D&D 5E It's Canon - Greyhawk's Sun rises in the South and Sets in the North (or possibly the other way around)

[Benjamin Olson]

I just want to note that East being traditionally on top in medieval European maps is why it is referred to as "orientation".

How dare they orient my map towards the orient!

 

[Helldritch]

Ho, and if millions of players of WoW can accept that Oegrimmar and Stormwind are the center of such vast empires with the few buildings and NPCs you can see within their walls, we can certainly accept that there are so many factions I such a small town. As JC Mellencamp said, lots happen in a small town...

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I read it and with a 500 population it can work. It is a bit of a stretch but it can work out if you take into account that about one and a half to twice the town's population live outside it. Dwarves are a bit away in the mine (where else could they be...) and the farmers and their workers would be in outlying farms as well as independent fishers that would live near the coast.

It would be a bit stretched but could still be believable. Add a very good smith living near a horse farms because he hates the mayor. A lone wizard and his two apprenctices living at the edge of the woods or marshes and a few other NPCs like that and the setting is suddenly very believable.

Let's play with numbers a bit.

First though, reading through the material on the town, Saltmarsh includes:
-3 factions (one secret)
-Prominent fishing families
-Prominent merchant families
-Workers
-Smugglers
-A senior town council member who owns 3 large fishing boats and is looking to expand the industry
-A wealthy merchant who "garners a great deal of support with the many feasts, entertainments, and other diversions he supports". He is a foppish dandy who enjoys "fine wine, good food, and the latest fashions" as well as a "patron of the arts and spends lavishly to support festivals, plays, and concerts"
-Smuggling operations sufficiently large that a bungled operation could land "a few respected people in jail"
-"Many" fishing boat crews, in fact, enough that it would take "several" going missing before the locals demand action be taken to figure out what happened
-"the town's various organizations"
-A full time town guard of 100 warriors
-A council member whose family has a trade cartel, and fleet of fishing boats, and several trading vessels
-Several popular fishing boat owners
-Can muster a militia of 500 residents
-A small force of marines
-A jail that can handle punishments including 2d10 years of imprisonment
-Docks that are "almost constantly busy" with two primary piers for large ships, and a series of smaller ones
-The capacity to build 6 new warships under a commission from the crown

All that is before you even get to reading through the key to the locations on the map.

Can we make that work with 500 people? Probably only 200 of them are adults.. Of those 200 adults, let's say only 10% are elders beyond their working years being cared for by their adult children. Now we're down to 180.

Those 180 need to accommodate everything above. But I'm going to pretend we're dropping the last zero on all the population numbers, so only 10 of them (rather than 100) are full time town guards.

Of those remaining 170 adults, we need to fit in all that stuff from before. Wealthy and poor families, prominent and less prominent. 3 large fishing boats attached to just one family, many other fishing boats (and I'm assuming that includes some other large ones based on context). We need to be able to build 6 warships in a reasonable amount of time, and that foppish dandy needs to be able to patronize the arts, etc.

This is not only not plausible for a town of 500, it is frankly impossible.

 

[Guest 6801328]

This is a night scene. A wizard just cast meteor swarm to the NE. Thus the shadows.

 

[Helldritch]

Let's play with numbers a bit.

First though, reading through the material on the town, Saltmarsh includes:
-3 factions (one secret)
-Prominent fishing families
-Prominent merchant families
-Workers
-Smugglers
-A senior town council member who owns 3 large fishing boats and is looking to expand the industry
-A wealthy merchant who "garners a great deal of support with the many feasts, entertainments, and other diversions he supports". He is a foppish dandy who enjoys "fine wine, good food, and the latest fashions" as well as a "patron of the arts and spends lavishly to support festivals, plays, and concerts"
-Smuggling operations sufficiently large that a bungled operation could land "a few respected people in jail"
-"Many" fishing boat crews, in fact, enough that it would take "several" going missing before the locals demand action be taken to figure out what happened
-"the town's various organizations"
-A full time town guard of 100 warriors
-A council member whose family has a trade cartel, and fleet of fishing boats, and several trading vessels
-Several popular fishing boat owners
-Can muster a militia of 500 residents
-A small force of marines
-A jail that can handle punishments including 2d10 years of imprisonment
-Docks that are "almost constantly busy" with two primary piers for large ships, and a series of smaller ones
-The capacity to build 6 new warships under a commission from the crown

All that is before you even get to reading through the key to the locations on the map.

