Why are city-states more popular than kingdoms and empires in fantasy?

This, city states are rare.
Even something like Neverwinter and Luskar is described as Kingdoms without vassal cities.

City-states instead of kingdoms or empires implies a true lawless land, genuine chaos and darkness and wilderness, wherein as soon as you step outside the city walls you could get gangraped by about three different groups. There'll be a great deal more space for adventure.

The prevalence of city-states, and near-total lack of anything resembling kingdoms, is one of the reasons why Wilderlands of High Fantasy is the best campaign setting in existence.

Huh? I connect Iron age with empires like the romans or the parthians

Because city states are more common historically? Kingdoms were mostly just collections of city states confederated by marriages

scale

unless your setting is based in antiquity/fake italy this is just blatantly wrong

City-states can also be kingdoms.

Less for the creator to have to flesh out. Kingdoms and empires will have hundreds of rinky dink villages, dozens of dialect or languages, and more claimants to the throne than anything.

City States lets you have "your guys" and just make everyone else an enemy.

A kingdom can be made out of several city states.
But a city state in itself, is a city state because it doesn't own other states.

Sell me on it you nerd.

I think they also might be thinking of the situation in the Germanies for some time, although saying the various "states with electors and a king/emperor" were "just a collection" is both true and not true.

Yeah, they had a lot of independence, but they were also definitely locked into their system pretty hard.

Of course, so were a lot of noble sub-domains in more solidly established kingdoms, too. Most nobles were the boss of themselves most of the time whether or not they had feudal obligations, and had a fair amount of rights too.

This.

Better yet give us a pdf so we can evaluate it ourselves.

For your standard sword and sorcery setting you need a less cohesive government, and a real wilderness. A big well organized empire can fuck up your average band of goblins on a weekly basis easily, which removes some of the room for adventurers.

It's a true child of the seventies: a setting from the times when fantasy and scifi were not two distinct genres but rather shared the same niche. Pulp is strong in this one.

It's got muscular barbarians and buxom slave girls. Cavemen, amazons, smilodons, and dinosaurs. Evil sorcerers and priests of dark gods. Vikings and pirates.

There's a war between a city of pirates and a city of wizards. Another wizard tower-city stands up in the far north. There's a Lost World area of thick woodlands and mountains full of extinct creatures. There's many a sea full of lost islands. Not a jungle without a whole lot of ruins in it - the pdf has a whole table for creating ruins and other shit you stumble into on the road.

The two biggest city-states in the setting are literally called "The City-State Of The Invincible Overlord" and "The City-State Of The World Emperor". The former is built on alien ruins. The latter (also known more boringly as Viridistan) is ruled by an ancient dark sorcerer who once summoned Demogorgon to deal with an enemy army.

Regular villages have names like Woe, Doom, and Smite.

I mentioned some aliens above. There was a whole prehistoric war between two alien empires once, and their ruins and wreckages still litter the land. You could find a raygun and shoot some motherfuckers with it.

And then of course there's the single greatest adventure module ever made - Dark Tower, in which you take sides in a war between the good and evil gods, and get to fight demonspawn and a lich, and a body-hopping wizard that's crazy enough to cast Fireball with himself in the blast radius.

>Better yet give us a pdf so we can evaluate it ourselves.

Unfortunately it's too big to throw in here, but I'll try to upload Dark Tower, or at least one of the campaign maps.

Not many GM or players know the intricancies of aristocratic ranks. How many players can answer the question of who is higher: Dukes or Counts?

Mega then?

Always bet on the Duke.

Condensing all the interesting bits of a culture or people into a single place is more narratively expediant than big kingdoms 90% of the time

Check out the OSR trove: pastebin.com/QWyBuJxd

Supplements --> Judge's Guild --> Judge's Guild d20

(I know you may not like the edition, but the d20 setting book is the clearest and easiest to figure out.)

This. I hate ignoramuses.
Top kek, the best part is you are right.

What is a city-state ruled by a king, user?

I know I'm right, I gave a silly answer because it seems silly. I don't know who you play with, but I think most people would know the truth. Failing that, a lore (nobility) roll isn't that hard to make.

what the christ are you talking about?

Thanks man. Didn't expect OSR general to keep around a 3.5 book. Never would have thought to look there.

Well it's not hard and fast. You might for example have a setting where, while a duke is next best thing to a king, a count is a foreign title that doesn't fit neatly into your ranking system. Now maybe from the duke's travels on the continent he's acquainted with counts and reckons they're usually accorded the prestige due to earls in his own country, but you never know for certain, and maybe the GM pulls a fast one on your and you're somewhere altogether more fantastical where being a count means being a peer of an emperor.

