Feudalism for D&D; Part 2

[Sword of Spirit]

My thanks to all those who shared thoughts in the first feudalism thread. It helped a lot. Now that I've got a base in mind for how I want to handle it, I've been thinking about how it would relate to a more or less traditional D&D world. I'm looking for thoughts on that.

The main issue is that while D&D settings and supplements often reference feudalism as the baseline, they almost never give it more than lip-service.* I can't even say they do a mediocre job of creating a fantasy feudalism. They really don't even do it all--instead they often create a decidedly unfeudal structure.

Unfeudalism**

Unfeudalism refers to the social and governmental structure often found in Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy settings. The key characteristic of unfeudalism is that it refers to itself as feudal, while failing to follow most of the conventions of actual feudalism. Most unfeudalism shares certain traits.
Rather than 90%+ of arrable land being populated and incorporated into fiefs, it's more like 9% in unfeudalism, with emphasis on the Village in the Wilderness. Despite the fact that border wars for land continue to be fought, most of the land is Inexplicably Uninhabited. Yet isolated villages somehow manage to survive despite the prevalence of monsters, possibly because Monsters Summon Heroes whenever they show up. These isolated villagers never seem to lack any basic goods or commodities necessary to live comfortably and provide adventurers with whatever goods they need, unless Poverty by Plot is invoked to set up an adventure.

Another common feature of unfeudalism is Manors Optional. Rather than actually portraying manorialism, most villages seems to be populated entirely by free peasants; serfs being absent from the Anachronistic Egalitarianism of these settlements. Not only are serfs absent, but even the smallest of villages often politically stands entirely alone as a Improbable City-State. Sometimes they are considered to be within the realm of a distant sovereign, but rarely anyone within a day's journey. Occasionally manors with lords are actually present, but they tend to be Conveniently Unobtrusive Rulers, generally sitting away off out of sight, and never asking anything of the peasantry, except perhaps modest taxes, which are not believably paid in agricultural products, but rather All Coins Are Accepted.

Unfeudalism also tends to forego a titled peerage in preference for Ambiguous Nobility. Rather than having barons, counts or others ruling over their fiefs, you tend to have the vast majority of fiefs ruled over by a Lord or Lady with no further title, who generally is assumed to be either the direct vassal of the sovereign, or a sovereign lord in their own behalf. Combined with Manors Optional the basic picture portrayed is of a few villages scattered over a mostly unpopulated wilderness that hosts an occasional Lord or Lady with an Improbably Expansive Domain who makes few if any demands of their Subjects in Name Only.

Perhaps not surprisingly, despite the fact that the Village in the Wilderness is rarely bothered by monsters, the Lords and Ladies are often Glaringly Incompetent Defenders of their realm. Because of Manors Optional, knights are not scattered across the realm. Rather they arrive as Spontaneously Generated Soldiers, whose purpose is usually to fail or die confronting any threats, causing the Lord or Lady to Beg for Heroes, even when those heroes should reasonably be considered Inferior Replacements for the knights who failed to overcome the threats.


While some of those issues are just general conceits we play with to allow us to enjoy adventuring, others clash strongly with any attempt at believable fantasy feudalism.***

Now, the general response of most DMs, I believe, is to either just go with the standard D&D Unfeudalism, or to implement a more believable fantasy feudalism. Since I'm posting this, I'm obviously not entirely satisfied with either option. What I'm really wanting to do is have a more inclusive approach. I think what I'd like to do is say that nominally feudal areas of the world include three basic types of lands:

1) Fantasy Feudal Lands
2) Unfeudal Lands
3) Hybrid Lands

I'll basically just decide based on the land or region how I want things to structured in different areas. That leaves me looking for help on two different questions:

A) How do we make #2 and #3 somewhat believable
and
B) What could #3 look like?


* Some settings, such as Birthright, are exceptions.
** I wrote it in mock TV Tropes style, because D&D shouldn't be taken too seriously. No actual trope links are present.
*** I'm not even talking about historically accurate feudalism, just believable fantasy feudalism as discussed on the previous thread.

