Sharn is a virtual ghost town!

Henry · Dec 23, 2004

My favorite part of you getting the Eberron and Sharn books, is watching your mind work on something I'm using.

Rel · Dec 23, 2004

Henry said:
My favorite part of you getting the Eberron and Sharn books, is watching your mind work on something I'm using.

Well I'm certainly making sure the forums are riddled with my inane conjectures on the matter, aren't I?

Now I'm mildly kicking myself for not offering up a Sharn game at the January Game Day. But it's probably better this way anyhow. When I get around to running it, I know I won't be satisfied with a simple one-off.

Banshee16 · Dec 23, 2004

Rel said:
Earlier today I was considering the architecture of Sharn and I started to conceptualize how big the average towers are. Once I understood the size I was dealing with I started to comprehend the enormous amount of space that was compared to the population of the city.

See if my math is correct here:

According to Sharn: City of Towers, the largest towers are 2,500 feet in diameter and the smallest are 800 at the base. The tops narrow to between 200 and 600 feet. So the average diameter at the base is 1,650 feet and at the top is 400 feet. This gives us an average diameter from top to bottom of 1,025 feet. 512 feet in Radius.

We know that the tallest towers rise to heights of 5,000 feet but let's assume that the average tower is only half that at 2,500 feet. The total volume contained in such a tower is 655,360,000 cubic feet.

Now we don't usually think of living space in terms of cubic feet but rather square feet so we divide this by 11 because that is the height of an average floor of a tower (this number should probably be higher but that's what the books says). So now we're down to 59,578,182 square feet. That's more than twelve World Trade Center towers per average Sharn tower! But wait, there's more!

I've taken a long look and done a bit of counting of the numbers of little towers represented on the map of Sharn on page 10. A VERY conservative estimate would be that there are 500 towers shown as being in the city. So that means we're looking at at least 29,789,090,910 square feet contained within the towers within Sharn. That's nearly thirty billion square feet.

Ok, let's reel that in a bit. Buildings are not 100% living space so we need to take out what is commonly called the "core factor". This is the space taken up by walls and such. Given that these are stone towers with thick walls, we'll use the absurdly high figure of 30% core factor. That STILL leaves us with well over 20 billion square feet of living space.

The population of Sharn is listed at 211,850.

So every man, woman and child within the city has a minimum of 98,430 square feet of ENCLOSED space to live in. That is over two acres each! A family of four would, on average, have just over 9 acres of enclosed living space.

My conclusion is that Sharn, as written, is not really an urban environment; it's a vertical suburb!

Do I really take these numbers seriously? No. Will this hamper my enjoyment of the setting? No.

I just thought you might be interested in knowing. Either that or my math skills really stink and I'm way off base.

I guess my only problem with the numbers is that you've taken the average tower size, and multiplied by 500 towers. However, that average size is a figure derived from combining the maximum and minimum sizes, and dividing by two, correct?

In my mind at least, I don't get the impression that half the towers in Sharn are super tall. Probably, instead, there are several really tall ones, and a bunch of average or smaller ones. That might just be my interpretation though. But if there are far more shorter ones, that would bring down the numbers.

The point of your argument is valid though. Not only is Sharn underpopulated, but so is Khorvaire as a whole. I read a thread either here or at the WotC message boards that claimed that there were 3.6 million people in Khorvaire.....which is *far* less than medieval Europe had for a smaller area. There are factors to consider....indiginous monsters that people in real-life Earth didn't have to compete with, as well as a 100 year long war that raged, destroyed cities, towns, depopulated areas, probably wiped out the majority of entire generations of young men and women, etc. If WW2 had lasted for 100 years, what kind of effect would it have had upon the population of Europe?

I'm not sure why the numbers are so low. Maybe it's because of the war scenario, or maybe it's because the designers wanted to have more open areas, and less clutter, or an excuse for fewer high level characters, etc. But I read on those threads that the population as it's written isn't nearly enough to sustain a civilization.

The Midnight setting has the same problem. The difference there is that it's a world that *is* dying. Civilization is literally coming apart at the seams, organized agriculture is ending, a market economy is dying, people aren't travelling anymore. That's the kind of thing I'd expect in an underpopulated area. Eventually, if the trend in the setting continues, I'd expect villages to become ghost towns, and people to revert to hunter-gatherer type societies.

Given that Rome had upwards of 1,000,000 people in it at it's height, I don't see why Sharn shouldn't as well. It *is* the largest, most powerful city on the continent, isn't it?

A lot of the settings in 3E have been like this. I'm pretty sure Waterdeep is supposed to have 500,000-750,000 people in it, and Sigil has about 1,000,000, but both of them were created in 2nd. Ed. Sigil manages that population with only a 2 mile diameter to the torus....and most of that space is just the space in the middle of the ring, so I bet it has a whole lot less area than Sharn.

Banshee

Hand of Evil · Dec 24, 2004

Most cities are like this, people migrate to their jobs, leaving vast areas empty and at the end of the day empting their work places, which are normally vast in size. You also have visitors to the city, we do not know how many people come into the city a day and their period of stay, sure it is not going to be much but it would mean space has to be provided for the period.

Another thing to note is live stock, even up to the 1900's cows, horses, and fowl were kepted in cities by families.

I am also not sure if the population numbers take into children either. Why would it? Older census only counted tax payers or head of household and that can be used here too.

kigmatzomat · Dec 24, 2004

I believe your core is off because you're looking at steel skeleton construction. I checked the empire state building; footprint vs height results in 8 million sq. ft while only 2 million sf is available for rent. You have to deal with elevators, stairs, air shafts, access shafts, utility rooms (where do you store the brooms & mops), trash chutes, etc. The Empire is a concrete & steel framed structure while Sharn will be rocks & magical construction.

