Bit of a behind the scenes meta-essay here, which turned out to be much longer than I first thought so I am giving it its own space. I had a conversation with a friend/colleague about fantasy worldbuilding, and was reflecting on this useful practical guide to doing as much, so I guess I just had a lot of thoughts on this matter. So if you want a little look "behind the scenes" on the sort of things I have been thinking about when writing stuff here, this overly long indulgent post might be for you! I link to examples in the stories I have up so far where these things have surfaced, so hopefully it will give you a sense of not just the explicit thoughts but also an idea of how that then plays out in my own attempts at short fiction.

First things first, what would one actually want out of worldbuilding in a fantasy? And since the focus for this post is economics, what in particular would one want from fictional political economy?

The basic answer is that everything has to be in service of narrative - the point is to set things up to tell a good story. Details are nice to have and can help a writer be confident in what they say. And they can be fun to come up with, to a certain kind of mind. But ultimately their worth is just being cashed out in story elements, helping the world feel lived in and avoiding moments of immersion breaking when the reader feels the writer wants them to accept something they just cannot bring themselves to do. The hope is that if you, the writer, have thought things through, then there will be an answer to any niggling "wait so how does that work?/why would that happen?/how could the characters do that?" style questions the reader has. Or, if you have not provided one, then the world will feel rewarding enough that hopefully others will be inspired to pitch in and write something up themselves therein, since it seems to be a place that operates according to internally consistent rules they themselves can pick up and deploy. I have been delighted to see this last happen with the Sanguinary Utnapishtim!

If that's worldbuilding in general, with political economy in particular (both in real life and in fiction) I think, typically, it is especially interesting as a means of getting insights into the history and constraints a people operate under. The balance of powers, within a group and between them and others who may help or hinder them from without, given the problems they face and the constraints imposed by environment and capacity, coalesce into a particular social form. It's a very nice way into world building to think about what sort of institutions would arise in the kind of environment you have constructed, given the particularities of a particular history you wish your group to have, and given how those institutions have interacted with outsiders and weathered challenges. You can pretty much start from any one of those points and develop ideas and constraints which will then inform how you write the others. Back and forth you go until you have something satisfying.

Now, a peculiarity of the 40k Universe is that given the vast scales people are operating at often resource constraints are a bit strange. The issue is just that some agents are able to marshal resources at such a scale as to make them almost... in some limited fashion, if that makes sense... post-scarcity. Or, rather, the restricting factors are always ability to marshal available resources in an efficient manner, and the opportunity cost involved in deploying the time and labour-power to develop resources in one particular way rather than another. Nothing is per se unaffordable or simply outside their productive capacity to these agents. The Rogue Trader game's peculiar profit factor mechanic is an attempt to navigate this, for instance. All the more so given that literal actual magic is available to certain factions (the Sanguinary Utnapishtim among them), so even the laws of physics are not an entirely binding constraint. All that just to say, many typical economic problems will not arise here.

This is a shame! Constraints and potential sources of conflict are what make for good stories. It's one less tool in the toolbox to have "we would like to do X, but we cannot afford to do X - so what can we do instead?" taken away as a problem the Empire must solve. Still, though, I think inherent to what I just said there are a couple of questions I can focus on (and which I have focussed on in worldbuilding) that provide the potential basis of narrative conflicts and conundrums.

The first concerns the legitimacy of the command structure and hierachy this society uses to decide how resources are to be marshalled. If their basic problems are ensuring that they use their time and resources well, then their problems will concern what counts as using such things well. Politics and economics are always ultimately about how we live together; who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by whom. Well, how do the societies of Warhammer 40k, and the Sanguinary Utnapishtim in particular, answer those questions?

The second concerns that opportunity cost -- how, in light of their own ideals, do they actually do? What do they end up producing, is it what they want to? Is it the best they could be doing by their own lights? If not why not, and what's preventing them from fixing that? What changes in their ideals are brought about by the results of their production, and how do they respond to those changes? More or less the whole of - how does their actual economic performance align, or fail to align, with their ideals? And when they come apart, what, if anything, tends to change? How do they resolve those tensions?

Since this is a fanfic project I think it is worth starting by surveying, what, if anything, canon sources have to say on economics in the grimdark future of the 40k universe. Well, both for one obvious and also one non-obvious reason, they do not say much. The obvious reason is: the audience for a detailed take on the economcis of the fictional societies in a satirical tabletop war game is... small. I can write about this on my little fanfic page because this is a one nerd's passion project, and I have a well-paying job to pay the bills in the mean time. If I needed to sell books I probably wouldn't be writing this at all. Fair enough.