>Cities have no control over the land one foot away from their border

What the fuck are you on about?

>wherein as soon as you step outside the city walls you could get gangraped by about three different groups

I suppose that's theoretically possible, if you're a breathless debutante who's managed to shake off her escort in her haste to get raped by the first peasants, brigands or gypsies she encounters.

I was making a comedic exaggeration, you autists.

I would hate to play there because my prior knowledge would clash with whatever the retarded DM is trying to pull.

If you want a new set of kingdom hierarchy just take a different cultures name, your way sounds already confusing. Or if you really want to change shit up, use irrelevant names for it. Like replace King with Gandhi, Duke with Churchill, etc. So it's at least easily recognizable.
>The Gandhi invites you to the ceremony

>Not many GM or players know the intricancies of aristocratic ranks
It's something you can easily google. Go to google images and you can even get a handy-dandy flowchart. Hell, a well-designed TTRPG handbook can even dedicate a page to something like pic related.

They're not. Most fantasy is as has already been stated ITT by other posters.

Now, if you were going for a time period starting with the neolithic and ending right before the Roman Kingdom, then you'd see more than a few city-states.

Maybe a Neandertal confederacy of cave-villages finds itself being approached by traders from some southern city-state they can't even conceptualize. Maybe there's a pentarchy of city-states that's beginning to see a fusion into a legit empire - if only those pesky dog-riders would piss off and let the nobility consolidate their power! Maybe the local hunter-gatherer bands of Homo ergaster happen upon the world's first city, where people with actual foreheads are busy "taming" ergasters that got too close...

Does a grand princess weigh as much as a thousand princesses?

Sparta.

They're smaller and thus both politically simpler and more accessible to individual hero/protagonist characters.

>a king
>Sparta.
Try again

That's even worse the players are just going to bring in their preconceptions of the relationship between Gandhi and Churchill!

>The King officially wields no power, but the Duke dare not move against him because of the popular support he commands

That's not really intricate. I'm pretty sure everyone knows it at least to the CK2 level.

Early Rome.

They're not, not even close

Whichever has more money and swords

The Tyrants were basically kings, user.

I dunno if I'd say city-states are more popular than kingdoms or empires. They each serve their own purpose. In the past if a group hasn't wanted a huge "globe-trotting" campaign, I've used a single city-state as a hub where they'd pick up quests from the local adventurer's guild, leave on their quest, and come back to the city-state when they're done. That's also a great way to build up interesting NPCs like shopkeepers, politicians, priests, and such that the players can interact with.

Allows for a lot of variation in a comparatively small geographical region.
Also, in terms of roleplaying games like D&D where PCs are generally mercenaries-for-hire it allows for a lot of stories generated from tension between local city-states á la Italian Condottieri

City-states are objectively better than kingdoms, so why be bothered?

Kingdoms are almost always too much for a player to really soak in, so they only really care about the capital city, and treat every other city or town as something unconnected, so why not make it so? Every town being an independent city-state makes it work for players, who can't tell the difference between a city a mile from the capital or 100 miles away, or even a city of a different kingdom.

Italian Renaissance city-states style > Holy Roman Empire style

Because underdogs or someshit.

They're not underdogs if everyone is equally shit.

I should put together a 2-page pdf or some shit that lets the reader roll a completely random city-state. Each specific trait/quality/factor would get its own die.

d4 for current status (empty, thriving, etc.), d8 for staple crop, so on and so forth.

This

So in other words creators are lazy.

>Italian Renaissance city-states style > Holy Roman Empire style
Have you never opened a history book? Are you by any change American? Take a look at the picture, the HRE consisted of a billion independent micro states

>Kingdoms are almost always too much for a player to really soak in
this is sad desu. I want to incorporate a old aristocracy of the capital vs the new landed magnates finding riches conquering the east independent of the capital dynamic so bad.

>"""""""""""""""Empire"""""""""""""""

>City-states instead of kingdoms or empires implies a true lawless land, genuine chaos and darkness and wilderness, wherein as soon as you step outside the city walls you could get gangraped by about three different groups.
So how does the city feed themselves if they don't control any land outside the city walls? You can have crops inside but they won't be enough, it's supposed to be a city so it has huge population. No trade caravans can get to the city because in the surrounding area there's utter chaos. So no food by trading.

A city state doesn't necessarily have to bee 100% urban.

