I'm running a Rise-otR campaign converted in 2e and I'm wondering what settlement level should Magnimar be? Sandpoint recently got a settlement stat block in Seven Dooms but Magnimar didn't.
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Per the settlement rules on page 170 of GM Core, Magnimar, as a city, would be in the band of 5–7.
That said, Magnimar is also the 2nd largest city in Varisia, and is growing (as opposed to Korvosa, the largest city, which is dwindling in population). Magnimar is also more welcoming of trade and adventurers than Korvosa, so at this point... I'd consider putting Magnimar at somewhere in the 8 to 10 range.
Since you're running Rise of the Runelords, I would suggest putting Magnimar at level 8 or 9 as well. A settlement's level is a great metric to use to estimate what item level of gear can be purchased in town, after all, and the PCs should be around 7th level while in town. By putting the city's level at 8 or 9, the PCs (who will be 8th level at the end of that section) will be able to shop for level-appropriate common items in town before they head out to the 3rd adventure.
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Magnimar is growing rapidly? I'm glad to hear that. I have always thought that Magnimar's population is too small considering its area.
It seems that even GM Core has no information about the approximate population of each settlement size category. Not sure if pre-Remaster Second Edition rulebook has mentioned this or not though.
If Paizo remakes Rise of the Runelords or Return of the Runelords using Pathfinder Remaster, how high would Xin-Shalast's or Xin-Edasseril's settlement level be? Near 20 perhaps, because of the presence of the runelord?
By the way, can the settlement level be higher than 20? If a settlement is very populated and developed, and has many high level mythic characters, then perhaps...? For example, I think the Eternal City of Axis' settlement level would be much higher than 20!
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Magnimar is growing rapidly? I'm glad to hear that. I have always thought that Magnimar's population is too small considering its area.
It seems that even GM Core has no information about the approximate population of each settlement size category. Not sure if pre-Remaster Second Edition rulebook has mentioned this or not though.
If Paizo remakes Rise of the Runelords or Return of the Runelords using Pathfinder Remaster, how high would Xin-Shalast's or Xin-Edasseril's settlement level be? Near 20 perhaps, because of the presence of the runelord?
By the way, can the settlement level be higher than 20? If a settlement is very populated and developed, and has many high level mythic characters, then perhaps...? For example, I think the Eternal City of Axis' settlement level would be much higher than 20!
The concept of Magnimar's population growing and Korvosa's shrinking has been part of Varisia for a long time. It might have been first put in print back in the Magnimar softcover book Adam and I wrote back in 2012.
Population numbers aren't something that we really concern ourselves with nailing down in print, because of the complicated history between RPGs' traditional depiction of "medieval" cities (where magic is a thing) and real-world "medieval" cities (where magic is not), compounded by the fact that the tradition of doing city maps where every individual building is shown is the industry standard and the customer expectation even though that means that if you do it right, you need poster maps or rolls of butcher paper or a parking lot in order to do that right for a city that's got hundreds of thousands or millions of people living in it.
These boards aren't the right place for me or anyone else at Paizo to start building world content, and each time I answer a question like the OP's here, I worry about folks taking my off-the cuff in-the-moment bit of advice as official canon, free new world lore, or both. So as often happens in a case like this, I have to reply with the "Wait and see if and when we officially update anything that touches upon that content in print for those updated rules."
The level cap for pretty much everything in 2nd edition has pretty much settled at 25. We've set Absalom at level 20, and that's the intended benchmark for a city in the Universe. Extraplanar locations, like Dis or Alushinyrra or Axis would probably be best represented at levels higher than 20, with, I suppose, an entire plane of a city like Axis hitting the cap at level 25.
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...compounded by the fact that the tradition of doing city maps where every individual building is shown is the industry standard and the customer expectation even though that means that if you do it right, you need poster maps or rolls of butcher paper or a parking lot in order to do that right for a city that's got hundreds of thousands or millions of people living in it.
Wait, so does that mean the maps of various settlements like Magnimar, Korvosa, or Oppara do not exactly describe the settlements like Google Earth? I mean, the number of buildings and houses drawn in the maps are clearly fewer than the actual buildings and houses needed to accommodate the population?
I have always thought that the map in City of Lost Omens Poster Map Folio accurately describes the city, that it includes literally every house and building in Absalom. Well, I didn't actually count the numbers of the houses to find out if there are enough houses to accommodate more than 300,000 people, though. Turns out even that map is not entirely accurate?
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Wait, so does that mean the maps of various settlements like Magnimar, Korvosa, or Oppara do not exactly describe the settlements like Google Earth?...
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LOL
I don't know if I should be sharing your sarcastic laugh or feel uncomfortable that you thought the maps were real. My favorite obviously-bogus map is the one they made for Katapesh back in, like 2009. But even the Riddleport map from back in the day.
