Domain Rules

[Username17]

But in D&D a month's worth of mage rituals/crafting will be 30 magic items and possibly hundreds of rituals with some spare time and spells to go take care of other local problems.

That depends on the edition of the game. In AD&D, preparing spells takes 10 minutes per spell level, meaning that at the higher levels preparing your spells for an adventuring day is itself a task that takes more than a day. When they added psionic enchantments (10th level spells) the preparation times were even longer and an adventuring day was something you could manage less than once per week.

In 5th edition, it takes more than half a year to craft a "rare" item, and those are the things you can craft at 6th level. There are two tiers of magic items past that which take exponentially longer (in the actual math sense of the word, in that the exponent is 10).

Even in 3rd edition, making a +3 shield takes a week and a half. The only edition where it is literally true that you can pop a major magic item out of fairy dust and a can-do attitude in the middle of an otherwise busy adventuring day is 4th edition. And that's the dumbest edition!

-Username17

[maglag]

That's only one edition where the party can't just spam rituals all month long. In 3rd, 4th and 5th the wizard can still recover every spell slot every day and go around mass-producing zombies/walls of stone/scrying/mending and whatnot

And in 3rd edition there's cheap stuff like the Dedicated Wright that can increase their monthly magic item crafting beyond even 4e's rate. One week and a half for one +3 Shield? How about one week and a half for 15* +3 shields and the wizard themselves is actually only busy for one of those days and can go spam rituals for the other days?

*Each wright needs 1 hour setup time, day has 15 hours but one hour for the wizard to recover their spells and another 8 of rest. There's ways of reducing rest time in 3rd edition of course but this is already enough to outpace even 4e monthly crafting rate.

[OgreBattle]

I like gameplay examples, especially when a big book of rules begins with them.

So what would be a brief gameplay example of ideal domain rules?

[Username17]

In 3rd, 4th and 5th the wizard can still recover every spell slot every day and go around mass-producing zombies/walls of stone/scrying/mending and whatnot

But doing that isn't a big deal. Your limit of zombies is fixed, being able to cast the spell every day doesn't change your zombie limit. You can cast Wall of stone every day, but you're not exactly casting Three Red Seconds. At 12th level, each casting of Wall of stone makes 100 cubic feet of stone. That's a significant amount of stone, but making an actual castle takes like, a lot of those. Coral Castle is made out of 1000 tonnes of stone, which works out to 14,700 cubic feet - or 147 castings of Wall of Stone. At 12th level, that would probably take you about 30 days even if you prepared Wall of Stone in your 6th level slots.

But Coral Castle is also an eccentric rich guy's house - essentially a wizard's tower. A stout curtain wall of a castle built for war is 40 feet high and up to 30 feet thick. That would require 12 castings of Wall of Stone per foot of the length of the curtain wall. If you wanted to put one of those around a castle the size of say Prague Castle, that's about 55 thousand castings.

3e Wizards can do some pretty amazing things, but people often get lost in hyperbole. It's impressive that a 3e Wizard can take five years off and make a full size castle with their bare hands - but building a castle in five years is something you could probably just do by spending money and putting peasants to work.

I like gameplay examples, especially when a big book of rules begins with them.

So what would be a brief gameplay example of ideal domain rules?

The purpose of rules in an RPG is to answer questions. If you don't have questions about what happens, you don't need the rules to do anything. In most cases I expect the player characters will enter the domain game by taking over an already existing region. As such, the very most important question is 'How much is this land actually worth?' From the standpoint of D&D characters that question has two parts: how many troops you can get, and how many gold pieces you can get.

And I think it's imperative that these questions have both simple and complex answers. The simple answer is that when you get acknowledged as the new authorities in the Orcish Moorlands that there's a population and a development level and you can ballpark what kind of upkeep costs there are each season and how much tax revenue there is at the end of the year at whatever tax rate you set. The complex answer is that you can go through each hex and total up how many farms you can have and how many you actually do have and how much urban population you have and track you regional production of gold and food and spare manpower.

