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Can someone point me to some resources on the possible population of a petty kingdom, like tiny for an actual kingdom? I have played around with a few of the calculators floating around the web but they give drastically different numbers. Even one that gave a reasonable population for the size of the area I had in mind still had it suggested that there would be something like 58 villages. How much of this should be hand waved? I am also looking for something like a way to calculate how many fighting men a leader would have available.

The best game source of this, IMHO, is ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) by Autarch, which is based on a lot of research on historical demographics and economics, and was written, at least in part, by a scholar of history. This gives you all these calculations built into D&D-style rules, including rules for running domains and trade.

BECMI/Cyclopedia D&D I believe had some good guidelines.

But really it depends on how populated you want the region.

Is it a frontier and sparsely populated? Or is it an ancient kingdom with dozens of provinces? Is everything clustered close together or along a road or river course? Or is it spread out all over the place?

Personally I prefer sparsely populated frontiers. There might be populous empires elsewhere. But that is for later if the group travels so far.

Same goes for population spreads. Is a town a garrison? How frequent are wars or raids?

Quote from: golan2072;784358ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) by Autarch

Quote from: Omega;784369BECMI/Cyclopedia D&D

Came here to suggest these.

Quote from: Arkansan;784357Can someone point me to some resources on the possible population of a petty kingdom, like tiny for an actual kingdom? I have played around with a few of the calculators floating around the web but they give drastically different numbers. Even one that gave a reasonable population for the size of the area I had in mind still had it suggested that there would be something like 58 villages. How much of this should be hand waved? I am also looking for something like a way to calculate how many fighting men a leader would have available.

Medieval Demographics by S John Ross is based on historical data.

The original article
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm

This site has a calculator faithful to the original article.

http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/

In a economy dominated by Manorialism there will be a lot of little villages. If it helps, you can think of them as estates with people living on them rather than a hommlet style village.

Each hex is 2.5 miles or one hour of walking.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/S4SjzBtsucI/AAAAAAAAAuw/4VfhrSeWsrM/s1600/Manor.jpg)

This show a farm based economy where most villages are market centers for the surrounding farms. Villages are more or less like the Village of Hommlett.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_mFjy4EWzmtg/S4Sjy0tZEMI/AAAAAAAAAuo/c-bjfCBRkI4/s1600/Farm.jpg)

Each hex of cropland has 6 to 15 family farms. Each farm generally deals with a village a half day's walk away.

ACKS does have a excellent set of domain rules as well as BECMI however both are oriented toward manorialism so will produce a lot of domains/holdings/settlements for a realm.

58 villages is not a very big number at all.

However, I wouldn't think in terms of villages, at least not in the modern sense. Medieval lands had manors, administered by a local chappie, who was a squire, or a member of the minor aristocracy. Some Lords had many manors, scattered across a kingdom, each administered by a son, cousin or nephew, sometimes by a sister, daughter or niece. The farmers looked to the manor for their protection, religion and so on. Sometimes, the manor formed the heart of a village, but more often the farmers were organised in little farmsteads around tiny hamlets, with several hamlets associated with each manor.

I would say that 10 people is a farmstead, 20 people is a hamlet,  100 people is a village, 1,000 people is a town, so 58 villages is between 5,800 and 58,000 people, not a huge population by modern measures.

A rule of thumb is 1 in 10 of the population can be fighting men, as militia or armed farmers, with 1 in 10 of those being any good. So, 10% can be turned out to defend the area, but only 1% are considered anything better.

The B/X rules had some pretty decent data in them, although it wasn't big by any stretch.

There was the old 2e World Builder's Guide that had a lot of detailed data as well.

It's safe to say most published fantasy settings are dramatically underpopulated by historical terms. Regional maps routinely show 30-50 miles between villages and towns, with several days of punishing forced marches between settlements of all kinds. So if you want a setting with plausible demographics, you would do well to ignore the examples presented in published RPG material.

Thanks for the input everyone. I forgot that I bought the pdf of ACKS so I will look back over that. I am trying to work things out for a truly small petty kingdom, it was once a tribal kingdom then incorporated into a larger local kingdom that lasted for a few centuries then collapsed within the last couple hundred years. Basically the area it is set in is the armpit of the world so to speak, a far northern region that is isolated by turbulent seas. The whole area is inspired by Britain and Scandinavia in the century and a half after the Roman withdrawal so I was really trying to go for tiny petty kingdoms with sparse populations.

Quote from: Arkansan;784439Thanks for the input everyone. I forgot that I bought the pdf of ACKS so I will look back over that. I am trying to work things out for a truly small petty kingdom, it was once a tribal kingdom then incorporated into a larger local kingdom that lasted for a few centuries then collapsed within the last couple hundred years. Basically the area it is set in is the armpit of the world so to speak, a far northern region that is isolated by turbulent seas. The whole area is inspired by Britain and Scandinavia in the century and a half after the Roman withdrawal so I was really trying to go for tiny petty kingdoms with sparse populations.

5-10 people per square mile would be about right for the inhabited areas. The Scandinavian and Highland Scots model was Farmsteads/Steadings with extended families, rather than villages & towns.

An advantage of ACKS is that the book actually shows you how to adjust the various parameters to suit a wide range of historical examples, especially in terms of population density and urbanization. It can simulate anything from the Bronze Age right up to a moment before the Industrial Revolution reaches the agricultural sector.

I love ACKS, but I've had a long argument with Alex that was mostly my missing a detail of pg 231: the ~90% non-urban population "is assumed to live in isolated homesteads and hamlets", where by ACKS' definition a hamlet is < 75 families and typically does not support any sort of persistent market. So the naive reading is "ACKS puts 90% of people in isolated houses like the sterotypical early American frontier", but it's really "ACKS puts 90% of people in villages under 375 people", which I find much more plausible in an environment with monsters.

Quote from: estar;784396Medieval Demographics by S John Ross is based on historical data.

I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu. Short version:

* Paris is unusual and so not a good representative sample, even if it looks like good data. (I'm looking for my keys over here under the streetlight because over there where I dropped them it's too dark!)

* Some of the numbers are hard to believe.

For example, the SV of Jewelers and Taverns/Restaurants is the same. Your village is just as likely to have somebody who deals in fancy jewelry as they are to have a tavern. (And an Inn is 5x as rare as either!)

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu.

Found it (in another current thread here!): http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2013/10/medieval-demographics-done-right.html, and sequel post.

So you know there are two parts to S John Ross article. The first part estimates the number of settlements which is the part relevant to the OP. The second estimates the number of businesses.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466I've read some pretty strong criticism of S John Ross' use of the Paris Tax Rolls on OSR blogs, but can't seem to locate it with 10 minutes' google-fu. Short version:

Actually he relies on Life on a Medieval City which uses a truncated version of the Paris Tax Rolls.

I found a spreadsheet of the original and generated my own table using the same algorithm.

I first write about it here.
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/02/difficulties-of-historical-settings.html

Give my own take in this
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/10/fantasy-sandbox-in-detail-part-xviii.html

The original
http://heraldry.sca.org/names/parisbynames.html

The Paris Tax roll spreadsheet
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Tax%20roll%20Paris%201292%20Rev%202.xls

My version of Demographics.
http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Fantasy%20Demographics%20Version%201.pdf

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466* Paris is unusual and so not a good representative sample, even if it looks like good data. (I'm looking for my keys over here under the streetlight because over there where I dropped them it's too dark!)

The algorithm works and can only improve as more lists of people by occupation turns up. And that the trick finding those lists.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784466* Some of the numbers are hard to believe.
For example, the SV of Jewelers and Taverns/Restaurants is the same. Your village is just as likely to have somebody who deals in fancy jewelry as they are to have a tavern. (And an Inn is 5x as rare as either!)

The problem is one of categorization. What is a Jeweller exactly? If you look at the Paris Tax Roll you will see that the recorder is pretty detailed on what each person does. Life in the Medieval City, S John Ross, and myself went thorough that list and came up with broader catagories.

In my PDF I listed what I considered belong to a given profession.

Jeweler
Deals with making Jewelry out of precious metals/materials.
Bone Carver, Button maker, Gilder, Gold Cloth maker, Gold Braid Maker, Gold Refiner, Goldsmith, Jeweler, Lapidary, Ring Maker, Silvermith, Engraver.

The big one that really skews the results are the 116 goldsmiths. If you take them out the most common jewellers are button makers, rosary makers, and lapidry. The first two are very plausible in a rural setting.

My view for my campaign is that Jewellers deals in finework. Small intricate works. It includes jewelry, gold, silver and other luxury items. But the most common use of  a Jeweler's skills is to make bits of useful but decorative items like buttons, wooden ties, along with a healthy market for religious items.

Quote from: Naburimannu;784475Found it (in another current thread here!): http://ravenswing59.blogspot.com/2013/10/medieval-demographics-done-right.html, and sequel post.

Good series of posts. The only downside that while part ii gives sort of hard numbers it does not present any of the original data. But I can see if I can get a hold of the books listed in part i and see what he is not listing.

This is fascinating.

So, is Manorialism less defensible than farm/centralized communities?

(And you guys have convinced me to pick up ACKS first chance I get. ;)

Defensible in what sense? Militarily?  I should think there are just as many castles either way.

Quote from: Will;784605This is fascinating.

So, is Manorialism less defensible than farm/centralized communities?

(And you guys have convinced me to pick up ACKS first chance I get. ;)

Western Manorialism resulted from the collapse of the roman economy. The only thing that was of true value was land. So the germanic kings warrior buddies all got villas and estates. This evolved over time to the feudal relationship of King and his vassals. For a variety of reason these estates were worked as communal farms creating the manors of the middle ages. In theory each manor had at least a knight as the holder as the grants were contingent on the holder providing military service in exchange for the land.

The reality was that things were shifting all the time. In a few instance for a few decades the feudal ideal was achieved, like William's conquest of England. But Europe was a patchwork of varying setups that depended on how the local economy was going and local custom.

A ideal feudal setup would have at least a knight in charge of each manor. The knight would be capable of mustering five men including himself. One knight, one squire, and three yeoman. A region wide problem would be responded to by the feudal overlord calling up his vassal from a central location.

A ideal farm setup would have regular forces conducting patrols from a central location. The farmers would be part of a local militia with some type of quick warning system so that the militia can be quickly formed within a day. The regulars would join with the militia to deal with whatever the problem is.

There are variation of the above, so much so that the real answer it depends on how you have set it up.

Been debating how to set up a kingdom in my fantasy setting.

It's a sizeable area between two large rivers, gulf to the west (trade), large dangerous mountains to the east, other friendly nations north, dangerous horse-riding slavers/hordes to the south.

So... hrm. It's a March, an old kingdom (it used to be in the middle of similar countries until horse-nomads slowly took over to the south), and I'm trying to figure out how exactly it'll be laid out.

Quote from: Will;784605So, is Manorialism less defensible than farm/centralized communities?

Depends on what you mean by defensible.  Manorialism (the bottom rung of what we think of as feudalism, but technically they're distinct concepts) helped concentrate wealth enough to build castles, which made conquering territory or permanently defeating a lord much more difficult.  On the other hand they didn't always do much for the peasants themselves.  The very difficulty involved in taking a castle diverted warfare towards pillaging and burning your rival's villages and crops, just to try to force him to a settlement.

Fortified farm houses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastle_house) (of which modern generic fantasy and its thriving villages of prosperous peasants don't have nearly enough) do more for their residents against raiders, but less to inconvenience a real invading army.  And free men are more likely to be trusted with useful weapons and fortifications, though standards varied from place to place.  (I had an idea the English law against crenellating a building without a license is still technically in force, but now I look I can't find a good source for that.  May be just a history nerd urban legend.)

