Kiero, this is a great question to bring up. I think this sort of thing causes people no end to grief.
The first thing to note is that the domain and settlement rules and guidelines in ACKS shouldn’t bind you, as Judge, any more than the dungeon creation rules or wilderness encounter rules bind you. In all cases, we are offering clear and straightforward mechanics for standard situations, but when your setting requires it, you should simply do what is required! The real-world is filled with thousands of examples of settlements and realms that would be a bad idea to “hard code” into the game mechanics, even though we all know they existed. (It’s similar to how you can’t design a good wargame by modeling the fastest-bestest marching times/rates of fire/kill rates, you have to base it on the averages).
To handle Massalia, here’s what I’d do:
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Review the Range of Trade on page 233 of ACKS. Find the length of Massalia’s trade routes and then set Massalia as a Market Class of that size.
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Turn to page 133, and build the city’s Revenues as if it was of the appropriate Market Class. (For example, 8gp instead of 7.5gp if it’s Class II instead of Class IV). Since Massalia is independent, it does not have to pay taxes. Assuming it is Class II, its revenue should be 9,600gp/month while its expenses are (960gp tithes + 2400gp garrison + 1800gp upkeep) 5160gp/month. This might be divided between the 15 executives, giving them 344gp each per month.
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If you want to increase Massalia’s revenue, you can assign it some Vassal Settlements from your list above, each providing a 20% tax income to Massalia.
That would represent the income that Massalia’s ruling families earn from ruling. That’s distinct from the wealth they’d earn from controlling trade.
- A simple way to assign wealth to trade would be to use the Starting City Criminal Guilds table on p.237 as a baseline. Find the city’s market class and then allocate the monthly syndicate revenue to the ruling families.
For example, if Massalia is Class II, monthly guild revenue is 75,000gp. Dividing that by 600 yields 125gp per month. That would place each citizen squarely within the “landed patrician” Standard of Living (p.39 of ACKS). You could of course allocate the trade revenues less equally. Perhaps the richest citizen earns 10,000gp from trade (marquis/count), the next richest 5,000gp, the third 2,500gp, the fourth 1,250gp, the fifth 600gp, and the remaining 595 each earn 110gp.
In this context, the wealth earned from controlling the city (344gp/month) is much less than the private wealth of the richest citizenry, but more than the wealth of the average citizenry. Executive positions are thus looked on with nobless oblige by the rich, but with ambition by the poor.
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Another way to assign wealth from trade would be to build Massalia’s revenues as if it were a much larger settlement in terms of population. For example, you could say it has 10,000 families for revenue purposes (Class II). That would mean 80,000gp in revenue per month instead of 9,600, or about 70,000gp. (Note that his yields similar results to #4, it’s just a different way of thinking about.
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Finally, you could model out the great houses’ trading wealth using the Arbitrage Trading rules or the Merchant Ships and Caravans tables on p145.
The rules provided in ACKS are focused on the experiences of adventurers conducting arbitrage trading, and didn’t get into the guidelines on the maximum economic activity occurring in a realm. The total economic activity in a town attributable to its population* is roughly 10 times the maximum amounts listed on the Markets & Merchandise table. So, for example, a Class II town has a maximum of 90 merchants** (2d4+1 max x 10) each dealing in (4d6 max) 24 loads per month. The average load is worth about 300gp and the average margin is 10%. That suggests (90 x 24 x 300 x .1) 64,800gp in trading profits per month are available to the citizens. We might want to increase that if we think the citizens are exploiting monopolies, adding 10% to the margin to yield 129,600gp per month. Of course some of that is probably foreign traders, and the citizens might have trade activities going on in far-flung towns, but you are at least within the ballpark.
In any event, from three different approaches, I consistently see a range of income per month from trade of about 60k - 120k for your republic.
*This number was derived from Say’s Law, which argues that consumption must equal production and vice versa. However, there is no theoretical maximum to how much trade can occur in a town between foreign merchants transacting with other foreign merchants. They are simply “using the platform”. If you have to hazard a guess, I would multiple the number of merchants by the number of trade routes to settlements within 1 market class of the same size.
**For simplicity, ACKS “bundles” merchants into a smaller number of bigger buyers. In reality, most merchants are relatively small traders. The actual number is in the thousands but that’s a bit too painful to run.