Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Gez 07-24-05, 04:11 PM	There are only 3 700 000 habitants in Breland, which is the most populated country of Khorvaire. Real world comparison, medieval France (which was only roughly 60% of Breland geographic size) was 20 000 000 during the 100 years war. England (without Scotland, nor Ireland !) was 5 000 000. Sharn, the biggest city of Khorvaire, with its building three time as high as the Empire State Building is only 200 000 habitants. Real world comparison, antic Rome : 2 000 000, without any magic to sustain it, or antic Antioch : 500 000. Or Alexandria : 1 000 000 etc.... One could think that most part of Breland is absolutely empty, but the ECS says that ALL of the northern country is occupied by ferms and ranchs. (agriculture is not mechanized, despite Vadalis...) So, I think we could probably multiply the number given in the ECS by 5 or 10 to have something realistic. Or is Khorvaire a greener clone of modern Greenland or Siberia ? Or maybe the last war killed 4/5 of the population in one century ? :eek:
Streamweaver 07-24-05, 04:14 PM	Or maybe the last war killed 4/5 of the population in one century ? :eek: I don't think this is a stretch really and this is how I play it in my world. The wars related to the Protestant Reformation pretty much descimated Central Europe and Germany population wise. The way I see it conflicts in Eberron would have all the savagery of classic Medeval Warfare but with the efficiencey of Modern weapondry. A deadly combination.
Aloïsius 07-24-05, 04:22 PM	I don't think this is a stretch really and this is how I play it in my world. The wars related to the Protestant Reformation pretty much descimated Central Europe and Germany population wise. 30% were killed, not 85+%... (on average) The way I see it conflicts in Eberron would have all the savagery of classic Medeval Warfare but with the efficiencey of Modern weapondry. A deadly combination. I see the Last War as the equivalent of the World Wars, but mixed with "intermitent" aspect of the 100 years war. A society can't sustain 85+% death toll in such a short time without crumbling to dust, IMHO. One of the Nation would have been destroyed/invaded before the destruction of Cyre.
polt 07-24-05, 04:22 PM	Well really, who ever uses those numbers for anything anyways.
Bluebrush 07-24-05, 04:39 PM	There's been a whole lot of discussion about this before, and by the numbers, yes, has a pretty low population density. Bear in mind humanity only turned up a few thousand years ago, and the rise of the common races is a relatively recent occourance.
Aloïsius 07-24-05, 04:49 PM	There's been a whole lot of discussion about this before, and by the numbers, yes, has a pretty low population density. Bear in mind humanity only turned up a few thousand years ago, and the rise of the common races is a relatively recent occourance. There has been an ice age in Europe until -10 000, "just a few thousand years". I think that such an underpopulated area make the existence of centralized state impossible. There is no way, even with magic, to control such a void, unless you have a nomadic people/army like Gengis Khan's one.
Gurv 07-24-05, 04:54 PM	There has been an ice age in Europe until -10 000, "just a few thousand years". I think that such an underpopulated area make the existence of centralized state impossible. There is no way, even with magic, to control such a void, unless you have a nomadic people/army like Gengis Khan's one. Amazing. And yet Galifar stood for one hundred years! Maybe we should discuss how things that have already happened did so, instead of discussing how past events couldn't have occured.
Fabius Maximus 07-24-05, 05:10 PM	There has been an ice age in Europe until -10 000, "just a few thousand years". I think that such an underpopulated area make the existence of centralized state impossible. There is no way, even with magic, to control such a void, unless you have a nomadic people/army like Gengis Khan's one. Administration? Easy. What do you think all the local nobles are for?
Twiggly the Gnome 07-24-05, 05:10 PM	Never mind.
Sarlax 07-24-05, 06:28 PM	Yes, the population numbers are incredibly low. Noting that humans arrived "only" 3000 years doesn't affect the discussion. First, 3000 is plenty of time for even a small population to explode. Second, the population figures listed in the ECS include nonhuman races. If you add up the population figures for every entry, you end up with about 18.3 million intelligent creatures. This is for an advanced civilization which had a centralized state for 900 years and continues to have well-developed governments, advanced magic, high-intensity agriculture, medicine, and sophisiticated communications. Compare that to pre-Columbian North America, which believed to have had 25 million natives in 1491 who largely lacked most technologies and social institutions which allowed for advanced societies. So yeah, Khorvaire's population is very low. The Last War doesn't explain it either. As has been noted, a society can't sustain the loss of such high numbers of its population. 30% would be devestating. The loss of 70% or so is impossible. You can say, "The ECS values don't account for Race X which lives in Nation Y," but then you're just agreeing that the ECS values are too low as written. The thing to keep in mind is that the important thing about Eberron and D&D is fun, not simulation. I actually prefer realistic population figures, but having such low numbers doesn't really harm the setting. I just multiply listed populations by three to five as a general rule, with adjustments for the nature of the city/nation/etc. as appropriate.
MysticTheurge 07-24-05, 06:36 PM	Do those figures include everyone? Or citizens? Does the Breland population include the random, unauthorized, wandering tribes of orcs, goblins, etc.? What about the intelligent (and unintelligent) "monsters" that live in the country? What about the other intelligent non-monsters that aren't likely to consider themselves part of the nation, such as Centaurs, Dryads or Satyrs? Sure there's probably a higher number of such sylvan creatures in Eldeen, but it's not like there won't be any in Breland's forests. How much territory does a mated pair of Hippogriff make unsafe for human habitation? What about Griffons? A troupe of Ettercaps? Medieval Europe didn't have to contend with the Monster Manual. ;)
Sarlax 07-24-05, 06:37 PM	Administration? Easy. What do you think all the local nobles are for? And how do you get those local nobles to obey the king? You can't control them over distances of hundreds or thousands of miles. If we followed Khorvaire's population numbers to their logical conclusion, local nobles would have no loyalty to the king. They'd become local warlords and carve out their own smaller kingdoms. The key to government is having a monopoly on violence and being able to use it anywhere in your territory. Khorvaire's huge. With the given population figures, it's impossible to field the necessary armies and police forces to govern the entire continent. There's a reason that Europe is made up of dozens of small countries without a strong central government. Local nobles only follow the king for any length of time if they believe the king can send them a bigger army than the noble's personal forces. And if the king is sending his army to fight Uppity Noble 1, Uppity Noble 2 is now free to rebel - unless the king has a huge army. But Khorvaire can't support that.
MysticTheurge 07-24-05, 06:41 PM	Local nobles only follow the king for any length of time if they believe the king can send them a bigger army than the noble's personal forces. And if the king is sending his army to fight Uppity Noble 1, Uppity Noble 2 is now free to rebel - unless the king has a huge army. But Khorvaire can't support that. Man, are all the nobles chaotic neutral?
Radkres 07-24-05, 06:46 PM	Is it possible that the population numbers are old pre war? And no current survey has been done?
greatfrito 07-24-05, 06:48 PM	I heard a recommendation a while back that one multiplies the populations by x10 across the board through the ECS. I personally think it's probably a good idea - and something my DM is doing, though not conciously, I believe (having had the discussion between him and a Rules-Lawyer about what the "right" population of Sharn was, after the DM quoted a figure).
Just another user 07-24-05, 06:55 PM	Compare that to pre-Columbian North America, which believed to have had 25 million natives in 1491 who largely lacked most technologies and social institutions which allowed for advanced societies. A thing that is stil a little unclear to me, how big is Khorvaire if paragoned to our Earth? I always had the impression it is large as much as Europe from Portugal to Siberia, more or less, Someone could confirm, deny or clarify this?
Shadowalk Nimblefeet 07-24-05, 07:00 PM	I have to say, I'm with Sarlax on this one. A centralised authority can't exist without the power to maintain order among the ranks of subordinate nobles. And this power has to come in the form of military might, but as is the population of Khorvaire couldn't provide that military power simply because it doesn't have the numbers. They're unrealistically low. Especially considering the number of sentient races which inhabit the nations, that's 10 common races (elves, dwarves, khorovar, gnomes, shifters, et c), not including the 'uncommon' ones (orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, et c) that may still participate in mainstream soceity. All these opposing cultures and races probably wouldn't coexist peacefully, unless they lived in the shadow of a greater authority that had the ability to make them get along. At least, that seems to be what history shows us. Without Galifar possessing the ability to field an enormously powerful, and numerically enormous, army then the Kingdom (an empire really) probably wouldn't have lasted two generations-- let alone nine centuries. Man, are all the nobles chaotic neutral? No, but even lawful nobles may refuse to submit to an authority that can't possibly relate to his people-- I mean, unpopulated geographical distance=cultural difference, and a fairminded noble might not find it right that a man (or woman) should rule people (s)he's never seen, can't relate to, doesn't share a culture, maybe not even a religion, with from tens of thousands of miles away. Alignment really has little to do with the matter. As people are fond of saying on these boards, it's not a 'straightjacket'.
ekomega 07-24-05, 07:03 PM	I believe Keith has said (in the previous incarnations of this thread) that there is a lot of empty space, and many of the countries claim land and territory that have little in the way of governance or actual settlements. The fact that Breland has certain borders doesn't imply that people live everywhere in Breland, as can be seen from the previous land they held in and near Droaam that was always monster land.
Edymnion 07-24-05, 07:31 PM	A thing that is stil a little unclear to me, how big is Khorvaire if paragoned to our Earth? I always had the impression it is large as much as Europe from Portugal to Siberia, more or less, Someone could confirm, deny or clarify this?Accourding the scale marker on the map... Khovaire is ~4,500 miles wide. and ~3,000 miles tall. For comparison, New York to LA is ~2,500 miles. Khovaire is about twice the size of the USA.
Aloïsius 07-24-05, 08:08 PM	Twice the size of the USA... So its superficy will be 4x bigger. It's freaking huge. I will use the x10 multiplier. This way, Sharn won't be so smaller than Cesar's Rome. But Khorvaire will still have only 180 millions habitants, which means that it will have a density = 1/5 or 1/6 of the USA, a country that IRL is not overcrowded... There will be a LOT of free space and wilderness still available. Well, let's say I will use a x8 multiplier, because of the last war.
Shadowalk Nimblefeet 07-24-05, 08:11 PM	I believe Keith has said (in the previous incarnations of this thread) that there is a lot of empty space, and many of the countries claim land and territory that have little in the way of governance or actual settlements. The fact that Breland has certain borders doesn't imply that people live everywhere in Breland, as can be seen from the previous land they held in and near Droaam that was always monster land. Yes, but even so the vast tracts of unpopulated land would make it effectively impossible for there to even be a semblance of governance. If the population size was at least tripled, that would make for more realistic numbers and possible societal order while leaving room for a still considerable amount of unpopulated frontier territory.
BloodyRoots 07-24-05, 08:58 PM	I love Eberron, but I hate the population/land size issue. I wish they would just come foward with some sort of fix. Personally I have redued the land sizes instead of Khorvarie being 5000 miles east to west I have it at 2500. I havent messed with the populations yet.
Beleriphon 07-24-05, 09:00 PM	Accourding the scale marker on the map... Khovaire is ~4,500 miles wide. and ~3,000 miles tall. For comparison, New York to LA is ~2,500 miles. Khovaire is about twice the size of the USA. More accurately still, if you mashed Europe and North America into one continent it would be abou the size of Khorvaire. Xen'drik is even bigger still. It looks to be some kind of Pangea like continent.
Salla 07-24-05, 09:34 PM	Khorvaire has a sparse population density because adventurers need lots of untamed wilderness to explore and get attacked my mysterious beasties in. :)
Edymnion 07-24-05, 09:54 PM	Yeah, its got about 4x the surface area of America. However, I can tell you from personal experience that there are VAST tracks of America where you can go hundres of miles without seeing another human being. You get out in Arizona and New Mexico, you can be doing 75 and still take 2-3 hours of steady driving to get from one fleabite town to another. Most of the US population is concentrated in a relatively few large cities and along the coasts. 10x population would definately be appropriate.
Darkest90 07-24-05, 10:20 PM	From the very start I have reduced everything to 0.75x the size and multiplied population figures by 7.5. I really like the sweet spot between 7 and 8, it helps out in many such cases.
Streamweaver 07-24-05, 10:30 PM	30% were killed, not 85+%... (on average) I never claimed a percentage, only stated that the population was decimated. Losting 1/3rd of the population fits that description, and this was done without magic is the point.
Splendide 07-24-05, 10:31 PM	Or you could use the Australian model for population spread. I'm thinking specifically that rural areas (or most of Thrane) would likely look a lot like country New South Wales. Hay (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/multimedia/gazetteer/list/hay.html) would be a good example. Just under 4000 people covering 11,348 sq. km of farmland and dirt.
ekomega 07-24-05, 10:58 PM	I never claimed a percentage, only stated that the population was decimated. Losting 1/3rd of the population fits that description, and this was done without magic is the point. Technically, decimation means that they lost 10% of their population. Look it up in the dictionary.
Beleriphon 07-24-05, 11:04 PM	Or you could use the Australian model for population spread. I'm thinking specifically that rural areas (or most of Thrane) would likely look a lot like country New South Wales. Hay (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/multimedia/gazetteer/list/hay.html) would be a good example. Just under 4000 people covering 11,348 sq. km of farmland and dirt. Here's a better one: Canada. 9,984,670 sq km (6,240,418.75 sq mi) 32,805,041 millions citizens. As far as population goes, Canada as an industrialized nation has a populatin about 10 times that of Breland, but has just over three time the land mass. I'm not sure how this helps, but it does add perspective with a modern low population to land mass country (Canada has one of the lowest population densities in the world). Technically, decimation means that they lost 10% of their population. Look it up in the dictionary. Even more technically it means one-in-ten, specifically the intentional killing of Roman legionaires. That being said, it is commonly accepted that ecimation means any exceptionally large number deaths, or other large scale descruction.
Streamweaver 07-24-05, 11:13 PM	Technically, decimation means that they lost 10% of their population. Look it up in the dictionary. You're wrong. That is one definition of it: 1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group). 2. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of. Unfortunatly in reaching for an excuse to act smart you seem to have missed the point. Death on a large scale is not unreasonable in the Eberron setting.
Splendide 07-24-05, 11:21 PM	Here's a better one: Canada.Disagree, due to the fact that so much of Canada would be uninhabitable given Eberron tech-levels (as ultimately is proven by the Frostfell). Australia is full of viable farmland, barring limited water supply...but then Australia doesn't have House Lyrandar's rain farmers.
Streamweaver 07-24-05, 11:29 PM	Just to chime in on area of Khorvair for comparison, having done an Eberron Worldmap (http://www.flagonwiththedragon.com/eberron/maps.php) in CC2 and used the land area tools I came up with the following stats. Posted them awhile back but they've long since scrolled away. (Distances in miles and area in square miles) Khorvaire West to East: 4300 North to South : 3000 Area: 7,313,500 Xen'drik West to East: 5200 North to South: 4800 Area: 9,970,000 Argonnessen West to East: 5100 North to South: 4700 Area: 9,500,000 Sarlona* * Sarlona doesn’t fit into a neat n/s and e/w box so I measured coast to coast distances differently as noted. Northwest to Southeast: 5500 Southwest to Northeast: 3400 Area: 8,640,000 Arenial West to East: 1100 North to South: 1400 Area: 675,000 For Comparisons there are some Earth size equivalents. North America: 9,449,460 sq miles Europe: 3,837,081 sq miles United States (continuous 48 states): 3,316,118 sq miles Texas: 268,601 sq miles Germany: 134,910 sq miles United Kingdom: 93,282 sq miles Georgia (U.S. State): 59,441 sq miles
Beleriphon 07-24-05, 11:36 PM	Disagree, due to the fact that so much of Canada would be uninhabitable given Eberron tech-levels (as ultimately is proven by the Frostfell). Australia is full of viable farmland, barring limited water supply...but then Australia doesn't have House Lyrandar's rain farmers. I'll agree with that, a vast majory of Canada is too far north to provide for a viable agrarian culture, but the population density issue still stands. Given the technology level that we do have, we could populate a much large area then has been. The same thing is true for much of Khorvaire. They could populate much more of the land, yet many of the nations haven't.
Streamweaver 07-24-05, 11:43 PM	The same thing is true for much of Khorvaire. They could populate much more of the land, yet many of the nations haven't. I think this is true and that people have good points, but ultimatly nothing needs to be ruled out here. If one GM feels the density should be more and bumps it up, then I wouldn't say they are wrong. Neither would I say a DM that keeps the density as is has to be wrong. I'm fine with low population levels in Khorvaire not only because of the war but the fact that these people live in a world of Trolls, Undead, and any number of other monsters that help thin the population. As people like to point out, Eberron is a low level setting but still has all the typical DnD monsters. That alone would keep populations down. People will make the argument that frontier life or life in the middle ages had all kinds of things to cause death as well, this is true but Khorvaire not only has those but all the monsters too.
Beleriphon 07-24-05, 11:47 PM	I think this is true and that people have good points, but ultimatly nothing needs to be ruled out here. If one GM feels the density should be more and bumps it up, then I wouldn't say they are wrong. Neither would I say a DM that keeps the density as is has to be wrong. Oh I'm with you Streamweaver. I'm just enjoying the debate. I do think the numbers are abnormally low for an area that has been continously populated for nearly 1000 years, but whatever. The cities and countries are populated by plot, and are as dense as they need to be for any given scene.
NOOC PHD 07-24-05, 11:48 PM	Or you could use the Australian model for population spread. I'm thinking specifically that rural areas (or most of Thrane) would likely look a lot like country New South Wales. Hay (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/multimedia/gazetteer/list/hay.html) would be a good example. Just under 4000 people covering 11,348 sq. km of farmland and dirt. Or better yet, rural Western Australia - population 1.9 million, land area 2.5 million square kms. WA has had the same land area for its two hundred year history (since white European colonisation), but its population only crossed the 1 million mark in the middle of the 20th century. It has always had one, central location of government; no rebellions or mass resistance to central rule; a singular, English dominated culture. The claim that Khorvaire lacks the necessary population to maintain national identities across the distances described is just not historically accurate. Australian history proves otherwise. I have no historical evidence but I suspect the Russian experience in Siberia would be similar for much of its history. The key point for societies with reliable communication (even slow communication) is not distance but culture and industry. Why would local nobles not just up and become warlords? Because the king of Breland has the power to control their access to the manufactured goods from Sharn etc. The king doesn't need an army big enough to conquer any rebels, he only needs one large enough to regulate (or block) shipments and merchants to the rebel zones. Local rebel nobles will find their population in arms against them or just migrating away to more prosperous areas. Historically, medieval nobles could afford to ignore centralised authority because trade was so much less important to their economies, which were rurally based. Khorvaire nobles are part of an international, mercantile culture. Personally, I don't like the low pop'n levels and tend to inflate them in my own play, but there's nothing in the levels as they stand that makes Khorvaire non-functional.
Tap Tap 07-24-05, 11:55 PM	Maybe Eberron humans have a slightly different biology than Earth humans and therefore do not reproduce as often. Also maybe the use of magical technology reduces the need to have large families like the need was on Earth. This is a fantasy setting after all.
Streamweaver 07-25-05, 12:05 AM	Oh I'm with you Streamweaver. I'm just enjoying the debate. I do think the numbers are abnormally low for an area that has been continuously populated for nearly 1000 years, but whatever. The cities and countries are populated by plot, and are as dense as they need to be for any given scene. I agree, as a thought experiment it's interesting. I have no idea if this is the reason for the values here, but in general I do think game developers tend to fall into the "desolate caveman" syndrome when thinking about the middle ages. That is more often reflected in world design. The truth is people in ancient cultures were as basically intelligent, thought obviously not as educated, as any of us. This is how you end up with theories that aliens built the pyramids, because people like to think of ancient cultures as full of idiots. The same applies to things like population numbers. People don't get that some ancient cities were very sophisticated metropolises. Personally I kind of frowned at the figures too but this isn't really something that makes it's way into everyday play so I really don't car. At an actual session NPCs are kind of where they need to be in any game. I related the world to my players through narrative, not through stats. Take Sharn for instance. I believe the book says the population of the city is somewhere around 45K with a volume (remember vertical city) that would make the city very sparse in terms of population density even if you count the gaps between the central plateau. This is actually the population of a Roman or Medieval city of about the same size in only one dimension. Personally I don't stress over these numbers, when I run in Sharn I describe the streets as clogged with people (with the stray lone ally for a fight or body to turn up in) and statistics don't really make it's way into my narration. So I definitely agree with it, while it's interesting to debate I don't think this has much of a real impact on running a game.