Ooo, Bastles would be perfect, I think. The southern folks are characterized by repeated, uncoordinated raiding parties look to hassle the northerners and get slaves.

Quote from: Will;784664until horse-nomads slowly took over to the south), .

That your critical element in figuring out how it is currently laid out.

One possible path.

1) There was people living in the area prior to the nomads moving in. How did they live and were organized?

2) Horse nomads suggest a steppe culture with semi-permanent settlements centred around herding.

3) Horse nomads moving in will likely mean they retain their nomadic culture at first. Likely using the pre-existing as source of luxury items. For ease of control and to clear land for pasture, the nomad will likely drive the native population onto concentrated estates. Each estate will overseen by a nomad clan. Powerful clans will control multiple estates.

The original nobility will be made into subordinates. If they prove too rebellious, the original nobles will be destroyed and collaborators will be elevated to subordinate positions. Likely much of the original rural population will be enslaved or more likely made into serfs with their freedom of movement restricted.

The region's urban centers will suffer as disruption in trade patterns spread through the region. However they will be viewed as THE major source of luxury goods by the nobles so will be more tolerated compared to the rural population. They will also be the nucleus from which nomad culture begins to integrate into the regional culture. The exact mix of the fusion culture will depend on how many nomads there are to how many natives.

If you choose to set the realm in the middle of this then the traditionalist will likely view the new fused culture as a corrupted form of what should be. While the progressives view the traditionalists as stick in the muds who are unable to appreciate the new finer things of life.

Understand that this has nothing to do with morality. It may be that the traditional nomad culture is a bunch of brutes and the fused culture is taking on aspect of the high art and ideals of the native. Or it could be vice versa, the nomadic culture is mostly egalitarian with a strong code of right and wrong while the fused culture is a degeneration into a dog eat dog world. Most cases are in between.

One constant among the variation is that the nomadic is likely to be the less sophisticated. Contact with the original centralized culture with urban center will leave the nomad scrambling for answers to various questions particular those related to ruling a large mass of people with a variety of trades. This is why the likely result will be a fused culture rather than nomads totally supplanting the original culture.

I can give detailed advice if I have more specifics.

If you are willing to entertain neeping about my campaign... sure!

Ok, two continents: Paccitania to the north, Farsvia to the south.

At one point, most of central to lower Paccitania was filled with early European-ish groups. Brisk trade across the narrow sea with ancient, developed nations in northern Farsvia.

Then dragons and their dragonborn minions swept through most of Farsvia, enslaving or killing most of the humans and driving refugees north.

Many refugees traveled by ship into southern Paccitania, filling and then taking over the area.

A radical bunch of horsemen grabbed some Farsvian port cities, then took over parts of southern Paccitania and began to sweep outward.

They are brutal remnants of a dozen cultures exterminated by dragons. Their horse nomadic slaver culture is actually very recent, so ... basically, they are land pirates.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/potchote.gif)

Rianneth is composed of European-like nations that essentially were pushed north (into lands that were once Celt-controlled before they got wiped out by a necromancer empire that the ~Europeans took out). The bit between Rianneth and the Clans was once a crossroads of trade and prosperous middle kingdom. Now it's a march guarding the south, though it's helped by the Clan leaders being distrustful/not adept sailors and two rivers (and the demon-ridden wasteland).

(The light green is deciduous forest, though it's likely to have been cut down in most inhabited areas)

So... thoughts? :)

How the hell do you pronounce 'Clctapl' with a human set of speech organs, and why isn't it spelled that way?

It's a dragon word, and, in this (20 year old) setting they talk more like parrots. Very... very big parrots.

And actually I can pronounce it... kl-kta-pl

I've been slowly going through and updating names for things into more sensible names, while preserving the original names as degenerate English versions.
So, Germanic nation Misserbrannen is properly Meißerbranheim, the Virdi people are Vårde, and so on. Yay Google Translate!

Lorsa river... been tinkering, making it a degeneration of L'Or de sang (blood gold) river once...

Expanding on the last, decided to go with the retrofit 'l'or de sang' and make the eastern part have once been an olive oil region.

Preliminary map of the Gedwil region, with some info from the demo site:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/Gedwil.png

(It's big so I'm not going to embed it)
Green is light forest (where it's not farmland)/seasonal, yellow is grasslands/maritime, brown is mountains, orange wasteland, cyan is swamp/marsh/rainforest (which is probably stupid, coming back to it a decade later, but whatever)

Scale is one hex = 10 miles.

The red is capital city, black cities are marked.
Fiefdoms of various types are marked in the Kingdom of Gedwil, using the rough idea that 30 mile radius is a day's travel. (Or should it be half that, so that anyone can take no more than a day to get somewhere from anywhere in the district?)

Neat! Mapping is one aspect that I tend to fall flat on. Historically I just do a write up of each regions general terrain and the distances in any direction from one point of interest to another with some tables of possible encounters and wandering monsters. It works ok but this go around I am really trying to be a bit more concrete about these things and actually map them out. I am using the free version of Hexographer and so far I really like it.

I love maps. I suck at them, but I love them. ;)

Yeah, I actually own Campaign Cartographer but every time I start tinkering with it I just... ... stare.

I'm sure if I spent a month exploring it I'd make great maps, but... I... don't really want to spend a month learning how to use an app.

Hexographer might not do everything, but it can work pretty fast and easy. (I find I prefer to switch the normal hex graphics off. I'd rather just have colored areas and occasional symbols)

Quote from: Haffrung;784429It's safe to say most published fantasy settings are dramatically underpopulated by historical terms. Regional maps routinely show 30-50 miles between villages and towns, with several days of punishing forced marches between settlements of all kinds. So if you want a setting with plausible demographics, you would do well to ignore the examples presented in published RPG material.

Don'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.

Quote from: Will;785130I love maps. I suck at them, but I love them. ;)

Yeah, I actually own Campaign Cartographer but every time I start tinkering with it I just... ... stare.

I'm sure if I spent a month exploring it I'd make great maps, but... I... don't really want to spend a month learning how to use an app.

Hexographer might not do everything, but it can work pretty fast and easy. (I find I prefer to switch the normal hex graphics off. I'd rather just have colored areas and occasional symbols)

Yes, I agree completely with your assessment of CC3. I've seen several instructional videos, and every time I get done with them I have a headache. It makes the GIMP learning curve look easy at times.

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.

(http://files.meetup.com/252197/Quail%20Valley%20-%20players.JPG)

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 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9973/9973-h/images/34.jpg). 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 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9973/9973-h/images/34.jpg). 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 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9973/9973-h/images/34.jpg). 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! :D

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.

One idea I'm using for my current game is that, other than a handful of (mostly nonstandard) races, most of the standard D&D races are actually half-breeds.

So, faerie + humans result in things like elves, gnomes, halflings, and dwarves. They last a generation or two before reverting to human. Sometimes groups of them appear, last for a while until their children are gone.

Half-elves are, basically, quarter faerie.

Tieflings, well, duh.
(Orcs, maybe something similar)

This is also a convenient handwave for many other demi-humans. Various mystic forces will give rise to small tribes of nonhumans, but over time they vanish.

Quote from: S'mon;785284Is this some Bizarro World thing they teach in US colleges now?

Nope.

Quote from: S'mon;785284Edit: 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'.

I wouldn't say Europe was "recovering from the collapse of civilization" except maybe in the broader sense of the Carolingian Renaissance that was more or less contemporary to the rise of the Kingdom of Ghana, but interesting things were happening in the Sahelian kingdoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahelian_kingdoms) (lots of interesting maps in this Wikipedia link).

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.

Exactly. Trying to model D&D after real world demographics only works in a low fantasy setting where monsters are few and far between rather than daily threat.

Possibly closer to the demographics of tribal settlements in Africa or South America where the wilderness is a constant threat.

Quote from: Haffrung;785278See, 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.

Well part of the problem is that things like this just didnt occur to the module or game writers at the time. Or simply because fort towns did not fit the imagry the writer wanted.

Quote from: S'mon;785284Is this some Bizarro World thing they teach in US colleges now?

I don't know what's taught in US colleges now; my view (subject to the ravages of memory) was formed mainly by books and articles available in the 1970s-80s.

QuoteEdit: 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'.

Zimbabwe, Mutapa, Kongo, Benin, etc., were nothing like the Franks and such? Really?

Perhaps I was misled by seeming memory of estimates comparing the scope of populations, armies and wealth of sub-Saharan African nations favorably with contemporary Western Europe in some periods. Maybe I confused affairs in other regions with affairs in Western Sudan. Then again, perhaps I retained a more accurate view than what you favor. Or we might simply disagree on what qualifies for such subjective adjectives.

Anyone who really cares is well advised to make an independent inquiry into the evidence.

Quote from: estar;784478Good series of posts. The only downside that while part ii gives sort of hard numbers it does not present any of the original data. But I can see if I can get a hold of the books listed in part i and see what he is not listing.

Gah, coming late to the party ... bad time for me to take a few days off!

Yer darn tootin' I didn't present the original data: I was putting up a couple of blog posts distilling data useful to the would-be fantasy worldbuilder, not writing a hundred-page footnoted dissertation that the likes of Fernand Braudel, Robert Lopez and Josiah Cox Russell did better than I could anyway!

I'm happy, of course, to cite more of the works I used for those genuinely interested in DIY, but that was the result of on-and-off research over more than thirty years.  To those maniacs who want to duplicate (and, hopefully, better) the research, go forth, and my blessings upon you!

In response to the OP: If the density and large number of villages bothers you, there are a couple of (historically accurate) options:

- place your setting in a less productive natural environment, i.e. tundra, moorlands, desert, mountains, dense forest or jungle - the few arable spots will have villages, but the land in between doesn't support permanent human habitation

- have a plague, war, or a high population of monsters render otherwise arable land unusable - deserted, ruined villages make for good settings

- come up with cultural or social reasons why some part of the population doesn't farm and settle, i.e. elves who prefer to live off the land, hunt, and sleep in seasonal settlements

Quote from: Will;785130I'm sure if I spent a month exploring it I'd make great maps, but... I... don't really want to spend a month learning how to use an app.

That's one of the reasons that's always turned me off mapping programs -- that, and the propensity commercial mapping programs have of provoking the following type of statement, which at one point had three similar threads created within a week of one another: "So, the company of my Uber Kewl Mapping Software went out of business, and I just changed to a new computer, and now I can't unlock my softwhare, help!!!"

I've been using a different method: 36 years now and going strong.  I have a giant pad of finely ruled graph paper, 17" x 36" (this particular pad, purchased in 1982, is down to the last few sheets).  I get out pencils, colored pencils and markers, and I make maps.  As needed, I scan and/or laminate them.  Voila -- maps.  No learning curve, no locked software, all in good order.

I just keep upgrading and redoing maps. ;)

Cutting edge MacPaint! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/localmap.gif

Cutting edge Fractal Mapper! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/potchote.gif

And now Hexographer! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/Gedwil.png


And, down the road, whatever else comes out. ;)

(For what it's worth, Hexographer has been pretty easy to use)

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.

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.

I'm thinking more of fortified villages rather than cities proper, but the idea is the same. Fields surround the community, which is city like in that it is high density residences. Catal Hayuk is the first thing that comes to my mind:http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l5wtnLUSeDY/Tyvgd2fDZCI/AAAAAAAAEPA/1IZP9NcW3eo/s1600/catalhoyuk_JaumeBoschMart%C3%ADnez.jpg (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l5wtnLUSeDY/Tyvgd2fDZCI/AAAAAAAAEPA/1IZP9NcW3eo/s1600/catalhoyuk_JaumeBoschMart%C3%ADnez.jpg), but the palace complex a Knossos, if the walls were fortified, would also work: http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/446/flashcards/4907446/png/knossos-14456EBFFFE2F24F956.png (http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/446/flashcards/4907446/png/knossos-14456EBFFFE2F24F956.png)

In Catal Hayuk's case the outer walls of the town are house walls, so if you need to expand you just add houses on to the outside. In a D&D type setting it might make sense to have these walls be thicker and fortified, which would mean that as the town expands you would have layers of fortified walls going, up, so even if someone breaks through one wall it only gets them into a house; there are still fortified walls all over the place. If a warning is given, run to the town and pull up the ladders. Maybe add crenelations to the top as well so defenders are protected.

