D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting

[Bedrockgames]

I would assume more small villages, hamlets, and lone homesteads all over the place, rather than increasing just the city population. Too much of RL's population is centered in the cities, when it should be far more rural. (Mind, this is a problem D&D has in general, where it seriously underestimates the rural population.)

Most of the settments listed in RoT, have small population sizes and many are rural. I just randomly grabbed one domain and this is the population listing

 

[Bedrockgames]

No I think that @Faolyn was right about the multiply by ten pop numbers for some of the domains. In general Ravenloft is closer to renaissance or eberron type tech levels & tends to have cities on par with those depending on the domain. The problem is likely one rooted in the old magic item availability by population size being pegged to faerun popsizes. While I'm not sure if ravenloft can be converted to pop/square mile to get densities like in eberron that make the basically uninhabited sub-Saharan desert look rather dense given ravenloft tends to avoid listing distances with good reason; hopefully the popsizes are something wotc will do better with for the more advanced domains with things like schools universities public works & the like over FR's dark age equitant as another way of showing how they aren't just FR regions with a themed monster.

I think if you increase the population sizes of settlements you run into issues though with the tone of the game. Also the old books listed distances. The old books included maps of towns with surrounding farmland. And the cultural levels were pretty all over the map. My point is, the settlements they list, are, I believe just meant to be notable settlements. I think countryside populations, and other settlements are assumed (this is one reason you have the homestead encounter in Feast of Goblyns). But it is meant to be a bleaker place and it is not the real world place So as much as I love Harn style thinking about population density, probably isn't as important to making Ravenloft make sense.

And again, many of the major settlements are fairly small in Ravenloft. Many of them come across as backwaters. Il Aluk was one of the bigger cities in Ravenloft with a size of like 25,000 which feels right to me (and while it isn't 100,000+ size city, keep in mind that not much smaller than Athens during the renaissance). For the vibe. I don't know. I love stuff like Harn, I actually quite like real world demographics, but for Ravenloft, I think you want the places to fit the tone of the source material.

Also there is some amount of flexibility when reading settlement population sizes in a game. Do we assume that is only the population that lives inside the city (or does that number also include the people living around the city). How you answer that question can easily double or triple the size of the population. Ultimately the setting is barebones in its presentation to allow for a wide range of interpretation. If you assume more population surrounding the settlements, assume more settlements than the ones presented on the map (which I do, and I always saw that as default), you get pretty close to that x10 number. I just personally wouldn't do it by increasing city sizes themselves, and I think it is the kind of thing that can vary from campaign to campaign

 

[Tonguez]

Most of the settments listed in RoT, have small population sizes and many are rural. I just randomly grabbed one domain and this is the population listing

View attachment 133756

I remember doing some research on Medieval Wallachia and Moldovia which stated that most estimates put the population in the 15th century around 400,000 across 800 - 1000 villages .
It noted too that Vald Tepes army had about 40000 troops (1/10th of the population)

So populations of 400 for most villages with a few larger towns is consistent.

However it also notes that the area had a low population density primarily because of the incursion of Turkish and Mongol Horsemen in the steppes north of the Danube which lead to regular depopulation after various wars.

A very low population density for Ravenloft also makes sense as the human residents are often subject to predation

 

[Bedrockgames]

I remember doing some research on Medieval Wallachia and Moldovia which stated that most estimates put the population in the 15th century around 400,000 across 800 - 1000 villages .
It noted too that Vald Tepes army had about 40000 troops (1/10th of the population)

So populations of 400 for most villages with a few larger towns is consistent.

However it also notes that the area had a low population density primarily because of the incursion of Turkish and Mongol Horsemen in the steppes north of the Danube which lead to regular depopulation after various wars.

A very low population density for Ravenloft also makes sense as the human residents are often subject to predation

I think demographics are cloudy and complicated, but they can be a lot of fun. I have been doing a lot of research on Song Dynasty China and the population sizes there are a lot larger than the standards you usually have for something based on Medieval Europe. It is sometimes hard too because there are times when you have sharp declines (like after a massive plague. There is a period when Constantinople drops to like 50,000 people. And you can see massive dips in its population over time (it isn't all one steady increase). For a fictional setting, especially one like Ravenloft, I don't think the designers were especially concerned with demographic considerations. I think their main interest was creating a world that reflected the tropes of classic and gothic horror. I honestly think they could have gotten too lost in the weeds, or made something too real-world like, if they did that (like I said, I think ravenloft is a balance between dreamy-surreal and real----and you need a certain level of atmosphere for it to work). It is a world that I imagine set more like old movies (say Hammer Studio and Universal sets, rather than the bright lights and gritty reality of outdoor shooting)

By the way, here is a map to illustrate what I meant about having farmland (I do think the 500 feet key is probably worth quibbling over though):

 

[Remathilis]

Unless you are using the different stories as distinct things the way Vampyres (race of blood drinking aliens with no undeath connections) and Dhampir (kids whose moms were attacked by vampires and have undead vampire connections) are in 3e Ravenloft.

