Okay so I've used this article many times to try and set up the population of nations in my Krenna setting. Every time I've done this the populations were huge, and I was wondering if I was doing something wrong. Yet I'd talk to other GMs, compare to real world countries, and even have people double check my math everything looked right.
Then it clicked, non of my forgotten realm books, or my pathfinder books provide acreage for realms.
I'd always seen the scale on the maps, so I had a feel for how long it would take someone to get from one town to the next, but never bothered to consider just how small a lot of the FR and Golarion realms were.
Most of my realms were larger than modern day germany, most FR and G realms are lots smaller than that.
So what to do? Dividing up some realms makes since, and its definitely a tempting thing to do, but it would be one more aspect of how my setting was like every other setting. Some of my incomplete realms could easily be broken into complete realms and incomplete neighbours. It wouldn't reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, but it would mean some of it was ready for a stage I wasn't thinking about quite yet. However, one or two realms are far enough along that breaking them up would make more work.
My current choice? Break some up, keep some intact, but cheat just a little. I've been doing these huge realms as one realm for the math in the article, but I was already breaking several of those realms into duchies or counties, after the math. I think in at least one realm that's been bugging me I'll turn around and do the splitup before doing the math, just to see what I get.
So I was looking at this again, and I was wrong, its not that some of the realms are a little larger than modern day Germany. Several were over twice the size of modern day France.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm actually considering just shrinking that whole continent. I only have 3, and the world's larger than earth anyway, so a little space for two more continents would be worth considering.