But it's important that you be able to get fast and simple answers to these questions without adding up columns because you may need to get questions about the relative outputs of other areas that you won't have the time or inclination to write up a potential hex crawl for in the timeframe the question is asked in.

-Username17

[maglag]

In 3rd, 4th and 5th the wizard can still recover every spell slot every day and go around mass-producing zombies/walls of stone/scrying/mending and whatnot

But doing that isn't a big deal. Your limit of zombies is fixed, being able to cast the spell every day doesn't change your zombie limit. You can cast Wall of stone every day, but you're not exactly casting Three Red Seconds. At 12th level, each casting of Wall of stone makes 100 cubic feet of stone. That's a significant amount of stone, but making an actual castle takes like, a lot of those. Coral Castle is made out of 1000 tonnes of stone, which works out to 14,700 cubic feet - or 147 castings of Wall of Stone. At 12th level, that would probably take you about 30 days even if you prepared Wall of Stone in your 6th level slots.

But Coral Castle is also an eccentric rich guy's house - essentially a wizard's tower. A stout curtain wall of a castle built for war is 40 feet high and up to 30 feet thick. That would require 12 castings of Wall of Stone per foot of the length of the curtain wall. If you wanted to put one of those around a castle the size of say Prague Castle, that's about 55 thousand castings.

3e Wizards can do some pretty amazing things, but people often get lost in hyperbole. It's impressive that a 3e Wizard can take five years off and make a full size castle with their bare hands - but building a castle in five years is something you could probably just do by spending money and putting peasants to work.

Prague castle officially took over a millenium to build with peasants and gold, from 870 to 1929. So the wizard completing it in just 5 years would be more than 200 times faster, that's two orders of magnitude faster.

And 30 inch thick was for the thickest walls, but thinner stone walls did exist and work just as fine for most situations. More in particular, the DMG gives stats for 3-ft thick Hewn Stone which is already a whooping 540 HP and break DC 50. A 3-ft thick wall of stone would be the same HP and DC 72 to break. A fortification of 3-ft thick stone would be much faster to produce by the wizard, and still keep almost many threats as the 30-ft thick wall out just fine.

But wizards can't just do stone walls and undead. There's also stuff like Fabricate and Permanent Image and Planar Binding (capless) and the list goes on.

I like gameplay examples, especially when a big book of rules begins with them.

So what would be a brief gameplay example of ideal domain rules?

The purpose of rules in an RPG is to answer questions. If you don't have questions about what happens, you don't need the rules to do anything. In most cases I expect the player characters will enter the domain game by taking over an already existing region. As such, the very most important question is 'How much is this land actually worth?' From the standpoint of D&D characters that question has two parts: how many troops you can get, and how many gold pieces you can get.

And I think it's imperative that these questions have both simple and complex answers. The simple answer is that when you get acknowledged as the new authorities in the Orcish Moorlands that there's a population and a development level and you can ballpark what kind of upkeep costs there are each season and how much tax revenue there is at the end of the year at whatever tax rate you set. The complex answer is that you can go through each hex and total up how many farms you can have and how many you actually do have and how much urban population you have and track you regional production of gold and food and spare manpower.

But it's important that you be able to get fast and simple answers to these questions without adding up columns because you may need to get questions about the relative outputs of other areas that you won't have the time or inclination to write up a potential hex crawl for in the timeframe the question is asked in.

-Username17

So ok, first question, how does the party (or anybody else) gets to count as in charge of a region? Because even if you kill the moorlands orc Warboss, there's probably a bunch of moorland orc Nobz in line for succession, and some or all of those may take their followers and go into hiding/guerilla against the invaders rather than bending the knee or request honor duels right away.

[Username17]

Prague castle officially took over a millenium to build with peasants and gold, from 870 to 1929

No. Prague Castle was built and rebuilt many times over a thousand year period, and various additions and retrofittings were made repeatedly.

But let's talk just one bit: the Hunger Wall. It was created over a 2 year period from 1360. It's 360,000 cubic feet plus there were some attached towers and some sections that have been torn down. So that bit is three thousand, six hundred castings of wall of stone. So if you can manage five castings of Wall of Stone, you can make the wall part (minus the bastions and the gates) in 2 years. Same as Emperor Charles IV managed as a Keynesian makework project with bread and silver and starving peasants.