Yes I said so, but it's not going to be enough to feed the population. Unless there are only ten buildings which pretty much makes it a hamlet surrounded by walls and not a city.

>Yes I said so,
You didn't.. You implied that controlling land outside the city walls disqualify it as a city state, which it wont. Now that I re-read your post you also imply that a city has to have a massive population, when in fact the word city doesn't have an all encompassing definition and being a city doesn't warrant a huge population. (I.E I live in a city by my own country's standards, because my city was given trading rights back in the medieval period thus making it a city. My city only has 40k people though, and doesn't fit the EU definition of a city)

You can have a city state that controls enough arable land to sustain itself, hell you can have a city that has farmlands inside their walls. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasian_Wall)

Also fish exist.

>You can have a city state that controls enough arable land to sustain itself
And by this I mean (in the outside the walls is unsafe) is that the arable land is in safe spaces, I.E inside the walls or protected by geography. The city for example gets its food from a safe valley protected by mountains. The "how they get their food" doesn't disqualify the "bad things behind the walls" thing, it makes its much more interesting.

Or the city is near the coast that is an archipelago, and the food is farmed on thousands of small islands where the monsters can't get.

>You didn't.. You implied that controlling land outside the city walls disqualify it as a city state, which it wont.
The guy to whom I originally replied said that the moment you step outside the city walls you could get gangraped so any land the city owned can't be accessed anymore. I never implied what you're saying.
>Now that I re-read your post you also imply that a city has to have a massive population
I never implied that. A city of ten thousand is still big in medieval settings and requires a lot of farmland if trade is out of the question.
>You can have a city state that controls enough arable land to sustain itself, hell you can have a city that has farmlands inside their walls. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasian_Wall)
Cities like Constantinople were rare. This guy talks about about a bunch of cities states being close together so they're not going to be all versions of Constantinople situated in peninsulas that can be easily defended. Not to mention how the hell are you going to man all these walls if you're in a state of constant war. You would need the entire population to protect these walls (and patrol the surrounding sea with boats in case of Constantinople
>Also fish exist.
The same problem with crops. They're not going to be enough. I assume in his scenario there are water monsters and pirates so you can't sail that far away from the city.

>Contains "Archduke"

T. Hapsburg trash.

>City-states are top tech, mercenary land of opportunity with noble houses fighting each other for art, technology and armies.
>Empires are evil, corrupt and stagnant. Usually shadows of a former greater empire.
>Kingdoms are alright and just want to be left alone and let its people be happy without outside interference.

The small look up on the normal sized as giants and see them as wrong.

So they are the underdogs to people that normally enjoy underdogs?

That could work but it's not what describes at all.

Here's a suggestion: Scrap the cities states and instead create small "colonies". At the area the game is set recently gold or some other precious material was found and so a lot of prospectors, adventurers, thugs and tradesmen started moving in and creating these little colonies in these uninhabited land. Maybe the nearby kingdoms sent some guards and officials to bring law but they had no success. The area is also home to many vicious monsters which frequently attack the colonists prompting them to build palisades around their villages. Chaos ensures over land claims that supposedly have gold with different factions fighting over them.

So there you go, you have lawless small colonies, genuine chaos and darkness and wildreness. There's a lot of adventure and it makes sense for your party to be there. And because the population is small it is possible to provide food just by hunting and fishing. You can make a very interesting world out of all this

Nigga I play ck2.

Monarchist for life.

A city state user.
Monarchy doesn't change that.
You can even have a merchant city state, it doesn't change that its a city state.

It's not just a matter of laziness. Laziness may be one factor, but having a thorough understanding of your skill level and knowing your limits isn't a bad thing. Even though you can put more work into developing your setting, it becomes exponentially more difficult to make your setting interesting and get your readers to buy into it the more complicated you get.

Because the "darkness" is concentrated in trade routes, migration routes, and valleys between spheres of control.

A city state might control everything in its valley, and some connected valleys/coastlines. But since it doesn't control all the land, there is lots of space between city states that is unsettled.
Meanwhile in a Kingdom, there is reasons to aggressive settling of the inland, build out infrastructure.
For city states, something similar would take massive effort and agreements, to even clear a trade route.

Do it! Make shit happen!

>he hasn't achieved Tolkien level world-building

Are city-states dependent on mercenaries or could they maintain their own armiea?

Oh, I will.

Just not tonight, though, kinda played Stellaris for too long. I'll get at it tomorrow, plenty of time after work.

