- I know the blog states it. But where in the rules does it list an average number of leveled characters in a realm? I would think it would be a good chart next to, or part of the chart on page 122 of ACKs.
- Also the chart on page 122 is confusing insofar as it is unclear if the population is # of families or total population.
- the reason is I want to recreate what I’ve done (roughly) with 0d&d and the FFC which is write up the stats for Erelei-Cinlu, the drow city in D3(?) and I need to know how many leveled drow are in a city of 10,800 drow split among 8 houses.
Erelhei-Cinlu boasts a population of some 27,000 souls. 40% of these are drow, 15% are troglodytes, 12% are bugbears, 10% are surface dwellers and undead, 4% are mind flayers, 4% are trolls, 4% are yugoloths, 3% are kuo-toans, 3% are demons, 1% are svirfneblin, 1% are orcs, and 1% are githyanki or githzerai.
here is a link to what I did with the FFC:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1NOvsu3hz-FKTmIFT9qhgxZ2L0CC2RtWjl691X1S4qtg
3a) in the DMG gygax says that demi-humans produce leveled characters at twice the amount humans do. I don’t know what ACKs might thinks about what this means if anything for their rules (2% vs. 1%).
quote:0th: Most able-bodied humans
1st: 1 in 12 – The best in an extended family
2nd: 1 in 40 – The best in an estate or hamlet
3rd: 1 in 100 – The best in a tiny barony or village
4th: 1 in 200 – The best in a small barony or large village
5th: 1 in 500 – The best in a barony or large village
6th: 1 in 2,000 – The best in a march or town
7th: 1 in 6,000 – The best in a county
8th: 1 in 10,000 – The best in county
this gives us: (assume 45% fighter 18% cleric, 18% mu, 15% thief 2% other subsuming subclasses)
900 1st level
270 2nd level
180 3rd level
54 4th level
22 5th level
5 6th level
2 7th level
1 8th level
1,434 leveled drow and 9,366 0-level (of which 2,800 are men of fighting age/fyrd/millia 30% right?). This gives us 10% of the population is leveled. of the 3rd and 4th level hero-1 and hero who can individually lead 30 men in battle (see: brigand in monsters and treasure) Gives us a total of 235, only 105 of which are fighter types, meaning you have enough “knights” to lead all the available militia.
How are my numbers?
In CHAINMAIL/ffc terms you have 261 (3rd-6th level) potential hero units and 3 super heroes (7th-8th+)? What’s the monthly stipend of a 4th level character again?
Taking the rules from 0d&d a fledgling barony of 1 5 mile hex a 9th level lord and 1,350 peasants (average) would give that lord:
200 0-level potential men at arms drawn from the populous
200 more 0-level men of fighting age available.
112 1st level characters of which 50 are fighters
33 2nd level of which 14 are fighters
13 3rd level hero-1 of which 6 are fighters
7 4th level heroes of which 3 are fighters
3 5th level characters
a good portion of the 4th and 5th level NPC’s are probably personal henchmen.
Except in ACKS we would include 35 0-level men at arm followers and 3 1st level followers, this 6 mile starting hex would have on average 35 families (pg. 117) which is only:
35 families/175 people the first month
44 2nd month
55 3rd month
68 4th month
85 5th month
106 6th month
127 7th month
152 8th month
182 9th month
218 10th month
243 11th month
280 families/1,397 peasants 12th month or about the same as 0d&d.
What ACKs needs is a “dominion screen” kind of like a DM screen with all the relevent charts all in one place…I’m flipping around a lot to build my barony.
LIMITS OF GROWTH PG. 115
ok. with a total population of 27,000 this puts the drow city just on the small side of “civilized” with 5,400 families (2,160 drow families) rulled by 8 lords (675 families per house 270 drow families). The drow city could see itself grow to twice the size if run properly.
- Eclavdra runs a house with 270 drow families and 405 families of various beastmen, slaves, etc.
- She has 175 0-level base born men at arms (175 other able bodied who could be pressed into service if need be.)