The non-obvious reason is that the Imperium (by far and away the largest economy in the game, and the faction whose inner workings we see most of) is deliberately set up to be incredibly varied and diverse in its workings. Doylean, this variety is because they want to give people like me a fairly free hand in crafting our own narratives, so the constraints are loose. Watsonian, this variety is because the Imperium is a galaxy spanning conglomoration of organisations in a setting where ftl communication and travel is possible but very dangerous and whose million worlds underwent literal millenia of seprate cultural evolution before they were reunited. The Imperium couldn't impose a uniform social-economic system if it wanted to. So I am not that much constrained by what we see in canon lore, because there's (deliberately) not much said.

Still, there being few constraints isn't quite there being none, so here is what we do see of economics in the GrimDark future. The norm set up by the Imperium is basically a sort of admixed feudal-capitalist economy, maybe something like early modern Europe under the mercantalist absolute monarchs being the best real world analogues. There is a central absolute political authority, which demands tithes from its subelements, the proper payment of which (and, generally, obeying the entire command hierarhcy overseeing which) is viewed to be a religious duty. These tithes are reckoned in direct goods and services rendered rather than any shared currency. Outside of that the central authority doesn't really care what you do in your planetary locale, only that you see to it the tithe is paid and you do not cross any red-lines re their religious-political diktats (which since it is a theocracy are not differentiated). However, despite that apparent disinterest in specifics, the requirement of paying the tithe creates two incredibly significant economic knock-on effects.

First, the tithe is set and managed by a ludicrously inefficient and callous bureaucracy (called "the administratum" or "Munitorum" where it is dealing with the military in particular) who take decades-to-centuries to register any need to change the quota they demand. So if anything happens to disrupt your production you are far far more likely to simply have troops sent in to take what they feel they are owed by force, and often execute whoever they blame for having been put to this trouble, than you are to have a reprieve granted. Since the central administration defaults to setting the tithe too damn high anyway, every government official has a very strong incentive to take no risks, at all, with their tithe payments. So they almost always choose to suppress consumption for the vast majority to ensure they always have the resources available to insure against a rainy tithe day.

That, of course, presupposes an inegalitarian government structure - a democracy might choose to share the burden more equally, after all. And that gets to the second knock-on effect of the tithe system. To oversee its interests the central authority appoints sectoral governors, who themselves appoint planetary governors. Each of these people has extremely broad authority to ensure that no heresy is permitted, and the most pressing instance of this is ensuring the (sanctified, holy, divinely ordained) tithes are paid on time. They are permitted to use whatever force necessary to see that these are achieved, and they have extremely broad power to interpret these directives as they see fit. So long as, again, when the munitorum sends its tithe ships it finds its cargo manifests match what it expects to receive. All of which really really means that if they ensure the tithe is getting paid, the governor can arbitrarily intervene to secure wealth and opportunity for themselves and those in their favour, and punish or destroy any person or organisation that looks like they might be a threat to that. All licensed under whatever spurious pretence they invent. The result of this is an incredibly corrupt extractive regime wherein absolutely everything is decided by who you know rather than whatever supposed merits you possess.

The best place I know of this being explored is the excellent short story collection The Vorbis Conspiracy. Spoilers for that anthology in this paragraph. The basic set up of that anthology is: the planet it is (and the other Crime books are) set on is due to upgrade its primary port-hub through which its tithes are paid. This means there is a big juicy government contract to be handed out on the one hand, and lots of scheming to win it. But also means that the eyes of the central government are upon them, as the Imperium cares deeply about any sort of infrastructure project that will touch upon tithe maintenance. Amidst all this a disaster occurs when a signalling failure leads a void-ship to crash into an inhabited district, killing hundreds of thousands. The anthology then followers various cops and opportunists all dragged into this affair, centered around the question of: who sabotaged the signalling apparatus, and why? And the answer is... nobody. It was just a cock up; this sort of thing happens sometimes when every major position is filled by whoever's cousin happens to be in favour at court that month. What is more, all the jockeying for economic position and attempts to compete for the contract are themselves a sham: the new contract was always going to go to the Mechanicus, as that was the organisation that antecedently had the most clout with the sector governor. But the local planetary government sure doesn't want the sectoral (let alone central, Terran) government to believe it is incompetent in a way that might affect their ability to pay the tithe -- like, say, messing up the operation of a space port! And various local economic elites are invested in the idea that one of their rivals might just have done something so dastardly in order to get ahead in the competition they are deluded enough to think they are meaningfully engaged in. So it becomes convenient to various People That Matter to pretend this was a deliberate and traitorous act of sabotage rather than just poor infrastructure maintenance! I genuinely love this series.

