38 million in Tokyo. City Populations, Largest Cities of the World - Worldatlas.comI tend to run modern day superheroes mostly, so whatever that biggest cities are in the modern world.
Recently I was rereading the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide and took note of the listings for various settlements by population (p. 137):
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:
- 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.
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.
- Planar metropolis: 100,000+ people.
"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.
That numbers sound perfectly reasonable to me. 200k is a huge city using D&D tech levels.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.
200K is almost 10x the minimum size of a 3e D&D metropolis, so yes it is huge using D&D baseline populations.That numbers sound perfectly reasonable to me. 200k is a huge city using D&D tech levels.
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 40.000200K 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.
Can I raise a practical question at this point?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.