 

[Dandu]

By 'fantasy', do you mean Western fantasy? Because the feudalism present in Asian fantasy can be quite different. Chinese fantasy stories, for example, could pkausiably have isolated villages who are only nominally part of a fief or kingdom since it is such a huge country. This comes up fairly often in Journey to the West.

There's even a Chinese phrase for this situation: Heaven is high above, and the Emperor is far away.

 

[Celebrim]

My thanks to all those who shared thoughts in the first feudalism thread. It helped a lot. Now that I've got a base in mind for how I want to handle it, I've been thinking about how it would relate to a more or less traditional D&D world. I'm looking for thoughts on that.

The main issue is that while D&D settings and supplements often reference feudalism as the baseline, they almost never give it more than lip-service.* I can't even say they do a mediocre job of creating a fantasy feudalism. They really don't even do it all--instead they often create a decidedly unfeudal structure.

Unfeudalism**

Unfeudalism refers to the social and governmental structure often found in Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy settings. The key characteristic of unfeudalism is that it refers to itself as feudal, while failing to follow most of the conventions of actual feudalism. Most unfeudalism shares certain traits.

Before I get into this, let me back up and explain why this is the case.

Everyone has seen the Disney princess films, right? Most people looking at them would think that they belong to this unfeudalism setting you are describing. In fact, if you analyze the social structures, technology, and most of all the costuming they are with the exception of Sleeping Beauty very late period pieces - mostly set in the 19th century. There is something I think very important going on here which has a very big impact on running RPGs. When people are asked to imagine the past, there is a limit to what most of them can imagine. Most people can't actually grasp the very real differences in the way society was organized and the way people thought and behaved more than a century or so into the past. Asked to imagine 'the middle ages' and feudalism, most people can get no closer than the first half of the 19th century with a few additional anachronistic trappings. Thus you end up with something like a knight in plate mail traipsing through a Dickensonian town. I believe this observation is even partly behind the evolution in the trope settings we see in fantasy. As time marches on, the trope fantasy world is evolving into being more and more like the later half of the 19th century than the first, with not the foretaste of a burgeoning industrial revolution, but the products of it. Thus, typical worlds are becoming more and more Steampunk, and more and more gunpowder is becoming a part of those worlds.

Keep that hypothesis in the back of your mind as we go forward.

Rather than 90%+ of arrable land being populated and incorporated into fiefs, it's more like 9% in unfeudalism, with emphasis on the Village in the Wilderness.

So this is Tolkienism. It's Tolkien that creates worlds which are huge tracts of empty wilderness in which their are isolated pockets of civilization. He does this because he's channeling not the High Middle ages that most people are familiar with and which we've been discussing, but the dark ages world of Beowulf with its proto-feudalism and comparatively empty low population density world. It's the same sort of world that you find in Homer, where a tiny tiny portion of the Aegean sea can become the setting for a years long Odyssey through the unknown. Homer wasn't describing the world his Greek hearers lived in, but the same dimly imagined past of their great-great-grandfathers. Tolkien can reach further back with power because he was a keen student and scholar of that distant world. He could bring it near to the reader in a way that on the average most people can't, and even then - as evidenced by all the bad translations of his world into a D&D game world - they probably won't get most of it (and yes, I am simplifying my Tolkien here).

Despite the fact that border wars for land continue to be fought, most of the land is Inexplicably Uninhabited. Yet isolated villages somehow manage to survive despite the prevalence of monsters, possibly because Monsters Summon Heroes whenever they show up. These isolated villagers never seem to lack any basic goods or commodities necessary to live comfortably and provide adventurers with whatever goods they need, unless Poverty by Plot is invoked to set up an adventure.

