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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4212024" data-attributes="member: 4937">Better, but counting the rural population in the town's population is really misleading.  If I read that there are 977 people in the town, I'm going to assume that means 977 or so people in town plus another 5000 or so people scattered around the 'barony' in villages of 40-200 people spaced about every two miles in every direction around the town.  I would assume that the town was the center of a largely agrarian community stretching about 12 miles in every direction around the town.  I would further assume that the kobold lair was itself a sort of village, and that it had a suitable buffer of several miles around it so that the kobolds could normally forage and hunt without coming into direct conflict with thier neighbors.  Since kobolds aren't agrarian I'd assume they'd need at least 4-8 miles of buffer to support themselves given the low productivity of hunting and gathering.  If this buffer didn't exist, the only way to explain the kobolds presense was that a) they just arrived, b) they had a death wish for moving so close to a hostile, better armed, and much larger human community.  How convienent that they'd offer themselves up as XP like that...But if the town represented a true border town in a hostile environment, I'd assume that the 977 people all lived within the safety of the town walls and farmed the towns immediate vicinity.  In which case, I'd expect to see at least 40-50 buildings in the town, or at least 80-100 if we are mostly talking simple thatched wattle and dung cottages.  In the surroundings I'd only expect a small (100-200) rural population of the very very poor and the very very self-sufficient - many of whom would survive by actually being allies of the local non-human population (witches, crazy hermits, cultists, lycanthropes, minanthrops, half-breeds etc.).  There might a few good apples in the bunch (rangers, retired adventurers, nature priests, your better sort of druid, ecentric wizards), but these would be naturally distrusted by the city folk.The other thing to keep in mind is that unless this is a garrison town, a town of 977 people probably has 8-10 full time soldiers.The layout provided is for kids.  The lairs of evil are too close.  There isn't enough farm land on the map (vagabundo provides a good illustration), and the rural population isn't sufficiently detailed regardless of the demographics in use.  It's the wilderness equivalent of a dungeon filled with disparate creatures that have no lives outside of waiting for the PC's to show up to kill them, never eat, never defecate, and never leave the particular room that they are in.</blockquote>

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