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Castle Brush
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One hex is 95 square miles. On open land or water, this usually means one cell on a hexagonal grid that's 12 miles across the flats (13.4 miles corner to corner). In caverns, nevermind exotic non-Euclidean territories, it gets more complicated.
One credit is economically-significant goods and services worth, in GURPS terms, a bit over $10^6. If you're setting up out on the frontier, without draconic sponsorship, you can play fast and loose with the paperwork, and make a lot of grandiose but technically non-binding promises to attract the long-term ambitions of hard-working heroic idealists, and thereby acquire such resources for as little as 1000 gold in actual cash up front. Once things are more established, with bureaucratic inertia and corruption and seasoned professionals being paid what they're really worth, the price goes up to 4000 gold per credit... but generating those credits through farms and trade routes and so on is no more difficult than before, and if you're inclined to plunder the treasury and vanish in the night, or squander it on an awe-inspiring personal panoply, or otherwise convert it to dense portable wealth, one credit can at that point be converted to two thousand gold.
That's why dragons are so willing, even eager, to provide sponsorship. They spend, say, fifty thousand gold setting you up, and then when you're all established ask for those fifty credits back, and they've doubled their money without even charging interest!
Anyway, prices.
1 credit: claim a hex. Has to already be explored and major monsters chased off, but that could potentially be accomplished in a day or two, depending on terrain type. This represents setting up all the things like more detailed maps, road signs, regular patrols, and tax assessments, which collectively make the difference between wilderness and territory someone can actually control.
up to 12 credits: clear and level a single square mile of land for a town or city. Cost varies by terrain type. Just one for plains, two for hills, four for sandy desert or forest, eight for cavern, rocky wasteland, or swamp, twelve for jungle or mountains.
12 credits: Build, supply, and staff a watchtower. Core function is to let a single guard keep an eye out for fires, invading armies, and suchlike, by providing a clear vantage point above obstacles. Since sight lines go both ways, might as well put a flag up there so everyone has a reminder of who's in charge poking out of the horizon. It's also a safe place for patrols to spend the night and resupply, and reasonably defensible against bandits or rioters or wild animals. Not much point setting up more than one per hex, except as part of a city.
24 credits, or 12 to upgrade a watchtower: build, supply, and staff a permanent fortified encampment, big enough to house a hundred-man cavalry troop and support staff. Smallest artificial structure that could pose a credible challenge to siege engineers, rather than being immediately smashed to flinders or burned down as a watchtower would be. If you want more defenses than this in a single hex, camp followers are going to expand and diversify into secondary and tertiary businesses, so you might as well lay out a walled town properly.
Each hex of territory, each square mile of urban development within that territory, and each isolated fort, costs another credit per month. This upkeep cost is mostly food, so it can be offset by farming and fishing, but farms and fisheries have to be built first, for 4 credits per hex. Fishing reduces upkeep by 1 per hex, and can be set up in any hex with a significant amount of water. Farming is 2 per hex, or 3 if within one hex of a city with a particular infrastructure upgrade, but can only be set up on hills, plains (half price), and sandy deserts (double price, and requires a water supply).
Ah, but how do you make cave, mountain, and forest hexes pay for themselves? Mines, quarries, and sawmills of course. They cost 6 credits per hex (half in woodlands) and don't merely offset upkeep, but produce a credit per hex per month (and provide other bonuses) which is added directly to the treasury. Surplus food just goes to waste... unless you've built a granary in one of your cities to store it, or established a trade route to sell it elsewhere.
The really fun part of the system, though, is cities. Each of those square miles is divided up into thirty-six 750' square blocks, which can then be filled with buildings, from humble tenements (1 credit per lot), through various commercial, cultural, industrial, governmental and/or military structures, up to majestic castles (54 credits), cathedrals (58 credits), palaces (108 credits), and universities (78 credits) which occupy 4 blocks each and can have very far-reaching effects.
Where an individual character has fortitude, reflex, and will saves, a kingdom has Economy, Loyalty, and Stability. Just about everything modifies at least one of those stats. Where a character had hit points, a kingdom has Unrest, which goes from 0 to 100 in increments of five. Every increment of unrest penalizes all three kingdom stats by one. At 55 Unrest or higher, hexes start getting de-claimed. At Unrest 100, you're not running a kingdom anymore, just standing on a balcony watching the riots escalate.
Every month, the ruler and senior advisors have to spend at least seven days performing administrative work and otherwise doing their jobs. During this time. somebody rolls a Stability check. If it succeeds, Unrest decreases by 5%, or if already zero, you add an extra Credit to the treasury thanks to pure civic-mindedness and popular gratitude for a nation well run. If it fails, unrest increases by 5%, or by up to 20% on a critical failure.
Then you pay upkeep. If this leaves the treasury below 0 credits, somebody somewhere is going hungry, so unrest increases by 5%.
Then you check whether the penalty from Unrest has pushed any of the three stats into the negatives. For each one it has, add another 5%.
The Enforcer, or Minister of Hospitality, or whatever you want to call the job of formally dishing out punishment, can decide to reduce unrest by 5% by applying harsh measures which risk permanently damaging Loyalty, especially if it's already low.
After all that, and some other stuff. roll 3d6+Economy and divide by three, rounded down. That's how many credit you gain from collecting taxes.
Cheapest way to reduce unrest is to build a sturdy wall (2 credit per linear mile, -10% unrest per square mile of town adequately enclosed) or houses (3 credit and -5% per lot, or 2 credit per tenement lot upgraded... but building those tenements in the first place adds 10% unrest per lot). Mostly, though, houses are just there as prerequisites to support other businesses. Guard barracks, monuments, an orphanage, public park, or small shrine all cost 4, 6, or 8 credit and occupy a single lot, reducing unrest by 5% when built and providing some other persistent bonus. Adding a watchtower or upgrading it to a fort reduces unrest by 5% and provides greater benefits, and some more expensive buildings reduce unrest by 10% when built, or even 20% for a Castle or Cathedral, but generally you want to be careful about accumulating it in the first place.
So, if you, say, wanted to recolonize Rook's Vineyard, first you'd need to somehow neutralize (not necessarily slay, but at the very least come to an accord with) the Thing Under The Lake which previously depopulated it, and explore the immediate vicinity of the lake, which counts as a forest hex with a river. If you were working on the cheap, you could claim that territory for just 1 credit, and then, assuming competent but unexceptional leadership and a bit of luck, bring in 3 or 4 credits in taxes and 1 in goodwill the first month. Spend 3 for a sawmill and 4 for a fishery as soon as possible, they'll pay for themselves before you even get started on the actual town. Of course, until you get some real infrastructure built, your legitimacy as a government is riding a razor's edge, where even a small and transient penalty could set off a death spiral of unrest.
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