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.  

Wizards are Weird: The Unclean Arts

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about the idea of the wizard as a cheat, or the wizard as the foolish rule breaker. The foolish rule breaker wizard, for the most part, has transmogrified into the mad scientist. The guy who uses the nuclear reactor to cook his hot pockets because a microwave takes two and a half minutes, but its only thirty in the reactor and HE KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING, YOU FOOL!!!

As a result, the short sighted genius still lives on, he just took off his wizard hat.

Then there’s the other side of things.

The evil side.

Sometimes they can be musicians.

Magic and spell casting is strongly associated with the forces of evil. Why is that? Well from a Judeo-Christian perspective (which informs most fantasy) it’s because powers only have two real sources, one side is the noble side, granted by God, and the other side is well, not.

The other side is the side of blood sacrifices, of using things for purposes they decidedly aren’t intended for. The seductive dark side. And there are no shortages of weirdness to be found here. Horrific, terrible, and for a DM, wonderful weirdness.

I was born to murder the world!

This is where we see the wizards as the corruptors, the destroyers, the despoilers. The strange agents of the unholy amongst us. With motivations as strange and imperceptible as a hurricane, or a demon.

The guy above is Nix. We never quite learn what his motivations are, but the guy is evil. He leads a cult. He keeps trained baboons. He comes back from the dead as an undead thing. And he claims he was born to murder the world. 

He’s horrifying, but a lot of what he does, doesn’t make sense. He kills those loyal to him. His aim always seem to be corrupting others, to spread whatever it is that corrupted him, to people of equally promising skills. But why? Who knows.

The idea that magical powers have an intrinsic cost is represented by people like this. They start down the path of magic for whatever reason, start as normal folks, and then turn into, well..

Something inhuman.

The master would not approve

By the simple expedient of trafficing with powers that are..not right, they themselves become the sorts of entities who spread that not rightness.  To the point that while we know that these creatures began as human, the fact they started treating with unholy powers, started making deals with strange masters, and started drifting with powers better left untouched, they transmogrify into something so thoroughly, we can't even imagine them as once being a "normal person."

You can even see this in sci-fi depictions of wizard. Remember, the 'wizard' isn't just the guy with a pointy hat. He's the weirdo. The strange thing that commands powers outside the ken of most.

Such as the Emperor of Darkness

I might revisit this, there's a lot here, but remember that just by being something else the wizard can be weird, and terrifying.

Also, I think that Grahf picture there is ridiculously righteous. I found it at this link here so please, go check that guy out. His art's pretty awesome.

SKM Development: The Vassal State, or “Oh, THOSE Guys”

Vassals are an important function of kingdom maintenance. In many cases they are automated, but the issue of who you have administering an area is important, it’s also important when you have areas that ostensibly under your control but who you yourself do not directly administrate.

In ACKS, a vassal has to pay 20% of his net income and is required to fulfill one favor to his liege per month. Additional favors requested result in more likelihood the NPC in the vassal state goes squirrely. In the case of PC’s being vassals to someone else (which ACKs assumes is a likely situation for someone just getting into the stronghold part of the game) the 20% is still there, but they’re free to get squirrely as soon as they want.

Now, why are vassals a problem? Because of the spreadsheet. A vassal state can itself have sub-hexes, tithe requirements, taxes, garrisons, strongholds, and so on. This means the mother state has to have a nested sheet just for someone else’s stuff. Someone else’s stuff which they might not be entirely truthful about. So it means the player has to have a sheet telling him that because Bob’s Vassal State has 250 families and such-and-such land value, he’s entitled to a certain amount of cash, assuming of course that Bob isn’t suspiciously overspending on his garrison.  And the DM might have another sheet, showing that Bob’s increased his tax rate to 4gp instead of 2gp and indeed has a suspicious garrison, a very large and very angry and very undead garrison.

I had this discussion with one of my players and he reaffirmed my personal belief. The player doesn’t need to know the nuts and bolts of the vassal state (the DM still does of course), no, the player just needs to know roundabouts how much he’s owed. If he knows that the vassal owes him 20gp a turn 40 subsistence , and perhaps 40 men as a combat levy, and when he goes asking for it he only gets 5gp, a firm handshake and a bushel of apples, well, he knows something is up. 

This also means that I just need to inform the player monthly of what he’s owed, and tell him what he actually got. Which, to be honest, is how it was working before.

Now on the DM side, we can once again crib mercilessly off of ACKs. 20% is a good reasonable percentage of income requirement. Instead of being nice and making it net though, let’s make the vassal requirement instead a standard requirement and make it off of the gross. So the vassal owes 20% of what a normal tax income would be based on 2gp per family, he owes 20% of his fams (in terms of military if he raises it) and he’s required to provide 20% of the income in subsistence that it would take to feed his own people (meaning he needs to produce 120% of his own required subsistence).    Instead of ACK’s favor system, we can make it so the player can just straight up request more of these categories, but doing so will tend to piss off the vassal.  This is also why I based it on the ‘typical’ requirements.

See, that way, we provide a ‘perverse incentive’ to a greedy vassal to overtax and over-raise his own men, meaning an incompetent or greedy vassal is going to rapidly put his own hexes in disarray. Meaning fun administrative problems!