Some musings on population numbers
by gmkerosI sometimes find it enlightening to drill down into the data we get provided by roleplaying materials to understand the setting a bit better, and as I lately have been thinking about using Thunder Rift as a drop in setting for my own campaign I was thinking about that a bit.
Now, some people complain that Thunder Rift is too small, but I don't actually think so. It's a perfect little starter setting, and the size is quite alright for that homey feel at the beginning of an adventurer's life. I didn't find exact measurements in the text of the supplement, so I took Havard's Thunder Rift Almanac Entry as gospel for my calculation, and the given measurements sound about right. At 688sqm or 1782km2 Thunder Rift is about the same size as one of the larger Landkreise (I guess the closest thing would be a county) in Germany, which is my frame of reference. That's not too large, but it isn't that small either. I could imagine crossing my home one in about a week if there weren't any roads. My frame for reference is Landkreis Bayreuth, which is a bit smaller than Thunder Rift, but has lots of hills/mountains and forested areas.
I of course can't use population numbers as those are drastically different, but I can use Havard's numbers to say something about the settlements we can expect in TR.
Now, when looking at the map there's of course nothing there. We have Melinir, which for a town is tiny, Torlynn (which at the beginning of TR is largely abandoned), Hearth-Home, Silvercrest (not on map), Kleine, Edgewater (not on map), and Aratarashai (which also isn't on the map even if it is mentioned in the text).
According to the text the grasslands have another 4 or 5 villages smaller villages but that might not be correct. Other parts of the text talk about inhabitants. So there might be hamlets or at least farms even in the swamps.
Havard gives us a number of 20.000 inhabitants, and specifically the usual player races, so humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, rakasta, and gnomes.
I don't know where the number is from, but it's the number I have and so I am going to work with it.
Torlynn with 50 inhabitants is on the map, Edgewater with 40 is not, so I guess everything below 50 did not make the cut.
That's of course just a rough estimate, I guess one could argue that Torlynn is on there as a historic town, but lets use 40 as a reasonable number of people in one village. Some might be bigger, some smaller. But I think it might be difficult to defend with much smaller numbers.
Now lets look at those numbers we have
There are 10.000 humans, 400-500 living in towns, so there are at least 9500 living in smaller settlements. This means there are enough people for another 190- 240 human villages with a population of about 40-50 people there.
There are 1000 dwarves, 300 of which live in Hearth-Home, so another 14-17 villages, holds, or maybe mining camps.
1500 elves, 500 of which are in Silvercrest (which technically is the largest town in the valley), so another 14-20 elf villages.
2000 halflings, most of which are in villages. So about 40-50 villages worth. There might be a whole miniature Shire or two in some parts.
500 rakasta, 200 of which are in Aratarashai, leaving another 6-8 villages of them unaccounted for.
100 gnomes. Which I guess could live in the towns, as hermits in caves, or fill another 1-2 villages.
What I mean to say with this is... it actually looks a bit different from the completely empty map we have. If we assume there are 20.000 inhabitants in the valley, that valley must have a network of small settlements all over the place.
Which, by the way, to come back to my frame of reference, is not that different from historic examples. Bayreuth has about 720 villages, hamlets, or other historic places in its area, despite having a smaller area overall.
Thoughts?