Beleriphon 07-25-05, 01:12 AM	Take Sharn for instance. I believe the book says the population of the city is somewhere around 45K with a volume (remember vertical city) that would make the city very sparse in terms of population density even if you count the gaps between the central plateau. I think Sharn specifically mentions 200 000, but that is still low for something with the same basic area of Manhattan, and nearly twice the height. As for cities, its always hard to say. Through most of the middle ages poor records were kept. The Romans on the other hand, having ones of the world's oldest bureaucracies, kept meticulous records of dang near everything. Of course since my latin is a little rusty most of the sources available to me aren't easy to interpret.
dracogen 07-25-05, 02:52 AM	Throughout history most of our population has congregated near the coastlines and internal waterways. Almost all "old" cities have a river flowing through them. Transportation was a big issue in the real world as road transportation was slow, expensive and risky. Waterways served as our arteries for a long time. The famed Roman road network extended from the French coast(and the British isles) as fas as Rome and beyod. They remained in service long after the Empire had fallen but often without any repair and reconstruction, causing damage over time. Infrastructure is a very important element of maintaining a large population. After the Roman Empire fell, European population droppped quite rapidly when the old infrastructure was destroyed and famine, war and diseases followed. Rome(the city) shrunk from it's glorious 2M population to under a million, too. This is despite the fact that numerous important farming innovations spread throughout Europe(a better plow for example) increasing farming efficiency quite a lot from the slave-dependent farming structure of the Roman Empire. There were not so many people to till the fields so the work-efficiency had to be increased. For Eberron this would mean that despite it's large land mass. The population numbers are not as low as they seem. Innovations like the lightning rail and others were only invented and built shortly before the Last War and thus might have not revonutialized the infrastructure to allow a much larger poulation. Mayne something like 4 times the numbers presented in the ECS. The modern population of the western societies is largely a result of the 19th century industrial revolution and improvements in medicine and general hygiene. Medieval European cities were filthy and disease was a very common cause of death. Eberron has magical healing and an advanced techniques of disease prevention(as displayed in a Sharn Inquirer article). But is this medical and magical help available to those most often struck down with the diseases, the poor?
nyysjan 07-25-05, 06:37 AM	Finland bigger than great Britain (do not count Ireland) population less than London my figures might be a bit of, about 5.000.000 people in Finland, definetly less than 6.000.000 people most of it is forest, water or swamp but the population of Khorvaire is a bit low i admit that just move the decimal point one to the right and all is well
Sereno 07-25-05, 01:51 PM	I can live with the low population numbers for the kingdoms, by the maps there aren't a lot of cities, most of them are lined up along the trade routes and rivers (like the real world). Lots of land claimed by the nations is really wild and, unlike the real world, likely populated with things a LOT worse than hostile humans. Imagine what "Go West, young man!" (USA history) might have been like if the Cheyenne, Apache, and Lakota were NOT the only intelligent people out there to be afraid of or have to fight with. Whites were afraid of them, they were afraid of the whites. Imagine if they were ALL dealing with orcs, and goblins, and trolls, and ogres, and nighthags, and everything else from the MM, MMII, and MMIII!!! Setting out for the "frontier" in Khorvaire is likely a death sentence except for a LARGE party (complete with troops, support, and magic). Single families would NOT be setting out in covered wagons to "stake a claim" in the wilderness. However, I really can't accept the population numbers for Sharn. A city the size of Manhattan (except 2-3 times taller) with only 200,000 people. With those numbers, it would feel deserted! Rome had a population of nearly 2 million (of course it also took up a lot more real estate than 5mi x 6mi). Even accounting for 50'-100' walls at the bottoms of towers, and lots of "air space" at the tops, I think less than 1,000,000 and the PCs will be hearing nothing more than the echoes of their own footsteps most places they go.
Baloo 07-25-05, 03:42 PM	There's some interesting stuff about medieval demographics, adapted to RPGs, at http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm . Notably, population densities in medieval Europe seems to have been around 80 people per square mile (France had more, Britain had less). Now, that's probably too high considering the recent war, as well as the fact that there are monsters around that make settling some areas hard. However, the figures given indicate a total population of 18 million spread across 7 million square miles - that's 2.5 persons per square mile. Even if you assume that roughly half Khorvaire's surface is basically unpopulated wilderness (Shadow marches, Droaam, Demon wastes, Mournlands - that's nowhere near half, but the sparse population of Darguun, Talenta and Valenar might make up for it, it's just a rough figure anyway), that still gives about 5 people per square mile. I don't think something like 25 people per square mile would be too much, so quintupling the population figures seems appropriate.
D666 07-25-05, 07:04 PM	Why are there so few people? My guess is birth control, either via low level magic or possibly through herbal means. Unlike real-world low tech societies, Khorvairians do not have 10-12 births per couple, they are more like modern societies that way. Throw in a higher death rate from predation, especially on the frontier, and you get a much slower growth rate of the population curve. Unless civilization collapses they will eventually reach the 60-80 per square mile that the land can support, but it might take another thousand years. Or more. As for the low pop's effect on central government, consider how dangerous life can be without it. Peasants don't walk away from their lords because they need armed protection beyond what they can provide for themselves. Likewise, local lords don't (usually) defy the king because they know they will someday need royal assistance to survive, so they grumble and then follow the king's laws and pay the king's taxes. Remember, it's not just the frontier that is dangerous. Vampires like cities, there are a lot of hiding places where the sun never shines and prey is plentiful. Mind flayers need a brain every month and prefer more. Strong government is not a luxury in such an environment, it is a necessity; individuals and small groups are just too vulnerable. Also, you do not need dense populations to have wars, consider the War of 1812 where a sparsely populated US attempted to invade an even more thinly populated Canada. People can always find things to fight about. Gene
Sarlax 07-26-05, 01:09 AM	As far as population goes, Canada as an industrialized nation has a populatin about 10 times that of Breland, but has just over three time the land mass. I'm not sure how this helps, but it does add perspective with a modern low population to land mass country (Canada has one of the lowest population densities in the world). The Canadian government, however, governs an effectively denser population than the official figures. The bulk of Canada's people live in the southern band of the nation. A large majority of the territory isn't developed. Some might say, "Yep, just like the Five Nations." The difference is that the inhabited area of Canada is small compared to the rest of the nation. The cities of Khorvaire are distributed across the continent. How could Wroat possibly exert political power over Starilaskur? They're more than a thousand miles apart. In a realistic model, Starilaskur would have become the capital of a nation based in east Breland. Wroat would probably govern the middle. Sharn would probably be the capital of a seperate state as well. Canada works because of modern infrastructure which allows for easy transportation and communications and the effective governed area isn't too large. The Five Nations have existed for at least a thousand years but they never had the infrastructure needed to be so large and durable.
Reinforcements 07-26-05, 01:22 AM	I can live with the low population numbers for the kingdoms, by the maps there aren't a lot of cities, most of them are lined up along the trade routes and rivers (like the real world). Lots of land claimed by the nations is really wild and, unlike the real world, likely populated with things a LOT worse than hostile humans. Imagine what "Go West, young man!" (USA history) might have been like if the Cheyenne, Apache, and Lakota were NOT the only intelligent people out there to be afraid of or have to fight with. Whites were afraid of them, they were afraid of the whites. Imagine if they were ALL dealing with orcs, and goblins, and trolls, and ogres, and nighthags, and everything else from the MM, MMII, and MMIII!!! Setting out for the "frontier" in Khorvaire is likely a death sentence except for a LARGE party (complete with troops, support, and magic). Single families would NOT be setting out in covered wagons to "stake a claim" in the wilderness. However, I really can't accept the population numbers for Sharn. A city the size of Manhattan (except 2-3 times taller) with only 200,000 people. With those numbers, it would feel deserted! Rome had a population of nearly 2 million (of course it also took up a lot more real estate than 5mi x 6mi). Even accounting for 50'-100' walls at the bottoms of towers, and lots of "air space" at the tops, I think less than 1,000,000 and the PCs will be hearing nothing more than the echoes of their own footsteps most places they go. You bring up some very good points, and if nothing else I think this is a fairly adequate explanation for why Khorvaire isn't densely settled. That is: it's friggin' HARD! Hell, even walking through a pleasant field of flowers in Aundair is just asking to be mobbed by petals (a type of fey from MMIII). I also agree, though, that the populations are low, especially for big cities like Sharn. What I would do was leave villages and such alone, but up the populations of big cities by a factor of ten. Arcanix is fine as a thorp (is it a thorp? Maybe it's a village. Whatever.), but Sharn can easily support 2 000 000 folks.
dracogen 07-26-05, 01:44 AM	Birt control, magical or otherwise is not something very likely to effect the world's population growth. To a society without state or privately funded pensions, having a big mob of children is prepareing for your twilight years. The children can take care of you when you are old, tend your graves when you are dead and give you a social network to benefit you. In medieval times, extended families were very large. The common family names in European nations are a proof of this, a living reminder that we too once belonged to a very wide network of pwople spreading across the lands. In other words, birth control might be the domain of the privileged, the truly desperate and those that wish to avoid scandals from illicit liasons.
Splendide 07-26-05, 01:45 AM	Canada works because of modern infrastructure which allows for easy transportation and communications. You mean infrastructure like elemental vessels, lightning rails, airships, travel spells, message stones and mass media?
aelryinth 07-26-05, 01:51 AM	Kindly note that while Sharn can probably FIT 2 million people, it can't SUPPORT that many. They don't grow food in sharn, and it all has to come from the countryside. I'm not sure of the proper ratio, isn't it like 5 rural to every Urban in medieval times? And fairly close to the city? If the population of Breland is low, so will the population of the cities be. If you increase the overall population by x10, then Sharn can be huge because now the rural food producers are there. ==Aelryinth
Splendide 07-26-05, 04:33 AM	Thanks to Lyrandar, Khorvaire has optimal farming weather. You can probably shift that medieval ratio a notch or two.
Sereno 07-26-05, 09:41 AM	Kindly note that while Sharn can probably FIT 2 million people, it can't SUPPORT that many. They don't grow food in sharn, and it all has to come from the countryside. I'm not sure of the proper ratio, isn't it like 5 rural to every Urban in medieval times? And fairly close to the city?==Aelryinth You do make a good point about the overall low population affecting the maximum sustainable populations in the big cities, however, the yeild-per-acre of Khorvaire is probably much higher than the typical earth peasant farmer. Khorvaire farmers have House Lyrandar to control the weather and bring rain when necessary and calm violent crop-destroying storms, too. They've also got druids who would know more efficient ways of growing crops that wouldn't deplete the soil (no slash-and-burn agriculture in Khorvaire!) And, there's a lightning rail line that runs right into Sharn. Food can be brought in by the trainload; that's a lot more efficient than each local farmer hitching up his wagon to a couple of horses and hauling goods one-farm-at-a-time. Also, built right on the Dagger River, goods can be floated downstream in barges and magically lifted right into the City at the docks in Precarious. Some of those huge warehouses are probably granaries and others are probably magically cooled to protect foodstores.
Splendide 07-26-05, 10:27 AM	Oh, and the frequently forgotten house Vadalis would know a fair bit about handling livestock too.
DarkWarriorKarg 07-26-05, 10:43 AM	Guys... not all levels of Sharn are properly inhabited. Most of the population would be at higher levels. This creates large spots in the lower levels where anything could happen.
Streamweaver 07-26-05, 11:21 AM	Guys... not all levels of Sharn are properly inhabited. Most of the population would be at higher levels. This creates large spots in the lower levels where anything could happen. I don't really see it this way, not that it matters much but my own take on Sharn is jam packed lower levels of people living in squalor, and it getting more comfortable and less dense as you go higher and into more affluent levels of the city. That’s pretty much the standard archeology/megacity idea that Sharn would be the equivalent of.
Hellcow 07-26-05, 12:22 PM	One could think that most part of Breland is absolutely empty, but the ECS says that ALL of the northern country is occupied by ferms and ranchs. In my opinion, this is an error. I believe that much of Breland - ESPECIALLY the west - is largely empty. There are concentrated webs of thorps, villages, and hamlets spread around any major city, but go farther afield and there is still empty land, even if it has technically been attributed to some noble lord (this is how you can get land in the Race of Eight Winds - because it's land in the middle of nowhere). The same is true of the other Five Nations; one of the reason the elves COULD claim Valenar was because of the low population density. The key is that this means that you can still find a Dhakaani ruin hidden in the wilds that no-one's stumbled on yet; there are still surprises to be found, even in the major nations. Personally, I have no problem with people increasing the population numbers by a factor of ten... or, for that matter, simply decreasing the scale on the map. But in my mind, the five nations are not one solid sprawl: there are many wide-open spaces that have yet to be colonized by humans and their kin. Likewise, I feel that where population numbers include creatures like orcs and goblinoids, these are simply the KNOWN populations; it's as if a census was done. There could be an addiitonal 500,000 goblinoids hidden in the Seawall Mountains... but the recognized population of Darguun doesn't take that into account. (Disclaimer: I'll note that I'm traveling, and as a result have not read any of the messages in this thread beyond the first.)
The_Fan 07-26-05, 01:01 PM	I don't believe that census takes into account the monstrous population. Some creatures like ogres and medusas will be counted, but marginally sentient creatures like displacer beasts, umber hulks, trolls, grey renders, etc. would not. I'm quite comfortable with the population numbers being fairly low in a fantasy world because the monsters tend to keep it that way.
AlDaRoN Arg 07-26-05, 02:09 PM	Take the Sharn for example, why would anyone build a city for 10 million people when the whole continent has 18 million? Its just ilogical. Sharn would be almost empty, it makes no sense.
Sarlax 07-26-05, 05:18 PM	Kindly note that while Sharn can probably FIT 2 million people, it can't SUPPORT that many. They don't grow food in sharn, and it all has to come from the countryside. I'm not sure of the proper ratio, isn't it like 5 rural to every Urban in medieval times? And fairly close to the city? Khorvaire isn't medieval. Two houses contribute immensely to the quality and production of livestock and plant produce. A Vadalis draft animal can greatly increase the productivity of a farm, while the Lyrander raincallers can increase any region's precipitation. There are also spells which help. Plant Growth increases the productivity of all plants within a half mile for a year. A Wand of Plant Growth has a market price of 11,250 and is easy for any artificer to make. Likewise, several nations (Talenta Plains, Zilargo, Valenar) are dominated by races whose people are physically smaller than humans and thus require less food.
Sarlax 07-26-05, 05:24 PM	You mean infrastructure like elemental vessels, lightning rails, airships, travel spells, message stones and mass media? Only "travel spells" are known to have existed for more than the last 150 years. The lightning rail was begun in 845. Airships showed up in the last 10 years. Mass Media (the Korranberg Chronicle) spread only during the Last War. Travel spells (assuming this means Fly, Teleport, etc.) may or may not have existed for the centuries that Galifar endured, but even if they were around, they'd be restricted to the very wealthy. They still are. All of these infrastructure innovations are new and/or very rare. They couldn't have possibly significantly contributed to the management of a continental empire.
Pax 07-26-05, 07:47 PM	Take Sharn for instance. I believe the book says the population of the city is somewhere around 45K with a volume (remember vertical city) that would make the city very sparse in terms of population density even if you count the gaps between the central plateau. Sidebar, page nine (first page of chapter one, actually), "Sharn by the Numbers", indicates thepopulation of the city is "211,850 (33% human, 17% dwarf, 9% halfling, 9% goblinoid, 8% gnome, 7% elf, 5% half-elf, 4% shifter, 3% changeling, 2% orc and half-orc, 1% warforged, 1% kalashtar, 1% other races)." And I seem to recall a comment that that only represents the permanent populationof the city - IOW, long-term residents, not tourists, visitors, or other short-term residents. This is actually the population of a Roman or Medieval city of about the same size in only one dimension. Right, 45K for each "level" - Upper, Middle, Lower, and Cogs. With fourlevels, that'd be ... ~200K. Sharn appears to have the same population density as those Roman and Medieval cities, after all. Still, I have to admit, the numbers are very low, comparatively. I think, if I run an eberron campaign, I'm going to bump populations, across the board, by a factor of about five. Something jkust over a million, for Sharn, sounds about right, IMO. Andsomething just under a hundred million for all of Khorvaire? Also sounds more right, to me. Best of all, it's a "happy middle ground" - gts the post-war population up to levels that are believably sustainable in terms of civilisation and government, BUT, still leaves enough room for adventurers to go traipsing all over creation wihtout seeing a village for days on end. ^_^
dracogen 07-27-05, 08:25 AM	An iteresting thought strikes me. Like the post-WW2 world, maybe Khorvaire will soon start enjoying a baby-boom. A few years of relative peace could bring about quite a lot of newborn babies into the world. This might have a profound effect on the economy and other areas of living. What do you think about this angle? It could brinf a whole new point of view into the world as people with new families are a bit less enthaustiac about a new war and crisis. Must do some research into the '50's and '60's it seems. And in a few short decades, Eberron hippies. Give Q'barra a chance, man.
Splendide 07-27-05, 09:58 AM	Only "travel spells" are known to have existed for more than the last 150 years. The lightning rail was begun in 845. Airships showed up in the last 10 years. Mass Media (the Korranberg Chronicle) spread only during the Last War. Travel spells (assuming this means Fly, Teleport, etc.) may or may not have existed for the centuries that Galifar endured, but even if they were around, they'd be restricted to the very wealthy. They still are. All of these infrastructure innovations are new and/or very rare. They couldn't have possibly significantly contributed to the management of a continental empire.So, what about the others things I mentioned? -2000YK - Mark of Storm appears among half-elves. Dragonmarked members by themselves can improve the speed of galleons. -1900YK - The Mark of Passage appears among humans. The Dragonmarked houses (and The Twelve) were established pre-Galifar, which certainly would've aided Galifar's control too. And of course, 789YK - House Sivis message stations begin operations
Malniemel 07-27-05, 10:19 AM	anyone have any idea how big sharn is compared to newyork? this would also seem a proper gauge of population...considering that's our MASSIVE CITY compared to theirs...i'm too lazy to look it up in the source books, and to help arguement...that and i haven't read all of the posts for this thread... cheers
SirBruce 07-27-05, 01:44 PM	According to page 24 of Sharn: City of towers, it's 1sp per mile to travel by Skycoach, and it indicates from Lower Tavick's Landing to Upper Dura would be 6sp. Given that Sharn is roughly circular, if we assume a diameter of 6 miles, that's about 28 square miles in total area. New York City as a whole is some 300 square miles, and Manhattan alone about 24 square miles. Bruce
Malniemel 07-27-05, 03:01 PM	how many people live in manhattan?
Joshua Dyal 07-27-05, 03:40 PM	anyone have any idea how big sharn is compared to newyork? this would also seem a proper gauge of population...considering that's our MASSIVE CITY compared to theirs...i'm too lazy to look it up in the source books, and to help arguement...that and i haven't read all of the posts for this thread... It's all right here in the thread already.
mistakeagian 07-27-05, 03:42 PM	From my understanding of the Sharn book, though, I though the buildings were large thick structures, so they are not like modern skyscrapers in that every avialable inch of square footage is useable. I mean sure its big but if its mainly flying buttresses and 100 feet thick bases for the towers to stand on then it can house less people than manhatten.
