Medieval Demographics Made Easy

[Piratecat]

Here is my attack of the nit pick . . .

And here's mine: "nitpick" in one word.

(Which is my gentle way of reminding everyone that not every poster has English as their native language, and not everyone has the same attention to spelling and grammar. Try to overlook typos when you can. Thanks!)

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

and here's mine: "nitpick" in is one word.

fify

 

[Ycore Rixle]

It is indeed a good site. Nonsensical demographics in a fantasy world is a pet peeve of mine.

Here are a couple more interesting sites: Medieval Prices and many World Building links.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I like the list of professions. But my "problem" with this site and others like it is that it assumes D&D is a "medieval" world. It's not. It has a history many tens of thousands of years greater, magic, different technology levels, etc. All of this would have effects on population numbers, max. density, professions, etc.

I tend to build my worlds with higher pop. density than medieval where the world is "civilized", more like ancient Italy during Rome's height, but with large swaths of non-friendly controlled areas which are very sparsely populated by the "friendly" races. Lots of goblins and monsters though.

 

[Christian]

fify

He did that on purpose! It was a trap! A trap, I tell you!

 

[Wombat]

I have used this site and calculator many times. I find it useful and generally conforms to what we know of medieval Europe fairly well.

As pointed out, D&D isn't the Middle Ages ... despite the fact it tries to keep most of the trappings. But this is no reason to throw out at least some of the basic concepts such as small villages are going to be more common than huge cities; it is simply too difficult to actually maintain huge cities without the ring of villages. Until the 18th century it was fairly common throughout pretty much all civilizations to have less than 15% of population actually living in cities.

Then again, I am a fan of "realistic fantasy", which is an oxymoron to many people.