Quote from: Daztur;785173Don't think that's a bad thing, there's so many things that eat people in D&D-land that it makes sense for population densities to be low.

Think that settlements should look like what you get historically in areas of constant low-level warfare (like the English/Scotland border historically) but even more so, with every last farmhouse being fortified except in very secure locations.

That's how I have always looked at it. D&D world is a dangerous place with a lot of competition for resources.

The mention of Bastles is excellent. I imagine they are VERY common in D&D world.

Quote from: Daztur;785173Don't think that's a bad thing, there's so many things that eat people in D&D-land that it makes sense for population densities to be low.

Its not just that that so many things eat people, a lot of them are people.

Every orc, kobold, gnoll, goblin, etc. should all be counting towards your population total if you are looking at being anything close to realistic.

Quote from: Daztur;785173Don't think that's a bad thing, there's so many things that eat people in D&D-land that it makes sense for population densities to be low.

Think that settlements should look like what you get historically in areas of constant low-level warfare (like the English/Scotland border historically) but even more so, with every last farmhouse being fortified except in very secure locations.

That makes perfect sense. However, the villages and towns presented in most published D&D settings are nothing like the fortified, beleaguered communities you would expect to find in such locales. Instead, we get prosperous, cheerful places with several bustling inns, shops full of all kinds of marvelous goods, artisans of all stripes bedecked in jewelry, and farmers who keep sacks of gold in the barn.

Take the Vault of Larin Karr, for example. We have a valley that's 150 miles by 100 miles, with two villages in it 75 miles apart. Each of them is a bustling, rich community full of highly skilled artisans, finely worked buildings, and cheerful prosperous folk. By the description, they wouldn't be out of place in an especially peaceful and prosperous period in the early Renaissance Rhineland. They sure don't come across as fortified outposts on the hostile wilds.



My take on it is most RPG worlds are created by people who's background in geography and history come a several removes in the form of vanilla fantasy novels. And furthermore, who grew up in North America and think in car-driving distances, not foot or donkey and cart distances (though even in the plains of Saskatchewan there is no town so isolated that it's 75 frickin' miles away from the next nearest community).

The situation can vary widely depending on physical and social factors.

The natural fertility of land varies, as does the efficiency of agricultural techniques. Dark Age Europe is different from China of the same period, from the Mediterranean civilization that preceeded it, and from the feudal civilization that grew from it.

One factor in early medieval poverty was that Western Europe largely abandoned the ocean, which meant both decline in trade and vulnerability to invaders such as Vikings.

Another was that kings and such tended to be better at fighting on their own than at organizing collective defense. Professional fighters could be called, but whether they would even come, never mind stand and fight, was dubious.Farmers would demand leave to work their farms. It tended to be very much every man for himself, or at most for his local comunity. Vikings, Hungarians, Saracens, etc., tended to terrify warriors who were steady enough against their own kind; and terror often gave way to alliance with the invaders against one's neighbors. Nomad hordes, on the other hand, had large numbers of highly motivated and well disciplined men who could be kept in the field indefinitely (and very capable women to defend the tribe's camp).

Population density in the Dark Ages was extremely low even by later medieval standards. Great cities were largely left in ruins, and forest reclaimed huge amounts of former farmland.

One thing that kicked the High Middle Ages into gear was the Black Death. Depopulation led to a higher valuation of labor, including an increasing shift of families from serfdom to the open market and the opportunities in towns.

Anyway, that's just a small sample of  considerations you can find in reading history, archeology and anthropology.

Magic adds its own share, creating conditions in fantasy that may be very different from an initial historical model. If magic has been an influence for a long time, the very "starting point" in historical reference may not have arisen in the first place!

More than anything else, the role of magic is highly variable, impossible to assess without knowing the particulars of your imaginary world.

Quote from: jadrax;785182Its not just that that so many things eat people, a lot of them are people.

Every orc, kobold, gnoll, goblin, etc. should all be counting towards your population total if you are looking at being anything close to realistic.

My own preference is that fairy folk reside in Faery, although invasions both ways can expand or contract the Fields of Men. Having creatures of the Other Side as residents of the mundane world tends to make them mundane, which is not to my mind desirable.

I am rather at odds here with a long history of conventions in D&D and related fantasy.

In contrast to the map above, here's a map at approximately the same scale. You'll note that it encompasses the fucking entirely of Yorkshire, including dozens of town, villages, and castles.

