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<blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8216974" data-attributes="member: 5948"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="humble minion, post: 8216974, member: 5948"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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