What would the world population be in a Baldur's Gate (Forgotten Realms) world?
MakeAthkatlaGrtAgain
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The Forgotten Realms is based on medieval earth where the population would be maybe 100 millions. Today our population shot up to billions due to medicine curing illness. However in the game, their medicine through magic is way better than ours--it can cure any disease even AIDS and cancer, and even raise the dead. If a person is dying from ebola, a simple cure disease spell fixes it.
The only limiting factors are (1) lack of farming technology, (2) lots of intelligent nonhuman creatures that kill humans.
The only limiting factors are (1) lack of farming technology, (2) lots of intelligent nonhuman creatures that kill humans.
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tl;dr read The Prince and tell me what would have happened if the Nazis had nuclear weapons since 1939 (no real order, first one is optional as well).
But Faerun is insanely violent, with powerful evil monsters in every nook and cranny, and even more powerful and even more evil monsters just a single spell from entering the Prime Material Plane and wreaking havoc.
Plus, humans appear to have fewer children than in medieval times--you don't hear about a lot of people in D&D with more than two or three kids, much like today.
The population could realistically be almost anything.
Interesting quote about regular causes of death from Irenicus in one of the first dream sequences of BG2:
This woman had power, of a sort. She lost her parents to plague, her husband to war, but she persevered. She was well respected, her farm was prosperous and her children were well fed. And now she's dead. Her land will be divided, her children will move on, and she will be forgotten. She lived a ‘good’ life, but she had no power. She was a slave to death.
Plague? Hmm... I really think it's the whole can't afford medical care situation.
Any mage doing that would have heroes questing to stop him.
The deal is, people with exceptional magical power *are* covered and are relatively more common figures to interact with in video games - since most people tend to block out the existence of peasant #2240, and the game has certain performance limits that it can't exceed. The same goes for stories - the powerful characters aren't going to interact much with common people. Nor are authors apt to spend a lot of time dealing with the circumstances of the common people. Not to mention how wildly expensive services are.
I don't recall if this was the norm in 2 ed., but I remember in 3rd ed., it was explicitly said that commoners earn about 1 sp per day (thus 1 GP every 10 days). So, let's say for example little Johnny Farmer was climbing a tree and broke his neck and died due to his injuries, the average commoner is *not* going to have the 400+ GP (the DMG for second ed suggests a base price of 1.5k gold - 3rd ed put it at around 5,000 GP - but you had to have the material component (like a diamond) worth that much, so a desperate farmer would be almost sure to get bilked for a larger amount) to pay for the resurrection. There also wouldn't likely be any means of securing a loan for such a huge amount as the amount would be unpayable - as it would take over 40 years to amass an adequate sum - if every last bit of cash went to paying. Sure Johnny's father could try mortgaging any property he may have, but it's unlikely to be worth anywhere near that much. It's also not implemented in BG, but in actual 2nd edition, the priest that casted the resurrection spell would incur a permanent -1 to CON. So, even if you were a goodly cleric who had managed to gain enough XP to be able to resurrect somebody you would only do it VERY rarely as you're literally shaving years off of your life every time you do it lol. It's even worse in 3rd edition where resurrection costs the recipient a level - since little Johnny won't have any levels to give (more than likely) he'll permanently lose 2 CON. So, it's way out of reach for the common person.
Also, raise dead doesn't work on people who have died of old age so whenever the CON score finally drops out and you fail your save against old age death it's a wrap.
Furthermore, if you even wanted *minor* temple services like cure disease or a cure light wounds, that would be a *tremendous* expenditure for a normal family which would likely leave them indebted for decades (if not longer). A simple cure light wounds *potion* which in BG1, can run ~150 GP, would take 4 years wages give or take to accumulate enough GP to buy for a commoner. So if you were a peasant that was lucky enough to own some farm land, you would almost surely have to put it on a 20+ year mortgage to afford a single cure light potion
So, while plague wouldn't be as much of an issue in a D&D setting - because priests could surely recognize it and put it a stop to it pro-bono before it got massively out of hand (at least in cases of normal pathogens) the mortality rate of the common people wouldn't be that much less than normal - and if anything it would probably be worse since they have to contend with all manner of strange and magical creatures living in the world. Like imagine how certifiably screwed you would be if you had to pay for ghost removal services lol.
I knew taking that course on population issues was going to be useful one day.
I believe that the population of the FR is more in line with the developed, modern world, even though it follows medieval social structures. Although I will state population in the FR does follow certain classical population principles.
Scholars still scratch their heads in wonder that in the classical era, Rome, Athens and other population centres could have a populations reaching millions, especially those important centres in China, India and Mesopatamia. The British Isles most likely had a population around 15 million before the Roman conquest. Yet those populations could crash suddenly and catastrophically. After the roman invasion, Britain's population crashed to below 200,000. Rome itself collapsed to around 20,000 at the start of the Medieval period (500 AD)
The later periods saw population crashes as well... Just not as pronounced. The huge crash of the native American population on the arrival of Spanish being an obvious example... The plague, Swine flu (An epidemic that killed more Europeans than WWI)
All, as you would expect, would involve a population crash.
