| gallowbraid |
I myself as a GM have had the same question....and have spent some time thinking on such. A few things to bear in mind ...
1. Not every single individual who resides in a city is going to live inside the castle walls, unless the city imports absolutly everything. There have to be farms, dairies, mines and all other sorts of support structures in place for a city to thrive. Historicly only the well to do actually lived inside the castle walls, the less well off serfs and peasantry lived outside the walls and entered only for daily business and for safety in an attack.
2. Based on historical castles towers when placed on walls for defense were generally close enough together to allow for overlapping fields of fire.using game mechanics i would think that this distance would be less than the first range increment for a longbow or 100 feet or so.
3. Civil engineering was not as well developed as it is today,certainly the major concerns were taken into account but most of the time cities were not designed with future compatibility in mind so streets were generally under-designed. In a number of ancient but still living cities roads are too narrow for modern vehicles as they were meant for either foot traffic or at best 2 way traffic of either horses or possibly charios and small carts.
Bearing theses things in mind, I used the most likely location that I could find for the old temple of erastil along with the map for the bastards of erebus lair and found that it fit perfectly once rotated a bit. This gave me a rough estimate for 100 feet,since the old church and the tailors shop are roughly 100 feet apart. When I printed out the westcrown map the line from one to the other was 1/4 of an inch(actually 17/64 of an inch for precision) for a total of ~400 feet to the inch making westcrown 4100' north south and an average of around 700' east west. If we assume that the average building in westcrown is 2 stories high that would give it an overall floorspace of around 1/2 of a square mile(allowing that the noble quarters are considerably more elaborate)..all we have to do is accept that roughly 25-30% of the peasantry live outside the walls everything falls in line nicely.
P.S..
I did not read all of the posts listed and so missed the post of Mr. jacobs as to the dimensionality of westcrown and I do not wish to argue or slight anyone in any way.
However, the map located in the council of thieves map folio was the map I used and the scale given allows for each resident of westcrown to take up well over 100 square feet at that scale even if the idea of a portion of the population living outside the walll is discounted. I would have linked the copies and scans to show my work but I don't want to risk infringing on any copyrights.