So yeah, most fantasy settings are just that - fantastically implausible in almost every respect, from demographic to geographic to political. My rule of thumb with fantasy maps is I have to reduce the scale by 5:1 (and often 10:1) to make them remotely sensible.

Africa south of the Sahara developed immensly populous and wealthy kingdoms and empires while Europe was recovering from the collapse of civilization, but the two regions were largely ignorant of each other.

Quote from: Haffrung;785196In contrast to the map above, here's a map at approximately the same scale. You'll note that it encompasses the fucking entirely of Yorkshire, including dozens of town, villages, and castles.

So yeah, most fantasy settings are just that - fantastically implausible in almost every respect, from demographic to geographic to political. My rule of thumb with fantasy maps is I have to reduce the scale by 5:1 (and often 10:1) to make them remotely sensible.

FYI: Gutenberg doesn't like your link.

Much as I love the words of JRR Tolkien, I blame him for the tendency for Fantasy maps, in contrast to real world maps, to have a large scale and scope with vast areas of nothing.

Quote from: Bren;785222Much as I love the words of JRR Tolkien, I blame him for the tendency for Fantasy maps, in contrast to real world maps, to have a large scale and scope with vast areas of nothing.

That's probably part of it. Even though Middle Earth is supposed to be a fallen world haunted by ruins, there's barely enough settled areas to support armies of any kind. And the movies don't help - the great towering city of Minas Tirith rises out of a barren lifeless plain. Not a single village, farm, field, or orchard is encountered approaching it from any direction. No herds of animals. No granaries or mills. What the hell do they eat?

There's also the fact that fewer and fewer fantasy gamers have knowledge or an interest in real-world history and geography.

Quote from: Daztur;785173Don't think that's a bad thing, there's so many things that eat people in D&D-land that it makes sense for population densities to be low.

Think that settlements should look like what you get historically in areas of constant low-level warfare (like the English/Scotland border historically) but even more so, with every last farmhouse being fortified except in very secure locations.

I pull right out of Faux-Medievalia and assume things look like the fortified city-states of Mesopotamia and pre-Columbian Central America.  Everybody lives close enough to the city that they can retreat inside the walls when shit happens.

Quote from: daniel_ream;785271I pull right out of Faux-Medievalia and assume things look like the fortified city-states of Mesopotamia and pre-Columbian Central America.  Everybody lives close enough to the city that they can retreat inside the walls when shit happens.

See, that makes far more sense in the presumed setting of a game like D&D, with monsters roaming all over the place, than the scattered unwalled villages and yeomen farmer homesteads.

Quote from: Haffrung;785196In contrast to the map above, here's a map at approximately the same scale. You'll note that it encompasses the fucking entirely of Yorkshire, including dozens of town, villages, and castles.

So yeah, most fantasy settings are just that - fantastically implausible in almost every respect, from demographic to geographic to political. My rule of thumb with fantasy maps is I have to reduce the scale by 5:1 (and often 10:1) to make them remotely sensible.

Yeah, when I ran Vault of Larin Karr I reduced the scale by 5:1 (to 1 mile per hex) - and the villages were *still* too far apart!

Quote from: Phillip;785201Africa south of the Sahara developed immensly populous and wealthy kingdoms and empires while Europe was recovering from the collapse of civilization....

Is this some Bizarro World thing they teach in US colleges now?

Edit: Such kingdoms as existed (Ethiopia, Sudan) were in north-east Africa and part of the Mediterranean trade world. There were no "immensly populous and wealthy kingdoms and empires" south of the Sahara. The Bantu Expansion dates to this era and brought farming & metalworking tribes across most of sub-Saharan Africa, largely replacing the indigenous pygmies and others, but there was nothing like a Eurasian 'kingdom' or 'empire'.

Quote from: Phillip;785195My own preference is that fairy folk reside in Faery, although invasions both ways can expand or contract the Fields of Men. Having creatures of the Other Side as residents of the mundane world tends to make them mundane, which is not to my mind desirable.

I am rather at odds here with a long history of conventions in D&D and related fantasy.

So when do you have all demi humans and monstrous races as residents of the faery realm? Or are some of them mundane?

I had been thinking of doing this to some degree with my 5e setting. Since I am doing all by the book I won't be leaving races out, but I had planned on having elves, gnomes, and most monstrous races belong either to the feywild or the shadowfell. Though I had imagined that there is no permanent barrier nor clear demarcation of where these realms end and the mundane begins, that way it would make perfect sense for their to be an orc raiding camp in the mountains for instance.