- Noble drow relatives number 112 1st level 33 2nd level, 22 3rd level, 7 4th level, 3 5th level, and herself (1 8th level) the remaining 7 lords of the remaining houses make up the seven 6th-7th level characters shown in the posts above.
TOTAL: Eclavdra is no more powerful than a 1st year human baron. She commands 2,025 chaos peasants, but in the city state of Erelui-cinlu she is top dog.
REVINUE
Let’s say she gets 10gp in revinue, so 20,000gp per month roughly.
question: of the 2,025 vassals, 177 are leveled drow. Does she get more money from these characters above what a typical peasant would pay? What does her 4th level nephew owe her in tithe per year? 1% of xp?
COSTS:
810gp in garrison costs per month (33 heavy elf infantry taken from her 175 fyrd)
375gp in house upkeep (75,000gp castle)
**since Eclavdera is not queen of the drow city, but only 1 of 8 house lords, no taxes?
2,000gp tithe to the church of Lolth per month
3,333gp festival cost per month for 4 festivals each year.
total: 6,518gp
net domain/house income: 13,732gp (excluding any trade/investments)
So, big question is how much do the leveled NPC’s pay eclavdra in taxes, and how much does she have to pay a 4th level fighter to lead her 33 town guard/garrison?
Bargle: “What ACKs needs is a “dominion screen” kind of like a DM screen with all the relevent charts all in one place…I’m flipping around a lot to build my barony.”
I agree; it’s a lot to keep track of. Maybe there should be something like that Chaosium-style character creation key for domain building as well?
I don’t know if representing Erelei-Cinlu as a domain of 27,000 is the way to go. First off, the simple fact that 4% are mind flayers and 3% are demons immediately suggests that this is not an ordinary city based on medieval demographics. Second, it seems more like a city than a domain, suggesting the domains (agriculture) are elsewhere. Third, drow send out patrols of leveled characters as if they are very common, suggesting that they have quite a stock of such characters to draw on.
If you want to achieve some fidelity towards Gygax’s presentation, I think you might get more useful numbers if you assume that Erelei-Cinlu is the capital city of a dispersed underground empire of subject peoples. A city of 27,000 suggests a realm of 100,000 families or 500,000 people.
Assuming 500,000 people, the drow kingdom would have leveled characters approximately as follows:
1 12th level
1 11th level
6 10th level
17 9th level
50 8th level
90 7th level
265 6th level
100 5th level
2,500 4th level
4850 3rd level
13,500 2nd level
40,000 1st level
That would give you 8 “heads of households” (10th - 12th level) and a useful array of mid-level subordinates, and a large staff of low-level guards and priests for the frequent drow patrols. I would assume that drow culture is probably one where heads of households reside in the capital rather than out on their domain holdings, so you’d have a city packed with high level characters.
Alex: How would we calculate that level distribution? I haven’t been able to find the discussion in the rules.
I was also curious how that compares to the breakdown of noble titles. At 100K families, that realm would be a prefecture/principality. That implies an average of 1 prefect, 4 palatines, 16 legates, 64 tribunes, 256 castellans, and 1024 patricians.
How does that correspond to the leveled characters?
1 12th lvl prefect,
1 11th lvl and 3 10th lvl palatines,
3 10th lvl and 13 9th lvl legates,
4 9th lvl, 50 8th lvl, and 10 7th lvl tribunes,
80 7th lvl and 176 6th lvl castellans,
89 6th lvl, 100 5th lvl, and 800-odd 4th lvl patricians?
(Unless there’s a typo at 5th lvl and that should be 1000, in which case 89 6th lvl and roughly 1000 5th lvl patricians)?
Or should we assume that some of the leveled characters are wizards with sanctums, thieves (etc.) with hideouts, and people who have chosen not to rule their own realms (presumably the chancellors, etc. of the prefect are high level, and some of them may not also be vassals ruling big realms)? That might lead to:
1 12th lvl. prefect
4 10th lvl palatines
16 9th lvl legates
64 7th and 8th lvl tribunes
256 6th lvl castellans (some actually probably 5th lvl)
1024 5th and 4th lvl patricians
with various non-realm rulers:
1 11th lvl
2 10th lvl
1 9th lvl
76 7th and 8th lvl
9 6th lvl (plus one for every 5th lvl castellan)
plus most of the characters 4th lvl and below.