Quote from: Ravenswing;785365Gah, coming late to the party ... bad time for me to take a few days off!

Yer darn tootin' I didn't present the original data: I was putting up a couple of blog posts distilling data useful to the would-be fantasy worldbuilder, not writing a hundred-page footnoted dissertation that the likes of Fernand Braudel, Robert Lopez and Josiah Cox Russell did better than I could anyway!

I'm happy, of course, to cite more of the works I used for those genuinely interested in DIY, but that was the result of on-and-off research over more than thirty years.  To those maniacs who want to duplicate (and, hopefully, better) the research, go forth, and my blessings upon you!

Historical is not always gamable. When I noticed S John Ross sources, I went "Mmmm I have Life in a Medieval City". Then I noticed where Life got it numbers. I wondered if the original was translated anywhere and sure enough I found it.

Then I did my own intrepetation of it. But I just didn't expection people take my word for it. I pointed the original source but I also did posted my work (a spreadsheet) so if somebody else wanted to give a go at it more power to them.

That was the essence of my mild criticism. Don't get me wrong your posts are very good. But the at the end of day they are your interpretation of your sources. You didn't save me any time to judge things because I have to go diving into the same sources you did. What would make them great posts is if they had the intermediate steps laid out.

I misspoke when I said it would be nice to have given your sources in detail. What I mean is it would be nice to see the intermediate "worksheet" that listed out all the data you cherry picked, in a good way, from your sources. Then show how you used them to get the numbers you did.

Quote from: Will;785393I just keep upgrading and redoing maps. ;)

Cutting edge MacPaint! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/localmap.gif

Cutting edge Fractal Mapper! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/potchote.gif

And now Hexographer! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/Gedwil.png


And, down the road, whatever else comes out. ;)

(For what it's worth, Hexographer has been pretty easy to use)

I have to point out if people like the type of maps I personally draw then Inkscape will do the job. http://www.inkscape.org. I use CorelDRAW but several years ago Inkscape developed to the point where every technique I use in Corel can be done in Inkscape. I keep up with Corel because it what I am used too. But for somebody just starting out use Inkscape.

If I ever want to do nice maps, rather than functional/informative ones, I will probably try Inkscape (I've heard about it from several sources).

For now, functional will do.

Quote from: S'mon;785284Is 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'.

Yes. They actually teach this now. Most college professors hate America and want to make absolutely sure we know how awesome every other place in the world is compared to Western civilization.

The first lecture I got in History in college was half about how muslims never took slaves for life and treated them much better than Christians; and the other half was how George W Bush is the devil.

This in about 2010.

If anyone wants to help with my stuff, come to : http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?p=785424#post785424

That's something I never thought about: monstrous humanoids ought to count towards total population.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785438That's something I never thought about: monstrous humanoids ought to count towards total population.

http://celtricia.pbworks.com/w/page/14956529/Trabler
yep.  I do all my nations as acculturated and total.

... Is that population 395 billion people?

Re fantasy villages; mine pretty well always have a palisade around them. It would never occur to me to do differently, except when running published adventures with their undefended villages in the howling wilderness. Even then I tend to stick a palisade around them unless they need to be undefended for Plot purposes.

The heavily defended farm/steading as seen in eg the Scottish Borders is another good model, one which I've only tended to use in Norse-type areas though - I should make more use of it in my core areas such as Loudwater in my FR game.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785414Yes. They actually teach this now. Most college professors hate America and want to make absolutely sure we know how awesome every other place in the world is compared to Western civilization.

The first lecture I got in History in college was half about how muslims never took slaves for life and treated them much better than Christians; and the other half was how George W Bush is the devil.

This in about 2010.

OK thanks, suspected as much. Even though I sympathise with their POV re Dubya. :D

Quote from: Will;785452... Is that population 395 billion people?

no.  thank you.  fixed.
http://celtricia.pbworks.com/w/page/27766668/The%20Bright%20Lands  use this example instead.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785414Most college professors hate America

No doubt some professors do. Just like some rightists clearly hate
America. But most professors? Let's see your strong supporting data for this wacky statement, otherwise I call BULLSHIT!

Quote from: Bren;785501No doubt some professors do. Just like some rightists clearly hate
America. But most professors? Let's see your strong supporting data for this wacky statement, otherwise I call BULLSHIT!

Okay here's my supporting evidence.

Of the donations from professors to republican candidates and to Obama for president in 2008 and 2012, 92% went to Obama. And his number one stated purpose is to fundamentally transform America. Which he has done.

That's how I know they hate America. You wanna fucking call me the fuck out on fucking America-hating academics, you can fucking bite me.  I know my enemies. Do you?

STFU with off-topic crap please.

This is a board about games.

Quote from: Bren;785501No doubt some professors do. Just like some rightists clearly hate
America.

The ones with swastikas on their lapels, I guess.

I supppose you could argue the Libertarians & trad-cons hate modern America, but they mostly adhere to ideas of a desired previous or potential America. There are a few throne-&-altar trad-cons who do hate America itself (they are against the Revolution which separated America from Britain), but they're a pretty tiny minority within the USA. They went to Canada. :)

That's a very good point, Simon, there are very few royalists in America of any kind and have not been for 150 years.

I must however take exception, respectfully, that nazis, paleo or neo, are conservative in the way we mean the word in America.  That is a lie told by members of the left that has gained some great traction in America over the last 50 years.

This article might be of interest to people in this thread. I haven't read it yet, but it looks appropriate.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/pdf/broadberry/medievalpopulation.pdf

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785513I must however take exception, respectfully, that nazis, paleo or neo, are conservative in the way we mean the word in America.  That is a lie told by members of the left that has gained some great traction in America over the last 50 years.

Nazis are radicals not conservatives, but there is a reactionary element in Nazi ideology so there is some truth in classing them as on 'the right' even though they don't really fit into the original (Revolutionary France) left-right spectrum, of left-wing radicals and right-wing conservative monarchists. But American Whig-Liberal Republicans don't really fit into the spectrum either. :D Of course there are left-wing elements in Nazism too, hence National Socialism. Actual Neo-Nazis seem to hate the mainstream US Left & Right about equally, but less extreme white nationalists do often seem to see themselves as closer to the mainstream Right, from what I can tell. That may be a modern phenomenon to do with recent racial polarisation though; fifty years ago they would have been in, or closer to, the Democrats than the Republicans.

Sorry for OT, will stop now. :)

Quote from: ptingler;785519This article might be of interest to people in this thread. I haven't read it yet, but it looks appropriate.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/pdf/broadberry/medievalpopulation.pdf

Some good stuff in there, thanks! Looks like population density by county was pretty low in 1086, I wonder how much lower it would have been in say 500? Or even 700?

Let me apologize to people not calling bullshit on me for derailing the thread too. It was at least half on me. The whole reason I am in the thread in the first place is because I am also interested in learning both about medieval demographics, and their fantasy analogue.

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785503Okay here's my supporting evidence.

Of the donations from professors to republican candidates and to Obama for president in 2008 and 2012, 92% went to Obama. And his number one stated purpose is to fundamentally transform America. Which he has done.

That's how I know they hate America. You wanna fucking call me the fuck out on fucking America-hating academics, you can fucking bite me.  I know my enemies. Do you?

yeah.  You can yank this thread now.
this is about as close to political trolling as you can get.
92% of a highly educated group went to one candidate.  and because they voted a way I disapprove of, they hate America.

Please raise the average IQ of the country slightly by leaving.

Back on topic.

AD&D set a 16% chance of any given hex being habited. 14% being actual dwellings, the other 2% being ruins. So about 1 hex in 7 having someone living in it ranging from 1 to 60,000+.

Alright now gentlemen lets let that particular portion of the thread lie. I think this has been a productive thread on the subject and I'd like to see it continue to be so rather than end up locked.

So back on topic, just how much can we account for fantastic elements in setting demographics before it becomes to cumbersome to do so? I know that this will vary from setting to setting, one thing that most seem to agree on though is that it would lead to a more militarized style of living. Having wandering hordes of monsters, or even the threat of the small groups of them, seems like over time combined with the normal threats a society faces might would drive a very high emphasis on the warrior class. That or end up in a society where everyone is expected to be something of a warrior. I am leaning more toward the first for the current setting I am working on for 5e.

Quote from: Arkansan;785529Some good stuff in there, thanks! Looks like population density by county was pretty low in 1086, I wonder how much lower it would have been in say 500? Or even 700?

Northern European populations were very low until the invention of the mouldboard plough allowed wheat farming in the heavy northern European clay soils. Even civilised areas like Roman Britain seem to have had low populations.

Quote from: Arkansan;785552So back on topic, just how much can we account for fantastic elements in setting demographics before it becomes to cumbersome to do so? I know that this will vary from setting to setting, one thing that most seem to agree on though is that it would lead to a more militarized style of living. Having wandering hordes of monsters, or even the threat of the small groups of them, seems like over time combined with the normal threats a society faces might would drive a very high emphasis on the warrior class. That or end up in a society where everyone is expected to be something of a warrior. I am leaning more toward the first for the current setting I am working on for 5e.

Yes - for worlds with wandering orc hordes and such, generally I find that classical (pre-Roman) and dark ages eras give me better inspiration than high-medieval, unless I am creating a world with large civilised areas ("Realm of Man") behind violent frontiers, in which case I can go more Gygaxian with civilised-medieval societies combined with frontiers that resemble the Scottish borders or the wild frontiers of medieval eastern Europe.

The 4e D&D World of Nerath was a good approach to a Dark Ages, post-empire type world. The Wilderlands has more of a Classical feel, or pre-Hellenistic Greek Dark Ages feel (with the Gnoll Times substituting for the Dorian Invasions). Greyhawk would work for High Medieval + Frontiers if the population numbers weren't so low; I think 3e multiplied them by 5 but really they need to be much larger still to fill the map in any plausible manner.  Forgotten Realms is a bit of an odd case, but closer to the Frontier approach - for the core Sword Coast & Heartlands I tend to treat it like the American Frontier minus any major centralised State, while Cormyr and a few other areas are traditional High Medieval. Core FR culture has a very modern 'Ren Faire' feel so historical analogues are weak, but the late 17th or early 18th century is probably closest.

On 'everyone a warrior', I mix it up a fair bit - in FR the typical frontier situation is most people are yeoman farmers who are fairly capable of defending themselves and their steadings or villages from wolves, bandits, goblins, Uthgardt etc. Some more populous areas have feudalism with a knightly class pledged to defend their peasant farmers; their tax demands have to be light though since there is plenty of unfarmed wilderness land for disgruntled peasants to flee to - only danger keeps peasants under the knightly shield.

My current Wilderlands Ghinarian Hills games are set in a kind of mini version of Mycenean or Greek Dark Ages culture, with local warlords defending their little realms with a small warband, and ruling over a mass of subjects whose status somewhat resembles medieval peasantry, but mostly sheep herders rather than wheat farmers (they also grow olive trees, but that hasn't featured in-game yet, whereas the sheep herding has come up a fair bit). In this setting the lightly armed 'peasants' use slings, javelins and such to ward off wolves from the flocks, and in support of the warlord's small force of heavily armoured elite soldiers.