Can we make that work with 500 people? Probably only 200 of them are adults.. Of those 200 adults, let's say only 10% are elders beyond their working years being cared for by their adult children. Now we're down to 180.

Those 180 need to accommodate everything above. But I'm going to pretend we're dropping the last zero on all the population numbers, so only 10 of them (rather than 100) are full time town guards.

Of those remaining 170 adults, we need to fit in all that stuff from before. Wealthy and poor families, prominent and less prominent. 3 large fishing boats attached to just one family, many other fishing boats (and I'm assuming that includes some other large ones based on context). We need to be able to build 6 warships in a reasonable amount of time, and that foppish dandy needs to be able to patronize the arts, etc.

This is not only not plausible for a town of 500, it is frankly impossible.

Lol, I did say to reduce the numbers. For the sake of arguement.
100 town guards is not that much if they are paid by the capital a bit further north. It would not be that unusual for a power center to have a bigger garrison in such a place.
500 militia would probably be every abled men and women in the vincinity, which would be a lot. 50 would be more like it.

The rest, factions and what not , can be justified. It would be a stretch, but still believable. And as I said, if it was believable in WoW, why couldn't it be in D&D?

 

[Charlaquin]

I just want to note that East being traditionally on top in medieval European maps is why it is referred to as "orientation".

How dare they orient my map towards the orient!

Well, T and O maps were, but until around 1400 there wasn’t a standard map orientation in Europe. Actually, given that this map depicts a coastal town, it would be more traditional to orient it towards the coastline. So, South would be up in that case.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Lol, I did say to reduce the numbers. For the sake of arguement.
100 town guards is not that much if they are paid by the capital a bit further north. It would not be that unusual for a power center to have a bigger garrison in such a place.
500 militia would probably be every abled men and women in the vincinity, which would be a lot. 50 would be more like it.

The rest, factions and what not , can be justified. It would be a stretch, but still believable. And as I said, if it was believable in WoW, why couldn't it be in D&D?

I mean, yeah, you can set it at 500 and still make use of some stuff, but you'll have to rewrite large amounts of the town description. Several taverns, multiple guilds...it's just not believable without substantial work. (And at that point, why not just take the easy route and assume the map is what's wrong rather than re-write the whole town?)

I do expect a substantially more believable impression of the population of an area in my D&D than I do from something like WoW or Skyrim. That's kind of one of the big points of playing a TRPG rather than a CRPG. My players would also find it pretty darn absurd if I presented anything like that place (even the architecture!) and told them it was a village of 500 people. They'd probably assume there is some wacky magical thing going on (which might derail anything else while they started investigating the anomaly!), unless I told them I know the numbers are ridiculous but that's what the book said. I could even imagine one of them saying, "can we just add a zero and pretend there are 5,000 instead of 500?"

But with all this talking about it, now I'm going to try to fix the map.

 

[Coroc]

Ho, and if millions of players of WoW can accept that Oegrimmar and Stormwind are the center of such vast empires with the few buildings and NPCs you can see within their walls, we can certainly accept that there are so many factions I such a small town. As JC Mellencamp said, lots happen in a small town...

If millions of players would assemble in Ogrimmar the server would severely lag and crash.

At the beginning of WoW when I still played it, back in 2005 we once formed 4 whole raid groups (40 people each back then), all levels, and went down on Ironforge. Oh my. I had a crappy computer with very little RAM, the only thing telling me what would go on in the freeze lag inside the town was the text chat and teamspeak.

But WoW is a much higher level of make believe than almost every D&D setting except maybe spelljammer

 

[Coroc]

Let's play with numbers a bit.

First though, reading through the material on the town, Saltmarsh includes:
-3 factions (one secret)
-Prominent fishing families
-Prominent merchant families
-Workers
-Smugglers
-A senior town council member who owns 3 large fishing boats and is looking to expand the industry
-A wealthy merchant who "garners a great deal of support with the many feasts, entertainments, and other diversions he supports". He is a foppish dandy who enjoys "fine wine, good food, and the latest fashions" as well as a "patron of the arts and spends lavishly to support festivals, plays, and concerts"
-Smuggling operations sufficiently large that a bungled operation could land "a few respected people in jail"
-"Many" fishing boat crews, in fact, enough that it would take "several" going missing before the locals demand action be taken to figure out what happened
-"the town's various organizations"
-A full time town guard of 100 warriors
-A council member whose family has a trade cartel, and fleet of fishing boats, and several trading vessels
-Several popular fishing boat owners
-Can muster a militia of 500 residents
-A small force of marines
-A jail that can handle punishments including 2d10 years of imprisonment
-Docks that are "almost constantly busy" with two primary piers for large ships, and a series of smaller ones
-The capacity to build 6 new warships under a commission from the crown

All that is before you even get to reading through the key to the locations on the map.