It’s not dramatically different; castellans average about a level lower, tribunes average half a level lower. It does produce weird inconsistencies between levels. Why are there twice as many 10th level independents as 9th (and as many 11th lvl as 9th)? But that may just be an artifact of my doing this in a haphazard “go down to the next level that’s bigger than the title to be filled and fill all the slots” style. But even that number of independents seems low to me; are there really only three thieves (lvl 9+) with hideouts and 1 wizard (lvl 11+) with a sanctum in a population of 500,000? What’s the ratio of (fighters, clerics, and equivalent realm leaders):(thieves, wizards, and equivalent non-realm leaders)? And how many independent mid and high level characters should we assume (i.e. characters level 6+ who don’t rule a dominion or have a sanctum, hide-out, or equivalent)?
This also makes me wonder why PCs aren’t getting mechanical help on getting followers until lvl 9. The rules seem to assume that “normal” PC development doesn’t get you a dominion until lvl 9, although some PCs may jump the gun. But by the time that PCs are level 6, they’re more powerful personally than the typical patrician/lord. And that’s without taking into account the party dynamic; a party of 6 level 6 PCs can take the average castellan and all of the castellan’s patrician vassals in a fight: that’s roughly 6 lvl 6 PCs versus one level 6 NPC and 4 level 5 NPCs, even assuming that the PCs don’t single out a 5th lvl castellan. Sure, the castellan’s army matters, too, but it’s likely small, so why isn’t the expected progression that the PCs hire a small mercenary band, position their retainers as NCO equivalents (a party of 6 PCs with average Cha could have 24 retainers–a small army even without hiring mercenaries), and crush a castellan at level 6, taking all of the wealth in the castellan’s castle as treasure to level up with? You could wait until level 9 when you get some free retainers, but why wait?
Politics could be the answer–maybe you can take the castellan, but if that triggers a war with the castellan’s liege (a lvl 7 or 8 tribune, backed by 3 (surviving) lvl 6 castellans, and 12 surviving lvl 5 or 4 patricians, plus an army of sorts), maybe it’s no good. But it seems like in the chaotic, shattered empire feel that I’ve inferred, you could often find a castellan without a liege who’s eager to go to war. Moreover, why isn’t it pretty easy for a sixth level PC with 5 allied sixth level PCs and a small army to find some tribune who will agree (at least after the fact) to make them a vassal and provide them some protection? “We all agree that Castellan Emirikol the Chaotic is a bane to the good people of this land; I don’t want to start a war now, but if you take your band of warriors, overthrow him, and come to me with a pledge of fealty, I will accept your oath and offer you my protection if his liege, Tribune Inattentus the Lax, makes trouble. If you fail, of course, I’ve never heard of you, and if you flee back into my lands I will hand you over to Inattentus as common criminals.” From the PCs’ potential liegelord’s perspective, this is great–they’re meaningfully more powerful than the typical vassal at that level, and they would add a new sub-realm to the liege’s realm without the liege having to do anything up front.
Anyway, I’m just trying to figure out how the demographic assumptions interact with the play assumptions.
How does that correspond to the leveled characters?
1 12th lvl prefect,
1 11th lvl and 3 10th lvl palatines,
3 10th lvl and 13 9th lvl legates,
4 9th lvl, 50 8th lvl, and 10 7th lvl tribunes,
80 7th lvl and 176 6th lvl castellans,
89 6th lvl, 100 5th lvl, and 800-odd 4th lvl patricians?
(Unless there’s a typo at 5th lvl and that should be 1000, in which case 89 6th lvl and roughly 1000 5th lvl patricians)?