So the very general fact we have about the Imperium is that it maintains a punitive and extremely hard to renegotiate (hence inflexible even given changes in circumstance) tithe, producing for which would nigh inevitably push down consumption. And that to monitor and ensure compliance with this it appoints sectoral and planetary governors whose extremely broad remit and ability to deploy overwhelming force usually leads to corrupt regimes which operate to the benefit of political insiders who can persuade someone above them to wield coercive power in their favour. This latter means the burdens of paying the tithe are not shared in a remotely egalitarian fashion, with well connected insiders able to enjoy luxurious lives even consistent with paying the tithe, but a super majority of miserable proletariat eeking out a living on what remains.

(Small nerd pedant side note - it's true that in one of the books we do see a somewhat different system implemented in Ultramar, which, while also authoritarian, is generally meant to be notably better governed than the rest of the Imperium. It's only ~500 worlds in an empire of ~1,000,000; so a mere drop in the bucket.).

Beyond these general truths though we get a lot of variation. Most planets we see look like proto-capitalist mercantile states, typically with a series of guilds and combines and powerful families jostling to secure monopoly-rights from political insiders, and most people "free" to sell their labour to the various employers this creates. You get the impression that this is the most common socio-economic form in the Imperium, which I think is neat worldbuilding as in some sense it does look like a fairly natural result of the general pressures just described. But it's a big galaxy and there's a lot of room for variation. For instance, on some planets slavery is the norm or at least legal, whereas on others it is... almost... illegal. (Almost because the Mechanicus' religious dictates make the use of cyborgs (known as "sevitors") an essential feature of anything-that-would-otherwise-require-automation. This means that attempts to ban slavery then have to legislate on how conscious a servitor would have to be in order to count as in violation of the law, and one of the best books in the excellent crime series then concerns the edge cases this generates.) Some planets are straightforwardly feudal in their economic and political arrangement, with the vast majority of people working as agricultural serfs. Some planets (most prominently Holy Terra itself, according to this book) are basically giant bureaucratic machines wherein everyone is an indentured labourer born into their role. We even see one planet that seems to operate like a recognisable modern capitalist country, basically running its economy like a planetary-scale tourist economy. About the only constant is high levels of organised crime, as the situation with the tithe creates an incredibly lucrative black market.

So, with all that background, what did I actually do? Well, when I was starting this I wrote myself a big lore document with a whole bunch of info (it's currently at ~30k words!) and I did give some thought to the socio-economic form there. Here were the Doylean constraints I came up with for myself through the process of writing that. Since (as discussed) one of my inspirations for the setting was the explorations of a Khornite society we get in Traitor General, I knew I wanted the Sanguinary Utnapishtim to be an intensely authoritarian society. From this I thought it would be more fitting for it to be some sort of command economy. Though I was initially tempted by something like an ancient Palace Economy, eventually I decided on something more akin to a permanent-mobilisation war-economy a la the Soviet Union. This, basically, because I thought a proto-feudal aesthetic would place it too close to the Imperium's Administratum in terms of vibe, whereas the Soviet Union is a more distinctly modernist-aesthetic authoritarian command economy.

So I had decided I wanted a sort of quasi-USSR war economy. That said, I didn't think they should be communists. For, despite there being some egalitarian aspects to Khornite worship (that's the joke here!) it was also pretty clear to me from early on that this would be a slave society. For a Khornite society to be long-lasting they need some people to be growing food, looking after the infrastructure, making the weapons, so on and so forth. In fact they need the vast majority of people doing some task that will fit within the so on or the so forth. But it's clear Khornites would view the greatest good in life to be dedicated to violence, warfare, religious observances thereof. So their society would have to be set up in a way whereby the great majority of people cannot possibly live lives that society deems worth living. It needs, in short, to be a slave society.

