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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6834304" data-attributes="member: 4937">You have the Kingdom of Kingliness.Divide it up into baronies that are about 16x16 miles across.  Pick a few baronies and reserve them for the King's estates, religious orders, royal forests, major cities, and the occasional largely unused land where ruins and monsters can be.  The remaining 150-160 or so are the Barons of the Kingdom and make up the minor nobility.   Each Barony has a small castle, a small town of 300-400 people, and 7-12 villages and hamlets of 60-80 people.  Each village has a Knight who is in service to the baron and who has a manor, 12-15 serf farmholds, a few craftsman, and 1-4 freeholders who hold property for whatever reasons - probably because at some point back, they had an ancestor in the nobility.Now group 6-7 of the Baronies together.  Promote one of the Baronies to being a Count, give him a bigger castle, and call the collection a county.  All the other Barons are now vassals of the Count.  Randomly promote one of the towns in the new County up to a city of 800-1200 persons.  Give it a mayor, some guildmasters, and some minor baronettes and the like who owe their title to being relatively rich.  You should now have 25-30 Counties.  Promote a 4-5 of the Counts who are near the borders of the Kingdom up to Marquises.  Give them much bigger castles.   Also the knights in the villages each have a simple Keep rather than a manor.   The borders are where the action is, so they are fortified.Now look at your map, and merge 2-3 counties that don't have Marquises together 5-6 times.  These are your Duchies, they have Dukes, and they have big castles like the Marquises.  Pick one city in each duchy and promote it up to a city of say 2000-4000 persons.   Note that some but not all Counts are vassals of the Dukes.   Those Counts that aren't vassals think that they are nearly as important as Dukes.  If you want, you can randomly retitle a few of those Earls, but I'm personally not a fan of that.  All those Dukes, Counts, Marquises are direct vassals of the King, at least in theory.  These are your peerage, or your great nobles of the Kingdom.  Now, all this is your core feudal hierarchy.  Go back to that first step were you left some baronies unfilled.  Pick 20 or so of them to be the King's Estates and Royal Forests.  This is how the King maintains sufficient personal power to keep those unruly vassals in check.   Where you have two of them adjacent put your capital city in one and the King's Palace in the next one.  The capital city has about 12,000 people in it and is real metropolis.  It's also got lots of little nobles running around trying to marry up, bourgeois trying to pretend that they are noble, penniless nobles with more taxes and debt than money trying to figure out how get out of debt possibly by marrying the bourgeois, families of counts trying to make appearance in the courts and fashionable places, and peerage hanging around running the country (if they are in the favor of the king at least).  All these nobles, thousands of them, are all related to each other at, at least the level of 5th cousins, and they all have petty grievances and domestic disputes that in turn have serious political consequences for the whole nation.  At any one time, a third of them want to kill another third of them, and the remaining third are egging them on hoping to claim their property after the scuffle is over.  For real medieval drama, pick about 1/5th to 1/3rd of the baronies to be occupied by people of a slightly different ethnic group, possibly with their own dialect or language, who for whatever historical reason have gotten folded into the Kingdom but who are still more or less maintaining their own national identity.  Draw a river running through the country adjacent to the capital city.  Put smaller rivers by a couple of the other big cities.  Pick one or two borders to be ocean front.   Pick 2-3 of the undistributed baronies near rivers or oceans to be large cities of 6000-8000 people who've basically grown themselves right out of the feudal system by gobbling up the land and rendering the old aristocracy mute.  Any nobles here are of the mercantile type, and you've got burgeoning trade and mercantilism going on and lots of freepersons rather protective of their rights.  The city and the major or council that run it are the defacto barons here.  Then figure out which Bishops and Abbots and other tangential buy in feudal lords hold the baronial sized fiefs you haven't yet distributed.  Anywhere left over put swamps, moors, mountains and other undesirable land.  Add some Bishops for all the big cities.  Put an Archbishop in the Capital.Start naming all this crap, which will take you like 40 hours all by itself and even then you won't get to all the villages, knights, and other rigmarole much less all the heraldic devices you'll need or the family trees of who relates to who that you need to make it all make sense.  However, in broad outline you'll have a medieval kingdom in all its elaborate glory.The fast version of that is to do the above, then only name the things in the very small area of the kingdom that the PC's start in.  Work down from the top when you have time, and expand laterally as the PC's move about.  After 3-4 years of gaming, you'll have done most of the work of putting everything together.</blockquote>

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