Can someone point me to some resources on the possible population of a petty kingdom, like tiny for an actual kingdom? I have played around with a few of the calculators floating around the web but they give drastically different numbers. Even one that gave a reasonable population for the size of the area I had in mind still had it suggested that there would be something like 58 villages. How much of this should be hand waved? I am also looking for something like a way to calculate how many fighting men a leader would have available.

The best game source of this, IMHO, is ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) by Autarch, which is based on a lot of research on historical demographics and economics, and was written, at least in part, by a scholar of history. This gives you all these calculations built into D&D-style rules, including rules for running domains and trade.

BECMI/Cyclopedia D&D I believe had some good guidelines.

But really it depends on how populated you want the region.

Is it a frontier and sparsely populated? Or is it an ancient kingdom with dozens of provinces? Is everything clustered close together or along a road or river course? Or is it spread out all over the place?

Personally I prefer sparsely populated frontiers. There might be populous empires elsewhere. But that is for later if the group travels so far.

Same goes for population spreads. Is a town a garrison? How frequent are wars or raids?

Quote from: golan2072;784358ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) by Autarch

Quote from: Omega;784369BECMI/Cyclopedia D&D

Came here to suggest these.

Quote from: Arkansan;784357Can someone point me to some resources on the possible population of a petty kingdom, like tiny for an actual kingdom? I have played around with a few of the calculators floating around the web but they give drastically different numbers. Even one that gave a reasonable population for the size of the area I had in mind still had it suggested that there would be something like 58 villages. How much of this should be hand waved? I am also looking for something like a way to calculate how many fighting men a leader would have available.

Medieval Demographics by S John Ross is based on historical data.

The original article
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm

This site has a calculator faithful to the original article.

http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/

In a economy dominated by Manorialism there will be a lot of little villages. If it helps, you can think of them as estates with people living on them rather than a hommlet style village.

Each hex is 2.5 miles or one hour of walking.



This show a farm based economy where most villages are market centers for the surrounding farms. Villages are more or less like the Village of Hommlett.



Each hex of cropland has 6 to 15 family farms. Each farm generally deals with a village a half day's walk away.

ACKS does have a excellent set of domain rules as well as BECMI however both are oriented toward manorialism so will produce a lot of domains/holdings/settlements for a realm.

58 villages is not a very big number at all.

However, I wouldn't think in terms of villages, at least not in the modern sense. Medieval lands had manors, administered by a local chappie, who was a squire, or a member of the minor aristocracy. Some Lords had many manors, scattered across a kingdom, each administered by a son, cousin or nephew, sometimes by a sister, daughter or niece. The farmers looked to the manor for their protection, religion and so on. Sometimes, the manor formed the heart of a village, but more often the farmers were organised in little farmsteads around tiny hamlets, with several hamlets associated with each manor.

I would say that 10 people is a farmstead, 20 people is a hamlet,  100 people is a village, 1,000 people is a town, so 58 villages is between 5,800 and 58,000 people, not a huge population by modern measures.

A rule of thumb is 1 in 10 of the population can be fighting men, as militia or armed farmers, with 1 in 10 of those being any good. So, 10% can be turned out to defend the area, but only 1% are considered anything better.

The B/X rules had some pretty decent data in them, although it wasn't big by any stretch.

There was the old 2e World Builder's Guide that had a lot of detailed data as well.

It's safe to say most published fantasy settings are dramatically underpopulated by historical terms. Regional maps routinely show 30-50 miles between villages and towns, with several days of punishing forced marches between settlements of all kinds. So if you want a setting with plausible demographics, you would do well to ignore the examples presented in published RPG material.

Thanks for the input everyone. I forgot that I bought the pdf of ACKS so I will look back over that. I am trying to work things out for a truly small petty kingdom, it was once a tribal kingdom then incorporated into a larger local kingdom that lasted for a few centuries then collapsed within the last couple hundred years. Basically the area it is set in is the armpit of the world so to speak, a far northern region that is isolated by turbulent seas. The whole area is inspired by Britain and Scandinavia in the century and a half after the Roman withdrawal so I was really trying to go for tiny petty kingdoms with sparse populations.