SirBruce 07-27-05, 04:42 PM	how many people live in manhattan? 1.5 million. So Sharn has 7,600 people per square mile, while Manhattan has over 60,000. But Manhattan is something of an outlier. For example, San Franciso only has some 15,000 people per square mile, Chicago, 12,000, and Washington, D.C. about 10,000. Many other "big" cities, like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, etc. have densities of only 2,000 - 3,000 per square mile. Sharn would be closer to Seattle (6,000), Pittsburg (6,500), or Baltimore (9,000). Bruce
tomtill 07-28-05, 12:00 AM	The populations seem about right to me—perfect for gaming, justifiable in game terms. After all, this is a world where violent death is a common occurrence even in its mightiest city (check out the dead body table in CoT). Gathering together for protection is not as effective as in the real world, given the powerful hidden monsters and rampant criminal elements that freely roam the cities. Cities are great if you have money, not so great otherwise. Away from the fortified cities, there are any number of monsters/NPCs with the power to wipe out whole towns without ever evoking conspiracy theories, and no end to them in sight. A farmer's three sons in Breland might each carve back some of the jungle wilderness to make their own farms/plantations (usually, the more wild the land, the more likely it is free for the taking). A generation later only one of those three homesteads may still exist, the other two destroyed by any number of hostile or simply hungry creatures. The expensive magic of the upper classes is not available for the common man. Mostly, the common man just dies. Mostly, it's their whole families, and sometimes their whole towns that die with them. There is no real world comparison. The population density has to take monstrous density into account and humanoid races are not at the top of the food chain, at least on a local level. Yes, the Breland farmer might have longbows and occasional alchemist fire or tanglefoot bags and even some exotic watch animals, but the monsters have massive size, or outrageous special attacks or other abilities that make them more like a 20th century tank, relatively speaking. We're talking about monsters designed to challenge mid to high level PC characters rampaging the countryside until a PC or a bunch of NPCs ("the calvary") show up to stop them. So yes, people die a lot, war or no war. And yes, people seek to belong to larger social order, because otherwise the calvary that eventually shows up would not show up at all. The king awards three adventurers, giving them land plots A, B, and C along a road near the Droaam border. After 100 years, A and B are ruins, and C is an isolated border keep with a small town around it. What happened to A and B that didn't bother C? All it would take is something like a vampire flying into one of the keeps one night, and feeding off the local population until everyone was either dead or had fled elsewhere. Borders only protect against other humanoid settlements, not the constant feeding of the monsters of the world on the humanoid population. So that explains why you have sparse populations of the civilized folk in Eberron relative to the real world. That explains why you have lots of ruins, and why there are widely dispersed towns/farms. Periods of expansion, followed by destruction in random places, sort of like massive tornados whipping through a neighborhood. So how can kingdoms, much less empires exist with all this violence and the resulting empty space? Some have argued that transportation and communication issues over such empty distances would make it unlikely. I think it more likely that there is a lot of autonomy, with varying levels of submission. It is humanoid nature to want to belong to something. Many people take pride in their nationality, even though they'd be hard pressed to say what belonging to their nation actually does for them. Many Brelanders are proud to be Brelanders, even thought they've never seen a government official. Nobles are nobles because they have families with long histories intertwined in personal relationships with other noble families. Histories which include times when the noble faced such a profoundly overwhelming foe that he had to request aid from his neighbors and his king. Histories where it was the kingdom that protected his land from the avarice of his neighbors. Histories which in this world would have involved the accumulation of magic items (through potential adventuring, but also through accumulation of wealth) as well as personal loyalties and arrangements that guarantee the continued dominance of the noble family. The royal families are the oldest noble families of all. It is not much of a stretch to argue that the royal families have some rather extravagant artifacts and eldritch machines that they have gathered over their long reigns (or inherited from Galifar), accumulated and taken as tribute or simply taken as a national security measure from the discoverer. And, of course, it's all relative. A noble has a small army, A king has a larger army provided by his vassals, and he plays the nobles against each other when necessary. If push comes to shove, he relies on the fact that his family is older and has more resources than the noble's, and he pulls out his artifacts and eldritch machines. My guess that the possession of a powerful artifact that a noble refuses to relinquish to the crown would be sufficient to earn the wrath of the crown. Even if a noble has a hidden artifact (and who doesn't?) he doesn't necessarily know what the crown can bring to bear so he might be reluctant to make a power play. Also remember that in this world, it is not ability, but money and relationships to entrenched interests that determine the limits. A king has the financial resources to teleport an entire platoon if he needs to, or to employ a high level PC party to wipe out a noble's entire family and the connections to call upon the most esoteric aspects of the dragonmarked houses. Can the noble bring all this resources to the table? Maybe, maybe not. But that's the nature of money and high politics. In any event, in any feudal system the king has to balance the power of the nobles against each other to maintain his own power. In Eberron the existence of magic is more likely to favor the entrenched royalty because of their greater wealth and history of accumulated magic. Unlike our own history, rapid travel and communications are a matter of money rather than possibility, so it can happen when it needs to. Unlike our own history, a well-financed party complete with high end magic can be fielded to completely overwhelm cheaper traditional forces, as if a modern military platoon was plopped down in the War of the Roses with unlimited supplies. Think third world dictatorship, where the government has jets and computers but there is no electricity or even roads to many parts of the country. Every local warlord who gets too big for his britches will eventually find that the pockets of the royal family are much much deeper than his own, for the royal families have much deeper connections. This is how kingdoms are maintained. Magic and monsters have a profound effect upon the world, and easily justify the large kingdoms with sparse populations found in Eberron. Further, this is desirable from a gaming perspective. That way you can have hidden ruins, undiscovered civilizations of weird monsters, and new monsters right in your own back yard. You can have towns where something strange is going on and nobody notices. You can have situations where only the PCs are able to act in a timely fashion. You can have local warlords that the government has not yet put down, and growing evil fortresses that the world hasn't noticed yet. It's much easier to DM, and easier to control access to high end items. This kind of loose stretched government makes it much more believable that the PCs are the ones to discover that something is wrong and that they are the only ones in a position to fix it. For people who are concerned about the population density of Sharn, others have mentioned the rather unique architecture which wastes space (which is cheap thanks to the manifest zone), but it's also worth pointing out that the city includes both the living space and the working space. In our own world, many cities empty out at night as people go home, and the neighborhoods empty out during the day as people go to work. Marketplaces are going to be crowded, residential areas are not. Most cities also have many empty buildings, as new buildings are built right next to old empty buildings, simply because the owners wanted something new and in their own style. Thanks to the manifest zone and magic, buildings in Sharn last much longer than in our own world, so this process has been going on for millenia. Sharn is also meant to be the center of commerce and heavy industry in Khorvaire, which also takes up space. Remember that the population statistics in DnD are for the adult populations, different from our method of demographics which include non-adults. So, again, the numbers seem about right to me.
Sarlax 07-28-05, 02:48 AM	From my understanding of the Sharn book, though, I though the buildings were large thick structures, so they are not like modern skyscrapers in that every avialable inch of square footage is useable. I mean sure its big but if its mainly flying buttresses and 100 feet thick bases for the towers to stand on then it can house less people than manhatten. Sharn's towers are 100 feet to 1 mile tall, 800-2500 at the bottom, 200-600 at the top. There's one story every 10-12 feet. The average wall is 10 feet thick. That's an average height of 2600, an average diameter of 1000, and a story every 11 feet. That's 236 stories in the average tower. Every floor is about 700,000 square feet (it's actually more, but I'm rounding down to account for interior walls, etc.). That's 165 million square feet per tower. That's about 6 square miles of space per tower. The average tower in Sharn has a thousand feet on the tallest buildings on Earth. And they fill up the entire city. 200,000 people? Ridiculous. No one builds such a vast city if they don't have the people to fill it.
tomtill 07-28-05, 08:04 AM	That's an average height of 2600, an average diameter of 1000, and a story every 11 feet. That's 236 stories in the average tower. Every floor is about 700,000 square feet (it's actually more, but I'm rounding down to account for interior walls, etc.). That's 165 million square feet per tower. That's about 6 square miles of space per tower. There is no data to determine the average height of a tower, since we don't know the distribution of sizes, only the ranges. Even with a tower that size, it's worth considering that this 6 sq miles includes streets, parks, infrastructure, enough space for skyboats to fly passengers around, large open areas for aesthetic and communal purposes. In short, a tower houses a small vertical town, not a rabbit warren of rooms like our real-world towers. Homes and businesses are described as being attached to the walls as independent constructions, not necessarily built as part of the tower. It's also worth pointing out that the world trade center was about half a square mile of space, but had a population of zero. (I don't think it had residential space, though I might be wrong on this point.) The aesthetics of the builders of the Sharn towers appeared to require that the tower interiors have more in common with a traditional town than the office buildings with which we are familiar.
Streamweaver 07-28-05, 08:26 AM	There is no data to determine the average height of a tower, since we don't know the distribution of sizes, only the ranges. This isn't true really, we at least have an idea. The whole concept of Sharn is that it has so many tall towers they can form whole vertical districts, this is how you end up with the Upper Methis and all that. The towers are uniform enough in height to interlock with bridges and platforms to form these strata. We not only know this, but every piece of art on the city shows most of the city reaches fairly high and it isn't just a stray tower here and there standing above the rest. The thing about Sharn is most people really aren't grasping the idea of volume. We can talk a bit about New York or any major city but these are two dimensional cities for the most part. It is the stray building that rises to a hundred stories or more, not the average. I agree there is no exact data but we definitly have at least a vague idea of the shape and dimensions of Sharns towers. It doesn't really matter to me if there is exact data or not however since I'm activly running an Eberron campaign I have to describe something. I can't just strug to my players and not give them a description of the place because we have no hard data. To me game material has to have a practical application at the table or it's pretty much useless. Sharn has enough detail to provide a useable narrative and that's all that matters to me.
tomtill 07-28-05, 11:01 AM	I agree there is no exact data but we definitly have at least a vague idea of the shape and dimensions of Sharns towers. It doesn't really matter to me if there is exact data or not however since I'm activly running an Eberron campaign I have to describe something. I can't just strug to my players and not give them a description of the place because we have no hard data. To me game material has to have a practical application at the table or it's pretty much useless. Sharn has enough detail to provide a useable narrative and that's all that matters to me. Granted, and that's sort of my point. CoT states that Sharn has a population of around 200,000 permanent adult residents, and this thread and others argue that this is not enough based upon estimates from vague descriptions from CoT, atmosphere artwork, and parallels to our own cities. I was only trying to point out that at this time official material declines to be specific, there are no specifically detailed maps of any part of Sharn, and descriptions of the towers provided can encompass any number of needs according to the campaign. This is probably purposeful, with "enough detail to provide a useable narrative" without being overly constrictive. Meanwhile, the 200000 population limit has real game purpose in terms of gp limits and number and quality of classed NPCs. I was simply arguing that these limits should not be discarded just because relative to our real life cities, the numbers don't make sense. Sharn is nothing like our real life cities. The information we are given states that there is a lot of empty space, especially at high levels. At low levels there is a lot of abandoned space. Space is not at a premium, as many have pointed out, so it is likely that people demand large spaces. The towers are more like vertical towns than they are like modern buildings in that there are roads, large open spaces (and navigable air space) and separate buildings within the towers encompassing residential, industrial, business, market, green spaces and infrastructure. Towers are built upon towers, with outdoor space built on top of a tower and smaller towers built upon this and perhaps bridging between base towers. This creates a lot of unusable space (air and infrastructure) at higher levels and a lot of less desirable space (closed in, oppressive) at lower levels. Think suburban sprawl except going up instead of out. The data in CoT is somewhat conflicting, from page to page, but I think this is meant to represent diversity and freedom for the DM to improvise. My point is that it is easy to reconcile the 200k permanent adult population with the vast volume of Sharn, and that there is no compelling reason to change it. In short, the descriptions of Sharn's architecture are more fluff than crunch (at least as described so far), whereas the 200k permanent adult population is official crunch, and crunch crunches fluff if you want to run a bona-fide Eberron campaign. If you don't, then do what you want, of course.
AlDaRoN Arg 07-28-05, 03:14 PM	Granted, and that's sort of my point. CoT states that Sharn has a population of around 200,000 permanent adult residents, and this thread and others argue that this is not enough based upon estimates from vague descriptions from CoT, atmosphere artwork, and parallels to our own cities. I was only trying to point out that at this time official material declines to be specific, there are no specifically detailed maps of any part of Sharn, and descriptions of the towers provided can encompass any number of needs according to the campaign. This is probably purposeful, with "enough detail to provide a useable narrative" without being overly constrictive. Meanwhile, the 200000 population limit has real game purpose in terms of gp limits and number and quality of classed NPCs. I was simply arguing that these limits should not be discarded just because relative to our real life cities, the numbers don't make sense. Sharn is nothing like our real life cities. The information we are given states that there is a lot of empty space, especially at high levels. At low levels there is a lot of abandoned space. Space is not at a premium, as many have pointed out, so it is likely that people demand large spaces. The towers are more like vertical towns than they are like modern buildings in that there are roads, large open spaces (and navigable air space) and separate buildings within the towers encompassing residential, industrial, business, market, green spaces and infrastructure. Towers are built upon towers, with outdoor space built on top of a tower and smaller towers built upon this and perhaps bridging between base towers. This creates a lot of unusable space (air and infrastructure) at higher levels and a lot of less desirable space (closed in, oppressive) at lower levels. Think suburban sprawl except going up instead of out. The data in CoT is somewhat conflicting, from page to page, but I think this is meant to represent diversity and freedom for the DM to improvise. My point is that it is easy to reconcile the 200k permanent adult population with the vast volume of Sharn, and that there is no compelling reason to change it. In short, the descriptions of Sharn's architecture are more fluff than crunch (at least as described so far), whereas the 200k permanent adult population is official crunch, and crunch crunches fluff if you want to run a bona-fide Eberron campaign. If you don't, then do what you want, of course. So in a few words you are saying that it's empty for game purpose? Think like you belong to Cannith why would you waste endless resouces to make taller and taller towers when you've got empty space everywhere? It just makes no sense from the logic of a society.
Pax 07-28-05, 04:48 PM	Granted, and that's sort of my point. CoT states that Sharn has a population of around 200,000 permanent adult residents, This is something good to remember, too - the population listed for Sharn, and probably for all of Khorvaire, is thepopulation of ADULTS. Figure that children will at LEAST equal toe adults in numbers overall, andmay even outnumber them. And figure that "children" includes everyone up to about fifteen years old (assuming Eberron hasn't stated an age of majority different from the default assumption of the PHB: sixteen). Or, well, the racial equivalent of fifteen, for non-humans. If we drop another 210,000 minors into the mix, we end up with about 420K permanent population. I daresay each "level" of the city might have half the population of the one below it - so half of the population lives in the Lower Wards, a third lives in the Middle Wards, and all but a very few of the rest live in the Upper Wards. And depending on the relative fecundity of Eberron, the underaged may outnumber the adults by 2:1, or even more - after all, if the death rates are as high as someone above suggested they might, due to monster predation (and that does make a frightening amountof sense), then family sizes can be godawfully huge without creating a population explosion. Most predators cull the weaker and easier prey from the herds, and that would mean children - not the youngest, who'd probably be under extremely close supervision, but the older kids (ages just getting into the double-digit range), the ones old enough to be apprenticed and such, are a bit more likely to be sent off on an errand without an adult watchdog. I'm guessing here, but in areas of truly high predation, and with the NORMAL gamut of injury-disease-and-misadventure thrown in as well ... maybe only one child in FIVE lives to reach majority. So, what's a family to do? Don't have two or three kids ... have six, or even ten! Of which two, maybe three will live to adulthood ...! Ergo, if Sharn has, say, four minors for every adult resident, now you're looking at an actual, total permanent population of a million. Plus transient population, "undeclared" population (meaning the sorts of people that don't want to be counted on any census, thank-you-very-much), and other incidentals like that. incidental population may DOUBLE the population of Sharn - up to two million souls. It's just that half of them aren't in town for long enough to count as "permanent residents", and the majority of those who ARE in town that long aren't old enough to be counted as permanent adult residents. Looking at things that way puts a whole new spin on things ... without changing the numbers at all, now, doesn't it? :) And let's also consider this: there IS a large, echoingly-empty "hollow" in the center of the city of Sharn: The Depths. They lay BETWEEN the Cogs, and the Lower Wards of Central and Menthis. That's a serious volume of nominally-unoccupied real estate. At a guess, I'd say you could borrow Undermountain from the 'Realms, drop it in there, and it'd have room to rattle around when you shook things up! That means that the great, heaping mountanous sprwl of sharn isn't even being completely utilised; the core of Sharn might as well be HOLLOW for the number of beings that'd reside there (and that provides a nice hiding place for all these putative monstrous predators that we need to explain the disparity between adult and nonadult populations, without having an imminent population explosion on our hands). Lastly, a word on the issue of wall thickness: the fellow who tried to compute an average area of each floor made, IMO, a serious mistake. Those "ten foot thick walls" would not be only the outermost walls of the tower, but would also comprise a good number of the interior walls - simply because they would be load-bearing walls (and no, pillars alone simply wouldn't cut it, even with the magical reinforcement CoT discusses). See, all those floors upon floors upon floors weigh a whole bloody lot, and that weight has to be transferred fromone floor to the next ... always increasing, because yo've got to hold up not JUST the floor above your own, but also every single floor above THAT. Take out the load-bearing walls, and the whole thing comes crashing (crushing?) down on your head. Unpleasant as it may be to think of it - to an extent that is what happened to the WTC towers; the fire weakened key supports, which then failed and allowed their weight to be transferred to the next floor's supports but not through the central column, which then failed under the increased weight from above ... lather, rinse, repeat a few dozen times. Eventually the stress on the structure got to be too much, andinstead of just the floor supports failing, the building failed. Omit those load-bearing interior walls, and the towers of Sharn do the exact same thing. So; I'd say, halve your estimates for useable floor space on each level, in most cases (there'd be a few exceptions, especially in the Upper Wards, where people wanted a couple floors' of open space - but then, we're looking at expensive magical reinforcement to make THAT possible, so it's right out of the picture in the Lower Wards!).
Quoriil 07-28-05, 04:59 PM	The floorspace estimates may not have been all that far off... don't forget the 'low grav'-iness of the entire manifest zone. All of our preconceptions about requirements for architectural integrity mean nothing in this city.
tomtill 07-28-05, 05:15 PM	So in a few words you are saying that it's empty for game purpose? Think like you belong to Cannith why would you waste endless resouces to make taller and taller towers when you've got empty space everywhere? It just makes no sense from the logic of a society. No, that's backwards. The population was set at 200k for game purposes. The city was designed as it was (abandoned at the bottom, spacious at the top) for flavor, but not against all logic. According to history, the lower levels were sealed off after the war of the mark and more levels built on top. In our own world we would have leveled the old city, but in Eberron the special properties of the location (lava flows for industry, manifest zone that allows easy vertical building without the need for massive foundations, fear of the very real dangers in the old city) made it easier just to seal off the old and build on top. What happened after that was the same thing that happens in our own world with urban sprawl and suburban flight. The more desirable property was that at the top and in newer buildings, away from the heavy industry, warehouse districts and lower classes. As these elements expanded to eventually become the primary industrial city of Khorvaire, the desirable property kept moving up and up, with the previously desirable property becoming converted to baser needs and housing for the less well-off. This is like how our many modern cities are full of empty buildings while new ones are being built right next to them, and the grand old mansions of a few centuries ago that were just outside of town eventually become apartments and then tenements within the sprawling cities as the wealthier residents move further and further out into the more desirable, less crowded suburbs. Most cities are relatively empty at night. Does it make sense? Probably not, but it happens in the real world so why not in the fantasy world. The only difference is that magical enhancements and the manifest zone and the geography of Sharn make it easier and cheaper to build up instead of out without fear of the old structures underneath giving out. We don't actually know the specifics of construction, in terms of who finances it and what resources are needed. Maybe it's really cheap. The literature suggests that different buildings and parts of buildings are commissioned by independent groups as needed for their own reasons. It is repeatedly stated that the city is not a planned city, but rather a grown one. It is explicitly stated in CoT that much of lower Sharn consists of repurposed buildings, once grand but now humbled. Towers grow up to a mile high, but was this planned as individual towers or did people keep building on top of what was below until there were towers that reached up to a mile high, but built on top of many other towers below? Remember that the manifest zone makes normal architectural concerns irrelevant, and that if House Cannith or anybody has special skills for construction within the manifest zone then this is about the only place they can sell these skills and they are priced accordingly. There are any number of possible scenarios. But for whatever reason, the fact remains that it must have been feasible and profitable, because that is what exists. It is reasonable, even if it isn't the way you would have done it. Personally, I think it makes a great story.
