D&D General World size and climates (Eberron population vs size)

[tetrasodium]

Sharn is one of the travel hubs in the setting. So while it only has 200,000 permanent inhabitants, at any time there will be many more who are en route to somewhere else.

No the population listed is freakishly low for tax paying citizens/residents(?) , those towers are a couple of miles tall & it's described as being a densely populates

 

[Ixal]

No the population listed is freakishly low for tax paying citizens/residents(?) , those towers are a couple of miles tall & it's described as being a densely populates

The usual problem of humans being generally bad at visualizing large numbers, using historic numbers as very, very rough guideline but also wanting things to be epic, so the designer uses a modern understanding of what would be impressive and then increases it a few times.

 

[Yora]

Fantasy and sci-fi writers shouldn't be allowed to use numbers with more than 3 digits. It always gets embarassing.

 

[Tonguez]

At the city level it's like "Sharn is, say, London-sized, but it's also miles-high, so if it has 200,000 inhabitants there is no way the street are bustling with activity, and if it has 2 or 5 millions inhabitants, then all of Breland's population (4.3 millions) is in Sharn, with no-one left outside to populate the other cities (or to do farming to feed them, given that they don't all rely on magic to create food).

you know modern New Zealand (land area 10% larger than UK) has a population of 5 million of which 2 million live in Auckland city

sure NZ is tiny, but its still diverse and big enough for hobbits and orcs to campaign in

 

[delericho]

Incidentally, I checked "Eberron: Rising from the Last War" a few minutes ago, and the population of Sharn is listed as 500,000 - so 2.5x the value assumed in this thread.