Maximum Domain Size and Types of Realms

General ACKS Forums General Discussion
1

I’m trying to wrap my brain around the expansion of domains…

Being an enterprising adventurer I’ve secured my little 6-mile hex domain in the borderlands. I call it This Land. It maxes out to 250 families so I begin securing adjacent 6-mile hexes, eventually securing an entire 24-mile hex. Hooray for the Domain of This Land, it is now at max size. To expand further I’m gonna need some henchmen. (This is per p. 129, Limits of Growth)

So I’ve got a full 24-mile hex. What Type of Realm am I. Looking at p. 229-230 I’m unclear if This Land is a Barony (it has no component parts which seems to match a Barony) or if it is a County (it takes up a full 24 mile hex but it has no Marches or Baronies within it).

Anyone able to shed some illumination on this?

2

Technically, This Land isn’t a realm at all, it’s a domain (“Multiple domains under the control of one ruler are called a realm.” ACKS pg 130).

If you are trying to estimate what This Lind ought to look like by comparing it to a similarly-sized average realm from the tables on p. 229-230, you should go by population.

3

The realm “types” or ranks are more of guidelines. You can call a village a kingdom and get yourself a crown, but most other nations will laugh at you for it. A king is a king because he has the too big an army for anyone to tell him he isn’t one (or he can trace his bloodline to a period when his family had such an army for long enough).

Do also note, that when you max out a Domain in the way you describe, you can upgrade from wild to borderlands and then from borderlands to civilized.

4

This might not be quite what you’re after, but…

A single 24 Mile hex, comprising of 16x6Mile hexes, could potentially be a County, with 4 Marches and 20 Baronies (5 per March). Assuming average pop. density of 50, you’d have 5000 families with the largest settlement being a Village (Market Class VI)

The total population should be 5260, but with the default population density you’re looking at 5000 and therefore your Baronies will be smaller than default.

That’s based on Chapter 9s guide to generating realms, which I used to create a spreadsheet to calculate.

5

It’s all very fuzzy, of course, but my vote would be “barony”, as it lacks sub-domains. (Ha! http://barony.march.com! Not a real URL.)

If you want to call it a county, hand off some of those 6-mile hexes to your henchlings, and them do the same, as per James’ description.

6

Does the hypothetical maximum domain size need to have the stronghold centered on it? For example, could one person hold a domain that would stretch 16 6mi hexes end to end?

7

The rules simply state that they have to be contiguous. So yes you could have the snake domain.

8

Wouldn’t want to ride end to end, thoug I suppose patrolling it would be just as bad, area wise.