Sarlax 07-28-05, 05:21 PM	There is no data to determine the average height of a tower, since we don't know the distribution of sizes, only the ranges. It's true that we don't have the specific mean height, but it's not reasonably to think that the averages generally fit in the middle of the given number. This is particularly true because Sharn continually uses words like "most towers are" or "in general, a tower is" when providing these numbers. These indicate averages, not extremes. Even with a tower that size, it's worth considering that this 6 sq miles includes streets, parks, infrastructure, enough space for skyboats to fly passengers around, large open areas for aesthetic and communal purposes. Just like any other city. The area of Manhattan was described as 24 square miles earlier. That's not living area, that's all area. It includes streets, parks, museums, businesses, etc. So if Sharn has at least six towers, it has the same area as Manhattan.
Pax 07-28-05, 06:13 PM	The floorspace estimates may not have been all that far off... don't forget the 'low grav'-iness of the entire manifest zone. All of our preconceptions about requirements for architectural integrity mean nothing in this city. That "ease of flight magic" is why the towers ofSharn can be that tall, at all. That doesn't eliminate theneed for load-bearing walls - what it means is, traditional medieval one-stone-atop-anothr ocnstruction, with some magical reinforcement and a bit of magical "lift" from the "Flying Buttress" things, makes it possible to have the towers be as big as they are. IOW, the manifest zone and related magics make it POSSIBLE to have the towers, and have load-bearing walls, even at the bottom, that are only ten feet thick - instead of fifty, or a hundred. :D
tomtill 07-28-05, 08:51 PM	It's true that we don't have the specific mean height, but it's not reasonably to think that the averages generally fit in the middle of the given number. This is particularly true because Sharn continually uses words like "most towers are" or "in general, a tower is" when providing these numbers. These indicate averages, not extremes. I'd be the first to agree that the descriptions are confusing. For example, as far as height goes… "…almost all of its buildings stretch hundreds of feet into the sky, and some are built among the clouds." "the towers of Sharn range in height from about 100 feet to nearly a mile tall" This would indicate that a typical tower is only "hundreds of feet." Yet, as has been pointed out, other descriptions don't really mention any large differences between towers, at least in the same district. So, is Upper Dura, for example, a few hundred feet into the sky or a few thousand? Another example: "The streets of the ancient city have been swallowed up as…lower walls thickened, to the point that now the towers tend to merge at ground level into a solid maze of walls, jumbled together with no discernable (sic) pattern." versus "A typical Lower-City exterior wall is 15 feet thick…" Also, Fallen is described as being run down with some collapsed buildings, yet the districts over it, Kenton and Sunrise seem just fine. The best way for me to reconcile all of this is to stick with the idea of many towers built on top of other towers, which matches other text in CoT for much of the city, while some towers may go straight up, depending on what the DM needs. Just like any other city. The area of Manhattan was described as 24 square miles earlier. That's not living area, that's all area. It includes streets, parks, museums, businesses, etc. So if Sharn has at least six towers, it has the same area as Manhattan. That was my point. A Sharn tower is more like a vertical town than a modern building. However, Manhattan (a very high density district) has dense skyscrapers on top of this 24 sq mile horizontal area, whereas a Sharn tower has buildings within the tower more appropriate to a traditional town. This, in combination with the abandoned lower levels, the spacious upper levels, and large amounts of nonresidential space, accounts for the low population density of Sharn.
Beleriphon 07-29-05, 03:33 AM	The average tower in Sharn has a thousand feet on the tallest buildings on Earth. And they fill up the entire city. 200,000 people? Ridiculous. No one builds such a vast city if they don't have the people to fill it. Sure they do. Its called urban decay. But isntead of building your suburbs on the outskirts of the city, expanding horizontally, Sharn expands upwards. The lower levels being like so many urban centre's "wrong side of the tracks" only worse. I can't imagine what a bad part of town would be like with roving gangs of hobgoblins.
aelryinth 07-29-05, 04:08 AM	Khorvaire isn't medieval. Two houses contribute immensely to the quality and production of livestock and plant produce. A Vadalis draft animal can greatly increase the productivity of a farm, while the Lyrander raincallers can increase any region's precipitation. There are also spells which help. Plant Growth increases the productivity of all plants within a half mile for a year. A Wand of Plant Growth has a market price of 11,250 and is easy for any artificer to make. Likewise, several nations (Talenta Plains, Zilargo, Valenar) are dominated by races whose people are physically smaller than humans and thus require less food. Actually, to a large extent, Khorvaire IS medeivel. Farmers can't afford to pay for constant weather patterns, and neither can nobles. Magebred animals are beyond the price range of most farmers. The Lightning Rail only stops at major cities...it runs right by the graneries of the smaller villages and rural communities, and using the Rail is EXPENSIVE in the extreme. Luxury goods and prime stuff for the upper class would certainly have the benefit of refrigerations and such amenities, but those are far beyond the average person. Most of the food from Sharn is probably brought in by wagon from the surrounding farms, with the quality/expensive stuff shipped in from long ways away (where it was brought to the rail on wagonback) since such stuff can probably make the money needed to pay the Rail fees. Also, crude agriculture will exist there as much as it exists in our own world. True Druids aren't any more common then master farmers are in our world...and for all the knowledge of free techniques that are available, such knowledge still has to reach the right people to be effective. Great ritual spells to enhance farm yields can only be performed by a relatively few number of people, and the area they effect is quite small for the amount of area devoted to farmland. I see the production capability of Khorvaire equal to maybe the middle 1800's. They do not have the infrastructure or the advanced tech (and magitech is priced out of reach) to truly do any better. Most of the population of Breland is probably clustered within 20-40 miles of the major cities, so as to be only a day or two away from being able to ship food back and forth while relatively fresh. The sheer amount of wandering monsters eager to prey on isolated colonists mean the rancher with huge acreage, wild herds, and living on the frontier is far more dangerous then living in, say, the American West. Thus, people will stick together for safety, and massive agricultural operations just aren't going to happen. And weather control is a pricey service, especially long term weather control. I can see a noble paying Lyrandar to break a crippling drought or divert torrential rains, but not to make ideal long term growing conditions. They would rapidly grow broke...and there aren't enough Lyrandar with the ability to truly make a massive impact, anyways. ==Aelryinth
Charles Phipps 07-29-05, 04:19 AM	On a seemingly unrelated topic, I've got to ask though a question that has bugged me for some time about the nature of the D&D setting. 1. Is it Medieval in setting? or 2. Is it really Apocalyptic? Basically, even in the Middle Ages, the countryside was fairly well maintained and under the control of the world. There was never really a "vast untamed wilderness" during that time. In Dungeons and Dragons, human beings are a race that certainly are incredibly weak by the standards of the MM. Things that are bigger, tougher, and nastier than anything a human being could ever face. I've always stated in roles for adventurers being different than other people suspect. Effectively players are somewhat like Hercules. They get away with what other human beings could never get away with because they exterminate pretty much whole armies of the things that have reduced humanity to (to us would be) near extinction. My campaigns basically have a far larger population than listed in the books of Eberron but they are decidedly differently located than Medieval Europe. There are VAST tracts of wilderness wandered by monstrous mutations, holes that lead to Khyber, and wastelands created by shells/bioweapons/attrition and so on with massive numbers of burnt out ruins that were once great cities. My population of Khovaire is about 25% of the original population because whole regions were exterminated with the survivors refugeeing together and abandoning the "lost lands" to the monsters. The Mournlands were totally lost but now that the war is over, the majority of humans look forward to reclaiming large amounts of the land. Cities maintained by decanters of endless water and effectively other magical sources of food.
Pax 07-29-05, 04:49 AM	Actually, to a large extent, Khorvaire IS medeivel. [...] I see the production capability of Khorvaire equal to maybe the middle 1800's. Um; you do realise that the ninetheenth century not only is not "Medieval", but is in fact early industrial age, right ...? Ifyou're saying that Khorvaire islike the nineteenth century in termsof agriculture andindustry,you're saying it's far from beng Medieval ... what you infer is that it is, in fact, post-Renaissance. Thus, people will stick together for safety, and massive agricultural operations just aren't going to happen. Oddly enough, defending such operations from monsters ould be the best and most prime way for the Warforged to find a place to belong, post-War. ^_^ And weather control is a pricey service, especially long term weather control. I can see a noble paying Lyrandar to break a crippling drought or divert torrential rains, but not to make ideal long term growing conditions. They would rapidly grow broke...and there aren't enough Lyrandar with the ability to truly make a massive impact, anyways. I can see the royals of a nation paying House Lyrandar to divert the worst storms and droughts, during critical points. An out-of-season hurricane that will destroy wide swathes of cropland is likely not going tohappen, unless it's supernatural in origin. And, I'm afraid that yes, Nobles will probably pay for SOME weather-tweaking to improve crop yields - becaus emore crops equals more profits. And whatever the 'rail and the Lyrandar weather-workers cost - trust me, the profits generated by those services MUST be sufficient to pay for them. Otherwise the price owuld be reduced! First law of successful business: charge only what your customers can afford to pay. And the 'rail, at least, IS a business, and DOES have to be run as such. Ergo, the fees for trans-shipping cargo must be less than the profit to be had by dealing IN that sortof cargo. While you may not get to stop at every little town and village when riding a PASSENGER train ... I'm willing to lay good money that CARGO trains make more stops thanthe passenger trains do. If you want to see how the 'rail can and can't makeprofits - you'd have to look at the early days of the railroad, in the real world. And for the longest time, FREIGHT-hauling is where the money was ... not passengers. ^_^
AlDaRoN Arg 07-29-05, 08:54 AM	No, that's backwards. The population was set at 200k for game purposes. The city was designed as it was (abandoned at the bottom, spacious at the top) for flavor, but not against all logic. According to history, the lower levels were sealed off after the war of the mark and more levels built on top. In our own world we would have leveled the old city, but in Eberron the special properties of the location (lava flows for industry, manifest zone that allows easy vertical building without the need for massive foundations, fear of the very real dangers in the old city) made it easier just to seal off the old and build on top. What happened after that was the same thing that happens in our own world with urban sprawl and suburban flight. The more desirable property was that at the top and in newer buildings, away from the heavy industry, warehouse districts and lower classes. As these elements expanded to eventually become the primary industrial city of Khorvaire, the desirable property kept moving up and up, with the previously desirable property becoming converted to baser needs and housing for the less well-off. This is like how our many modern cities are full of empty buildings while new ones are being built right next to them, and the grand old mansions of a few centuries ago that were just outside of town eventually become apartments and then tenements within the sprawling cities as the wealthier residents move further and further out into the more desirable, less crowded suburbs. Most cities are relatively empty at night. Does it make sense? Probably not, but it happens in the real world so why not in the fantasy world. The only difference is that magical enhancements and the manifest zone and the geography of Sharn make it easier and cheaper to build up instead of out without fear of the old structures underneath giving out. We don't actually know the specifics of construction, in terms of who finances it and what resources are needed. Maybe it's really cheap. The literature suggests that different buildings and parts of buildings are commissioned by independent groups as needed for their own reasons. It is repeatedly stated that the city is not a planned city, but rather a grown one. It is explicitly stated in CoT that much of lower Sharn consists of repurposed buildings, once grand but now humbled. Towers grow up to a mile high, but was this planned as individual towers or did people keep building on top of what was below until there were towers that reached up to a mile high, but built on top of many other towers below? Remember that the manifest zone makes normal architectural concerns irrelevant, and that if House Cannith or anybody has special skills for construction within the manifest zone then this is about the only place they can sell these skills and they are priced accordingly. There are any number of possible scenarios. But for whatever reason, the fact remains that it must have been feasible and profitable, because that is what exists. It is reasonable, even if it isn't the way you would have done it. Personally, I think it makes a great story. Its pretty expensive if you take a look at the Sharn book, a flying buttress 48k gps, Lift 24k gps and you need a lot of man power to built a city like this one. Whats the point of all that empty space? If you look at old cities you won't find empty space anywhere. Cities grown as it's population grows not just becouse it can, it doesn't matter if you can built a 9 mile tower if no one is going to live there. Economics rule the world, even a world like Eberron.
Pax 07-29-05, 09:42 AM	[...] First off - might I respectfully suggest that you improve your signal-to-noise ratio? Qhat you quoted was easily five or mroe times longer than your reply ... that should almost NEVER happen. Quote the salient points you're responding to, or else (if you intend to respond to the post as a whole), just whichever portion best sums up that whole post. Now, to suit action to words: Its pretty expensive if you take a look at the Sharn book, a flying buttress 48k gps, Lift 24k gps That's the market price. The cost-to-craft is half that ... and there're feats like Exceptional Artisan to make it even less. And if you've ever read the Stronghold builder's Guide (the closest we have for a 3.Xe "what does it cost to make X sort of building" book from WOTC) ... those're very nice items, for the price. downright bargain-basement stuff, both of 'em. and you need a lot of man power to built a city like this one. Whats the point of all that empty space? What's the point of Central Park? What's the point of anoffice buildinghaving a three- or four-story atrium almost entirely skinned in italian marble? I also think you're ignoring the fact that there isn't really that much empty space, not compared to the way most fantasy cities already work. The population cited for the city is, as I've already observed, the permanent population ... of adult age. Transients and/or minors aren't included. The actual number of warm bodies in Sharn is probably between 1.5 and 2.0 million at any given time. If you look at old cities you won't find empty space anywhere. Untrue. One of the oldest cities around? Rome. Open space? I direct you to the Forum - and remind you that, in rome itself, the Forum we know was not the only of the fora - it's meely the one that remains today. I also direct you to the many plazas, with large, positively-sprawling fountains choked with statuary. Those fountains date back to when Rome was the center of the world - and some are even still fed by the original aqueducts!! Cities grown as it's population grows not just becouse it can, it doesn't matter if you can built a 9 mile tower if no one is going to live there. Economics rule the world, even a world like Eberron. Ah, but people WILL live in those towers. and have done so, since time immemorial. Since, in fact, millennia before the first human ever set foot on Khorvaire. The Cogs, below the city, are why there Is a city. That, and the rivers. The area immediately around the city as it stands simply isn't suitable, from how I'm reading the maps, for horizontal growth at ANY savings over vertical growth; hilly, crag-filled country is what the maps make it look like. And the description of the immediate surrounds isn't any more promising: Sharn, the largest city on teh ocntinent of Khorvaire and one of hte defining locations of the nationof Breland, looms atop an inhospitable outcropping of rock near the mouth of the Dagger River. The City of Towers rises high into the cloud-filled sky, growing upward within the limited space available on a plateau bounded on the west and south by the Dagger River and it's eastern tributary, the Hilt. To the north and east, steep cliffs define the city's bounaries, while deep chasms formed by volcanic action cut the plateau into five distinct regions [...] Emphasis is, of course, wholly mine. And that adds up to one thing, in my mind: Sharn did grow horizontally - until it hit rivers on two sides, and cliffes on the OTHER two sides. Then it had only one direction to grow: Straight up, into the Syranian Manifest Zone above.
tomtill 07-29-05, 10:56 AM	Whats the point of all that empty space? If you look at old cities you won't find empty space anywhere. Cities grown as it's population grows not just becouse it can, it doesn't matter if you can built a 9 mile tower if no one is going to live there. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And there are cities that match that ideal. But most American cities have huge amounts of empty space, especially in the form of abandoned or under-utilized buildings. That doesn't stop new buildings from going up. Urban sprawl occurs because there's money available, and the economics make it cheaper and more desirable to build something new than to renovate something old in what is becoming a questionable neighborhood. Economics works in Eberron, but we don't have enough information to fully understand it. One clue we are given is that Sharn exists, as it is. There's plenty of money in Sharn. Everyone that has it wants to get as close to the top of the city as possible. It should not be that difficult to understand, given that we see the same thing in our own cities, just horizontally. The same human(oid) psychology applies.
AlDaRoN Arg 07-29-05, 11:51 AM	First off - might I respectfully suggest that you improve your signal-to-noise ratio? Qhat you quoted was easily five or mroe times longer than your reply ... that should almost NEVER happen. I understand, but english is not my native language and it takes a lot of time and effort just to write a few sentences (Besides I'm at work :p ). That's the market price. The cost-to-craft is half that ... and there're feats like Exceptional Artisan to make it even less. And if you've ever read the Stronghold builder's Guide (the closest we have for a 3.Xe "what does it cost to make X sort of building" book from WOTC) ... those're very nice items, for the price. downright bargain-basement stuff, both of 'em. It's still a lot a money, even if someone has it, why waste it? What's the point of Central Park? What's the point of anoffice buildinghaving a three- or four-story atrium almost entirely skinned in italian marble? I also think you're ignoring the fact that there isn't really that much empty space, not compared to the way most fantasy cities already work. The population cited for the city is, as I've already observed, the permanent population ... of adult age. Transients and/or minors aren't included. The actual number of warm bodies in Sharn is probably between 1.5 and 2.0 million at any given time. 2 million is closer to what I think, I don't want Sharn to be a 15 million people city like BA but is a huge city and a huge city should have a huge population. Untrue. One of the oldest cities around? Rome. Open space? I direct you to the Forum - and remind you that, in rome itself, the Forum we know was not the only of the fora - it's meely the one that remains today. I also direct you to the many plazas, with large, positively-sprawling fountains choked with statuary. Those fountains date back to when Rome was the center of the world - and some are even still fed by the original aqueducts!! I get your point, every city has some open spaces, parks, stadiums, etc. And still has a lot more population than Sharn per km2 and when I say more its like 10 times more, it's a big difference. Again sorry for my english.
DarkWarriorKarg 07-29-05, 11:59 AM	Economics rule the world, even a world like Eberron. Fantasy economics, my fine, gaming friend. Those who write the background are WRITERS, not professional economists (unless this is a sideline). Trying to match fantasy economics to real world economics is like trying to match Star Trek Science to real world science: Yes, we have some analogues (Communicators=cellphones), but it's pseudo-science. So these are pseudo economics, that are logically consistant with themselves. On another note, real world economics are wierd as well...
Sereno 07-29-05, 12:41 PM	Actually, to a large extent, Khorvaire IS medeivel. Farmers can't afford to pay for constant weather patterns, and neither can nobles. Magebred animals are beyond the price range of most farmers. The Lightning Rail only stops at major cities...it runs right by the graneries of the smaller villages and rural communities, and using the Rail is EXPENSIVE in the extreme. Luxury goods and prime stuff for the upper class would certainly have the benefit of refrigerations and such amenities, but those are far beyond the average person. Most of the food from Sharn is probably brought in by wagon from the surrounding farms, with the quality/expensive stuff shipped in from long ways away (where it was brought to the rail on wagonback) since such stuff can probably make the money needed to pay the Rail fees. It's expensive for the average person to ride on the Lightning Rail as a passenger, but Kieth answered my question about the economics of the high passenger rates by pointing out that Orien largely uses the 'Rail for freight. So the cost to transport freight must be MUCH lower ... as moving goods and materials is, apparently, the primary purpose of the 'Rail. Since the 'Rail comes right down through Breland and into Terminus in Sharn, it's reasonable to assume that there are numerous freight 'whistle stops" along the line (that don't even warrant a dot on the map) where farmers, lumberjacks, and miners can load their materials into the freight carriages. For all we know, there can be ten freight trains for every passenger train. Situated where it is, there isn't much farmland around Sharn, at all ... just cliffs, the Dagger River, and the King's Forest. Food has to come from the north. It looks like the best farmland would be the stretches to the north and east of Baran's Keep. There's an Orient trade road there, and the 'Rail.
