I mean these are the largest populated centers with the greatest amount of available food. They're well defended and have more resources than pretty much anywhere else in the tablelands. I'm inclined to think that they would be much more populous than the figures presented in the Veiled Alliance sourcebook. Cities like Nibenay, with a ready source of water, especially should attract and support larger numbers of people. Even if we quadrupled the population of every city, town, or nomadic band in the tablelands it would probably still be under 10 million. That's practically nothing for a landmass so large.
That's practically nothing for a landmass so large.
Well in general, it is supposed to be a barren wasteland.
However, there are wide swaths of land around each city that actually supports the city-dwellers with their food, beasts of burden, extra slaves, etc., and those figures are likely several times that of the city inhabitants, perhaps 10x the city figures - inside the city walls the slave-to-freeman ratio will be much less than out in the fields, so you could have several hundred-thousand individuals toiling to support the 30ish thousand living in relative luxury and security inside the city walls. There's some website I found that did a good job of explaining "historical" population counts for cities and such, and IIRC it listed how many people it took to support a city of a particular size...and the numbers were pretty large.
In the Prism Pentad, the Crimson Legion numbered what, 3000-5000 individuals alone? Or maybe that was Urik's army...but in any case, you're talking an extremely high and largely non-sensical percentage of the population being slaves, soldiers and/or gladiators in either case if you take the given DS population #s as applying to the entire city-state as opposed to just those living within the city.
- During the era of "The Dragon", significant numbers were "sacrificed" to keep the spell of containment from expiring.
- Significant percentages of the city-states were slaves who were worked to death.
- The constant wars.
- The city-state population numbers were only for the citizens within the city walls, rather than those who live out among the fields or mines.
The real problem with believing the low population figures is in fact the Dragons levy. 1,000/year from each of the city states.
A discussion between a scribe-slave and his young master:
I cannot say what the levy is for, young master, but I can tell you how we arrive at it each year. You say you can't understand how a city can lose a thousand heads and not grow small...
You know of the quarries of our king, where the slaves that don't belong to a household go at night? It is where most of them work in the day, making mud and stone bricks. Your father bought me there, since I was working as the regulator's accountant and he needed someone capable with numbers...
It take years for an untrained eye to notice there is always enough slaves to man the quarries. I see such a place as a giant beast that produces youngs and feeds on them, keeping itself alive, all the while digging its barrow a little further each day...in this case producing bricks.
I would tell you the same is true of our city, young master. It is like our quarries, a giant beast our king has erected out of the sands, going through the motions each day to provide a thousand slaves year's end.
The villages we trade with do not have quarries to brick their walls, and those outside the perview of our king, we raid for slaves. If our city was as small as they, we would be prey for our mighty neighbors.
You would think as a people we make trading goods for a living, while in fact our true purpose is to raise slaves for the levy, and grow strong so as not to be counted among its numbers...
do you have the website you mentioned about population sizes and city support? I've been looking online for a while and can't seem to find it.
http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm
It doesn't list the in-city to outside-of-city ratio per-se, But here is some of the info from that page that I used to calculate the probable number of people living in the area immediately surrounding the cities (I'm taking a population of 35k, which IIRC is what Balic is listed as, as my justification):
1) 1 square mile of land will support ~180 people, so that's almost 200 square miles to support Balic's population. The verdant terrain shown on the DS map right around Balic ends up calculating out to right about that size...but if you include the scrublands beyond that, which could be used as range for livestock and could also support farms (albeit at a much reduced yield), you're at twice the needed size. Also, that 180 figure takes into account that A) there is no magic to help raise crops or livestock and B) includes "requisite roads, villages and towns" which for the most part aren't present in that area - said towns exist farther away, with their own farmland. Given all that, I think it's safe to assume that, despite the difficulties of Athasian life - and actually including it, if you consider a high population of "expendable" slaves that are getting much less food than they really need - you're looking at Balic being able to support a good 100,000 people without having to go beyond the Balican peninsula, and that's likely a low number.
2) That site lists 1 guard per 150 people...let's say per 100 since this is Athas. That's 350 guards for Balic, of which a good portion will be templars, given that they serve in both a defensive role as well as a bureaucratic one...I'm going to say 1/2 that, so 175. Unless someone can find me a better figure, I was able to come up with a ratio between 10:1 and 20:1 for the number of commoners:knights in a medieval-style army...so assuming that we can plug in templars in place of knights, that'd give Balic a field-able army of 1750 to 3500.
Although that's possible, those numbers seem pretty small to me - I'm much more inclined to think that Balic could field around 4000 troops *and* still have some held in reserve, and the Crimson Legion (IMO) backs this - even after having their army crushed, there were still numerable templars in Urik to attack the Crimson Legion, and IIRC there was also still a sizeable force of soldiers to protect the city as well. So, with all of this taken into account, my guess is that an Athasian city would have about 2x the number of templars stated above, still at around 1 for every 100 (or less, in more militant city-states), which again (I realize my logic is getting somewhat loose here...;) ) leads you to a population 2x or more than that listed in the Wanderer's Chronicles.
Finally, and this comes from a different site (http://www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/overview03.html - took me forever to find something like this
), you've got to look at population growth numbers to support a 1000-per-year levy. According to that site, you're looking at fractions of a percent of population growth during most of human history, and even the modern-day "baby boom" was only about 2%. So, even taking that 2% figure, that's only a 700 person increase in Balic's 35,000 population per-year...and that's probably an extremely high percentage. If that was the case, and you could additional levy slaves coming from elsewhere, then the population would be sustainable. If we go with a much more realistic growth rate - say .5% (which is still probably really high), that's a measly 175 people per year...which would mean that Balic would have to have a population pool of almost 6x their 35k population in order to be able to acquire enough slaves to feed the levy and keep the population completely stagnant. That's 210,000 people - and again, this is considering a population growth equivalent to that following the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th century.Yes, I realize I've gone back to using science and math again to justify stuff from a fantasy setting with magic and silt seas and man-eating cacti, but still... ;)