Little question about Realms, Domains and Vassals.

Hey guys, I hope all is well in the background and ACKS is imminently going to appear on my doorstep :wink:
I know this is massively late in the day, but I’ve been tinkering with domains again and something new is niggling. It’s about realms splitting into domains and the hierarchy – all chapter 10 stuff.
Let’s say you’ve got a Marquis. According to the Realms by Type table his realm consists of 4-6 domains. We also know he has 4-6 vassal Barons. Let’s say he has 6. Each of those Barons has his own domain, so that’s 6 domains out of a possible 4-6. Where does the Marquis live?
My worry is that the subtraction of personal domains hasn’t been taken into account when breaking a realm down into vassal domains at the next step.
I’m already hitting myself with the ‘it doesn’t really matter’ stick, but the logical mathematician in me is balking at trying to make 2+2 = 5. Could someone help me understand it please?

I noticed that too. My solution was that the Marquis has a maximum of 5 Barons, he keeps the 6th slot empty for practical reasons (like, to gift to the PCs…)

I don’t think 2+2=5. According to the Realms by Type table, the Marquis’s domain consists of 1 March and 4-6 Baronies. The March has 320 families (personal domain) and then each Barony has 160 families. At the low end the realm population is (320+4x160=) 960 families and at the high end its (320+6x160) 1,280 families.
At a larger scale, a Duchy would have 1 Duchy, 4-6 Counties, 16-36 Marches, 64-216 Baronies. The Duchy has 1,500 families, each County has 780 families, each March has 320 families, each Barony has 160 families. At the low end a duchy would have (1,500+4x780+16x320+64x160=1500+3120+5120+10240=) 19,980 families [table rounds this to 20,000]. At the high end the duchy would have (1500+6x780+36x320+216x160=1500+4680+11520+34560)= 52,260 [table rounds to 52,000].
I think the appearance of faulty math is created because you are ignoring the “1” digit in the top-level realm.

Hi Alex,
Thanks for responding. I’m sorry to say I’m still not clear.
The ‘Realms by Type’ table doesn’t say that the Marquis’s domain consists of 1 March and 4-6 Baronies. The ‘Political Divisions of Realms’ table does, so I’m assuming that’s what you meant.
I’m also thinking and calculating in domains rather than families, so hopefully we’re not ending up at cross purposes.
If I’ve understood you though, it means that the total number of domains for a Marquis should include their personal domain, which gives a total of 5-7 and which means that the ‘Realm Domains’ column on the ‘Realms by Type’ table is misleading or incorrect at every level except the Barony.
Following your larger scale example, the total number of Domains in a Duchy Realm would be 85-259, with as few as 20,000 families inhabiting 85 Domains to as many as 52,000 inhabiting 259. The ‘Realms by Type’ table lists a Duchy as having 64-216 domains - which is the number of Baronies a Duchy has on the ‘Political Divisions of Realms’ table.
I hope that helps me be clearer. I’ve got a nasty cold at the moment, so my thinking is fugged up anyway.

A marquis doesn’t need a barony. You ask if a Liege Lord has 4 baronies ruled by 4 vassal barons, then where does he keep his castle? The answr is he puts his castle wherever he wants because all 4 of the baronies are “his” and he doesn’t need a 5th “barony” for himself, he’s got one big duchy made up of 4 baronies.
He’s the CEO of a company with four vice-presidents who each run a division of his company.

James, you are correct, I was referring to the Political Divisions of Realms.
And now that I am looking at the correct chart, I see the error! The realm domains column on “Realms by Type” is simply wrong. The correct number for that column should be the sum of each row on the Political Divisions of Realms table, not simply the last column on that table.
EXAMPLE:
Barony should be 1
March should be 5-7
County should be 21-43
Duchy should be 85-259
Principality should be 341-1,555
Kingdom should be 1,365-9,331
Empire should be 5,461-55,987
I just double-checked on my spreadsheet and the number of domains is correct therein, so it looks like I just typed the wrong set of numbers into the word document.
If you seen any other errors, please let me know. I will fix it in this chart and in the one in the Campaign section. (You’ve found this error just in time for us to fix it in the final PDF. Phew!)

That’s great to know Alex. I thought I was going mad. If I spot any other errors in the next short day or so I’ll let you know asap.