Not surprisingly, if you listen to Gygax, the details of his setting weren't largely drawn from the real middle ages, but just as much drawn from his own culture's gone but not yet forgotten past - the American Frontier. Asked to explain what his setting was like, he'd reach back to ideas like the Klondike gold rush. The D&D world is very much a cowboy world of frontier justice with some pseudo-feudal trappings. Gygax had some very keen insights into some aspects of the feudal system, but often he would break them for game purposes, and at times he'd just get things dead wrong. Because of Gygax, everyone for example in gaming calls a warsword or an armingword, a longsword and he repeats the Ivanhoe anachronism 'chain mail' and 'plate mail' until its engrained in everyone's vocabulary.

Another common feature of unfeudalism is Manors Optional. Rather than actually portraying manorialism, most villages seems to be populated entirely by free peasants; serfs being absent from the Anachronistic Egalitarianism of these settlements. Not only are serfs absent, but even the smallest of villages often politically stands entirely alone as a Improbable City-State.

The political situation in most D&D settings is not feudal. It's early-modern to in some cases post-Enlightenment. Most nations aren't ruled by a Fuedal King, but a Sovereign King whose vassals while important are largely quelled and subservient. Most of the arms of the nation aren't owed to a distributed feudal system were the noble's labor is taxed, but rather there are large standing national armies who serve for pay and not out of loyalty or as a form of tax payment. And there are a smattering of Constitutional Monoarchies and Republics about the map.

Occasionally manors with lords are actually present, but they tend to be Conveniently Unobtrusive Rulers...

Unless they are actually the villain, which is very common, because we tend to see authority figures as natural villains and not natural heroes.

generally sitting away off out of sight, and never asking anything of the peasantry, except perhaps modest taxes, which are not believably paid in agricultural products, but rather All Coins Are Accepted.

This is probably the most startling departure from the feudal system as it actually was. The feudal system was driven in no small part by a lack of coinage. The lack of coinage drove everything toward barter, including the taxes and the daily functioning of government. And I have to tell you, it's annoying to run your game any other way but abundant coinage. Indeed, 'realistic coinage' is one of those ideas I've had to put aside as simply not worth the hassle it becomes when you implement it, particularly when you have a large group. My economy has some nods to realism - everything is priced in silver as the base coinage and not gold, for example - but actual realistic monetary concerns are only going to show up if I have an entire table filled with historically literate economists who want to play that game.

And this gets back to my main point, which is that while you can go realistic if you want, expect the game to bog down to a crawl as you try to give the players the equivalent of 20 hours of college coursework in medieval history over the course of the campaign. And this might not work too well if the main aesthetic of play of some of the players is not historical simulation, but rather kicking doors down, killing the monsters, and taking their stuff. It's good to be able to analyze what really goes into the makeup of a setting and to understand all of its parts, but you are also going to have to make some compromises for the sake of gameplay if you want to run the game smoothly. So unless you have a whole table full of Latin speaking medieval historians, asking them to imagine living in a real feudal system should probably be considered a bridge too far. Or at the very least, you should be easing your players into the setting slowly, by having them come from an Unfeudalism part of your world and gradually move into a part of your world with more realistic Feudalism, exposing both the player and the character to the novelty at the same time instead of demanding that the player animate a character according to beliefs and knowledge the player can't possibly have.

Now, the general response of most DMs, I believe, is to either just go with the standard D&D Unfeudalism, or to implement a more believable fantasy feudalism. Since I'm posting this, I'm obviously not entirely satisfied with either option. What I'm really wanting to do is have a more inclusive approach.

Sounds like a good idea, for several reasons.

I'll basically just decide based on the land or region how I want things to structured in different areas. That leaves me looking for help on two different questions:

A) How do we make #2 and #3 somewhat believable
and
B) What could #3 look like?

I rather pride myself on having bizarre detailed systems of government around the world that have believable in universe roots. My answer to what a fantasy government can look like is, "Just about anything if you are willing to take the time to imagine how the situation came to pass and why it endures." Remember, just as the fantasy world contains features the real world doesn't, so there are structures that could exist and arguably should exist that you don't find in the real world. You can still inform the world with your knowledge of historical feudalism, but you don't have to be hide bound to it. The important thing is to be conscious of what you are doing and why rather than blindly imitating.

