Building a Lawful Good kingdom in Pathfinder, part 2

This is part 2 of a discussion about making something you could call a Lawful Good kingdom in Pathfinder:

"Basically, can it actually be both good - however you want to define that; greatest good for the greatest number is probably a working starting point - and feudal. Can you have castles and banquets and things, and subsistence level farming peasants outside to supply the tassels and banquets and things, and still be good?"

In the first part of this, I looked at the average working humanoid and discovered that the Profession rules for earning a living, coupled with costs of living rules, allow a fairly comfortable existence. Our peasant Jay "lives in their own apartment, small house, or similar location—this is the lifestyle of most trained or skilled experts or warriors. They can secure any nonmagical item worth 1 gp or less from their home in 1d10 minutes, and need not track purchases of common meals or taxes that cost 1 gp or less."

All this, as a 1st-level peasant for the price of a week's salary per month (10gp). Jay earns 12gp per week, giving 51gp per month (assuming 30 days), so they have 41gp left, after minor taxes.

Taxes

The rules don't cover taxes in much detail. There's general advice which has one figure:

A good rule is for the GM to tax the party once per character level for an amount roughly equal to a single encounter’s total treasure value at their APL. The GM could also split this amount into multiple taxes or fees over the course of that character level. For example, a party of 3rd-level PCs on the Medium track should be taxed about 800 gp.

For non-adventurers, that's not terribly helpful. Our peasants aren't gaining levels through encounters, so there's no sense of how often a tax would apply. For a 1st-level character, the Medium value is 260gp, so if we were using that, Jay would owe a tax of 7 months' salary at an unspecified interval. Maybe that really is the annual tax rate? 50-60% of income is the going rate in the Nordic countries.

Since we're assuming that Lawful Good kingdom will provide beneficial public services, the Nordic countries seem a reasonable model. High taxation, but high services. So yes, let's take the 260gp/year figure at least for now. It's not going to work for high-level peasants - nobody is earning enough to pay 67k a year as a peasant farmer.

Jay is therefore paying 21.7gp per month in income tax, and still has just shy of 20gp in spending money every week.

What's on offer?

Now let's look at what extras we could get for Jay, either through personal spending or through taxation.

Everyday magic

Food and water are the first priority – preferably nourishing food and pure water to drink and cook with, followed by tasty food and clean water to wash in.

A Lawful Good government should be organized enough to identify people with magical potential, and train them to cast 0th-level spells. A number of traits give access to cantrips, even for those in non-magical professions.

Cantrips like purify food and drink and create water are absolutely transformative. Food can be stored for longer at the household level, and crucially, restored to edibility even after going bad! Real-world civilisations often have periods of scant food over winter or dry periods, when little grows and stores are getting thin or rotting. With a widespread system of basic magical training, there should be enough people in every village to ensure an absolute basic level of sustenance.

Access to create water also means you can keep livestock and crops alive during droughts. While you’re not going to be seriously irrigating, an apprentice can produce 2 gallons of water per six seconds, 20 gallons (about 4 bucketsful) per minute. Obviously we don’t expect anyone to do this every 6 seconds for a full working day; that would be wildly incompatible with our Lawful Good kingdom’s ethos. Still, it’s a lot.

You can bolster this with a few well-chosen investments, either directly or through supporting infrastructure. A goblet of quenching costs 180gp, but provides enough fresh, clean water for a family of 4 to drink. That’s a significant investment for the average citizen, but Jay can save up for one within a couple of years even at high tax rates. Unlike household appliances, magical items don’t usually wear out, and it's clear from canon that they can easily last for centuries. Thus, each one is a permanent boon to your people! You could encourage their proliferation further by having salaried state wizards make and sell them at cost, or decreeing that artificers must pay a tithe of items like this. They only cost 90gp to make, and are perfect for apprentices and minor priests to practice their crafting with.

On a national level, disease, malnutrition and injury are bad. They cause misery for the population, which is more than enough for a Lawful Good king to take action. On a practical level, they mean less productive workers, smaller harvests, and resources expended in treatment. Any kind of recruitment, from armies to state officials, has a smaller pool of viable candidates. People age quickly and can do less in their old age; the elderly, sickly and injured need care from people who could otherwise be doing other things. Ensuring everyone has clean water to drink and decent (if basic) food means a happier, healthier, more successful society.

Hygiene is another important tool for public health. Accessible clean water means fewer infections, and easy cleaning of infections and wounds. Utensils and medical implements can be kept clean, too. You avoid the risk of zoonoses by not sharing water sources with animals. Other simple spells – notably prestidigitation - can clean up even without water and soap, and remove stubborn stains and oil. Traditional laundry techniques put a lot of strain on fabric with pummelling, hot water, and strong soaps, so using magic should reduce wear and tear.

