Demetrios1453
Hero
Yep, the city itself is 132K but the greater lands of Waterdeep are 1.3M, so apparently it is a fairly settled area in the immediate environs.
Again this is all 3e here. I don't have any 4e materials and as far as I can see, the SCAG doesn't give a 5e population count.
One thing that struck me while researching my earlier posts is that we've never had a good large-scale map of the immediate vicinity of Waterdeep, say at 10 to 30 miles to the inch. We've had plenty of maps of the city itself, and plenty of small-scale maps of the North in general, but nothing in between. It would be very helpful for people running Waterdeep-centric games to have that information - especially to know what threats there are to the city in its immediate environment, particularly in the obviously wilder lands in the Sword Mountains and on the eastern side of the Dessarin. And any such map would solve an issue that has been bothering me for years: Waterdeep owes much of what it is due to the trade up and down the Dessarin, but Waterdeep is explicitly stated in text and on maps as not being located at the mouth of the Dessarin, but a few miles to the north. How do the goods get from the Dessarin to Waterdeep, and vice versa? It would be very dangerous to try to float heavily-loaded low-draft river barges even a few miles via sea from the river to the city - is there a protected shipping channel along the shore? Is there an unrevealed river port where the cargo is loaded/unloaded (and it's not at the logical location along the Trade Way where it crosses the river at Zundbridge from descriptions of that location)?