Ravenloft Demographics out of whack?

[NeoTiamat]

You know, we ought to have a poll... "What size do you make the core?"

Two comments:

First is that it's not just vampires. All of these predators are competing with one another. Vampires and werewolves are the most prominent, but ghosts, ancient dead, mad scientists, and all the rest combine for a pretty regular death toll. Even ghosts, who tend to be rather quiescent unless disturbed, can still kill an idiot or skeptic every few years.

Plus the peasant's life isn't that easy as it is, and many of the commoners will die due to fever or poor harvests or bad winters.

Secondly, one of the other reasons I like having a much larger Core is that it lets me stick tiny villages in all over the place, far apart. For me, claustrophobia doesn't do it in terms of horror. Isolation does. I'd much rather have the PCs snowed in a tiny village in the mountains, with a two-day trip to the nearest city, fighting with a werewolf or ghost for survival, then have it be a short jog to Levkarest and the city guard.

[Jack of Tears]

I'd much rather have the PCs snowed in a tiny village in the mountains, with a two-day trip to the nearest city, fighting with a werewolf or ghost for survival, then have it be a short jog to Levkarest and the city guard.

I have nothing against isolationism, and have run some very good games based upon that theme, but I think you are giving the "claustraphobia" angle too little credit. Sure it may be a quick jog to get the city guard, but who is to say those guard aren't on the take? Can they be trusted? Will they believe what you have to say? And won't your enemy expect you to do just such a thing? He could be waiting for you along the way, or anticipating just such an action. And can the guard keep you safe? Even if they are not simply paid off to do away with you themselves, or the people around them not convinced to do you in, you still have to hope they have the means to keep you safe before "protective custody" becomes nothing more than a way for the villain to trap you in one location. And how long can you hide, always looking over your shoulder, wondering when the axe will fall?

Each approach has its value.

[Joël of the FoS]

Don’t take my initial comment badly. I think people are sometimes looking too specifically to some details with the setting, which I’d like to remind everybody that Ravenloft is an even more “artificial” setting than other D&D fantasy / magic settings.

Yes, it is fun to guess/estimate the number of vampires in Barovia, or the number of wolves in Kartakass or the declining population of Falkovnia, but please do not let these calculations or our world’s guidelines limit your game. You are the DM, do not try to make the perfectly balanced ecological system, but do as you want for your campaign to be fun.

Most players won’t make this kind of calculation and ruin your plan. If they do notice, tell them a lie and say how horrible this place is (“Yes, sometimes even Drakov has to moderate as the population is declining. Then they catch outsiders to the state...”)

When you see something incongruous, remember that most normal people never see the horrors of Ravenloft in their entire life, but heroes have a knack to quickly find these horrors

Joël

[cure]

I take at least two valuable points from 'running the numbers':

monsters should not be dime a dozen, but instead rare, with a (local) history that may well help in defeating them;

monsters should not only be at the throat of mankind but also each other in the competition for habitat and resources, not infrequently manipulating adventurer to the end of ridding themselves of rivals.

[InVinoVeritas]

I just use the "Dark Powers" explanation for the Ravenloft population.

Basically, the Realms of Dread exist specifically because the Dark Powers place them there for the torment of the Darklords. The denizens of the Realms are placeholders. So, if Paridon is surrounded by the mists, where does the food and water to support the population come from? The farms and aqueducts, of course. Have I even seen the source springs or these farms? No, certainly not, they're a bunch of uncultured brutes out there. I buy my food from the merchants.

In other words, there is enough of an outside world to explain whatever situation there presently is. Maybe there are no farms, no aquifers, and yet the food just seems to arrive. No one notices.

So, maybe a vampire DID manage to just slaughter the village and turn everyone into vampires. Then, in the morning, everyone wakes up and goes on about their day, perfectly human, and completely ignorant of what happened last night. Because it didn't.

[Kane]

Not to beat a dead horse, but demographics help give the reader/DM a better feel for what what's possible or even plausible in a domain. When you have a couple thousand people in a whole domain, most of which are peasants, you can't expect to run into large number of guardsmen or find someone with the skills to help repair weapons, etc. I'm going to go with the suggestion that you multiple the population figures by ten. It's easy math and it makes more sense to me.

Kane

[WolfKook]

Also, if the dark powers fill in the blanks each time the population drops, the sense of dread is somehow lost, IMO.