That's not really an issue of political structure though. A city-state has an economic incentive to control and develop territory just like a kingdom does. The city-states of Greece/Phoenicia, early Rome/Carthage, Cahokia, Toltlan, and arguably early (like pre-Sargon) Mesopotamia may all fit the points of light aesthetic. But think also about the early kingdoms in Scandinavia, Poland, and Lithuania. PoL is not even nearly exclusive to city-states. It's an economic thing rather than a political one. Consider also the reign of Sargon, who united the top and bottom of the Tigris and Euphrates. He was bragging about the trade routes that his empire formed. How can that be something worth bragging over unless the wilderness remains unpacified?

>Monarchist for life.
I'm genuinely torn between posting a picture of Robespierre and making a joke about a guillotine, or posting a picture of a Roman and calling you a pleb. Your political system of choice is so shit, I genuinely can't choose between the various methods of tearing it a new one. Even when resorting to jokes rather than arguments the available options are way too numerous. My point is that you're a homosexual and your mother has questionable sexual morals.

Sparta was famous for her armies. So was Athens; less so but she also didn't orient her entire society around producing soldiers.

Not him, but there's something to be said for having a ruler who is trained from birth to rule and who has no real requirement to deal with special interests. A well-trained leader with no concerns but leading is a lot better than the corruption inherent to democracy.

How about you give us an argument about why Monarchy is so bad?

>he fell for the democracy meme

Rule of cool

realism>rule of cool

In what scenarios? Do you have any proof that realism is always better in ALL circumstances over rule of cool?

Poster you responded to.

I stated my ideology. You seem to be having a nice meme over there on my particular belief. If you'd like to debate it, let's take it to /pol/.

>but there's something to be said for having a ruler who is trained from birth
There are so many examples that prove this wrong. Just think of all the inbred kings who ended up literal drooling retards or having 20 seizures a day, or the child kings that left their kingdoms entirely crippled due to being too young to even act (if I'm not mistaken a large part of why Scotland eventually became part of the UK is because after the death of James IV the throne passed to his infant son and Scotland eventually become diplomatically isolated and sidelined). And then there are the monarchs who weren't retarded but just indifferent, those who were born to the throne but would rather do anything but rule.

>who has no real requirements to deal with special interests
Yeah, that's the big advantage of lifelong rulers, I'll grant you that. Then again, that also means they have zero responsibility to their subjects and only a formal responsibility to God.

I implied my gripes earlier: leaders are chosen by birth rather than by merit, which can lead to questionable leaders you cannot get rid of.

Democracy in its modern sense is retarded though, and pretty much every classical liberal political thinker tried to limit democracy (point out that the Federalist Papers has an entire chapter titled "limiting democracy" to any modern day American and 'ave a nice giggle). Rousseau was probably the most generous in handing out voting rights (desiring egalitarianism before the law) and even he envisioned a Roman style system of citizen-soldiers.

Or the preroman levant, or pre dynastic china, or most of southeast asia, or india, or pre-mongolian russia, or a number of other historical periods.

>leaders are chosen by birth rather than by merit
So what system do you follow? Surely it can't be democracy with that mindset.

The only difference between a king and an emperor is that they chose to call themselves that. The only reason that emperor and king are two different titles is because the Romans didnt want to admit they'd gone back to what was essentially hereditary monarchy. Prior to napolion, emperor was identical to king but with an added sprinkle of claim to roman heritage.

>pre-mongolian russia

Kievan Rus was hardly a city-state.

While you bring up some good points, I must correct you that the reason why Scotland became a part of the United Kingdom had to do with James VI inheriting the throne after Elizabeth I died without heir.
The part about Inbreeding fucking up kingdoms is correct. Spain got fucked in the 18th century because of that shit when the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II ended up a total retard after the generations of inbreeding among the Spanish Habsburgs and Spain never really recovered in power after that.

There's nothing wrong with that after introducing conscription, eliminating female suffrage and erasing the option for first generation immigrants to become full citizens

>Just think of all the inbred kings who ended up literal drooling retards or having 20 seizures a day, or the child kings that left their kingdoms entirely crippled due to being too young to even act
Well, no system's perfect. But it worked well in Europe for a thousand years and is working better than the alternatives right now in Africa and the middle east. And Bhutan I suppose.

>Then again, that also means they have zero responsibility to their subjects
Yeah, but without political obligations to the contrary, they're left to be human, and humans fundamentally tend to be good, especially towards their own people.

>which can lead to questionable leaders you cannot get rid of.
So in other words, the ideal government would be a monarchy but with a procedure for impeachment?