Michael Thayne's page

I got thinking about the relative military strength of the various nations of Avistan, which got me wondering about their populations, which in turn got me wondering about their land areas. So I downloaded the following map from the wiki: https://pathfinderwiki.com/mediawiki/images/a/a1/Inner_Sea_region_map.jpg

Then I used some image editing tools to work out the area, in square miles, of each marked region in the Avistani part of the map (maybe at some point in the future I'll do Garund). Here are my results, in every case rounded to three significant figures:

* Absalom: 11,300
* Andoran: 136,000
* Brevoy: 67,700
* Cheliax: 375,000
* Druma: 60,400
* Five Kings Mountains: 31,700
* Galt: 114,000
* Hold of Belkzen: 68,700
* Irrisen: 84,500
* Isger: 46,600
* Kyonin: 33,300
* Lands of the Linnorm Kings: 120,000
* Lastwall: 41,000
* Mendev: 57,100
* Molthune: 74,600
* Nidal: 90,300
* Nirtmathaas: 53,600
* Numeria: 106,000
* Razmiran: 21,800
* Realm of the Mammoth Lords: 110,000
* River Kingdoms: 217,000
* Taldor: 256,000
* Ustalav: 98,200
* Varisia: 289,000
* Worldwound: 161,000

But what about population? Looking at the populations for the largest cities in the various regions, primarily capitals, it reminded me of figures I'd seen for historical cities in medieval Europe. I looked up the details in the widely-cited article Medieval Demographics Made Easy (Google it) and tried the math for Cheliax. In most cases, I found the sizes of the largest cities were consistent with what you could generate using Medieval Demographics Made Easy. In a few cases, such as Taldor, the largest city was 5-10% larger than it "should" have been, but I honestly wondered if Paizo had used the article's guidelines straight, and I had merely made a slight mis-estimate of land area.

There were also a few more extreme outliers, which seem to have been intentional—Absalom, of course, is explicitly an island port that relies on food imports to survive. Iadara (capital of the elven nation of Kyonin) may have been made intentionally on the large side, especially for a city in the middle of a forest, because Elves Are Just Better. And we're likely meant to understand that Nerosyan (capital of Mendev) relies on a steady flow of crusaders from the south to maintain its large population.

If Paizo really used Medieval Demographics Made Easy when planning out Avistan, this means most if not all of the regions above should have a population density between 30 and 120 people per square mile. The exact population density within this range will depend on terrain and climate. The Realm of the Mammoth Lords is likely near the bottom of this range, while Andoran and Taldor are likely near the top. Most nations will be somewhere int he middle.

One odd case is Karlsgard, largest city in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings. Its canonical population of 72,080 wouldn't be out of place in southern Avistan—but it's way up north in the setting's Scandanavia stand-in, in an area explicitly stated to be terrible for farming to boot. The explanation seems to be that it's positioned at one end of the land route between Avistan and Tian Xia. Possibly it imports food in much the same way Absalom does.

Books like Ultimate Campaign and Ultimate Intrigue introduced a bunch of rules subsystems for mass combat, kingdom building, nemeses, and so on. These are fairly easy to find because they're all in the SRD in the "other rules" section. But it's come to my attention that some Golarion-specific products have similar material which did *not* make it into the SRD. For example, Lands of Conflict has a militia subsystem which is essentially a more generic version of the Hell's Rebels rebellion system (which I loved), and which I can see being very useful for any campaign with a lot of intrigue.

What other Golarion-specific products are like this? I'd love to have a big index of them for ideas to mine for homebrew campaigns.

Years ago, I was a player in a Hell's Rebels campaign. It was a lot of fun, though unfortunately we only got through the first two chapters. Now I'm thinking about running a Pathfinder adventure path, and Hell's Rebels is rather high on my list of ones I'm seriously considering—both because I've played part of it, and because there seems to be a broad consensus about the awesomeness of the AP (aside from some controversial bits in the final third).

However, there's one aspect of the AP I'm having trouble with. I understand that Hell's Rebels is somewhat unusual in that the Big Bad is "on screen" from the very beginning of the AP. This raises the question of why he doesn't just kill the PCs before they're high enough level to fight him. I've bought chapters 1-4 and read them, and it first the AP seems to answer this question well enough. Over the first two chapters, the PCs go from "beneath Barzillai's notice" to "local celebrities who it would be unpopular to kill". So far so good.

The trouble starts at the end of chapter 3 when Barzy decides he finally needs to put down the rebellion, starting with the frame job at the Ruby Masquerade. The explanation of how Cizmekris was disguised as Barzy on p. 59 made me go, "wow, that's a lot of effort for a very unclear upside". Why isn't Barzilai overseeing the massacre himself? I get that he's recovering from cutting his own heart out—but that didn't stop him from appearing personally to thank the PCs for their service to the city at the end of chapter 2. And Barzillai would be a lot more formidable than Cizmekris even if you gave him the Sickened condition, or a few negative levels, to represent the fact that he hasn't fully recovered from the ritual yet.

It gets worse in chapter 4. At the very beginning of the chapter, Barzy has apparently discovered the location of the PCs hideout—but rather than show up in force, he sends an unproven amateur leading a relatively small force of dottari. Not only does this make Barzy look incompetent, it's a level of incompetence that seems incompatible with having pulled off the Night of Ashes successfully. Compare the first chapter's description of the assault on the Sacred Order of Archivists (p. 45): "Powerful devils and high-ranking Asmodeans worked together to smite the archivists in a devastating assault." It's also unclear how he could have captured a high-level character like Shensen with such a half-hearted approach.

What do people think of this? Is there a way to make all this more plausible than I'm seeing? Or is there a way to fix chapter 4 especially so that it initially has a very Empire Strikes Back feel *without* just killing the PCs or driving them from the city permanently?