Can we make that work with 500 people? Probably only 200 of them are adults.. Of those 200 adults, let's say only 10% are elders beyond their working years being cared for by their adult children. Now we're down to 180.

Those 180 need to accommodate everything above. But I'm going to pretend we're dropping the last zero on all the population numbers, so only 10 of them (rather than 100) are full time town guards.

Of those remaining 170 adults, we need to fit in all that stuff from before. Wealthy and poor families, prominent and less prominent. 3 large fishing boats attached to just one family, many other fishing boats (and I'm assuming that includes some other large ones based on context). We need to be able to build 6 warships in a reasonable amount of time, and that foppish dandy needs to be able to patronize the arts, etc.

This is not only not plausible for a town of 500, it is frankly impossible.

So if I had to adjust that (which I would especially now that I know of the demographic problem) I would do it like that:
-3 factions (one secret) no prob at all, they all shall have about 20 members
-Prominent fishing families (200 people)
-Prominent merchant families (100 people)
-Workers (100 people)
-Smugglers (50 people)
-A senior town council member who owns 3 large fishing boats and is looking to expand the industry (he is one of the fishing families)
-A council member whose family has a trade cartel, and fleet of fishing boats, and several trading vessels (all part of the above)
-A wealthy merchant who "garners a great deal of support with the many feasts, entertainments, and other diversions he supports". He is a foppish dandy who enjoys "fine wine, good food, and the latest fashions" as well as a "patron of the arts and spends lavishly to support festivals, plays, and concerts" (yeah he invites the fisher smuggler and trader "high society" so what is the prob
-Smuggling operations sufficiently large that a bungled operation could land "a few respected people in jail" (does not make the city more crowded)
-"Many" fishing boat crews, in fact, enough that it would take "several" going missing before the locals demand action be taken to figure out what happened (200 people most of them being at sea for extended time no one counts them all when they return)
-"the town's various organizations"
-A full time town guard of 100 warriors (That's a bit to many, a standing guard of 25 does the job perfectly)
-A council member whose family has a trade cartel, and fleet of fishing boats, and several trading vessels (n.p.)
-Several popular fishing boat owners (n.p.)
-Can muster a militia of 500 residents (Make that 200 and you are fine, every able man will defend the town no matter if fisher or smuggler)
-A small force of marines (Yeah so add another 30 soldiers if it has to be)
-A jail that can handle punishments including 2d10 years of imprisonment (no one says you cannot throw 20 people into one cell, the only thing unrealistic here is that there were no jail sentences in the middle ages, that would have been much to costly to feed prisoners all the time. You had corporal or monetary punishment, the only ones locked up were awaiting trial or someone come with the extorted money to get free)
-Docks that are "almost constantly busy" with two primary piers for large ships, and a series of smaller ones (like it should with such a large fleet)
-The capacity to build 6 new warships under a commission from the crown (Yeah being boat people they should have some wharf, that's were some of the 100 workers above make there living)

 

[dave2008]

I don't know how it relates to the map or the discription of Saltmarsh in the adventure, but I found this interesting about: Villages in the Middle Ages

"The average population of a village is surprisingly hard to estimate, given that peasants tended to generate little documentation and even tax rolls are only marginally useful in determining reliable numbers. Most villages probably averaged around 250 to 300 residents, though certainly much smaller and significantly larger population centers might be described as villages as well. At the bottom end of the scale a village would need to comprise at least a few distinct households. About 25 people on a hide of land would be a reasonable bare minimum. At the other end of the spectrum, villages could become quite large and in densely populated regions might merge together. Still, there were practical limitations on how large villages could become as increasing size led to greater commuting distance from the communal fields; hence, smaller villages would likely be far more common and efficient. A village of 500 people would be large but not at all unheard-of and that total might even be doubled before the settlement truly began to qualify as a town.

Still, for the sake of illustration, let’s imagine a village contains, on average, about 250 people. That would likely take up just over 10 hides of land or 2 square miles. There would probably be between 50 and 75 households in such a village and perhaps 100 structures."