We’ve been refining the tactical end of the Iron Empires on the forum, most recently with the sprawling Build Your Own Anvil Battalion thread. The Brick itself gives a good overview of the grand strategic situation of the various Empires and successor states. But now Chris Moeller’s map of Sector 243 (in the galactic southeast of the Comoran worlds) gives us a fascinating glimpse into the level in-between an individual Anvil Lord’s battalion and a Great Lord’s empire: a district of scores of worlds and multiple feudal domains of several systems each.
And here we have considerable undefined territory in canon. How many worlds does an “average” Forged Lord (if there is such a thing) control? How many layers of the feudal hierarchy exist between a Great Lord like the Darikahn Emperor and a particular inhabited planet – that is, between the general setting information in the Brick and the specific location that the players create using the World Burner?
Chris’s map gives us a few clues. I’d been thinking of the archetypical Forged Lord’s domain as a single heavily industrialized world, to support its main Hammer fleet, with a half dozen lesser worlds around it as economic fodder. But there are way fewer “House” names marked on the map than industrial worlds – the borders of their domains aren’t clearly marked, and maybe aren’t clear in (fictional) reality, but it looks like each of the named Houses on the map controls several industrial worlds.
So, I have some questions for Chris, and some thoughts of my own, and all of it I’d like to throw open to general discussion.
Questions for Chris:
How do you generate these sector maps? I get the impression there’s a Traveller-style randomization process at work.
Specifically,
- how many systems to the average sector?
- how many systems in each of the Empires?
- what percent of systems are industrialized?
- what percent of systems are at what Tech Index levels?
And then how do you draw the borders and sketch the political areas, especially the more local ones (“House Udolor,” “Sika Outraders,” etc.)?
Thoughts for everyone to discuss:
Power in the Iron Empires is first and foremost military power. Military power requires wealth (“The sinews of war are infinite money” - Cicero), specifically industrial capacity. So what matters, militarily and politically, is the industrial worlds (the equivalent of the high-population worlds in Traveller). Everything else is just maneuvering room.
Power in the Iron Empires is also highly decentralized. It’s a feudal system, and distance matters enormously. Power projection is hard, and your influence diminishes dramatically at greater ranges from your power base.
These two factors together suggest that a region’s political structure depends on the distance between industrialized worlds. Where several industrialized worlds are close together, you either have endemic conflict between them, or one Lord who unifies them. The more isolated a given industrial world is, the more politically independent it can be.
The thing that is not clear in my mind is how many layers of feudal hierarchy there’d need to be. My quick estimate suggests there are nearly 100 industrialized worlds in “Sector 243.” If those little grid squares on the map on p. 28 of the Brick are Sectors, then each of the Empires has 30-50 of them – so we’re talking thousands of industrialized worlds per Empire.
My first reaction is that each Empire (with the partial exception of the Darikahn, who are more centralized) is really a confederacy of a number of regional domains, with the Emperor’s personal domain being the strongest but not so strong that one of the others can’t challenge it – hence the Gonzagin Civil War between Gonzagin and Evans (p. 139) or struggle for the Overlordship of the Dunedin between Norsadek and Gadazh.
- Let’s call these individuals “Great Lords,” with the recognized Emperors and Overlords of the various regions being first among equals but not dramatically more powerful than the others. (Excepting, again, the Darikahn Emperor, and only to a degree). Let’s allocate each of them a couple hundred industrialized worlds.
- But there’s no way one powerbase can control so many systems. So each Great Lord has perhaps a dozen or so major vassals, who control, say a couple dozen industrialized worlds. I’ll tentatively call these “Quadrant Lords,” since each quarter of Sector 243 has about the right number of systems to support one of these nobles.
- Then the Quadrant Lord holds sway over 10-12 “Sector Lords,” one based at each of the worlds marked as a “Sector Capital” on the map, each dominating 1-4 industrialized worlds.
- Only then do you get down to your neighborhood System Lord, with a single industrialized planet as his (or her) home base. Perhaps this level doesn’t even exist, though. Perhaps power is more centralized at this local tier, so that not every industrialized world is homebase to a Forged Lord: maybe some of them just have Hammer Lords and Anvil Lords with their liege in a neighboring system.
This is me attempting to construct a fairly flat hierarchy – a Lord of level (x) controls 10-12 Lords of level (x-1), a very wide “span of control” in military terms – and it still took me five tiers: System Lord, Sector Lord, Quadrant Lord, Great Lord, Overlord/Emperor.
But my basic assumptions as to numbers may be off, or small errors in my estimates may have compounded nastily as I scaled up from the Sector 243 map to the Iron Empires as a whole.