Then you get into the reality of the city at war. Beseiged, surrounded, it turns to internal farming. IIRC, it takes about 1 acre to feed a person for a year. The 211,000 people would require 211,000 acres of food or 9 billion square feet of food.

Doing a quick review of most city skylines, there's 2 or 3 competing for tallest, a half dozen or so at half the height, and hundreds that are less than a quarter the height of the tallest. (FYI on wall street 20% of the buildings are <8 stories) By number, the 1/4 would be the norm so typical height would be 1250. Assuming a proper construction with 11' of *interior* height and another 3' of stone flooring and you have 14'/floor. Still we've still got 90 story buildings. (On par with the Empire state. Useful, that)

Do the same with the base and you have something like 1200' diameter.

90 stories x pi x 600^2 = 10,1736,000 sf x 500 buldings = 50,868,000,000 sf.

Using the Empire's ratio of function vs. gross =12,717,000,000 sf.
Subtract 9 billion sf of farms = 3.7 billion sf.
Pull out 30% for govt/public usage = 2.6 billion sf
Assume 15% for industry = 2 billion sf
Assume around 10% for warehousing = 1.66 billion sf

Divided amoung the 211,000 leaves about 7900sf. Still a lot but lots less than the 27,000sf.

BryonD · Dec 24, 2004

They need that space in order to house all the chickens the DMG formulas indicate would be available for purchase.

Rel · Dec 24, 2004

kigmatzomat said:
Doing a quick review of most city skylines, there's 2 or 3 competing for tallest, a half dozen or so at half the height, and hundreds that are less than a quarter the height of the tallest. (FYI on wall street 20% of the buildings are <8 stories) By number, the 1/4 would be the norm so typical height would be 1250. Assuming a proper construction with 11' of *interior* height and another 3' of stone flooring and you have 14'/floor. Still we've still got 90 story buildings. (On par with the Empire state. Useful, that)

Do the same with the base and you have something like 1200' diameter.

90 stories x pi x 600^2 = 10,1736,000 sf x 500 buldings = 50,868,000,000 sf.

Using the Empire's ratio of function vs. gross =12,717,000,000 sf.
Subtract 9 billion sf of farms = 3.7 billion sf.
Pull out 30% for govt/public usage = 2.6 billion sf
Assume 15% for industry = 2 billion sf
Assume around 10% for warehousing = 1.66 billion sf

Divided amoung the 211,000 leaves about 7900sf. Still a lot but lots less than the 27,000sf.

I'm not really going to argue with your calculations. There is really not much point in trying to claim accuracy because we've got to make a helluva lot of assumptions any way you slice it.

But there are two points where I'll say that my mental picture of Sharn differs from that which you paint. First, nowhere in the book have I seen any reference to any substantial farming within the city. And I wouldn't expect there to be. This place is the very definition of "prime real estate" in that the Syrania manifest zone is only so big. Not much point in wasting large chunks of it with farmland when there is plenty of arable land nearby to cultivate and ship food into the city. Though I agree that they'd be in big trouble if it ever came to a siege. Presumably they could keep the city supplied with food via the Dagger River or evacuate the population using the same method.

The other thing is about the average building height and the supposition that the vast majority of the buildings are not all that tall. I agree that this matches the skylines of our modern metropolises but it clashes somewhat with my notion of how the upper wards come together. There seems to be a large degree of implied connectivity between the towers of the upper wards and this would be all but impossible without many of the towers rising to those heights. If only one in ten buildings rose high enough to be part of the upper wards then the distances the bridges would have to stretch start to grow absurdly long.

I'm not claiming to be "right" about this. But when I did my earlier calculations I was making the assumption that there really is no such thing as a short building in Sharn, just variations of tall.

I'm not going to obsess about finding out a definitive answer to these issues but if anybody knows of an authoritative source, I'd love to hear it. If I'm going to take the time to map out some of the wards then I'd like to be able to make them as true to the intended setting as possible.

Thanks for all the input on this fairly trivial issue.

jgbrowning · Dec 24, 2004

BryonD said:
They need that space in order to house all the chickens the DMG formulas indicate would be available for purchase.

Not just chickens, my friend, GIANT chickens. Free roaming. Be afraid.

joe b.

RangerWickett · Dec 24, 2004

Yeah, I never understood the fantasy trope of having a massive city of "hundreds of thousands." The biggest city in my world has 2 million inhabitants. Hell, compare Sharn to New York or Tokyo, and it's obvious something's screwy. Sure, you might say Eberron is pre- or early-Industrial, but they've got frikkin' flying cars! We don't have flying cars! We don't even have servicable robots that can learn to cast lightning bolt!

*grin*

AdmundfortGeographer · Dec 24, 2004

Well, many levels will have very high ceilings. Auditoriums, theaters, warehouses, temples... etc. Certainly, the wealthy will also desire higher ceilings than the lower classes. Similarly to medieval cities, where the wealthy showed off their wealth and influence by "wasting space" with gardens and plazas inside walled towns where space was a premium, I'd imagine that in Sharn the wealthy and powerful "waste verticle space" in a similar show.

It is also a likelihood that floors/ceilings are thicker as well. With so many people living in towers, having thicker walls between levels would help with the psychology of "private space". Having to hear ever footfall of the resident above you could drive you batty.

Warehouses will definitely use up verticle space easily. It is easier for such operations to expand up or down in a thousand-foot tower, than outward, IMO.