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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 1925890" data-attributes="member: 7883">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</blockquote>

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