Tuala Morn: Demographics?

[gojira]

So I sat down to do a little work with Tuala Morn and fill in some details. The first thing I did was a quick estimate of land area.

 

I took a scan of the main map, filled in the mainland with green, the took a histogram count of the green pixels: 936056 of 'em. Then I measure the size of the map scale -- 100 miles was 165 pixels, according the to software -- and did a quick calculation. One pixel was 0.606 square miles, so I had 936056 x 0.606 = 567 thousand square miles.

 

Jebus! That's more than France. More than twice the land area of France, in fact. No wonder Tuala Morn felt huge.

 

As a quick check, I measured the rough dimensions of Tuala Morn. Not choosing the furthest point, but just eye-balling a middle extent, it's 655 miles east to west and 495 miles north south. That's 324 k sq. mi. so I think I'm in the ball park.

 

Anyone see any obvious problems with the way I've done this? This is just way more land area than I was expecting.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I may have made a mistake with one of my calculations. Each pixel is 0.606 miles on each side, which is 0.367 sq. miles per pixel.

 

Still, that's ~344k sq. miles, which is well over France (260k sq. miles, iirc). Ok we're getting closer to a Medieval sized country at least....

[misteradam]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I don't fully understand what you're trying to do. When scaling things down, its easier for me to do it in even numbers of 5:1, 10:1, 100:1 etc.

 

i would stay away from measuring pixels..it depends on your resolution. stick to inches.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

Fair enough.

 

Here's the question turned around: how big of an area would you estimate Tuala Morn covers? (Assuming you own the book.)

 

What I'd like to do is eventually use a source like Medieval Demographics Made Easy to compute some reasonable population numbers, just to see how it works out. Probably I'll just do a couple of duchies, not even a whole kingdom. But when I started, I got such a huge number I thought I'd better stop and check out that I wasn't wasting my time.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

Tuala Morn really is supposed to be big, I believe.

 

Comparing it to a single European Country (like France) is a bit of a bad idea, since the land exists pretty much on it's own. Other lands outside are touched on, but the focus of a TM campaign is that one bit of land to itself. It's got to be big enough to have civilization and unknown wilds in it both.

 

And I would probably shy away from a Medieval Demographic calculator as it definitely doesn't follow standard demographics. Or more usefully, measure each of the Ten Kingdoms separately focusing on the populated areas of them.

[Steve Long]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I tend to err on the side of making worlds designed for gaming on the large side, since that leaves more room for GMs to add things of their own, for the PCs to carve out their own kingdoms, for wilderness areas, and so on. If you prefer a smaller scale, just reduce everything by a factor of X (at whatever value you prefer to assign to "X" ) and have fun.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

Steve, could I post a map of one kingdom, say Conhaile, that's marked up with where I think the "dense population" should be, and have you comment on it? It'll be pretty well covered in my own splotches and cropped, not much chance of this becoming a free download for people looking for a free map.

 

I'm not really concerned about the size of Tuala Morn, just a bit surprised. I'm kind of playing around with how to get a campaign started, and I wanted to get the sizes of towns and villages "about right." So I popped over to the Medieval Demographics site and did some number crunching, I again I was surprised. This isn't a bad thing, I just had to readjust my thinking a bit.

 

Mostly, I didn't want to start a campaign, and then have the original descriptions turn out to be totally bogus. So I'm just noodling around with some background work right now.

 

Here are some more numbers from the Medieval Demographics site. Again I'm looking for generalities and trends. One thing I was struck by is how fast the cities go below the limen for a town (about 8 thousand folks, according to Medieval Demographics). That's probably something I'll just plain have to fudge, since each of the ten kingdoms has a few important towns and cities. I just take it as a warning to not go hog-wild with the size of these towns.

 

Tuala Morn Demographics

 

Total Land Area: 340,000

People per square mile: 30

Total Estimated Population: 10,200,000

 

Largest City Population: 49,113

 

Second Rank City: 24,159

Third Rank City: 19,038

4 th, etc. 16,492

5 14,493

6 11,097

7 7,584

8 5,228

9 3,452

10 2,530

11 2,162

12 1,796

13 1,340

 

Oh yes, I'm still working on a list of large towns / cities. Steven if you have any thoughts about the relative sizes of cities in Tuala Morn, that would be helpful. Near as I can tell, just looking at the big map, not every kingdom has a capital cities that would rate as a city. But I'm thinking I should fudge that, make more small cities, just to let adventures have a destination to travel to.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I figured, just from my personal vision of the place, that Tuala Morn had half a dozen cities at best. Making even these somewhat 'legendary' in the minds of most Tualans who live in small towns and villages.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

Yes, that's what I'm trying to work out too. What is the right "feel" for the place? I'm kinda of wavering between a more traditional medieval feel with Celtic accents and with a fair number of towns and castles, or something far more wide open and wild like the imagery from the Conan the Barbarian movie.

 

I'm just using the numbers as a launching point. If I go further I'll try to break up kingdoms into more towns and villages (likely just starting with one kingdom as a base of operations) and see how it goes. Flavor is the most important consideration, I'm just messing around trying to get a feel for it.

 

It's interesting at least to try some numbers and see how they work out. Something to hang the flavor on.

 

For example, just looking at the map I have now, Dun Culross (in Conhaile) is either very small, or isolated and in need of regular re-supply by caravan. I'll probably go the latter because it means a "guard the caravan" adventure is possible. Poking at demographics makes things like this pop out and present themselves for consideration.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

Looking at Dun Culross, I get the impression it's merely the castle of the Duke Of Culross and as much population to support that, and no more. (part of that decision is the fact that it is marked as as square on the map, not a circle like the major cities).

 

Going further, I would imagine Culross itself has only small and medium sized villages, maybe one decent sized town on Loch Cormaron, and the only city in all of Conhaile would be Dun Conroy, with Cathair Kildare being a very large town. I imagine most of the population spread out amongst small mining towns (or larger villages depending on how you looked at it), clustered farmsteads and fishing villages on the coast.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I was assuming that the forest Kylle Dreenan was like Mirkwood, full of fell things. Thus the eastern side of those hills in Culross would be very sparsely inhabited, if at all, and the western side of the same hills would be lightly inhabited, since they're exposed to human raiders from the north, and probably isolated in winter.

 

Come to think of it, I don't see an eastern border for Kildare on that map, and the southern border of Culross between Kildare/Conroy seems missing too. I hadn't thought about how far down Culross's border might go.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

regarding Conhaile I would say a 'natural' border is Loch Cormaron, north is Culross, south is Kildare. Kildare probably runs all the way to the river Sulvain.

[gojira]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

That's possible I guess, although the text for "The King's Lands" says that Conhaile rules "a demesne running west from the Glamorgan Hills all the way to the border with Kildare." So I'd guess the border was left off the map, and should be just west of MacFerla's, the King's Hostel.

 

For Culross, I agree that the point where the land gets pinched between Loch Cormaron and Kylle Dreenan, from the point furthest east of on the lake, is the most likely southern border.

 

Now that I re-read it, I don't see Bashaelen, the king's castle, on the map either. I'd assume on a hill south-east of MacFerla's, roughly mid way between MacFerla's and Dun Conroy.

[Steve Long]

Re: Tuala Morn: Demographics?

 

I don't have any particular thoughts about city sizes, other than to say I'd expect a Tualan city to be much smaller than a city in a more "traditional" FRPG setting like Greyhawk, Ambrethel, Forgotten Realms, etc. And I think if you're satisfied with how you've laid out the population, that's fine; no need for me to comment on any maps.