Image courtesy pixabay.com, provided under Creative Commons 0 license

Disaster has struck, and the laptop that I have been using to do – well, everything – has lost it’s visual display. It’s possible that this is simply a new symptom of the battery power problem that it’s been experiencing for some time, or it might be some new devilry.

This problem is complicated by the fact that it’s the only reasonably-modern computer in the house that recognizes my USB modem, so I have also lost almost all internet connectivity. I’m hoping to resolve that sooner rather than later, but it might be that the only way that I have been able to let you read these words is by utilizing an internet cafe for the upload. If that’s the case, it’s not something that I’m going to be able to do for very long. Look for an update at the end of the article that will advise on the latest information.

It also means that I no longer have access to the spell-checker that I have been using – so I apologize in advance for any misspellings!

How large should a kingdom be?

It’s not as straightforward a question as it seems. But if you look at the examples provided in most fantasy literature, you would get the impression that most of them are the size of modern France, or Germany, or China. A few might make the kingdoms the size of Great Britain, or India. Some have Empires the size of Europe, or even Europe plus the Middle East.

These are fine if you have a good reason for that size and know what you are doing. Most people don’t have the first idea. Historically, Kingdoms were often the size of countries like Belgium or Luxembourg or Switzerland. Italy once comprised several city-states (7 I think, but I’m not sure and without the internet, can’t check). Of course, these were not always actually named “Kingdoms” by the locals, though that is the way the word might be translated today.

Over time, marriages and conquests unified these into larger administrative nationalities. These were often conquests from the outside, forcing a new relationship onto the conquered peoples – and then falling apart. Kingdoms the size of France or Britain or Italy couldn’t exist without the Roman Empire.

Another mistake that a lot of people make are having firm, defined borders. Unless you’re on a major trade route or invasion path or something of that nature, borders – like citizenship – are rather more vague and unofficial. Technically, a border might be precisely defined – but there is a difference between what you can claim and what claims you can enforce.

Kingdoms, in order to be practical, need to be administered. The decrees of the throne have to be enforced, the taxes have to be collected. There are practical limits to how much of this is possible.

Transport Modes

Transport modes are vitally important to determining the size of a Kingdom or Realm. It’s one full third of the story.

Game systems frequently give movement rates for horses and other mounts but don’t write about how long they can sustain this rate of movement, and that’s what dictates how far they can travel. The same is true for characters.

I do most of my regional maps at a scale of 6 miles to the hex. That gives a daily movement rate on foot on roads, paths, and trails of 4 hexes or 5 for a forced march. Horses travel about 6 hexes in a day unless you change mounts regularly – which messengers often do but which is not an option for military and commercial traffic. I then adjust these movement rates for terrain and roads – -1 for a light impediment, -2 for 1 serious impediment or two light impediments in composition, -3 (minimum 1) for two serious impediments. Boats heading upstream can travel 2-4 hexes, those traveling downstream 4-8.

Another way of looking at these numbers is that an official can travel two hexes from his administration center and back again in a day. Every two hexes and changes in policy, in laws, in politics, are all a day out of date and a day weaker.

Roads & Settlements

The quality of roads is already factored into the above, but this is sufficiently important that it’s worth re-emphasizing. The quality of the roads is a key factor in determining how large a nation can be.

Settlements tend to be one day removed from each other. The average community in the middle ages was about 2000 people. As it happens, thats about the same size as the town I grew up in, so I can relate to such communities almost without thinking about it. Everyone knows all, or almost all, of the businesses in town. At least a third of the town is known by name, about half of that number by their first names.

The dominant factor when it comes to town size is the ability for food to reach the community. A ring one hex deep and seven hexes in total area would be enough to feed a community of 1000 people – if the people involved in the agriculture didn’t have to eat, themselves. To allow for this factor, we need to push out another hex in radius, adding another 12 hexes to the agricultural base, of which six hexes can be stored against future famines or shipped to feed a larger community elsewhere. The other 13 hexes worth are consumed locally (including stores for next year’s planting).

This requirement can be halved for especially fertile land, and doubled for especially poor croplands.

By an absolutely amazing coincidence, this is the same distance over which direct daily supervision is possible, and half the distance between communities.

Which means that a nation of arable land that is fully occupied with settlements delivers 6 hexes out of 13 needed for every 1000 citizens – two such towns are almost but not quite enough to support an extra 1000 people. Which should make it clear that towns with 2000 people have a substantial level of malnourishment in a poor social class.

The average size of 2000 people also means that a lot of communities are going to be smaller. In fact, communities tend to roughly follow a geometric expansion: 62, 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, 16000, 32000, 64000, 128000, and so on. For any community size, the next size down tend to be 5-20 times as numerous (these are very rough guidelines only).

