Empire Building
You rule more than a party: you rule a realm. Every season your domain grows, hungers, pays and plots through one seasonal turn. Gold, food and loyalty move only by these rules, never by improvisation.
How to read this book
- Starting Realms: pick your rung and your starting package.
- Your Sovereign: build the ruler you play, and choose the paths they grow along.
- The Dominion System: ranks, Authority, settlement sizes and the holding catalog.
- Population, Food and Needs, then Income, Taxes and the Collect: how a realm feeds and pays itself.
- The Seasonal Turn: the clock everything runs on.
- The rest is reference, to look up when it comes up: war, unrest, rivals, conquest, law, intrigue, pacts and the others.
The units (used everywhere, never mixed)
| Measure | Unit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Population | pop = 100 people | Decimals allowed: 8.4 pop = 840 souls |
| Food | 1 Food feeds 1 pop (or 1 company) for one season | Mounted companies eat 2 |
| Materials | timber, stone, iron, salt, ore, luxuries: 1 unit is worth 100 gp at face value | |
| Gold | gp, counted per season | Wages, upkeep and income are all seasonal; only fielded armies are also paid monthly |
| Company | 100 soldiers | An army is a stack of companies |
| Stability | 0–10 | Local on each settlement, realm on the Empire |
| Unrest | 0–100 per settlement | Bands at 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 |
| Legitimacy | 0–100, realm | Five bands |
| Authority | actions per season | Set by rank plus bonuses; cap 20; unspent Authority is lost |
| Relationships and loyalty | −5 to +5 | |
| Threads | clocks 0–6 | Resolve at 6 |
Scales that never change
Across tiers 1–5: cost ×1/2/4/8/16, upkeep ×1/2/3/5/8, output ×1/3/5/8/16. Every "× tier" in this book means the size rank of the settlement involved (Village 1 to Supercity 5) unless it says holding tier. Realm-level costs (dowries, laws, rank deals, co-opting) use the realm's rank tier: Knight–Lord 1, Baron–Viscount 2, Count–Earl 3, Duke–Archduke 4, King–Emperor 5.
When a rule says only "Stability": an effect from a holding or on one settlement means local Stability; a realm-wide effect (laws, succession, pacts, Legitimacy, needs, war, councils) means realm Stability.
The rule of gold
Everything costs or checks. If it isn't on a ledger, it didn't happen; if it happened, the ledger remembers (factions, threads, vassals, memory). Your Empire file holds treasury, Authority, realm Stability and Legitimacy. Each settlement file holds its pops, holdings, local Stability and unrest. Army files hold their companies.
Core and modules
The core is grounded medieval rulership. Three modules add the fantastic. All three are switched on by default (a game can still turn any off at start):
- Faith and Oaths: measurable divine favor, rites and omens.
- High Magic: vials, the Arcanum, war-mages and portals.
- Dragons: roosts, bonding and dragon units.
Rules marked (module) apply only when that module is on.