Sereno 07-29-05, 12:45 PM	1.5 million. So Sharn has 7,600 people per square mile, while Manhattan has over 60,000. Doesn't the population of Manhattan increase to something like 9 million on a workday? Perhaps, in addition to the population of minors, there's a BIG influx of people from the surrounding area to do work. After all, there are a LOT more non-residential districts. Providing services to a large "daily immigrant workforce" population could be part of the economics of Sharn. They don't need places to stay (usually) within the city, but the DO need restaurants for lunch and dinner, and (of course) some place to dispose of the money they earn....
AlDaRoN Arg 07-29-05, 03:07 PM	Fantasy economics, my fine, gaming friend. Those who write the background are WRITERS, not professional economists (unless this is a sideline). Trying to match fantasy economics to real world economics is like trying to match Star Trek Science to real world science: Yes, we have some analogues (Communicators=cellphones), but it's pseudo-science. So these are pseudo economics, that are logically consistant with themselves. I'm not saying that they should be economists and they can write whatever they want, I'm just saying that there should be more people in Sharn according to its size while other users say otherwise. On another note, real world economics are wierd as well... Yes they are, they are very very complex, just as we are.
Charles Phipps 07-29-05, 04:07 PM	Again we're entering Planescape territory. Magic in D&D can concievably destroy the point of many of the industries we know to be in our society. Let's take the Decanter of Endless Water. The object directly links to the Elemental Plane of water and goes through a purifying filter. Use this item and flesh water never becomes an issue for a non-coastal area of the planet. The game myst also had interdimensional farming locations as well and while I doubt anything's that high level in Eberron, we should consider the possibilities of other objects that might drastically cut down on the need for vast amounts of children as well as cultivated farmland. Everblooming bushes made by Bioartificers perhaps?
Sarlax 07-29-05, 06:10 PM	Fantasy economics, my fine, gaming friend. Those who write the background are WRITERS, not professional economists (unless this is a sideline). That's the key. The writers aren't simulationists. They rightly focused their energies developing the feel of cities and nations. I'll take that trade. But that doesn't change the matter that these places are all extremely underpopulated. Going back to Khorvaire as a whole - I think the writers just didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how huge the continent is. The Dagger River? It's not a river. It's a narrow bay. Khorvaire has a lot of anomolies like this. There are castles complete isolated, with no cities within hundreds of miles. Bridges that span 40 miles of water.
AlDaRoN Arg 07-29-05, 08:29 PM	But that doesn't change the matter that these places are all extremely underpopulated. Going back to Khorvaire as a whole - I think the writers just didn't spend a lot of time thinking about how huge the continent is. The Dagger River? It's not a river. It's a narrow bay. Not really, I live in Buenos Aires, we have a pretty wide river. Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Plate
aelryinth 07-29-05, 08:32 PM	It's expensive for the average person to ride on the Lightning Rail as a passenger, but Kieth answered my question about the economics of the high passenger rates by pointing out that Orien largely uses the 'Rail for freight. So the cost to transport freight must be MUCH lower ... as moving goods and materials is, apparently, the primary purpose of the 'Rail. Since the 'Rail comes right down through Breland and into Terminus in Sharn, it's reasonable to assume that there are numerous freight 'whistle stops" along the line (that don't even warrant a dot on the map) where farmers, lumberjacks, and miners can load their materials into the freight carriages. For all we know, there can be ten freight trains for every passenger train. Situated where it is, there isn't much farmland around Sharn, at all ... just cliffs, the Dagger River, and the King's Forest. Food has to come from the north. It looks like the best farmland would be the stretches to the north and east of Baran's Keep. There's an Orient trade road there, and the 'Rail. I doubt there are 'passenger trains' at all, just 'passenger cars'. Passengers are only profitable when there are a lot of them on a very regular basis...which there is not in Eberron. Passengers take up a lot of space with amenities you could be filling with stuff. Freight makes money because it maximizes use of time, space and money. Passengers are erratic. Regular cash over time is a big thing. As for whistle stops, the establishing of a lighting rail station has been alluded to a major undertaking. I call most of Khorvaire medeival because they are using production methods hundreds of years old. I say they are equal to mid 1800's BECAUSE they have the means to alleviate catastrophic weather, ship large amounts of certain goods over vast distances with regularity and relative speed to maximize profits, and access to some amounts of magic to increase yields. But the lot of the individual farmer isn't that much different from folk of 'traditional' fantasy campaigns. Indeed, the lack of high level casters and focus away from technology might make it even worse. and if the population numbers are true, then the lack of dominance of civilized races also brings into play a very real safety factor that did not exist in our world. There really AREN'T a lot of people around to fight all the things out there that want to eat sentients. Just keep in mind that Sharn's population is not out of line if Breland's population is correct. Up Sharn, and you have to increase the whole country by the same amount. Lots of empty spaces, mmmm. ==Aelryinth
Pax 07-29-05, 10:15 PM	I understand, but english is not my native language and it takes a lot of time and effort just to write a few sentences (Besides I'm at work :p ). Then, as I suggested, don't leave the post you're responding to 100% intact. :) Seriously, just quote the first paragraph, and leave it at that ... that one paragraph should be sufficient to point people at hwich post you're replying to in particular. It's still a lot a money, even if someone has it, why waste it? Actually my point was that, when itcomes to building anything with walls and a roof in D&D, those items do not cost a lot of money. I get your point, every city has some open spaces, parks, stadiums, etc. And still has a lot more population than Sharn per km2 and when I say more its like 10 times more, it's a big difference. That population is only that spase because the fellow making the measurement decided to count EVERY square inch of EVERY floor in that tower as residential space. Take Manhattan. Add up the floor space of every building, plus the subways, pedestrian walkways, roads, sidewalks, parks, bicycle paths, etc, etc, etc. I thinkyou'll find that Manhattan has a lot more square footage of useable horizontal area per permanent resident - and I do mean tolimit it to residents, not commuters - than you might realise. A lot of Manhattan is vertical, too! Again sorry for my english. Why? It's certainly far better than my, er, whatever your native language is. ^_^; For example, I think I can still count past ten in french. Maybe. If I really concentrate (it's been nearly twenty years since I was taking lessons).
Sarlax 07-30-05, 01:32 AM	That population is only that spase because the fellow making the measurement decided to count EVERY square inch of EVERY floor in that tower as residential space. No, I didn't. I counted it as city space. When Manhattan was quoted as being 28 square miles, it wasn't just residential space. It was all space. Take Manhattan. Add up the floor space of every building, plus the subways, pedestrian walkways, roads, sidewalks, parks, bicycle paths, etc, etc, etc. Correct, that's the way to do this. The total area of the island is one factor. Then multiply in all that height and you end up with the total area that can be used. Divide that into the population and you get the effective population density. Sharn's base is just a bit smaller than Manhattan's but it shoots thousands of feet into the air all over. It's total effective area is vastly greater than Manhattans. Even if my numbers on the average tower height are wrong, Sharn is still vastly underpopulated. If the towers are just several hundred feet high (instead of 1000-2000), then Sharn is comparable to Manhattan, which has 1.5 million residents.
Edymnion 07-30-05, 01:50 AM	And we already know for a fact that the tallest towers in Sharn are a MILE high, well over 5,000 feet.
a_psh 07-30-05, 02:51 AM	If you want to see how the 'rail can and can't makeprofits - you'd have to look at the early days of the railroad, in the real world. And for the longest time, FREIGHT-hauling is where the money was ... not passengers. ^_^ Err, freight hauling is always where the money is, not just was. Amtrak, the passenger train company in the US, operates as a government-sponsored (and, albiet somewhat indirectly, goverment-owned) monopoly. It has no competitors. Not because of business practices or infrastructure or massive investment required to get into the railroad game or any unfair advantage that Amtrak has over any potential competition. The fact is, no one wants to compete for customers with Amtrak because, even as a goverment-supported monopoly, Amtrak loses a ton of money. Now go to Eberron, where the lightning rail from Sharn to Starilaskur is definitely vastly more expensive than the $60-100 it costs to go from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia via passenger train (I'm not claiming distances are comparable, I'm just pulling locations out of nowhere). Orien must necessarily be in the freight business if they is any purpose to the lightning rail (you'll note that there are plenty of time-sensitive goods that need to be transported in Eberron, e.g. spoilable luxury foods and copies of the Korranberg Chronicle). Back to the main point of the thread (this is now a general note, not a specific response), I don't think one can claim the "suburb effect" mentioned for Manhattan as applying to Sharn. Based on the CoT, there is some isolated farmland and fairly inhospitable forest around Sharn, and not very much else. According to the sidebar in CoT, it would take any "commuters" an hour or two to get from Wroan's Gate or Terminus to many areas of the city... walking the whole way. I really don't see this happening, especially given that, although the setting definitely isn't "medieval," people who live in the country are still farmers, and people who work in cities try to actually also live in cities. On monsters, I don't think that monsters are killing off people in Khorvaire in droves. Even, say, 1 in 10 children dying by violence would produce a rather twisted society. There'd be a lot more fear and a lot less expansion and ambition, for one. And, while the humans of Khorvaire have been slow to develop certain regions, they're definitely not cowering in the shadows. If vampires are killing off entire villages in droves, as an above example claimed, you're not going to be building a palatial floating cloud mini-city above Sharn - you're going to be building rows upon rows of catapults filled with holy water around each city, and cremating everyone who dies in your society. The fact that disasters do sometimes occur and people continue to be resourceful, ambitious, and masters of most of the continent, shows me that the number of folk being killed off has to be a drop in the bucket compared to the number that exist in total. So I have a hard time seeing that 200,000 as actually representing 1,500,000 people, with 300,000 of them being children and 1,000,000 of them being vagrants. ( Side note: ) Also, if it turns out that the population figures are always representative of only a trivial amount of the total population, as a lot of people claim, there really should be a much better standard for defining an actually useful city size number.
Charles Phipps 07-30-05, 03:10 AM	Actually, I think that death tends to actually breed ambition in human beings. With starvation, pestilance, and rampaging monsters, it's probably likely that many human beings would jump at any chance to improve their lot in life. Cultures can be destroyed by not wanting to rock the boat just as much as they are destroyed by damage done to their society by more violent means. But I have the weird question now... How many do you think hitch rides on the cars?
Sarlax 07-30-05, 03:56 AM	On monsters, I don't think that monsters are killing off people in Khorvaire in droves. Even, say, 1 in 10 children dying by violence would produce a rather twisted society. I agree. It's often said, to justify the low numbers, that Khorvaire was never fully settled by humans because of pre-existing populations of other races as well as monsters. First, existing populations don't matter because the given totals include nonhuman residents. Second, Khorvaire wouldn't have been settled at all if it were filled with hostile monsters. Even if insane pioneers made up the human population for the first 2000 years of human habitation, they couldn't have spread much beyond Lhazaar's original landing site. If there's a 20% murder rate due to monsters, no one will live there. So I have a hard time seeing that 200,000 as actually representing 1,500,000 people, with 300,000 of them being children and 1,000,000 of them being vagrants. Agreed. Such theories also do nothing to solve the broader problem of Khorvaire's overall low population. Sharn might have ten million visitors at any given time, but they have to be taken from other locations. The population of Khorvaire will remain rather constant even if for some bizarre reasons the populations of particular cities can swing by 1000%.
a_psh 07-30-05, 04:15 AM	Actually, I think that death tends to actually breed ambition in human beings. With starvation, pestilance, and rampaging monsters, it's probably likely that many human beings would jump at any chance to improve their lot in life.. If Khorvaire were Monsterland, as described, I would see humanity as a bunch of folk huddling in fortress-towns for protection, knowing that setting foot outside leads to instant death. <pointless humor section> The entire world would function very much like a Final Fantasy game, where people stand around in their houses waiting for great heroes on epic quests to save the world to come by and run random trivial errands, most of which involve walking 10 feet and talking to someone else, for them. Why can't Joe the FF commoner go bring that Quest Item (tm) to Bob the FF commoner himself? Because Joe knows that, with ever step he takes, there's a high probability of... RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! That's right, sometimes even a single step into the outside world sets off... RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! Why are a fire elemental, a winged bat thing, and a tiny cactus man trying to kill you? Who cares! They're... RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! And no stupid peasant can survive... RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! And, thus, our great heroes take time off from their epic quest to save the world to go deliver a thing to this guy who lives half a block away and then come back for a trivial reward, all because Bob and Joe are rooted in place, so paralysed by fear that they will do anything to try to avoid... RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! </pointless humor section> Not exactly conducive to nation- and empire-building and a hundred years of warfare: if monsters were really this bad, humans would be spending all of their trying to kill them, not each other. Events like the Purges prove that, in fact, the common races *are* clearly in charge of Khorvaire. Note that the hags set up Droam specifically because humans, half-elves, dwarves, haflings, &c. were so good at beating the bejesus out of the giantkin and monstrous humanoids. Sure, there are things that prey on mortals, but they operate mainly as social parasites and manipulators (e.g. vampires, rakshasa, mind flayers, &c.), trying to gain power in society rather than murder lots of people. Even a creature of such power acting openly would, ultimately, get squashed. So, yes, being surrounded by monsters who kill 1 out of every 10 children does engender a certain resolve, but it rather precludes the existance of a thousand-year-old empire.
tomtill 07-30-05, 08:52 AM	You guys confuse me. Near as I can tell, the argument is that because the real world (and other campaign settings) have higher population densities at a certain point in history, so must Khorvaire. That the population density of Khorvaire must be limited only by agricultural capabilities. That a kingdom couldn't exist over that much space because they don't in our own world (which ignores large chunks of history). That because a citizen of a modern culture wouldn't do something, neither would a resident of Khorvaire. To me, your argument is similar to saying that the weatherman says that the conditions are such that it will rain all day, you look outside and see sunshine, then you go on to argue how that cannot be, because all the conditions are right for rain. Or are you arguing that the designers made a mistake, and that one day soon an errata will come out saying that they missed a decimal point, over and over? Khorvaire has a low population density. It says so in the ECS. I guess it would make sense to argue that this is wrong if it were completely impossible—to the point where suspension of disbelief was impossible. But I think explanations have been raised on this board that provide a credible history for how this came about. They didn't address why in the ECS, other than to mention war, to add even more monsters to the MMI, II and III and the other monster compendiums, and to point out that in Eberron, low NPC levels and low magic are common and high magic is available, but rare/expensive (at least for the good guys). The world has been described as extremely violent and post-apocalyptic, with multiple civilizations brought to complete collapse. It fits within this theme to argue a high monster population density living off the low NPC level civilized races as a reason for low population density (and fits the random encounter tables for overland travel). One can argue that the kingdoms are held together by the need for the resources of the government to deal with particularly tenacious monsters. The only response to the idea of "monster predation" was to argue that nobody would want to live in Khorvaire under those conditions. There are two responses to that. One, that certainly isn't true in the real world. In places where war/terrorism has torn apart the area for generations, visitors are typically shocked by how surreal it all seems, with people living their lives like everywhere else, just with lowered expectations. Certainly the early explorers/pioneers experienced that kind of uncertainty, yet they pressed on. Remember also, that disease, no social safety net (and therfore starvation, crime) repression, and horrible working conditions made staying in the cities the greater of two evils for many. Second, and this is more important, ethnocentrism makes saying what people would and would not do tricky. For example, western europeans thought that the indigenous peoples were "savages" that needed to be "civilized", because their cultures were different than western europe. Amerindians on the east coast, for example, never developed stone dwellings not because they were stupid, but because building permanent dwellings did not seem necessary, and went against their world view. The Europeans believed that if they could have they would have. That's ethnocentrism. I don't mean to be didactic, and I know that we need some point of reference, but at least some of the cultures of Khorvaire are purposefully alien to most of us. I think that's really interesting. It's more fun to come up with reasons why things are, rather than argue why they can't be. Monster predation/low magic is one explanation for the officially presented population density, and I think the best one, but in the absence of an official explanation, I'd love to see other explanations presented on the boards. There's no problem with bumping up the populations if you want to do so, but it dramatically changes the flavor of Eberron. Still a good setting, just very different from the official version.
tomtill 07-30-05, 09:15 AM	If Khorvaire were Monsterland, as described, I would see humanity as a bunch of folk huddling in fortress-towns for protection, knowing that setting foot outside leads to instant death. Not that being in town is that much better. And since when was DnD not Monsterland? Not exactly conducive to nation- and empire-building and a hundred years of warfare: if monsters were really this bad, humans would be spending all of their trying to kill them, not each other. Oh? Most predations are random acts of nature, not concerted attempts to take over control from the existing regimes. It's conceivable that if it's not a matter of national security, resources will be spent only when things are really out of hand. Events like the Purges prove that, in fact, the common races *are* clearly in charge of Khorvaire. Well, it's pretty easy for a group of mounted calvary/paladins/clerics/adepts to take out an isolated werecreature—over and over again. (I notice that they didn't purge vampires :D ) And they did believe that the whole issue with werecreatures is that they were spreading an evil disease, spreading evil within human society. This wasn't the unfortunate homestead getting wiped out. This was a threat to the existence of mankind! Of course, it's conceivable that this was more a political act than an attempt to end suffering for humankind ;). Note that the hags set up Droam specifically because humans, half-elves, dwarves, haflings, &c. were so good at beating the bejesus out of the giantkin and monstrous humanoids. Oh, is that why they did it?
tomtill 07-30-05, 09:36 AM	Second, Khorvaire wouldn't have been settled at all if it were filled with hostile monsters. Even if insane pioneers made up the human population for the first 2000 years of human habitation, they couldn't have spread much beyond Lhazaar's original landing site. Oh? How could you possibly prove this? I mean, it is settled. And there are monsters. What we have here could be described as a steady-state. Humanoids dominate here and there. Monsters dominate here and there. Humanoids kill monsters, monsters kill humanoids. There's no war. Humanoids just aren't at the top of the food chain. Sort of like how herd animals live right next to lions and hyenas, except that the humanoids are better at fighting back. Humanoids take over areas and build things. Some stick, some don't. It's a random thing, the monsters are not acting in concert. I mean, from where do you think all the ruins come? Where do you think the monsters are when they are not attacking PCs? Why would a traveling party of commoners have a different wilderness encounter table that a traveling party of PCs? You don't need a even 20% murder rate. You just need sporadic violence combined with the parasitism you describe. Everything is more or less OK for a generation or six, then some horrible monster attacks the village that everyone has assumed was safe. It works, over time. It certainly works at least as well as trying to accomodate all these monsters into a high magic/high population world.
