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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Azazyll" data-source="post: 1615301" data-attributes="member: 4367">Sorry, just wanted to add my two cents, as a major in medieval history:There were a lot less people in medieval times.  You can't have big cities without telephones and mass transit.  The largest cities in the world (In China, mostly) rarely reached a million people.  And those were truly exceptional exception (or is that totally redundant?).  There were only a billion people on this planet even at the begining of the 19th century, and (hard as it may be to believe) there are more people alive now than the total number of dead people, conservative estimate.  Two people per square mile is very reasonable.  Most people huddled around cultivated areas, plagues, infant mortality, war, famine, all dramatically reduced the population, and people usually didn't live past forty.  Even modern dentistry has improved peoples chances of survival, as odd as it sounds (apparently a lot of the things dentists fix can be fatal if allowed to go on for twenty years or so).  Farming was much more primitive than today, 90% of the population was needed just to grow food for the people that were around.  And politics in the West frankly didn't encourage an urban society, which is where big populations really come in.  The middle east did, Islam being a primarily urban religion, and East Asia did, since rice is the most efficient crop and administration was better and centralized.  Most D&D campaigns are INCREDIBLY out of proportion as far as population and cities go.  It's probably the most fantastic part of the game, really.  A fireball spell is paltry compared to upping the demographics 500% or more.That being said, one of the things that excited me most about Eberron was the promise that this was a campaign where the effects of magic would be felt at all levels.  The idea of the Magewright is truly splended.  But frankly, better irrigation isn't the first thing that most people would think of when they think of Fantasy in our times.  Believe me, it is the first thing the average person would have thought of until about three hundred years ago.</blockquote>

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