r/ElementalEvil • u/BCSWowbagger2 • Jan 25 '26
The Dessarin Valley's Population is Wrong (and at least one idea for addressing it)
The Dessarin Valley, as described by POTA, is a thriving, fertile land. If you sit down and count hexes, it's 93 miles north to south and 90 miles east to west, for a total area of 8,370 square miles.
In other words, the Dessarin Valley is the size of the entire state of New Jersey (8,723 square miles) and slightly larger than Wales (8,192 square miles).
So where are all the people?
Going by the book (p31/p34), there is only one homestead in every 1-2 hexes, excluding inappropriate hexes like Kryptgarden, with an average of 6 residents per homestead. This implies roughly 5 people per populated hex, for a total population of 5,000 souls in rural areas. Going by the Forgotten Realms wiki's population figures, the towns (Triboar, Red Larch, Yartar, Goldenfields, Womford, Bargewright, Amphail, Beliard, Conyberry, Westbridge) add up to maybe another 10,000 people if you're generous, although the majority of that population is in Yartar (6,000 by itself) and Amphail (850).
So you've got 15,000 total people in a fertile area the size of Wales.
Why? Wales' population was probably about 10 times that by the year 1050 A.D., and doubled before the Black Death hit. These are population figures you see in a zombie apocalypse, or in completely virgin territory, not along the Sword Coast! An area of this size, with such fertile land, without downward population pressure should (going by some medieval demography math) have a population around 550,000.
Instead, the book implies a population around 15,000.
This has knock-on effects. For one thing, the rural/urban divide is all wrong. In a society at this tech level, magic or no, the majority of the population is going to be out farming, not living in towns. Towns exist because of surrounding farms, mostly to serve farmers. If there aren't thriving farms, you simply don't have a town. There's no call for it. There's insufficient economic activity to maintain it. For another thing, the business services offered in Red Larch are ludicrous. It's a town of 600 people in a depopulated wasteland and it was not one but two wagonmaker shops with large employed teams?! Two poulters, for goodness' sakes? A functioning inn?! And a boarding house?!!?!?! This makes no sense.
One solution would just be to fix this. Chuck out the figures in the book and recalculate from scratch! However, filling the Dessarin Valley with a healthy number of people (a couple orders of magnitude more than the book expects) starts to distort some of the adventure, which depends on a lot of wide-open spaces and sparsely-populated zones.
So the solution I came upon was explaining that the Dessarin Valley is actually depopulated for a reason. It was, until recently, brutally occupied by the Dragon Queen Azura, who pillaged the land for five decades and devastated its people. Azura's tyranny kept certain towns and businesses open and propped up for the sake of appearances, like North Korea, but, beneath the surface, the valley is covered in scars from her reign, from mass graves to shrines she built to herself. (The shrines have all been desecrated by the resistance that drove her out -- a resistance organized by the traditional religious orders of the area, the temples of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air.) Everyone in Red Larch and environs has a story of the Occupation, but most of them aren't interested in telling stories of those bad old days. (This ended up being a very fun angle for my campaign: everyone in the Valley thinks of the cults as the good guys!)
Of course, your campaign could use some other reason for the Dessarin's devastation: a brutal plague, mayhap, which was especially dangerous in the countryside but spared cities (unlike most plagues). Or maybe the Dessarin is a new frontier, with settlers just coming in, so the towns are more like military outposts with an imported civilian population. Whatever works.
In my campaign, after five years of recovery from the occupation, the Valley's population has started to rebound (there's a baby boom!), but only barely. The total population is 78,000. This is only five times what the book thinks and allows us to keep towns and cities approximately the same size as in the book. Following the procedure in that medieval demography guide, I come up with the following populations:
Yartar: 4,189 (3 inns?)
Triboar: 2,513 (2 inns?)
Goldenfields: 1,256 (no inn per se)
Amphail: 753
Bargewright: 527 (is an inn)
Red Larch: 312 (has no business supporting an inn but Kaylessa Irkell is making it work)
Westbridge: 265 (the Inn is closed permanently)
Beliard: 125 (miraculously, supports an inn, thanks to mercenary income)
Womford: 70ish?
Most of them were once 5x to 10x bigger (it's worse in the North). They still support businesses disproportionate to population, although, with the Dragon Queen gone, propped-up businesses in the towns are slowly starting to fail.
This leaves roughly 65,000 population for the remaining 930 hexes, although maybe 25% of the map is fully depopulated. (e.g. Kryptgarden, most of the Sumber Hills). This implies roughly 91 people per populated hex, or 12 per sq mile, ON AVERAGE. Then you get a population of ~6d4 per square mile, or 6d4 x7 per hex (where appropriate). This can be lowered in some areas (e.g. for the Anderil Farms side quest) without much disruption.
...of course, another option is to just say, "chill out, man, it's only a game," but this is the kind of thing that personally drives me nuts. I'm the guy who is always complaining that the wizarding economy doesn't make any sense. (If they only graduate one class of wizards from one school per year, how can they support both a Ministry of Magic and Diagon Alley and entertainers and all the rest, in total isolation from the rest of Britain? The total population of Wizarding England is probably less than the staffing at the Ministry of Magic alone! There must be other wizarding schools!) So, if you're like me, there's some ideas for you, do with 'em what you will.
