable in the long term."

"I mean, wizards and dragons and so on still have to get someone's hostile attention to get murdered. The kind of person who'll kill a random mid-circle wizard who's minding their own business is probably also not deterred by their target being instead a cantrip wizard who does laundry all day. At some point they decide what to do in ways that respond to the information they have and goals they're pursuing. I think it is often possible to avoid getting in the way of that."

Tanya doesn't buy that. People who 'attract attention' are likely to be expecting trouble and so better defended. A marauder given license to attack wizards at large will pick soft targets, and if that doesn't work as well in making him tougher he'll just kill more of them. The kind of people attracted by a life of freestyle murderous banditry won't abstain from killing any 'legitimate' targets they can get away with, including anyone they happen to meet without looking. They'll probably claim afterwards they 'had it coming' by 'attracting hostile attention', and who can say that a mage or dragon was really incapable of defending themselves? Obviously we only go after worthy targets that bring us glory and power. You wouldn't want to claim otherwise, seeing as how we're here telling the story of their glorious demise and they aren't. Why, if you said we murdered defenseless strangers you might be considered to be deliberately attracting our hostile attention! Pfeh.

"You're a third-circle wizard and, at least in Taldor, conspicuously a drow. You seem to be saying that if we meet any adventurers from Absalom outside of Absalom, they'll cheerfully murder you if they think they can get away with it. And your plan for dealing with this is to go to Absalom, and while in Cassomir to visibly cast spells in public?"

"You may have noticed that no one has seriously attempted to kill me here so far! Or attempted so far as we've observed to summon help to put me down, either. Most people need... any motive... other than thinking they'll get away with it, to murder people? Even people who are a locally unpopular color. I'm not planning to start any trouble. I'm not going to go around bragging about eating babies and owning people, I'm not going to steal shit, I'm not going to turn random corpses into undead, I'm not going to start proselytizing for Nocticula. I could still get into a bad spot if someone wants my bag or mistakes me for someone else or is having a really bad day or is themselves looking to turn some people into undead and think I'd suit, but yeah, I'm going to cast spells, both because this makes me safer from the much commoner brand of low-powered assailant and because that's how I make a living."

"You describe the world-at-large - presumably more so in cities than in the villages we've seen so far - as having a large number of adventurers able and willing to kill random wizards. It sounds like you're expecting a - significant lifetime chance, or even a significant yearly chance, of being assaulted with lethal intent by a stranger who might well succeed and who, if successful, will face no penalties. It sounds like we agree on this and you've just - accepted this as the way of the world? I think that's a terrible way for things to be and a terrible indictment of places that aren't better than that, and - obviously I can't just give you that safety, but." But what? But Tanya aspires to change the world for the better? Absurd. She is, according to Belmarniss, in a world where society does not expect or want to be so changed.

"I hope some places are in fact better than that, if not the nearest countries. Because I do know it's possible to do better."

"The world is full of people who are able and willing to kill defenseless farmers, too, that's just, like, more understood as not a standard adventuring activity than getting into a fight with - and it'd normally be characterized as 'getting into a fight with', not just randomly deciding to kill - a wizard they've no other reason to interact with. Going after the kind of person who kills defenseless farmers is a standard adventuring activity, I believe. Like, if we stop in at a baron's place on our way through Taldor, there is some chance there will be some monster or bandit or villain activity of some stripe in the area they'd like to hire us to deal with, if they're too busy or it's above their power level, because we are presenting ourselves as adventurers in this sense."

"If there are at all likely to be people killing defenseless farmers in a randomly chosen barony and this is not a very novel or passing phenomenon then this is a failed state." This is not how the world works! This is not how anything works!!! How many taxes are you going to receive after a decade of murders of random farmers? Do these people even have a police or national guard or some kind of militia? "The first village we went to had one (1) spearman! He did not look very ready to defend against even a single madman who happened to have a lethal weapon and attacked people out of his sight! How can a place like that keep existing if the world is as you describe?" Belmarniss has to be wrong somewhere.

