From: Michael Hitchens (M.Hitchens@st.nepean.uws.edu.au)
Date: Tue 15 Nov 1994 - 07:00:22 EET
Alex Ferguson
>Michael Hitchens predicts:
>> I know I have propably been Gregged all over the place, but at least they
>> are something.
>> Balmyr
>> Population: 3,500
>> Number of Clans: 3
>
>Thou art hereby Gregged: <g> KoS, p202 gives them as having ten clans.
>Mind you, that was 300 years ago.
Oh well. I'll have to go have a look at my figures and see if the Balmyr should have more people. But that means someone else looses out. I really get the feeling Greg hasn't done the figures. He seems to have in mind tribal populations which add up to far more than 180,000.
>While 1000-member clans may be the norm, I'd be surprised if things
>work out very neatly like that in practice. After all, the Colymar
>went from being a single clan to five, with (presumably) the same total
>population.
All I was going off was KoS, where it said that the range was 500-2000, with 1200 being the norm. If you look at my figures, the numbers of clans per tribe is roughly tribe poplation/1200 fiddled a little. You could make the Balymyr (say) seven clans, all very small. You could easily say they have lost three over 300 years (look at how many the Colymar lost). You might also like to decrease the number of clans in a couple of other tribes, just to keep near the 1200 average for the kingdom. In fact, I will go and alter my figures accordingly. And try and wrok out some reason the Balmyr clans are so small.....
>> I don't think the population of Clearwine (~1500) as given in KoS and the
>> population of Sartar in the Genertela book (180,000) can both be correct.
>
>That's a bit of a leap, to say the least. That Clearwine has 1500
>residents hardly means all stockades do; after all, by your own figures,
>the Colymar are one of the largest tribes, and the town also adjoins
>Balmyr territory. Nor is it an insuperable problem that this could
>make it bigger than some of the "cities", since this status may have
>more to do with their founding by Sartar, their fortification, amenities,
>socioeconomic importance and/or political status, rather than mere
>population.
>I'm skeptical whether the populations of Boldhome and Alda-Chur are as
>high as are quoted here (8000 and 4000), since this would have them
>accounting for 2/3 of the urban population, which seems a tad steep.
It was all very rough. The only figure I had was for Sartar 180,000, per
G:CotHW. The RQ GM's book says the maximum urbanisation is 10%. I think
G:CotHW says the same thing, but I may be wrong. I really doubt Sartar is
that high, except that those cities are probably pretty sparse, compared
to (say) New Pavis, or anything in the LUnar Empire (the walls came first
and people probably grapped large areas within them - I think there is a
*lot* of room for growth. Given that, you could postulate a higher number,
say something in the order of 24,000 (15%), because a lot of it is not
really urbanised. Let's use l (low) for figures based on 10% and h (high)
for figures based on 15%.
G:CotHW also gives Boldhome and Alda-Chur the symbols on the map for the
6,000-25,000 and 2,000-8,000 categories respectively. They have to have at
least 8,000 (l) people in them. Getting them off the bare minimum, giving
them 12,000 (h) does not seem unreasonable to me. Alda-chur is not one
of Sartar's cities (I think) so it is probably fairly crammed and has had a
while to grow. Boldhome is the capital and the map in Home of the Bold
portrys a very large settled area within the walls. Even on a figure of
only 1/4 as dense as New Pavis, you still get a population of 8,000.
So that leaves 10,000 (l) or 12,000 (h) for everywhere else. I certainly take your point about the artifical nature of the southern cities. But they all seem to have important temple settlements and are on important roads. They should have out paced the stockades by now, especially as they are multi-tribe, giving a wider population base for people to move to them. So I really can't go with giving Alone, Jonstown, Swenston, and Wilm's Kirk less than 1000-1500 each. That leaves us with 5000 (l) - 7000 (h) for eveywhere else.
You could put 1,500 of them in Clearwine, but that leaves 3,500 - 5,500 for the other 15 stockades, an average of 230 - 370. (I also thought Clearwine was wholy Colymar. It might be near the Balmyr, but I didn't think any Balmyrians lived there.) That average is scraping he bottom of the classifications of urbanisation in the RQ GMs book. And why is Clearwine a stockade if its so much bigger than all the others? Certainly there is no way all those stockades could have anything like 1,500 (or even a 1,000) each. Anyway, if Clearwine has 1,500 people than that is the total urbanisation that the Colymar can support, they are doing nothing to help the cities, that's all being left to other tribes. Maybe, but I don't know. I think it says somewhere the Colymar would not take part in Sartar's city building, but I also get the feeling that the thing's he was building were going to be much larger settlements, even immediately, then anything the tribes already had.
I think the real answer is that Greg has not done the sums. One (or maybe
both) of the following is false:
1. Sartar has 180,000 people
2. Clearwine is significantly more important than any of the other stockades
on the DP map
Unless an official Sartar Pack appears, we are not going to know the "answer". For the time being, 1,500 is too big for my vision of Clearwine. If nothing else, it means there are going to be too many temples there, and I want my players to travel when they go looking to sacrifice for divine magic.
Michael
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