For the idea of what the institution of slavery would look like I used Sparta's helots as my model for what it would look like for there to be state owned slaves in a highly militaristic society. I have no real expertise in that so I just picked whatever came up when I searched academic articles and ran with them. From this I gather that even a paranoid and ultra-elitist militarist society did try to offer some positive incentives to the helots to buy in as well as limited opportunities for manumission (which I have thus featured in a story) -- and that this was not that successfull. I also used Spartan society to get an estimate on a reasonable figure for the amount of slave vs free members of the population. The numbers I saw were 9:1 or maybe 7:1 viewed as the upper end of plausibility for helots in Spartan society (number from point 4 of the Summation here) so I just rounded that down to around 3:1 here because I guesstimated that due to technical advances and the availability of literal-actual-magic the Sanguinary Utnapishtim would not need as high a proportion of their society doing just-above-subsistence-agriculture. Here is what I put in my private lore document, just to give you a sense of how that reads:

So you have ~ 3/4ths of the society producing to keep ~ 1/5th in a constant state of combat readiness, with the former probably none too happy with their lot in life. For obvious reasons that would create huge worries about legitimacy, internal enemies and dissent, and the possibility of slave uprisings. So how do they try and legitimise this?

When it came to developing ideas about legitimacy of this command structure I could draw on the ideology of real life life slave societies. Fortunately my philosophy PhD came in handy here for the first time ever, and I was able to draw on some actual expertise. I thought the Aristotlean idea of "natural slaves", people whose good consisted of being living tools to be used by others, seemed especially apt for deployment by a Khornite society. Or, rather, a Khornite society that latched on to this idea might actually stand a chance of lasting more than two minutes rather than just burning out. So I refreshed myself on some ancient slave ideologies (this essay in particular was useful, as well as this book which I'd read some time ago) and pretty much the first first story I ever wrote is just a narrativised account of how I see that ideology working in the Sanguinary Utnapishtim. That's right, this whole thing began as an exercise in fictitious political economy. The nerd life chose me!

Presumably not everyone will buy into that ideology. The slaves, for one, might be inclined to disagree. (And indeed another of my stories is inspired by the idea that enemies have identified the large slave population as a potential weakness of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim, ripe for destabalisation...) But this is where all the reading up on both real world political economy and lore sources would be useful. It does seem that authoritarian societies can generate a lot of buy in simply by plausibly improving living standards for people therein (indeed this is one reason the historical Soviet Union managed to hold on as long as it did, c.f. page 398-399). And, well, the Imperium sets the baseline in the setting. It's the largest and wealthiest and most salient organisation, and what's more since many of the subjets of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim would have been former subjects of the Imperium, it's what they would have been used to. This is what people think "normal" economic functioning is, and that includes for many of the people in my setting. And as discussed above, it's a society that gives almost no thought to production for consumption for the vast majority of persons. This means the typical person with memory of life in the Imperium would, even in the best of times (and if the Sherden Pact managed to successfully invade, it was probably not the best of times even before they turned up), have been very poor and known little by way of creature comforts. I think it would not be that hard to gain a little bit of legitimacy for the Sherden Pact's occupation by just improving living standards very slightly, because people's baseline is just so bad in this universe. So that too made it into the first story, the Sermon linked above.

(Here too I am also inspired by stuff in the canon. It's implied throughout the lore, for instance in the excellent book Elemental Council -- for some of my thoughts on which see here -- that this is a significant part of how the Tau are able to subvert the Imperium. Through a combination of sincere ideological conviction and savvy real-politik, they actually care about improving living standards for people in their territories. So once they conquer a world they set up distribution centres that directly provide some necessities to the population, and in addition to running war industries, wherein they automate the most onerous or dangerous tasks, they also allow at least small scale private enterprise in a regulated market. Being a second class citizen but you get a welfare state, actual work place safety standards that the government genuinely care about enforcing, and some ability to actually improve your lot through private enterprise, is so much better than what the typical Imperial subject - or subject of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim, for that matter! -- can expect in life that it is a genuine huge draw for them. Economics as a weapon of war!)

Likewise, although I am going to caveat this in a bit, I think rule by the Sherden Pact would be a bit less grindingly inefficient than rule by the Imperium. The general joke of the shorts is that despite the absolute insanity of the ends they pursue, the Sherden Pact have highly rationalised how they pursue those ends. They very much exist within the Iron Cage, and do not generally tolerate perceived inefficiencies. It would feel very out of place for the vibe or aesthetic I am going for if they took three centuries to reply to a retithe request from a now long dead world with "You forgot to fill out form J-B-187, please refile". So, and here's the caveat, while I certainly wouldn't want anyone to think that this bunch of ridiculous goofballs are actually competent administrators, the particular way their incompetence expresses itself shouldn't be quite like that. They're not bad because they are absurdly self-undermining - they're bad because they're pretty good at achieving their ends, which are absurd.