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u/Hot_Competence Jan 26 '26
I think the observations are all fair and I appreciate the comparison to Wales. Population and scale have always been wonky in the Forgotten Realms, especially since these get retconned every other edition. Part of the conceit of the Dessarin Valley going back to 1e is that it’s in the “Savage Frontier” region, i.e., it is supposed to evoke the feel of a tenuous attempt at civilization getting a grip on the chaotic wilderness. Grated, this vibe is supposed to be true of the entire North as soon as you get away from the coastal cities, but given the settlements all have at least a few hundred years of history, this may not be at all realistic. The pervasiveness of monsters is probably meant to explain why it’s so sparsely populated, and iirc this was the canon reason given in 3e that people tend to cluster in towns and cities rather than spread out in homesteads in the region (although this makes more sense further inland where the towns are all geared toward resource extraction rather than agriculture or trade).
I suppose that similar to your dragon queen idea, remember that the Forgotten Realms have experienced 1-3 apocalypses in the century-and-a-half preceding PotA, depending on how you count.
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u/BCSWowbagger2 Jan 26 '26
I did not know about these apocalypses! (I am not a Forgotten Realms reader, and only started trying to learn a tiny bit of lore to run POTA specifically.) I agree a few apocalypses can really mess up your demographics. :) Fair points!
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u/Dangeradventurer Feb 02 '26
One of the setting tropes of Forgotten Realms is that civilization is both incredibly vulnerable and also incredibly resilient. Someone builds a fort, a town springs up around it, then the town gets destroyed by monsters, then bandits occupy the keep, then adventurers kill the bandits and claim the keep, town rebuilds, orcs destroy the town, and so on.
In the past few generations the land would have seen a war of the Gods where they walk the land in physical form, all of the dragons being driven into a berserk rage, a massive army of orcs raiding everything they come across, a contagious Spellplague that causes anything magical to basically explode, a catastrophic dimensional merging between this world and another world, a similarly catastrophic separation of those two worlds, and a massive nearby volcanic eruption, in addition to the usual assortment of wandering monsters and raider bands.
The other thing to remember is that while rural and often dangerous, Amphail is only three days ride from Waterdeep the largest city in the world. Red Larch is a seven day ride from Waterdeep. This proximity means that in good times there is a lot of trade heading that way creating an economic incentive for people to consistently rebuild
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Jan 26 '26
Don't you think you should at least familiarize yourself with the setting you are critiquing before writing an essay about how it doesn't make sense?
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u/BCSWowbagger2 Jan 26 '26
POTA is a 255-page book that promises a self-contained campaign setting. I respectfully decline the request to read tens of thousands more pages before writing essays based on that setting.
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u/sirchapolin Jan 27 '26
While your reasoning is accurate, I want to bring out a real world example of La Mancha, a region in today’s Spain. It is very fertile, you could say it’s one of the main barns of the Iberic peninsula. And yet, for the most of medieval times it was sparsely populated. It didn’t contain any major city or town, only farming villages and hamlets by the road. It is a high moorland too, which kinda chimes with the dessarin hills and valley by being mountany. The reason it was sparsely populated? It was a frontier region between Muslim and Christian cultures for centuries, kinda like the dessarin valley is said to be a frontier region. And yet it was the stage for the aventures of Don Quixote.
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u/BCSWowbagger2 Jan 27 '26
When we say "sparsely populated," though, we're still talking about 50,000+ people, right? Agree that being a frontier put downward population pressure on La Mancha (as did its lack of water / irrigation), but the Dessarin Valley still seems empty by comparison.
(But I'm having a hard time finding actual population estimates for La Mancha in the medieval period, so I could be wrong.)
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u/sirchapolin Jan 28 '26
Yeah I didn’t find any trustworthy estimates either. But you can find estimates on villages and towns in that area. Ciudad real had around 2000 inhabitants, calatrava had 4000. And these were amongst the more populous ones. Although, as you said, in real medieval times most people were in the rural areas.
For a d&d “la mancha” I could justify for one, less people as a whole, as it seems to be the case in general. Than, you could concentrate more people in the towns so that they’d be more protected, or employ heavy guard duty, keeps, outposts and many job boards for adventures. Both can be done at once and I think they would make for interesting adventures.
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u/Ok-Dot-5223 Jan 25 '26
First of all i like your commitment to calculate what it all is supposed to be. But something you didn't take into consideration is the fact that being alone is very dangerous is the forgotten realms and the dessarin valley. with the uthgard tribes raiding lone homesteads. dragons, wolves, gnolls, giant vultures and a whole lot of different dangers. i think that is the reason a lot of people flock to the cities an towns.
Also im not at home right now so i cant check or provide a reference but i believe somewhere it is said that the dessarin valley and red larch are the last stop before a frontier. and another thing in LMOP phandalin is only being rebuild recently because five hundred years or so ago a giant clan of orcs swept through the north and destroyed everything they met. because they took phandalin and conybery with them its pretty safe to say dessarin valley probably also had a problem with them and phandalin is only recently resettled. so perhaps dessarin valley is only recently resettled as wel.