Quote from: Arkansan;784439Thanks for the input everyone. I forgot that I bought the pdf of ACKS so I will look back over that. I am trying to work things out for a truly small petty kingdom, it was once a tribal kingdom then incorporated into a larger local kingdom that lasted for a few centuries then collapsed within the last couple hundred years. Basically the area it is set in is the armpit of the world so to speak, a far northern region that is isolated by turbulent seas. The whole area is inspired by Britain and Scandinavia in the century and a half after the Roman withdrawal so I was really trying to go for tiny petty kingdoms with sparse populations.

5-10 people per square mile would be about right for the inhabited areas. The Scandinavian and Highland Scots model was Farmsteads/Steadings with extended families, rather than villages & towns.

An advantage of ACKS is that the book actually shows you how to adjust the various parameters to suit a wide range of historical examples, especially in terms of population density and urbanization. It can simulate anything from the Bronze Age right up to a moment before the Industrial Revolution reaches the agricultural sector.

I love ACKS, but I've had a long argument with Alex that was mostly my missing a detail of pg 231: the ~90% non-urban population "is assumed to live in isolated homesteads and hamlets", where by ACKS' definition a hamlet is < 75 families and typically does not support any sort of persistent market. So the naive reading is "ACKS puts 90% of people in isolated houses like the sterotypical early American frontier", but it's really "ACKS puts 90% of people in villages under 375 people", which I find much more plausible in an environment with monsters.

Quote from: estar;784396Medieval Demographics by S John Ross is based on historical data.

I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu. Short version:

* Paris is unusual and so not a good representative sample, even if it looks like good data. (I'm looking for my keys over here under the streetlight because over there where I dropped them it's too dark!)

* Some of the numbers are hard to believe.

For example, the SV of Jewelers and Taverns/Restaurants is the same. Your village is just as likely to have somebody who deals in fancy jewelry as they are to have a tavern. (And an Inn is 5x as rare as either!)

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu.

Found it (in another current thread here!): http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2013/10/medieval-demographics-done-right.html, and sequel post.

So you know there are two parts to S John Ross article. The first part estimates the number of settlements which is the part relevant to the OP. The second estimates the number of businesses.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu. Short version:

Actually he relies on Life on a Medieval City which uses a truncated version of the Paris Tax Rolls.

I found a spreadsheet of the original and generated my own table using the same algorithm.

I first write about it here.
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/02/difficulties-of-historical-settings.html

Give my own take in this
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/10/fantasy-sandbox-in-detail-part-xviii.html

The original
http://heraldry.sca.org/names/parisbynames.html

The Paris Tax roll spreadsheet
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Tax%20roll%20Paris%201292%20Rev%202.xls

My version of Demographics.
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Fantasy%20Demographics%20Version%201.pdf

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466* Paris is unusual and so not a good representative sample, even if it looks like good data. (I'm looking for my keys over here under the streetlight because over there where I dropped them it's too dark!)

The algorithm works and can only improve as more lists of people by occupation turns up. And that the trick finding those lists.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466* Some of the numbers are hard to believe.
For example, the SV of Jewelers and Taverns/Restaurants is the same. Your village is just as likely to have somebody who deals in fancy jewelry as they are to have a tavern. (And an Inn is 5x as rare as either!)

The problem is one of categorization. What is a Jeweller exactly? If you look at the Paris Tax Roll you will see that the recorder is pretty detailed on what each person does. Life in the Medieval City, S John Ross, and myself went thorough that list and came up with broader catagories.

In my PDF I listed what I considered belong to a given profession.

Jeweler
Deals with making Jewelry out of precious metals/materials.
Bone Carver, Button maker, Gilder, Gold Cloth maker, Gold Braid Maker, Gold Refiner, Goldsmith, Jeweler, Lapidary, Ring Maker, Silvermith, Engraver.

The big one that really skews the results are the 116 goldsmiths. If you take them out the most common jewellers are button makers, rosary makers, and lapidry. The first two are very plausible in a rural setting.

My view for my campaign is that Jewellers deals in finework. Small intricate works. It includes jewelry, gold, silver and other luxury items. But the most common use of  a Jeweler's skills is to make bits of useful but decorative items like buttons, wooden ties, along with a healthy market for religious items.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784475Found it (in another current thread here!): http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2013/10/medieval-demographics-done-right.html, and sequel post.

Good series of posts. The only downside that while part ii gives sort of hard numbers it does not present any of the original data. But I can see if I can get a hold of the books listed in part i and see what he is not listing.