Isn’t there that one service that calls for an extra tax on the vassals?
You could have that, one or multiple times, and have them pay the tax in goods rather than coin. This would also lead to them often feeling exploited as extra services have a negative effect on morale, as I recall.
Could reduce land or service value and assign it to the capital, representing capital interests completely bypassing the vassal->liege relationship. (monetarily no different than more tax...)
You could depress the market availaibility of goods locally - either actually knock everyone down a market class or do it by category, depending on what you want to happen. That'd represent merchants/traders actively not even bothering to sell locally.
More detailed approach may be adjusting "capital" demand modifiers up and local modifiers down - selling gets you not as much locally as going to the capital - but you might have to inverse that for buying things locally to have the full effect - that may or may not get weird...
Oh, duh. Just have the Czar pass favors to his favorite and require duties of the rulers of the other zones. That's the most straightforward option for sure.
Alright, so, let's use the book to learn about our empire! So, everyone gets 4-6 vassals. I already know I want five kings, but beyond that, I'm just going to use a dieroller to randomly figure out some totals.
1 Emperor
5 kings
26 princes
130 dukes
650 counts
1950 marquis
7869 barons.
Now, I think that the bears and mongols are relatively desolate kingdoms, not to mention that they have substantial nonhuman populations that are harder to sustain, so they will have the lowest population density the book suggests, at 40 people a square mile. The swamp is probably a bit more lively, so I'll give it 50 people/square mile. The southern human kingdom is excellent growing country, with 80 people/square mile. Lastly, the northern kingdom SHOULD be a desolate wasteland, but it's importing lots of food, so we'll give it 80 as well. That's 4,000, 5,000, and 8,000 families per hex.
I *had* written down the exact hexes of each of my kingdoms, but I failed to retain that document, so I'll wing it.
The bear kingdom is about 80 hexes. 320,000 families.
The Northern Human kingdom is about 250. 2,000,000 families
The Centuar Kingdom is about 400. 1,600,000 families
The Southern Human Kingdoms is about 600. 4,800,000 families
The lizard kingdoms is about 240. 1,200,000 families
Total empire size: 1,540 hexes, 9,360,000 families total.
This gives us, first and foremost, an idea of how big our settlements will be based on realm pop. So here's how our realm breakdown works:
Emperor has over 4 million families, owns a max size metropolis.
NHK and SHK own over 2 million each, so they get smaller metropoli too.
CK, LK, and BK all get Large Cities, class II markets.
Princes will then control some fraction of that, but I haven't drawn lines yet or figured out how many princes are assigned to each kingdom. Everyone except the bears can support class 2 markets even at the principality scale though, so every prince except for four controls a large city.
So that's 1 emperor's metropolis, 2 king's metropolises, 3 king's large cities, 22 prince's large cities, and 4 bear prince small cities.
That's probably all the cities worth putting on the large-scale map for the empire. We don't have to roll demand modifiers for all of them, because the trade routes are short enough that unless they're directly adajcent, they don't interfere with each other! Only the one closest to our players will matter.
GODS, METAPHYSICS THEREOF: The more powerful a god is, the less time it spends on the earth, and the more time it spends in the Sacred Realm. The less powerful a god is, the less time it can spend in the Sacred Realm. The line between God and Demi-God is thus drawn based on which domain the being spends more time in.
Very, very powerful beings have a very difficult time entering the material plane, and may do so only at great cost, or with great assistance from the other side. They prefer to act through champions and intermediaries.
Divinity is acquired through the relationship of an individual with communities. Worship is the act of consciously choosing to transmit divine power, but unconsciously, almost all actions resonate with energy. Adoration, fear, lust- any time you think about something really hard, that's sort of like worshipping them. It's not as direct as saying "PRAISE [X] WHO I AM WORSHIPPING RIGHT NOW" but it's a start. A lot of the Early Gods were legendary beasts that the first bands of humans told stories about around the campfire, gathered together to fear and hate, and they grew bigger and meaner off of those liquorous emotions. (That's why ancient cthonic gods are kept a secret- Because, say, ten people fearing them is as good as one person worshipping them.) Others ascended to divnity off of more positive emotions and became champions of humanity.
