I have a renaissance era city that covers 150000 square miles of land...

I have a renaissance era city that covers 150000 square miles of land. It's roughly 500 miles across and 300 miles from north to south. There is however a sea splitting the city in half with a width of about 70 miles, smack bang in the middle of the city. The city joins in the middle via a bridge in which the emperors palace is also built into. I need to justify the city being this big. The setting has magic, and the empire is human, having returned to their homeland in the millions to drive out the elves that took it from them. The city grew to this size over 500 years. There was also a demi-god in charge of the empire at the beginning until she ascended to the astral sea.

It needs to be this big because I fucked up on the map and decided to roll with it, it's been established as being this big for 5 years or so OOC.

Any advice or suggestions?

You're going to need some constant, serious teleportation to keep this colossal city running; as it would literally be impossible to cart food in from the countryside to the inner areas of the city fast enough if you're using real life renaissance era technology; it would spoil before it got there.

As for justification? Maybe the Demi-God who was running it for a while had some sort of ability to inspire/control people but with a limited geographic scope, so tried to mush as much of the empire as possible into an area within radius of her power.

ROOFTOP GARDENS

This. The logistics would be absurd, doubly so with renaissance.

Also fires and plague are going to wreck the place constantly.
Whatever you do, the MegaCity you built needs some Judge Dread style law enforcement.

It would be incredibly difficult to support that many people with renaissance era technology, even with pretty impressive magic (unless you go fully automated magic gay communism)

Food and water has to get to the people via some route. All the excrement and trash has to leave via some route. Do things just get teleported in and out?
For contrast, in a historical city there might be some type of a basic sewer system and night soil carts involved.

What happens if there's a fire? Consider that many historical cities have wholly or nearly wholly burnt down in past. Can the fire fighters respond quickly and effectively enough, even with magic? Because it's a big city and people would use fire on a daily basis.

She ruled by fear, but also could bend people to her will, so perhaps she could have done something like that, a range limit could make sense. She wanted to control the entire empire, after all.


Also, detail I forgot to mention. The city is (at least post-demi-god), ruled by mages. Somewhat in the style of Tevinter if anybody here has played dragon age (this comparison was unintentional, but it occurred to me that the similarities were strong). Before that there was an emperor who had lived for 8000 years guiding humanity, but he disappeared the moment the humans cast down the elven empire.

If it helps, this particular branch of humanity were the ones who perfected weather manipulation magic, and was a very widespread sphere of magic used by mages.

What you have is two megacities, or two Seven Cities situations going on

Sanitation is going to be your big problem. Lack of availability of clean water and the presence of disease was what kept real-life cities from getting huge before the extensive sewer systems of the 19th century.

Canals, shit tonnes of canals, maybe with magically powered barges for speed, like some sort of hydro train, can say the magic is powered by a central magical hub that all the canals lead to to justify them not using this propulsion tech beyond the city.

Can we see this map might help clear things up?

According to google, its a city about half the size of South Carolina, or half again the size of Maryland.

Are you OP or did you calculate that using the info he gave in his post?

New York City has Central Park taking up a big chunk in its center. What if the city had a few large undeveloped pockets in it that served as farmland? As well as the afor mentioned roof gardens and maybe a few hanging gardens as a part of many Noble estates.

A few aqueducts running to nearby mountains. A sizable underground river for wells?

Not OP, just friendly user.

Big pockets of druidic farmland providing the bulk nutrition for their respective districts, rooftop and street gardens, aqueducts around the banks of the sea with water magically fed up into them to flow down throughout the city for drinking and irrigation/plumbing (a city with low meat consumption could just use the plumbing lines for irrigation as well).

Public transit is important as well. Teleportation is the best option, but it's magically demanding. The aqueduct canals could possibly solve this similar to a subway system. Propelled barges across the lake would keep the bridge from bein perpetually clogged for trade.

The place itself would probably need to be divided into municipalities/counties/districts or what have you, just to be reliably governed.

Does the surrounding geography lend itself to a portion or majority of the city being irrigated via aqueducts?

Canals will get filthy, but I once ran a large metropolis run by mages that enforced their general will by each controlling one of the seven aqueducts.

I attempted to make a square 300 miles high and 500 miles wide, using NYC as the starting point. Lines get curvy because Earth is a globe.

Given Renaissance tech, this city would be an entire country unto itself.

