It occurs to me that a similar approach might be cool for running Inquisition detachments as well. I have the Inquisition as something closer to a chaos-focused Mi6 than the Spanish inquisition in SoE.
So somewhere down the line a supplment or two for Shadows of Empire I'm going to do a proper city sourcebook. One of the ideas I'm playing around with for that is to introduce a troupe style play mode to run Night Watch games. So every player has a core PC that is an officer or Sergeant, and...
Don't let small sample size make you pivot too quickly either. I just played in a live play where a party of four very good 1st level characters got taken to school by 6 Stingbats. I design encounters to give monsters some synergy and as the GM I play them like they know what they are doing...
I think the domain rules from REIGN are worth a look. Obviously noone will use the ORE mechanics for their OSR game but the system is awesome. That's where I'd start for OSR domain play anyway.
Here's a village map I did today for my current Shadowdark adventure project. It's a screen grab because the PNG is too big, so some of the detail is a little fuzzy.