How big are the biggest cities in your campaign world?

[Bohandas]

I feel that realistically the population of Dis in Baator might number in the billions

 

[Voadam]

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

38 million in Tokyo. City Populations, Largest Cities of the World - Worldatlas.com

 

[Big J Money]

My upcoming campaign has a mythically large city (the largest city in the known "multiverse") so its size is actually unknowable, but at least in the millions. I guess you could even think of it as "the realm of citiness". It's a trade hub between realms. My setting doesn't call them planes per se, but it's somewhat the same concept.

At some point I will create city crawl rules for actually populating and generating the inifinite city as the players explore it, but not before the campaign begins. I have a rough idea on how I want to do it.

 

[Kyphura]

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. Even so, I found it quite amusing to consider that a town with a hundred thousand people or more is so large that it constitutes being known across the multiverse for its size.

"Across the planes of existence, there are places where untold masses live, converging in groups so large as to boggle the imagination. Places with names such as Sigil, Dis, the City of Brass, and...Akron, Ohio."

So that got me wondering: how large are the largest population centers in your campaign world? Are they places with a few tens of thousands of people, like in the DMG? Or do you have them approaching more contemporary standards? How big are your world's "big cities"?

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

I have a dwarven underground mega city that has about 7.8 million people living inside this giant mountain that goes roughly a hundred or so miles underground for JUST shopping and residential districts. The nobles live off to the side around the middle area, and the entire place is run on steam and magical minerals like the crystals that help light their lanterns and giant braizers. They have gondolas that take people from place to place (similar to how buses and trains would work) and they also use a mix of natural gas and boiling underground water to produce their steam for these engines. The dwarves in my world, at least in this area, were inspired by the Dwemer of Tamriel.

I guess my point was that despite my campaign taking place in a heavy medieval setting regarding knights, dragons, and magic, my dwarves are much more on the side of technology and because of this they have produced an extremely large population. I have a huge city that is capital of the trading region of my world that acts as a bastion for goods and services going from both sides of the world and it has about 25 million people in it.

I have hamlets that hardly have above eighty people, and some cities that have 25-50 thousand. Some towns have a few hundred, some villages or smaller cities have 2-5 thousand. It varies. A big thing to remember is that everyone and every place has a story. Even the hamlets have histories and legends. In one of my hamlets was born one of my players, who has since become a legend since his time had passed. They have a statue of him and everything, and regardless of the campaign, his stories are told throughout the world- sometimes even improperly.

Sorry for the lore-dump. Point is is that population matters to the extent of how and why it matters. 25 million people is unheard of for medieval times, but for a trade city that provides a safe haven for merchants across the entire continent? Or the technological marvels of an ancient dwarven society that is revolutionizing a new technology? Famine, disease, and war can effect populations with refugees, takeovers, occupations, etc.

Make your world feel alive and lived in, have reasons for populations, don't make other areas feel less important just due to size and people, and your world will feel immersive and real. That is my advice though- take it with a grain of salt, and have fun!

P.S. It's your world. Go wild. If you want to make it realistic, look at areas you're taking from in the time period you're in, or have the whole thing take place in one giant multi-billion population metropolis. Who cares? As long as you're having fun.

 

[Ixal]

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.

That numbers sound perfectly reasonable to me. 200k is a huge city using D&D tech levels.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I rarely use big cities as a DM. I'm sure they're somewhere in the world, but I don't find them fun to run. I think I enjoy the impact characters can have on villages and small towns.

In my last homebrew game, the biggest city was a portside haven for pirates and criminals. If I had to ballpark guess, it probably had a population of 6,000 - 10,000? What's funny is that the characters never traveled there for fear of the Vampire Queen who had her hold right next to it.

 

[Voadam]

That numbers sound perfectly reasonable to me. 200k is a huge city using D&D tech levels.

200K is almost 10x the minimum size of a 3e D&D metropolis, so yes it is huge using D&D baseline populations.

Whether that seems big enough to support "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 a separate question.

The answer may be yes for some, but there is a mismatch between low population major D&D cities and modern baselines.

According to wikipedia 200k is about the 2021 level of Salt Lake City, Utah.

International trade hub city Freeport is a 10K small city in D&D terms but equivalent to about Sedona, Arizona or about half the population of 18K small town Concord, Massachusetts, a large D&D city in 3.5.

 

[Ixal]

200K is almost 10x the minimum size of a 3e D&D metropolis, so yes it is huge using D&D baseline populations.

Whether that seems big enough to support "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 a separate question.

The answer may be yes for some, but there is a mismatch between low population major D&D cities and modern baselines.

According to wikipedia 200k is about the 2021 level of Salt Lake City, Utah.

International trade hub city Freeport is a 10K small city in D&D terms but equivalent to about Sedona, Arizona or about half the population of 18K small town Concord, Massachusetts, a large D&D city in 3.5.

Its also larger than 16th century Venice and about as large as Tenochtitlan which was among the largest cities in the world at that time while Cologne, the most important and largest "german" city had a population of 40.000
In fact Sharn would be the 2nd largest city in Europe in 1500 only slightly after Paris and 7th largest city worldwide at that point in time.

The problem here are the modern baselines.

 

[Tonguez]

Bishnagar is the largest cty imc and goes over a million (though Ive never specified just how many). It was established by a dragon and sits at the center of both the North-South Salt-Ivory Route and the East-West Silk Routes and is thus the cosmopolitan centre of world trade, banking and learning.

most other cities are much much smaller with 20000 being considered large, in some parts of the world the capital city has only 5000 people

 

[Lanefan]

I have a dwarven underground mega city that has about 7.8 million people living inside this giant mountain that goes roughly a hundred or so miles underground for JUST shopping and residential districts. The nobles live off to the side around the middle area, and the entire place is run on steam and magical minerals like the crystals that help light their lanterns and giant braizers. They have gondolas that take people from place to place (similar to how buses and trains would work) and they also use a mix of natural gas and boiling underground water to produce their steam for these engines. The dwarves in my world, at least in this area, were inspired by the Dwemer of Tamriel.

Can I raise a practical question at this point?

What do those 7.8 million Dwarves do for food?