ACKS has the best demographics/world-building/domain ruleset out there, IMHO. So far it deals mostly with civilized domains of settled farmers under a feudal or quasi-feudal ruler.
However, my world (http://www.autarch.co/forums/actual-play/my-acks-campaign-setting-frost-bitten-lands) has two “barbarian” cultures - one is the semi-nomadic Mammoth Herder culture of the tundras and the forest-steppes, which makes a living out of herding Mammoths (and using them for milk, fur, meat and transportation), roaming around in the summer and settling down in their winter camp in the harsh winter. The other is the Esquit culture, essentially Arctic hunters-gatherers similar to the Inuit of the real world - living in the harshest environments. The first (Herder) culture is similar to the Sami and Nenets people of our real world as well as to the Bedouins.
How would these cultures be handled under the ACKS demographics/domain rules? Or do they deserve their own rules (for running “Barbarian” Tribes)?
I found BECMI rules for this today, in the Champions of Mystara box set’s Designer’s Manual. A true nomadic society needs 10 square miles per person (which would work out to 50 per family in ACKS), which is about 10 families per 24-mile hex. Horticulturalists (hunter-gatherers) can sustain a dozen people per square mile, or 6,000 (1,200 families) per 24-mile hex, while agriculturalists (farmers) can manage 25-100 per square mile, depending on sophistication.
Champions of Mystara is a late BECMI product that gathered most of the Voyages of the Princess Ark articles from Dragon in Heroes of the Princess Ark, had geographic information in the Explorer's Manual, had a Designer's Manual for airships, fantasy technology, and world-building (which is one of the oddest combinations of topics for a single book), and had Spelljammer-esque stat cards for different airships (including a gnomish zeppelin, an Alphatian magical galleon, and a Norse ship pulled by white dragons). The writing was by Ann Dupuis working from Bruce Heard's existing articles plus bits of Top Ballista and Dawn of the Emperors. It is the last of the major D&D Mystara products, since Red Steel and Savage Baronies (which came out in '94) were AD&D.