Quote from: Arkansan;785552Alright now gentlemen lets let that particular portion of the thread lie. I think this has been a productive thread on the subject and I'd like to see it continue to be so rather than end up locked.

So back on topic, just how much can we account for fantastic elements in setting demographics before it becomes to cumbersome to do so? I know that this will vary from setting to setting, one thing that most seem to agree on though is that it would lead to a more militarized style of living. Having wandering hordes of monsters, or even the threat of the small groups of them, seems like over time combined with the normal threats a society faces might would drive a very high emphasis on the warrior class. That or end up in a society where everyone is expected to be something of a warrior. I am leaning more toward the first for the current setting I am working on for 5e.

Right.
You need to figure out a lot of the base-level/historical demographics BEFORE you get to these.

What % of your population is 'level-capable'?  What % of that can cast magic?  And of that, how many are priest-like and how many are others?  Lastly, what type of power scale is your game?
These alone have a gigantic effect on the political and economics of your fantasy setting.  For example, If your setting is one where an average town has 8 churches with an average of 10 casting priests, how likely is an outbreak of disease when the city has 96 cure disease spells a day available?

On the opposite, how prevalent are undead and where do they come from?  What tribes of humanoids are out there, and how level capable are they?  How large do they have to be to thrive in a setting with all sorts of larger and more powerful threats?

Quote from: Scott Anderson;785543[...] I am also interested in learning both about medieval demographics, and their fantasy analogue.

I have to admit I have long since lost my taste for "realistic" clockwork universes, unless I am explicitly playing a low-magic, low-fantasy sandbox or something.  In the same way that "Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off" homogenized fantasy in the 1980's, "An era of medieval history with the serial numbers filed off" (GRRM being the biggest offender, but I'm also looking at you, Dave Duncan) is homogenizing fantasy badly now.

Give me flying ships, impossibly huge crystalline castles sticking out of the side of mountains at impossible angles, talking animals and royal families of water elementals whose social structure looks like the Chinese Imperial bureaucracy.  I want some fantasy in my fantasy.

Quote from: daniel_ream;785630I have to admit I have long since lost my taste for "realistic" clockwork universes, unless I am explicitly playing a low-magic, low-fantasy sandbox or something.  In the same way that "Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off" homogenized fantasy in the 1980's, "An era of medieval history with the serial numbers filed off" (GRRM being the biggest offender, but I'm also looking at you, Dave Duncan) is homogenizing fantasy badly now.

Give me flying ships, impossibly huge crystalline castles sticking out of the side of mountains at impossible angles, talking animals and royal families of water elementals whose social structure looks like the Chinese Imperial bureaucracy.  I want some fantasy in my fantasy.

I teeter back and forth on the issue. Sometimes I like a lower fantasy where things "make sense". However I do have the urge from time to time to just go over the top and truly be "fantastic".

There's a middle ground -- having a firm grasp of realistic demographics can help provide a solid jumping off point for fantastical weirdness.

It reminds me of art. Pablo Picasso's early work is surprising to most people, because it's very realistic portraiture. When he started doing cubism... it was a conscious decision to do things in a particular 'unrealistic' fashion. He did it _informed_ by how perspective normally works.

Basically, if you don't make an attempt to learn how things really work before changing things, you're kind of being lazy and missing an opportunity to improve your work.

Quote from: LordVreeg;785620Right.
You need to figure out a lot of the base-level/historical demographics BEFORE you get to these.

What % of your population is 'level-capable'?  What % of that can cast magic?  And of that, how many are priest-like and how many are others?  Lastly, what type of power scale is your game?
These alone have a gigantic effect on the political and economics of your fantasy setting.  For example, If your setting is one where an average town has 8 churches with an average of 10 casting priests, how likely is an outbreak of disease when the city has 96 cure disease spells a day available?

On the opposite, how prevalent are undead and where do they come from?  What tribes of humanoids are out there, and how level capable are they?  How large do they have to be to thrive in a setting with all sorts of larger and more powerful threats?

Right, the game books give you a lot of bits and pieces, but with rare exceptions (I'm thinking of some official lines in 4e) they leave it up to you how those fit together and in what proportions.

The best way to work up a plausible game situation is with actual play: Establish some premises, and cut people loose. What you learn from that dynamic process can then inform the background for another game.

GDW did something like this to create the background for Traveller 2300 (later disambiguated with the title 2300 AD).

Quote from: Phillip;785636Right, the game books give you a lot of bits and pieces, but with rare exceptions (I'm thinking of some official lines in 4e) they leave it up to you how those fit together and in what proportions.

And this is so critical to making the game seem like it works.

Things can be totally fantastic and make sense, or be gritty and low powered and make sense.  And somewhere in between can be pretty cool as well.

Quote from: Arkansan;785552So back on topic, just how much can we account for fantastic elements in setting demographics before it becomes to cumbersome to do so? I know that this will vary from setting to setting, one thing that most seem to agree on though is that it would lead to a more militarized style of living.

I'd say that very few settings -- and certainly fewer published settings -- have thought this through.

If you have wandering monsters and orc raids routinely rampaging through the countryside -- deep within the notional borders of nations, and powerful enough to require PCs to kill -- then the nations' ability to produce the food and luxury goods that the players rely on having in affordable abundance is seriously compromised.

If, by contrast, you have a countryside militarized enough to handle or cordon off such threats, a lot of PC plotlines go away ... and, incidentally, the PCs' ability to push around or intimidate schmuck villagers should be sharply reduced.

Good point about wandering encounters being an external pressure to be accounted.

I personally work plain wildlife and travelers/merchants/etc. heavier in the Common & Uncommon slots while in civilized areas. I allow smaller races to overlap on the periphery, such as halflings/gnomes/goblins/kobolds, as long as there's agreement to tolerate each other. I use wilder, less organized races like goblins & kobolds to be buffers to utter wilderness.

In this way civilized areas are safer, though still dangerous rarely, and then progressive rings of less safe organization.

Quote from: Haffrung;785185That 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.

Well there's only one situation I can think of in which that kind of society would make sense: a post-apocalyptic area in which the human population has been reduced to a tiny fraction of its former value (or in which humans are new colonists) but where there aren't many threats about at the moment.

Obviously this state of affairs is passing as the human population will boom rapidly but it's possible and I think it shows up a lot in fantasy because it fits with two things that would be very familiar to a lot of people when the fantasy genre was getting its legs under it: Tolkien and the Wild West.

Middle Earth in Tolkien is absolutely post-apocalyptic which explains the very low population density but it doesn't seem THAT dangerous as long as you're not poking your nose in scary places, which is why Bree exists and why the dwarfs were able to travel around for years and years and years without dying before the start of the Hobbit. Dangerous, sure, but not so dangerous when there's not a war going on that you can't have prosperous unwalled villages in some areas.

Same goes for the American West (and in a lot of ways D&D can really feel like a Western), which was again post-apocalyptic due to the massive die-off that hit America as a result of the Colombian Exchange etc. This resulted in a lot of small, unwalled and fairly prosperous villages with massive areas of wilderness in between. Again, certainly dangerous but no so dangerous that you can't have prosperous unwalled villages.

So the sort of demographics you're complaining about are certainly POSSIBLE, but yeah, using them as a baseline is rather weird and not my preference either.

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.

My own preferences are for things to be on a bit smaller scale. I suppose fortified manors/large farmhouses make sense if there are small scale but endemic threats while fortified cities make more sense if there's occasional but massive threats. There's a trade-off between quality of fortification and how quickly people can get behind the fortifications, for example it'd be hard to have a sizable city in which all of the people who farm food to feed it get behind its walls every night.

Quote from: Daztur;786053Middle Earth in Tolkien is absolutely post-apocalyptic which explains the very low population density but it doesn't seem THAT dangerous as long as you're not poking your nose in scary places, which is why Bree exists and why the dwarfs were able to travel around for years and years and years without dying before the start of the Hobbit. Dangerous, sure, but not so dangerous that you can't have prosperous unwalled villages in some areas.

One thing a lot of people forget about Middle Earth is that the shire only exists as this cheery, safe, prosperous place because there is an elite order of warriors dedicated day and night to keeping Hobbits safe in their little bubble. So in a lot of fantasy settings we get shires, but not the 200 rangers dedicated to the protection of each.

It's worth noting that the dwarves pre-Hobbit were pretty much penniless wanderers who traveled in largish groups and skulked and ran from anything scary. And Tolkien doesn't go into detail about their sometime home in the Blue Mountains, but one gets the impression it's not exactly the thriving, bustling, rich community we get in most fantasy RPG settings.

Quote from: Daztur;786053Same goes for the American West (and in a lot of ways D&D can really feel like a Western), which was again post-apocalyptic due to the massive die-off that hit America as a result of the Colombian Exchange etc. This resulted in a lot of small, unwalled and fairly prosperous villages with massive areas of wilderness in between. Again, certainly dangerous but no so dangerous that you can't have prosperous unwalled villages.

Good point - something like Quail Valley in VolK looks VERY like a Western movie setting. I think this is pretty much the default for American RPG fantasy.
It occurs to me though that the main reason IRL that Western settlements were not fortified was that the inhabitants had rifles, a more powerful deterrent than any palisade. Without some equivalent advantage over likely threats (whether Red Indians or Orcs), Western-type townships seem very unlikely to me.

Quote from: S'mon;786063It occurs to me though that the main reason IRL that Western settlements were not fortified was that the inhabitants had rifles, a more powerful deterrent than any palisade. Without some equivalent advantage over likely threats (whether Red Indians or Orcs), Western-type townships seem very unlikely to me.

Well, that, and the American West didn't have the overwhelming number of trees that made colonial seaboard stockades not only feasible but quite a good idea.  You need to clear the trees from about two acres of forest (on a very rough average) to provide a stockade around a space as small as an acre, and an acre is a very teensy town.

That being said, in line with Haffrung's cogent comment, you hit upon another distorting fact about the American West: it was at the end of a high-tech supply chain.  The western settlers didn't have to rely on weapons they cobbled together themselves: they were heavily armed with modern guns right out of the workshops of Springfield, MA, and Hartford, CT, hauled out by railroad lines from which few in the west were more than a few days ride away.  The settlers didn't have to solely rely upon themselves, but had the well-armed federal cavalry around and about -- and in cases of dire threat, large armies dispatched by the national government.

Quote from: S'mon;786063Good point - something like Quail Valley in VolK looks VERY like a Western movie setting. I think this is pretty much the default for American RPG fantasy.
It occurs to me though that the main reason IRL that Western settlements were not fortified was that the inhabitants had rifles, a more powerful deterrent than any palisade. Without some equivalent advantage over likely threats (whether Red Indians or Orcs), Western-type townships seem very unlikely to me.

The repeating rifle was a match or more for skilled bowmen, but of course once it hit the market Indian silver was as shiny as anyone else's (and Americans' propensity for selling anything, legality notwithstanding, goes back to colonial times).

Natives in some areas had cliff dwellings that served well as fortresses. In the woodland east, warfare was a pretty continual business; tribes unable to hack it got forced out to the west (if not wiped out).

I'd say  it's not so much what you've got as what you do with it to make the other guys reluctant to attack you. Anyone with a couple of revolvers could wreak a load of carnage on Main Street, but what was in it for him? Likewise somebody with less fancy gadgets in an old-time American Indian (or medieval European) homestead.

I guess I have not seen "most published D&D settings," because what I do recall is mostly well in line with its context as far as amount of fortification.

Quote from: Haffrung;786055One thing a lot of people forget about Middle Earth is that the shire only exists as this cheery, safe, prosperous place because there is an elite order of warriors dedicated day and night to keeping Hobbits safe in their little bubble. So in a lot of fantasy settings we get shires, but not the 200 rangers dedicated to the protection of each.