Canals etc are perfectly viable here. Only issue is when you get to the north of the eastern half, where it's hilly at best, mountainous at worst. This is where the city sprang from initially, the base of these mountains and hills.

I'm at work but I have one and paper so I can have a go at drawing the city later. The original map is of 500 years after the city fell anyway.

Here's a map I drew just now. If the whole districts thing doesn't work I can do it differently. Surrounding geography is fenland plains to the west and South, mountains to the east and north. North of the western half there is a massive cliff face. After the city fell some survivors founded what would become a new country up there.

Bump

The "city" used to be part of a greater kingdom with more or less its present borders. For whatever reason, the smaller original city got fed up with the kingdom's leadership and revolted.

Due to incompetence and general decay of the state (likely a result of, or the reason for the rebellion in the first place), the city was able to win. But that opened up some extremely messy problems related to inter-kingdom treaties that would have brought economic and/or military ruin if they broke up the kingdom into smaller colonies (think slave vs. free states in pre-civil war US). So rather than bother with that, they instead became a very large "free city". Many people have moved here over time because of its relative freedoms compared to its neighbors and opportunities. Formal diplomatic matters are taken up by the original city's governor's office, which has blossomed into an apparatus more complex than most monarchies

The logistical problems other anons have brought up, such as sanitation and food, are a separate can of worms.

The only way to realistically make this city work is by having massive amounts of farmland spread out among the suburbs which would necessarily result in it ceasing to be a continuous city (not to mention that in real life, there would probably already be impassable geological features doing this already).

Seriously, just delete a few zeros and say that it is 3x5 miles in size

where would you even get enough people to populate a city like that?

>where would you even get enough people to populate a city like that?
It's essentially 90% of the human race. There was a mass migration into the area, the humans threw down the elves that had kicked them out aeons ago.

>Seriously, just delete a few zeros and say that it is 3x5 miles in size
Nah, it's too well ingrained in my campaign and out of the game as well. Plus, I think it's fun to get really bizarre shit like this and try and make it feasible in-game.


To be honest, I think so far the best reason for this being done this way is >Maybe the Demi-God who was running it for a while had some sort of ability to inspire/control people but with a limited geographic scope, so tried to mush as much of the empire as possible into an area within radius of her power.

So I'll probably go with that. I just need to justify how the population survived and thrived for 500 years. Now, the whole government was made up of mages following the disappearance of the demi-god, and the empire had a very high number of mages, even if they were low-level. Food spoiling during transportation could have been addressed by mages freezing the food during transit perhaps. Disease and plague could be dealt with via the churches and temples everywhere, full of healers and clerics. Perhaps each city segment could be designed to be easily quarantined as well?
In terms of fires however, I need ideas.

I also missed this before, but this could work very well, I've already got canals as a thing within the region.

Annnnnnnnnnnnd a bump

and final bump before bed. If nobody else replies, then thanks for all the advice guys, it's helped!

>I have a renaissance era city that covers 150000 square miles of land. It's roughly 500 miles across and 300 miles from north to south.
Stopped reading there. Why the fuck would a city ever need to be that big.

just solve everything with magic, waypoints though the *county-sized-megacity* a la diablo waypoints and they let you teleport a cart with you. sewers end in teleports that throw that shit out midocean. rainclouds, water elementals and dust storms kill fires. hyper fertile roof gardens and farm-parks provide the food. shit's bonkers dont overexplain it to players.

having waypoints could let you have fast swat teams and emergency seevices anywhere in no time.
sorry shit typing tablets suck

That's okay I like the ideas. Do you have any more? Can you see any more issues that might need addressing?

Wow, three sentences and user calls for the use of Judge Dredd. That's quick, even for us.

I disagree with the logistics nightmare. Remember, Renaissence people are crafty as fuck. Yes, /feeding/ that many people and /disposing/ of their waste is a monumental task but we shouldn't forget the entreprenurial spirit of man.

If there's money to be made, you bet someone will take care of it -- imagine the active, imagenous renaissence people /with access to magic/. What couldn't they do?

I would think that for a city this large it's a combination of three things that kept it running:

1. A large public works undertaking to build a very complex system of aqueducts, canals, and man-made streams/rivers to provide enough irrigation to Central Park sized farmlands, Wells for people to draw drinkable water from, and a bunch of covered above ground tunnels to act as a early form of sewer system.

2. Constant upkeep, repair, building of new aqueducts, farmlands, and repurposed buildings for people to live in. No matter how much magic you have, eventually things will break down, and there needs to be a new work of repair crews to keep the city running.

