PDA

View Full Version : Kingdom Sizes



GladiusVCreed
2017-02-01, 04:34 PM
Hey all,

I'm making a map for a new setting that is largely landlocked.
My question is; How much land do kingdoms cover on average? I know that size varies widely between kingdoms but whats a good ballpark?

Thanks In Advance :smallsmile:

The Glyphstone
2017-02-01, 04:40 PM
There's no good answer to that because a kingdom, by itself is just a political unit, not a geographical one. An empire isn't necessarily larger than a kingdom, nor is a kingdom going to be bigger than a republic.

What you need to look at is transportation and communication versus the local terrain. A country with traversable rivers, or well-maintained roads, will be larger than one that is mostly mountains and forests, because having good roads allows you to move things and people around faster and further. The easier and more effectively a king can manage situations on his borders, the easier it is to keep those borders or even expand them. Having plentiful resources helps too, either in trade or raw material to fuel a more aggressive expansion. At the same time, a river or mountain range can make a great boundary for a kingdom; history has lots of precedent for feuding groups settling peace by saying 'this side is mine, that side is yours'.


If you just need to draw a map, though...take your entire landmass. Freehand draw in a 'big' lump, call it a kingdom. Then draw two lumps half that size, and four lumps a quarter of the size. Now you have 6 different kingdoms of varying sizes. Repeat until you've used up all the land on your map, then decide what advantages the big kingdoms have to make them bigger than their neighbors. Alternatively, figure out your geography first, where your rivers and lakes and mountains are, then build kingdoms around them to fit.

Tiadoppler
2017-02-01, 04:55 PM
How easy is long-distance travel and communication? If it takes a message more than a couple weeks to get to the farthest reaches, you're probably too big for a totally centralized government. If you start having local governors who govern in the name of the monarchy, you're approaching something more like an empire.

Do the local governors come from the capitol (they're seen as outsiders/interlopers/invaders to the people they govern), or do they come from among the local population (they might be MORE loyal to their local area than the central government)?



For low-magic settings, a kingdom might be three or four hundred miles across, with the capitol in the rough center.

For high-magic settings where teleportation or flight is regularly affordable (at least for governments), there's no real limit (assuming an Earth-sized world, and not a Jupiter-sized world, at least :smallbiggrin:)


Edit: I agree with The Glyphstone, but I type slower than he does.

Malimar
2017-02-01, 05:15 PM
For a realistic setting, if you want hard numbers, you can use this list of Earth's largest historical empires (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires) as an upper bound on size. There's basically no lower limit on size, there have been many teensy kingdoms in history.

ngilop
2017-02-01, 05:26 PM
In agreement with the above.

I would point out that natural barriers tend to shape kingdoms moreso than the chain of command.


So a big river would be a natural borde between two kingdoms, as would a nigh-impassable mountain range, a desert, forest, lake and other such.

Having a kindom or a couple of kingdoms sandwiched in between mountain ranges that are almost impossible to traverse gives you a chance to give those kingdoms very unique.

FOr instance random kingdom similar to the Gupta Empire amongst the other psuedo-europe medieval kingdoms of your world.

Mechalich
2017-02-01, 05:44 PM
In addition to geography kingdom size also depends on historical political and ethnic divisions. Imperial China is, as Empires go, remarkably large, and geographically quite dispersed, but it managed to remain a unit over time - even as its political structures were periodically shattered - because the people living in that region had decided by around 0 CE that they were the Chinese people and therefore appeals to unity for the Chinese were continually possible.

And I echo sentiments that high magic changes all the rules. In general in a very high magic (meaning D&D by RAW) setting none of the extant systems are going to resemble those found in a technologically comparable period of Earth history.

JAL_1138
2017-02-01, 06:43 PM
I suggest taking a gander at Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm). It has a lot of information on land area, population sizes, and the like mainly geared toward gaming use. Some of the calculators based on the information linked at the bottom of the page give info including number of hexes, if I recall.

daniel_ream
2017-02-02, 02:46 AM
What you need to look at is transportation and communication versus the local terrain. [...] a river or mountain range can make a great boundary for a kingdom; history has lots of precedent for feuding groups settling peace by saying 'this side is mine, that side is yours'.


In agreement with the above.
I would point out that natural barriers tend to shape kingdoms moreso than the chain of command.
So a big river would be a natural borde between two kingdoms, as would a nigh-impassable mountain range, a desert, forest, lake and other such.

It's not just transportation and communication; it's also force projection. Major geographical features tend to demarcate borders because it's hard to get an army across them quickly in either direction. For all intents and purposes, a kingdom ends at the point where the king loses the ability to credibly insist that this land is part of his kingdom.

Geographical determinism insists that geography determines everything else about culture; whether that's true or not for the real world, you can use it for these purposes. Start with a regional map. Identify good locations where a city might have sprung up - this is almost universally a confluence of two rivers, a river delta, or an estuary. There's your kingdom's capital. Now spread out in every direction easily traversable by your proto-kingdom's technology - along the rivers, across plains, along coastlines - and stop when you hit major geographical features, like a major river, a mountain range, the sea, a dense boreal forest, an escarpment - anything you couldn't easily march an army of 10,000 soldiers through. There's the borders of your kingdom.