So for example, gender equality is a common unfeudalism thing that is present in many gaming worlds. There are a lot of different reasons for that, some of them arguably quite good. But there are plenty of in game reasons you can have to justify why that fantasy world doesn't work like the real one. In the real world, evolution gives humans a shared simian legacy of gender dimorphism where in the male of the species is evolved to be a predator and protector. Male humans are about 25% stronger than females pound for pound, and about 25% larger. In a world where the only effective means of making war is based on physical strength and with the human propensity for combat, it's natural you end up with a lot of governments revolving around a male aristocratic warrior caste that controls most of the political power. And while that certainly could happen in a fantasy world, in a fantasy world none of that has to be true either in detail or outcome. Indeed, none of that has to be true regardless of whether or not you have a world that true to history has almost all soldiers be male rather than an anachronistic fully integrated armed forces. After all, the ancient Greeks - about as sexist of a group as you'll ever find - imagined a world containing a fully female army. And in a world where ordinary people can drop fireballs and toss lightning bolts, the core fighting force of a nation doesn't have to be guys swinging swords. It's quite easy to imagine a social structures in a fantasy world where wizards or clerics ended up forming the aristocracy rather than armored cavalry, in which case this might be a case of Girls Do it Better.

To make something believable, all you have to do is put enough color in to get your group to suspend disbelief. If you put as much as a page of thought into how the countries social and political structures evolved, and its even the least bit coherent, your group is going to swallow it hook line and sinker after about the fifth time they ask a question and you have a ready answer. Pretty quickly, they'll just assume you have got all the details already thought out, and move on with play (unless you are actually dealing with a guy that speaks Old English and has a Phd in History, in which case, better crack some books).

 

[Dandu]

And in a world where ordinary people can drop fireballs and toss lightning bolts, the core fighting force of a nation doesn't have to be guys swinging swords. It's quite easy to imagine a social structures in a fantasy world where wizards or clerics ended up forming the aristocracy rather than armored cavalry, in which case this might be a case of Girls Do it Better.

The Drow, for instance.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Thanks for the great thoughts. So here is what I'm currently ruminating on.

I've decided that I need to start by just acknowledging that ripping out the core feudal element of manorialism works better for D&D. Kick it out, and see what we can do with what's left.

Without manorialism, I need an alternative basic unit of civilization. Something flexible and local. I'll call it the population area for lack of a better word. The traits of a population area are simple. It has people living in some sort of defined area with some sort of structure and means of survival.

It might be domain with a few villages ruled over by a local "Lord" or "Lady." It might be a single town and surrounding farmlands with a ruling council. It might be a hamlet supporting a wizard in a tower, or a frontier logging village with nothing but a militia and a friendly acquaintance with the nearby elves to keep them safe from goblin attacks.

In areas outside of any sort of nation, that's all you've got. Wilderness with population areas. You probably have a variety of types of them. This is what you see in the North of Faerun, for instance.

But now I want to move out of such an Unfeudal society into something that has a surface appearance of feudalism, but without the reality. More of a Pseudo-Feudalism, which I'll want to use in more civilized area.

First, I should give the background of much of my world, as it seems like it will provide a good foundation to create what I'm going for.

Several centuries ago a vast human empire (The Iteran Empire, or the Third Great Empire of Man) held sway over much of the world (the areas I'm focusing on). The collapse of that empire was a slow drawn out affair, which left in its wake many kingdoms and nations with strong sovereigns.

In reflecting on this, it is easy to envision the landed nobility as essentially arising from appointed officers, rather than tribal warrior-chiefs. Due to the length and extent of the empire's power, this is true even if in many cases they first arose as warrior-chiefs. Noble titles and estates are normally hereditary at this point, but all exist under the sway of the crown. The sovereigns can appoint or strip titles and lands as they see fit, unless a sufficiently powerful nobles alliance can rise up and defeat them.

The length of the empire also means that coinage is spread far and wide. With coinage fundamental to commerce and power radiating from a central source, standing armies become believable.

