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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kae'Yoss" data-source="post: 3113374" data-attributes="member: 4134">I don't know about Toril, but Faerûn has a population of something like 66 million. It's not nearly as crowded as present-day earth is at places. Large countries have like a couple of million habitants, and everything over 30.000 is considered a metropolis. Earth, on the other hand, has about 6 billion people, with single countries with over 1 billion people. I don't know about international standards, but in Germany, a city of 30.000 is called a "middle city". Cities start with a population of 10.000. I think, generally a metropolis needs a million inhabitants.And while not everyone is a wizard, there are spellcasters who can help the crops grow.And if it's not effective enough? Then he gets a magical one.And mages can replace many uses of technology. Not everyone needs to be a magic-user. For many things, access to a magic-user is enough. Take war, for example: Faerûn doesn't need tanks and fighter jets, and artillery and whatever because they have spellcasters who can fly, destroy large groups of combatants at once, take down fortifications, and so on.For centuries, even millenia, they all got by without. The fighter doesn't need a rifle. He has his magic bow. The rogue doesn't need surveillance gear, he has his cloak and boots of elvenkind, his ring of invisibility, and his eyes of the eagly, maybe even some divination magic. And far less advocates. There's Gond, and the gnomes sometimes, and that's it. Most of the great old realms were very powerful in magic (in Netheril, it was used for just about everything, for example).If rich people need quick transit across the continent, they get teleport. If they want something destroyed, they get a good evoker. If they need healing, they get a priest. If they want to have something creted fast, they get a conjurer. And so on. Sure, the poor folk doesn't have all that, but they couldn't afford it. And they couldn't afford the invention of things like airplanes, modern surgery equipment, and heavy construction machinery. And that's an important point: Though you see nowadays that many people, average citizens, even poor people have TV, cell phones, cars, they weren't invented for or by them really. In order to have something invented, you usually need two things: Someone to invent it and someone to fund the whole invention/design process. And that's where Faerûn differs from Earth: Many, if not most, of the smart guys who could invent anything are wizards and create new magic. Sure, there are gondsmen, techsmiths, gnomes, and some other inventors, but they're only a small percentage of Faerûn's population, the rest will study magic.And the guys with the money, usually nobles and such, will often put their money to have a pet wizard, not a court artificer. Magic is established, worked for millenia, is proven to be quite powerful. But that tech freak? He creates unwieldy clockwork contraptions that need strange fuels and often aren't safe to operate. Why pay such a nut money to take half a year to make something to dig my dishes, only to have it blow up in my face after a day of working? I can put the same money to pay a wizard, and he'll have the first ditches dug by noon tomorrow, using telekinetik force, disintegration, or summoned creatures, or what not.</blockquote>

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