It's impressive, but it's not world shatteringly impressive. Still, it's enough that you'd expect various out of the way caverns and valleys to be filled with some very weird Minecraft works made by various liches and Elf wizards and such.

So ok, first question, how does the party (or anybody else) gets to count as in charge of a region? Because even if you kill the moorlands orc Warboss, there's probably a bunch of moorland orc Nobz in line for succession, and some or all of those may take their followers and go into hiding/guerilla against the invaders rather than bending the knee or request honor duels right away.

The question of whether you own the Orcish Moorlands is one that can be approached from either the direction of the RPG or from the direction of Domain Management. That is, the party becoming the primogen council of the Orcish Moorlands is a plausible entry into Domain Management that could happen as an adventure reward for things you do in the heroic scale adventures. But also too you could march an army into the Moorlands and conquer the place in a three month conquest campaign with some major battles. Both need to be viable.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Unless being a wizard implies being an architect, you'd probably want to hire an expert for that bit, otherwise your castle falls down halfway through building it.

RAW for Wall of Stone, looks like while you could make an equivalent volume of stone, there might be problems getting it the right shape.

[maglag]

Wizards are Int-based, they can do the math. There's plenty of spells to buff skill checks too.

Prague castle officially took over a millenium to build with peasants and gold, from 870 to 1929

No. Prague Castle was built and rebuilt many times over a thousand year period, and various additions and retrofittings were made repeatedly.

No. Any repairs, additions and retrofittings are officially counted for a castle's total building time.

What's even the alternative exactly? Just counting how long you take to set the first stone is set and then going "yep, the mighty castle is finished, everything else will just be additions and retrofits so they don't count for the total building time".

Things are finished when they're finished, not a moment sooner.

But let's talk just one bit: the Hunger Wall. It was created over a 2 year period from 1360. It's 360,000 cubic feet plus there were some attached towers and some sections that have been torn down. So that bit is three thousand, six hundred castings of wall of stone. So if you can manage five castings of Wall of Stone, you can make the wall part (minus the bastions and the gates) in 2 years. Same as Emperor Charles IV managed as a Keynesian makework project with bread and silver and starving peasants.

Yes, Emperor Charles, with vast lands and millions of peasants at his command.

I'm pretty sure that your average domain ruler will have significantly less peasants and gold at hand than one of the greatest rulers in history.

It's impressive, but it's not world shatteringly impressive. Still, it's enough that you'd expect various out of the way caverns and valleys to be filled with some very weird Minecraft works made by various liches and Elf wizards and such.

And chasm/river bridges. You know how long it takes to build a rock-solid stone bridge with peasants? I'm not sure, but I bet it's certainly more than half a day needed for the wizard.

Or even better, flying castles are on the wizard's menu as well. How long does it take for the peasants to build one of those again? How many flying castles emperor Charles even built during his reign? I can't seem to find it on the web.

So ok, first question, how does the party (or anybody else) gets to count as in charge of a region? Because even if you kill the moorlands orc Warboss, there's probably a bunch of moorland orc Nobz in line for succession, and some or all of those may take their followers and go into hiding/guerilla against the invaders rather than bending the knee or request honor duels right away.

The question of whether you own the Orcish Moorlands is one that can be approached from either the direction of the RPG or from the direction of Domain Management. That is, the party becoming the primogen council of the Orcish Moorlands is a plausible entry into Domain Management that could happen as an adventure reward for things you do in the heroic scale adventures. But also too you could march an army into the Moorlands and conquer the place in a three month conquest campaign with some major battles. Both need to be viable.

-Username17

Shouldn't good old assassination/intrigue be on the menu as well? What if you charm/dominate the current rulers? That's a pretty big classic.

And also just how big are those domains supposed to be? Because if Emperor "rules over millions on half the continent" Charles is meant to be the basic example of a domain ruler, those are some pretty big damn domains, when I thought we were talking regular D&D/dominions scale where a domains headcount is just on the (tens of) thousands.

