Villages, Towns and Cities - Urban Settlements

Under ‘Villages, Towns and Cities’ there’s the description of Revenue vs Expenses and the Average Monthly Revenue Table (which is a Net Revenue figure, according to the text).
Having plugged the numbers step by step into a spreadsheet, I’m struggling to see how they tally with the table in two ways:

  1. The numbers on the table are slightly rounded (which is fine given the explanation in another thread about this using ‘average’ settlement sizes)
  2. The numbers only apply if the Urban Settlement is in a Civilised Domain.
    For example, a 100 Family Village generates a mighty 16gp/month - which tallys close enough to the table. However, if that Village is in a Borderlands or Wilderness Domain - where the ruler isn’t paying taxes, the Net Revenue is 136gp.
    Am I doing something glaringly wrong here?
    It seems that a self-starter independent ruler of a city state is, from the table, getting short-changed by being assumed to pay tax to a higher authority that may not exist.

James, you are of course correct!
That said, here was my reasoning:

  1. Historically the vast majority of rulers paid tribute to someone. Even independent city-states were often only nominally so, and had to pay tribute to the local superpower in some manner.
  2. An independent PC domain shouldn’t be using this system as they’d use the full rules.
  3. A campaign centered around a truly independent city-state might want to flesh out the city-state in more detail.
  4. If it’s not worth fleshing out the city-state, it’s probably not worth worrying about the gp difference.

Thanks Alex, your reasoning makes perfect sense :slight_smile:
Given your reasoning, should the table come with a note that says ‘This table is for quick reference and assumes that there’s a liege lord to pay and that the settlement is in a civilised or borderlands domain. If the settlement is a PC settlement, you should calculate the revenue using the full system’ or something like that.
Word count issues aside, there’s value in telling people when they should be using that table, to avoid confusing - or perhaps remove the table from that chapter completely because it’s effectively repeated in Chapter 10, and any PC who is going to engage with the domain growth and creation rules is likely to want exact figures given the time investment they’ve already put in.