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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seankreynolds" data-source="post: 1069385" data-attributes="member: 3029">{Everyone agrees the Calimport population given in FR3 Empires of the Sands is too high. The FRCS designers also tried to rationalize other population numbers according to this scheme. This, in my view, was totally unnecessary since Ed's original figures were perfectly well thought out already.}There never was a consistent effort in FR to decide how big a "big" city, town, or village was. In some supplements a big city was 10,000, a big town was 1,000, and a big village was 100, while in another supplement a big city was 100,000, a big town was 10,000, and a big village was 1,000. In some cases there was an obvious competition in later products to prove that "their" area _really_ had the largest city in Faerun. It was ridiculous. So when putting together the FRCS, we figured out the geographic area of each country, decided if overall it had a high, average, or low population per unit area (on a scale of 1-5, using known census data from real-world cities in various medieval countries and times), multiplied the population per unit area times the total area, and threw in a small variable to make the end results vary by about +/- 5% from that base number. That's how we got the results in the FRCS. And we showed them to Ed, who asked us to make some adjustments on the whole system (upward, factoring in magic's ability to keep people healthier, ensure better crop yield, etc.) and once those adjustments were made Ed was happy with the result.So I stand by the numbers in the FRCS. It was the first systematic attempt to determine population in FR based on population distribution, terrain, and real-world census data.</blockquote>

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