[Sylaire]

Add me to the (apparently very!) long list of people who are unsatisfied with the population figures of the domains as they exist. Heck, there are times my major problem is that in some domains in order to support the encounter rates (or the actual monster population in certain published adventures) the monsters would actually outnumber the people...and given that the average monster is both aggressive and violent and is a better fighter than the average person...that's not so good. I think sometimes that the wolfweres of Kartakass allow the humans to live at all just because it's Harkon Lukas's curse never to effectively rule anything. Or that someone needs to make the meekelbrau. Or be served as lunch occasionally.

To be fair, some domains work just fine as they are, especially with the original setting's fluid and mutable distances. The tiny populations in Lamordia help to emphasize its "ends of the earth" loneliness. Kartakass...if you drop the monster population a bit...works nicely as a small corner of rural Middle Europe. Barovia doesn't need to be bumped by much to have the perfect sense of the "dead shell" ruin of a once-great country that Transylvania is generally portrayed as in Dracula fics.

Other domains...not so much. The city of Paridon is supposed to be a post-Renaissance London analogue (it's got Georgian technology, but Victorian culture) with the population of a modern-day small town. Dementlieu is in my opinion the worst offender--there just isn't a large enough population to support a large enough nobility to have that whole French Revolution vibe going on. Victorian London Society was referred to as the "Upper Ten Thousand" for a reason; something is very wrong when the guest list at the kind of decadent grand ball that would occur in Dementlieu is somewhere around half the population of the domain's second-largest city. And it's inexplicable that Drakov hasn't managed to conquer Dementlieu, given that his army outnumbers the entire population of the whole domain and that D'Honaire's abilities don't have the whiz-bang combat effectiveness to neutralize him the way Azalin's would (sure, turning a few generals into Obedients would be very effective indeed, but the question is, how, since he's got to get into their presence to pull it off).

(Complete side note: Exceptional Dementlieu mood/setting inspiration: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania. The anime Le Chevalier D'Eon doesn't suck, either.)

Another problem with the population figures is that they don't support the size of city available. My parents, for example, live in a small rural Maine town with a population of around 1000. There are, at my last count, four stores in the entire town (a mini-grocery, a restaurant/bar, a gas station, and a credit union). This is not the kind of thriving commercial district that supports museums, operas, bookstores, etc.

In conclusion, I'd say that the population figures are absurd on two levels:

1) It's entirely possible that they don't matter in your campaign. After all, from a player's point of view in a Gothic horror adventure, it doesn't matter if Mordentshire has 1,500 or 150,000 people. The question is how do they get to the spooky manor house on the hill, what the local lord knows about the situation, what conditions prevail in Saulbridge Sanitarium, what the striking view from Keeldevil Point looks like as storm-tossed waves lash the cliff face...Demographics aren't really relevant to whether the Creature can complete his horrible revenge against the Alchemist. (I think this relates to some of what Joel's talking about.)

2) Conversely, if Ravenloft starts to become an existing, organic setting for a long-term campaign featuring character development where the mechanics of world-building come into play, then despite the world's unusual characteristics internal consistency is vital and the published statistics just don't cut it.

Or in other words, it may or may not be necessary to publish figures at all, but the figures that are published are either unnecessary or unsuitable, and I can't really understand where they came from (other than TSR's very long-standing tradition of having population figures much smaller than the "mood" they're trying to establish in a setting would provide...Mystara is the obvious example of that).

[cure]

I would disagree with one point, and one point alone, from the previous post. As little as 30 years ago 1,000 people towns had hardware stores, banks, restaurants, bars, hotels, a library, and much more.

There was no internet for entertainment. Not that much earlier there was no television either. And even radio is a relatively recent thing and certainly post Ravenloft.

Equally, some products were still made locally and a great many of them were still distributed locally, rather than centrally from giant box stores, shopping malls, and commercial strips, all attached to large population centres.

It was a different world. The rot in the downtown cores of larger towns and cities also testifies to this lost past.

So in a world where your entire network was within a short car ride at worst, there was so much more going on within that short car ride. Opera in a 1000 person town? No. But a visiting theatre troupe? Certainly.

[Joël of the FoS]

So, maybe a vampire DID manage to just slaughter the village and turn everyone into vampires. Then, in the morning, everyone wakes up and goes on about their day, perfectly human, and completely ignorant of what happened last night. Because it didn't.

Interesting in a dream environment. But in RL, I don't know many players who would buy this explanation.

And after a while, as Wolfcook said, the players would say "so what?" at the next adventure hook if there is no rewards for a good heroic action.

