Levoid's Government generator is a print-and-play tool for creating unique types of governments for worldbuilding games. It works by grouping governmental responsibilities, such as Justice or Taxation, into institutions with differing levels of power. The game can be downloaded here.
The Inspiration
Levoid's Government Generator has its origins in an expansive and overambitious civilization building game that I was working on. I was trying to find a way to create emergent and complex governments that were full of incongruities the same way that real governments often have strange features or institutions. I started looking for existing government generation tools and found that there weren't many satisfying ones. There was one 80 page document that had an unethical amount of rolling involved that I ended up setting aside.
I'm not sure how I arrived at the decision to create the distribution of power first, and then let the player use their imagination to derive names, conflicts, and ideology, but I think that that was the best way to create governments with depth without going the 80 page route.
Playtesting & Iteration
Playtesting went unusually well, and most of the friends I showed it to like it the way it was. They requested new features and variant rules, but few changes to the core mechanics of the tool. So I added options for a heavily privatized government, a decentralized one, as well as divisions in the military.
Future Development
For now, Levoid's Government Generator is rather low down my list of projects. When I come back to it, however, I will likely be adding more variant rules, responsibility lists for science fiction and fantasy settings to be considered, and I did have a gamified version in the works that allows several players to compete for control of government.
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