3. A near Judge Dredd esque level of protection for said public works. They are literally the lifeblood of the city, and will be closely protected from sabotague and tainting of water via careless or drink individuals who want to dump sewage in the drinking water canals.

After that you can use a combination of magic and "steamboat" transportation to ferry people and goods around as needed, with there being so many waterways throughout the city.

I think you have this reversed- aqueducts, raised above the city and slightly sloped from the hills and mountains, will be much cleaner and more reliable as drinking water.

Canals might certainly still be a thing, but without magical waste disposal, they'll likely be more about transport (Venice in the wetter districts, Bruges in others, etc) than potable water.

Oh I see what you mean. Those work too, one of those had been used in game already too

How did it become established that this city was larger than most European countries without you ever wondering whether or not it made sense? Did you have your PCs taking several sessions just to walk from one end to the other?

>mass migration
for what ungodly reason would 90% of humanity decide that they wanted to live in this impossible stagnation trap?

They literally had nowhere else to go. Elven Nationalists had kicked out humanity 8000 years ago, during the late stone age, maybe early bronze. Humanity fled to the oceans, and most believe there is nothing beyond the ocean, so humanity was thought dead for 8000 years. They they returned with renaissance era technology from across the seas, and the entire human race returned to reclaim their homeland. A small force landed in the east first and drew the attention of the elven empire, and began building some smaller cities (made an alliance with the dwarfs immediately and gained a fortress city right at the start, which helped a lot), but then the rest of them sailed up the sea that split the city in two and took the fight straight into the heart of the empire.

And it was due to the original map that was drawn. I intended the whole place to be one country with cities, but then during game we established how many miles it was from a trading post marked on the map to a forest, and when we applied that to the rest of the map it was ridiculous but I rolled with it, so now every city is the capitol of its own country. Anyway, that was about 6 years ago now, and everything has moved on, evolved and developed more since then so I'm way too deep if I wanted to change it back. Also, on the map this city was just ruins now, so I didn't actually pay much attention until they decided to go in and I realised just how massive the place was.

We have a new campaign set in the country that sprang up in the eastern half of the old city. There's usually a few days travel time if they're heading to another region of the country etc.

Absurdly broad municipal definitions. The legal boundary of the 'city' includes hundreds of miles of countrtland and even some wilderness.

I might use large open areas in there but it's already established as mainly being built up areas

Well if you can afford such a large city the advice of a commoner such as I would do you no good sir.

Nonsense. Some of the best inventions in the world came from commoners.

Boston is a city of about 5 million people. It covers almost 1500 square miles.

Your city is 100 times larger than that. It is two New Englands in size. If you made it as dense as Boston, which is still full of much low density, old housing, your city would be almost as populous as Earth.

Reconsider.

a good twist is to have just a million ppl in this megacity because half of it is ruined and the waypoints and portals stopped working when the god abandoned them. the func. parts still work great but theres no way to tell when they run out of juice and there are wild people and refugees and bandits abound kinda like a manonly town of sigil this town can house a wide variety of different landscapes and battlegrounds, imagine fighting on giant dams one moment the sewer nex t and then the rooftops or elder skyscrapers with elevators that maybe works. persoally think its better as a ruined megacity than a living one

sorry tabletposting if i had a real keyboard this wouldve been said with more style

Yeah I think people are massively underestimating the massiveness of the city. Assuming you even get the logistical elements figured out, you still have a single city that rely on continents worth of farms for it's food supply.

I like this idea. You can have a massive huge city, with possibly untold riches, but still have a reasonable population, and more "wild" parts for players to explore.

I'd personally run it like a Mordheim style game.

The more I think about it the more I like it.

You could have two, or more, different countries inside the city. Because of the breakdown of enough waypoints, despite being in the same territory, and some of it overlapping, they're still isolated from one another, either with a single shared waypoint, or having to ship things "the hard way" across miles of potentially hazardous abandoned city.

yes mordheim exactly godspeed friend

multiple human kingdoms inside? different fractions?

God damn magic fucking everywhere.

The very centre of the city, the Imperial Palace, is a huge ass leyline nexus, making it one of the most magically potent power sources in the world. Most importantly, this being in the goddamn ocean means it's easy to restrict access to the power.

This means that most issues of "how do you X" can be replied to with FUCKING MAGIC BRO. A huge infrastructure of magitek is developed that allows for faster transport of goods, water, people, waste.

