Eberron`s internal consistency.

[Gez]

Gez, read up on the section on Clerics and "corruption". Eberron takes from the real world where the church can be more important than the faith as it were.

I was more thinking of the old crone that knows the virtues of plants and dabble a bit in magic, giving her a few levels in adept. Not an established member of the church or any religion, just the old village witch and midwife...

 

[Storm Raven]

I also find the military demographics of most fantasy worlds to be laughable. In ancient times, the Romans likely had over 1,000,000 soldiers spread across their empire. The Persian Empire even once fielded a single army of 1,000,000 soldiers, personally led by King Xerxes, when they invaded ancient Greece. Its doubtful that the Persian king left his nation completely undefended so its safe to assume that probably several hundred thousand or more soldiers remained in Persia.

In ancient times, historians wrote political fiction to gain the support of those in power. Most modern scholars consider the figures given for troop strengths in ancient texts and histories to be laughable propaganda. Estimates vary widely as to what the true sizes of armies would have been but, based upon educated guesses informed by archeaology, you can probably divide the numbers you see in most texts by a factor of five or ten and get a realistic figure.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Where Thucydides lists the 2.5 million number it's pretty clear that he's being a tad sarcastic even. Perhaps even exagerrating the number to make his later points more impressive.

Still classical armies were impressively large.

Outside of Europe they got pretty big too.

The basic Mongol Tamarch was a 10,000 man formation. Now, they didn't have a lot of these to throw around, but there were more than few.

The Turkish Samarkand Sultanate from the same period had a standing army of over a 100,000 but that was considered obscenely large.