General Population of Barsaive

[The Undying]

[Minor edit: This information is for the Prelude to War era, not modern ED4. Significant time and events have transpired between these eras, and numbers/demographics have changed. If you'd like to chime in with ED4-relevant numbers, feel free, but please preface that so we can keep the thoughts separable. Thanks.]

I'm doing some research for a campaign I'm putting together, and general population information is core to it. As a result, I've been doing some research into some of my old source books on the topic. I figured others might find this useful, as the only other place I see this information is in an old (circia 2003 IIRC) post on the rpg sub of stackexchange, and I think there was a brief exchange on the old forum.

As always, this is just the information provided from the books and my secondary logic: make your Earthdawn your own.

Bottom line up front: I place the population of Barsaive a bit above one million Name-givers, excluding Crystal Raiders and Ork Skirmishers.

That said, first and foremost, almost all the basic information you really need is in the epically old Barsaive Box Set. The book provides some serious hard numbers for the major cities for that time period, some of which may surprise you if you've never looked into it. I won't get into racial breakdown, as that is exceptionally well summarized in tables, but here is the summary of the specific per-city numbers.

- Bartertown: ~50,000 people
- Haven: ~1,000
- Iopos: > 100,000
- Jerris: ~80,000
- Kratas: ~50,000 (though city could hold twice that)
- Travar: ~95,000
- Urupa: Undefined, but 7 small kaer banded together, with 2,000 troop militia
- Vivane: 95,000 (of which 20,000 are slaves)
- Throal: Five complete Inner Cities at ~25,000 each

When you add these numbers together, you get to the oft-quoted ~595,000 population of Barsaive. Here are the shortcomings, though:

- These are only the major cities. Minor cities, as well as all the villages and towns are, are not included.
- The population of the Blood Wood is left out (though the area is discussed).
- The population of Urupa is left out (though the area is discussed, and a militia head count is provided).
- There's more to Throal than the Inner Cities: primarily, the Halls of Throal and land-grant communities in the Throal Mountains and its foothills.
- Crystal Raider and Ork Skirmisher populations are left out of the head count (though this is probably for the best), although some general numbers are provided.

EDC in the "Nations of Barsaive, Vol 1" later reinforces this ~600,000 "total" population by giving Throal and its' holdings (Halls and land-grant communities) a total population of ~195,000 and "public conjecture" that the population of Throal is roughly equal to the total population of Barsaive. Here, though, we get more information on Throal:

- ~30,000 in nine Halls of Throal
- ~20,000 in the ~40 land-grant communities

By my reckoning, in the major cities to exclude the Blood Wood, we're at closer to 650,000.

After the major cities, about the only guidance we have is that there are "hundreds" of villages and towns (called "communities") "dotting" the landscape. Further, as a rule of thumb, a village has 10s-100s, and a town has high 100s to the thousands. Many of these would be along roads and established trade routes, but definitely not all - there are plenty of communities that prefer seclusion for safety's sake. If we do something like a 4 villages to 1 town ratio, and we assume there are maybe 300 communities, we end up somewhere in the neighborhood of ~20,000 in villages and ~45,000 in towns.

At this point, again excluding the Blood Wood and any minor cities, we're at ~720,000.

After this, it's really just hand-waving, although some source material might provide more information.

- Given that the Blood Wood is pretty much the only place to find Blood Elves, and this would've been a fairly sizable community before the Scourge, I'd find it hard to believe that we're talking less than 50,000.
- The standard Barsaive map shows nine cities with no population information. Seems only fair that each of these cities be counted AT LEAST 25,000 each, in line with the Inner Cities of Throal.
- No meaningful information is provided for the T'Skrang, either in their villages along the Serpent River or in the number of riverboats and average crew size. However, we know they have problems reproducing, and we know they are less than 10% of overall racial distribution. Given the other bumps we've ended up providing to the other races, I'd say that we really ought to bump this by ~50,000.
- Obsidimen and Windlings will never make a major impact on the numbers, they're just too few, no sense futzing over them.

With these cities, we're over ~1,000,000, and that seems like a good enough stopping point. We'll have skewed up the racial distribution since including the Blood Wood brings in a lot of Elves while K'tenshin and other cities on the Serpent River likely brings in a decent number of T'skrang.

Personally, I'm okay with excluding the Crystal Raiders and Ork Skirmishers from the population count. These guys really are "enemies," so unless you're playing a campaign where the players are likely to try to have civil interaction, you'll likely use them as you see fit, regardless of numbers. Again, though, keep this in mind as it likely screws up the racial distribution information.

[The Undying]

I wanted to make this post a separate thought, as it definitely rolls in more opinion than sourced data...

For what it's worth, these numbers don't include truly nomadic communities.

This isn't a huge note from the perspective of the mundane population of Barsaive, as this likely only adds a few ten thousand. However, I'd personally say that the majority of the adventuring Adepts would fall into this category.

