Holdings and the Multiworld Clan

Aihao (Iwahfuah 2409 A9CA947-C), the industrial capital of the multiworld Hlaotiyoiho (Manytongues) clan, a likely Tlaukhu contender ranked 30^th in the Hierate, and said to control over 50 mainworlds.

Clans of the Aslan introduced the clan profile, which defines an Aslan clan much like the world profile defines a Traveller world. One of the keystone characteristics is Holdings, which measures the amount of mainworld territory directly controlled by the clan. (A clan might also hold additional territory on secondary or split-control worlds, or in lands held by vassal clans in fief.)

A Holdings score of 4 or less indicates the clan controls less than one entire world; a Holdings score of 5 indicates the clan dominates exactly one mainworld in its entirety; and a Holdings score of 6 or more indicates the clan controls two or more mainworlds. Each step in this scale represents a rough doubling of worlds:

Clan Holdings Scores

Holdings	Description	Average
6	2–3 worlds	2.5
7	4–7 worlds	5.5
8	8–15 worlds	11.5
9	16–31 worlds	23.5
A	32–63 worlds	47.5

A Multiworld clan therefore will always have a Holdings score between 6 and A. Aslan worlds controlled by Multiworld clans can be identified by either Government Type K or the allegiance code AsMw.

In a previous post on Independent Clans we assumed that approximately 1,300 worlds in the Hierate are controlled by Multiworlds clans, and an average Multiworld clan controlled 17 worlds, implying there were probably around 76 different Multiworld clans. These estimates were reflected in this passage from Clans of the Aslan:

There are probably less than 100 Multiworld clans in the entire Hierate. On average, Multiworld clans have populations in the low tens of billions. These clans can hold as few as two mainworlds to over 30, with an average somewhere between 12 and 24 worlds.

These estimates are also reflected in the clan generation system, where the average Holdings score is between 8 and 9.

While I think the clan generation system works perfectly well for fleshing out a handful of clans for a subsector, as I worked up details on an entire sector I felt the system was producing too many Multiworld clans with Holdings scores that were too high, even though the averages were consistent with our previous assumptions. Hlakhoi sector, for example, has 78 worlds with the AsMw allegiance code—which, with an average of 17 worlds apiece, would represent only 4–5 Multiworld clans. This struck me as far too few, even assuming that Multiworld clan territories overlap sector boundaries.

I was also concerned with how these Multiworld clan results stacked up against the Tlaukhu clans. When I first reverse-engineered the composition of the Hierate, I assumed all Tlaukhu clans had Holdings scores of A, and thus an average Multiworld clan Holdings of 8 or 9 made sense. But once I had sleuthed out details on the individual Tlaukhu clans, I ended up with a handful of Tlaukhu clans with Holdings as low as 8, and another handful with Holdings as high as B. This meant the average Multiworld clan had Holdings comparable to the weakest Tlaukhu members. While some overlap in strength between the two groups is both reasonable and desirable, too much would contradict previous canon, which holds that membership on the Twenty-Nine is relatively stable.

The problem, I concluded, was that clan Holdings should likely exhibit a highly skewed distribution, wherein a small number of very large clans push the average Holdings results upward, much like average “real world” incomes can be skewed upward by just a few ultra-wealthy individuals. Traveller world populations exhibit a similar skew, as each increment in the Population code represents an order-of-magnitude increase in population. Using straight-up world generation, the average Traveller world has a population of 1.71 billion, which is driven by only a handful of Pop A worlds.

For skewed data like World Population, real-world income, or clan Holdings, the median value is often more informative than the average value, as it reduces the impact of extreme outliers on either end of the data set. So while the average Traveller world population is 1.71 billion, the median population is only 500,000. Roughly half of the worlds produced by Traveller world generation would be expected to have populations below 500,000, while half would have populations above 500,000.

By going back to basics, I played with a 2D6 distribution that would produce more Multiworld clans with lower Holdings scores and much fewer clans with higher Holdings scores. I wanted to target a Holdings score of 7 (4–7 mainworlds) as the median result.

Multiworld Clan Revised Holdings Distribution

2D	Probability	Holdings	Total Clans	Worlds/Clan	Total Worlds	Weighted Result
2	2.77%	6	4	2.5	10	0.07
3	5.55%	6	9	2.5	23	0.14
4	8.33%	6	13	2.5	33	0.21
5	11.11%	7	17	5.5	94	0.61
6	13.88%	7	22	5.5	121	0.76
7	16.66%	7	26	5.5	143	0.92
8	13.88%	7	22	5.5	121	0.76
9	11.11%	8	17	11.5	196	1.28
10	8.33%	8	13	11.5	150	0.96
11	5.55%	9	9	23.5	212	1.30
12	2.77%	A	4	47.5	190	1.32
			156		1,293	8.326

With this distribution, the median number of mainworlds controlled by a Multiworld clan drops to 5.5 (Holdings 7), with an average of 8.33 (Holdings 8). This seems much more reasonable to me, though it does increase the expected total number of Multiworld clans in the Hierate from 76 to 156. These results can be further consolidated like so:

Multiworld Clan Holdings

2D	Probability	Holdings	Clans	Worlds
2–4	16.65%	6	26	66
5–8	55.53%	7	87	479
9–10	19.44%	8	30	346
11	5.55%	9	9	212
12	2.77%	A	4	190
			156	1,293

Based on these changes, the description of Multiworld clans in Clans of the Aslan could be revised to read:

There are probably more than 150 Multiworld clans in the entire Hierate. Multiworld clans have median populations in the high hundreds of millions and average populations in the low billions. These clans can hold as few as two mainworlds to over 30, with an average somewhere between 6 and 12 worlds. A Multiworld clan also controls a comparable number of secondary worlds and have many smaller holdings on split-control worlds.

With these change in mind, the table of Random Clan Holdings on page 79 of Clans of the Aslan can thus be expanded from a 1D to 2D table like this:

Random Clan Holdings (Revised)

2D	Major	Multiworld	Single World	Minor	Major Vassal	Vassal	Minor Vassal
2	8	6	5	0	5	3	0
3	8	6	5	0	5	3	0
4	8	6	5	0	5	4	0
5	9	7	5	0	6	5	0
6	9	7	5	1	6	5	1
7	9	7	5	1	7	6	1
8	A	7	5	2	7	6	2
9	A	8	5	2	7	6	2
10	A	8	5	3	7	7	3
11	B	9	5	4	7	7	3
12	B	A	5	4	7	7	3

The old table works fine for most uses, but if a referee wanted to develop an area larger than a subsector or two, this revised version should work better for that purpose. Using this, the number of Multiworld clans in Hlakhoi increased to twelve, with one clan with Holdings A, one with Holdings 9, three with Holdings 8, three with Holdings 7, and four with Holdings 6—a much more varied and interesting result, in my mind.

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