So now we've got justification for a basic Pseudo-Feudal setup.

Filling in the details, I'm going to stick with the basic sort of setup of tiered noble domains from the other thread, but with some tweaks to adapt to both D&D assumptions and the setup I described. However, instead of the manor as the basic unit, I'm going to stick with the population area. In a highly civilized land, you can probably safely say that most if not all of these are "lordships". A lordship might be a town with a resident lord, a few villages with a lord, or even just a hamlet supporting a military border fortress with a lord commander of a powerful force.

Even though a typical lordship is ruled by an untitled "Lord", it will typically be at least as big as a barony, and sometimes quite a bit bigger. This makes all higher tiers (barony, county, duchy, with variants) larger as well, and creates the rather small number of titled nobles you generally see in D&D settings.

Population wise, I'm probably going to embrace the D&Dism that there is usually plenty of land just sitting around without being used. In civilized regions it is going to fall within some noble's domain, and probably be patrolled by some of his guards more or less regularly. With an assumption of standing military forces and a lack of manorialism, the typical knight will either live in a noble's castle, or perhaps have a nice country estate. Such country estates will wield no political power (though they may have some military presence), and the household servants will have to go into town to buy food with coins just like everyone else does.

What is still hanging me up is that part of me wants to allow for a sort of sporadically represented manorialism (that can show up anywhere as an individual manorial estate) but I can't figure out how to make it work subordinate and superflous to the rest of the system, rather than foundational or obtrusive. Thoughts?

With frameworks both an Unfeudal and a Pseudo-Feudal setup, I can then create a hybrid simply by taking a Pseudo-Feudal area, stretching out the sizes of the domains, and adding some unclaimed territories between them (perhaps considered the sovereign's land, but undeveloped and mostly unpopulated).

One of the things I think will work well is having the population areas/lordships be highly flexible and diverse. This means that when I'm doing bottom-up level design I can simply think up interestingly-themed population areas that cover all the bases, and I know they will seemlessly integrate with the top-down design framework.

While I was brainstorming, I came up with a flavorful example. In a highly civilized region, I imagine a lordship composed of a Lord with his castle, outside of a decent-sized town. Vineyards surround the town and castle, and that is the physical extent of the domain. You have an architecturally beautiful and wealthy town known for its fine wines which form the basis for its commerce. (I was slightly inspired by Skingrad from Oblivion.)

 

[Dorian_Grey]

I had one thought regarding the section on knights sole purpose to be to die, causing a call for heroes. In your world design, have the local leadership be focused on a larger threat to the realm. If all the knights must be ready to go to war with the orc hoards, or the enemy kingdom, they won't have time for smaller things, such as a goblin infestation. For levels 1 to 5 (just an example, expand the range as you see fit), the player characters would essentially be mercenaries/franklins/yeomen who are available to solve the kind of issues that the knights just do not have the time, energy, or manpower to address. This would actually fit within my understanding of the time period as mercenaries were used to bolster defenses throughout many kingdoms. I could be wrong, however, as my understanding is coming from one class I had more years ago then I care to admit in public.

Additionally, moving away from my sketchy understanding of history and back to fantasy resources, the Deeds of Paksinarion could be a source for building on that mercenary trope. The world felt more like it was in a Renaissance period instead of the middle ages, but scaling some aspects back could work. What I like was the point where Paks went off on her own and arrived in that small town with the druid type character and the thief. No one felt comfortable with her because they didn't know how she fit in the world order: she wasn't with a mercenary company, she wasn't with a Guild, she wasn't with a Lord, she wasn't with a religious order. The town council was ready to mark her off as a bandit. It was only after she took a contract with them, putting herself under their sway, that she was found to be acceptable. Players could be in a similar situation. If they are attached to a known mercenary commander, then all is well and good. If they misbehave the local Boyer will know where to go. But freelancers? Might as well be bandits!