Gods are thus tied to their relationship with their believers, and shaped by it. Most can't benefit from anything other than direct worship and a couple favorite emotions, and it's a lot of effort to learn to accept a new feeling. Even if they went through the effort, Divine Space Hitler can't suddenly turn around and be nice, because he's depending on fear and hatred from the general populace for most of his divine power. He could try for it, and maybe the rebranding would be successful, but he'd probably end up a lot weaker, or forgotten entirely. Even one nice act could ruin his reputation.
NOTES:
Pretty much anything can store energy. It takes a lot of people or a lot of time, usually both, to make something a god, but sometimes stored energy precipitates out as small miracles. Parents superhumanly lifting trees off of children might just be tapping into the bank of stored energy from years of loving that kid.
This does mean that maybe, maybe just once in my campaign, I'll allow the Power of Friendship to be invoked between two characters that really have been friends for a long time.
GODS, A HISTORY:
Once, there were many tribes and city-states in the land-that-would-be-Borya. A lot of them had their own little gods. The ogres killed many of them, used powerful magic to enslave others, and some simply fled, presumably dwindling to mortality without worshippers. When the revolution came, Caesar again defeated the conquered gods, but did not free them, instead, he seized them, and bound them anew to his cause.
The gods of Borya must obey the laws and serve its people, but this was not a choice. They are the Lawful gods because their chains are Law and they unbreakable. Below the slave-gods are the Saints, legendary Boryans who were canonized for their contribution. The pantheon of saints and slave-gods are worshipped collectively by Borya, and when the horse-men of the West were annexed, some of their gods voluntarily became chained.
This is a good place to tie back in to "my" dwarves. Dwarves don't have gods. Instead, they have a form of ancestor worship and belief in a time-bound afterlife. When a dwarf dies, his soul goes to the Great Workshop, where it labors to protect mortal dwarves from supernatural foes. The soul of a dwarf only lasts as long as something the dwarf created is still existent in the world. This is why their traditional leaders are Craftpriests. Those who work in stone or metal are the most highly regarded, for their works will last for centuries if nothing goes wrong. Farmers are regarded as very nearly the lowest of the low, for crops last no more than a year or so before being either eaten or replanted. Dwarves mark objects that are intended for export with secret craft-marks that virtually no non-dwarves can identify. These objects are well made, but are not intended to be the anchors of a dwarven soul. A non-dwarf, any non-dwarf, with an object that was clearly made by a dwarf but does not have the craft-mark will draw instant, unremitting hostility from any dwarf, because it means the immortality of a dwarven soul is in the hands of a non-dwarf. This is not tolerable. Wars have been started over a human noble possessing the wrong dwarven sculpture. Orcs are known to engage in spiritual warfare against dwarves by taking the arms and armor of slain dwarves, partially melting them and twisting them into useless slag, then using catapults to launch them into the courtyards of dwarven fortresses.
The Craftpriests are the most righteous of dwarves, those who are able to channel the power of their ancestors to protect and heal their people and their allies. Furies are dwarves who have sacrificed their chance for immortality to become powerful warriors, capable of slaying many mortal foes. Vaultguards are pretty much normal dwarves. Delvers are almost a sort of holy warrior, breaking the objects of other races so their ancestors will go to their final death. Machinists, though...machinists are heretics. Every good dwarf knows that dwarfishness revolves around doing work with ones own hands. Machinists, though, have become focused on efficiency, on creating things to do work for them. This offends traditional dwarves. Furies will often get along with Machinists, since both are pragmatists at heart, but Vaultguards will be split, and Craftpriests will almost never tolerate the presence of a Machinist. Some Delvers try to break Machinists' creations, to eliminate the undwarfishness among the dwarves, but others take the practical outlook that they're all trying to help in their own way.
Dwarves will respect any smith or mason, be neutral towards woodworkers, have little respect for farmers or alchemists, and have no respect for a person with no skill at creating things. Truly great artisans may be invited to spend time in a dwarven region, teaching their craftsdwarves new techniques and thus strengthening the souls of the dwarves. This is rare, and the dwarves do not usually teach techniques in return, but they will pay very well.