However their the similarities end. All women in the FR have access to birth control, like most women in the developed world. They also have access to perfect health care in the form of clerics, druids and potions. Also health enhancing potions are socially acceptable, unlike the performance enhancing drugs of our world. Lastly, they have had this for millenia.
Looking at european census data, the effect of good healthcare, good infant mortality rates and accessibe birth control means fewer births. European populations are stable, most families on averageopting for 2.5 children, to form the nuclear family so often revered in popular culture... Two children perfectly replace the two adults. A perfect population balance. That extra 0.5 to replace those lost to accident or disease.
I presume that in the FR, this pattern is followed. If not, we would have a cycle of rapid population growth followed by cataclysmic famine, followed by rapid growth etc...
Technology does not improve in the FR so no industrial revolution to suport any population explosion for example.
As famine does not seem to be the norm in the FR we can make a certain assumption. Families tend to be smaller than the medieval norm of 8 to 12... 3 children would be a good estimate.
Hope you enjoy and find this insightful!
Also in this world you have Priests of Talona who actually seek to spread disease. So there is that side to consider as well.
All in all my answer to the question of "What would the world population be in a Baldur's Gate (Forgotten Realms) world?" is:
"Dead."
It would be an interesting plotline if a Queen of a nation goes and decides she wants to socialize it and give it all to people for free.
Well then you'd have to train 1/4th the kingdom as priests because they can only heal for a little bit each day.
Then you'd have people from all the neighboring kingdoms dropping in to freeload of the services.
And of course the heroes would have to solve this problem and could do it various ways.
The only places in Europe exempt from this (as a rule rather than as exception) that I'm aware of is Scandinavia, Sweden and Iceland in particular, and Basque Country. In fact, as the Basque kingdom of Navarra was absorbed into Spain/Castille the entire Basque population was given status as hidalgos, the lowest form of Spanish nobility.
In Faerun, however, most peasants are free. They can live where they want, marry who they want, move where they want, own land, and so on. This is much more akin to the teeny tiny percent of peasants in England that was allowed to own land without being nobility or to the free farmers of Sweden or Iceland than to how the vast amount of serfs and peasants in Europe lived.
Strangely enough this is reflected in the D'Arnise keep quests (but most of the research into the prevalence of Serfdom was being done in the early 90's so I guess that makes sense). Where your peasants are *technically* free, but they're held to the land by indebtedness.
FR is a really varied place - you can find basically any historical trope you want from Greek City states, to old Norse mythology style communes, feudal Japan, etc.
In fact, I've seen it stated somewhere that the vast majority of commoners will never see a gold piece in their lives, so popping to church and shelling out 100 of them for a healing spell is not gonna be an option for 90% of the population. Remember that not everybody has some great destiny or is part of a prophecy or has the blood of a deity running through their veins, those NPCs we ignore because they're just "commoner" or "townsperson" who have only one generic line to say when we speak to them actually make up most of the population of these worlds.
Slavery: actually, slavery is as old as humankind, and continued right through until its abolition in the 19th century. Apparently some groups of people still practice it (illegally obviously). The world is bigger than Europe, and the Ottoman Empire was particularly notorious for trading slaves. But fantasy worlds tend to avoid having slave cultures, as it's hard to not impose our own morality on a historical setting, so they limit slave ownership to certain regions. So if anything, in such a period, there were more slaves in our world than there are in FR.
It's also worth keeping in mind that unlike us, who work for a wage then spends it on necessities, the average Faerunian peasant would be a self-sufficiency farmer - working primarily to directly produce the necessities feed themselves and theirs, then selling the surplus to others. A farming peasant needs to spend less cash because a lot of the things a wage-peasant needs to pay for is already being produced in the household.
Yes, the typical serf would not be able to afford the ridiculous prices that priests charge adventurers, however, they may offer the same services for a reduced price or for free to those part of their flock/community.
It is one thing to heal a boy of a parishioner of your temple that comes every day for prayers and another to heal the idiot who thought he could take on the red dragon all by himself who you've never seen before.
Commoners don't understand arcane magic (mages are either feared or admired, not necessarily understood) and very few wizards are altruists. Even though it might be quite normal for a commoner to see people sling spells, it doesn't mean that he understands or relies on it.
Clerics are more common but most Faerunian deities work pretty much like the catholic church did in medieval times - they seek to claim authority over the common folk. In AD&D there is also a large quantity of level 0 characters, and the "chief resident" of a temple would rarely be beyond level 5 or 6.
Adventurers are 1% of the population, but the higher their level the rarer they can be. Level 7 characters are powerful well known heroes and characters beyond level 10 are legendary heroes and villains. They might even try to rule nations because of their power, but let's not forget that there are monsters with even more power who could kill you with the lift of a finger , such as liches and mind flayers.
Even in nations such as thay you can see that most of the Zulkirs are only a couple of levels above 15, so it's unlikely that we would find 10th level wizards in every corner.
Of course, this is all because we are analysing Faerun as if it were a real world. In an rpg game you can twist all that and make the continent more or less magical, give Zsass Tamm a twin brother and have dragons with feet like rabbits kill mummies.