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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 2059715" data-attributes="member: 463">D&D is not a trading game (though I have the old Minrothad & Darokin Gazetteers I've never used their trading rules), so detailed rules on the amounts of imports and exports available, profit margins and such are rarely necessary.  OTOH when presenting an area to players it's _very_ useful to have some idea of how a settlement functions economically, ie whether it's an agricultural wheat-exporting area, a mining town, a boom town built on wealth extracted from the local dungeon, a trading centre, et al.  Knowing what's economically important to the town or kingdom helps a lot in making it seem alive.  Also I use a simplified version of the Rules Cyclopedia domain management system, in particular the 'resource income' table - ie if an area has valuable mineral resources it produces more taxes, handy for PC dominion rulers to know.Population - I like to see details on populations because you can derive lots of other info from this single figure, like taxes, maximum army size, whether the area feels 'settled' or wilderness, etc.  However most games designers are very very bad at getting this right, most commonly giving population figures far too low (under 1 per square mile not uncommon), so maybe just saying "this area is lightly/sparsely/un-populated" would be better if you can't be bothered checking real-world figures (for reference, in medieval europe 10/sq mile would be very sparsely populated borderlands-to-wilderness like parts of the Scottish highlands, 100/sq mile densely populated farmland like much of France, 1/sq mile effectively unpopulated  - for western Europe Norwegian arctic mountains like Jotunheim, maybe, or empty desert).</blockquote>

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