What a splendid thread!
Delightful! I'm definitely incorporating some of this into my game, perhaps as a competing faction to the Viking-dwarves and the Mechanist-dwarves.
So, the next step is probably to start on my local map. But before I can do that, I have to pick which part of the game to put the local map in. Deciding on a region limits what kinds of things I can run within that region, which leads me to the realization-
I'm really pleased with all the neat stuff I have planned, but it's all on OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE WORLD. What the hell, past me? Did you really think players were going to spend time in both the deserts of not-africa and the tundras of the arctic? How were you going to move them from one place to the other?
So, at this point, my options are:
1. Figure out what setting stuff I just never want to use. Goodbye, gnolls! :-(
2. Come up with an excuse for bouncing the players all over the world to hit all the hotspots. You're... uh... gladiators... on a... magic... train... Yeah that's not going to work well either. :-(
3. REWRITES
I think the easiest solution is to declare Ursa Major the starting zone. I think polar bear secession is an interesting environment. We can just apply a lens filter to the gnolls to make their sandmobiles into snowmobiles and make them wolves instead of hyenas. Plus, you know, BEARS VERSUS GNOLLS, NATURAL ENEMIES! Tell me you don't want to see an armored bear fighting a wolf motorcycle gang.
The arctic is also already on the coast, so it's easy to include mer-stuff. Plenty of mountains and trees, so dwarves and elves are present. I think I'll redraw the map so Zahar is closer, so I can have the orc invasion arc if I need to. That'll require rewriting a little bit of the backstory, but that's fine. The aztecs don't get to play as big a role, but that's fine, narratively I didn't know what to do with them.
Once I redraw the world map a little, I can start on the local map, and while I'm working on that, I'm also going to be mulling over some generic RPG-setup questions. The big ones for me are:
1. What level should the PCs start at? I think we've all been level 1-4 enough for a lifetime. I'm so sick of the endless cycle of joining a game at level 1, grinding desperately to just past 3, and then the campaign falls apart because Dave's new job has him working nights and Steve keeps having funerals to go to on game night because everyone he loves surely dies. So then you eventually join a new game at level 1 again and you go your whole life without getting to cast Teleport. On the other hand, for the reasons I just mentioned, I'm most familiar with the lower levels. I don't think I'd start a party off at 14th, I'd have no sense of scale. It'd be weird.
2. Do I want to establish some kind of concept for the party? In another ACKS game I'm in, the DM has declared that all PCs are part of the same secret society, and new PCs joining are agents from the homeland just arriving. This removes the need for the gathering-of-the-party episode that's almost always a nightmare of a first session, and makes it less awkward to meet a cloaked stranger on the road and immediately accept him into your inner circle because he's Dave's new mage. With the societ society thing, well, if he knows the passwords, he's trustworthy, done and done. Plus it provides an easy device for introducing new NPCs- "Your contacts within the guild inform you that a Mr. Byrnner is in Adamantus and worth speaking to. He is of your order and may have gifts to give or favors to ask."
2A. If so, what kind of concept? Right now I'm leaning towards they're all former gladiators, with bonds forged in blood. This establishes them as a team familiar with each other, but not with the starting region, which is good, because the players will be at least a little familiar with each other, but not with the starting region.
2B. Or not 2B. That is the question.
I personally vote for exmilitary auxiliaries. the empire would naturally have a bunch of soldiers who wernt full time and just basically get dumped in an area when the empire is done with them. It would also help explain why these members are leveled. It also allows more freedom of backstory for characters sinve wizard gladiator is kind of crazy but wizard who served in the empires 5th auxillary makes sense. the party could be the lieutenants left behind, the captains and generals went with the main force as it moved on and all the soldiers have moved on since the players couldnt afford them anymore. The few who stick around would be the henches.