If it's a long, long way to any such features, you're more likely to get city-states with intensive agriculture right next to the capital and only nominal borders out in the plains. The "borders" will mostly be defined by how far out the grain fields go, because beyond that there's no easily defensible natural border and there's nothing out there you care about defending anyway.

If you want to get advanced, do this for multiple cities on the same map and take note of where the proto-kingdoms end up pushing against each other; assume they dicker back and forth and the border between them settles at any likely natural border - foothills, small rivers, a natural bend in the valley, etc.


For high-magic settings where teleportation or flight is regularly affordable (at least for governments), there's no real limit (assuming an Earth-sized world, and not a Jupiter-sized world, at least :smallbiggrin:)

Nonsense, Valentine Pontifex ruled Majipoor all by himself and it's bigger than Jupiter.

Mmagsgreen
2017-02-13, 10:57 AM
Not sure if this is worth considering for you, but typically the larger the society the larger the government will need to be to administrate it. If I recall correctly, the Chinese encountered this issue at one point when they decided their version of Confucianism was the best and they could serve their nation with the same number of people even as their number of subjects grew. This resulted in a lack of ability to govern, which was followed by instability and rebellion.

LibraryOgre
2017-02-13, 11:35 AM
Simple version, for the lazy: For every level of government, assume it is two days journey (one day in every direction from the center of power).

So, if a king is served by dukes who is served by counts who are served by barons, you're probably looking at a maximum of about 8 days across before force projection becomes a problem. Two days journey on foot for the Roman legions was about 100 miles, so your kingdom really shouldn't be bigger than about 800 miles across... less if you have intervening geography that makes travel significantly more difficult.

On Earth, that would be an Empire stretching from Houston to Mexico City... alternatively, you could say it would be about the size of Texas, as governed from San Antonio. Not a lot of difficult geography (no impassable rivers, and not a lot of mountains, though you'll have to watch your water), but you're still looking at a LOT of territory.

Mastikator
2017-02-14, 01:11 AM
Any piece of land that is very easy to defend gets to be independent. If there's a wide river or better yet- mountain range that divides the land, you may have two kingdoms, one on each side.

What I'm saying is, you create the geography first and then let that decide the kingdoms, then you can change the geography (and kingdoms) to make things interesting. The kingdoms wealth should be defined to their natural resources (food, ore, fresh water, etc). Areas without the bear necessities should be bearly inhabited, and even then only by bears.

You could also decide to let one of the kingdoms have dragons and all the other kingdoms swear fealty to it, like an Song of Ice and Fire thing.

Another, perhaps more realistic option, is to have all the royalty be loosely related, the more closely related families are on more friendly terms. Greed should drive hostilities, natural resources are a reason to be wealthy and a reason to be exploited.

WbtE
2017-02-14, 02:34 AM
Lots of good answer so far, but how about this? A kingdom is as big as it needs to be.

There's no need to plonk down a map for the players to oggle (unless you're an ace with map illustration), so just tell the players vaguely what their characters would know of the surrounding geography. e.g. "The kingdom is pretty big. There are orcs to the north, elves to the south, nigh-impassable and haunted mountains to the west and a scattering of city-states to the east." That should be enough for them - then what you need is hard details for the area in which the PCs are expected to adventure, so that travel times, weather, local features and that sort of thing can be consistent. As the area of the PCs' interest expands, the kingdom's dimensions will get nailed down sooner or later, but it's not something that needs to be determined at the start of the game.

Fiery Diamond
2017-02-14, 02:50 AM
If you have high-powered magic, even if it's relatively rare, the kingdom could be bigger than non-magical travel and communication limitations would normally allow. If you have reliable teleportation and message-sending magic, even if 99% of the population doesn't have access, you can have vastly different "normal" travel-and-message times versus "bureaucratic" travel-and-message times, with the latter being the bigger decider on upper limits: just remember that army transportation (or, in a D&D-like world, the big powerhouse military folk rather than the whole army) is nearly as important if the kingdom is bordered by other potentially-hostile powers.

Thinker
2017-02-14, 11:39 AM
Other considerations for your kingdom size include claimed territory that may or may not be populated and may or may not be claimed by someone else; territories who pay lip-service to the king, but are defacto independent; and areas that should be ruled by the king (based on distance and ease of travel), but are currently in open revolt or are led by a strong enough leader to challenge the king's authority.

You might also stumble across a system of tributaries where there's a High King who can call upon subservient rulers for troops and tribute, but has no legal authority within their realm and so, while it's a "kingdom", it's so decentralized that it may act as many small units. Similarly, feuds between nobles within a kingdom are not uncommon so travel might be restricted in certain areas, even to loyal subjects of the King.