For me in my actual Gameplay, I just shrink the populations way, way down to realistic numbers.
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The level cap for pretty much everything in 2nd edition has pretty much settled at 25. We've set Absalom at level 20, and that's the intended benchmark for a city in the Universe. Extraplanar locations, like Dis or Alushinyrra or Axis would probably be best represented at levels higher than 20, with, I suppose, an entire plane of a city like Axis hitting the cap at level 25.
Agreed.
Cool bit of crunch, James.
Thanks!
EDIT: I would absolutely KILL for a hardback book on Axis similar to the one recently published about Absalom.
An AP (lvls 11-20 maybe?) set there could be TOTALLY awesome!
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Creative Director
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...compounded by the fact that the tradition of doing city maps where every individual building is shown is the industry standard and the customer expectation even though that means that if you do it right, you need poster maps or rolls of butcher paper or a parking lot in order to do that right for a city that's got hundreds of thousands or millions of people living in it.Wait, so does that mean the maps of various settlements like Magnimar, Korvosa, or Oppara do not exactly describe the settlements like Google Earth? I mean, the number of buildings and houses drawn in the maps are clearly fewer than the actual buildings and houses needed to accommodate the population?
I have always thought that the map in City of Lost Omens Poster Map Folio accurately describes the city, that it includes literally every house and building in Absalom. Well, I didn't actually count the numbers of the houses to find out if there are enough houses to accommodate more than 300,000 people, though. Turns out even that map is not entirely accurate?
Paizo does not have the budget to compete with Google Earth.
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Paizo does not have the budget to compete with Google Earth..
I can not be the first person to have begged for this: Y'all should really hire Anna B Meyer! I would sell my soul for some Anna Meyer maps of Pathfinder locations
Anna is an amazing artist and cartographer, but the problem isn't that we don't have talented and amazing cartographers.
The problem is one of scaling. The maps in Google Maps are not only the result of a HUGE corporation's work over the course of many years, but one whose built and iterated on maps that have existed for decades or centuries and are augmented by satellite imagery of said locations as well.
None of that exists for any city in Golarion. Especially for the cities we haven't created yet.
Producing "each building is visible" maps of cities is possible for smaller settlements, but once they get larger, it gets increasingly difficult to do so and still publish that map on a single page of paper (or more often, half a page) as we do in our products and adventures.
To say nothing of the fact that very few RPG writers are also talented cartgographers and often struggle to provide maps for our professional cartographers to use—a problem that gets worse when you talk about city maps since they're the most complex of the three classic types of maps (urban, wilderness, and dungeon) that show up in RPG products.
Maps, and the way they interact with the text of a product, are one of the most complicated parts of this job. I've been working with doing maps of all sorts for adventures, professionally, for over two decades now, and trust me, if there was a way to get a "Google Earth" version of Golarion out there that would match Paizo's quality and budget and resources to produce, it would have happened by now.
I bought a boxed set back in the 80's, the Free City of Haven, which described a massive fantasy metropolis. It included a poster map of the city (with lines for the streets, and street names, but just white space between - no buildings represented); and then it had thin cardstock sheets that showed one third of the city in much larger scale, focusing on specific neighborhoods, with the individual buildings and important sites. The plan was that you'd be able to put all the cardstock out to show the city, but you'd need a LOT of space. Or you could just pull out the one the PCs were in, and anything adjacent, and swap out as needed, just like map tiles.
I always thought it was a brilliant way to go. Unfortunately, it was meant to be a three-part product, and while the creators published the second section, they never did publish the final third.
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I bought a boxed set back in the 80's, the Free City of Haven, which described a massive fantasy metropolis. It included a poster map of the city (with lines for the streets, and street names, but just white space between - no buildings represented); and then it had thin cardstock sheets that showed one third of the city in much larger scale, focusing on specific neighborhoods, with the individual buildings and important sites. The plan was that you'd be able to put all the cardstock out to show the city, but you'd need a LOT of space. Or you could just pull out the one the PCs were in, and anything adjacent, and swap out as needed, just like map tiles.
I always thought it was a brilliant way to go. Unfortunately, it was meant to be a three-part product, and while the creators published the second section, they never did publish the final third.
Yup. There's a LOT of great examples of amazing fantasy city maps/products like that. And so many of them end up the same way—incomplete. Largely, I suspect, as a result of the cost of production not being covered by the sales, or by the creator burning out or giving up because the scope of the project was too big, or both.
RPG products have been underpriced/undervalued since the start, really.
Monte Cook's Ptolus book is one of my favorite RPG city products. Published in 2006 with an MSRP of $120.00, which adjusted for inflation would be an MSRP of $186.00... it STILL feels underpriced to me.