How big are the biggest cities in your campaign world?

[Alzrius]

Recently I was rereading the 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide and took note of the listings for various settlements by population (p. 137):

• Thorp: 20-80 people.
• Hamlet: 81-400 people.
• Village: 401-900 people.
• Small town: 901-2,000 people.
• Large town: 2,001-5,000 people.
• Small city: 5,001-12,000 people.
• Large city: 12,001-25,000 people.
• Metropolis: 25,001+ people.

What bothered me about this was that I knew that I'd seen a listing for a larger population center somewhere. After some checking around online, I was finally able to zero in on where. The Epic Level Handbook revised the population tables (from the 3.0 DMG; the revisions weren't kept in the 3.5 book, which is part of the reason I had such a hard time finding it initially), and in so doing added the following:

• Planar metropolis: 100,000+ people.

Now, it's fairly intuitive that these population distributions are meant to reflect a pseudo-medieval world, where urban centers aren't nearly the size that they are today. Even so, I found it quite amusing to consider that a town with a hundred thousand people or more is so large that it constitutes being known across the multiverse for its size.

"Across the planes of existence, there are places where untold masses live, converging in groups so large as to boggle the imagination. Places with names such as Sigil, Dis, the City of Brass, and...Akron, Ohio."

So that got me wondering: how large are the largest population centers in your campaign world? Are they places with a few tens of thousands of people, like in the DMG? Or do you have them approaching more contemporary standards? How big are your world's "big cities"?

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Both Rome and Alexandria topped 1 million back in ancient times, so megapoles aren't impossible. As my campaigns tend to draw heaviest inspiration from the Ancient Near East, the largest cities in my campaigns tend to have over a half million, easy.

Our supplement on the City of Brass estimated the City's population at 400,000 to 3 million (from the comically reduced 4e population to the old 2e estimates). Our forthcoming book estimates the population of Golden Huzuz at 800,000, per 2e.

 

[ccs]

Well, as I've simply included Waterdeep wholesale into my own world.... however big WD is.

 

[el-remmen]

The biggest cities in my homebrew were between 100k and 250k people - but most "cities" were down near 20 to 30k.

 

[TwoSix]

I tend to run settings that are more high-magic and therefore more modern-ish in their population assumptions. When I ran Ravnica, I set the population at around 250M. I'm running Eberron right now, and I have Sharn and its environs set at around 4M, and some other major cities (Wroat, Thronehold, Korth, Thaliost, and Flamekeep) are all around the 1M range.

 

[Nytmare]

I was assuming that the biggest city in my Sumerian post apocalyptic Torchbearer campaign was around 6000 people, a little less than a tenth of what it had been in real life sans apocalypse.

I also think that you're reading the chart a bit backwards. It's not saying that a population of 100,000 people allows a place to qualify as an interdimensional metropolis. It's that if an interdimensional metropolis exists, it's going to have at least 100,000 people living in it.

 

[zarionofarabel]

My games tend to follow the numbers in the chart. Within a country there might be a single large city, and perhaps a second smaller city. No more than a handful of towns, most of which will be on the smaller end of the scale. The Thorpe, hamlet, and village make up, by far, the vast majority of settlements.

 

[Lanefan]

A quick google shows London had a population of about 18000 in 1086 (the Domesday Book) and about 45000 in the 1300's.

Given as the settings usually seem to assume a 1300-1500-ish level of advancement, having a few cities get a bit north of 50000 doesn't seem inappropriate. Add in some conveniences magic can bring and it might go even higher.

Im my own campaign, the biggest cities the PCs have yet encountered are in the 20K-to-30K range; there's two bigger ones on the continent that they've heard of but have yet to get anywhere near (those being my game's vague equivalents of London and Rome), and other than that they've got to go off-continent to find anything bigger.

 

[aco175]

Does a town include the smaller farms and sections of a place in the total. A town may have a core location and several outpost areas or townships that are dependent on the main place. A cluster of farms may be listed as a hamlet, but be considered part of the town proper.

For example, Waterdeep has a base population living inside the gates, but do you add the population living in the surrounding area of the Undercliff.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Now, it's fairly intuitive that these population distributions are meant to reflect a pseudo-medieval world, where urban centers aren't nearly the size that they are today. Even so, I found it quite amusing to consider that a town with a hundred thousand people or more is so large that it constitutes being known across the multiverse for its size.

Note well that the tables in the 3E DMG were stated clearly to be for use in coming up with details for a settlement on the fly. They were never designed for use as a template for all settlements and indeed work quite badly for that. However, they were seized upon by players as if meant for it anyway, to the extent of reverse engineering complete world-building principles and rules from it that were never intended.

For my own games, if not specifically using a commercial game setting (and sometimes even IF using one), the largest cities I cared to assume were perhaps 100,000 population at best, with MOST major cities being in the range of about 30,000. Those are much more manageable sizes to draw detailed maps for. A city of 1,000,000 or better can't be mapped in practical terms by the DM, much less by the players. And a city that size always feels to me that it wants to be a setting in its own right rather than just one location within a larger setting.