[o11c]

The advantage of the world being a village is that you no longer have to have extreme paranoia over everyone who isn't from your village.

It turns out that in a world of "people forced to leave the village to live a new life free from the consequences of their prior deeds", the main reason people would try to start living in a new village was because they had done something that made them no longer welcome with all the people they knew before.

One oft-understated advantage of an explicit noble class is that it provides a medium for verifying "this person really is traveling for legitimate reasons".