Blackmoor Population

[Havard]

Havard that site is a great find. I'd limit some of the stuff there to only certain kinds of places but the mechant/SV chart is an awesome resource.

One of the things from that site that's only relevant to certain kinds of places is the pop density info.

I found that 51,750 sq mi figure curios too. I don't know how he derived it, so I tried figuring out the sq mi from scratch. Looking at the FFC hex map and doing an extremely rough counting of 10 mile hexes yeilds something in the neighborhood of 20 x 30 hexes for the area east of the misaugua and north of the root rivers. That's 600 hexes times 86.6 square miles per hex. That yields 51,960 square mile.

Bugger all if that aint close. I didn't try to account for water areas but parts of the land extend beyond what I counted so it comes close to balancing out.

I'm sure Cthuldrews figure is a more careful counting than mine.

The d20 maps appear to be on exactly the same scale. I'm sure Dave L. has this all figured out for sure.

Excellent! I was going to do the maths from scratch myself, but I agree with you that this makes sense.

So, if you go with Alex’s 262,500 figure you get a pop density of 5.07 persons per square mile. That is actually a very reasonable figure for a northern country with long winters (October to April) and a primarily hay based agriculture. (FFC specifies that a domesticated form of bison (i.e. cows) are the agricultural base. Garbage pits of despair also mention sheep.)

Similarly low and even lower population densities are estimated for similar places, such as medieval Norway,

http://books.google.com/books?id=PWP6LX ... ay&f=false

Much the same can be said of finland, Iceland, and so forth, so upon reflection, Alex’s figure, is probably about correct with that number being spread between country , towns and cities.

I'm not sure Norway is a good comparison here. Keep in mind that about 80% of Norways area is uninhabitable. S. John Ross who wrote the article I linked above suggests reasonable population to be between 30 and 120 people per square mile. While I would agree that Blackmoor should be on the low end of the scale, 5 people sounds unreasonably low.

Reasons for a low population could be the following:

• Cimate, as you mention, though I dont know if it should be much worse than Scottland.
  
• Wars, wars, and more wars: This is a big one. Although we also know there is migration to the North from the Thonian Empire.
  
• Swamps: Such large parts of the kingdom are wetlands. It is hard to say how inhabitable these swamps are, yet there are clearly settlements found within the swamplands.

In spite of these factors, I think the current population numbers need to be revisited.

-Havard