Advice on Campaign

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Aigol

I was curious if what it gives seems reasonable

The results it gives are probably not blatantly impossible. With my historian hat on, I'd probably find all manner of things wrong with it (notably, it mixes numbers from a variety of sources over time without much apparent attention to the underlying social, political, economic, and technological basis on which those numbers rest), but with my gamer hat on, I recognize that playing a roleplaying game, playing an economic simulation of a kingdom, and researching history are three different amusements, and I'm best off picking one to focus on.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

As for GURPS books, Low-Tech and Low Tech Companions I and III will probably be useful for you.

Plus the most recent issue of Pyramid. That said, the Low Tech material works from the ground up (quite literally, in the case of the agriculture rules), so there's a vast amount of work to extrapolate the rules and numbers we provide with individual characters in mind to cover societies as a whole.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Chicken Butchers and Butchers as a useful distinction?

This is an example of what I was saying about mixing stuff from different sources without worrying about what it all means. I don't doubt that it's a mere professional distinction, based on listed membership in the poulterers guild somewhere vs. membership in the butchers guild.

[Aigol]

Thanks , yeah I will probably use this as a starting point and I find the part about how many settlements there are particularly useful as I could never figure a good approximation of population and how many cities I should have.


As another question, for roads would it mainly be just connecting the towns and cities with less used trails connecting the villages to a main road, or would travelling from one of the villages be mainly just overland traqvel without a real road to follow?

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Aigol

As another question, for roads would it mainly be just connecting the towns and cities with less used trails connecting the villages to a main road, or would travelling from one of the villages be mainly just overland traqvel without a real road to follow?

In my campaign, the only roads that count as such for overland travel are major highways that get noted on the world map. Traveling from any mapped town to the next (since the ones shown on the map are all larger towns with 2,000 or more population) I rule to be base overland travel, as if over even ground as the party uses trails and rough roads. If they cut out on their own in a civilized nation's borders, they move even slower but still have a good chance of running across hamlets and minor villages that don't feature on maps.

[Aigol]

To expand on one of my original questions about size of military forces, did a standing army make up proportionally more of the population than modern armies do?

I ask because I am comparing to the numbers I have here on modern military

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...of_troops#List

it lists per 1000 capita but dividing by 10 gives me a percent and mos countries seem to have around .5 to 1.5 % of population for active service and a small smattering of countries around 2-3% including countries like Israel with mandatory service.

I understand the medieval wartime numbers would likely be higher since they had more power to draft than many modern countries do

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Aigol

To expand on one of my original questions about size of military forces, did a standing army make up proportionally more of the population than modern armies do?

I ask because I am comparing to the numbers I have here on modern military

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...of_troops#List

it lists per 1000 capita but dividing by 10 gives me a percent and mos countries seem to have around .5 to 1.5 % of population for active service and a small smattering of countries around 2-3% including countries like Israel with mandatory service.

I understand the medieval wartime numbers would likely be higher since they had more power to draft than many modern countries do

Ancient armies are certainly more of a percentage of the population than modern ones. They required less civilian support for one, and they had much broader responsibilities. Armies in most of the ancient (and fantasy) world were responsible for broad construction projects, as well as duties that normally fall under police jurisdiction today. Also, the slowness with which ancient armies were mustered and deployed meant that they had to have a more generalized purpose for the nation's security.

[Aigol]

As an aside does anyone know of (hopefully) simple to use software I could use to make a map o5 a kingsom I stat up like this, preferably something that I can measure distances so I can get scaling to where I want it to be?






And very unrelated is the Gurps hex 1 yard side to side or vertex to vertex?

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Aigol

As an aside does anyone know of (hopefully) simple to use software I could use to make a map o5 a kingsom I stat up like this, preferably something that I can measure distances so I can get scaling to where I want it to be?

If you're looking for something artistic, you could try using any layers based art program. I made this with photoshop, for instance. Photoshop has a measurement tool, as do most nicer art programs.

If you want something more interactive than artistic, though, you could use any given VTT. Even if you don't have the players use it, a lot of GMs like them as visual aids and to help keep position straight without using models.

And very unrelated is the Gurps hex 1 yard side to side or vertex to vertex?

That's 1 yard from the center of one hex to another.

[Aigol]

Originally Posted by Dunadin777

If you want some specific numbers on Kingdom outputs, I can share the specifics of my own approach. But for now here's my general approach. Using GURPS City Stats as inspiration, I took the population of the region or kingdom, and then multiplied this by the average wealth of that populace--for this scale I used half-values of the GURPS wealth levels, so there's a step halfway between average and struggling, average and comfortable, etc. I then assumed some arbitary tax level (5-60%, from CR0 hippies to CR6 autocrats), modified by corruption, and there you have a rough level of the wealth of that kingdom.

By half steps do you mean that you have additional levels to spread out the possible income amounts or do you mean if a kingdom is average wealth you take the middleground between average and strggling or do you take the middle between average and comfortable or is it more of a whatever fits your game type thing?

[Dunadin777]

Originally Posted by Aigol

By half steps do you mean that you have additional levels to spread out the possible income amounts or do you mean if a kingdom is average wealth you take the middleground between average and strggling or do you take the middle between average and comfortable or is it more of a whatever fits your game type thing?

I take the average between the two levels, so between Average and Struggling I have Avg-1, which is 75% of Average Wealth. Between Average and Comfortable there's Avg+1, which is 150% of Average Wealth. I find that on a realistic medieval continuum no nation is likely to fall outside of the range from
Poor to Comfortable, so this gives a total of 7 granular options as opposed to the RAW four. It also makes the wealth jumps a bit more gradual, too, and describes a situation in which, say, half of the majority of the population is in one wealth bracket and the other half is in the next--then I use the half Wealth value.

[Aigol]

Oh I see now.

I was taking alook at mass combat to maybe use that to figure out how much a kingdom of given size could afford to support and making some arbitrary assumptions it seems like it can come close depending on how much I have the kingdom spend on military force but I'm at the place now where I like playing with the numbers but I'm not sure if it will really matter/ pay off in an actual game


Along with this though do you need a logistic force if you aren't actually at war with anyone? Is the logistic force necessary just to keep barracks/castles etc properly stocked/maintained?