 

[Celebrim]

What is still hanging me up is that part of me wants to allow for a sort of sporadically represented manorialism (that can show up anywhere as an individual manorial estate) but I can't figure out how to make it work subordinate and superflous to the rest of the system, rather than foundational or obtrusive. Thoughts?

Fundamentally, the Manor was the basic preindustrial economic institution. During the middle ages the manor was also the basic political institution, but long after the Manor ceased to have much of a political role, it maintained its purpose as a hub of economic activity, whether wine growing, wool production, cheese production, or whatever. Mr. Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year, produced largely on the collection of estates revolving around his main home in Pemberly, remained terribly important even though Mr. Darcy himself ceased to hold high political position.

 

[Celebrim]

Additionally, moving away from my sketchy understanding of history and back to fantasy resources, the Deeds of Paksinarion could be a source for building on that mercenary trope. The world felt more like it was in a Renaissance period instead of the middle ages, but scaling some aspects back could work. What I like was the point where Paks went off on her own and arrived in that small town with the druid type character and the thief. No one felt comfortable with her because they didn't know how she fit in the world order: she wasn't with a mercenary company, she wasn't with a Guild, she wasn't with a Lord, she wasn't with a religious order. The town council was ready to mark her off as a bandit. It was only after she took a contract with them, putting herself under their sway, that she was found to be acceptable.

I'm not sure how much of this you are already aware of, but every detail of the "Deeds of Paksinarion" is explicitly based off of the world described by 1e D&D. The mercenary company Paks is a part of is based off the section describing hiring and employing mercenaries in the 1e DMG. Paks implicitly starts out as ordinary 0th level fighter, and 'levels up' after her first adventure to become a Paladin of increasingly high level. The village that she arrives at is in every detail, the Village of Homlett from the module of that same name, and the contract she takes with the village to clear the ancient moathouse of bandits is the adventure described in that module. And the method she uses for defeating the bandits is based on Gygax's description of what constituted good smart play by the player. The entire work is an exercise in showing how a AD&D Paladin ought to be played, based on the feeling that how Paladins were often portrayed in AD&D was nothing like how such persons would actually behave.

 

[Dorian_Grey]

I'm not sure how much of this you are already aware of, but every detail of the "Deeds of Paksinarion" is explicitly based off of the world described by 1e D&D. The mercenary company Paks is a part of is based off the section describing hiring and employing mercenaries in the 1e DMG. Paks implicitly starts out as ordinary 0th level fighter, and 'levels up' after her first adventure to become a Paladin of increasingly high level. The village that she arrives at is in every detail, the Village of Homlett from the module of that same name, and the contract she takes with the village to clear the ancient moathouse of bandits is the adventure described in that module. And the method she uses for defeating the bandits is based on Gygax's description of what constituted good smart play by the player. The entire work is an exercise in showing how a AD&D Paladin ought to be played, based on the feeling that how Paladins were often portrayed in AD&D was nothing like how such persons would actually behave.

I did not actually know any of that! Wow! I've been reading those books for what feels like ages! My sister gave me her copy way back in either 97 or 98. And never realized that the story was based off of that. Is that a direct quote from Elizabeth Moon too? Or just speculation based on coincidence after coincidence in the story?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Fundamentally, the Manor was the basic preindustrial economic institution. During the middle ages the manor was also the basic political institution, but long after the Manor ceased to have much of a political role, it maintained its purpose as a hub of economic activity, whether wine growing, wool production, cheese production, or whatever. Mr. Darcy's 10,000 pounds a year, produced largely on the collection of estates revolving around his main home in Pemberly, remained terribly important even though Mr. Darcy himself ceased to hold high political position.

This is really good to know. I had a breakthrough with that in connection with Gygax's inspiration coming from frontier America. Basically estates are going to have to make money somehow (unless the lord has other income) but they don't necessarily need tenant farmers. In a land where feudalism proper never took hold, and a powerful monarch didn't take kindly to people with swords claiming their neighbors land (and where agreements for protection weren't as necessary) the family farm as an economic baseline could be believable (I mean, it worked in frontier America). Where estates do exist, they can acquire hired-help from the inhabitants of the hamlets that exist at the edge of the estates. Or at least that's one way to do it.

