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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2434001" data-attributes="member: 3051">Okay, from your phrasing I'm assuming the people are coming TO Corsai, not FROM.  So, are the refugees all coming from one city or area, or is this more of a general influx to the one safe place in the world?  If it was a single city that fell, and its entire population is moving, then the newcomers will be more likely to try reasserting their old structure.One thing that helps here is that thanks to the church of Aeos, Corsai will have more priests per capita than most other cities.  That means that failing all else, create food and water can sustain the refugees for a while, and the various healing magics can help prevent massive plagues and water contamination.  Mystical "soup kitchens" will go a long way, here.Sewage will be difficult no matter how you look at it; it's not so much the disposal of actual sewage that'll be the problem, it's the fact that poor refugees probably aren't in a position to be as careful about waste and disease as they would be normally.  Again, magic helps, but the only long-term solution is to get them into livable conditions again.When you say Corsai is in the desert, do you mean that it's a spring/oasis style of mid-desert town (like many in Saudi Arabia), or do you mean a town along a freshwater river that runs through a desert (like those near the Nile in Egypt)?  River-based ones wouldn't be too bad; you'd still have some good farmland, water consumption could increase to match the new population, and the sewage increase would really only be a problem for whoever's downstream of you.But, if it's an oasis-centered city, you'd have huge problems.  The amount of semi-arable land would be limited; without the ability to expand the local farmland, you're not going to solve the food issue easily, and the people won't be able to simply spread out into the wilderness.  In fact, for the city to grow to enclose new houses, you'd actually have to reduce the farmland a bit.  If the primary source of food for the city is animal-based (livestock, fish, etc.) then the food supply can't be expanded quickly at all even if there was enough land.  These sorts of desert cities tend to reach the maximum size their environment can supply, and then hold there, because the methods required to expand beyond that point are prohibitive, and tend to be detrimental to the area (see also: Los Angeles' water supply).In fact, I'd say then that the long-term problem is that the majority of the refugees simply CAN'T stay in Corsai.  It just can't hold them; no city can easily handle a tripling of population in a short time, even if there were no food/water issues.  A few could stay, since it's practically guaranteed that Corsai could absorb a small number of skilled immigrants, but most would have to go elsewhere.Solution: If there are any other oases or rivers nearby, you might actually see a number of new, smaller "protectorate" towns springing up instead, populated almost entirely by refugees, each limited by the size of its own water supply.  While there might already be small towns near Corsai, a few things limit that; this area has been cleaned out in the past by both the Mang and later the Necromancer Kings, right?  Plus, they've probably had the usual problems with raiders.  I'd think that only large, fortified cities would have survived those times, so there are probably a good number of abandoned/razed small towns near other sources of water.  Maybe they're only mostly abandoned.So, let's say Corsai encourages (and helps fund and construct, with serious magic) a number of new towns located in these spots, with the understanding that their military will defend the towns against external threats.  Corsai might end up with 120k people (adding more military and bureaucracy, plus some people who just like big cities), and there would now be a dozen new small towns within 100 miles, ranging from a few small towns of 5k people to one or two big 50k cities.  They wouldn't be homogeneous; the Dwarves might end up running one town, while the Elves end up with another, and so on.  Any group uncomfortable with the current setup in Corsai would prefer its own town, and if the immigrants came from a small number of cities, you'd see a lot of towns with "New" in the name where they attempt to re-establish the system they lived under before.  In fact, you'd probably see some current Corsai residents choosing to move out to the small towns; they'd probably be the wealthiest ones there, too, so Corsai might end up even MORE Aeos-dominated than before.It's not even implausible to have towns develop this way.  Under normal circumstances, a village can't grow from a small, agrarian village to a walled city overnight, so it's understandable that even with a number of good city locations, only the largest (like Corsai) would have survived the various armies that have gone through this region, while the inhabitants of the rest moved to the safer cities.  But if you're supplying tens of thousands of new residents AND the resources for construction AND defenders while the construction is underway, it's actually feasible.So, questions:> What are the primary sources of food and water for Corsai, currently?> Have you already established the geography of the area for the players, or are you free to play around with it a bit?> What are you aiming for, in the long run?  Do you WANT those 200k to be part of Corsai?  Do you want them to remain in the area?  Are they going to be able to return to their original homes?  Or are they just a problem that's going to move through?</blockquote>

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