Pax 07-30-05, 11:50 AM	No, I didn't. I counted it as city space. When Manhattan was quoted as being 28 square miles, it wasn't just residential space. It was all space. The problem is, you apparently only counted the space at ground level. (And that's about 22-23 square miles, according to the references I can find). Given the high number of rather tall buildings in close proximity to each other, and the underground spaces as well ... I cannot believe that Manhattan has less than fourty square miles of utilisable space. If not more. I honestly think, given the prevalence of multistory buildings (not just two-floor, but as much as eighty and ninety floors!), that with an area of ... for simplicity's sake, let's call it a round 20 square miles ... well, I'd be surprised if all those multifloor buildings, and underground spaces as well, if we didn't end up at least tripling the "utilisable space", maybe even as much as quadrupling it. So we're at the 60-80 square mile range, now. Makes the population densities go way down, when you count things completely, in all three dimensions. Correct, that's the way to do this. The total area of the island is one factor. Then multiply in all that height and you end up with the total area that can be used. Divide that into the population and you get the effective population density. Except you seemto have given an inexplicably low area for Manhattan; it appears as if you didn't really account for the vertical space. Sharn's base is just a bit smaller than Manhattan's but it shoots thousands of feet into the air all over. It's total effective area is vastly greater than Manhattans. ... and a large chunk of it's core, under Central and Menthis, is described as utterly abandoned (by civilised folks). Even if my numbers on the average tower height are wrong, Sharn is still vastly underpopulated. If the towers are just several hundred feet high (instead of 1000-2000), then Sharn is comparable to Manhattan, which has 1.5 million residents. Manhattan benefits from modern agriculture, refrigeration, and sewage technologies. Absent these three - which are, in turn, absent from Sharn - and that many people would be unable to live within such a small space. Also note what I have stated multiple times already, now: while I believe the census figures for Sharn cite only the permanent adult population, the "true" population may be as high as two mllion - epending on the ratio of permanent non-adult residents per census-counted adult, and then, the ratio of nonpermanent residents (of all ages) to the number of permanent residents (of all ages). By "True population", mind, I mean "the total number of warm bodies withn the city limits at any given time". On monsters, I don't think that monsters are killing off people in Khorvaire in droves. Even, say, 1 in 10 children dying by violence would produce a rather twisted society. Note, I merely count the presenceof predatorymonsters as "yet another major cause of death". It might even tie directly into the extermination of Lycanthropes by the Church of the Silver Flame, in fact: be seen to be DOING SOMETHING about a cause of death that had risen to "#1 culprit". The truth is, IRL ... before modern medicine enters the scene, having over half of your children die (by one means or another) before adulthood probably wasn't that extraordinarily bad, at least not for the poorer classes. So I have a hard time seeing that 200,000 as actually representing 1,500,000 people, with 300,000 of them being children and 1,000,000 of them being vagrants. Mynumbers are more like "200,000, wiht 800,000 being under the Galifaran age of majority (presumably sixteen) and up to another 1,000,000 nonpermanent residents". Note, nonpermanent resident doesn't mean vagrant. A Merchant who spends one month in every six in Sharn overseeing that part of his business interests (along with his family, their servants, and the servants' families) is a nonpermanent resident (actually, a whole slew of them). Adventurers would probably count as nonpermanent residents. Especially those intent on travelling to Xen'drick ... ( Side note: ) Also, if it turns out that the population figures are always representative of only a trivial amount of the total population, as a lot of people claim, there really should be a much better standard for defining an actually useful city size number. "Total permanent adultpopulation" seems a perfectly useful standard to me ... as long as you alwys bear in mind "this is only a specific proportional fraction of the number of people actually PRESENT at any given time".
Fabius Maximus 07-30-05, 12:22 PM	And how do you get those local nobles to obey the king? You can't control them over distances of hundreds or thousands of miles. If we followed Khorvaire's population numbers to their logical conclusion, local nobles would have no loyalty to the king. They'd become local warlords and carve out their own smaller kingdoms. The key to government is having a monopoly on violence and being able to use it anywhere in your territory. Khorvaire's huge. With the given population figures, it's impossible to field the necessary armies and police forces to govern the entire continent. There's a reason that Europe is made up of dozens of small countries without a strong central government. Local nobles only follow the king for any length of time if they believe the king can send them a bigger army than the noble's personal forces. And if the king is sending his army to fight Uppity Noble 1, Uppity Noble 2 is now free to rebel - unless the king has a huge army. But Khorvaire can't support that. Oh, please. Virtually every medieval kingdom in Europe had exactly the structure that the king relied on the nobles for administration. It was not very centralized. The use of violence was one solution, but never a very convenient one. Using family ties, old loyalities, money, marriage, etc. was much better. Unclaimed lands or disputed territories would be made "crown land" for the use of the royality, and distributed as fiefdoms under loyal nobles by king or queen, for example. Alls this changed when absolutism was introduced. Only then you could speak of 'central administration'.
a_psh 07-30-05, 06:33 PM	Oh, is that why they did it? ECS 164, first paragraph in the second column: "a haven for all the creatures feared and shunned by the common races". Now, that's probably not why they actually *DID* it, but that's more or less their official line on why they did it. And, for that to be an official line, it has to be credible. Yes, Eberron has frontiers and wild areas. A lot of them. But the common races are still in control of a lot of it. If there was a 50% chance per day of your cavaran getting ambushed by a gang of thirty ogres riding displacer beasts, no one would send out caravans. If there was a band of rampaging trolls for every small village, there would be no villages within a month. People are welcome to disagree about population figures. I think the numbers in the ECS don't hurt anything, though they do seem a bit low to me. Whatever, no big deal. I really don't care about what numbers you use. I mostly don't even care about what numbers I use. But to trot out the argument that oh-my-god-humanity-is-besieged-by-monsters-that-pillage-one-in-three-farms-every-year as a justification for low population numbers is, to me, missing the point. The main argument for a population increase is "These numbers seem kinda low... would it be more in keeping with the flavor text to increase them?" The counter-argument to that should use the setting as written, not twist everything into a world where man/elf/dwarf/halfling-kind is ridiculously besieged by monsters at all times. The population figures really don't matter very much: I'd rather just say "meh" and change the number, or, well, keep playing without every looking that number up in the first place because it doesn't matter much, than use one set of numbers to turn Eberron into "Oh noes!!! Monsters ate Timmy #4! Let's go bury him next to Timmies #1-3 and rebuild our shattered, lousy village again!" That's really not what the setting is about.
Sarlax 07-30-05, 06:42 PM	Oh, please. Virtually every medieval kingdom in Europe had exactly the structure that the king relied on the nobles for administration. It was not very centralized. The use of violence was one solution, but never a very convenient one. Using family ties, old loyalities, money, marriage, etc. was much better. Please read the rest of the argument. You can't use such methods over spans of thousands of miles unless you have remarkable infrastructure and high population. Look at the size of European nations. Look at the United States. The reason for the incredible disparity in size is that European culture developed long before infrastructure allowed for continent-spanning governance. The United States grew with technology. The U.S. could not exist as a single nation today if not for steamships, railroads, a postal system, and the telegraph. If those technologies had not developed, the United States would be instead be multiple smaller states just like Europe. The reason you can't have giant nations without infrastructure is that isolated regions inevitably develop their own cultures. Look at Europe. You can even look at the United States. At various times, the U.S. has been split into several governments - take the Confederacy. The CSA could not have been brought back into the USA if the U.S. didn't have the population necessary to field armies, or if the USA lacked a centralized government. Again, Khorvaire hasn't had the necessary tools of infrastructure for most of its history. The development of rail, airships, etc. didn't happen until the end of Galifar. There was no efficient way to move troops or supplies or to spread culture. Why is this important? Because no one will obey a government two thousand miles away that has no power to compel obedience - especially in a feudal world. Think of Germany before Bismarck. Think of the competing regions of Italy. Consider the divisions that still exist in Britain - until just a few days ago, Britain was still threatened by an armed rebellion in its own territory. The Romans were able to hold large chunks of Europe because they could field the massive armies to do so. They built the excellent roads. They did their best to supplant native cultures. They used and had the infrastructure. Even then, they didn't come close to holding the amount of territory that Galifar is supposed to have governed.
Sarlax 07-30-05, 06:43 PM	Oh? How could you possibly prove this? I mean, it is settled. And there are monsters. The entire point of this discussion is that the given population figures are nonsense. Referring back to their publication doesn't prove that they are reasonable.
a_psh 07-30-05, 06:49 PM	Instead of Manhattan or whatever, why not compare it to Greyhawk? Looking at the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, we have: Nyrond - population ~ 2 million Furyondy - population ~ 1.5 million Those two together are roughly a Breland, population-wise (Breland has 3.7 million, according to the ECS and 5N). Furyondy is a military powerhouse, but has only recently reclaimed its north from Iuz. So most of the country has been damaged by a terrible war (though not a hundred-year one, certainly). Nyrond, meanwhile, is struggling with food and money, IIRC. In terms of monster density, I'd figure Greyhawk is fairly similar to Eberron. Given that the random encounter tables are supposed to apply to a Greyhawk-esque world, and that there is a long tradition of kill-the-ogre sidequests in that setting, I don't think you can claim there are many more monsters per square mile in Eberron, unless there are many more people per square mile as well. Otherwise, the monsters-civilization dynamic would be radically different. So we have a roughly medieval world with lots of critters, mostly low- and mid- level adventure opportunities, and a few scary scary demigods. Certainly a bit different, but not ridiculously so. Looking at the maps, the distribution of forests, rivers, and mountains vs. regular land is pretty similar, too. Measuring on the map ("one hex = 65 miles"), Furyondy seems to cover about 40 hexes, while Nyrond is like 50 - I'm trying to be pretty liberal with these counts. So that's about 500,000 square miles (I deliberately overestimated somewhat here: this is just a ballpark, fudged in the direction of making things bigger). Looking at the map of Breland in the ECS, we can cut the country up into roughly three 1000x1000 mile chunks. Now, that's being a bit liberal with the area, so we'll say it's 2.5 1000x1000 chunks instead. That gives us... 2,500,000 square miles. Okay, so I do buy that Eberron may have lower population density in most areas than Greyhawk. But it also has bigger cities, in spots. Overall, I don't think that the differences between the two worlds justify a 5x difference in population per area. Thus, if we use the LGG as a guide, a x5 multiplier to the population figures in the book is justifiable. I'm not arguing that it's necessary, but it's definitely justifiable. Based on this data, x10 would be a bit extreme. (You could also argue that the map scales are off, but then you're shrinking the world down, which breaks a lot of things like travel; probably easier to just mess with the population numbers and not touch that scale.) (EDIT) Five Nations actually gives Breland's size as 1,800,000 square miles. But, yeah, unless I did something wrong with a decimal point somehwere, most of those rough calculations are still usable, of course.
Sarlax 07-30-05, 06:54 PM	You guys confuse me. Near as I can tell, the argument is that because the real world (and other campaign settings) have higher population densities at a certain point in history, so must Khorvaire. That the population density of Khorvaire must be limited only by agricultural capabilities. That a kingdom couldn't exist over that much space because they don't in our own world (which ignores large chunks of history). That because a citizen of a modern culture wouldn't do something, neither would a resident of Khorvaire. That's not what the argument is. You've misunderstood. The argument is that to govern any particular area, you need a large enough population to do so and the right infrastructure. Or are you arguing that the designers made a mistake. Yes. We're arguing the designers made a mistake. It's not an important one - it doesn't prevent the setting from being enjoyable. But it creates a world that doesn't hold together very well under scrutiny in this particular regard. We're arguing about this because we like the setting and enjoy exploring it. Khorvaire has a low population density. It says so in the ECS. First, we're not debating what the ECS says. We're debating whether what it says makes sense. It's entirely circular to refer to the ECS to prove that the ECS makes sense. Second, the ECS doesn't say, "Khorvaire has a low population density." It presents a world with a low population density, but it never addresses this. The only reason we know Khorvaire has a low population density is because we added up the populations and divided that by the massive area of the continent. The only response to the idea of "monster predation" was to argue that nobody would want to live in Khorvaire under those conditions. There are two responses to that. One, that certainly isn't true in the real world. In places where war/terrorism has torn apart the area for generations, visitors are typically shocked by how surreal it all seems, with people living their lives like everywhere else, just with lowered expectations. Certainly the early explorers/pioneers experienced that kind of uncertainty, yet they pressed on. That's incorrect. Nothing in the real world comes close to what the people of Khorvaire would have experienced. Yes, there are terrible places to live on Earth that suffer endemic war, drought, etc. But people don't move into warzones. They don't move into places filled with monsters. Humans have never punched into a territory that was already filled with a society made of another intelligent species. Second, and this is more important, ethnocentrism makes saying what people would and would not do tricky. For example, western europeans thought that the indigenous peoples were "savages" that needed to be "civilized", because their cultures were different than western europe. Amerindians on the east coast, for example, never developed stone dwellings not because they were stupid, but because building permanent dwellings did not seem necessary, and went against their world view. Native Americans didn't build structures because they never had the technology to do so. As you say, however, it's not for a lack of intelligence. It's because of a widespread lack of agriculture. The argument is too long to repeat here, but it's laid out very reasonably and understandably in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The short of it is that Europe developed technological civilization because they started with the best strategic position. Eurasia had the most plants that could be made into crops and the most animals to domesticate. It is also the easiest geography across which ideas can spread.
Sarlax 07-30-05, 07:06 PM	Except you seemto have given an inexplicably low area for Manhattan; it appears as if you didn't really account for the vertical space. I did. Watch: Sharn and Manhattan are each verticle cities. The bases of each city are about equal in area. Sharn is massively taller than Manhattan. That means the total available area in Sharn is greater. Many more people can fit into Sharn. ... and a large chunk of it's core, under Central and Menthis, is described as utterly abandoned (by civilised folks). Two things. First, the tower heights are above ground level. They sub-levels of Sharn add a whole new factor to Sharn's area. Second, and more importantly, Sharn's population figure specifically includes Sharn's non-civilized population. That means that if there's some huge monster population filling the city out, it's already listed. Mynumbers are more like "200,000, wiht 800,000 being under the Galifaran age of majority (presumably sixteen) and up to another 1,000,000 nonpermanent residents". There's a problem with this approach. What indication is there anywhere in the ECS, Sharn, Five Nations, or other book that these figures represent anything other than specific population averages? Terms like "census" have been used. What indicates that these numbers represent some in-game census? The beginning of Sharn says that these numbers are in DMG city presentation format. It's not Breland's "best guess" based on tax records. It's the official and actual population total.
Pax 07-30-05, 07:42 PM	I did. Watch: Sharn and Manhattan are each verticle cities. The bases of each city are about equal in area. Sharn is massively taller than Manhattan. That means the total available area in Sharn is greater. Many more people can fit into Sharn. ... and unlike Manhattan, Sharn has large chasms runnign through it's center, cutting it into five sections. On the sharn Overview map, those chasms look to account for ~25% of the area occupied by the city-as-a-whole, if you simply draw the "city limits" as a border around Dura, Tavick's Landing, and Northedge.. Also, I'm not so sure that Sharn sits on 20+ square miles of land, horizontally speaking. Let's see, from lower Tavick's landing to upper Dura by Skycoach, at 1sp per mile ... costs 6sp (CoT, page 24). So, basic trig - presume one mile up, six miles on the hypotenuse ... we come up with a ground-level diameter of just about 3.88 miles. Call it 4 miles, if you like; it's a nice round number. The area of a circle is pi (3.14) times the square of the radius; so ... pi times 2^2 ... or 12.56; thus, Sharn is NOT the same size as Manhattan ... it's barely HALF the size. And remember, those chasms do eat up some of this area ... we can probably drop the actual useable area inside that rough circle to about nine square miles (IOW, knocking about 25% off the area). So, sure, Sharn is a lot taller. But it'd take a Sharn that was a thousand feet or more from ground to roof just to begin to equal Manhattan's area. But wait. In manhattan, youdon't have all that space BETWEEN the towers - which is pretty nonexistant in the Lower wards, but becomes readily navigable by flying creatures andvehicles in the Middle wards, and is a fairly significant portion of the horizontal area when you hit the Upper wards. I'd say each level has about 20% less utilised space, due to that very distance between towers, compared to the level below it. So the Middle ward has about 7.2 square miles of space, and the uppe Ward just under 5.8 square miles. 9 + 7.2 + 5.8 = 22. So, Sharn, WITH it's vertical element (but, I admit, discounting the Cogs, which would add another 12.6 miles of space - but it's almost exclusively (a) industrial space, and/or (b) populated by creatures NOT included in the official census. Second, and more importantly, Sharn's population figure specifically includes Sharn's non-civilized population. That means that if there's some huge monster population filling the city out, it's already listed. The book says the Depths aren't inhabited by any known elements of Sharn's population - so whatever might (or might not) be livingin there isn'tincluded in the population figure for sharn. Indeed, CoT specifies that most residents have completely forgotten that the Depths EXIST. Sharn has a big, unoccupied core, largely under the Central and Menthis plateaus. Terms like "census" have been used. What indicates that these numbers represent some in-game census? The beginning of Sharn says that these numbers are in DMG city presentation format. Exactly - that population count is based on the DMG rules for handling towns - and there, we see Table 5-2 (page 137) has a footnote that reads, and I quote: * Adult population. Depending ont eh dominant race of the ocmmunity, the number of nonadults will range from 10% to 40% of this figure. Now, if you like, we can launch into a (probably pointless) debate about wether that "10% to 40%" is an appropriate measure of how many children there owuld be. I tend to believe it is abysmally low and under-represents the number of children that would, actually, be present; child and infant mortality rates are alot higher than what the DMG is, IMO, trying to model. But clearly, the 211,850 beings countedin the population of sharn are permanent adult residents. Speaking strictly by-the-book, mind.
a_psh 07-30-05, 08:05 PM	I think looking at nations rather than cities, especially ones as odd as Sharn, would probably be more productive. So, yes, okay, I buy the large number of children. It shouldn't be more than the total number of resisdent adults. But where do all of these nonpermanent residents come from? Are we just assuming that there are several million peole in the world who don't officially live anywhere and thus aren't factored in in the country entries? (This is exactly like saying that the numbers are too low to represent all of populated Khorvaire, mind.) Sure, you can say "I think Sharn has a population of half a million temporary residents," but where do all of those people come from? If they're still being counted as Brelish, that's nearly a quarter of the population of the country in that one city. And, really, is saying "the numbers don't count adult humanoids that fall into categories X, Y, or Z" is a lot like saying that the numbers presented are, in fact, too low.
tomtill 07-30-05, 08:39 PM	Actually, the sample encounter tables presented in the DMG (most of which would be lethal to commoners) are more in keeping with the "living among predatory monsters scenario" than the "we control the world and have to go looking for trouble scenario". Do you guys remember the fragility of a low level character? 8-12% per hour chance of a lethal (if you are low level) encounter, by the DMG, when traveling. Check it out. Every two or three days, a potentially lethal encounter, on average. I think Eberron's low density is easily explained by the game as written, especially given the low level/low magic (for the masses) setting. To have a higher population density, one could argue that you'd need either a low monster or a high magic setting.
aelryinth 07-30-05, 08:49 PM	One other note on the height argument. Buiildings in Manhattan are divided by stories, averaging 10-12 feet a story. The towers in Sharn are divided by levels and sublevels, which probably amount to a few hundred feet, with sub-buildings on each level. Sharn is NOT an efficent user of space...it's more like an average city all chopped up and stacked atop one another. So Manhattan can certainly cram more people in. Add in technological infrastructure with water and sewage, and the permanent residents of Sharn are going to be much lower then Manhattan by any stretch of imagination. ==Aelryinth
tomtill 07-30-05, 08:56 PM	First of all, if you need a reference to our own history, look at the ancient empires. Yes they eventually failed, but many survived longer than any of the current nations. Look at the Age of Colonization. High tech european cultures completely subjugating ancient civilizations. Second, don't forget not only magic, but the disparity of magic. Things impossible in our own history are possible with sufficient resources in Eberron. The greater the resources, the greater the magic. Ancient noble families with "family atomics (from Dune)" against upstart warlords, no contest. Modern dictatorships with a few helicopters and troops with modern weapons pacifying an entire nation of poorly armed, poorly organized peoples. An empire simply needs a substantial technological advantage over the subjects. Some reason for a local government to pay tribute. The DMG ties money to magic. Eberron in particular ties ancient families and money to magic. Magic doesn't go away. When Galifar was formed, there was conquest and consolidation of power (artifacts) into the existing royal families. Yes, eventually things get discovered that upset the balance, and they are either co-opted or things are about to get hairy… But as has been mentioned, especially for an old regime, violence is seldom needed as long as the infrastructure is working.
