When we started the village we had ~6 people living in a small palisade and a few people camping outside. Most of the outsiders would either play for a few days and quit or play a few hours a week. Only one of us already had lawspeaking (though I had an alt I was willing and able to make the village with) so they basically became the lawspeaker by default. We basically had no idea what we were doing, but Aokigahara was kind enough to give us some things (like metals for keys, the antlers/teeth for the village, a bear cape, bear tooth necklace, etc) to get us started.

There are a lot of different things we needed as a village so we each took different roles. The LS was going to be a miner. I foraged/hunted/traded. G did cooking/sewing. F did farming. S just did whatever. K was rarely ever seen. We only had the palisade and were actually using the gate/keys to get in and out. We also had a steady stream of immigrants as the only /jp/ village accepting new people, but we had no room so they had to slum it outside.

Things progressed for a while. We had a storehouse with an entire basement full of raw meat and the cook and I wanted to make some sausage. We did not have a mine or much metal so I decided I would trade some of my curios for a q90 or so grinder. I needed my trade alt's hearthfire destroyed to trade, but none of my characters had any strength. I could have just used the bear cape and pickaxe we had, but the LS constantly wore them and would not give them up. After asking several times over a few days for the LS to destroy it I finally got angry and yelled at him to break it or give me the fucking axe/cape he got pissy with my attitude, but destroyed it. A little while later I arranged a trade with another village for the grinder and asked if he would be around to oath my alt back and he said yes. I went to the other village, traded items, and asked for him to oath me back into the village so I could return, but he went afk. I had to sit in the other village for five minutes before I could get someone else to log on and re-invite me to the village so I could get back. Thankfully, my trading partner was not too put off by the trade taking so long. The cook spent hours turning all of the meat I had stockpiled into sausage. There was probably a cupboard of each type and we thought we were set for a while. Two days later only about 20% of it was left because the LS decided to binge on it while pounding dirt to increase his stats. When questioned he said he needed the stats for jewelry/mining even though he ate most of the food for basically every stat category. It really annoyed me as he did not do anything useful to burn stamania like plow fields or mine-- which he has yet to do--and if I increased my perception I could have actually foraged better things and hunted easier.

The LS basically never did anything for the village and was just a drain on resources. I killed a bear and was trying to trade it along with some other goods for a decent herbalist table. When I went to do the trade I found out he had skinned the bear just to discover it. I didn't have anything else to substitute the bear with so I had to cancel the trade because no one really wants the bear meat and a terrible quality skin. His excuse for never doing anything was he was full industry, even though that didn't matter for 80% of the things we needed like linen of any quality. He never looked for caves or prospected for a place to put a minehole. When we finally made ten hardened leather for a minehole he took five of it and made a q18 traveler's sack which was doubly awful as you need q20 to get an extra row and column from using one. It was still basically impossible to get him to do anything useful--like start a new cellar--even if he was the only one that could do it because he was the only one that had metals discovered. Basically constantly being selfish and not helping the village progress.

He also was terrible as leading the village. At one point K logged on after over a week being gone and had an hours long tantrum about a small farm by her house being removed because we were running out of space and had removed it for a place to put carts and boats right by the gate. It was never resolved and K was mad and never logged back in for another week. We were still using the gate, but were not supposed to leave with a key. Someone ended up dying with a key outside and then they broke into the palisade and stole a bunch of stuff and killed a few more people. D was proactive and built a new wall and inner gate since we could not easily destroy and replace the old one. However, that resulted in K having another dramafest about us encroaching on her space when she finally came back as the new wall had to cut part of her yard. The LS again failed to do basically anything to mediate.

We ended up with a group of probably 10 moderately active players living outside the palisade. We did not have space for them inside and they obviously wanted more security due to various incidents. I forget how, but this guy Q that had played for a while with a prominent faction came to help us out. Q and D worked on expanding the palisade which mean making a few new walls and then knocking down existing ones. Most people pitched in however they could, be it getting wood or me hunting and making endless amounts of boneglue or whatever. It got done in a few days, mostly due to having to wait 8 hours every time we repaired the battering ram. Y had stepped up and basically was organizing the slums outside the walls as much as they could. We had a lot more space, but not enough for everyone. No one ended up moving in to the new space from outside the walls because of it being harder to go out and the effort of moving or whatever. Also, a palisade provided basically no protection at this point in the world.