Mechanically it is mostly the same niche with minor differences. For story purposes the differences are more significant.

The good news is that the dhampir (as it appears in the UA, and I assume the last version) isn't exactly origin specific. In fact, they give eight potential origins (and six possible diets). It would completely be possible to mimic the RL vampyre, the 4e vryloka, and 3e half-vampire concepts with the same stats and just tweaks to origin.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Forlon is perfect if you want a game about to clean a zone to bluild your stronghold, something like Conan Exiles or State of Decay 2. Goblyns should be faes, not undead, because without variety of monster types then the players become specialist of undead-slaying. A retcon of the goblyns would make these to become ashes when they die (or something like a sand castle destroyed by the water), to avoid gore, and then Forlon would be better for a family-friend horror story, or game. Maybe here we should add "digievolutions" or mutant version of the goblyns.

I have to say I found Goblyns as a concept and mechanically, some of the best, most ferocious things you could throw at players. They were one of my favorites.

 

[humble minion]

I think if you increase the population sizes of settlements you run into issues though with the tone of the game. Also the old books listed distances. The old books included maps of towns with surrounding farmland. And the cultural levels were pretty all over the map. My point is, the settlements they list, are, I believe just meant to be notable settlements. I think countryside populations, and other settlements are assumed (this is one reason you have the homestead encounter in Feast of Goblyns). But it is meant to be a bleaker place and it is not the real world place So as much as I love Harn style thinking about population density, probably isn't as important to making Ravenloft make sense.

And again, many of the major settlements are fairly small in Ravenloft. Many of them come across as backwaters. Il Aluk was one of the bigger cities in Ravenloft with a size of like 25,000 which feels right to me (and while it isn't 100,000+ size city, keep in mind that not much smaller than Athens during the renaissance). For the vibe. I don't know. I love stuff like Harn, I actually quite like real world demographics, but for Ravenloft, I think you want the places to fit the tone of the source material.

Also there is some amount of flexibility when reading settlement population sizes in a game. Do we assume that is only the population that lives inside the city (or does that number also include the people living around the city). How you answer that question can easily double or triple the size of the population. Ultimately the setting is barebones in its presentation to allow for a wide range of interpretation. If you assume more population surrounding the settlements, assume more settlements than the ones presented on the map (which I do, and I always saw that as default), you get pretty close to that x10 number. I just personally wouldn't do it by increasing city sizes themselves, and I think it is the kind of thing that can vary from campaign to campaign

When it comes to city vs rural population, the Gazetteers do actually list domain-wide population numbers, which are very low in line with the listed settlement populations. We're talking about 25-27000 total population for each of Barovia and Hazlan. So it's not like there's a large rural population base propping up the demographics. My strong suspicion is that the low numbers were pulled out of the air in some of the earliest modules when it was assumed that this sort of thing wouldn't matter very much, and subsequent writers plumped for sticking with established canon rather than performing a retcon which could annoy people.

You're entirely right about population being tailored to the tone rather than vice versa - but I'd argue that the numbers are tailored to the tone of Barovia, which leaves the rest of the setting in a bit of an awkward state. The more urban domains, especially. These need a larger population to be functional. You need your city packed full of small shopkeepers, your aristocracy, your landed gentry and city watch and gamekeepers and skilled artisans and traders and so on before you can have the consulting detective agencies and secretive gentlemen's clubs and teeming squalid gin holes etc where the stories are set. The sort of late-renaissance pre-Victorian culture that you see in the western Core domains, and that supports gaslamp-type stories, really needs a large population to be plausible. If your PCs are tracking an obsessive golem-maker, then they should have the option of, for instance, finding the glassblower who made his specialised retorts etc, or investigating the shipping company that he uses to import rare chemical reagents. You can't do that in any interesting way in a city or domain that's so small in population that there's probably only one glassblower and one shipping company that comprises one family that owns one ship. Complex tech bases and complex civilisations (and the stories that get told in them) need larger populations.