[Thaluikhain]

Wizards are Int-based, they can do the math. There's plenty of spells to buff skill checks too.

Being smart enough to be an architect doesn't necessarily make someone an architect though. But you might just want to abstract that away, I guess, in the interest of not having to go to magic architect school which seems either really boring or something that only gets interesting when totally unrelated dark wizarding happens.

(Actually, that sounds like the premise of a TV show parodying Harry Potter that only gets as far as the pilot)

No. Any repairs, additions and retrofittings are officially counted for a castle's total building time.

What's even the alternative exactly? Just counting how long you take to set the first stone is set and then going "yep, the mighty castle is finished, everything else will just be additions and retrofits so they don't count for the total building time".

Things are finished when they're finished, not a moment sooner.

Er, that seems an odd way of "officially" counting things. Even if they kept mucking about with things for centuries, they still got to the stage of having a working castle long before that. Otherwise every castle that's got wifi has only finished being built within the last few years, if that.

[maglag]

Wizards are Int-based, they can do the math. There's plenty of spells to buff skill checks too.

Being smart enough to be an architect doesn't necessarily make someone an architect though. But you might just want to abstract that away, I guess, in the interest of not having to go to magic architect school which seems either really boring or something that only gets interesting when totally unrelated dark wizarding happens.

(Actually, that sounds like the premise of a TV show parodying Harry Potter that only gets as far as the pilot)

Knowledge(arquitecture) is a basic D&D skill that wizards can buy and have the spare skill points thanks to being Int-based. Even just dumping one skill point would be enough to get a significant result for any arquitecture stuff with other buffs.

No. Any repairs, additions and retrofittings are officially counted for a castle's total building time.

What's even the alternative exactly? Just counting how long you take to set the first stone is set and then going "yep, the mighty castle is finished, everything else will just be additions and retrofits so they don't count for the total building time".

Things are finished when they're finished, not a moment sooner.

Er, that seems an odd way of "officially" counting things. Even if they kept mucking about with things for centuries, they still got to the stage of having a working castle long before that. Otherwise every castle that's got wifi has only finished being built within the last few years, if that.

Stuff like Wifi isn't counted as a castle structure. After all I'm pretty sure Castle Prague has wifii, but its official finished date is 1929.

It also started as a simple walled church, and I would say it's really silly that said church being completed would count for the full prowess of Castle Prague as it is today. All those 30-inch walls, they took centuries to complete, over a millenium before it was over.

[deaddmwalking]

Things are finished when they're finished, not a moment sooner.

Nothing is ever finished - especially not Castles. When you complete to the plan, if you have money and resources you expand.

Castles are an early example of 'AGILE PROGRAMMING'. They start with a 'minimum viable product' and then they add additional features as they can. Motte and Bailey is a good example.

You start with a wooden keep and then you add the ditch and palisade. Then you upgrade the keep to a stone keep. Then you upgrade the walls to stone walls. Then you add more and more towers to make your wall better defended. Then you enclose another space and keep going, making it bigger and better.

Even if you built to completion and didn't modify your plans, it doesn't STOP costing you because you've completed it. There are upkeep costs, too.

[Username17]

I lived down the street from Prague Castle for several years. maglag very definitely doesn't know what he's talking about, and I don't understand why this part of the conversation is still going. I've been in Emperor Charles' throne room. It's a closet. I've seen his crown up close... it's not actually that impressive. He was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but that's functionally being chairman of the board of a very loose association of principalities. He was for practical purposes King of Bohemia, which at that time would include:

• Bohemia
• Lusatia
• Moravia
• Silesia
• Egerland
• Oberpfalz

Functionally, I would expect each of those regions of the Kingdom of Bohemia to be a province that the players could control in the Domain Management game. But I could definitely see chopping Lusatia up into Upper and Lower Lusatia for cultural reasons and chopping Bohemia proper into 2 or three pieces because it's bigger than Yorkshire and yet reasonably populous.