To me, city/town/village populations would include the people who actually spend their lives in that community. They live there, work there, and buy local goods. Adventurers might own a home somewhere, but I'd be hard pressed to call them a member of that community, especially from a population standpoint.

Why is this an important caveat? One worthwhile metric (for the number-minded) a GM should consider is how prevalent Adepts are, both from an adventuring and fixed asset basis. Keeping adventuring Adepts out of the population is an important consideration, the end result being that Adepts included in the population are mostly vendors and craftsmen (Enchanters and Weaponsmiths mostly), retirees (from an adventuring perspective) that have likely turned to either politics or milita/mercenary roles, criminals (Thieves, or any variety of adversarial groups), and societies/guilds (secret or otherwise). That's not to say that adventuring Adepts won't be around when interesting or needed, of course. It also likely doesn't skew numbers significantly - I wouldn't say this as a whole, but I'd lean towards personally saying that most Weaponsmiths are in the general population, not out adventuring. Finally - and this is very much a personal opinion - part of being an Adept is a general longing to build one's legend, which I would say is best done on the move.

[Lys]

Personally, I'm okay with excluding the Crystal Raiders and Ork Skirmishers from the population count. These guys really are "enemies," so unless you're playing a campaign where the players are likely to try to have civil interaction, you'll likely use them as you see fit, regardless of numbers. Again, though, keep this in mind as it likely screws up the racial distribution information.

I strongly disagree with that, Ork Scorchers and Crystal Raiders are as much a part of Barsaive as anyone else. If you're going to remove them because they're enemies, you might as well not count Iopos either. Plus you say excluding them screws up the racial chart, since in both cases these groups account for a significant portion of their population, and in the case of the Crystal Raiders a majority of it. What's more, not counting Scorchers leads to some bizarre things happening to the population count when Cara Fahd is founded, and many of those bands decide to the join the new nation. It honestly seems better to just include them like the books do.

[The Undying]

As I said above, the books DO NOT include Crystal Raiders or Ork Scorchers in population counts, and excluding them LIKELY screws up racial distributions. There's no clear indication as to whether or not these groups are included in the racial demographics, actually. It seems like a fair assumptions they would, but that assumption can go either way - it's equally likely that the racial demographics they give are only for the populations they count, since they seem to say "all of Barsaive" is equal to the few cities they actually tally.

As for leaping towards Iopos because I exclude the Raiders and Scorchers, that is not a fair comparison. Iopos is a MAJOR city, with major political ties, as well as a mixing of multiple Namegivers. There is a huge amount of potential for player characters to interact with many, many elements of the city. Meanwhile, it's likely that most play groups would only interact with individual Crystal Raider moots and Scorchers Raider/Calavry on a skirmish basis rather than as large swathes of the faction together. For those play groups that do want to bring them in as major players, there are ED1 sources for the Crystal Raiders that can be dug through to determine population approximations and resources available to them, and the Scorchers would have to build off the rough estimates from the Barsaive Box Set.

[The Undying]

As a matter of completeness, for those who would like to include them, information from the Barsaive Box Set (which, again, is not included in population information and may or may not be included in racial distributions):

- Ork Cavalry: ~12,000 in the three major cavalry groups described, of which a quarter are the actual fighters (rest are family, retired). More cavalry groups likely exist.
- Ork Raiders: ~17,000 in the three tribes described, of which a quarter are the actual fighters (rest are family, retired). More tribes likely exist.
- Crystal Raiders: ~3,000 in the three trollmoots described (as in ~1,000 each). More moots DEFINITELY exist. No meaningful information given for Newot.

This bumps the population from around 1,020,000 (trying to compile the specific numbers) to basically 1,070,000, using the numbers provided.

My personal concern, which led to this research, is what kind of civilization players are likely to run into while exploring Barsaive. Arguably, yes, players will likely come across Scorcher camps, but again, as these are "enemies," they will very likely be given a wide berth. Having rough numbers does provide some idea of how often adventurers might stumble across camps, but again, as "enemies," I would expect to use them as I see fit.

If anyone wants to scour through the ED1 "Crystal Raiders" source book to provide more comprehensive information for them, please do so and chime in with the results. For the Scorchers, I'm not sure if there's a more meaningful source, but if there is and someone wants to compile that information as well, please do so and chime in with the results.

And, of course, if anyone has any suggestions/corrections on my numbers, especially the ones that I ended up generating because I didn't have any good citations, please let me know. For what it's worth, I'm looking at the Prelude to War era, not modern ED4 times. People are entirely welcome to chime in with more modern information, but please preface that.