You can have wizard police, which is basically the only way you can manage to enforce law across something this big. Lot of scrying, paladins detecting evil all over the place.

Just from an administrative point of view, the districts are going to have to be divided up pretty majorly and might even have dynamics between them more like nation states. You might have a district given over more to farming, trading with the more densely populated centres.

150,000 not 15,000. It's roughly the size of California.

You are describing a horror show, this is a scale we as modern humans have never worked on in city planning.

Just getting all the food in and the shit out is inducing deep concern in me. You'll want a team no fuck that you'll want an entire social class who's sole function is work round the clock digging, maintaining and expanding swears so the city doesn't drown in its own refuse. So much employment will just be people working to stop it from imploding, you'll need someone to have done germ theory or at least got a way to get clean water to all the different parts and make sure they don't burn themselves out or start a new plage every day this is SO MANY PEOPLE.

You'll need a strong central government but also lot's of cooperative local government because this is just TOO MANY PEOPLE to manage even if they're not far away.

As others already pointed out this city is giantic even by industrialized standards and isn't in any way feasible at Renaissance tech level.
Food/water, sewage and governance are the three most important issues, but there's many more that make this a nightmare even by today's standards of tech.
You need a lot of magic-based handwaving and/or a good twist if this is supposed to be in any way explainable.

Your most glaring issue, above all the other extremely problematic issues you are facing is, that you are at a tech level where the largest percentage of the population is still occupied with producing food, and necessarily so. If, as you said, there is relatively little open land within the city limits where food could be grown, but at the same time 90% of the population of your nation live within this city you need some very good explanation (likely something magicky) where all that fucking food is coming from.
After that you can try to solve issues like, where alle the waste is going, where enough fresh water is coming from, how there is still a semblance of a central government and how it manages to hold power without the city splintering into different political entities, how public order is upheld, where the ressources for building such an enormous city came from, where the ressources that keep this city functioning - ressources for the economy and construction works - are coming from and who produces them if such a large percentage of the population lives inside the city, etc, etc, the list goes on.

What I am trying to say is, it is fucking impossible without handwaving it, changing the parameters, or scrapping the idea altogether.

Given the approx pop density of a german city in the high medieval period (using cologne here, which is what google-fu provided me), a city of 500x300 miles with a pop density of 80 people per hectare (which is the low end of the estimate) would give a population of just over 3.1 billion people. That's nearly half the population of modern day earth in a single city with medieval technology. You'll need magic at godly levels coming out your ass to even get close to justifying how this could exist.

I'm thinking you base this city on the Earth Kingdom from Avatar.

Include farms and smaller Burroughs but use the same big city archetecture throughout. Have semi-independent wards that have the necessary water, food, sanitation, etc.

...

2

This city is gonna basically be its own nation state, and if the demi-god empress is no longer around that means the city is gonna be left in charge of humans which, even when backed up by magic, aren't gonna be able to manage a city that size cohesively. Likely you're either looking at a Megacity 1 situation or something where the city would get divided into smaller boroughs that are managed independently of the whole. Gang warfare (or actual warfare between whoever is in charge of the boroughs) would be common. It would be like if Gangs of New York was scaled up to fit an entire state.

An interesting idea would be that the city is about to go full tower of Babylon and maybe one side of the city hates the other which may spark into a civil war.

But yes the best way to explain this would be as others already said.
>why
Because the demigod willed it and wanted a more centralised city and people so it would be easy to rule and maybe it was a sort of vanity project to build the biggest city ever.

>how?
Teleporation is key but active use of the sea can also help while having said building farms in some areas. Maybe the people also have an under ground region for mining and food gathering ?

I am getting huge China vibes from this.

>You'll need magic at godly levels
I think he said said god was dead/gone.

It's going full necromunda/mordhiem with it.

With the majority of the magic gone there's still a fuck huge city left but most if it is ruins to be explored/looted.

That's literally a city the size of kansas.

Fuck canals, where are you going to get the farmland for all these people?

I have a solution to the police problem, the food problem, and the sanitation problem.

Skeleton workforce. Everywhere.

I'm still not certain that solves the food problem. I mean, consider how much food a typical city requires, then imagine that city is several orders of magnitude larger than new york.

Even if you're talking a medieval town with lots of rives and canals to ship things on, simply getting that much food to the interior parts of the city in sufficient quantities is going to be impossible.

Just by simply walking, it would take you days or weeks to try to get anywhere in town.