It's worth noting that the dwarves pre-Hobbit were pretty much penniless wanderers who traveled in largish groups and skulked and ran from anything scary. And Tolkien doesn't go into detail about their sometime home in the Blue Mountains, but one gets the impression it's not exactly the thriving, bustling, rich community we get in most fantasy RPG settings.

I wasn't thinking the Shire so much as Bree. Bree seems a very D&D sort of town in my experience (not much in the way of higher authority, far as fuck from anything else, rough and tumble but not really a war zone or fortified) as well as close as you can get to a Western town in Middle Earth.

It's just the sort of town that you're complaining about being highly unrealistic, but it's something that does make sense if and only if it's on a frontier and/or post-apocalyptic (and Middle Earth is certainly post-apocalyptic as are most D&D settings) while also not being in an especially dangerous location.

So the American fantasy baseline is a strangely cheery and prosperous post-Apocalyptic wasteland. Pretty weirdly specific baseline and one I don't care for myself but not TOTALLY unrealistic.

In an area that is not on a clear military frontier, you can have internal affairs that are not readily addressed with fortresses and armies - and hence more suited to the employment of small groups of resourceful adventurers.

Likewise, if adventure is to be found in unsettled wilderness, you won't be meeting much in the way of towns at all. The original D&D booklets gave me the impression of something like the weird wasteland in Arthurian tales, and of course that brings up the fact that the subject of the game is myth-rooted fantasy, not quotidian economics.

Quote from: Ravenswing;786392Well, that, and the American West didn't have the overwhelming number of trees that made colonial seaboard stockades not only feasible but quite a good idea.  You need to clear the trees from about two acres of forest (on a very rough average) to provide a stockade around a space as small as an acre, and an acre is a very teensy town.

Please replace 'palisade' with 'adobe wall' if you prefer. :D
Those modern Afghan fortified steadings/farmhouses seem like a good example of what you get in a really dangerous location, and the walls will stop AK47 bullets.

Quote from: Phillip;786411Anyone with a couple of revolvers could wreak a load of carnage on Main Street, but what was in it for him?

Death. Compare the Viking Sagas like Njall's Saga - one bunch of Vikings could go attack out a smaller bunch of vikings, set fire to their steading and usually wipe them out without losses. In the Old West Clanton/McCoy family feuds involved bushwhacking more than frontal assaults, because the weaponry created high mutual vulnerability.

Getting back to the lack of fortification in the Old West - the danger level generally just wasn't that high. The Apaches, if still around, might hit an isolated farmhouse, but they weren't likely to raid the town and suffer the losses that would involve. Bandits might rob the bank, but probably wouldn't try to level the town. Whereas in a Quail Valley type setting the local orcs could well raid town & aim to burn it down, with good prospect of success.  The fantasy village should really look more like an Iron Age settlement, not 1880s Arizona or 1930s rural England.

Interesting Western aside, most gunfights resulted in 0 casualties, and even the big 'massacres' are often, like... 10 people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Old_West_gunfights

Now, genocide against Indians is a different matter.

For the curious, my map-so-far is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/Gedwil2.png

(It's 6060 x 3700 pixels, so...)

Scale is 1 hex= 2.5 mi; the hatched green hexes are farmland in strongly seasonal climate (cleared woodlands), the medium green with tufts in it is farmland in more maritime climate (cleared grassland). Little house icons are villages.

And I just found out Hexographer doesn't bind 'ctrl-S' to 'save' so almost all the details on that png are... gone.

Oh my fucking God.

2-3 hours of work.

(facedesk)

Update:
AAAAH. Thankfully, since I exported the map and Hexographer DOES have an 'overlay on an image' function, I was able to very quickly recreate the details.

Quote from: Ravenswing;785984I'd say that very few settings -- and certainly fewer published settings -- have thought this through.

If you have wandering monsters and orc raids routinely rampaging through the countryside -- deep within the notional borders of nations, and powerful enough to require PCs to kill -- then the nations' ability to produce the food and luxury goods that the players rely on having in affordable abundance is seriously compromised.

If, by contrast, you have a countryside militarized enough to handle or cordon off such threats, a lot of PC plotlines go away ... and, incidentally, the PCs' ability to push around or intimidate schmuck villagers should be sharply reduced.

Most settings I've seen tend to have orcs and whatnot off in the borderlands... usually where there's some kind of Keep set up with the intention of holding them at bay.

Quote from: RPGPundit;787583Most settings I've seen tend to have orcs and whatnot off in the borderlands... usually where there's some kind of Keep set up with the intention of holding them at bay.

Same with the Majestic Wilderlands, Orcs tries dwell beyond the frontier of settlement or live in undesirable territory like mountainous terrain. There is one case of a region occupied by orcs that once a realm (an elven forest). But that just a special case of a frontier.

In the Elphand Lands, the individual realms are smaller many of them with a small amount of wilderness (a day's walk usually). This creates corridors where orcs and other "Monsters" can use to get around.

The reason for this is that population density is low due to the fact that the region is a mix of human, elven, dwarven, gnome, and halfling realms. All "friendly" with each other but also keeping to themselves.  Compared to the land area of the region this causes the population to clump together in a way that leaves large gaps between the various edge of settlement or control.

Think northern Russia in the early medieval times.

I deliberately contrived this to make this region the bog standard D&Dish/Forgotten Realmish area of my setting. Kept chipping away at the backstory over 30 years until made sense with the history of the rest of the setting and with real world demographics.

I will add that medieval russia and eastern european is a great source for making plausible demographics for a D&Dish setting. You don't have use their culture per say but rather read up why their settlements were the way they were. Basically clumps of settled lands with miles of true wilderness in between.

Then mix with the culture of your choice and you have a plausible D&Dish setting with orcs and other monster running amuck.

Yeah you can justify pretty much any set of demographics with a bit of thought and magic. What I don't like is when they just have a set of strange demographics without any thought as to why they're that way.

It's kind of like Medieval settings without any sexism. No problem at all with setting having that but I'd like a little bit of thought as to the reasons why patriarchy was so common in the real world and the logic as to why those reasons don't apply to the setting (magic reducing maternal mortality, birth control herbs, etc. etc.).

Quote from: Daztur;787723[...] I'd like a little bit of thought as to the reasons why patriarchy was so common in the real world and the logic as to why those reasons don't apply to the setting (magic reducing maternal mortality, birth control herbs, etc. etc.).

One of the reasons I couldn't get through the Deed of Paksenarrion without wincing.  In addition to the presumption that women can be heavy infantry just as well as men, there's a birth control herb served with every meal.

Women being able to control their own fertility, along with the huge reductions in infant mortality/death in childbirth brought by magical or mundane healing, totally upends any kind of pre-20th century social structure.

Re: birth control herb...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

Quote from: daniel_ream;787793In addition to the presumption that women can be heavy infantry just as well as men...

The presumption was that some women could be heavy infantry just as well as some men. And the protagonist, Paksennarion, was not some petite, sheltered, courtesan but a big strapping farm girl.

Quote from: Bren;787801The presumption was that some women could be heavy infantry just as well as some men. And the protagonist, Paksennarion, was not some petite, sheltered, courtesan but a big strapping farm girl.

In another thread there was reference to optional human sexual dimorphism in the Creatures Book of Avalon Hill RuneQuest. Thing is, those rules don't allow for the full spectrum of real-world sizes. A woman with SIZ 30-something would have more HP and twice the damage bonus of the largest man the rules allow (and there have of course been men larger than her).

But it doesn't take such an extreme. I'm exceptionally short for a modern American man, but perhaps about average for an ancient Roman. And ancient Teutons were I think bigger than them, women as well as men. Didn't keep the little Romans from conquering an empire; didn't keep 'em from watching out for the women of Gaul (by some accounts more ferocious than the men) either.

Just how the society in the Paks tales is supposed to collapse because of birth control and a few female soldiers is a mystery; perhaps the person who suggested that can illuminate us.

I am not going down the "women are exactly the same as men except PATRIARCHY" SJW rabbit hole with you fruitbats.

Nothing wrong with women being heavy infantry if you have birth control herbs in steady supply. Seems sensible to me. Just don't like "just like the Middle Ages but no sexism because *handwave*"

Quote from: daniel_ream;787809I am not going down the "women are exactly the same as men except PATRIARCHY" SJW rabbit hole with you fruitbats.

... Yes, because pointing out stereotypes are only ever true on a large scale and individuals vary a lot, and how certain characteristics don't matter as much as people might think is TOTALLY SJW.

I realize it's easier to throw a bunch of tribal bullshit up in the air and duck for cover rather than, you know, argue a point, but it makes you look like a kneejerking moron.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787809I am not going down the "women are exactly the same as men except PATRIARCHY" SJW rabbit hole with you fruitbats.

The adult response to realizing that you unthinkingly wrote something stupid is to correct what you wrote and possibly apologize. But instead of doing the adult thing you decided to invent a strawman contrasting argument to point at as you run away from the conversation. Classy.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787793Women being able to control their own fertility, along with the huge reductions in infant mortality/death in childbirth brought by magical or mundane healing, totally upends any kind of pre-20th century social structure.

Oh really? From what point in time? In what way does it upend society? If a birth control herb discovered in 1100 AD would upend feudalism. How about 500 AD or 300 BC oh wait they did have a birth control herb then. Did not  make society of that era any less patriarchal did it?

In the Deed of Paksenarrion, the tradition of women military service stems from a combination of the influence of the Fellowship of Gird, Elves being an equilaterian society in regards to sex, and the fact the deities of the setting manifested their power and picked women champions.

Fellowship of Gird is that way because of the founder's effect of Gird allowing women full participation during his revolt against the mage lords.

And despite all these factors the author still had women being a minority within the military. It was further limited to distinct regions of her setting. I.e. the northern kingdoms of Fintha, Tasia, and Lyonya. It was specifically remarked that other regions considered the presence of women warriors to be unusual.

Quote from: Daztur;787811Nothing wrong with women being heavy infantry if you have birth control herbs in steady supply. Seems sensible to me. Just don't like "just like the Middle Ages but no sexism because *handwave*"

As I recall, it makes no pretense of being just like the Middle Ages. It's very obviously close to Tolkien's Middle Earth, perhaps a Fourth Age. And also obviously close to the usual D&D-Land.

Quote from: estar;787625I will add that medieval russia and eastern european is a great source for making plausible demographics for a D&Dish setting. You don't have use their culture per say but rather read up why their settlements were the way they were. Basically clumps of settled lands with miles of true wilderness in between.

If anyone actually did that, that'd be one thing.  Except, of course, they don't.

Medieval Russia had three characteristics that went hand in hand with its demographics that you don't find in published settings: low tech level, lack of wealth and consumer goods and vast distances between settlements.  If PCs don't mind getting paid by the thankful villagers in chickens, don't mind that the blacksmith's asking them for the iron before he makes them new swords (and laughs, "And where you'll find enough I've no idea!"), and has no problem with several days' travel over empty steppe to get anywhere ... but we're talking a setting that makes Harnworld look like Renaissance northern Italy.

Quote from: Phillip;787806In another thread there was reference to optional human sexual dimorphism in the Creatures Book of Avalon Hill RuneQuest. Thing is, those rules don't allow for the full spectrum of real-world sizes. A woman with SIZ 30-something would have more HP and twice the damage bonus of the largest man the rules allow (and there have of course been men larger than her).

But it doesn't take such an extreme. I'm exceptionally short for a modern American man, but perhaps about average for an ancient Roman. And ancient Teutons were I think bigger than them, women as well as men. Didn't keep the little Romans from conquering an empire; didn't keep 'em from watching out for the women of Gaul (by some accounts more ferocious than the men) either.