This might be something that can be addressed in the 5e 'everything is an island in the mist' model. If the domains are more separated and there's less travel between them, then you can have some large, highly-populous domains as well as some backwater feudal dungheaps, without having to deal with the messiness of borders and politics and trade and migration and war between them. But that's going to be a YMMV matter. If you like Ravenloft as a functional, lived-in world, then it'll probably annoy you. If you prefer it as a more tightly-focused weekend-in-hell type setting, then it'd work better.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think if you increase the population sizes of settlements you run into issues though with the tone of the game. Also the old books listed distances. The old books included maps of towns with surrounding farmland. And the cultural levels were pretty all over the map. My point is, the settlements they list, are, I believe just meant to be notable settlements. I think countryside populations, and other settlements are assumed (this is one reason you have the homestead encounter in Feast of Goblyns). But it is meant to be a bleaker place and it is not the real world place So as much as I love Harn style thinking about population density, probably isn't as important to making Ravenloft make sense.

And again, many of the major settlements are fairly small in Ravenloft. Many of them come across as backwaters. Il Aluk was one of the bigger cities in Ravenloft with a size of like 25,000 which feels right to me (and while it isn't 100,000+ size city, keep in mind that not much smaller than Athens during the renaissance). For the vibe. I don't know. I love stuff like Harn, I actually quite like real world demographics, but for Ravenloft, I think you want the places to fit the tone of the source material.

Also there is some amount of flexibility when reading settlement population sizes in a game. Do we assume that is only the population that lives inside the city (or does that number also include the people living around the city). How you answer that question can easily double or triple the size of the population. Ultimately the setting is barebones in its presentation to allow for a wide range of interpretation. If you assume more population surrounding the settlements, assume more settlements than the ones presented on the map (which I do, and I always saw that as default), you get pretty close to that x10 number. I just personally wouldn't do it by increasing city sizes themselves, and I think it is the kind of thing that can vary from campaign to campaign

I could be wrong, but seeing that Il Aluk seems to be in the necropolis it makes for an extraordinarily poor example for a city representative of domain populations given the Necropolis has this breakdown
Major Settlements: None. Necropolis itself is

As an example of what @humble minion was talking about... Lamorida has a hereditary aristocracy renaissance level development and 3200 people with two major cities that themselves have 700 & 900 pop. Kartakass by comparison is little more than log cabins in wolf infested forests with medieval development & 4,500 pop.

edit: Put in perspective, the highschool I went to years back has a higher enrollment than the entire domain of Lamordia

 

[Bedrockgames]

I could be wrong, but seeing that Il Aluk seems to be in the necropolis it makes for an extraordinarily poor example for a city representative of domain populations given the Necropolis has this breakdown
Major Settlements: None. Necropolis itself is
View attachment 133761
As an example of what @humble minion was talking about... Lamorida has a hereditary aristocracy renaissance level development and 3200 people with two major cities that themselves have 700 & 900 pop. Kartakass by comparison is little more than log cabins in wolf infested forests with medieval development & 4,500 pop.

Prefacing this by saying this is largely just preference and stuff, so if you want higher populations, that is fine. Il Aluk had living inhabitants in the Black Box, it was later meta plot that led to it being a Necropolis (and honestly this development made Darkon, already a domain I had trouble really using well, almost unusable for me (I am sure others found the Necropolis worked, but for me, I just didn't have an easy time making use of this particular change).

So, Lamordia as originally described is meant to be an isolated place with hostile weather than deters people from settling there. Yes it has a more advanced culture, but the imagery that leaps to my mind are small coastal communities in Europe or New England (it isn't New England, but I live north of Boston and the imagery of Lamordia with small coastal communities resonates with me----grew up in a town of under 4,000 people). I believe most of the renaissance culture really is just an extension of Mordenheim. I think this is where making it too real world would probably reduce the horror. In a place like Ravenloft, you can have a small village with some distant ties in its history to a more advanced culture, and they don't sink into a dark age.

For me, and for the kinds of adventures I liked to run in Lamordia, it worked well. I also found a lot of the content from Adam's Wrath useful (not all but there was some very good stuff in there)

This is the original description of the folk:

 

[Bedrockgames]

As an example of what @humble minion was talking about... Lamorida has a hereditary aristocracy renaissance level development and 3200 people with two major cities that themselves have 700 & 900 pop. Kartakass by comparison is little more than log cabins in wolf infested forests with medieval development & 4,500 pop.

edit: Put in perspective, the highschool I went to years back has a higher enrollment than the entire domain of Lamordia

Yes, but Kartakass is a much more lively and celebratory domain. It is a place of bards and werewolves. If I recall you literally need to be a good singer to be mayor. Having Renaissance level tech doesn't automatically mean you need to have higher population sizes. The domains are very individual. Also, I question the medieval designation for Kartakass. If you look at Kartakass as presented in Feast of Goblyns there is a blunderbuss in there and there is also a doctor who is a kind of mad scientist vampire who feeds on cerebral fluid. I feel that the overall vibe of the domain felt a little bit past medieval for me (but that is just my opinion).