If the quality of the book is like that, I suggest firing everyone involved in creating that mess.
Is it too much to ask that people that write books for D&D know the (current) rules?
If they keep that up we get a book for Prime worlds, introducing such fun classes as elf and dwarf, and they will use different XP tables for levelling up.
(ah, good old days
)Yes, they made it much smaller than it was in 2e (the 2e populations were defined by Wolfgang Baur in Uncaged: Faces of Sigil, who also designed Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, but apparently the editors made him go with the Planar Handbook numbers.
That paragraph is easily ignorable, though. There's a lot of problems I have with it (for example, that they claim the Lady of Pain is LN), but it's sooo easy to ignore.
The population stats are directly from the Planar Handbook.
That and the city stat block itself are a cut and paste from the planar handbook. I'm thinking that the developers dropped the ball.
Pre industrial cities with a few exceptions weren't that big in terms of population. 250000 makes it more or less the same size as Ancient Rome, that city in Mexico whose name I can't remember and various Chinese cities which were the largest cities on Earth in ore industrial times. Considering those cities were superpowers of their times that would make Sigil rather impressive.
Can Sigil even grow enough food or would it have to import?
They don't grow any appreciative amount of their food, and there isn't much plant-life in the city except for the razorvine, and a few scraggly trees in the rather small elven racial enclave, the Park of the Infernal and the Divine, and some of the private estates in the Nobles District. Virtually all of the city's food and any other raw material is imported, with a smaller but significant fraction being magically conjured.
For instance, fresh water is dependant upon known portals to elemental water, and their frequency of appearance and gate key if known, or mercantile shipments from other planes. Sigil can't produce much of anything of its own unless supplied with raw materials from elsewhere, and even the air supply is limited to about a week or two if the Lady were to seal off all of the gates.
They don't grow any appreciative amount of their food, and there isn't much plant-life in the city except for the razorvine, and a few scraggly trees in the rather small elven racial enclave, the Park of the Infernal and the Divine, and some of the private estates in the Nobles District. Virtually all of the city's food and any other raw material is imported, with a smaller but significant fraction being magically conjured.
For instance, fresh water is dependant upon known portals to elemental water, and their frequency of appearance and gate key if known, or mercantile shipments from other planes. Sigil can't produce much of anything of its own unless supplied with raw materials from elsewhere, and even the air supply is limited to about a week or two if the Lady were to seal off all of the gates.
I was just wondeirng if there was some trait that reduced the need for food or if there was some other reason that would reduce food consumption. At 250000 people Sigil is still bigger than virtually every FR city I can think of and probably Greyhawk and Krynn as well.
Only planar cities and the rare prime city would be bigger.
that city in Mexico whose name I can't remember
Tenochtitlan.
And yeah, Sigil has to import everything. No springs, no fields, no mines, not even its own atmosphere. It's a darn good thing nobody can lay siege to the place, otherwise it would be fodder for every army across the planes! That said, somebody who carefully catalogues all the main portals for food trade and seizes them from the other side could do the city some significant damage, apparently beyond the reach of the Lady...
I was just wondeirng if there was some trait that reduced the need for food
No, of course not; if anything, Sigil consumes more food per capita than Waterdeep, since there's more large-sized creatures in it. It's not called the City of Doors for nothing, though - it's got thousands of doors to every plane imaginable to import food through. There's no food shortage. Sigil could easily support millions of people.
I mean, think about it for a minute - what city actually grows a substantial amount of food within its walls? I guess some Asian cities sometimes had rice paddies in them, but Waterdeep, Greyhawk, Sharn, and the other major D&D cities don't have fields growing food inside - they get their food from outside the walls, and farmers bring the food to the city's marketplaces in carts and wagons. Sigil's no different, except it has a lot more food available to it from a lot more places, so if there's a famine on one world there's always plenty of food elsewhere.
That said, somebody who carefully catalogues all the main portals for food trade and seizes them from the other side could do the city some significant damage, apparently beyond the reach of the Lady...
Maybe, though of course the Lady of Pain (or possibly the dabus) can move the portals whenever she wants, so if her city was truly threatened she could simply move the portals to convenient agricultural areas elsewhere in the multiverse.
That said, the Lady might not care enough to change the portals, at least not for a long while.
most real life city states at least controled the surrounding area to get food from.
Well, in Sigil's case, the "surrounding area" presumably consists of an infinite void and possibly an infinite spire, so not much point laying claim to that (though, as I type this, I realize there must surely be at least a handful of barmies who, on principle, might actually do it anyway). Speaking more broadly, about the area that Sigil is adjacent to via portals, it still is unlikely. For one thing, most cities would not be ruled by somebody so seemingly fantastically uninterested in controlling anywhere else as the Lady. And since she appears to be the one who controls all Sigil's entry and exit points, she is the only one who could make any attempts to maintain any kind of Sigilian hegemony over other planes become a reality. She just has to move the portals around on a reasonably regular basis to prevent anyone else from trying (and some in Sigil just might have done that in the days of the factions: the Harmonium would just _love_ the idea (as long as they were a part of it), and at the least the Mercykillers, Doomguard and Fated probably would have signed up on it as well for their own reasons), ignoring here the fact that most portals are not really fit to maintain any form of dominance over the place at the other end. All of which is not to say that Sigil has not maintained some kind of external relations (we know for a fact that there have been "Ysgardian ambassadors", whatever those would be representing, in the City, and other planar entities of significance probably also made a point of having a presence), but the one leverage a Sigilian governemnt would have over other places would be trading rights (and that's quite the leverage, given the opportunities), but even here it is limited, since it unlike most medieval city governments would be completely unable to control all entrants and exits to the city effectively, and there's plenty of operational space for black markets to exists within Sigil itself.
So in sum: Sigil may be the Center of the Multiverse, but it is a center that cannot hold.