Karameikos - Vaults of Pandius

The Demography of Karameikospopulation of other Known World’s elvenclans – the Callarii alone would have nearlyhalf the population of whole Alfheim! – and,regarding the latter, with GAZ1 itself,according to which 6,500 gnomes live inHighforge alone. So, the whole PoorWizard’s Almanacs’ figures seem at least tohave been written a little too hastily, withoutproper consideration of other sources andsupplements.Anyway, how can those figures be preserved?My suggestion is to avoid touching thelocation and spread of the various levels ofsettlement, in order to leave unaltered whichareas are borderlands, which are wilderness,and so forth, and to work instead on thepopulation densities of each level. Inparticular, decreasing human populationdensities of each level of about 40% wouldgenerate the following figures:As mentioned at the beginning of the article,there seems to be no problem… until youtake into account the 125,750 people thatrepresent Karameikos’ urban population. Asyou see, for example, Specularum’s hugehuman population of 57,300 is more thandouble than the whole number of peoplewho live in the city’s suburban countryside.In fact, the figures above can only be kept ifyou bring back the urban population topre-GAZ1 level (one-tenth of the officialfigures, more or less). Thus, two solutionsare possible at this point.First solution: Add the urban population tothe figure indicated above. This wouldgenerate a total human population of363,200, which is halfway between theofficial figures and those presented in thisarticle. Should you adopt this solution, Isuggest halving the humanoid populationalso, bringing it to 18,000. Overall, theGrand Duchy would thus have a population(considering also all other races, and leavingtheir figures identical to those presented inthis article) of 428,750. Note however thatin this way the urban population of theGrand Duchy will reach the high pinnacle ofTable 5: Decreased Human Population LevelsSettlementAverage populationdensity (people/sq.mile)Total Population persettlement area(averaged)% on totalpopulation(averaged)Very high 93 20,800 8High 62 79,850 32Average 39 76,450 31Scarce 12 45,700 18Borderland 3 24,850 10Wilderness 0.1 2,400 1TOTAL 13.55 250,050 10035THRESHOLD: The Mystara Magazine Issue #1