Q really pushed us to make a brick wall. We needed wrought iron and steel for it so we found a mine he could break into and started getting ore. D planned out various ways we could make the wall and how much material we would need for the wall. S and I made a lot of bricks and stockpiled them in cornerposts. We still needed a bunch of wine (so people could use crossroads) and linen (so we could expand the village and actually make crossroads). LS finally started something useful and mined a bit, but I don't really know how much. The peasants outside the wall constantly complained about the elitism of the wall-dwellers, questioned the need for a brick wall rather than palisade, demanded that any brick wall enclose their land if it is built, and with few exceptions did not contribute in any way to building it. 

There is a lot of debate over "Big Wall" versus "Small Wall" and the LS says he will make a decision, but keeps pushing it off until later. We get rather tired of this and basically start planning a coup if a decision isn't made by the time the last batch of wrought is finished. When pushed the LS goes on a rant about how no one appreciates all of the work he does and we've been conspiring against him behind his back. He never wanted to be the LS anyways, but we forced him into it and he would have given it up if we asked. We end up making one of my alts the new LS and I give D and S the password and the LS leaves the village and fucks off. Q isn't around at the time. We talk for a bit and decide on a plan for the wall and then get to work on initial preparations. We think finally the village will soon actually start getting somewhere.

The next day we go to start work on the wall and D notices that all of our metal is gone. Q had always just had a really tiny plot with one small chest on it and the chest is gone. We grab some scents from the theft and can't find any holes in the palisade. It would take us probably a week to make enough metal again, but Q wasn't around and we had no other miners. People don't normally trade wrought, but I figure I start working on trading basically everything I own for the metal we need. While doing an inventory someone notices that the cornerstone posts we were using to hold bricks have been partially built. Normally you can just take items out of an unbuilt sign, but if you try and build them it slowly turns them into spent materials and you can no longer easily remove the sign. Basically, we had a row of useless posts that would be a pain in the ass to get rid of and all of the bricks we had made to use for the wall were gone. People are really upset with the old LS at this point.

The next day D and S go hunting for the old LS. They track him down, murder him, and recover Q's stuff and some of our things. He argues that he was only holding Q's things for safe keeping and we stole them and should give them back. No one has heard from Q and they tell him to fuck off. I log on and they start telling me about how they got revenge. I say thats cools and all, but there is a giant hole in the back side of our palisade and basically all of the cupboards in the village are destroyed. One of the friendly Polish guys asks us to oath over a bunch of people so D does because fuck it we have nothing left anyways. The Polish guys go raid a Chinese village that was near us that had recently been driven out by some other force. The village is pretty much dead at this point both physically and as a community. 

S actually had a private villa away from the village and offered to take some people in. I was going to take a break, but decided to do some final trades with some people for gifts. This one guy I got some armor and a sword wandered over to the former Chinese base and there were some guys there still looting and they killed him like less than 10 minutes after I gave him the stuff. People were moving out and this one guy just started taking anything he could. He even took all of my personal stuff that even had a runestone next to it to not fuck with it. He would log in and then immediately log off when I messaged him about it. After about the third time of that I claimed his whole house and he decided to stick around and talk. His story was that he didn't know he couldn't take my stuff and the game crashed every time he logged in. He gave back some of my stuff but claimed he studied all of the curios he stole (including several pearls) which would not have been possible with his client crashing on log in like he claimed. D had been living in the mine at the place VDZ had found abandoned after we broke in, but someone jumped the brick wall with a charterstone and killed him.

Obviously this is all from my perspective so it is biased and it has been some years so my memory isn't perfect. It would be great if anyone else could share their experiences. Just know that insiders can be just as dangerous to you even if not explicitly hostile or trying to be. I still had a lot of fun with D and S like the time we stole some abandoned cows and transported them over 20 rivers on the way back.