Now that I've got most of it figured out, I think I want to devolve things back to D&D setting assumptions, and spell those out as a basic political template. From there I can adjust my individual kingdoms and nations to my heart's content, making them more believable wherever it seems interesting to do so, but not needing to mess with them in order to keep the D&D lore feel and the feudal nobility feel with one of the templates.

So I figured I'd write this all up, primarily for my own reference. But if I'm going to do it anyway, I might as well clean it up a bit and share it with others. So here goes try number whatever:


D&D (un)Feudalism

To allow for easy creation of kingdoms and nations for the purposes of D&D, I've created these guidelines. Following them will help you replicate the types of political and civilization structures featured in D&D settings and lore. From that baseline you can then expand and customize to create your own interesting ways of structuring your kingdoms, nations and lands. Since it is easier to begin with D&D assumptions and add more authentic elements to taste than to go the other way, that is how we'll do it.

First, I'll cover the baseline assumptions that hold sway in all of the suggested D&D political strutures. Then I'll present templates for three basic types of political structures for lands, including examples from published settings. In addition, I'll include suggestions for how to customize for your own needs.

The Baseline: The basic unit of civilization in a D&D setting is generally an isolated settlement surrounded by wilderness. This settlement is surrounded by family-owned farms and/or prospers through other natural-resource-acquiring hired-workers. The settlement itself features several independent businesses catering to travelers, supported by coinage-based inter-settlement commerce.

Each of the following civilization templates assumes that baseline and then adds to it.

Wilderlands: This sort of intermittent civilization features widely-spaced politically autonomous settlement-states, with no standard form of leadership, but some means of mostly adequate defense. For a discussion of these sorts of lands, see http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?480199-Feudalism-for-D-amp-D-Part-2.
Examples: The North, the Western Heartlands, and the Dalelands, are examples of this type of setup in the Forgotten Realms.
Customization: Sometimes settlement-states may form alliances or confederacies, like the Lord's Alliance in the Forgotten Realms.

Unfeudalism: This sort of civilization features well-spaced settlements within a simply-structured nation. The political structure features usually untitled nobility and lacks nested domains, but is protected by a strong monarch with standing military forces. This structure might be as simple as a collection of settlements in a bordered region with a single ruler. Alternatively, there might be multiple domains within the nation, each existing at the same domain level. For instance, a kingdom might be divided into quadrants, with two regions each called baronies, one called a county, and one called a duchy, but none of them overlapping with or contained within any of the others. Sometimes normally dependent domains, such as baronies or counties, might exist as sovereign nations.
Examples: Cormyr in the Forgotten Realms is an example of the simplest type of structure, while the various nations of Cerilia of the Birthright setting provide examples of the multiple domain structure, and the domains of Ulek and Urnst provide examples from the Greyhawk setting.
Customization: Other elements you might consider adding could include include serfdom under local lords, types of rulers other than monarchs (councils of nobles, elected rulers, knights with estates, etc), or increased emphasis on a barter-based economy.

Pseudo-Feudalism: This sort of civilization features moderately-spaced settlements within a politically complex nation. A strong monarch with standing military forces rules over feudally nested domains governed directly by a hierarchically titled hereditary nobility with their own standing military forces, while lesser untitled nobles hold appointed positions. While nobility and others may maintain wealthy estates, they are worked by non-tenant hired help rather than serfs, and estates do not imply rulership. For inspiration for this sort of political structure, see http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?476649-Feudalism-for-D-amp-D especially page 2.
Examples: There are few examples of this within published D&D settings, though they are present in many other works of fantasy.
Customization: For a more authentic feudal experience, you can add manorialism, shift power away from the monarch, and reduce or eliminate standing armies. Other possibilities for customization might include making a prominent distinction between areas directly governed by the monarch through appointed officials (such as shires and cities) and the domains of the nobles, or the customization suggestions for Unfeudalism.