The important thing to note about such communities is the number of hexes of arable-land-equivalent produce they have left over, because that is where the food supply for those communities larger than 2000 people come from.

Using these numbers, you can easily count up the number of farm hexes ‘left over’ from each community size category and how many of the larger communities they can support. Twenty towns of 1000 people on arable land gives a total of 20×6=120 hexes ‘spare’. At 13 hexes per thousand people that’s 9000 people that can be fed adequately, or 18000 people that can be fed at typical levels, on top of the base 2000. So one community of 20,000 people can be fed by the land around it and 20 communities around that.

The best approach is to work the size list from one size to the next – how much excess food out, how much excess food required. The geographic size and the relative quality of the land will thereby dictate the size of the communities contained within a kingdom.

These numbers also take into consideration the likelihood that some communities – perhaps as many as 1 in 4 – will generate some non-edible commodity. Logging and Quarries and Mines and so on. Fishing can also bump up the numbers considerably for communities on the coast, or which contain major river systems because a fishing fleet can exploit more hexes, and can also yield greater food densities (i.e. each fishing hex counts as 1.5 ‘arable land’ hexes). That means that a coastal fishing community can exploit areas up to four hexes away – if half the are around the town is water, that’s a total of 32 fishing hexes which is the equivalent of 48 ‘arable land’ hexes – plus the 5 hexes of arable land that they actually have for a grand total of 53. They need 7 of those hexes to feed themselves; the other 46 can either go to supporting a larger fishing community, or be shipped to support a number of other communities.

In practice, however, with communities 4 hexes apart, perhaps even less and smaller in size along the coast, no one community is going to get it’s entire potential allocation – their neighbors will get some of it. Trying to figure out which community gets how much sea is a waste of your time; simply add up the number of sea hexes within reach of any port and divide by the number of coastal communities to determine how much ‘sea’ each one gets, and hence, how much they can contribute to the population size of the kingdom.

Note that all this is a far simpler and less accurate method than others that I have seen. It’s a compromise between accuracy and speed.

Administrative Radius

Now for the fun part: Every whole number of towns supplying food for a single larger community can be considered under the control of that community. The lands administered by a noble are thus a function of the size of the largest community within that Noble’s domain.

It’s relatively easy to create a list of courtly ranks and allocate communities of a certain size to these ranks. A town of 4000 might have a count, 8000 an earl, 16000 a duke, 32000 a prince, and 64000 a King – or whatever. The important thing is to set King to the largest community that the Kingdom you have mapped out can support, then spread the lesser noble ranks through the rest. Titles in the capital city tend to get a “bump’ of one grade, so bear that in mind.

A Kingdom is all the lands beholden to the most highly-ranked noble, plus all the lands beholden to those below him in rank who have any part of their domains within the King’s administrative reach. Kingdoms thus tend to stretch out along rivers and trade routes, and be walled off by natural barriers.

Efficiency

The third major factor in the size of a Kingdom or Realm is much harder to quantify, and is far more abstract. All sorts of things go into it, from literacy and numeracy rates to theology to philosophy of government, but it can be summed up in a single pair of words: Administrative Efficiency. If the bureaucracy is poor, with records held only locally, administrative radii are of the size indicated. With each increase in efficiency, the radii expand. Good record-keeping permits accurate tallies of resources, incomes, and taxation. That’s how an Empire the size of the Romans becomes possible, and how nations the size of those larger geographic entities can function.

The British Empire achieved its growth by centralizing broad policy decisions and placing daily oversight in the hands of governors with considerable freedom of action – then making sure that those governors were loyal. China became the size it is today because of the Imperial Bureaucracy that was capable of administering a nation of that size, and through having sufficient military force under that control to expand. If the Bureaucracy wasn’t up to the job, lands would be conquered and the conquerors would then create their own little fiefdoms, effectively fragmenting the resulting nation back into manageable chunks.

With every hex you travel away from the administrative center, control weakens. That’s the lesson of the Roman conquest of England – they could get as far as Hadrian’s Wall, but no further.

This barely scratches the surface; there are a great many more complexities involved in Kingdom size. But as generalizations go, it’s a useful one.

Update:
I have been in contact with my ISP. They tell me that because my modem is more than 7 years old, installation disks are no longer available, but because I have been a customer for so long, they will ship me a replacement modem that my computers will be able to access, free. (It will also be fully NBN-compatible, which won’t mean anything to anyone outside Australia but which is a big deal, locally – without it, I would have had to replace the modem again next year.

In the meantime, I’ve been able to get a very slow internet connection happening with a very slow computer which has only an even slower and more limited browser – but which should be good enough for me to upload this post and the one that’s due to be published later this week, which I have also written already.

Normal Campaign Mastery service should be resumed by the weekend :)