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

[Coroc]

It seems that is correct. The City itself has a smaller population, but all the lands around it have a ton more. This is the number given in the 3e era.

1,347,840 (City of Waterdeep, Metropolis, 132,661)

This is the current info on population.

I do not disagree on it being the biggest city but it is two small for 2 millions. Really. Who feeds them? And where are the skyscrapers where they live in?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I do not disagree on it being the biggest city but it is two small for 2 millions. Really. Who feeds them? And where are the skyscrapers where they live in?

They live around the city not just in the Walls. There is a large amount of area controlled by Waterdeep.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I do not disagree on it being the biggest city but it is two small for 2 millions. Really. Who feeds them? And where are the skyscrapers where they live in?

Only that 132,661 lives within the walls, the other 1 million live outside the walls in the area controlled by Waterdeep, which goes as far north as Amphail (which is 3 days ride north of the city) and as far east as the Dessarin River, an area of several thousand square miles. That is the population which farms and feeds the city. Moreover, Goldenfields, a vast farm complex blessed by the goddess of agriculture herself (and thus always producing fast-growing bumper crops) is adjacent to the lands controlled by Waterdeep and greatly assists in the feeding of the city.

 

[jasper]

I'm not talking about the size of the books, I'm talking about the actual size of the city physically within the setting. Think Kilometers instead of page count.

Swing on and missed. Strike two on not getting Jasper Humor. On page 13 The Gate is one and a third palms. On page 4 of 09-01 The Gate is just a black dot smaller than Elturgard which is a black dot with a white circle around it.
Bing has waterdeep at Waterdeep is approximately 3.8 miles x 1.5 miles. Or ~20,000 feet north/south and ~8,000 feet east/west. Both measurements were done along the greatest straight-line dimension of the city.
Bing has Baldur's gate at no dimension but a 42 K population. Baldur's Gate (city) - Wikipedia

 

[gyor]

It seems that is correct. The City itself has a smaller population, but all the lands around it have a ton more. This is the number given in the 3e era.

1,347,840 (City of Waterdeep, Metropolis, 132,661)

This is the current info on population.

So we don't currently know what the Metropolitan area population is for either Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, or Calinshan, ect...

 

[MonsterEnvy]

So we don't currently know what the Metropolitan area population is for either Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, or Calinshan, ect...

Baldur's Gate current figure is 125,000

Swing on and missed. Strike two on not getting Jasper Humor. On page 13 The Gate is one and a third palms. On page 4 of 09-01 The Gate is just a black dot smaller than Elturgard which is a black dot with a white circle around it.
Bing has waterdeep at Waterdeep is approximately 3.8 miles x 1.5 miles. Or ~20,000 feet north/south and ~8,000 feet east/west. Both measurements were done along the greatest straight-line dimension of the city.
Bing has Baldur's gate at no dimension but a 42 K population. Baldur's Gate (city) - Wikipedia

Count me as strike 3 I can't understand what you are talking about.

 

[Salthorae]

How exactly do you hide from an area-wide magical effect that overcomes you with an overwhelming need to not just leave, but leave and NEVER COME BACK?

I really hope the answer is anything but "crappy writing/crappy worldbuilding".

I already answered this up thread.

Dragonstaff of Ahghairon is the answer to all your questions on that.

 

[tetrasodium]

I do not disagree on it being the biggest city but it is two small for 2 millions. Really. Who feeds them? And where are the skyscrapers where they live in?

WotC doesn't really have a good handle on population density & such. That 2 mil figure was probably pulled from the fact that it sounded good rather than fitting those kind of questions. Prior to about 1900 we really didn't have skyscrapers like we think of them today. Sure church steeples & such were impressively tall, but from 1797-1885 the tallest skyscraper was a 52 foot tall mill. We broke 500 feet in the late 1800s & are just over 800 feet tall since 2010.

To get a good estimate of pop size estimate how tall/dense the buildings should be & find a historical city that was similar or extrapolate from it. The Eberron community did it after Rising & it shows just how bad WotC's population numbers for large cities can be, Geographically Sharn is similarly sized with Manhattan but the towers go up about a mile. Keith Baker has said that Sharn is about the size of manhattan stacked on top of itself 8 times over... Even though that falls far short of a mile high, not every building needs to be that tall. Rising says sharn has half a mil pop & that puts it on 1850s manhattan not the 8-12++ mil that 8x manhattan would have & that shows just how far off WotC is with population ballpark numbers.