For those in messy professions, fastidiousness is a 1st-level spell that keeps you spotless and wards off disease. It would be a boon to medics, butchers, tanners, nightsoil collecters, miners and many more. For 1,800gp we can craft a magic item that casts it whenever you say the magic word - something like a magic curtain you pass through on your way into the workplace. It's not cheap, but it would great for morale and keep workers healthy. In fact, you could erect something like this at the entrance to an industrial quarter, and let all the city's workers file through, though that would be slow, at 600 people per hour.

Sanitation

For a number of reasons, toilet facilities make a big difference. Hygiene is obvious, as poor sanitation can spread disease and parasites. Toilets help control pollution and keep an environment pleasant. They can also be important tools for public safety, as people nipping into the bushes or a dark alley are vulnerable to attackers - a real-life problem in many places.

Luckily, magic offers us the chance to build clean, hygienic toilets without the disruption and challenges of massive infrastructure projects. I present the Mark I Prestidigitoilet.

Once cast, a prestidigitation spell enables you to perform simple magical effects for 1 hour. The effects are minor and have severe limitations. A prestidigitation can slowly lift 1 pound of material. It can color, clean, or soil items in a 1-foot cube each round. It can chill, warm, or flavor 1 pound of nonliving material... Any actual change to an object (beyond just moving, cleaning, or soiling it) persists only 1 hour.

The Mark I is a sturdy 6-ft. cubicle containing a toilet seat with bowl, and a basin. It's imbued with a permanent prestidigitation effect. The enspelling costs 1000gp, as it's a cantrip cast at caster level 1.

When someone places their hands in the basin, it focuses the prestidigitation spell there, cleaning their hands. Otherwise, the spell cycles through the cubicle, cleaning it one 1-ft. cube at a time. The entire thing contains 216 1-ft. cubes, which would take 1296 seconds to clean, or just under 22 minutes. That's far better than nothing, but not great.

However, we don't really need to clean the entire thing constantly. The actual toilet is only around a 2-ft. cube, giving 8 cubes, which take less than a minute to clean. It's fairly reasonable to have customers wait 1 minute between uses to ensure a clean toilet. In fact, if the customer stays put, the Mark I guarantees a clean posterior as well - essentially a combination self-cleaning toilet and bidet.

If we're allowed some flexibility with the 'intelligence' of the spell, we could program it to do a full clean at intervals.

Depending on how we interpret the "clean" part of the spell, the Mark I may dispose of sewage. If not, we'll need provision for removing it, but we can at least keep the facilities hygienic. If we have the toilet full of water, a purify food and drink spell will do the trick, since it explicitly "makes spoiled, rotten, diseased, poisonous, or otherwise contaminated food and water pure and suitable for eating and drinking".

Good Repair

Breakages can be a significant drain on household and business finances. This means another really useful spell is mending.

This spell repairs damaged objects, restoring 1d4 hit points to the object. If the object has the broken condition, this condition is removed if the object is restored to at least half its original hit points. All of the pieces of an object must be present for this spell to function.

For households, broken crockery, tools, and damaged clothing will need replacing. It's likely to disproportionately affect the poor: they're likely to buy cheaper goods that break more easily (the classic Boots Theory). Children tend to break things easily but don't earn income, so families with children will have a higher burden. We can also guess that infirmity and disabilities increase the likelihood of accidental breakages, again placing higher costs on vulnerable people. So this is a good point of intervention.

Again, this is a cantrip, and will cost 1000gp as a permanent effect. However, it has a casting time of not 6 seconds, but a full 10 minutes. That's a bigger issue. We can only repair 6 items per hour, so a hard maximum of 144 per day.

I'm envisioning here basically a box that you put broken things into and leave for 10 minutes while it 'cooks' them back together. Or maybe the boxes are mundane, but you pile them up on a magic table and it cooks them one at a time.

An advantage we do have is that the spell isn't worried about cost. You can repair a diamond ring as easily as a wooden spoon. If we assume people will prioritise repairing the more costly items, it can be fairly efficient. But let's take a conservative assumption: we're repairing broken cups, at 1gp each. The table of marvellous repair will fix 144 cups per day, paying for itself in a week. Well, probably a bit more with the cost of the table, call it a fortnight. After that time, the repairs are essentially free - they increase the disposable income available to the populace, and avoid unnecessary waste, while likely benefiting the poorest most. After all, the wealthy aren't going to waste 10 minutes hanging around for a 1gp cup to be fixed, let alone queue for it.

This service can also provide employment: someone to explain the process, hand out boxes, or do it on clients' behalf. On a modest salary, it would be well-suited to a retiree or someone unable to manage more physical or complex jobs.

Wealthier households and large businesses could easily have a box of marvellous repair of their own, perhaps at a higher caster level to allow repair of heavier items. A high-end restaurant with expensive china could save a lot of money in the long run. A jeweller would find the box handled fiddly repairs of delicate items much better than they could, since the difficulty of the repair isn't a factor. An artisans' guild might splash out 5,000gp for the 5th-level variant, which can repair a full set of masterwork tools (5 lb.) in a mere ten minutes - a hundred uses would cover the cost.