Canonfire!

Tue Feb 02, 2016 5:16 pm Master Population List of Greyhawk Communities

Does anyone know if there is some sort of master list of the communities spread throughout the Flanaess or even certain kingdoms. I would be looking for name and population on such a list.
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Eileen of Greyhawk, Prophet of Istus, Messenger of the Gods

Tue Feb 02, 2016 5:28 pm

Eileen the best I know is the Zavoda Index which does show populations of major cities, maybe not minor ones though.

http://melkot.com/mechanics/Encyclopedia-Greyhawkania2003.pdf

It's in alphabetical order so it'd be hard to filter out just communities, but I'm sure if you do a search by TWN (town) it'll skip to just what you need.

Tue Feb 02, 2016 5:45 pm

The problem with the index for population figures is that when they are taken from the LGG, they are wildly overstated. I was working on a BK project years ago and I was comparing old canon population figures to those in the LGG. The LGG often had increased the population by as much as 5 times, if not more, for a region or nation (I don't think I got as granulated as checking the town's data). I recall asking Holian about this during a Greychat. I think it was done to increase the population density of Oerth but I forget what he said. It was so bizarre that I actually mention it in BDKR1: The Unofficial Living Greyhawk Bandit Kingdoms Summary in the 590 CY Planting entry. I rationalized that, after the Greyhawk Wars, the nations of Oerth would want to inflate their population figures to help deter future attacks.

590 CY
Planting
Census takers in a variety of nations
overinflate their population figures by as much as
500% in efforts to make their nations appear more
populated (and thus better defended) than they really
are.

Tue Feb 02, 2016 5:52 pm

Wed Feb 03, 2016 12:27 pm

Wed Feb 03, 2016 1:46 pm

The premise used in writing the LGG was that the old Guide figures only represented "fighting males only."

The Guide said this was true of demi-human and humanoid groups (page 18), not for humans, but the LGG writers expanded the concept to explain why the Flanaess seemed so underpopulated.

You're not supposed to assume the population literally increased by fivefold.

Wed Feb 03, 2016 1:56 pm

Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:20 pm

Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:41 pm

Here you go.

According to my old printout from the Nineties, this list was originally posted by Jeff Mckillop at http://142.103.100.20:80/users/students/matthews/greyhawk/cities.htm.

Wed Feb 03, 2016 3:03 pm

I also seem to recall the gazetteer saying somewhere the number of demi-humans and humanoids were generally not included in that number and if so were only approximations based on percentages.

Personally, I never really took great issue with the "under valued" numbers when comparing them to our own world's historical "norms" .... since I don't recall vast quantities of magical creatures roaming about eating the populace of early France, Britain, or Germany. Shocked

It seemed fairly reasonable that the Oerth's population, with more competing races and creatures, would not compare to our own...
just my 2cp.

Wink

Wed Feb 03, 2016 8:56 pm

Because I did not want populations to increase five-fold in some nations, I went with the reasoning that the 590CY census takers were informed to vastly overstate their population figures.

Also, I took into account the fighting men of age for demi-humans vs. humans discrepancies when I did my initial analysis of canon sources vs. LGG. The math still didn't make sense.

For the record, I do not believe the older sources understate values just because they were accessible by players. If the source doesn't say it understates, then I assume it was written as a game supplement and contains accurate information about the game world.

All that being said, it would probably be a really neat project for someone to provide more realistic population figures for the Flanaess based on historical real-world population density and city sizes throughout history.

Thu Feb 04, 2016 2:35 am

Sun Feb 07, 2016 11:52 am

Not to "necro" a past thread, but in this case it is parallel to the conversation here.

http://www.canonfire.com/cf/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1066

Now I haven't looked in detail of S. John Ross's link or sources nor the calculator by Derek Bryan, but it seems a good jumping off point for the project Aurdraco suggests....

The only pitfall I see is what would (if any) canon would be considered inline and reasonable, or is it a better approach to consider it "fanon" and establish a new baseline?

If the latter sets the preference, then that base line would (IMO) need to be targeted at a certain year (585cy? or something else) and progressed (or regressed) based on accepted canon for that era (ie wars, migration etc as others have already suggested)

And then it would (again in IMO) need to establish what that baseline is "assuming"

Such As

Certainly a grand and challenging undertaking.

Would certainly be a neat sidebar byproduct to have those populations of Elven Kingdoms, Dwarvish Clans, Orc Tribes, etc. that don't "fit" within the Darlene country boundaries but across them. Talk about great background flavor!

DLG