Anyway, the bottom line is that player characters should be able to hold significantly more than 6-8 provinces and also be a lot richer and more productive than historical 14th century Europeans. So the ability to spend 24 domain turns making most of a wall upgrade that the historical Kingdom of Bohemia managed while doing other things in the middle of a major famine event isn't actually that impressive.

Characters who have stone control magic should actually be able to do more than that in less time than a 3rd edition Wizard with access to Wall of Stone can manage. If that's your shtick, you should be able to put up a Hunger Wall with your stone magic in much less than 24 Domain Turns.

In general, I would say that if something is your shtick, you should be able to see real progress in a season or less. A Winter Witch should be able to make an ice tower in a month. A Grand Marshal should be able to raise basic troops in a month. 3e's magic outputs are too much if we're trying to worry about personal wealth and the cost of arrows, but they are too fiddly and small for the kinds of monthly realm actions you'd want to take.

-Username17

[Username17]

So the provinces in ACKS are ridiculously too small. The maximum is 16 hexes, which is 512 square miles. That's smaller than 15 of the 76 districts of modern day Czech Republic and almost precisely the same size as Tabor, one of the seven districts of Southern Bohemia. That's an area less than 25 miles across that you could hike across in a day if you were good at marching and didn't mind having sore feet afterward.

The 14 Regions of Czechia seem more reasonable, but are still ultimately too small. Seven times too small is often still too small. Upper Silesia, for example, is 117 hexes and is represented by a single province in Crusader Kings and could probably be a single province here as well. About the largest areas that I think makes sense to consider as a single province would be places like Volhynia in what is now Ukraine and Poland at 866 hexes. This gives a rough idea of a province being less than 900 hexes and at least 12 hexes (Hong Kong is 13, and I would be legit insulted by a province much smaller than that).

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I think that your idea of a domain should be flexible. A highly urban space with lots of people/skills (like Singapore/HongKong) might be a 'province' in your terms, while in the game of Risk Kamchatka is like 1/10 of the land-area and is a single territory.

Since domains can have different levels of output, it should be supported to have a large mostly wilderness domain (like the Louisiana Territory was when acquired by the United States) and turn it into more consolidated domains over time.

[Dean]

So the provinces in ACKS are ridiculously too small. The maximum is 16 hexes, which is 512 square miles. That's smaller than 15 of the 76 districts of modern day Czech Republic

I don't have information on how large an area a polis or barony might have controlled in the past but I'm confident that the sizes of modern countries and states will be a bad measure to weigh them against. Fantasy territories tend to be ludicrously small compared to those in the modern world and I am more interested in a system who's numbers work well when modeling Rohan or Corinth or Winterfell than when modeling modern day England.

[maglag]

I lived down the street from Prague Castle for several years. maglag very definitely doesn't know what he's talking about, and I don't understand why this part of the conversation is still going. I've been in Emperor Charles' throne room. It's a closet. I've seen his crown up close... it's not actually that impressive. He was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but that's functionally being chairman of the board of a very loose association of principalities. He was for practical purposes King of Bohemia, which at that time would include:

• Bohemia
• Lusitania
• Moravia
• Silesia
• Egerland
• Oberpfalz

Maybe if you hadn't spent so much time in Charles throne room you would've noticed that his domains in Europe were just a tiny fraction of his empire.



The Emperor's domains extended to roughly half of America plus Africa and Asian colonies.

It's really weird that you keep trying to sell emperor Charles as some average ruler when he was a top dog of his time by any measure.

It's even weirder if that's supposed to be the player's domain starting point. "Yeah, yesterday you were slaying rats but today you have dominion over lands accross all the main continents besides the smallest one".

[Chamomile]

Rohan and Winterfell are enormous. They're super sparsely detailed, but they're meant to be a significant chunk of an entire continent. Corinth is...an ancient Greek city state? Probably that name got recycled into some fantasy nation of significantly larger size, but Google is just getting hits for the historical city.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Maybe if you hadn't spent so much time in Charles throne room you would've noticed that his domains in Europe were just a tiny fraction of his empire.



The Emperor's domains extended to roughly half of America plus Africa and Asian colonies.