[Lys]

So inspired by you, here's my own estimate of Barsaive's population. First we have the populations of Bartertown (50k), Iopos (100K), Jerris (80k), Kratas (50K), and Travar (95k) for a total of 375 000. The Kingdom of Throal minus outlying settlements has 170 000, which brings it up to a total of 545 000. In Cara Fahd we have Claw Ridge with upwards of 35k, adding up to 40k when adding nearby Mountain's End, raises it to 585 000. Now we start estimating: Urupa id' say probably has some 25k people, giving us 610 000. Next the Tskrang, for whom there is little data, particularly the Underwater City of Ishkarat. The Cliff City of Syrthis however has 60k people. It is said the Floating City of V'strimon could rival Travar in size if it were possible to fit more people inside it, so i'm going peg it at 80k people. The Sixteen Towers of K'Tenshin have an unknown population but implied to be very large, perhaps at least as large as Cliff City so i'd say 60k. So right there we have another estimated 200 000, bringing the estimated total up to 810 000.

That's just the large cities, it doesn't count the many towns and villages, the Blood Wood, nomadic and jungle tribes, or any highland settlements. Neither does it count any part of Theran-held Barsaive, which includes all of Vivane Province. Though since we mentioned them, the populations of Vivane, Skypoint, and Vrontok are about 110k, with Asheren adding another 20k. There's also a number of towns that would add another 15-20k but i'm ignoring them because i'm focusing on the big cities. Additionally the Vivane Boxed Set says that Landis has a population of 400 000, a number which i don't know what to make of given how out of line it seems with everything else, so i'm inclined to ignore it.

So where does this put us? Well taking all of Barasaive into account we have at least 920 000 people in the major urban centres. Now the question is, how much of the population lives in the rest of province? Well you can pick a number here. Normally you could estimate the level of urbanization based of the technology level, which is about Renaissance for Barsaive, but they have magical farming that makes any estimates effectively impossible. At the bare minimum we can take the fact that 10% of Throal's population lives in the outlying settlements and extrapolate that to the rest of Barsaive, giving us a minimum total population of 1.02 million. The actual number is probably much larger in order to properly fill out the rest of the province, personally i'd like to think the outlying population is at least half that of the major urban centers, putting the total 1.4 million. Note that this is an extremely high level of urbanization for a Renaissance-type society. Without the magical farming, you would be expecting the population over 10 million in order to support that many large cities.

[The Undying]

Yeah, the mechanics of farming, food distribution, balance between producers and consumers, and the role of magic in any or all parts of that I think falls squarely into "your Earthdawn" territory. There was a separate thread, either on this forum or the old forum, talking about the use/availability of Plant Feast and it's impact on food production ... and that's really not a topic I want to revisit. The best guidance I'd really even wade into is "ED does not strive for realism, don't try." Unless your campaign really wants to get into possible topics of famine due to widespread food production issues, I'd highly recommend just hand-waving it, with the further idea that "the occasional loss of a caravan due to raid does not really affect anything, only a concerted effort to effectively siege a city by sustained disruption of food supply could like result in starvation or upheaval due to lack of food."

[ChrisDDickey]

How about Adept population?
What percentage can become Adepts? What percentage have been Initiated? What percentage have reached Journeyman? Warden? Master?
When the party hits Travar (pop 95,000) with backpacks full of silver and everybody in the party wants their weapons and armor forged... How many Weaponsmith Adepts are they going to find?

[The Undying]

Adept population is never really covered in any source material that I am aware of. I believe it is intentional: the GM decides how precedent these elements are.

My personal rule of thumb is about 10% are practicing Adepts, including Initiates. Maybe another 5-10% have the capacity to become Adepts but are not for any number of reasons. Another 5-10% don't have the capacity to become Adepts but are more attuned to magic than the mundane population. The latter two groups perform various minor ritual magics and half-magics - nothing to rival Talents or spells but still very useful.

Weapon smiths fall into that has valley: how accessible do you as a GM want them at your table. My thoughts are as follows. Novice weapon smiths are problem easy to find, esp in cities but also possibly even in mid-size towns. Journeyman weapon smiths are likely available for general use in cities, maybe rarely in large towns, but it's likely they have a bit of a waiting list (forging a single thing basically takes all week). Warden weapon smiths are inaccessible except viable exclusive memberships (secret societies, royal guard, etc) which is very hard to get in to. Master weapon smiths are basically not accessible - players would have to really seek them out and, due to Karma concerns, it would take quite a lot to get them to forge, much much more than simple coin.

[Flowswithdrek]

How about Adept population?
What percentage can become Adepts? What percentage have been Initiated? What percentage have reached Journeyman? Warden? Master?
When the party hits Travar (pop 95,000) with backpacks full of silver and everybody in the party wants their weapons and armor forged... How many Weaponsmith Adepts are they going to find?

The Travar book isn't quite out yet, but hopefully will soon, and while it doesn't specifically go into numbers, its written with the angle that there are more adepts in Travar than other cities, especially during the run up to the Founding. Xoros Honeyed-Tongue runs a number of forges in and around the city, there is the Dragon’s Forge run by the Strugen family, there is the gate market at the Twilight Gate that caters specifically to that kind of thing. All the rich merchants and big trading houses, would have Weaponsmiths in their employ, you just need their patronage. There's even and adventure about a forge and a Ledgendary Weaponsmith.