London has a lot in common with Waterdeep from historical standpoints.. is about 1.1 square miles & the "Greater London Metropolitan Area" just over 600sq miles(and much larger than waterdeep at 45 miles across) & has population estimates that go wayyyyyyyy back. Depending on where you drop the pin in history, waterdeep probablty has 30-150k pop... That's still gigantic for a city in FR's level of technological advancement, but it's a size that can import enough food to feed itself with FR's level of food production, transport, & industry.

 

[Beleriphon]

London has a lot in common with Waterdeep from historical standpoints.. is about 1.1 square miles & the "Greater London Metropolitan Area" just over 600sq miles(and much larger than waterdeep at 45 miles across) & has population estimates that go wayyyyyyyy back. Depending on where you drop the pin in history, waterdeep probablty has 30-150k pop... That's still gigantic for a city in FR's level of technological advancement, but it's a size that can import enough food to feed itself with FR's level of food production, transport, & industry.

Rome at its apex had a population pushing at least 1 million people, that's in the city proper, not the surrounding country side. So Waterdeep having a similar population, which is what the current numbers purport, seems accurate. Plus Waterdeep does have sky scrapers, several of Waterdeep's walking statues have been hollowed out and converted into living space.

Waterdeep in DR 1372 had a population of roughly 130 thousand. Officially by DR 1485 it is over 2 million. That's not entirely unreasonable given that Waterdeep is very much an analogue of cities like London or New York. London's population around 1530 was 55 thousand, by 1605 estimates put it at 225 thousand. 1700ish it has doubled to between 550 thoussand and 600 thousand. By 1801 CE the offical London population was 939,300. So lets call that 1 million.

Waterdeep having a crazy high population isn't unreasonable, give that its a trade hub on the see one might compare it to New York which went from 60,515 in 1800 people to 3,437,202 people in 1900. That isn't counting the "outer boroughs" either that became part of the city in 1898. If include the outer boroughs in 1850 the population of New York was 696 thousand, but 1880 the population had tripled to over 1.9 million. That's only 30 years, so the idea that Waterdeep could see a population explosion isn't unreasonable.

 

[tetrasodium]

Rome at its apex had a population pushing at least 1 million people, that's in the city proper, not the surrounding country side. So Waterdeep having a similar population, which is what the current numbers purport, seems accurate. Plus Waterdeep does have sky scrapers, several of Waterdeep's walking statues have been hollowed out and converted into living space.

Waterdeep in DR 1372 had a population of roughly 130 thousand. Officially by DR 1485 it is over 2 million. That's not entirely unreasonable given that Waterdeep is very much an analogue of cities like London or New York. London's population around 1530 was 55 thousand, by 1605 estimates put it at 225 thousand. 1700ish it has doubled to between 550 thoussand and 600 thousand. By 1801 CE the offical London population was 939,300. So lets call that 1 million.

Waterdeep having a crazy high population isn't unreasonable, give that its a trade hub on the see one might compare it to New York which went from 60,515 in 1800 people to 3,437,202 people in 1900. That isn't counting the "outer boroughs" either that became part of the city in 1898. If include the outer boroughs in 1850 the population of New York was 696 thousand, but 1880 the population had tripled to over 1.9 million. That's only 30 years, so the idea that Waterdeep could see a population explosion isn't unreasonable.

The ancient city of rome is bigger than waterdeep at about 14km (8.6miles) across

Spoiler: Roma

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It also had running water, public baths, public latrines, & more thanks to the Aquaduct... Waterdeep has wells.. More importantly Rome was the center of an organized empire that managed trade, conducted war, expaded itself, built roads, maintained roads etc. Waterdeep not so much. The Roman Empire had better roads than FR & the city of Rome could not have existed at the timewith out those roads. I may have overlooked it, but nobody in Faerun is building or maintaining roads llike the romans did. Rome had that population because it did all those things. Other huge trade hub cities at the time were things like (Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Ephesus, Salona etc.) had populations of about a few hundred thousand & waterdeep should be similar at best. Faerun being isolated nations little more than manorial towns leaning so heavily on the bones of past empires really hurts it when it comes to plausibly supporting cities like waterdeep

Your target choice of the 1900ish population explosion of those cities ignore what happened with high density construction capabilities between 1885 & 1908. The tallest skyscraper between 1785 & 1885 was 52 feet tall. From 1885 to 1889 it was nearly 3 times that at 138 feet tall. Then again 1889-1908 it was 550feet tall... They just kept growing in height from there. Population density exploded because people started building up rather than out & more importantly things like freight trains& soon after cars/trucks became ubiquitous for bringing produce, raw materials, & finished products into, out of, & across those booming cities.... faerun doesn't have any of that.

Having a plausible population in watedeep does not hurt waterdeep or FR, in a lot of ways it actually helps it by removing some of the "don't look over here" handwaiving the OP touched on.