That's Charles V. The HRE whose throne room was in Prague was Charles IV, who died before Columbus was born.

[Mistborn]

Rohan and Winterfell are enormous. They're super sparsely detailed, but they're meant to be a significant chunk of an entire continent. Corinth is...an ancient Greek city state? Probably that name got recycled into some fantasy nation of significantly larger size, but Google is just getting hits for the historical city.

Witerfells domain is smaller that you'd think. Remember the Westeros is actually a feudal kingdom not a modern/early-modern nation-state populated be resistance fair extras the way many fantasy kingdoms are. House Stark are Kings/Lords Paramount of the North but they administer very little directly, instead they have lords who are sworn to them who themselves have their own domains.

A fanmade map showing the spheres of influence of the various noble houses of the North.

[Dean]

Corinth is...an ancient Greek city state? Probably that name got recycled into some fantasy nation of significantly larger size, but Google is just getting hits for the historical city.

I meant the Ancient Greek city state. I think a polis is more accurate representation of what places in a fantasy adventure world would look like than most entries in a forgotten realms gazetteer. Where the world around is wild and dangerous but then there’s city walls and inside those walls is a culture of shared traits and beliefs. The thing where fantasy writers will draw a line around an enormous area and call it Zhent is an incredibly anachronistic expression of their modern understandings of nations. If your kingdom contains troll fens and vampire ruled castles and thri-keen clutches then that’s not your kingdom and no one will call it that. They will call your capitol and it’s surrounding farms “Zhent” and those other things the Troll lands and the evil forest and whatnot. A government (or domain in this context) only exists as far as it can effectively monopolize force. In the modern day communications and helicopters and shit allow a government to express a truly wild amount of force over truly vast amount of areas but fantasy writers drawing modern day style maps is basically just a statement of their confusion about what a nation even is.

Races of War also recognizes that the societal structures of the Bronze Age are the best fit for the dnd world. What I’m basically saying in summary is places that can effectively represent powerful city state like domains are massively more important than being able to represent England or France. Ruling England is the end credit screen of the domain game for Arthur, the rules for ruling Albion matters a lot more. Obviously if both can be done then hurray but if the rules have to strain to fit one side then the choice is easy.

[Thaluikhain]

Random question about castle building, are skeletons and zombies any good for that (beyond pulling large stone blocks around under supervision). They are usually described as being mindless, which would make them unsuitable for most jobs, but then being able to compete with a human in a swordfight (even badly) means they can't really be mindless, I'd have thought.

I meant the Ancient Greek city state. I think a polis is more accurate representation of what places in a fantasy adventure world would look like than most entries in a forgotten realms gazetteer. Where the world around is wild and dangerous but then there’s city walls and inside those walls is a culture of shared traits and beliefs.

The city state still has to secure land outside itself.

OTOH, yeah, going the polis route makes sense, lots of independent places of different shapes and sizes, and they can be as different or similar as you want.

The thing where fantasy writers will draw a line around an enormous area and call it Zhent is an incredibly anachronistic expression of their modern understandings of nations. If your kingdom contains troll fens and vampire ruled castles and thri-keen clutches then that’s not your kingdom and no one will call it that. They will call your capitol and it’s surrounding farms “Zhent” and those other things the Troll lands and the evil forest and whatnot.

Assuming that those areas are independent and/or hostile, yes. No reason why Zhent couldn't be an empire or a league or otherwise be made up of separate parts that work together. The Persian Empire was contemporary with the greek city states, some of whom formed the Delian League in response.

[Dean]

The city state still has to secure land outside itself.

At whatever point the land is no longer secured is where that land ends. So if Zhent has troll fens that isn't Zhent. If it has vampires that isn't Zhent. The amount of space that D&D tells you you have to travel before you get to space where trolls or gnolls or dragons rules is pretty small and dramatically more in line with the ideas of ancient poleis than modern nations.

You could obviously create empires that are 500 poleis or cities stitched together under rules of vassalage to one crown but a player ruling the Persian Empire seems like a massively less uncommon occurence than ruling Albion or Corinth or Winterfell, and if ones rules were to prioritize which of those they work well for I would choose smaller kingdoms over larger ones.

