Khorvaire:Two Problems

[Cam Banks]

I've heard this same complaint from Dragonlance fans before. "But Ansalon must have X number of people! You're talking like it doesn't! XXth century Europe had Y people!"

Right, and Ansalon had a fiery comet smack one corner of the continent and come out the other side of the world, in the process creating titanic upheavals, tidal waves the size of mountains, lifting mountain ranges up where none used to be and plunging parts of the landscape under the water. Followed by a hundred years of famine, disease, strife, and the loss of a healing magic they'd depended on prior to the comet removing the largest most populated urban area in the world.

And then they want to make the place three times as large, too.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[WizarDru]

I've never understood this arguemnt at all. Unless you're basing your game around the PCs as a bunch of census takers, what does it matter? It's all about how the DM presents the world, the actual numbers just shouldn't come up in most games...

Seconded. When are the PCs actually going to notice any of these kind of details? It's the same thing as complaining about the logical inconsistincies of the geographic layout of a campaign world like Greyhawk. You may be right, but even if you are, who cares? My players don't care if the river is too large for the mountain range it comes out of, or if it doesn't run to the ocean according to proper science. They just want to know if they can follow the trail of the bugbear bandits across it, and whether they can run them to ground. It's a non-issue.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Unless you're basing your game around the PCs as a bunch of census takers, what does it matter?

Tee hee! Thirded.

Do you folks ever actually PLAY THE GAME?

Or does your gaming experience consist entirely of years spent perfecting your home-brew world-building skills and hoping that someday some players might eventually come along who are worthy to stomp their boots across your beloved land?

 

[Derulbaskul]

(snip) Eberron 2e: Let's get it right this time.

What a horrid little man you are. Expressing an opinion is one thing; insulting the bloke who actually got himself published is another.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Doesn't a low population density indicate that there's lots of room left to expand into, which hasn't yet been expanded into? Just because there are some big city-states doesn't mean they've done anything with the lands inbetween. Especially when those lands are full of trolls. Trolls eat people. It's a bit of a pain in the butt. Especially when the only people who are willing to go out and settle into those lands are commoners (read: troll chow). You may insert your favourite wandering monster where I place troll, above.

I always thought that fantasy settings were too heavily populated considering the number of natural predators the PC races have. If you can't go further than ten miles from town before a sphinx eats you, you don't go any further than that. That land doesn't get settled. It might get some primitives that can live in a hostile situation, but they're not going to be very well-established if there's a day-to-day threat of being devoured by a hostile organism.

And as for the technology infrastructure needing support from a large population base...the technology in Eberron is magical. It doesn't need a support structure. You craft the item, it works forever. End of story. The lightning rail isn't a regular railroad that needs a constant crew of maintenance workers keeping it going. It's a huge friggin' line of magic items that carry the train around. You don't need to have any support structure except someone to serve you lunch on the train.

The _only_ issue I can see is the XP cost of building all these magic items everywhere. A magewright only has so much to give before he just peters out. But since pretty much everything was built before a really big war that decimated the population, you can assume that there used to be more people, and many of those people were crafters.

 

[SkidAce]

DM: The wizened old man squints at you through his one good eye and speaks: "To cross this bridge you must answer these questions, three... What is your name?"

Player: Jeiki of Turnike

DM: What is your favourite colour?

Player: Blue.

DM: What is the population density of southern Khorvaire?

Player: Err... umm... I, ah... I don't kn-aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beautiful....

Besides, pick a point in time and you can get any population you want (within reason). I. E. ,500 years from now in Eberron the population may explode to what would be more "realistic".

I could have a completly empty world except for one kingdom..they could be fairly advanced...just not expanded out yet...too dangerous. Set the campaign thousands of years later and the whole world could be populated.

 

[WayneLigon]

I think the so-called 'low' population works well when you consider that you also need large tracts of unexplored and unexploited lands to have that 'Age of Exploration' feeling. And you need room for all of the other sapient races as well, plus room for monsters.

Midieval England had 14 number of people per square mile in the Middle Ages and it was the lowest population density we know of; France, with much, much better farm land supported about 100 people per square mile. All I have for those sources, though, is a webpage on Midievil demographics. How they can know the population density when people still come to blows over what types of helmets and swords they used is another question. But let's be generous and say that there can be a population varience as much as 50% either way.