"I don't know that specific village's arrangements, he might have been tougher than he looked or had a way to call for backup, but the question seems to me sort of like wondering why there's a squirrel over there when we could totally kill and eat it," she says, pointing at a squirrel. "Like, yeah, we could, maybe we will, it would not be a risky operation, nobody will get mad at us for it, and yet squirrels exist."

"...people don't breed back as quickly as squirrels, and depopulating an area doesn't immediately cause the murderers to starve. There has to be a balance. If people are being murdered rarely enough that it's not one of the predominating causes of death, then it can't be the case that random baronies have murderers in them and know where they are and just don't have the resources to deal with them." Tanya pauses to think about this. "Take a birth rate of thirty or forty per thousand people per year, I think that's fairly high. If there's one murderer among those thousand people, and he kills ten people a year, that would make him the leading single cause of death, ahead of disease and war and hunger and accidents. Murders have to be rarer than that or they'll outright crash your population. What numbers are you imagining here? Maybe the baronies are large and the authorities are very bad at policing and there's a few murderers around who persist without anyone doing anything about it but I find that hard to imagine, active murderers the state isn't handling will draw vigilantes. Local ones, not - waiting for a random foreign adventurer to happen to come by."

"And people plan for their own survival, they don't passively wait to be murdered. If the state isn't fulfilling its core function of ensuring the people's safety - even a tyrannical state does that, because it wants to tax people - then individuals will take things into their own hands. These two villages aren't a big sample but they didn't look like they were doing that. In other words, it would have been easy for a stranger to murder someone if they had no other desiderata. Would they really stay like that if they thought random murder was a serious possibility and they couldn't rely on the state police?"

"Local vigilantes going up against something too powerful for them to handle will just die. ...also that birth rate sounds kind of low for humans, like, you guys live, how long, call it seventy-five years if nothing gets you, maybe twenty-five years of that are fertile, most everybody gets married, so half of people are having a baby in one third of years by default, and you could cut that in half again for miscarriages and widows and people who don't marry or do it late and years where they're too hungry to get pregnant if that's a thing in humans though I've heard it's not really? That's still about twice as much as you just guessed. Next time we go through a village we can try counting kids though I don't know if humans like to keep the tiny ones inside or something."

"I quoted the rate per population, including males, so it's twice that for women. It's the standard statistic, I assume because it's convenient to compare to total deaths per thousand people per year. Thousand people, half women, woman fertile for a third of her lifespan, gives birth every three years, that's... it depends on how many women survive to which age, but if all women lived to be at least forty they'd give birth to five babies each and we'd get a birth rate of fifty-something, higher than I said but within reason, I think some places are that high or higher. Alright, so our hypothetical murderer would have to murder twelve or fourteen people per year, I don't think that fundamentally changes my question?"

"I mean, maybe they are in fact averaging one every three years instead of one every two, though I don't know how they go about it, humans can't do the elf thing we can do and usually have men in charge so they can't even reliably withhold sex. I think among humans men do a lot of the high risk behavior including both committing and being tempting targets for murder, which might affect things."

"Yes, I assumed a birth every three years. In many cultures women marry later and don't have twenty-five fertile years, and some women die before the age of forty - childbirth itself is dangerous for human women - and these balance out somewhat, I don't have exact numbers but I'm sure I'm not off by a factor of two. Human women generally don't become fertile again while the previous baby is still suckling and that's the main reason they don't give birth every year in the absence of reliable contraception or safe abortifacients."

"You're absolutely right that men, especially young men, disproportionately both commit and are the targets of violence. If all these random murders have a strong norm of not targeting women and children, and if the family or community reliably raises orphans, there can in fact be a lot of random murder, that's what makes large-scale war sustainable. I - suppose that could be the way it works here."

"I don't think I'd say a norm. I would be a little bit surprised if anyone was like 'you wizard ladies should be at home because you're girls', for example. A tendency, more."

"Yes, I wondered how that would work when half of wizards and presumably dragons are women. I thought maybe adventurers target men and women equally, and random murderers who aren't socially-approved 'adventurers' mostly target men? ...are half of human adventurers women? I'd be surprised if they are."