Me again!
Some questions of curiosity.
The ‘Revenue by Realm Type’ table on page 259 (Chapter 10) gives the size of the Realm rulers Personal Domain, in families. What assumptions and/or calculations are made to reach that value?
It’s interesting me for two reasons.

  1. At Kingdom and Empire level, the Personal Domain is 12,500 families, which is the maximum number of families a Civilised 24 Mile hex can support, established in Chapter 7. That makes complete sense - if you’re the King you will live in the safest, most civilised area, and people are likely to want to live there, hence the ‘maximum’ population possible for your maximally sized personal domain. Yet, there’s no indication that the personal domain could be Urban, which I find interesting.
  2. At Barony level, Baron Harkonnens personal domain is 160 families. The total domain size is 120-200 families. So there’s a couple of things here as well. Firstly, I’m assuming that if the domain size is less than 160 families then the personal domain is, of course, less than 160 as well. Secondly, if the population is 200 families, what is the status of the 40 families in excess of the Barons personal domain?
    As an addendum to this, in the thread where Patricians and Manors are so cruelly subjected to a metaphorical Death Star, Alex says:
    “Going forward, the barony will be the default smallest domain. Baronies will now cover 16 square miles and have 160 peasant families (so the net population is unchanged). They will now generate about 600gp per month for their barons. The elimination of the manor makes the barony the foundation for all larger realms. It means, for instance, that an empire is made up of 4000-46,000 baronies, rather than 16,000 to 280,000 manors.
    There are other small ramifications of this change that show up in the rules, but by and large it should be painless and probably unnoticeable in casual play.
    Why am I making this change? It’s largely for convenience of mapping and movement during campaign play. ACKS assumes a 6-mile map for regional play. Baronies nicely occupy a 6-mile hex. Thus, with a barony as the foundational domain, the GM can work out the “average barony” in a realm and know, more-or-less, that there is 1 stronghold with 1 baron present in each 6m hex of settled land. This is very helpful for wilderness hexcrawls, and particularly important for Domains at War campaigns where armies are maneuvering across the regional map.”

A 6 mile hex covers approximately 32 square miles of land, whilst the Barony is stated to cover 16 square miles. What’s the status of the other 16 square miles of land in that hex?
Based on the tables on page 259 the implication is that 2 baronies will exist in any given 6 Mile hex (see, the row for March on the ‘Realms by Type’ table - a March that consists of 4-6 Baronies takes up 3-4 6 Mile hexes. The maths says 16 * 4 = 64 (2 Hexes) + 1 Hex for the March itself, or 16 * 6 = 96 (3 Hexes) + 1 for the March.
Also - the Barony row on the same table says it could have a size of 12-20 square miles, which given the quoted area above, could be incorrect. I don’t know.
Counter to that, the block quote above says explicitly that “Baronies nicely occupy a 6-mile hex. Thus, with a barony as the foundational domain, the GM can work out the “average barony” in a realm and know, more-or-less, that there is 1 stronghold with 1 baron present in each 6m hex of settled land.” The fairly clear implication there is that it’s 1 Barony to 1 6 Mile Hex.
Hence some confusion on my part.
If you’re mapping large scale first (which ACKS suggests is the ‘correct’ way to do it) and then working out population, realm sizes, etc… etc… then as you come down to the Barony level my experience is suggesting that you need twice as many 6 mile hexes as you thought you’d need to populate with all the Barons generated, or you need half as many Barons as you thought.

Oh, and I just spotted that the line “They will now generate about 600gp per month for their barons” suggests that the Domain Income / Month entry on the “Revenue By Realm Type” table, which currently reads 450-750gp, may be incorrect.

I don’t know about the square mileage issue, but to my mind saying a barony has 120-200 families and saying, shorthand, that the have 160 families is a wash. Likewise, “about 600gp per month” and “450-750gp”. It just indicates even distribution around the mean.

I found a table in Domains at War that I think is impacted by the error we identified on the “Realms by Type” table.
On Page 11, the ‘Vassal Troops by Realm Size’ table has a column called ‘Number of Domains’. I think the figures in this column refer to the total number of domains in a realm of a given type, and would need adjusting upwards so it’s not just listing the number of Baronies.