Earth's Middle Ages didn't have to contend with monsters and magic at all. By the time of the 14th century, when we get that 14 person/square mile number, most of England has been carpeted in worked land and settled lands. There's precious little room for monsters and such; certainly no room for goblin tribes, hobgoblin clans, huge stretches of woodland where no-one goes because it's too dangerous. It also hasn't suffered through a magical WWI, either.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Okay, so we know that the population counts DO NOT include children. That is worth knowing.

But the population counts also count a lot of creatures that some folks might not consider worth counting in population tallies. Goblinoids (goblins, bugbears, hobgoblins), orcs, kobolds, rakshasas, medusas, harpies, hill giants, minotaurs, ogres, trolls, lizardfolk. That's less "people" in the numbers, in the minds of some. Myself, I'm glad that some of these creatures that have societies are taken into account and "counted".

Another thought I had is that humans are colonists of Khorvaire. (How long have humans been in Europe as original inhabitants without monsters to deal with?) A first wave settled the islands to the northeast 3,000 years ago, and then another wave settled the mainland 1,500 years ago. These seas ARE actually monster filled. How many would have actually made the trip?

Starting from that small base of original settlers that spread across the continent to find their 1,000 acres to farm, were they thinking of coming over to start empires with metropolises? The majority would be looking for a farm for their own. Most of those first farmers would have been slaughtered by the monsters in the wild, so there goes another batch of original humans. So instead those first humans would have grabbed good defensible territory which could be farmed and collectively defended. Not until 500 years after the original humans the distinctive settlements that become the "Five Nations" begin to be recognizable. Khorvaire doesn't sound like it was populated by wave after wave of continuous colonization from a continent going through an industrial revolution like North and South America. Just an original wave followed by a second instance.

Then the history of Khorvaire is one of repeated conquering, attempted annexations, civil wars, inquisitions (like against lycanthropes), rebellions, invasions from Khyber (like when medusas came up and took possession of Cazaak Draal). In 987 there were still settlers moving out to farm new land in "civilized" lands like Breland, as when King Boranel pulled settlers back.

And I don't think there are any peoples in Eberron that have discovered Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" or modern farming techniques. A population is only as big as it can feed itself, no matter how many lightning trains it can build.

Regards,
Eric Anondson

 

[RangerWickett]

This thread gives me a headache.

Keith, I suggest that next time you publish a campaign setting (*grin*), just don't include census details. Eberron's a great setting, and I'm mining it for ideas left and right, but even if I played in it, knowing that a city has a population of 51,201 doesn't affect my game if you detail the city as being a small town (and really, how were there that many people in Twin Peaks?).

My personal campaign setting has two continents, one the size of Europe, the other as big as Texas. Not much space, but there are, oh, about twelve major nations. The party has only ever been to three, but they knew the rest were out there, because they saw the occasional oddball traveler. As long as there is a diversity of cultures in a setting, which helps make adventures more flavorful, I don't worry about how many nations there are.

This is a silly thread, and I am not going to interview it.

 

[Kichwas]

Large countries with low density are only possible with trucking, refrigeration, and highways.

Food need to get from farm to market, and goods need to be dispersed.

Traditional pattern has always been dense populations, even going back to primordial prehuman days - humans lived in tight bands close together for security, food, and reproduction.


I don't know the population of Khorvaire, but if it gets too far below 40 per square mile it will break aparrt - the means of keeping a food supply going are not there.

This is especially true in a post war situation, not less true, but more so.

If the population had been dramatically lowered by the war - despite people reproducing throughout those hundred years and not having the technology to do sudden population drops until the last day of the war with the creation of the Mournland - if the population had gone down, people would move away from their homes into central areas - making the kingdoms very small again, with a lot of wildlands in between.


Even at the height of the black plague, England's population only dropped from about 99 people per square mile to roughly 50 - if I'm reading this and this and even this right (remember, a square kilometer is about 1/3 of a square mile - England: 50,085 square miles, 130,395 square kilometers). Most of -that- death was in the cities.

Look at old world civilizations - a village every mile. You see that in Europe, Africa, Asia, New England, and everywhere else that had advanced civilization before electricity.

Without the means to distribute goods, food, law, and sex you cannot have a civilization at low density. You can have a land mass with low density - merely because most of it will be uninhabbited, the size of the actual civilization will just shrink back from its old borders.