a_psh 07-30-05, 10:02 PM	8-12% per hour chance of a lethal (if you are low level) encounter, by the DMG, when traveling. Check it out. Every two or three days, a potentially lethal encounter, on average. Encounter tables are for PCs. In the published adventures, every single vehicle the characters use gets attacked by enemies. Does that mean all vehicles get trashed by enemies? The fact is, the DMG just assumes that, being adventurers and important people, the PCs are trouble magnets. Extrapolating this to everyone is a logical fallacy. Using a chart you roll on because you don't know what to do next while paladin Bob rides off from Cityville to the Evil Dragon Cave to determine the entire layout of the world is ludicrous. If monsters were pillaging every caravan, the transporation entry wouldn't talk about airships and lightning rails and magebred horses and how much it costs to send things the slow way via House Orien. They'd talk about armored wagons and how much it costs to hire a giant mercenary company to get to where you want to go. Encounter tables are full of crap. They're there as an aid, not as a rule. You design them around the world, not vice versa. Encounter tables exist to help DMs fill in dead space. Most of the ECS suggests adventures where the PCs aren't, in fact, wandering around having random encounters all the time. The ECS recommends more action tied to the plot rather than just killing things because they're there. Encounter tables have never stopped any other setting from being populated. The same charts apply to FR and Greyhawk. But they're both much more populated. If you go by the charts and assume everyone in the world also has random encounters, I should be able to find a dead peasant on the road every 5 minutes. Then we're back to the Final Fantasy Paradox, which really isn't a way to design a world, and it certainly wasn't the big idea behind designing Eberron.
tomtill 07-31-05, 12:42 AM	Encounter tables are for PCs…The fact is, the DMG just assumes that, being adventurers and important people, the PCs are trouble magnets. Extrapolating this to everyone is a logical fallacy. Wow. I would think that applying encounter tables only to PCs is the logical fallacy. This is a thread that argues about how "realistic" certain assumptions in Eberron are, and now the argument becomes that monsters only exist when PCs walk into a neighborhood. It was argued that I was changing the game by invoking a high monster density, and when I quoted the DMG for official monster density data I was told Encounter tables are full of crap. As evidence, we have reference to "gold standards"… Encounter tables have never stopped any other setting from being populated. The same charts apply to FR and Greyhawk. But they're both much more populated. As if these are necessarily more "realistic", and also ignoring the different distribution of class levels/magic in these settings. And also exaggeration… If you go by the charts and assume everyone in the world also has random encounters, I should be able to find a dead peasant on the road every 5 minutes. A lethal (to a small low level party) encounter every 2-3 days is not every five minutes along a stretch of road. I would imagine there'd be a reason for all those guards accompanying caravans. And bodies, like monsters, do not lay around in stasis until a PC shows up to notice them. And while I realize that the encounter tables in the DMG are only sample tables, I think they serve to illustrate my point that DnD was designed with a high monster density in mind. I am not invoking an unusually high monster density, just extrapolating to what might happen in a low average character level setting. But you are right, I was mistaken. I thought the goal of this thread was to try to make sense of the published setting—something I would find very useful. But I have been informed that, no, the goal is to show how no other explanation could possibly exist, that the designers must have just been wrong/negligent and that they haven't bothered to correct it. The evidence for this is that things just couldn't be this way because, well, they just couldn't. It didn't happen this way in such and such a time or in some other campaign setting, and human(oids) just couldn't possibly behave in some way other than what I think they should and therefore the setting is just plain wrong. Now I am informed that not only is this setting wrong, but the DMG is wrong, or should be applied only when the monsters can sense that the small party traveling through the wilderness area is a dangerous PC party, instead of a bunch of lightly armed farmers on the way home. So, I am told, the only way to avoid "changing the game" is to increase the population of Khorvaire beyond that stated in the ECS, thereby increasing gp limits (magic items) and character levels across the board, and to ignore the data published in the DMG on monster population density (even though it fits quite nicely with the campaign setting as written). Right.
Brastan 07-31-05, 03:51 AM	Adult population: See page 137, Table 5-2 Random Town Genertion, asterisk(*) notation about % of population not show by the presented figure. In my opinion the suggested upper limit on the figure will be to low for Sharn as goblins make up a reasonably sized portion of the population, and goblins breed like well.... goblins ;). For Breland how much area do we loss from locations the King's Forest and the Blackcaps? It would appear that the peoples of Breland are settling were its reasonably safe to do so. My :twocents: on random encounter tables is that the samples are just plane nuts when it comes to true random encounters. The DMG tables(and methods for creating them) are intended for adventures or an adventure that pass though an overland region(PG. 95). D&D begin a very combat orinted game at its core, only contain monstrous encounters and not run in with a merchant traveling with his goods to the next thorp. I will not argue against the idea that monsters contribute to the causes of death for your average level 1 commoner. Bulettes are native to Breland and could very well be the reason that most thorps don't make on the official maps for very long. And bodies, like monsters, do not lay around in stasis until a PC shows up to notice them. Well in a metagame sense they are quite static. Things only really exist when the PCs are interacting with them. Sharn is actually a great example of a place were bodies site around in stasis waiting of the PCs to show up. :) Tomtill, I receive sarcasm from my brother on a daily bases and it's never useful in an argument. Especially in text were there is no tone or body language to highlight it's use. Humor is almost as bad as sarcasm, hence the use 'smilies' ;). I understand that people want a rational for the low population numbers and or a legidiment reason for increasing the population. Already their have been many good suggestions on how to explain and support both of wants. For my own stand point I usually come down on the 'Fun is right' side of an argument. If a group needs higher population to have fun while playing then by all means the population should be increased. The suggestion that the population figures don't include children or non-citizens has been one explanation I've seen mention here. Commoner monster munchies is probably the most comical explanation I've ever seen for a low population. It would seem to me that this thread is doing its job in providing DMs with options that they might not have thought of. The power of a collective and what not. My last thought before you lot tear into my non-junior lawyer post and deconstruct my(not very well crafted) sentences is, that isn't nice to have to multiply up from an undersized population than reduce down from an over sized population? As a lazy DM I think its wonderful, its far easier to add people were they are need than to remove them from were they aren't.
Fabius Maximus 07-31-05, 08:48 AM	Think of Germany before Bismarck. Think of the competing regions of Italy. Consider the divisions that still exist in Britain - until just a few days ago, Britain was still threatened by an armed rebellion in its own territory. Very good example. Let's take a look at the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. At it's largest expanse it spanned from the North Sea all the way down to Sicily, with the exception of the Church State. Now look at the structure. The emperor was elected by the highest nobles. They had the power, not the emperor. He held only the power over his own lands. The emperor was forced to buy the nobles' loyality in one way or the other and the only reason that he could rule was that the nobles were pitted against each other in their struggle for power. That's the reason for the cultural fragmentation of all of Europe's nations today. Now take ex-Galifar. Look at the five nations. Do they share a common culture? Were are the similarities between Aundair and Karrnath? Or Breland and Thrane? Were does the ECL say that Galifar was a really centralized empire? So far it struck me as a rather loose one. And what's your point about infrastructure? There had to be roads, and very good ones, too. The dragonmarked houses as the economic leaders on the continent would have to rely on good infrastructure for commerce. Heck, it only took 20 years to establish the lightning rail network.
tomtill 07-31-05, 09:04 AM	For Breland how much area do we loss from locations the King's Forest and the Blackcaps? It would appear that the peoples of Breland are settling were its reasonably safe to do so. That's an excellent point, that perhaps was lost in color of "monster munchies". Another way to look at it is that people do, in fact, shy away from being eaten :D. So, the actual area under control of human(oids) is limited by the viciousness of the untamed wilderness (all those monsters the PCs fight). The controlled areas are relatively safe, but are limited. The trade roads are patrolled, the population centers protected. But the key point here is that unlike other campaign settings, high level resources are heavily restricted and limited (and this was clearly a stated goal of the setting), thereby limiting the amount of land that can be made safe. But the whole point of bringing up monster predation was to show how communities can become separated over time (years, centuries) through attrition of the intervening communities. An equally valid point is that, with limited resources, you simply have communities spread along trade roads, rivers, important trade routes, etc., leaving the rest of the country to the wilds.
tomtill 07-31-05, 09:33 AM	Well, avoiding sarcasm and humor, let me point out that encounter tables are a world building tool, meant to be customized to a local environment or region to provide consistency and color to that region. In the civilized regions of Thrane you would have one encounter table for travel between towns, in the Mournlands you'd have a completely different encounter table. The EL of these tables depends upon what you'd like the flavor of these regions to be. Encounters with neighbors and family dogs indicate a safe, mundane environment, encounters with a dire wolf pack or bulette would indicate an untamed environment. The use of these tables provide consistency, and increases the believability of your world. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that a setting doesn't make sense in terms of the real world. It only needs to be self-consistent to allow suspension of disbelief. That is the basis of fantasy. In the interests of credibility, these tables should apply to everybody, all the time. In high magic campaigns, these tables would become low EL near civilized regions, since there are plenty of classed characters/magic items that can wipe out serious threats. My hypothesis was simply that, in the purposefully limited resource setting of Eberron, these tables would be higher EL in more places, simply because there are less resources to deal with the baddies, especially in the aftermath of a hundred year war. Low population density would be a natural result of this, because the amount of controlled land would be low, and pioneers would have a high attrition rate (over tens or hundreds of years, which is plenty of time, at least in real world human psychology, for people to take the risk). I referred to the sample tables in the DMG, not to suggest that they had to be used as is, but to point out that I was not invoking monster densities or ELs greater than what DnD was meant to encompass.
JmX 07-31-05, 11:08 AM	The great thing about the low population in Sharn compared to the available floor space is that I can easily afford a 10,000 square foot apartment.
tomtill 07-31-05, 11:15 AM	What's the big deal. Why not just increase the population? Well of course, that's your prerogative. But what will it do? Eberron is designed to have a low number of high level classed PCs and NPCs (at least as allies). It is designed with increased low magic, but decreased high magic. It was designed to let the PCs become the heroes in a way that was consistent with the setting. It was also designed to follow core rules as much as possible. The higher the population, the higher the classes, and the greater the availability of expensive goods and services. The less important the abilities of the PCs. If you increase the population of a small town that needs you to solve its problems by 10x, you have removed the need for you to solve their problem—by the core rules, they have access to what they need already. Of course, you can come up with a reason, but Eberron uses low population to make it built into the setting. So, if you increase the population and still follow core rules, you will change one of the basic aspects of the setting. An alternative is to increase the population, but make exceptions from the core rules or add flavor reasons why these things don't occur. But the designers chose to make it simple and have a lower steady state population. Why is a low population density (averaged out over the nations) a problem? I'm not sure. I mean if the designers thought it was a problem, they could have just made the civilized world smaller, and achieved the same goals. But the spread out world certainly provides plenty of opportunities for adventure and leaves room for lots of the unknown, right in your own backyard! Some believe that it just isn't reasonable for sustainability/ governance issues. These arguments don't make much sense to me, given that the setting takes great pains to establish entrenched institutions like the dragonmarked houses, the royal families, and other institutions that have the resources to overcome the limitations imposed on the regular people. To me, arguements relating Eberron to the real world or to FR simply underscore that Eberron is not like the real world or FR. OK. I don't think it's that hard to see it as consistent in itself, and it that context it makes a lot of sense. That's all it needs to be.
tomtill 07-31-05, 11:20 AM	The great thing about the low population in Sharn compared to the available floor space is that I can easily afford a 10,000 square foot apartment. Yeah! In Fallen.
JmX 07-31-05, 12:21 PM	Sharn's towers are 100 feet to 1 mile tall, 800-2500 at the bottom, 200-600 at the top. There's one story every 10-12 feet. The average wall is 10 feet thick. That's an average height of 2600, an average diameter of 1000, and a story every 11 feet. That's 236 stories in the average tower. Every floor is about 700,000 square feet (it's actually more, but I'm rounding down to account for interior walls, etc.). That's 165 million square feet per tower. That's about 6 square miles of space per tower. The average tower in Sharn has a thousand feet on the tallest buildings on Earth. And they fill up the entire city. 200,000 people? Ridiculous. No one builds such a vast city if they don't have the people to fill it. You have not been in the homes of th rich and famous. Your number are good. I think people are missing out on the distribution. I live in Houston and we have some high rise aparments that run $1.5 million for about 1/4 of the floor. There are some people that just buy the whole floor, and just two people live there. They have bathrooms the size of a bedroom, bedrooms the size of an average apartment, living room, dens, library, huge kitchen, formal dining room, breakfast room, offices. And that is just their apartment in town, there mansion is larger. There is a lot of space in Sharn, but it is not unoccupied, it is just under-occupied. A student's hovel might be 2000 sqft. A moderate family dwelling might be 10,000 square feet with 20 foot ceilings. The wealthy might live in 100,000 sqft apartments with naturally lit gardens, atria, skyboat garages and so on.
Brastan 07-31-05, 03:30 PM	Thanks Tomtill. I had difficulty ascertaining your current position on topic. I agree with most of your comments. For me, I love the low population density. As you said it does allow for adventures in the PCs backyard, possibly even literally. The problem some DMs might face is where do they place villages and towns. My simple answer of that is not to worry about population figures and place towns as and were they are need. In settings like FR I don't think their is much need or the use of random town generation. In Eberron I think it's expected. As kind of joke what you think the chance of randomly encountering a town? Actually come to think of it this might not be a bad idea if used in the Mournland. "As you reach the crest of the glass hill," roles dice behind screen, "you are ambushed by a Thorp." Wandering towns could be fun(for the DM) addition to that broken place.
Sarlax 07-31-05, 04:10 PM	But the whole point of bringing up monster predation was to show how communities can become separated over time (years, centuries) through attrition of the intervening communities. An equally valid point is that, with limited resources, you simply have communities spread along trade roads, rivers, important trade routes, etc., leaving the rest of the country to the wilds. If communities are being separated, why would they remain part of the same nation or empire? The highest duty of the state is security. If the king can't prevent the occasional loss of a village or city to monster attacks, he won't have any loyalty. Likewise, if he can't stop monsters from attacking, he probably can't stop provinces from rebelling. The next problem in this interpertation is that no nation would have initially developed under such conditions. I'm fine with the idea of human colonists establishing far-ranging communities is disparate safe zones - that's what expanding species do, after all (but people don't usually move into terribly dangerous areas). So you can have scattered human communities all over Khorvaire, even cities. But how do they ever become a nation? If you assume that monster activity is distributed throughout the continent, it's too difficult to build lines of communication and a common culture. Cities will spring up in safe spots, but trade and travel will be seriously impaired. You'd likely end up with a collection of cultures like that of Ancient Greece - cities with a common background who attempt to dominate their local regions. A continent-spanning nation-state could not be achieved until Khorvaire was relatively free of monsters.
Sarlax 07-31-05, 04:34 PM	If you increase the population of a small town that needs you to solve its problems by 10x, you have removed the need for you to solve their problem—by the core rules, they have access to what they need already. That's not the only way to increase the population. Instead of increasing the populations of every listed thorp and metropolis by a factor of 10, build into the setting new towns and villages that are spread throughout the nation. Plenty of places in Khorvaire have reasonable populations as written, so they don't need to be changed. There might be a few places that have too many people. Not every location needs its population magnified. The population totals for the nations are rather low, so those can be lifted just by saying that there are more small communities. This also gets to the original premise of the thread - Khorvaire won't be a vast wasteland with sparse pockets of civilization. So, if you increase the population and still follow core rules, you will change one of the basic aspects of the setting. Eberron already ditched the core rules. The Demographics Dragonshard (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20040712a) creates new rules for determining NPC levels in Eberron. The core rules produce levels of power that aren't right for Eberron. Since the designers aren't bound to the core rules, it's fine for them to have tweaked things to produce outcomes they like instead of just saying, "Sharn can't have a million people because that means there's five 20th level wizards," - which I don't believe they did. The Eberron Under the Glass articles had this one (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebug/20041227a) on character levels. It also points out the Eberron specifically avoids the standard rules for NPC levels. So the core rules aren't a factor in how power is distributed in Khorvaire. Eberron has its own standard. This means that you can make Sharn have five or ten times its current population without worrying that this will create too many high-level characters with PC class levels. You also don't need to worry about tampering with the GP limit - as a metropolis, Sharn's already reached the max GP limit of 100,000. For other communities, you can always do with magic access what Eberron does with NPC level distribution - change it. It's perfectly within reason to say that high-level magic items just can't be found easily in Eberron, particularly because high-level creators are uncommon. We don't have to let the DMG RAW get in the way of building a setting that is both fun and more realistic.
Pax 07-31-05, 06:46 PM	I think looking at nations rather than cities, especially ones as odd as Sharn, would probably be more productive. So, yes, okay, I buy the large number of children. It shouldn't be more than the total number of resisdent adults. Except that it indeed should be. In a modern nation, your'e right - at any one time, there probably aren't more minors than there are adults; birth rates are comparatively low, and population doesn't decline mainly because rates of death are also quite low. But in a world where a third or more of all children die before they reach ten or fifteen years of age? A world where even the adult death rate is noticably higher due to supernatural predation, and even paranatural causes such as magical illness and disease? Let me put it this way: my Grandmother, born in 1914 in rural Canada (just 5 minutes' cross-country walk north of the border with the state of Vermont, actually) was borninto a family of ... oh lord, IIRC, eight children. And IIRC, there were a couple more who didn't survive out of infancy, too! This was less than 100 years ago, and that family was not unusually large for that time and place. Yet, that family had no pressures from being predated upon by rnegade goblins, lycanthropes, the undead, and extraplanar horrors. They did have the advantage of relatively-modern medicine, so they were less-susceptible to ordinary diseases than folks in Eberron would be. I wouldn't be surprised, given the same circumstances but in Eberron instead of southern Quebec, if the family size hadn't swelled to fifteen or twenty children! Now, would EVERY family be that big? Of course not; I'd be willing to bet the average middle-to-lower-class family has maybe eight children, if they've any at all. But enough of them would be in the fifteen-to-twenty range to make up for the childless couples, IMO. But where do all of these nonpermanent residents come from? Are we just assuming that there are several million peole in the world who don't officially live anywhere and thus aren't factored in in the country entries? Possibly. But, the nonpermanent residents issue was one I raised only to explain the population of Sharn - and I specifically gave a very high estimate, to show what I felt would be the upper bound of Sharn's possible population. Truly, I think we'd be loking at 2-3 minors, and a similar number of "transient residents", per permanent adult resident. Thus, the actual number of "warm bodies" in Sharn is probably on the order of 1.0-1.5 million - counting everyone, infants to grandparents, permanent residents to "in town for a month on business". If they're still being counted as Brelish, that's nearly a quarter of the population of the country in that one city. Brelish, some, yes. But not ONLY Brelish. People from ALL of Khorvaire (and beyond), however, is what I'm thinking of. And possibly a large number of expatriates, people who truly don't have any specific nation-of-residence. And, really, is saying "the numbers don't count adult humanoids that fall into categories X, Y, or Z" is a lot like saying that the numbers presented are, in fact, too low. No, when I say that, I mean "the numbers cited for a city only count a specific, defined portion of the total population".