Just how the society in the Paks tales is supposed to collapse because of birth control and a few female soldiers is a mystery; perhaps the person who suggested that can illuminate us.

But he sexual dimorphism in humans isn't just about size. Women have lower muscle mass and muscle density than men. That is just a thing its not dependent on any setting or background its just a thing.
Now the D&D rules in particular only differentiate up to the top 0.5% of the population so is it possible that the top 0.01 or one in 10,000 women is physically stronger than the top 0.5% of men well if you look at numbers ..
The 75KG female snatch WR is 131 KG  the men's 75KG male snatch is 175 KG the lightest male category is 56 KG and the record there is 137KG.
So big strong women are roughly as strong as small (56 KG s tiny...) strong men.
Now I have no issues with female warriors, I prefer them to use technique over brute strength and the ability to use finesse in 5e might enable that. I just want to make sure that strong female warriors look more like Brienne than Brittany.

Quote from: Phillip;787806But it doesn't take such an extreme. I'm exceptionally short for a modern American man, but perhaps about average for an ancient Roman. And ancient Teutons were I think bigger than them, women as well as men. Didn't keep the little Romans from conquering an empire; didn't keep 'em from watching out for the women of Gaul (by some accounts more ferocious than the men) either.

It took me a while to realise that even women who are much bigger than me are not nearly as strong as me. The difference in upper body strength between men and women is enormous. I recall reading that if you take away body fat, humans are the most sexually dimorphous of all the great apes.

So, a little Roman man was likely still stronger in the upper body than a big Gaulish woman. Which is why historical female fighters (who were rare) tended to be light support troops such as archers, not heavy infantry.

Quote from: Daztur;787811Nothing wrong with women being heavy infantry if you have birth control herbs in steady supply. Seems sensible to me.

If women could be effective melee infantry you wouldn't need birth control. Chastity has the same effect. You'd have battle-nuns, for instance.

Birth control in the 20th century allowed women to have sex without getting pregnant. It thus removed a traditional incentive to marry - so you could have sex. It makes fielding mixed sex armies somewhat more practical, but does not have a big effect IMO - plenty of female soldiers still get pregnant. Sex-segregated units would be a lot more effective than voluntary contraception; they'd probably be more combat-effective too.

Quote from: Phillip;787901As I recall, it makes no pretense of being just like the Middle Ages. It's very obviously close to Tolkien's Middle Earth, perhaps a Fourth Age. And also obviously close to the usual D&D-Land.

Didn't meant to criticize the book, have never read it but stuff like birth control herbs at mess makes it sound like the author has done their homework which makes me want to read the book, was criticizing other settings that just say "nope, no sexism here" without thinking about the reason and consequences for that.

Quote from: Ravenswing;787911If anyone actually did that, that'd be one thing.  Except, of course, they don't.

Medieval Russia had three characteristics that went hand in hand with its demographics that you don't find in published settings: low tech level, lack of wealth and consumer goods and vast distances between settlements.  If PCs don't mind getting paid by the thankful villagers in chickens, don't mind that the blacksmith's asking them for the iron before he makes them new swords (and laughs, "And where you'll find enough I've no idea!"), and has no problem with several days' travel over empty steppe to get anywhere ... but we're talking a setting that makes Harnworld look like Renaissance northern Italy.

Sounds really interesting. Makes me wish I'd learned more of that kind of nuts and bolts stuff in my college Russian history class (Kievan Rus to 19th century) but never really got a good sense of what the economic and social structure of rural Medieval Russia was like but sounds very D&D-worthy. I'd assume there would be strong river-based trade routes?

For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

That's a lot of kids. And because they didn't have vaccines or clean water these kids got sick all the time with lots of very serious illness or death that required a lot of nursing. If these kids didn't get breast milk it was even worse. The titanic size of the time sink this represents is something that's hard for modern people to wrap their brains around, which puts a massive barrier in the path of women.

Then if you take a demographically significant chunk of women and put them on birth control and get them killed and the whole demographic situation starts to fall apart in pre-modern societies you NEED that massive fertility rate.

Good thing we don't anymore, the idea of spending so much time on kids who die half the time sounds rather nightmarish.

Yeah, I seem to recall in some periods/areas they didn't even bother naming children until 1 or 2, because what's the point?

It's also interesting that 'average lifespan' is often wildly misleading because normal calculations include everyone, which means that infant mortality can knock off 10-30 years.
Which means people look at the number and go 'wow, people only lived until 50?'
No, lots of people didn't make it to 3. If you actually lived past THAT, your lifespan was likely to be a bit higher.

Quote from: Will;787943Yeah, I seem to recall in some periods/areas they didn't even bother naming children until 1 or 2, because what's the point?

It's also interesting that 'average lifespan' is often wildly misleading because normal calculations include everyone, which means that infant mortality can knock off 10-30 years.
Which means people look at the number and go 'wow, people only lived until 50?'
No, lots of people didn't make it to 3. If you actually lived past THAT, your lifespan was likely to be a bit higher.

Yeah and having two kids really makes me understand just how much time kids take up. I can't even imagine having six kids. And I have healthy kids.

Basically just multiply sane maternity leave times the fertility rate needed to maintain a pre-modern population and look at the holes that that leaves in female education and work experience.

Then make the kids much sicker.

Quote from: Daztur;787941For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

That's a lot of kids. And because they didn't have vaccines or clean water these kids got sick all the time with lots of very serious illness or death that required a lot of nursing. If these kids didn't get breast milk it was even worse. The titanic size of the time sink this represents is something that's hard for modern people to wrap their brains around, which puts a massive barrier in the path of women.

Then if you take a demographically significant chunk of women and put them on birth control and get them killed and the whole demographic situation starts to fall apart in pre-modern societies you NEED that massive fertility rate.

Good thing we don't anymore, the idea of spending so much time on kids who die half the time sounds rather nightmarish.

This description bears some resemblance to the situation in pre-modern sub-Saharan Africa, where disease and crop-devouring megafauna often did require all hands to the fertility plough. But in most of the world the threat was overpopulation, not underpopulation. Adaptive measures to avoid starvation through overpopulation included late marriage and nunneries - at times in medieval Europe very large numbers of women became nuns. A nonexistent need to breed has nothing to do with the lack of women warriors, at least not outside Africa.

Quote from: Daztur;787941For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

Don't even have to go back that far. I wrote a paper on population statistics in the 1990's for my U.N. political science class and recall regions of Africa with 7+ children per woman with negative population growth. I don't recall which nation it was, but one of them had an average of 9 childbirths per woman and still had a negative population growth.

Reminds me of the National Geographic article that had a biologist term Africa "the living Pliocene." So many living things there grew alongside with mankind and its meteoric rise that they had a longer chance to adapt and survive. The rest of life on the other continents fared far less well in resisting humanity. Basically the article noted life's evolutionary response to humans in Africa was hyper-aggression to keep humans away. It apparently worked.

Makes for great gaming fodder: a continent that is the origins of a human(oid) race, leaving evolutionary legacy flora and fauna.

Quote from: estar;784675That your critical element in figuring out how it is currently laid out.

One possible path.

1) There was people living in the area prior to the nomads moving in. How did they live and were organized?

2) Horse nomads suggest a steppe culture with semi-permanent settlements centred around herding.

3) Horse nomads moving in will likely mean they retain their nomadic culture at first. Likely using the pre-existing as source of luxury items. For ease of control and to clear land for pasture, the nomad will likely drive the native population onto concentrated estates. Each estate will overseen by a nomad clan. Powerful clans will control multiple estates.

The original nobility will be made into subordinates. If they prove too rebellious, the original nobles will be destroyed and collaborators will be elevated to subordinate positions. Likely much of the original rural population will be enslaved or more likely made into serfs with their freedom of movement restricted.

The region's urban centers will suffer as disruption in trade patterns spread through the region. However they will be viewed as THE major source of luxury goods by the nobles so will be more tolerated compared to the rural population. They will also be the nucleus from which nomad culture begins to integrate into the regional culture. The exact mix of the fusion culture will depend on how many nomads there are to how many natives.

If you choose to set the realm in the middle of this then the traditionalist will likely view the new fused culture as a corrupted form of what should be. While the progressives view the traditionalists as stick in the muds who are unable to appreciate the new finer things of life.

Understand that this has nothing to do with morality. It may be that the traditional nomad culture is a bunch of brutes and the fused culture is taking on aspect of the high art and ideals of the native. Or it could be vice versa, the nomadic culture is mostly egalitarian with a strong code of right and wrong while the fused culture is a degeneration into a dog eat dog world. Most cases are in between.

One constant among the variation is that the nomadic is likely to be the less sophisticated. Contact with the original centralized culture with urban center will leave the nomad scrambling for answers to various questions particular those related to ruling a large mass of people with a variety of trades. This is why the likely result will be a fused culture rather than nomads totally supplanting the original culture.

I can give detailed advice if I have more specifics.

I live right next to a town that was started as a trading post where Comanches used to come to buy and sell goods @150 years ago. Depending on certain conditions, there could be no Comanches at all and then suddenly  hundreds -maybe a thousand or more- coming to town to carry out business and just as suddenly they'd go home.

I bring this up because many world builders, when using one of the random placement charts or computer programs, will panic when the results are a large group of creatures turning up out in the middle of nowhere. Usually, they'll ignore the results because a tribe of a thousand nomadic horsemen here, a war party of 500 orcs there, etc seems seriously out of whack.

One way to handwave this is to assume that when monsters turn up in large numbers in this fashion, they are recent arrivals (an invasion) or that this is a regular seasonal migration: "The horsemen of the Dry Heath follow the spring rains with their herd and usually depart by late summer". Or it could be a hallowed site for pilgrims or whatever.

Quote from: Haffrung;784429It's safe to say most published fantasy settings are dramatically underpopulated by historical terms. Regional maps routinely show 30-50 miles between villages and towns, with several days of punishing forced marches between settlements of all kinds. So if you want a setting with plausible demographics, you would do well to ignore the examples presented in published RPG material.

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.

Correct answer. But to add to it, monsters (including human ones) can cause damage far greater than just killing people outright. That ogre wasn't just content to eat the shepherd, but killed all the sheep, ransacked the shepherd's home, raped his daughter, then set fire to everything else in the village that would burn (including the crops) -all for shits and giggles. Needless to say, the surviving villagers will be looking to get out of Dodge as soon as possible unless they can find a band of plucky heroes to kill that ogre...

But if they can't, those fields won't be tilled, those meadows won't be grazed, and so on. There won't be any surplus of food or other goods to support the towns and cities because there won't be any produce at all. Look up Chevauchée for more.

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.

That's how I do it. I use the simple formula of X number of people that could be supported in a given square mile (sometimes by random roll). Every HD of monsters in a hex supplants at minimum a like number of human HD. Especially evil/destructive/chaotic monsters will remove a much greater number of human HD, for the reasons above.

Quote from: Haffrung;785196In contrast to the map above, here's a map at approximately the same scale (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9973/9973-h/images/34.jpg). 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.

You think maybe that's why it's called fantasy?

Quote from: Haffrung;785253There's also the fact that fewer and fewer fantasy gamers have knowledge or an interest in real-world history and geography.

Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to fantasy. They can add a nice touch here and there, but they don't really matter all that much.

Quote from: Ravenswing;785984I'd say that very few settings -- and certainly fewer published settings -- have thought this through.

If you have wandering monsters and orc raids routinely rampaging through the countryside -- deep within the notional borders of nations, and powerful enough to require PCs to kill -- then the nations' ability to produce the food and luxury goods that the players rely on having in affordable abundance is seriously compromised.

