How big are the biggest cities in your campaign world?

[CleverNickName]

Sharn has a population of about 200k, and it's the current "home base" for our characters. I don't know if it's the largest city in Eberron, but it's probably in the top ten.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

In my Greyhawk campaign I've really only thought about 3 cities in that level of detail. Zeif city is the largest city in the campaign so far, with a population of about 1M. Alhaster has a population of about 50K. And Greyhawk City itself has about 150K, having had a population boom in the wake of the Greyhawk Wars some 20 years ago.

 

[corwyn77]

As has been said upthread, this is general

I don't run D&D very often. Most of my games are in GURPS and semi-historical so they could be anywhere.

Upcoming game takes place in 1860 London
Previous games: Deadlands (1880 US), time travel game that spanned from 1752 - 1974.

Currently I am running a DFRPG campaign loosely based on Vikings - started in a town of ~500, largest town is a newly recaptured fortress town of a couple thousand. There are larger cities to the south but the campaign will likely never go there and I haven't considered how large they are.

The current game I'm playing in has no cities, apparently. The group started in a castle adjoining a small agricultural town. Since I joined we have seen a couple of keeps (outposts, really), and some small villages inhabited by Raccoon people, maybe 50 - 100 of them.

 

[Alzrius]

As has been said upthread, this is general

I don't run D&D very often.

That's why I made it general. I opened with a D&D reference, certainly, but the thread was never meant to be limited to D&D in particular; I wanted people who play other RPGs to chime in as well.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I'm sure you don't; the question is for those who want a Dark Ages feel but would also like large cities.

There were large cities in the Dark Ages. I simply don't want them.

 

[Voadam]

I use a mashup homebrew of Golarion, Ptolus, Freeport, among others. Tarsus, the capital of the Ptolus Holy Lothian Empire is similar to Byzantium so I would think about a million, Ptolus is a sort of Monte Cook Greyhawk which is D&D Lankhmar, which is fantasy New York so I think big, and I was surprised when I read in the Pirate's Guide to Freeport that the major mercantile hub city is only about 10,000 people by the book.

I go more on the modern reference scale. I grew up in a small town of 7,000 people, I went to college with 40,000 other undergraduates, the county I live in is over 1 million people, so a major city of 10,000 is jarring.

I used a planar metropolis gate city to Acheron when running Lord of the Iron Fortress and remember giving it multiple LE militaristic factions with armies in the tens to maybe a hundred thousand or two, and then having an army of half a million orcs camped outside the city when the PCs arrived, to have a faction betray the city and join the orc invasion from the inside part way through the party's planar murder investigation in the city.

For the most part I don't worry too much about such numbers and go with narrative descriptions in practice that feel right. So small town, big mercantile city, sprawling capital.

 

[the Jester]

The city in my game- the final city standing after the fall of civilization- has a population of roughly 50,000.

 

[Bohandas]

Recently I was rereading the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide and took note of the listings for various settlements by population (p. 137):

• Thorp: 20-80 people.
• Hamlet: 81-400 people.
• Village: 401-900 people.
• Small town: 901-2,000 people.
• Large town: 2,001-5,000 people.
• Small city: 5,001-12,000 people.
• Large city: 12,001-25,000 people.
• Metropolis: 25,001+ people.

What bothered me about this was that I knew that I'd seen a listing for a larger population center somewhere. After some checking around online, I was finally able to zero in on where. The Epic Level Handbook revised the population tables (from the 3.0 DMG; the revisions weren't kept in the 3.5 book, which is part of the reason I had such a hard time finding it initially), and in so doing added the following:

• Planar metropolis: 100,000+ people.

Now, it's fairly intuitive that these population distributions are meant to reflect a pseudo-medieval world, where urban centers aren't nearly the size that they are today.

No, it's not that. I think they just didn't do their research because there were cities much larger than that in the distant past. If they did they would know that not only did classical Rome have a million people, but even Ur - 2000 years prior - got over halfway to the 100000 mark, and Ur was operating on a level of technology that makes medieval europe look like a space opera

 

[willrali]

In some D&D settings, the cities are way too small. When I ran Eberron, I multiplied city populations by 10. The idea of a city of 200k having a vast and complex web of top-of-the-pyramid powerbrokers, huge guilds and crime syndicates, the capacity for powerful people to be anonymous, and miles and miles of impossibly tall towers a-la Bladerunner, is ridiculous. Ancient Rome had over a million people. With the industrialized magic we see in a lot of D&D, there's no reason sanitation and logistics won't support very large cities.

Now, running Exalted, my largest city is over 4m.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I tend to run modern day superheroes mostly, so whatever that biggest cities are in the modern world.