Joël

[Pamela]

The concern over the size of the populations seems to depend on the DM's preference on domain/cultural settings. I prefer the renaissance domains, and so find the figures are ridiculously low. Those who prefer to focus on the medieval and rest will probably be content with the tiny populations and geographical size.

[InVinoVeritas]

So, maybe a vampire DID manage to just slaughter the village and turn everyone into vampires. Then, in the morning, everyone wakes up and goes on about their day, perfectly human, and completely ignorant of what happened last night. Because it didn't.

Interesting in a dream environment. But in RL, I don't know many players who would buy this explanation.

And after a while, as Wolfcook said, the players would say "so what?" at the next adventure hook if there is no rewards for a good heroic action.

Joël

Well, the trick here is that since the PCs are also part of the fabric of RL, they also forget that this happened. So, you don't play any of this with the players. In fact, you kind of forget about it until the PCs are ready to complete the "get past the powers/beat Ravenloft" stage in the campaign. Then you start dropping hints about the PCs' exploits that never happened, how they were defeated in Hazlan but never were in Hazlan, that sort of thing. Then they can question all reality and free everyone, and the campaign ends.

But otherwise, you're right, you can't just have the DPs undoing the evil and undoing the good otherwise. That would kill dread.

[tomokaicho]

Some thread necromancy here - I want to say that Kane is absolutely right!

Ravenloft is not the only fantasy setting to low ball population levels. The Dark Sun setting of Athas was also notorious for it. As Kane points out, the low population levels cannot sustain all these sophisticated institutions, social classes, infrastructure, etc. Unless the opera houses we are talking about are an outdoor shed with an audience of 10 people.

Most likely these societies would have a clan-based family structure. Plenty of the people would even be blood relations of the Darklord. No class stratification, lower class, middle class, bourgeoisie, only ruling class and ruled.

Saying 'this is a fantasy setting' is a non-sequitur. Even magic cannot fit a square into a circle.

What about Paridon? Supposed to be a combination of Paris and London in the renaissance period (Pari - Don, see?), it has 11,000 people according to the Zherisia Gazetteer. There are more social classes, professions, schools and universities, and so on than there are people! Compare this to actual Renaissance London that Paridon is based on, for example. London had a population of 350,000 to 400,000.

So Kane is absolutely right, and adjusting the population 10 times upward is a useful rule of thumb, adjusting for how the domain is described, and for what is possible at a given population level.

[alhoon]

Most realm populations are so small that they would be subsistence farmers at best, unable to support any industry, and definately not able to support opera houses, art galleries, etc. The major cities in Ravenloft nead to have a much larger population to really be considered cities. Even early medieval cities had way more population then the largest cities in Ravenloft. Thoughts?

Kane

My thoughts were to increase the size of Ravenloft. The Core is about the size of Switzerland, I did x4 the area and x4 the population, doubling the size of many cities.

Keep in mind that means the Dementlieu is still too small to realistically be able to support opera and university.
However, Ravenloft is supposed to feel an artificial world (in my campaign). And nobody except me in my games really bothered to ask how a town of a few thousand people can support universities and operas.

The problem is not so much (for me) the universities in cities of 5000 people. It's how Richemulot survives. We have "mostly urban" population inside woods. Good luck bringing food for all these people from Falkovnia on time.
Even with very fertile soil (or plant growth spells which are unravenloftian) and early renaissance agriculture techniques, you need at least 2 food-producers for each 3 food-consumers. That means that at least 2/3 of your population must be in food production. With a druid casting plant growth or exceptionally fertile ground.

What I did? I decided that around the big cities of Richemulot there's a ring of farms and villages close to one another, that the ground is fertile and that if Falkovnia actually shuts down grain trade, Richemulot will face a famine.
Those farms are maximum 2-3 hours walk from the cities (say, 5-6 miles) but they cover most of the land around the city. That gives 10K-15K "food-producers" per city. Not enough by far, but it puts my mind at ease.

[Alastor]

What about Paridon? Supposed to be a combination of Paris and London in the renaissance period (Pari - Don, see?), it has 11,000 people according to the Zherisia Gazetteer. There are more social classes, professions, schools and universities, and so on than there are people!

Well you could say that many of these social strata exist mainly as placeholders occasionally used by dopplegangers. With a large percentage of the city's population switching regularly between identities, it makes sense that the population would be lower than expected for the number of positions occupied. A lot of the "citizens" are purely fictional. Admittedly, a factor of 35 is pushing this.