If, by contrast, you have a countryside militarized enough to handle or cordon off such threats, a lot of PC plotlines go away ... and, incidentally, the PCs' ability to push around or intimidate schmuck villagers should be sharply reduced.

Oh noes! The DM will have to come up with something new!

Quote from: S'mon;786063Good point - something like Quail Valley in VolK looks VERY like a Western movie setting. I think this is pretty much the default for American RPG fantasy.
It occurs to me though that the main reason IRL that Western settlements were not fortified was that the inhabitants had rifles, a more powerful deterrent than any palisade. Without some equivalent advantage over likely threats (whether Red Indians or Orcs), Western-type townships seem very unlikely to me.

Depends on what you mean by "fortified". Most had timber or adobe palisades, with the exception of Fort Worth in Texas which was built on a cliff overlooking the river (i.e. a natural fortification):

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Z_ekkJMORRg/Tt_XrtTCPdI/AAAAAAAAAaI/-60_5LyFk0k/s640/1853+FW+Original+Fort+Site+Plan.jpg)

Quote from: S'mon;786489Death. Compare the Viking Sagas like Njall's Saga - one bunch of Vikings could go attack out a smaller bunch of vikings, set fire to their steading and usually wipe them out without losses. In the Old West Clanton/McCoy family feuds involved bushwhacking more than frontal assaults, because the weaponry created high mutual vulnerability.

Getting back to the lack of fortification in the Old West - the danger level generally just wasn't that high. The Apaches, if still around, might hit an isolated farmhouse, but they weren't likely to raid the town and suffer the losses that would involve. Bandits might rob the bank, but probably wouldn't try to level the town. Whereas in a Quail Valley type setting the local orcs could well raid town & aim to burn it down, with good prospect of success.  The fantasy village should really look more like an Iron Age settlement, not 1880s Arizona or 1930s rural England.

One notable exception would be Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas. I agree with your overall point which why, as far as I can remember, is why almost every village or town in hostile lands would either be fortified or have some other means of defense. Of course one defense is fear -fear of swift and bloody retribution. Which is why many strongholds, from the Norman motte and bailey forts to the palisade forts used by the U.S. cavalry 800 years later, were built in the first place: To give mounted troops a safe place to stay when they're not riding around smiting those scurvy Saxons/dirty Injuns.

Quote from: Daztur;787723Yeah you can justify pretty much any set of demographics with a bit of thought and magic. What I don't like is when they just have a set of strange demographics without any thought as to why they're that way.

It's kind of like Medieval settings without any sexism. No problem at all with setting having that but I'd like a little bit of thought as to the reasons why patriarchy was so common in the real world and the logic as to why those reasons don't apply to the setting (magic reducing maternal mortality, birth control herbs, etc. etc.).

I worry about that as much as I worry that so many other things in a typical FRPG setting are anachronistic. In AD&D the average human male is assumed to be six feet tall. That seems out of whack but in a world where humans do all kinds of things no one can do in real life, it's nothing to fuss over.

Quote from: jibbajibba;787912But he sexual dimorphism in humans isn't just about size. Women have lower muscle mass and muscle density than men. That is just a thing its not dependent on any setting or background its just a thing.
Now the D&D rules in particular only differentiate up to the top 0.5% of the population so is it possible that the top 0.01 or one in 10,000 women is physically stronger than the top 0.5% of men well if you look at numbers ..
The 75KG female snatch WR is 131 KG  the men's 75KG male snatch is 175 KG the lightest male category is 56 KG and the record there is 137KG.
So big strong women are roughly as strong as small (56 KG s tiny...) strong men.
Now I have no issues with female warriors, I prefer them to use technique over brute strength and the ability to use finesse in 5e might enable that. I just want to make sure that strong female warriors look more like Brienne than Brittany.

How many real-life people fight dragons or orcs?

Maybe FRPG people are just different.

Quote from: Elfdart;788082How many real-life people fight dragons or orcs?

Maybe FRPG people are just different.

I tend to run it that the adventurers are different, but that there is still a baseline of normal humanity where (eg) men are stronger than women, and society somewhat resembles the real world. Trying to  extrapolate the implications of actual significant changes to human nature creates a more science-fictional feel.

Quote from: Daztur;787941Sounds really interesting. Makes me wish I'd learned more of that kind of nuts and bolts stuff in my college Russian history class (Kievan Rus to 19th century) but never really got a good sense of what the economic and social structure of rural Medieval Russia was like but sounds very D&D-worthy. I'd assume there would be strong river-based trade routes?

Mmmm ... yes and no.  Russia is blessed by a lot of rivers.  Most of those rivers flow in inconvenient directions for trade (the Arctic Ocean being less than helpful in this regard), although almost all of Russia's meaningful cities in the medieval period were situated in the Volga, Don and Dnieper watersheds.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080But if they can't, those fields won't be tilled, those meadows won't be grazed, and so on. There won't be any surplus of food or other goods to support the towns and cities because there won't be any produce at all.

Beyond that, the damage raiders can do -- and often did -- goes farther than that.  Chop down the orchards of a fruit-growing town, and it won't recover for a generation.  Wreck the irrigation canals, and it might be the work of years to rebuild -- presuming the surviving peasantry possess engineering skills.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to the kind of fantasy I like to play.

There, fixed that for you.  I'm sure you weren't out to suggest that the style of fantasy you prefer is the only one conceivable, and that you're well aware of the many folks out there who prefer verisimilitude to I-don't-give-a-shit.

Quote from: Bren;785222FYI: 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.

I have never assumed a game or setting map shows everything that is there. I assumed this to be the case with Middle Earth as well (though I am not someone who has gotten deep into Tolkien beyond reading LotR and the Hobbit). When I run a published setting I am always adding settlements and other features to the map, and just take those that are visible as note able for some reason or another. Just like if I have a typical map of the Roman Empire in a history book, it it will show a handful of important cities or those relevant to the topic. A map of the empire with every city gets cluttered very quickly.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080You think maybe that's why it's called fantasy?


Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to fantasy. They can add a nice touch here and there, but they don't really matter all that much.

Then why not throw in cell phones, motorcycles, and predator drones to fantasy worlds? I mean, anything goes in fantasy, right?

Fact is, people have varying degrees of interest in verisimilitude in their fantasy RPGs (and in fantasy fiction). Some want medieval Europe with a dash of magic throw in. Some want Eberron. Hand-waving away all concerns about demographics, technology, and social models is just a lazy way to discount legitimate preferences.  

I've thrown down fantasy fiction is contempt when it showed too modern of an outlook (or rather, when the worlds that were dramatically different from our own were full of people with modern outlooks). To me, behavior flows from setting. In historical fiction, fantasy games - all imaginary worlds. I can no more overlook blatant inconsistencies than I could shrug off Legolas calling Gimli a douchebag and playing Angry Birds on his iPhone during a lull in the battle of Helm's Deep. It spoils any sense of immersion in a plausible world.

Quote from: Haffrung;788153Fact is, people have varying degrees of interest in verisimilitude in their fantasy RPGs (and in fantasy fiction). Some want medieval Europe with a dash of magic throw in. Some want Eberron. Hand-waving away all concerns about demographics, technology, and social models is just a lazy way to discount legitimate preferences.

Heh, I even have a sticky response, which given that there's some moron every day on some gaming forum somewhere who pulls the riff is only sensible:

QuoteI think the real question here is, "why do you consider the mechanics nonsense"? We're talking an imaginary dwarf, with 100 imaginary hit points, falling off an imaginary cliff, taking damage that is, also, imaginary.  If the designer finds it desirable that a character could fall off a cliff and survive, it will be so. If not, for whatever reason, it will not be. (The first mention of "but it's not REALISTIC!" gets you kicked. This is all *imaginary*, remember?)

If I had a dime for every time I've heard this over the last couple decades, I could pay all the bills this month.

Well, yes, it's all imaginary.  So why use cliffs, or indeed any recognizable terrain at all?  Why not adventure in big fluffy masses of amorphia?  Or just teleport to anywhere we want to go, and imagine it to be anything convenient to us?

Why should we use perfectly recognizable medieval weaponry?  It's imaginary, isn't it?  Don't limit yourself, hit the enemy with your kerfluffmezoz or your wheezimithuzit!

And since it doesn't have to make sense, we don't need to have these pesky movement rules, besides which we all want to be Matrixy and John Woo-esque, don't we?  Tell your DM that you're running through the air and phasing right through every intervening tree and foe to hit the Big Bad with your wheezimithuzit, and better yet you're doing it before he cut down your friend, because since it's all imaginary we don't have to use linear time either.

No, I don't care that I rolled a "miss."  Skill progression is one of those boring realism constructs, and I don't believe in it.  Let's just imagine that I hit the Big Bad whenever I need to, and for twenty-five hundred d8 of damage, too.  Encumbrance is boringly realistic too, so I’m ignoring it, and I’d rather imagine that my snazzy quilted vest protected me like the glacis armor on a T-72, please.

Alright, show of hands.  Why don’t we play our RPGs that way?

It’s called suspension of disbelief. We put our games into recognizable settings that mimic real life.  We use swords in fantasy games because we have the expectation that such milieus use swords, and those swords do the relative damage of a sword instead of the damage of a 155mm mortar shell because that is our expectation too.  Our fantasy characters wear tunics and cloaks, live in walled cities or sacred groves, and scale ramparts where the force of gravity pulls us downward, not pushes us up.  We have an expectation of how fast we can walk, how far we can ride, and how long we can sail.  All these expectations are founded in reality.

To the degree we ignore these things, just because, we lose touch with suspension of disbelief.  If the ten-foot-tall Big Bad hits a peon with his greatsword, we expect the peon to be in a world of hurt; we don't expect the sword to bounce off.  If the party wizard shoots a fireball at the orcs' wooden stockade, we expect that it might catch fire; we don’t expect the wall to grow flowers instead.  

And if an armored dwarf takes a gainer off of a hundred foot sheer drop, we expect to find a soggy mass at the base of the cliff.  We sure as hell don't expect a dwarf boinging around like a rubber ball, happily warbling, "Bumbles bounce!"

That there are a great many gamers who want their rule systems to reflect reality, rather than ignore it -- so that we find ourselves constantly sidetracked as to issues of WHY suchandsuch doesn't make sense, or because the GM has to explain how come the dwarf isn't a soggy mass -- ought be a surprise to no one.  Why is it such a one to you?[/COLOR]

Hear hear, Ravenswing!!!!

TOTALLY amen amen amen.

I've had similar comments regarding parallel discussions in MMOs, too.

'Realistic' is the improper term to worry about.
The term to work with in pairing Mechanics and Verisimilitude and the ability to suspend belief is 'Logical'.

As in, 'internal logic', conscious and unconscious.
"Cognitive psychology virtually depends on the brain's unconsious and autonomic attempt to create systems of logic and expectation.", from this discussion (http://www.thecbg.org/index.php?topic=59990.20;wap2) a few years ago.


In trying to create a world for the character's to grow and exist in, we more easily feel and sense through the character if said world is logical to us.

Quote from: Will;788263I've had similar comments regarding parallel discussions in MMOs, too.

Yep, seen it those places myself ... a MMORPG forum was in fact where the original of that sticky came from.

Now, okay: it's plain that there's a spectrum.  On one side of each line are people happy with that amount of verisimilitude.  On the other side of that line are people who don't care one way or another, and a bit further down the spectrum are people who are irritated by verisimilitude.  So stipulated.

It just pisses me off how angry some of the antis get that there are gamers who dare to want more verisimilitude.  I've asked them why they feel so threatened by the issue ... and I think that's the crux of it right there: they do feel threatened.  Which is silly.  It's okay for them to want a less intellectual, less rigorous game setting than others do.  It'd just be nice for them to own their position, rather than fling insults at those who disagree.

