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What would the world population be in a Baldur's Gate (Forgotten Realms) world?

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.



Comments

  • TeflonTeflon Member, Translator (NDA) Posts: 515
    Well maybe simple magic spell itself also a major factor to...... Reduce populations. :expressionless: I think that creates some equibrilium in pop.
  • Magic spell to reduce population? That would mean either sterility or killing people.
  • CrevsDaakCrevsDaak Member Posts: 7,155
    You also have to consider the big morale gap in between our world and the FR that the power a human being can amass creates (if you want an example of what I'm saying, read Steelheart by Sanderson. It's not the best of his books but it's the most precise example I could think of). Take a very high level Fighter/Mage for example. None can beat him in combat and none is smarter than him. How would you deny this F/M from overtaking the world and murdering millions? He can justify his actions by proving his superior power, and breaking moral codes won't matter to him, as those exist among a certain group or faction, and he would be out-of-league with humans, so he would have no reason to follow those moral codes. Also, slavery is far more common, and democracy isn't very popular, and these two factors help dictators immensely.

    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).
  • semiticgoddesssemiticgoddess Member Posts: 14,903
    The environment in D&D is a lot cleaner than the medieval times in the real world. The streets aren't flooded with refuse and waste, child mortality isn't massive, people aren't covered in scabs and lesions, malnutrition doesn't mentally cripple the peasantry, nobles are not plagued by gout... In Faerun, disease never seemed to be a major cause of death, probably because it's not as dramatic from a story perspective. Under those circumstances, the population would soar.

    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.
  • Well if people live in a society where everyone around them is dying violently all the time, this has a huge negative psychological effect. It especially does on children and they grow up with a lot of mental problems.

    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.
  • TeflonTeflon Member, Translator (NDA) Posts: 515

    Magic spell to reduce population? That would mean either sterility or killing people.

    Exactly. :*
  • Teflon,

    Any mage doing that would have heroes questing to stop him.
  • EinhardtEinhardt Member Posts: 53
    Gallenger said:

    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.

    Man, people in Candlekeep were very generous to give it away for free.
  • GallengerGallenger Member Posts: 400
    The funny thing about that is - I could be off here - the only people that just give you healing potions in the entire game are the 1 priest in Candlekeep.... and Xzar (who is insane). So even the game acknowledges how ludicrously expensive they are :D lol.
  • AnduinAnduin Member Posts: 5,745
    A great topic!

    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!
  • Einhardt said:

    Gallenger said:

    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.

    Man, people in Candlekeep were very generous to give it away for free.
    But it's very very difficult to get into Candlekeep. I forgot exactly how the manual described it but it was like people waited decades to just visit there for a day and I think they needed a large donation.

  • So these priests can only heal so many people a day and then they just to take a nap for 8 hours.

    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.



  • scriverscriver Member Posts: 2,072
    CrevsDaak said:

    Also, slavery is far more common [in the Forgotten Realms]

    Had to cut this out because no, it is not, not by far. In the real world medieval Europe the vast amount of people were serfs - slaves in all but name. In the feudal society, generally speaking, the only people who were free were burghers and the nobility - as a rule, the lowest rank of nobility/gentry is the unlanded and untitled free man.

    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.
  • GallengerGallenger Member Posts: 400
    edited December 2016
    Serfdom was not as common in the middle ages as we're typically taught. Semi-serfdom (which is basically like share-cropping or tenant farming) was *far* more prevalent then we've been lead to believe, than outright serfdom - and then things flipped with very stringent serfdom coming to Russia and Central Europe (where previously there had been little serfdom) and what strict serfdom there was fading away in Western Europe. Our image of serfdom is tied up in romance writers who saw Russia/Central Europe and figured that's just how things had always been.

    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.
    Post edited by Gallenger on
  • SquireSquire Member Posts: 511
    Bear in mind that healing spells are actually quite expensive - being RPG players, we get an isolated view of the world, but if this place would actually exist, we wouldn't find 10 gold pieces in the bottom of a barrel at some random village, because while 10gp is nothing to us, it's a hell of a lot of money to some commoners. :D

    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.
  • scriverscriver Member Posts: 2,072
    Squire said:

    we wouldn't find 10 gold pieces in the bottom of a barrel at some random village, because while 10gp is nothing to us, it's a hell of a lot of money to some commoners. :D

    Actually, I think what really happens is that we stumble upon and absent-mindedly loot the hiding place of some poor pauper family's entire life savings, carefully hidden away for some unforeseeable accident or disaster. I guess Tiny Tim won't be able to cure that severe case of water lung cough now D:
    Squire said:

    I've seen it stated somewhere that the vast majority of commoners will never see a gold piece in their lives

    This could be true, but only in the sense that a peasant is far more likely to do his business in the lower currencies (even if he would have a gold's worth of silver it might even be to his disadvantage to not keep them as silver coins - given as it is extremely unclear whether coins in FR/DnD receive their value from their weight, as they did in the real world, or not) and that he will spend most of it before it reaches a full gold coin in value.

    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.
  • deltagodeltago Member Posts: 7,811
    About priests and healing magic:

    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.
  • Yulaw9460Yulaw9460 Member Posts: 634
    edited November 2018
    Deleted.
    Post edited by Yulaw9460 on
  • CrevsDaakCrevsDaak Member Posts: 7,155
    Yulaw9460 said:

    deltago said:

    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.

    Yeah, soloing Dragons. What are people thinking?
  • Mantis37Mantis37 Member Posts: 1,177
    According to the old Forgotten Realms Adventures books the majority of major cities have populations in the 100,000 range, though certain cities such as Waterdeep (or to a much greater extent) Calimport may swell to many times that number in some seasons.
  • DJKajuruDJKajuru Member Posts: 3,300
    Even in Faerun arcane or divine magic doesn't substitute mundane technology . It takes years of study to become a mage or cleric and the chances of ever getting above level 5 are minimum.

    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.
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