JmX 07-31-05, 09:57 PM	DELETED
tomtill 07-31-05, 10:16 PM	If communities are being separated, why would they remain part of the same nation or empire? One possibility would be that they don't have a choice. Let's say that there is a adamantine mine that the king finds profitable. There is a community along the way that is fed up with the king and wants its independence. Is the king going to give it to them? Or will he ensure their loyalty to protect his access to the mine? The current kingdoms have a long history. Simply maintaining the current borders might well be seen as a national security issue. Monsters attacking are a very different problem from provinces rebelling. As long as they are relatively isolated (even though frequent) events, it is a local problem. Monsters (mostly) don't seek to hold the land. They eat and move on. On the other hand, a beseiged community might welcome a government from which they could request the "calvary" when needed. The next problem in this interpertation is that no nation would have initially developed under such conditions. I'm fine with the idea of human colonists establishing far-ranging communities is disparate safe zones - that's what expanding species do, after all (but people don't usually move into terribly dangerous areas). A (probably bad) analogy would be the expansion into the American west in the face of sporadic native uprisings. While conditions were quiet, expansion occurred. When the natives went on the warpath, settlers and sometimes whole communities died. The cycle was repeated because the areas under attack were sporadic and isolated. It was a reasonable risk (apparently). It happens, but it might not happen to you. But I wasn't trying to say that this was the sole distribution of communities in Khorvaire. I fully expect that most communities are more or less along trade routes/ rivers etc. It's the presence of isolated communities away from these more populated regions for which I was trying to find an explanation. Or why there might be regions along a trade route without any settlements.
tomtill 07-31-05, 11:28 PM	That's not the only way to increase the population. Instead of increasing the populations of every listed thorp and metropolis by a factor of 10, build into the setting new towns and villages that are spread throughout the nation. Granted, since there is no mechanic for determining the class distributions for a region rather than a city. This works, if you feel you need it. Eberron already ditched the core rules. …with regard to class distributions. They created modifed tables. Oops. That's true. Complete and unconditional surrender. Population levels were not chosen to match desired levels from the DMG, but to match desired levels from the modified Eberron demographics table. On the other hand, this would have been a perfect opportunity to match the desired class levels to a much larger population—I mean, they could have modified the tables any way they wanted. This would suggest that the designers purposefully chose the smaller populations for other reasons. Flavor? Mistake? I suppose we could just ask Hellcow his intentions. This means that you can make Sharn have five or ten times its current population without worrying that this will create too many high-level characters with PC class levels Well, actually, since Sharn is already a metropolis the only thing that changes is the cash on hand and the number of 1st level NPCs (these are the attributes directly tied to population, instead of category of community) However, if you boost the category of other communities (town or city to metropolis, for example), things change as we've discussed, even using the modifed Eberron demographics tables. For example, I think only Sharn and Wroat are currently metropolis's in Breland, accounting for 280,000 of the 3.7 million inhabitants. Anything over 25,000 is a metropolis, so boosting the cities or large towns by a factor of 10 definitely changes the PC and NPC class distributions for Breland. We don't have to let the DMG RAW get in the way of building a setting that is both fun and more realistic. Well, I still disagree that the setting as represented is unrealistic. While you certainly can change it, I don't agree that you must change it. It is reasonable to have most of the civilized areas of Khorvaire limited to narrow bands of roads/rivers connecting larger communities and important sites (mines, forts, etc). Further expansion thus far has been limited in many areas by monster predation and a relatively low magic setting (limited resources). Expansive kingdoms are maintained by high magic resources concentrated in the hands of entrenched institutions (dragonmarked houses, royal families, religious traditions, history) and the need of the smaller communities for help in dealing with persistant threats. Sounds both fun and realistic to me.
Sarlax 07-31-05, 11:37 PM	One possibility would be that they don't have a choice. Let's say that there is a adamantine mine that the king finds profitable. There is a community along the way that is fed up with the king and wants its independence. If the king can't stop monsters from occasionally destroying communities or from continually preying on the people, he probably can't stop a rebellion. Even if the king can somehow stop rebellions but not stop monsters, it can't last. You can't keep a kingdom together for a thousand years like that. If the king isn't stopping the monsters, the city gets eliminated by trolls or the people build their own militia. Once they have their own forces, how does the king stop them? If the kingdom can't eliminate the monsters, it'll be faced with continuous rebellions or the regular destruction of cities. In either case, it's the end. On the other hand, a beseiged community might welcome a government from which they could request the "calvary" when needed. But which is it? A local problem the kingdom doesn't care to solve or is it something the kingdom intervenes in?
tomtill 08-01-05, 12:04 AM	If the king can't stop monsters from occasionally destroying communities or from continually preying on the people, he probably can't stop a rebellion. The king has vast resources relative to a town, but they are limited; he can't pacify his whole nation of monsters. He can of course, stop any monster he wants to spend the resources to stop. But he most certainly will stop any hint of any rebellion. The president of the United States can't stop murders within the cities, but he certainly can stop any attempt at foreign aggression or internal rebellion. … people build their own militia. Once they have their own forces, how does the king stop them? Well, one can argue the traditional standing army, but in Eberron the most likely response would be a party of relatively high level government "enforcers". Imagine even 6 mid level characters going against even a large town militia. The greater the threat, the greater the response. I have argued previously that the ancient royal families (with the lineage of the Galifar empire) have accumulated significant resources in the form of money, artifacts and alliances. I think even a coalition of rebels from noble families would be hard pressed to dominate the entrenched institutions.
a_psh 08-01-05, 01:56 AM	On the other hand, this would have been a perfect opportunity to match the desired class levels to a much larger population—I mean, they could have modified the tables any way they wanted. This would suggest that the designers purposefully chose the smaller populations for other reasons. Flavor? Mistake? I'm not 100% sure on the statement I'm about to make, but I heard that the maps didn't originally have scales when drafted, and that those were sort of fudged later. In which case, the population figures could have been designed for a continent 1/2 or 1/4 of Khorvaire's actual size. This was mentioned a fairly long time ago in a forum somewhere, but I'm not sure about the accuracy. Still, if you believe that Khorvaire is underpopulated, it's possible that the world is too big rather than the population being too small. Probably easier to fix the pop. numbers than the physical distances, though.
tomtill 08-01-05, 06:00 AM	I found another thread where Hellcow already addressed these issues. http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=94027 Quotes from Hellcow from this thread: With that said, you said before that you've seen hints that Khorvaire may not be fully settled... which I've said a few times on this thread. You do realize that I'm the guy who designed the setting, right? Check back on my earlier posts. There are supposed to be large areas in all of the nations that are not settled by the human and demihuman races, along with areas depopulated during the war. Centers of development have formed around the most suitable areas, which may have been considered suitable because of pre-existing fortification or because of magical phenomenon (manifest zones)(which, of course, defy real-world logic). Where there is a major city, there will be thorps and hamlets around it, and then, yes, a large unsettled region until you reach the next major settlement. Largely, these areas are self-sufficient, which is why they have been established where they are to begin with. Thus, while House Orien can make cooling caravans, most of these settlements do not relying on the distant cities for survival. So Breland is more an alliance of far-flung city-states than one big massive settlement -- though all of the cities give their fealty to Boranel. and My point is that I'm not going to defend it as logical. I'm going to defend it as something that supports adventuring. Looking to what *I* see as logical, large areas of unsettled space are the only way you should be able to get dangerous monsters; otherwise, if civilization has been established for an extended period of time, these creatures should have been hunted down and destroyed by the rulers of the community. Likewise for dungeons. Khorvaire accounts for the presence of dungeons, with the existance of Dhakaani ruins, remnants of the War of the Mark or the Age of Demons, and Khyber. But if you've had a village in the area for 300 years, why hasn't someone explored it already? You're not the first group of adventurers in the history of the world (though with that said, in Sharn the ruins were only partially explored before being sealed off). Open space allows for adventure. Continuous urban spread, as logical as it may be from a real-world perspective, is going to be less exciting. We've always said that it's a pulp setting, so look to Conan: the emphasis is on what works best for the story. When Conan is wandering in the wilderness and finds a lost temple -- well, I as a reader didn't think "So why aren't there a few villages nearby?" Again, it is not my intention to dismiss your concerns if this *does* bother you. I'm just saying that this is the purpose the space serves in the setting, and if you don't like it you should change it. But Khorvaire is not supposed to be fully settled from head to toe, and that's not something that will change.
a_psh 08-01-05, 08:53 AM	Thanks, tomtill. That's a useful reference, and it's good to hear stuff from the Cow's own mouth.
Sarlax 08-01-05, 01:12 PM	Regarding the quotes, I think they're important in one particular regard: they confirm that the creator likewise finds the arrangement to be illogical. I agree that adventuring is easier in places with wilderness. You don't get huge supernations with big chunks of monstrous enemies filling in large areas, though. I see that Hellcow would describe Breland as a city-state alliance. That still doesn't work and it's not what's portrayed in the ECS or Five Nations. The two primary sources on the nations presents them as just that - nations. They aren't loose confederacies. Only Karrnath comes close to having that kind of loose structure, and that's only through the empowerment of nobles as warlords that has made them restless. One of the major features of Eberron governments is that nationality is more important than race. I enjoy that, but you can't development such strong national sentiments easily. Why would the cities in Breland identify with each other at all? What could Sharn have in common in Vathirond, nearly 2000 miles away? What could Vathirond have in common with Wroat? Why would either city pledge loyalty to the king? If want a situation that's both more realistic and adventurous, the several nations of Khorvaire need to be partitioned in much smaller states.
a_psh 08-02-05, 12:58 AM	Something Keith said reminded me of medieval Russia. Less populated, less cohesive, and with more room for random people wandering around doing heroic deeds than the medieval west. Lots of empty space, especially up north. And a lot of the territory taken up by woods and stuff. So, let's take a crack at things, using these two sources: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pop-in-eur.html - for very rough population estimates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1533-1896.gif - to guestimate area Now, this is going to be terribly inaccurate, given that this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation using very, very, very fudged numbers to begin with, but let's see if this gets us something. From that map, 1533 Russia is actually kind of Breland-shaped, and is approximately composed of three 1000x1000 mile squares. This is just like what we figured for Breland. I think Russia's a tad bigger than Breland. Based on that chart thing I mentioned, the population should be about 6-8 million. So, okay, if you assume Breland's 3.7 mil isn't counting children and this one is (we've gone so far to the back of the envelope at this point that we're scribbling madly on our own hand, anyway). In that case, the 3.7 mil becoming 6 to 8 mil if we figure in kiddies isn't much of a stretch. So Breland is about as populated as medieval Russia. Now, that means there's a lot of open space, woods, &c. But, yeah, I guess it's not particularly bad. So, okay, this is by no means authoritative, but I guess I *can* accept the figures as they are.
Sarlax 08-02-05, 04:32 AM	Now, this is going to be terribly inaccurate, given that this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation using very, very, very fudged numbers to begin with, but let's see if this gets us something. Heh, I think you're right. About a third of Russia lies above the Arctic Circle. The diets would have been quite different. There was no magical weather control, no super draft animals, no magical disease cures. There's really no valid comparison - except to note if a particular place of about the same area as Russia has more advantages to habitation in a dozen dozen ways, there should be more people in that place.
tomtill 08-02-05, 07:19 AM	Regarding the quotes, I think they're important in one particular regard: they confirm that the creator likewise finds the arrangement to be illogical. My fault. This quote was at the end of a long thread. I guess I should have quoted more, but you could read the thread. He was not saying that he thought the arrangement was illogical. He was saying that he's not going to argue the point. He believes that the typical DnD adventure is made more believable by the punctuated population arrangement, as he elaborates. From the players point of view, you have these ruins/monsters/lost civilizations/violence oriented classes all around you. With higher population density, the player might begin to wonder "how come in thousands of years of civilization this hasn't already been explored/pacified." This argument is more important to him than whether distant communities would remain together as a nation. He likes the flavor of the world as a frontier, rather than pacified. It's a choice. As I have stated previously, if you like that flavor, it is not all that hard to hypothesize that the presence of magic/monsters/skewed resources changes the dynamics of human(oid) populations such that people do, in fact, seek alliances across large distances. Arguments that that's not how it happens in our world fall flat with me because I think Khorvaire is nothing like our world. Our own world was limited by what we could do at a particular point in time. We did not have magic to fall back on. While high magic/superhero classes are not available to the masses, they are available to exceptional families/individuals, just not in vast amounts. Having said that, there have been plenty of times in our own history where governments were spread out over vast areas. In Eberron I think this trend could be exaggerated simply because high magic/character classes are needed to deal with the bigger threats, and these are in the hands of the ancient families and/or the accumulated populations of a nation. England controlled much of the world at one point because of skewed resources (they controlled the seas/ had better technology than the areas they colonized/pacified) They did this to control access to resources for their government/mercantile influences. It's not hard to imagine situations like this for the nations of Khorvaire. And yes, eventually local nationalism destroyed the British empire. But it happens the other way too (Hawaii, Alaska?) and perhaps the Eberron communities don't end up feeling used. The crown does step in and help where needed, and this help cannot be provided locally. Ain't that enough to make you proud? Arguments that that's not what people would do fall flat with me because, while our own world's culture is becoming more and more homogenized, there have been many different cultures across the course of our history, and lots of mistakes made about what people would or would not do. It's hard for a Christian to imagine the concept of the suicide bomber, since the Islamic fanatic is motivated by religion, and suicide is a sin in the Christian faith. But it happens nonetheless. So it's easy to imagine that people would do whatever you want them to do. Just say this is their philosophy, bang, they do it. Why would the kalashtar think surviving, dancing and meditating will defeat the Dreaming dark? Yeah, they have a reason in their own minds, but the rest of Khorvaire thinks they're cracked.
Sarlax 08-02-05, 04:28 PM	This argument is more important to him than whether distant communities would remain together as a nation. He likes the flavor of the world as a frontier, rather than pacified. It's a choice. That's not how the world's presented in the ECS or 5N, however. It's not a frontier world, it's a bunch of big nations. As I have stated previously, if you like that flavor, it is not all that hard to hypothesize that the presence of magic/monsters/skewed resources changes the dynamics of human(oid) populations such that people do, in fact, seek alliances across large distances. Alliances are fine. I'd expect them. But why is Vathirond allied with Sharn? For that matter, why is Sharn allied with Wroat? City-states don't ally across distances of 2000 miles, 1000 miles, or even really 500 miles - not in any meaningful way. Nor does a common culture emerge. Cities will ally with nearby settlements for protection certainly. But the people of Sharn and the people of Vathirond won't emerge as members of a common culture with an equal fervor for democracy. England controlled much of the world at one point because of skewed resources (they controlled the seas/ had better technology than the areas they colonized/pacified) But they never created cultural hegemony. It's possible to stretch a government across a planet if, as you note, it has the right strategic positioning, much better technology, and developed structures. But you can't transform cultures this way - see India. I guess it doesn't matter though, since you don't care about the real world examples, right?
a_psh 08-02-05, 06:35 PM	There's really no valid comparison - except to note if a particular place of about the same area as Russia has more advantages to habitation in a dozen dozen ways, there should be more people in that place. But, regardless of circumstances, the point of that vague comparison was to see if the population densitys listed for Breland could create similar social structures to Russia. I think that, with a lot of fudging, it can. So the population densities aren't quite as oddball as I first though, which was my point with that half-hearted calculation. I still think that, for the reality-minded, increasing the populations is in order, but probably not by a factor of 10. I would pick a number between 3 and 5.
Beleriphon 08-02-05, 07:00 PM	But they never created cultural hegemony. It's possible to stretch a government across a planet if, as you note, it has the right strategic positioning, much better technology, and developed structures. But you can't transform cultures this way - see India. I guess it doesn't matter though, since you don't care about the real world examples, right? Sure you can, it just takes much longer than the British had been in India. Something to remember is that a large part of Khorvaire owed allegiance to Galifar, and it is only relatively recently that the five nations have formed. In fact open strife has occured in several of them, which would suggest that they can't control the area they claim. Audair lost the Eldeen Reaches, Karrnath lots the Mror Holds, and Breland lost western Breland to Daargun. Also, if we consider that the population of Cyre was basically killed outright over the course of a few hours we're probably losing 2 to 4 million people.
tomtill 08-03-05, 11:37 PM	But they never created cultural hegemony. They started with cultural hegemony. The dominant race of Khorvaire, humans, began as colonists. They have diverged enough to form national identities, after these identities were imposed by the empire of Galifar. The 5 nations were provinces before they were kingdoms. Your concept of space is limited by the perspective of a mundane world. Magic and other resources in Khorvaire have made the vast distances not all that vast for those with access to these resources, directly or indirectly. Trade is worldwide, and respected enough to be left alone (at least the trade controlled by the mercantile houses) even during the Last War. Trade connects people. Since you do like real world examples: our own world is vast to the man on foot, not so big for the man with the money or the connections (his employer) to fly. I can't afford to go to India, but I talk to people who live there whenever I need customer support. Technology/magic shrinks a world. It doesn't have to be available to everybody, just to those who shape the world.
mhacdebhandia 08-03-05, 11:55 PM	As far as I'm concerned, it's enough to compare Khorvaire, even now, to the period of settlement & conquest in the United States in the 1800s. There can be a lot of empty space out there that's claimed by Aundair, Breland, Droaam, or whatever, but which isn't settled per se - or settled in great density.
Charles Phipps 08-04-05, 02:16 AM	Out of curiousity, just for the sake of a slightly more settle Khovaire, I'm going to multiply the population of Khovaire's locations exactly by x10. New Cyre becomes an important city. The warforged become 400,000 to 500,000 and the Lord of Blades has the beginnings of a potentially huge army. (40,000 warforged are all trained soldiers after all) Any comments on this decision? How would this affect he landscape and politics?
Sarlax 08-04-05, 02:47 AM	They started with cultural hegemony. The dominant race of Khorvaire, humans, began as colonists. They have diverged enough to form national identities, after these identities were imposed by the empire of Galifar. The 5 nations were provinces before they were kingdoms. Please reconcile this with the connections you refer to in the next paragraphs. Is there or is there not enough infrastructure for powerful nationalistic cultures to emerge? Yes, you can say, "Human culture started with the Lhazaar expedition. It diverged as humans spread across the continent. Somehow it converges into 5 distinct cultures across thousands of miles - it's magic." But you still have to account for this: Galifar ruled all the human kingdoms of Galifar for 900 years. How does any cultural identity remain? The Galifar Empire represents Khorvaire's Age of Development. This is the period when the dragonmarked houses were given guarenteed roles in the empire. It's the period in which the lightning rail developed. All the trade, the links, the communication, etc. They all would have grown stronger in this period than any other. How can such powerfully distinct national identities have endured? You're arguing that national identity somehow coalesced prior to Galifar despite a lack of sophisticated infrastructure, but that distinct identity endured during the 900 in which Galifar increasingly enhanced its power to communicate, govern, and trade. My answer: even at the present level of development, there's not enough infrastructure to support a common culture across a big distance. A technological culture that spans thousands of miles is only barely becoming possible from influences like the new rail, the new airship, and the new use of nation-spanning newspapers. I'm not ignoring Eberron's magical resources when I say this: the Five Nations are too big - reasonably, they should be dozens of small nations. Your concept of space is limited by the perspective of a mundane world. Magic and other resources in Khorvaire have made the vast distances not all that vast for those with access to these resources, directly or indirectly. Which magic? Which resources? Khorvaire's communication and travel infrastructure is at its highest point ever. The rail, the airship, etc. didn't exist prior to end of the Galifar era. Yes, the Houses existed. But only a fragment of the population can afford their services in the present, and that's with the current level of magical sophistication. In the pre-Galifar era, it would've been even more difficult to travel and talk. Since you do like real world examples: our own world is vast to the man on foot, not so big for the man with the money or the connections (his employer) to fly. I can't afford to go to India, but I talk to people who live there whenever I need customer support. Technology/magic shrinks a world. It doesn't have to be available to everybody, just to those who shape the world. Khorvaire doesn't have anything like this. Unlike us, the people of Khorvaire can't call people on another continent for assistance with magic items. They can't even call their neighbors. The price of rail travel from one major city to the capital in the same nation is prohibitively expensive to almost everyone at the price of 5 sp. Mailing a letter 10 miles costs 1 sp - a day's wage for the average commoner. How do you get a common culture out of that?