Quote from: LordVreeg;788269'Realistic' is the improper term to worry about. The term to work with in pairing Mechanics and Verisimilitude and the ability to suspend belief is 'Logical'.

(shrugs)  Nomenclature is nomenclature.  It grows organically about twenty times as often as it's manufactured, and gaming (as with every other human endeavor) is studded with terms that make no objective sense.  The issue was termed "realism" decades ago, it's the one that enjoys universal recognition and traction in such discussions, and I doubt it's going to change in your lifetime or mine.

Quote from: Ravenswing

Quote from: Originally Posted by LordVreeg'Realistic' is the improper term to worry about. The term to work with in pairing Mechanics and Verisimilitude and the ability to suspend belief is 'Logical'.

(shrugs) Nomenclature is nomenclature. It grows organically about twenty times as often as it's manufactured, and gaming (as with every other human endeavor) is studded with terms that make no objective sense. The issue was termed "realism" decades ago, it's the one that enjoys universal recognition and traction in such discussions, and I doubt it's going to change in your lifetime or mine.

Probably why I've always been quite happy doing my own thing gaming wise.  I really don't care as much about what some parts of a hobby term a thing as long as we know what we are talking about when we are having a discussion here.  The term 'realistic' is actually fraught with conversational mischief as to how it relates to our reality; so I feel no pains in introducing a better term that is not so burdened.  

Now, when we talk about an actual historical setting, or a game set in a real place,the ability for a game system to mimic it could be called 'realistic'.  But if we are talking about a setting other than ours, one where one can achieve suspension of belief but still has fantasy races and magic and strange religions and demons and undead....one doubts a term that can be defined as "the faithful representation of reality" is really the best one to talk about how it helps suspend said belief.

Further, since it is clearly NOT often the right term, the use of it impedes.  

Now, I happen to agree with your comments  about verisimilitude.  I don't understand how someone's preference for wanting more should make them bad; and frankly, to a certain point, I'll go further and say that some level of it is laudable and should be recognized as such.  Sure, some beer and pretzels gaming is fun, and sometimes we just want to create a little something and see how it flies.  But someone really working and building something unique to their vision that actually holds together well and increases player involvement is entirely a working of no little achievement.

Quote from: Ravenswing;788303(shrugs)  Nomenclature is nomenclature.  It grows organically about twenty times as often as it's manufactured, and gaming (as with every other human endeavor) is studded with terms that make no objective sense.  The issue was termed "realism" decades ago, it's the one that enjoys universal recognition and traction in such discussions, and I doubt it's going to change in your lifetime or mine.

In case Lord Vreeg is right because when it comes to things like superpower or magic nothing is realistic. But my experience that players buy in better when they are able to deduce how things works as they learn about the setting.

So I agree with Vreeg that Logical is the goal to shoot for rather talking about realism.

Quote from: Haffrung;788153Then why not throw in cell phones, motorcycles, and predator drones to fantasy worlds? I mean, anything goes in fantasy, right?

Well, why not?

QuoteFact is, people have varying degrees of interest in verisimilitude in their fantasy RPGs (and in fantasy fiction). Some want medieval Europe with a dash of magic throw in. Some want Eberron. Hand-waving away all concerns about demographics, technology, and social models is just a lazy way to discount legitimate preferences.  

I'm not dismissing all concerns, just the way some obsess over them far beyond anything remotely relevant to a fantasy setting. If having potatoes in Middle Earth or Westeros kills SoD for you because medieval Europe didn't have them, that's more your fault than Tolkien's or Martin's.

QuoteI've thrown down fantasy fiction is contempt when it showed too modern of an outlook (or rather, when the worlds that were dramatically different from our own were full of people with modern outlooks).

Maybe that's because people haven't really changed much over time, so there's no reason to think they would change very much over time and distance. Again, this notion that a fantasy setting needs to follow the real world is dumb.

QuoteTo me, behavior flows from setting. In historical fiction, fantasy games - all imaginary worlds. I can no more overlook blatant inconsistencies than I could shrug off Legolas calling Gimli a douchebag and playing Angry Birds on his iPhone during a lull in the battle of Helm's Deep. It spoils any sense of immersion in a plausible world.

That's a truckload of tough titty for you then.

Quote from: estar;788376In case Lord Vreeg is right because when it comes to things like superpower or magic nothing is realistic. But my experience that players buy in better when they are able to deduce how things works as they learn about the setting.

So I agree with Vreeg that Logical is the goal to shoot for rather talking about realism.

Yeah I used to go off on the quest for realism in my games. Like you said though, I have realized that what is more important is a gaming world that has a measure of coherency, things make sense within that context.

My friend and I were noting similar issues about games that overly favor players at the expense of contextual cohesion. A word that came up that encapsulated that disaffection was "continuity," as in there felt a lack of continuity amid all the pyrotechnic awesome glommed onto PCs compared to the world around them.

Quote from: Elfdart;788460I'm not dismissing all concerns, just the way some obsess over them far beyond anything remotely relevant to a fantasy setting. If having potatoes in Middle Earth or Westeros kills SoD for you because medieval Europe didn't have them, that's more your fault than Tolkien's or Martin's.

Still not getting the distinction between "fault" and "preference," are you?

This is not a matter of me being better than you because I prefer more verisimilitude than you, or you being better than me because you think the degree of verisimilitude I want in this situation or that strikes you as being over the top.  The degree I choose to obsess over something -- or you choose to obsess over something -- is a preference.  It's nothing to do with morality or sanity.

Swear to heaven, you're sounding like a guy who'd jeer at a chef because the fellow wants his spices Just So, instead of just going out for a burger or popping a TV dinner in the oven, which suits that guy just fine.

I do think this is all just preference. As a GM I usually let the needs of players guide me here since they are the ones I need to buy into the setting. But I don't think this is a single spectrum, it is many. I've run into players who care a lot about some details, not about others. Demographics are one of those details I see people invested in once in a while, but just because a player doesn't care about population density in a region that doesn't mean I can ignore other aspects of the setting (even when I was a history student, demographics came up very rarely). So you might have a player who doesn't care how many people are living in the valley or how far apart your settlements are, but might care very much about where the wood for their houses comes from and how they manage to get so much of it being in a seemingly wood-poor area of the world. They might also care about other things like the hierarchies of your religious institutions, the way trade is conducted, how armies are organized and what tactics they use, etc. Usually I try to zero in on the things I see my players asking questions about. Those are the parts of the setting I give most of my attention to. In a campaign last year I had a player who was especially interested in Carp farming in one of the settlements so I made a point of researching ancient aquaculture.

My view is that it is all preference, but there are techniques or elements that been shown to work more often than not. As well as techniques and elements that been shown to fail more often than. To confuse the issue, there are reports and anecdotes where a referee does everything "wrong" but everybody has a great time playing.

It similar to what is a good movie? There is a lot of technical aspects to making a movie and if you don't do them well the result is a bad movie, except when it isn't. It can be maddening but that how it is when it comes to human beings and entertainment. The same with tabletop roleplaying.

In my mind any debate about including Fantasy Demographics in a game is pointless. The simple fact is that there are people where it add greatly to their game. And there are people where it doesn't. And it is a spectrum issue as well in that people and groups vary in just how much detail they want.

Anybody in this thread should read any affirmative statement about including Fantasy Demographics as being precedded by "If you like the details of Fantasy demographics, here are my thoughts." An ideal world I wouldn't have to say this. Obviously we don't so there it is.

This thread about when Fantasy Demographics are included in a game. If you are not interested in this type of detail. Then this topic is of no use to you.

Also undertstand what doesn't work for you, is it not true of others. One of the top priorities of a  referee of any campaign using any system with specific type of detail is to understand what his players are interested. If you don't do that then you are going to have problem period as you are operating in the blind.

Quote from: estar;788503This thread about when Fantasy Demographics are included in a game. If you are not interested in this type of detail. Then this topic is of no use to you. d greatly to their game. And there are people where it doesn't. And it is a spectrum issue as well in that people and groups vary in just how much detail they want.

While I think some discussion on the merits of any subject is normal and fine (even if it is a little off topic) this is worth keeping in mind. The OP originally was just asking for resources on producing demographic information for a personal campaign. I am going to go ahead and start a separate thread on the subject of whether demographics matter for purposes of verisimilitude to help keep this thread focused on serving its original purpose.

QuoteAlso undertstand what doesn't work for you, is it not true of others. One of the top priorities of a  referee of any campaign using any system with specific type of detail is to understand what his players are interested. If you don't do that then you are going to have problem period as you are operating in the blind.

This is key for me in any discussion on these matters.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;788498In a campaign last year I had a player who was especially interested in Carp farming in one of the settlements so I made a point of researching ancient aquaculture.

I care little about aquaculture, but I've got to say someone liking it and you including it because someone likes it is cool. :cool:

Quote from: Bren;788556I care little about aquaculture, but I've got to say someone liking it and you including it because someone likes it is cool. :cool:

ditto.
I get pretty wide in my description, as I enjoy it, but when a player wants to know something, it is awesome...and leads us places we have not been in our own worlds....

Quote from: Bren;788556I care little about aquaculture, but I've got to say someone liking it and you including it because someone likes it is cool. :cool:

I honestly could have cared less about it at the time too. I've always been more interested in social structures frankly. But this player was asking a lot of questions in character about the carp farming occurring in a village they found. I think I just had the Carp farming present in my notes because I had wanted the village to feel a touch different from some of the other places they'd been to. After the player asked some questions I couldn't really answer I did the research and became quite interested in it as a result. It definitely helped me flesh out a key part of my setting at the time.

Quote from: Elfdart;788460I'm not dismissing all concerns, just the way some obsess over them far beyond anything remotely relevant to a fantasy setting. If having potatoes in Middle Earth or Westeros kills SoD for you because medieval Europe didn't have them, that's more your fault than Tolkien's or Martin's.

Uh, you do realize that Martin's primary goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire was to present gritty real-world medieval attitudes and environments in a genre he felt had become completely un-tethered from those realities, right? He has pretty much the same issues with bog-standard fantasy that I have. The fact there's a massive audience receptive to his approach at building a setting suggests there's real appetite for grittier, real-world settings and drama. ASoIaF could easily be historical fiction. Which isn't surprising, as Martin himself admits that in recent decades he has read far more history and historical fiction than fantasy.

Quote from: Haffrung;788561Uh, you do realize that Martin's primary goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire was to present gritty real-world medieval attitudes and environments in a genre he felt had become completely un-tethered from those realities, right? He has pretty much the same issues with bog-standard fantasy that I have. The fact there's a massive audience receptive to his approach at building a setting suggests there's real appetite for grittier, real-world settings and drama. ASoIaF could easily be historical fiction. Which isn't surprising, as Martin himself admits that in recent decades he has read far more history and historical fiction than fantasy.

In my opinion Martin's approach works not because it is gritty, bloody, or full of sex. (Although it doesn't hurt). But by drawing on real attitude and environment he makes his character feel more like people. Ultimately what most people are most interested in reading about is what other people are doing. I.e. the Soap Opera effect.

One of the reason I include history and demographics in my games is not because it makes the numbers plausible. But it allows me to create more compelling NPCs for the PCs to interact with. NPCs come off as having their own life which in my experience makes them more interesting to players.

Quote from: estar;788588In my opinion Martin's approach works not because it is gritty, bloody, or full of sex. (Although it doesn't hurt). But by drawing on real attitude and environment he makes his character feel more like people. Ultimately what most people are most interested in reading about is what other people are doing. I.e. the Soap Opera effect.

Agreed. On some level, even subconsciously, people recognize if the characters are products of their environment. The characters in ASoIaF are not only interesting themselves, but they behave in the way we would expect people in a ruthlessly competitive dynastic environment to behave.