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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6866065" data-attributes="member: 6677017">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.)</blockquote>

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