[Chamomile]

Ruling England is the end credit screen of the domain game for Arthur, the rules for ruling Albion matters a lot more. Obviously if both can be done then hurray but if the rules have to strain to fit one side then the choice is easy.

This is a weird example to choose, because Arthurian stories frequently include him bringing to bear all the forces of England against one or more of Ireland, Norway, France, and Rome. That's not the exception in the source material. In Lord of the Rings, Gondor and Rohan both turn out in their thousands to fight Mordor. I don't know if Conan ever gave any troop counts, but Aquilonia something like 1200 miles across and Conan goes from ruling nothing to ruling that. World of WarCraft never gives strict numbers, but it's based on an RTS which is naturally all about large military confrontations, and though mechanical limitations limit the actual onscreen enemies to a few dozen on a side, cut scenes, films, and so on make it pretty clear that this is supposed to be representative of a confrontation between armies of thousands. I don't know of any exact numbers for Game of Thrones, but the HBO show certainly seems to depict a similar scale.

People think of D&D as medieval and want medieval scale domains. This has always kind of clashed with D&D's existing mechanical grounding in more bronze or early iron age trappings where, the existence of windmills and plate armor notwithstanding, civilization rarely extends much past city walls, but D&D's existing mechanics being bad at giving people the domain scale they want does not mean we should conform to those mechanics at the expense of emulating source material and giving people the domains they see in books and movies.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The city state still has to secure land outside itself.

At whatever point the land is no longer secured is where that land ends. So if Zhent has troll fens that isn't Zhent. If it has vampires that isn't Zhent. The amount of space that D&D tells you you have to travel before you get to space where trolls or gnolls or dragons rules is pretty small and dramatically more in line with the ideas of ancient poleis than modern nations.

Historical kingdoms had functionally independent enclaves within them all the time. If a regular baron could stop paying scutage and flying the flag of the king, and that didn't shatter the realm, a vampire baron can do the same thing. If a brigand group can hole up in a swamp and kill any tax collectors who stick their noses in without being recognized by external political entities, so can a troll family. Historical kings and nobles had a lot of things they wanted to do and limited resources, and it was very frequently more trouble than it was worth to put down every minor rebel, especially if the lost income they represented was bullshit.

[Username17]

Corinth is indeed a small place, but Corinithia is itself too large to be an ACKS domain - it's 880 square miles, which works out to 28 hexes.
Rohan is of course contentious because the movies don't give scales and the books are somewhat contradictory because Tolkien changed his mind about some key issues while writing various books - but a perfectly respectable calculation on the wiki is that Rohan is 52763 square miles - 1648 hexes. Now that's a square 41 hexes on a side, but I should still think that you'd be better off chopping Rohan into at least two and probably three or more domains.

Anyway, on skeletons. Yes, zombie labor should be as good as human labor and you don't have to pay it. Nothing says "I'm in a fantasy world" like having zombies carrying boxes at the docks or harvesting grains from the fields. Here's the thing about D&D necromancy: it's really small scale. It's game breaking in 5th edition because none of the monsters are set up to be able to survive having 30 disposable bozos throw javelins at them, but you don't get a lot of laborers. Consider a single hex of mixed agriculture. It's 32 square miles, and each square mile is 640 acres. If our typical mixed agriculture family farm is 20 acres, our hex of mixed agriculture has 1024 farms on it. Now let's consider the extremely basic idea that each farm generates an average of one free worker (we could get more complicated with seasons and shit but this is a good start). So that's like a thousand workers. From one hex.

Obviously not all hexes are going to be at capacity. But just as a ballpark, a hex with no urban population that is turned over to mixed agriculture produces 100 manpower for every 10% settled it is. Which means that the lowest trackable settlement status of a single hex of farmland produces more laborer manpower than a 3rd or 5th edition necromancer can control. That's kind of bullshit, actually. A Domain level Necromancer needs to be able to make enough zombie labor that you actually notice it in your manpower numbers.

-Username17