National populations?

[Paige Stormblood]

Hey everyone.

I was wondering if there is any way in working out the average populations for each of the Inner Sea nations and mabye even the World of Golarion.

Each nation has a pop total from as low as 10,000 to 300,000 for their main settlements so how much would local towns, farms forts, villages etc add to this on average? Varisia has a current population of near 100,000 total for its main settlements. Adding in the rest of the nation's humanoid pop would it be near a million or so total pop for Varisa or am I way off?

[Jeven]

It depends on whether the city/town populations include the rural hinterland (surrounding farms and hamlets).

If it doesn't, I would just add all the settlement populations together, then assume there are 4x as many rural dwellers on top of that.

1 urban : 4 rural is probably reasonable as its a low tech world and farming is quite labor-intensive. But they have magic so it need not be as rural as the real world equivalent.

[Drejk]

Jeven wrote:

It depends on whether the city/town populations include the rural hinterland (surrounding farms and hamlets).

If it doesn't, I would just add all the settlement populations together, then assume there are 4x as many rural dwellers on top of that.

1 urban : 4 rural is probably reasonable as its a low tech world and farming is quite labor-intensive. But they have magic so it need not be as rural as the real world equivalent.

Assuming no magically augmented agriculture/herding? Closer to 1:10 and it is still quite generous for cities.

[Jeven]

Drejk wrote:

Assuming no magically augmented agriculture/herding? Closer to 1:10 and it is still quite generous for cities.

That sounds better actually.

All of Cheliax's towns and cities add up to about 370,000 people.
Times that by 11 for the rural people and you get 4 million, which was about the population of England in 1600. It does sound a bit low for an empire the size of Cheliax though. But I guess with non-human humanoids and monsters running about all over the place it makes sense.