So, with the Panzerbjorn kingdom selected as the regional map, let's start thinking about zooming in. It's actually almost exactly the size of a regional map, so that's great! Now, a regional map should be 50% wilderness, but I don't think that conflicts with what we know about the bear lands if we make a large portion of their "kingdom" just empty, although I think in official terms this might make them a chunky principality if they only have 600 occupied hexes out of the 1200 encompassed by their borders. Whatever. That's fine. So, 250 familes per hex, 600 hexes, 150,000 families. 3/4ths of a million people, roughly, live in the updated Bear Kingdom. 150k is half the maximum size for a principality, so the King in the North collects about 33k from his domains, and 15k from his cities. He has a stronghold worth 360,000. (For a sense of scale, 360,000 could buy 55 gatehouses, 5 keeps, a million square feet of 10 foot deep filled moats, a wall 60 feet high and 10 feet thick and 1600 feet long, or, HOPEFULLY, some combination featuring a handful of each of those.)
Anyway, the largest settlement in the Panzerpality is a City. Then there's a handful of Large Towns, and then we get into Class VI territory and stop mapping. I might throw a Large Village in just out of pity for Class V's.
In a minute I'll put Hexographer on my work computer and actually map this out, and then I should have a working Regional Map by the end of the day.
one closer inspection I have no idea how big mountains are. How TALL they are, sure, but width? Total mystery. Can you fit a mountain into one six-mile hex, or should it be a whole cluster? Or is a mountain small enough you could have two in one hex? This merits some examination before I continue.
Mauna Loa is about 4 miles by 2 miles, and it's a huge mountain, so in general one should be able to fit a pair of mountains or more into a 6 mile hex.
On the other hand, everest has a circumference of 64 km, making it almost 12 miles in diameter, so it would seem REALLY big mountains can fill multiple hexes.
Now, obviously, we don't want every mountain to be everest, but there's nothing wrong with going a little nuts for fantasy's sake.
Open up your favorite mapping service, turn on topography and contour lines, and measure.
e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0588695,-120.0120182,11z/data=!5m1!1e4
It's about 6 miles from the lakeshore, over Genoa Peak, and down to the flatland on the opposite side.
It's about 10 miles from the lakeshore, over Martis Peak (north side, you'll probably have to zoom in once or twice to get the marker to display), and down to Hinton along I-80.
It's about 4 miles from Martis Peak to Relay Peak, then a mile to each of Tamarack Peak and Mount Houghton, another mile to Mount Rose... These things don't cleanly fit in a 6-mile hexmap (he says from experience).
OKAY SO, REGIONAL MAP IS MOSTLY DONE! Link at the bottom.
So, the settlement suggests having 15 "Static Points of Interest" represent human and demihuman settlements, including castles. I've done that! I'll write up descriptions for them eventually, but it should be fairly clear. My experience is that most cities are named after people, other cities, or whatever happened to be nearby, and as you go further back in time, the more of the third kind you find. Thus, most of my city names are just relevant nouns thrown into google translate. (I also took a couple years of German in college, so I still retain a toddler-level vocabulary.
As you can see, 15 landmarks makes for a good start on filling in the map, espicially the lower half where the players will spend a lot of their early-game. (Although, since I'm starting them at level 5 or so, their early game will be much shorter.)
Now I just need to come up with 30 dungeons and put them on the map- Actually, this is important, should I put all 30 starting dungeons and lairs on the map? It seems like it might be more fun for the players to fill it in as they go. Heck, I may not even give them the hex-map that I use, and instead redraw the whole thing by hand to make it feel less gamey. Hexes are so artifical-looking, you know?
[MY PLAYERS: Please refrain from clicking this link at this time.]
http://imgur.com/IBFuSBP
Making progress on my 45 starting locations! Here's the playerside blurb for one:
Quadstrich Lair: Ostriches are the worst, most people believe. They are unaware of the Quadstrich. Bred during the war by Malkiznek by crossbreeding ostriches with additional ostriches, these creatures have double the legs, double the raw hatred, and at least twice as many venomous talons.
[quote="susan_brindle"] ...crossbreeding ostriches with additional ostriches... [/quote]
LOL - 'You know what this ostrich needs? More ostrich.'
I like to think that quadstriches might have two necks and heads as well, with a chance on encounter for one of the heads to be buried in sand.