Populations

[Thomas Percy]

200.000 is very, very big city in medieval standards.
I think designeres try to keep as many medieval mood as it's possible in D&D,
because there are tens of thousands customers as I who like medieval, chivalry, castles etc.
Medieval mood was is a reason I started to play D&D and it is still one of most important reasons.

 

[edgewaters]

I'm curious if someone here will know the answer to a question I've had for quite some time now.

I'm preparing a campaign set in Eberron at the moment, and I've been noticing that even "metropolis" cities rarely reach the 100,000 mark, with the largest I've found being Sharn at 200,000 people.

My question is this: why are cities for roleplaying games so small? Especially the major metropolises. Rome, at its height, was over 1 million people and other major cities of the past were similarly sized, yet I've never seen a city (not just for Eberron, but in other worlds, too) with a population over 300,000.

Actually no - at least not in Europe. Rome was entirely exceptional and its size required an entire continent to support it. Nothing like it was seen again until the modern era, and it had absolutely no rival in population in the ancient world.

Most medieval era cities didn't even top 100 000. Many "cities" of the period are only 10 or 20 thousand. 12th century London was twice as big as its nearest rival in England (York) and it was only ... 20 thousand people, the biggest city in England. By about 1350 it was still only around 80 000 but it had become one of Europe's biggest centers ...

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/i-m/london2.html

 

[S'mon]

Medieval Europe was a barbaric backwater though, the great cities of the middle East and Asia were far larger.

 

[robberbaron]

I thought about the Last War being a cause... but other cities throughout the centuries (again, I reference Rome) have engaged in major wars but retained an incredibly high population nearing the 1 million mark.

The thing with Rome is that it wasn't IN a major war during its rise; it grew as a result of its wars elsewhere, including hundreds of thousands of slaves.

Also, consider how large a modern town/city of 200,000 people is (2 or 3 miles across?). Factor in low rise buildings instead of blocks (making it larger in area) and add all the ancilliary functions that today are dealt with well away from town (farms, mills, slaughterhouses, tanneries, etc.) and it could easily take a day or more to walk all the way across it.
That makes this town as imposing and impressive, to a medieval peasant, as a country would be to us today, with our modern transport.

It wasn't very long ago that people in the country didn't travel further than the nearest village. Even 100 years ago, a small town was like a new world to country folk. London would have been truly amazing.

 

[edgewaters]

Medieval Europe was a barbaric backwater though, the great cities of the middle East and Asia were far larger.

True, there were even much larger cities in the Middle Americas ... but the general setting for most RPG or fantasy worlds is a medieval, European one.

 

[Hussar]

Even if there were larger cities scattered around the world, the vast majority were not larger than a couple of hundred thousand. The largest city in the world circa 1000 AD was Angkor Wat with a little over 1 million and the Khmer empire controlled some of the most fertile land on the planet.

Assuming population densities around 12th century, you don't get a whole lot of really large cities. It isn't until the Renaissance era that cities start to really grow.

One thing that surprised me recently is how small cities in England are today. Ignoring London for a moment and the next largest city is smaller than 1 million (according to Wiki anyway) with most cities in the 300 k range. Now, there are quite a number of cities, but, still, I didn't realize how small most English cities really are.

While there are notable exceptions, they are just that, exceptions. Before the Renaissance, 300k cities were freaking huge.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

My question is this: why are cities for roleplaying games so small?

I've often wondered about that. While cities in the real medieval ages had good reasons for being relatively small, fantasy worlds can offer plenty of ways of achieving large crop yields, thus supporting a much larger urban population.

For this reason, I deliberately made cities with population numbers with six or even seven digits relatively common in Urbis.

 

[Kaodi]

Size and population in Eberron have been messed up since leaving Keith's hands. Originally, Khorvaire was a lot smaller than the current scale indicates. However, they never adjusted the populations. It has been said quite a few times to just multiply the populations of each nation by 10. Really, it doesn't matter except to versimilitude because the settlements of each nation only add up to 1/10th the current population, so there is no way for PCs to really see more than the current population first hand.

Sharn, however, should get the huge population boost. For all the talk of war and medieval populations, Sharn has the advantage of magic, and comparable to medieval society even their non-magical healing is probably pretty advanced. If you operate on Eberron's assumption that magic IS technology, then it becomes clear that their populations would be looking for towards a period that was as technologically advanced, like, oh, the 19th Century.

From Wikipedia:

London: 1600 AD - 150, 000; 1700 AD - 550,000; 1800 AD - 960,000; 1900 AD - 6,506,954

In the technological period which magic in Eberron approximates, there was a MASSIVE population boom. I don't think it would really be a stretch to say that the most advanced city on the face of Khorvaire has a population of at least a million, especially given its physical size. Not only has it been barely touched by the war, it has had an influx of refugees from other parts of Breland, and Cyre, swelling the population.

 

[Thunderfoot]

I think the greatest disparity comes in the form of magic - one reason for 'stunted' populations was disease; of course with clerical magic available a quick slip of the tongue and touch of the hand and boom, no more disease. On the other hand, you didn't have dragons rampaging through villages using them as buffet lines either, so should you look for justification in either case, either to keep them at current Medieval levels or inflate them, you could easily justify it.

And BTW, though Rome had 1 million people during the 'Bronze Age' period, that number dropped considereably through the Dark and Mediveal periods due to war actually reaching the city, the capital moving to Constantinople, disease and general break down of governmental direction - it has been said that one reason the outlook was so bleak in the Dark Ages specifically was that the people were surrounded by marvels of engineering such as the collosseum, viaducts and aquafers, fountains, roads, etc. and couldn't replicate them.

 

[Prophet2b]

Okay, I did some quick research, and it seems you guys are right... Medieval Europe had a relatively low city population. Of course, before the Middle Ages and after the Middle Ages, cities were notably larger.

I suppose this bothers me with Eberron just because I thought Eberron was one of the few campaign settings I've seen that makes sense to me. If you have magic and it's such a huge part of your world, then it will serve as your technology, and your society will grow up around that. Even despite the Last War, Khorvaire is a fairly developed continent and I don't get the impression that it's mood is trying to suggest a more Medieval feel to it. In fact, if anything, I get just the opposite impression...

And yet out of everything that makes sense and seems right, you have the cities, which (in my mind) are tiny compared to what they should be. The entirety of the population just seems to fly in the face of everything else in that, which makes so much sense.