Or should we assume that some of the leveled characters are wizards with sanctums, thieves (etc.) with hideouts, and people who have chosen not to rule their own realms (presumably the chancellors, etc. of the prefect are high level, and some of them may not also be vassals ruling big realms)? That might lead to:
1 12th lvl. prefect
4 10th lvl palatines
16 9th lvl legates
64 7th and 8th lvl tribunes
256 6th lvl castellans (some actually probably 5th lvl)
1024 5th and 4th lvl patricians
with various non-realm rulers:
1 11th lvl
2 10th lvl
1 9th lvl
76 7th and 8th lvl
9 6th lvl (plus one for every 5th lvl castellan)
plus most of the characters 4th lvl and below.
ALEX: The reason you haven’t found this in the rules yet is that those rules haven’t been translated from notes and spreadsheets yet. They’ll constitute Section 11 in the next version of the rules. In any event, either one would be fine – it would be up to the judgment of the GM what he’d prefer. (And yes there’s a typo at 5th level - it should be 1,000).
It’s not dramatically different; castellans average about a level lower, tribunes average half a level lower. It does produce weird inconsistencies between levels. Why are there twice as many 10th level independents as 9th (and as many 11th lvl as 9th)? But that may just be an artifact of my doing this in a haphazard “go down to the next level that’s bigger than the title to be filled and fill all the slots” style. But even that number of independents seems low to me; are there really only three thieves (lvl 9+) with hideouts and 1 wizard (lvl 11+) with a sanctum in a population of 500,000? What’s the ratio of (fighters, clerics, and equivalent realm leaders):(thieves, wizards, and equivalent non-realm leaders)? And how many independent mid and high level characters should we assume (i.e. characters level 6+ who don’t rule a dominion or have a sanctum, hide-out, or equivalent)?
ALEX: The number of independents you are assuming seems about right to me. ACKS does not have nearly the population of high level characters that, e.g., 3.5 does, and it assumes that if you are high level, you probably matter. For instance, a principality probably only has 1 city and 2 large towns, so having 3 9th level thieves means you’ve got a master thief running each large urban area. There’s only 1 or 2 powerful wizards, who are either friends and advisors to the prince, or terrifying foes.
This also makes me wonder why PCs aren’t getting mechanical help on getting followers until lvl 9. The rules seem to assume that “normal” PC development doesn’t get you a dominion until lvl 9, although some PCs may jump the gun.
ALEX: As far as why 9th level for followers, its partly because that’s a mechanic that compensates for the fact that hit dice no longer increase. But it’s also a logical place for followers to arrive. Consider that (according to the calculations in Domains at War), a manorial lord probably only has 2 troops in his employ and is earning only around 100gp per month. In most cases, the manorial lord is the enforcer of his manor. Meanwhile, a typical baron (castellan) has 12 men and earns about 450gp per month. A successful 5th level adventurer can make well more than 450gp per month. For an adventurer to tie himself down with domain management at that point is akin to a high powered executive stepping off the fast track – it’s more like retirement. Meanwhile, a marquise (tribune) has up to 72 men, and a count (legate) has between 73 and 420. In our playtests, 9th level fighters and clerics end up with around 150 men (a mix of followers, retainers, and mercenaries). This makes them about the equivalent of a count (legate), and counts should reasonably between 7th to 9th level. One could argue that followers should arrive a level earlier, but given the other gameplay reasons for making it 9th level, I think it’s a good place.
But by the time that PCs are level 6, they’re more powerful personally than the typical patrician/lord. And that’s without taking into account the party dynamic; a party of 6 level 6 PCs can take the average castellan and all of the castellan’s patrician vassals in a fight: that’s roughly 6 lvl 6 PCs versus one level 6 NPC and 4 level 5 NPCs, even assuming that the PCs don’t single out a 5th lvl castellan. Sure, the castellan’s army matters, too, but it’s likely small, so why isn’t the expected progression that the PCs hire a small mercenary band, position their retainers as NCO equivalents (a party of 6 PCs with average Cha could have 24 retainers–a small army even without hiring mercenaries), and crush a castellan at level 6, taking all of the wealth in the castellan’s castle as treasure to level up with? You could wait until level 9 when you get some free retainers, but why wait?
