SKM Development: Townsfolk or “The Adventurers have to get jobs from someone”

ACKs has a system for founding a settlement. As the game is an OSR game primarily focused on stuff like markets, dungeons and the like, creating a town is a relatively easy thing to do. For a ruler anyway. It requires that you control a hex, that the hex be at Civilized tier, and that you have enough dosh and enough people to turn them into an ‘urban population.’ Now, the urban pop generates no land value income or service income, but they do generate tax income and they do generate a specific urban income value based on how many fams live in the urban settlement. More people in the settlement, more that each family brings in. So having a really big city, makes up for the fact every person you put into the city deprives the ‘land’ of them.

That’s fine and dandy for ACKs, since in ACKs townsfolk eat gold pieces. And as long as gold keeps getting generated, they’re fine. We changed that economic angle though. We knocked down the fence that had all income be gold.

So what are we going to do?

Well, firstly, since we abandoned Civilized-Wilderness hexes, we’re letting players create a settlement whenever they want to. One settlement to a hex. At least at first.

See, remember how I keep mentioning how our maximum size for a domain is 16 contiguous 6-mile hexes that forms 512 square miles, and is roughly the size of the New York Metro area? Well, like New York itself, or like the fictional Midgar from Final Fantasy 7, massive metropolis style cities are often formed from numerous towns folding together. So, let’s think of that as like our ‘end goal’ for settlements.  

In the meantime, for a settlement, let’s assume that requiring the charter for one requires a gold piece outlay and the people in the city still need to eat. So basically it’s like a ‘hex’ you pay for, and you’d still need to take fams away from the hex you’re building the settlement in to populate it (although we’d need to put a mechanic in that penalizes you for depopulating a hex too quickly). 

Our settlement would then expressly not generate subsistence. Not a damn grain. No. Towns and cities in our system are going to be hungry little jerks. They’re going to represent families in a realm that have to be fed, but who’s population cannot be allocated to subsistence production.

In exchange, they’ll make resources. They’ll make shitloads of resources.

Whatever the resource value for a territory is, the families allocated from a settlement will get a more beneficial return on them. A mining town is going to be more efficient at mining then random peasants. Maybe there’ll be a research option to let a city start generating food on its own, or some food. See, the terrible truth is that towns and cities, even in the modern world, aren’t self-sufficient. They require outside resources.

ACKs also uses settlements as a way to bust the hard-cap they put on pops for a territory. I’d need to check the numbers for that, but I might end up cribbing off of them again. Mostly because I know next to nothing about reasonable quasi-medieval population density statistics.

Sadly, we’re getting to the close of the theorycrafting soon.  Once I figure out some other mechanics, I’m going to have to start crunching numbers, and I am not looking forward to that.