Worldbuilding: Who Claims Priority?

Everything your characters want to do will need some kind of resources to do it. Who controls those resources, and why?

This goes from something as small as getting some eggs from your own chicken flock to make scrambled breakfast, to buying, negotiating, or outright stealing the Phlebotinum, needed to make sure your Mad Science/Wizardry goes right… or someone else’s Goes Horribly Wrong.

Who has the resources to start with may be a matter of luck. You explored into wilderness, you came up with a new use for something everyone else discards, you got saddled with an unexpected inheritance. Who keeps resources can be a matter of grit, money, social pressure, or odder reasons. If you have a flock of egg-layers, you decided the time and effort was worth it to have that resource right at your fingertips. If you suddenly find you’ve been living in a HOA all this time and someone Does Not Like Chickens… well, then you can either give up and get eggs from the grocery store like everyone else, or you can launch a mad scheme to get a variance, or even destroy the association! Mwah-ha-hah….

Ahem.

Who keeps resources can also to a great deal depend on how important society at large thinks those resources are. For instance, after about 1598 AD in the Joseon Dynasty, forestry fell under the administration of the navy.

Yes, the navy. No, they didn’t have trees growing in the ocean, it’s way too cold for mangroves. (Though a fantasy where sizable trees did grow in cold salt water would be Really Cool.) What Joseon did have was ships. Ships that had been the key to smashing the Japanese navy; and while it took Ming forces to kill enough of the land troops to halt the invasions, even that wouldn’t have been enough if Hideyoshi’s followers had been easily able to ferry in reinforcements. They weren’t, because Admiral Yi Sun-sin beat them high, wide, and handsome; and with Hideyoshi dying about that time, surviving Japanese commanders decided enough was enough.

Joseon beat back the invasion, but the resulting destruction left a cultural mark. Not least because, scholars estimate, about twenty percent of the population – possibly some two million people – were now dead, with about a hundred thousand more vanished as slaves, and whole villages and farmlands laid waste. In some cases, destroyed so badly no one could live there anymore.

(If you want a comparison – between military and civilians the U.S. Civil War is estimated to have had somewhere between 600,000 to over a million dead, out of a population of about 30 million. As in about three percent of the total population. Hideyoshi’s invasion was devastating.)

What survivors knew was that the navy had saved them, and would need to save them again if Japan came back. Navies need ships. Ships need wood. Therefore, the navy got administration over forest lands, because they needed it most.

(In the king and ministers’ opinions, at least. Probably a lot of commoners as well, given the respect held for Yi Sun-sin to this day.)

One of the knock-on results of this is that when the Japanese occupied again post-1890, they took over forestry. Korean environments are still dealing with the results.

What do your characters need, to survive your story? Who has that resource? Why do they have it? A purely industrial resource may be simple for your characters to get their hands on, even if it’s expensive. A material of strategic importance – that’ll be a lot harder.

…And remember, if your characters are competing cooks in a bake-off with a prize worth millions, then simple butter and sugar may become strategically important!