Do any of you DMs/GMs out there have a method you use to generate the population of your nations/provinces? For instance, I have generated a city I'm calling Greenstone, and I have its total population (11,760) and the boundaries of the region for which it serves as the baronal seat. What approach would you all recommend for determining how many people live in the lands governed by the Baron of the Eastern Reaches?
This is obviously an economics question, I guess, and I hate math (I've even got the t-shirt), but I'm willing to put in the time to build as specific a world as I can. If any of you have a systematic approach to this sort of thing, I would love to read about it. Besides, I've got 6 other baronies to populate just for this one kingdom, nevermind the other 9 significant geo-political powers I have already placed in this setting. I'm trying to crystallize a start-up point for this setting so I can tell a handful of central stories and then have a real, "lived-in" world in which to run any and all future campaigns. It's a huge project, but I won't rest until it's done.
You might want to check the Kingmaker campaign subforum, I seem to recall this was a pretty big topic there once and there's a lot of talk about nation building as part of the module.
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I remember reading that the approximate area of land needed to sustain one person is an acre of arable land in a temperate climate. This seems a reasonable start point. Arable land is the sort suitable for crops. Pastoral land is suitable for livestock, and tends to produce less overall food per unit area than arable.
There are 640 acres per square mile. You'll need to decide how much of any given area is farmable land and how much is woodland, lakes, rocky hills etc. A simplification could be to say that 1 square mile of generic countryside can support 200 people - this allows you to have lots of woodland and hills, or to farm non-food products like wool. This is sort of a maximum though - you don't *need* to have 200 per sq mile, but that's the most you could probably support.
With any town or city you're likely to have satellite small towns or villages nearby. It's worth taking these into account, as each can then have inns, mayors, forts, local problems and all the things needed for adventures to happen.
It's also worth considering *why* any town or village exists where it does. Here are a few things to consider about a place:
Does it have a natural harbour? Is it on a navigable river? Is there a bridge or a ford nearby that makes it a natural crossing point? Is it at a crossroads between other places? How about controlling another natural chokepoint like a mountain pass? Is it a settlement that started as a defensible point like a hill? Does it have a market for locally produced goods?
Thanks, all.