So that's how I envision the Sherden Pact maintaining the legitimacy of their command structure. They have an ideology which tells some people, the minority, that they are Mighty, they should get all the best stuff, that the greatest good in life is dying in the state's forever-war to bring the greatest rage to the greatest number, and lucky them because they'll get a chance to do just that. The fact that exposure to the warp tends to drive people a bit wild, and they engage in constant ritual practice designed to productively attune them to the warp, reinforces the plausibility of these ideas to them. And it tells others, the majority, that the best thing they can do is help the minority do all the stuff I just said. It's not that good a deal for the minority (in fact it's awful) but since they can plausibly raise living standards for the average Imperial citizen in Imperium-Nihlus where they operate, they generate more than zero buy in. What's more, they deliberate leave some paths to relative social standing and security open to talented slaves in the logistical bureaucracies (so slaves are constantly shown as coworkers in the Office for Ceremonial Calculation, for instance) and a tacitly tolerated black market, precisely to give them something to direct their energies towards other than rebellion. Between all these things, plus the vast paranoid security state they operate, the Sanguinary Utnapishtim keeps enough of its population in line and doing roughly what they ought to be doing to keep the war machine going. How about the legitimacy of their distribution of stuff?

As to how they do, I feel like I should come back to this section once I have wrote the story that initially prompted me to post this...

... but ok I will say more than nothing now. So far, I have assumed something like: they do well enough to actually maintain a multi-planetary war. This is, to put the point mildly, no mean thing. This is in part because they genuinely are more efficient than the Imperium, in part because they have secured various powerful allies that make up for their own deficiencies in key ways, and partly because (and this is something I definitley want to do more on) -- since they are not bound by the Mechanicum's religon they can actually automate stuff! If you really want to do war communism at massive scale I basically think you have to be able to have some near magical (maybe actually magical) computational power. But then you can realise Red Plenty ... but for murder.

There's a passage from the RP which has stuck with me for years. The scientist Kantorovich has just had the basic idea that would go on to develop into linear programming. When thinking about what this could mean for society he says to himself:

I really think there should be something like that thought within the Sanguinary Utnapishtim, a widespread dissatisfaction with what they actually achieve but which does not yet delegitimise the regime because they think they are on the cusp of doing better. They are, strange as it is to say, a progressive Khornite empire - in the sense that they are, and expect to be, getting better at what they do. So while they are a long way from achieving the greatest rage for the greatest number, they fall far short of their actual ideals, they think their successive and regular growth rates along the markers they care about are evidence that they can actually do it. So their productive inadequacies are masked by growth creating positive expectations. So, at least among the Mighty and those slaves invested in the regime for whatever reasons, this keeps the regime stable by keeping animal spirits high.

I have one short story already playing with them introducing automation, and some others already linked above about them trying out various magitek policy reforms. It's long been my ambition to do more along these lines. So I think part of my answer is: they do not actually achieve their goals, but the fact that they are organised to be a somewhat open-minded and progressive (in this sense!) society means this does not generate too much satisfaction but rather just spurs innovation.

That said, while that's what I have done so far, there's a lot I feel I need to do on this front. So what I want to explore most is 1) how slaves meet their consumption needs through a black market, since I think the above sort of chipper optimism about our ability to do ever more murder if only we worked out the details better should not really do all that much to appease the vast majority of the population. 2) A more basic economic failure due to either rent seeking from insiders, the inadequacies of even their magitek computational abilities, or just incompetence from planners, leading to a downturn in some way. I am reading up on Soviet economic failures right now to see how that should be modelled. Or 3) conflict between the state's need to encourage innovation to better meet the ideological goals of its leadership cadre, and its inevitable suspicion of original thinking given that it is a paranoid authoritarian dictatorship.

I am working on (2) now and will do a follow up once that is done. But this is where I am on that front, obviously a bit less developed than the ideological part. In my defence a philosophy degree made thinking about the ideology easier and more natural to me! Now I am getting to the more concrete bit of the world building, and I must say I am enjoying it; history is my second love.

So I hope that was a mildly interesting look into my thought process and general approach to world building. Political economic world building is useful to me for three main reasons. First, because I want the setting to feel rich enough to reward thinking through, and that way I will get more collaborators and guest authors. I have been vindicated in this thus far, and I am delighted by that fact. Second, I hope worldbuilding of this form will help keep people immersed, as the stories will at some point answer whatever question they have that might be distracting, or they simply won't arise because I will have anticipated written around them. Third, as I have tried to illustrate with the story links, I frequently get ideas for stories by just thinking about tensions the ideology and circumstances of the Sanguinary Utnaphistim, and how they may clash and how the citizens (or slaves) thereof might want to resolve them.