ALEX: When you think about it, gathering small armies and attacking enemy strongholds is actually what most PCs do in any D&D-style RPG. It’s just that the strongholds are populated by humanoids. There’s no reason at all PCs couldn’t do the same to a human ruler, or seize control of the humanoid populations, for that matter. But, as I said, for most mid-level adventurers, continuous adventuring is likely a faster avenue for advancement than taking on the management headaches of a small domain.
Politics could be the answer–maybe you can take the castellan, but if that triggers a war with the castellan’s liege (a lvl 7 or 8 tribune, backed by 3 (surviving) lvl 6 castellans, and 12 surviving lvl 5 or 4 patricians, plus an army of sorts), maybe it’s no good. But it seems like in the chaotic, shattered empire feel that I’ve inferred, you could often find a castellan without a liege who’s eager to go to war. Moreover, why isn’t it pretty easy for a sixth level PC with 5 allied sixth level PCs and a small army to find some tribune who will agree (at least after the fact) to make them a vassal and provide them some protection? “We all agree that Castellan Emirikol the Chaotic is a bane to the good people of this land; I don’t want to start a war now, but if you take your band of warriors, overthrow him, and come to me with a pledge of fealty, I will accept your oath and offer you my protection if his liege, Tribune Inattentus the Lax, makes trouble. If you fail, of course, I’ve never heard of you, and if you flee back into my lands I will hand you over to Inattentus as common criminals.” From the PCs’ potential liegelord’s perspective, this is great–they’re meaningfully more powerful than the typical vassal at that level, and they would add a new sub-realm to the liege’s realm without the liege having to do anything up front.
ALEX: Leaving aside issues of whether PCs will want to manage small domains early on, your thinking here is absolutely awesome, and the rules could certainly handle it. The intent is that ACKS allows you to run exactly those sorts of games, if that’s what your players want to do.
I’m left wondering how a city-state could be written up. I like what you did with Erelith-Cinlu making it a capitol of a larger area. The 8 drow families could rule the city with 10,800 drow and the attendant masses, with the remaining 17k being made up of vassal lords of troglodites, orcs, etc with a peasant/wilderness population of some 500,000.
However, Why couldn’t a city just exist by itself? the vatican does, hong-kong does. This certainly gives reason why the drow raid the realms above so often…they are raiding for food and gold! A drow city of 10,800 would have to also do a lot of trade (slaves brought from above realm raids and loot taken from the same).
I think it might be too pat to allow the drow to self sustain with an agriculture. Heck, is there a way for chaotic realms to not have “peasant” classes at all. Why would orcs and goblins farm the soil and pay taxes? It’s too bland. the drow have their city of 10,800 and like the ante-bellum south, they survive on slave labor and trade and in the drow’s case, raids on more prosperous neighbors.
I think it would be awesome - although perhaps beyond the scope of the ACKS core - to have campaign creation guidelines that you could use to plug in values like “slave labor,” “mushroom urban-farming,” and “divine subsidies” and come up with an Erelith-Cinlu city-state whose economics make sense in the same way that the ACKS defaults do for their values.
Some ways to pitch city-states:
Trade cities: What would the aggregate trade need to be for the customs tax to provide all of the domain revenue, if the domain is entirely composed of the market city?
Meccas: What is requisite pilgrim traffic and tithing infrastructure to provide all of the domain revenue for a domain composed entirely of the urban population?
Chaotic raiders: How much domain revenue must be bled off neighboring domains (or coterminous ones!) to provide domain revenue for the city?
The new version of ACKS should handle city-states of all sorts with greater ease.
Rather than try and calculate how much revenue is required to sustain a city, the route that ACKS v20 uses instead simply calculates the food cost per urban family up front, and subtracts this in advance from the urban revenue generated by a city. (That’s why a peasant family generates 12gp per family, while an urban family generates 6gp per family. You have to pay for bread and circuses for the urban family.) So the player doesn’t have to worry about it - the food is coming from somewhere.
The only time where this wouldn’t work would be if the city in question was somehow cut off from all or most trade. In that case, to be strictly accurate, the GM could enforce a requirement that the food cost (12gp per urban family) actually be somehow accounted for. If you want to do this, you’d need to check to see whether the Land Value X # of Peasants of existing domains that are adjacent or connected by trade route is sufficient to equal 12gp X # of Urban families.
