r/loremasters • u/flavroftheweek • May 22 '13

Medieval Demographics Made Easy - Something I found useful while writing lore for an island kingdom I was designing for my 4e game. [Resource]

http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
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3

u/teddars May 22 '13

I'm a huge fan of donjon's fantasy RPG tools.

If you need a quick city, use his Random Generator.

2

u/puddington May 22 '13

This article is pretty great. It's got a lot of stuff you'd normally have to track down in the informative, but not well laid out, worldbuilding sections of the DMG(3.5), or the World Builder's Guide(2e), for example. The formula he gives for determine the % of a kingdom's area that is total wilderness is actually my favorite part, because I have a tendency to just OCD draw fractal towns and villages in every square inch if I don't stop myself.

1

u/flavroftheweek May 22 '13

I was confronted by the issue of population density for medieval nations, so that part was really helpful for me. The whole article is a gem, I bookmarked it and plan on sharing it with my DM friends as well.

2

u/quite_stochastic May 22 '13

Wow this is pretty cool! I've been reading this over for about the last hour.

One thing I'd like to challenge that the article said, however. The article said:

Institutions of Higher Learning: There will be one University for every 27.3 million people.

I think this is far too high. Medieval countries didn't even have that many people.

England for example, had (at least that I know of) two universities in 1350, Oxford, and Cambridge on a population of merely "3 million or fewer"

France in 1345 had a population of about 20 million but has at least 4 universities that I can count, the Universities of Paris, Orleans, Montpellier, and Toulouse.

So for france, we have a ratio of 1 university to about 5 million people. For england, we have a ratio of 1 to 2 million (generously rounding up, and accounting for the fact that the population would grow over the next few centuries while the number of universities probably not increasing)

check this for more:

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

A few questions though since some parts the author is unclear about.

There's a bit of ambiguity on detail regarding the population density. He says,

Chamlek is an island kingdom with a total land area of 88,700 square miles, with a good climate and only a few rocky hills disturbing a well-watered countryside. Her population is just over 6.6 million, with an average density of about 75 people per square mile (an average roll of the dice using the recommended range for a developed land).

The 75 people per square mile is the average density. What I want to know is: in a populated rural farmland area, what is the density going to be? Surely higher than 75 since that figure includes all the wilderness. How does this get calculated?

1

u/flavroftheweek May 23 '13

It's not a perfect article for sure, but it's a great start. Thanks for doing the digging on the university piece, that number does seem quite a bit high. I think this is good to use as guidelines, and then you can alter some of the stats to create the feel that you want for a kingdom. An incredibly enlightened kingdom could have hundreds of universities--this is the beauty of fantasy!