D&D 5E Crash-Course On The Forgotten Realms

[tetrasodium]

Population is literally half that in most sources.

I live in a city of 120k. Population density was more of course in older time but not that much more.

I live in a city that is geographically close to the size of waterdeep, we have a ton of 2-4 story buildings & an estimated population of ~38k. Yea most of those buildings have yards, but postage stamp lots are the norm not the exception. If you level the solar farm, (freight) train yard, & various indistrial areas you might be able to double that... but doing that gets into waterdeep's other problem, it doesn't really have any industries that need an expensive city to economically function & doesn't have the sort of bureaucratic overhead needed to run an empire like ancient rome had.

@Demetrios1453 200k would put waterdeep at a quarter the population of current day san francisco(884k) in just under a tenth the landmass (6.5 square miles & 46.8) square miles without all the modern & semimodern high rise apartment buildings sending it back towards Manilla type densities.

 

[pukunui]

Hey! Of the different settings you're allowed to write for on the DM's Guild, I think that Forgotten Realms is the one I dislike the least, I think.

If you're thinking of writing FR content to publish on the DMs Guild, you should check out the FR Style Guide (one of the docs in the free DMs Guild Style Guide Resources set). It's got a wealth of useful info on the Realms.

 

[gyor]

Those towers go up a mile because that little manhattan sized island is a manifest zone linked to Syrania, not "Because magic". It's the only city like that in eberron because they literally can not build another. It also has a gigantic cove (along with another city extending there), a river delta, & a lightning rail line to bring things in & sky coaches (mini flying airships that only work in sharn basically) to transport people & goods around the city itself. Waterdeep has a port, a river and none of that.

@Salthorae Those 5 story apartments are on par with the tallest buildings of the 16th century & probably earlier just not recorded on that wikipedia page. those apartments housing 2 million people in an area 3.8x1.5 miles in size who are fed by horse drawn wagon & boat imports just doesn't add up... especially considering they poop in a bucket or a hole in the ground

@Beleriphon "That's all true, but Waterdeep is also has magic, " Hold on there sparky, this is Forgotten realms not khorvaire or blue age Athas. The only settings worse at applying the use of magic to every day problems are the ones that don't even have it & maybe greyhawk. "Because magic" doesn't solve these kinds of problems without turning FR & waterdeep into something extremely different from what it is due to the fact that it's never applied by anyone but a tiny few. There's still the fact that waterdeep isn't managing any empire like ancient rome was & basically has no industry to speak of that doesn't also exist in almost any town big enough to have a map PoI making the need for all of those people to exist so close rather dubious.

Waterdeep has portals, teleportation circles, caravans.

 

[gyor]

One thing to take into consideration when it comes to population is health-care and Lesser Restoration Spells, cure wounds, ect..., reducing the mortality rates.

Spells like Create Food and Water, low level spell means a single cleric can also produce shocking amounts of food when not healing. Druid casting plant grow on farms.

 

[tetrasodium]

@gyor create food & water is on the cleric list yes, but it only creates "fifteen humanoids or five steeds for 24 hours" not ten to a hundred times that. There are no soviet russia style bread lines described in waterdeep, many of FR's religions are pretty horrible, and none of them operate large scale feed the hungry type operations that would be needed to support the massively overpopulated mil figure. Yes waterdeep has a portal or even some portals, but it does not have sigil like network of portals everywhere, 3.5 tippyverse stype permanent* teleport circle networks handling trade, or what have you...it has a seaport & river with pre-industrilaization levels of tech for loading/unloading/distributing the contents of those ships. As a florida resident well familiar with the efforts FEMA goes through before & after any major hurricane to keep food/water/gas/utilities/services operational I can assure you that it would be an insurmountable hurdle for waterdeep's level of technological advancement.

Yes they have caravans, but the next major city (daggerford) is about a hundred miles away A horse drawn wagon can travel 50 miles in 8-12 hours & somehow that amounts to 100-150 in 24 hours according to that link, or according to phb182 somewhere in the 24-30 mile/day range for a team of 40 speed draft horses. That makes the trip from daggerford almost a week each way through wilderness.

* Sigil is still sigil, Eberron can get around it with dragonmark focus item/eldritch machine teleport rooms in Orien's control, but neither of those are FR & "FR has that too" turns it into something very different. "Because magic" and "FR has that too" don't work because FR doesn't apply magic like eberron or blue age athas & FR does not have "that"... Instead FR has a gaggle of megapowerful do nothing groups with no responsibilities, services, or activity in the world beyond existing... instead of "FR has that too" work out ways for FR to plausibly have that kinda stuff within what FR does have or how FR would need to change in order to import "that" from other settings

 

[Iry]

Rise of Tiamat establishes that Waterdeep does have a Teleportation Circle it uses for trade and disaster relief between major cities, but I seriously doubt they utilize it to Tippyverse levels.

 

[tetrasodium]

Rise of Tiamat establishes that Waterdeep does have a Teleportation Circle it uses for trade and disaster relief between major cities, but I seriously doubt they utilize it to Tippyverse levels.

Fitting ~307,000 people /square mile* in waterdeep would be about 3x the density of current day manilla. might need to go well past tippyerse levels. It would be like living & working in a maximum capacity stadium

@gyor I meant to touch on it earlier but lack of caffiene took over. plant growth on farms would only double the yield, that doesn't produce enough food near enough for FR's freight transport network capabilities. Even if it did, you immediately run into the fact that FR is still using horse drawn plows & manual labor to harvest it. A few tens of thousands... maybe low 100k pop is really all waterdeep can support & adding more quickly runs into the fact that waterdeep is not running an empire like ancient rome & has no industrial base that needs the city like industrial revolution cities had.

* the density needed for 2mil pop in 6.5 square miles

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Fitting ~307,000 people /square mile* in waterdeep would be about 3x the density of current day manilla. might need to go well past tippyerse levels. It would be like living & working in a maximum capacity stadium

@gyor I meant to touch on it earlier but lack of caffiene took over. plant growth on farms would only double the yield, that doesn't produce enough food near enough for FR's freight transport network capabilities. Even if it did, you immediately run into the fact that FR is still using horse drawn plows & manual labor to harvest it. A few tens of thousands... maybe low 100k pop is really all waterdeep can support & adding more quickly runs into the fact that waterdeep is not running an empire like ancient rome & has no industrial base that needs the city like industrial revolution cities had.

* the density needed for 2mil pop in 6.5 square miles

There is a 20 square mile Abbey with divinely blessed farmland in it (Literally blessed by the Goddess of the Harvest) nearby that Sells most of it's yields to Waterdeep.

Goldenfields is a huge, walled temple-farm dedicated to Chauntea, the goddess of agriculture. Called “the Granary of the North,” it’s the only reason many Northerners ever taste soft-fleshed fruit larger than bush berries. Waterdeep and its neighbors consume the temple’s reliable output: carefully husbanded grains and dried, oil-packed, or salted foodstuffs preserved in vast storage cellars, vats, and squat stone grain-towers.

It's a also heavily associated with the Emerald Enclave and has tons of druids, and Treants in it.