Is a world primarily focused on intrigue and politics widely sustainable?

[Sparky McDibben]

So I’ve poured dozens of hours into my homebrew campaign setting, making sure that all the history matches up, all the nations are consistent, etc. But recently I noticed it’s very skewed to my tastes in D&D; there’s not a lot of dungeons and always chaotic evil orcs lying around, every creature with an intelligence score above 8 is given cultural and political treatment like the PHB races. All the throwaway minion races have been lumped together into a single continental political entity, and all the nations hate each other and are going to enter another war the moment some adventurers from another nation trapeze into their territory. But now I’m concerned that this setting will only fill a very niche role with the usual groups of murderhobos. I’ve even been thinking about eliminating the alignment system, but I’m not sure about that either.

While trapeze-based travel systems sound cool as hell, I'd maybe look at a few other items:

- Are these nations monolithic? Are there any factions or people who can be pitted against each other? Are there political parties within a nation, for instance, who could be manipulated into a civil war or a coup? I've found that the more factions (and sub-factions!) you have, the more fun intrigue becomes as a pillar of play. Keeping them straight can be a challenge, but it's quite rewarding, especially when your players start linking a faction in Country A with a heretical sect in Country B in order to supply arms to revolutionaries in Country C. Or they just burn it all down. That's cool, too.

- Are these nations all equally lawful? You don't have chaotic evil orcs, but do you have bandit gangs? Elven death squads killing journalists for an autocratic regime? Manticores who enjoy disemboweling their prey and then playing jazz trumpet to entertain the target while they bleed out? A gnomish Manhattan Project? A church full of life clerics who kill some of their acolytes every year to ensure scarcity of clerical healing, thus commanding higher rates? You can do a lot with groups of people who either don't conform to or actively subvert archetypes.

- Finally, to actually answer your question, it's very much dependent on group. Hell, sometimes it's dependent on the day - if someone's had a terrible week and they are not here for complex political machinations tonight, it can really crimp things. You can still run a group of murderhobos in an intrigue-heavy setting, though. For an example, look at how you would run a murderhobo group through Eberron or Ravnica. That's where you can really leverage intrigue or political actors as patrons for the party, and the murderhobos start to look like highly skilled mercenaries or retainers for a lord, who tolerates their disruptions because darn it, they're just really, really good at their jobs.

But honestly, I don’t want to cushion them. Part of the fun of accidentally causing a war is fighting it.

This is awesome, good on you!

I’m thinking of still keeping Law/Chaos though, since I’d still like to make sure no paladins are chaotic and stuff like that.

I'm curious - why can't you have chaotic paladins? I mean, how else would you characterize Ancients or Vengeance Paladins (assuming you're playing 5e here; if I'm wrong, let me know).