General Population of Barsaive

[The Undying]

Reading through the ED3 Player's Companion again, and I noted this cherry line in the Nethermancer section, pg 54: "most villages can boast at least one adept to serve as an advisor". This is not something I really envisioned, so it's nice to stumble across.

[Tattered Rags]

Reading through the ED3 Player's Companion again, and I noted this cherry line in the Nethermancer section, pg 54: "most villages can boast at least one adept to serve as an advisor". This is not something I really envisioned, so it's nice to stumble across.

I would have thought that kind of thing would be in the Weaponsmith section.

[The Undying]

Could be, didn't get to that part. this particular blurb occurs in the reinforcement of "Everybody hates Nethermancers!!" topic.

[Tattered Rags]

Could be, didn't get to that part. this particular blurb occurs in the reinforcement of "Everybody hates Nethermancers!!" topic.

Every village has an Adept to advise, and it's not a Nethermancer. Hah!

[The Undying]

I hate to necro a thread, but ...

Others like me may not have noticed the great article that Mataxes (or one of the other developers) posted on this topic on the main web home: http://fasagames.com/2016/12/06/adept-populations/

First, I'd just like to acknowledge this entry. I'm ASSUMING (posts on the main site aren't dated) that this post was made around the time we were discussing it, which is a definite nod from FASA that they're paying attention to the stuff we talk about and are weighing at varying levels (and I'd credit a man-site post as a bit more "official" than a forum post given the time, thought, and polish it tends to require). Sadly, it looks like (at least for me), it flew completely under the radar. So, I just want to say, thanks Mataxes/FASA for weighing in on this, your entry on the topic is great, and as always, I appreciate all the hard work (even though I know I tend to sound critical - it's always easy to critique, much harder to DO, right?).

Anyways, to the post ...

There's not much I can really add to the post since it's great and doesn't belabor the point. Population numbers jive with published info but also gives a nod to the number we've come up with (~million) while providing commentary ("pretty high"). The Adept population information is really the more interesting part, and is why I even embarked on futzing with population in the first place.

The big take-aways (again, focusing on the Adept stuff, since population calculation was really just a means to an end for me):

• The number of Masters of each Discipline is minuscule (5-10), with only about twice as many Wardens.
• Between the small head count at these tiers and the Legend status associated with it, good chance they're well known, even if specifics about them and their whereabouts aren't.
• Opportunities for high-Circle Adept enemies aren't great, campaigns really need to built around them as masterminds, they aren't going to be villain of the week to be killed.

The only thing that I will also note is that the numbers in this post are based on the "1 in 20" and assumes that all those would actually become Adepts while also acknowledging that that is unlikely. If you assume that AT BEST maybe half the people with "the ability to follow the adept’s path" actually are discovered by someone that can train them, the numbers shrink significantly. If you also add in a Circle 0 (which makes sense, Namegivers don't go from "not Adept" to "Adept"), the numbers shrink EVEN MORE. The numbers aren't all that important, again, it just is a further guidance (at least for me) that even Journeyman Adept enemies need to be used pretty sparingly.

[Mataxes]

The date of the post, while not on the page, is in the URL. Dec 6, 2016.

Thanks for the compliments. I think the discussion here inspired some of my thinking. Kind of like how, back in the 90s, the discussion of why they used d20+d4 for Step 14 instead of 2d12 inspired my probability analysis of the Step System (archived here if you've never seen it before).

Which is to say, rather than get bogged down in the forum discussion, I said, "That's an interesting question," and figured out how to get an answer.

A tangent just occurred to me, based on the population thought... what does the average population density look like? Based on (very) rough measurements from the map in Barsaive boxed set, the province covers about... 1.5 million square miles. Maybe about half the size of the continental United States.

(I have no idea how this measures up to the "real world" counterpart of that area. I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole.)

Using the figures from my linked article (600,000)... you end up with an average population density of 0.4 people per square mile. That's an area more than twice the size of Alaska (663,000 sq miles), but with one third its population density (Alaska is the lowest population density in the fifty US states, with 1.4 people/sq mile).

(Assuming my figures are accurate.)

That's... impressive. Like... WOW. Barsaive is empty.

[The Undying]

Yeah, population density is an interesting thought.

The old Barsaive box set makes it very clear that 'Adepts can go days [during overland travel] without encountering a town or village' and that are only 'hundreds' of villages and towns. Then, the text from the Serpent River source says that, in summary, most modern villages and towns are along the Serpent or the Aras Sea. Combine that with some general ideas of average size of villages (both in space and population), and you end up with something like:

• Pretty much every 'hex' (one day of travel), or every other hex, along the serpent likely has a village of town.
• Likely, every cluster of seven hexes (one center, and the six adjacent) in the plains and foothills around the Serpent's banks but not adjacent to it likely has a single village or town.
• Beyond that, in the central and eastern plains, maybe one village or town every week's worth of over-land travel.
• Aside from Iopos and Jerris, there MIGHT be a handful (say 4 or 5) of villages in the entire Northwest of Barsaive (basically, the square with Glenwood Deep in the lower right corner)

That's just the plains, though.

For the mountains:

• The Throal mountains immediately around Throal have villages pretty much every hex, probably for a total of about 15-20 villages.
• The Twilight Peaks have the troll moots for the Crystal Raiders - I haven't read up enough there to suggest density.
• Likely, other mountains can probably be considered generally uninhabited, except where the GM wants to do something special.

Jungles and forests (as in, within them, not on the ridges) are likely inhabited, but likely by nomadic tribes rather than established villages.

However, that ALLLLLL goes out the window when you also take into account that the Barsaive box set says VERY PLAINLY: Throal makes up 1/3 of all Barsaive's population (so, ~200,000), another ~400,000 are in other major cities (95k in Travar, 50k in Bartertown, 80k in Jerris, 100k in Iopos, 50k in Bartertown), and then the numbers break with the official number for Vivane at 95K (we've somehow gone over 600k in the same book that says the total is about 600k). So, all Namegivers are present and accounted for in just the major towns and cities...

[Lys]

When material in a fictional setting contradicts itself, you do the same thing you do when you have contradictory evidence in real life. First you establish what the bulk of the evidence says, deprecate or throw out any outliers, and use that to come to a relevant conclusion. In this case, "Throal is one third of Barsaive's population" is the part that doesn't fit with the rest of the evidence, so we ignore it and go with what the rest of the sourcebooks tell us. Like i established in my earlier post, when you tally up the information from all the published material, you get a minimum population of around a million.

Also note that at least in the Throal book that the Kingdom accounts for one third of Barsaive's population is presented as something that people believe, not something that is necessarily true. From Pg. 11 of the ED3's Nations of Barsaive 1: "Common wisdom has it that the population of Throal is one-third of the total population of Barsaive. However, as no practical way exists of counting the population of the entire province (much of which remains unexplored), this figure is popular conjecture rather than hard fact."

It's very likely that they wrote it in those terms because by 3rd Edition, the writers had realized that the one third figure didn't add up.

[etherial]

A tangent just occurred to me, based on the population thought... what does the average population density look like? Based on (very) rough measurements from the map in Barsaive boxed set, the province covers about... 1.5 million square miles. Maybe about half the size of the continental United States.

(I have no idea how this measures up to the "real world" counterpart of that area. I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole.)

It's tough to estimate because the mountains have moved, but I estimate it to be around 640,000 square miles. So during the Age of Legend, Earth was much bigger and much much more massive.

[Lys]

It seems to me that the more parsimonious explanation is that the scale on the map is off.