EXAMPLE: A city-state of 5,000 urban families needs 60,000gp in Land Value revenues from domains that are neighboring or connected via trade route. This would mean, on average, 10,000 peasant families.
In most cases, this is a fairly easily met standard, and it added complexity with little gain, so I left it off. I might include it in Domains at War.
Reading this conjures up a few thoughts and questions.
- Bargle assumes a class distribution of ‘45% fighter 18% cleric, 18% mu, 15% thief 2% other subsuming subclasses’. What’s the basis for that? What are the assumptions ACKs makes? Is there a canon ACKs distribution?
(This is useful to me because I want to be able to model (roughly) the impact of something like ‘Cure Disease’ on something akin to the Black Death to see if the Plague is a useful mechanism for campaign background - explaining depopulation, monster incursion, ruins, and the ‘frontier’ approach that D&D seems to take) - There’s some discussion of PCs of a certain level being more personally powerful than NPCs of equivalent level. Leaving the party dynamic aside, why is that? Are levelled NPCs not ‘Classed’ NPCs? Or is there an implied ‘Noble’ NPC class?
- Again, talking about PCs vs NPCs, ahstrongmorse mentions PCs hiring mercenaries and positioning retainers as NCOs. To me this makes perfect sense, and in a ‘Real World’ analogy it seems to fit as well. Assume that Nobility is granted not inherited. Assume a period of war. A PCs are soldiers who manage to survive long enough to collect some war loot. They decide to invest that loot in hiring men and forming a mercenary unit. They get a mercenary charter, get paid to war, and get richer. They are, in the eyes of nobles and kings, commoners - but commoners with power. Eventually, when that power becomes threatening, or as a reward, the King ennobles the mercenary leaders. So, your 6th Level PCs might be powerful compared to a 6th Level Noble NPC, but they’re still ‘adventurers’ and that sort of folk dies all the time - there’s no need to do anything with them, but lets keep an eye on them just in case they try to overthrow the local Baron. At 9th Level the King thinks ‘yeah I like these guys, I’ll give them land and title’ or ‘Bugger me they might go for me soon, I’ll bribe them with land and title’. Until 9th level - recognition from the crown (or whatever) - followers are paid mercenaries. After 9th, they are still paid, but are perhaps more idealistic in their following. I’m sure there are a thousand other perspectives on this, but the gaining of followers at 9th makes sense to me, and that’s my rationale for it. I’d (very much) welcome other thoughts!
- I think a Domain Building Screen is a fabulous idea. Simple worksheets to make life easy would be a terrific boon to a game that has mechanical systems for modelling economics and population growth(automated spreadsheets even more so!)
- Bargle assumes a class distribution of ‘45% fighter 18% cleric, 18% mu, 15% thief 2% other subsuming subclasses’. What’s the basis for that? What are the assumptions ACKs makes? Is there a canon ACKs distribution?
Technically, ACKS’s class distribution varies based on level. Our assumption is that mages are more common at the highest levels because they have the largest incentive to keep leveling. The formula gets complex, especially as some classes drop out at different levels. For most purposes the following will suffice:
Fighters 35%
Thieves 11%
Clerics 10%
Mages 10%
Bladedancers 7%
Assassins 7%
Bards 5%
Explorers 5%
Dwarven Vaultguards 3%
Elven Spellblades 3%
Dwarven Craftpriests 2%
Elven Nightblades 2%
=100%
Fighter types 44%
Thief types 23%
Cleric types 19%
Mage types 14%
=100%
- There’s some discussion of PCs of a certain level being more personally powerful than NPCs of equivalent level. Leaving the party dynamic aside, why is that? Are levelled NPCs not ‘Classed’ NPCs? Or is there an implied ‘Noble’ NPC class?
I believe that the reference is to PCs of a certain rank of nobility being more personally powerful than nobles of the same tier. For instance, the local Baron is probably a 5th level character. If a 9th level PC sets himself up as a Baron, he would be be personally more powerful than the local baron. Our expectation is that the PC wouldn’t stay a baron for long.