How large does a city need to be in order for it to not only be the center piece of an entire setting, but the only real fleshed out thing in the setting?
I have considered having a single massive city and its surrounding country be the only real thing discussed in anything but short blurbs in the setting.
Megacity 9 to 16 was surrounded by desert.
Had plenty to do too if you believe the judges.
The city can be as large as you want. Just have literally nothing in the surrounding area. Look up Hive Cities in 40k and Megacities in Judge Dredd.
Presuming the lands around it are at least somewhat inhabited and we're dealing with a medieval setting, I think 100,000 inhabitants would be enough to make the city massive by medieval scales. Very few medieval cities had more than 1 million inhabitants but it was a thing that happened? Late Roman Rome hit those numbers, as did Constantinople at some point and I think Paris near the end of the Middle Ages?
About 5.000 people. Seriously, for most of the people in medieval times their own village (and maybe a few neighbouring ones) was the entire setting. You can live, love, work and have every day adventures in a small town.
Depends
on
the
setting
Silent Hill is basically the only place fleshed out, and it's not even big.
Or just go the SnK route and make it the """only""" place that exists where people can live because everything else is hostile.
>every day adventures
>roll to lift bales of hay
>role to scoop shit
>role to avoid the dog that wants to sniff your crotch
>roll to avoid the goat ramming his horn up you rass
>roll to save against cholera
Riveting
Why are you on Veeky Forums if you have no imagination?
Anything that can fit a population that surpasses Dunbar's number: About 100 and 250 people/characters, your tribe. Basically, the number of stable relationships that a single human can get to know and keep track off. Above that, relationships become much more formal and increasingly rules-based.
Because to my knowledge there are no systems dealing with village life and everyday adventures.
So you're saying that you're pretty new to the board.
>15 very close friends
>50 close friends
>150 friends
What bizarro world does this guy live in? Doesn't the average American (presumably the average Westerner based on that) have less than 3 close friends?
The image is dumb, but it refers to the average size of hunter-gatherer tribes. Groups of that size generally can police themselves and everyone knows each other personally. Above that number, you need more and more rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group.
I think Golden Sky Stories and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine do that kind of thing.
Well how's movement in this setting? If horses are all you have no larger then Paris is necessary I think. Do you have cars, metro? I don't know, maybe half of the size of The Sprawl? The Sprawl being something around the west coast of the US sized.
Escape From LA sized
As big as you want it to be. You could just have a few dozen people if you wanted, either in a post-apocalyptic setting where that's all that's left as far as anyone knows or a colonization setting where civilization is very far away.
Due to the stupid scale mistakes in the original setting book I tend to multiply Eberron population numbers by ten, leading to Sharn, City of Towers to be a mile-high city with two million inhabitants. Considering it's a literal city with its own setting book, it's without question the centerpiece whenever I DM Eberron. To the point many of my long-term players have made it their personal goals to destroy the place, just because it's so corrupt and full of magical doomsday bullshit.
big enough to need its own map.
Oh god, I'm getting daggerfall flashbacks
Look up Kill Six Billion Demons. The main part of that setting is Throne, basically the center of the multiverse.
So that's one way.
You mean Sigil.
>About 5.000 people.
Errrh... two big issue with that figure. The first is that that number is based on old scholar ship that just took citizenship rolls or period estimates at face value. The thing is that a) not everyone living in a medevail city were citizens of said city and b) medieval figures were for the official city limits not a metropolitan area. A great example of this is Tours. It officially only had about 16500 citizens. However it had long grew into a number of other cities & town. Modern estimates put its merto area at around 320,000 to 360,000 residents just before the black death. Tours was large for its era sure. However it was merely the second largest metro in France and somewhere around 4th thru 6th merto in Europe.
Second is that type of figure is very period to the 10 to mid 13th century. Keeping it short Medieval states ran out of good sites for new settlements ~1260 and the size of important cities exploded in a single generation. Over the next 50 years the key regional cities grew to 2 to 4 times their old size.
>How large does a city need to be in order for it to not only be the center piece of an entire setting, but the only real fleshed out thing in the setting?
If we are doing it HRE style...
~4500 citzens
~8000 non-citzens inside the city limits
~ 4 to 8 market villages that feed the city inside easy walking range
---> each with 400 to 1000 residents in their area
~ 1 to 3 monasteries with 30 to 500 monks plus 1/3 that number in commoners who live on their land thus their rule.
So around 17000 total residents in its metro area.
>trying to overcome every obstacle by just throwing dice at it
found your problem
Honestly, they're extremely similar. Throne is cool because the setting emphasizes how FUCKING HUGE it is and how ludicrous and crazy a multiverse with 777,777 universes would look like.
I don't see why not. I have a setting set in an alternate, inescapable dimension where the only civilization at all is one single city. If you try to get out or explore the wastes beyond it you'll almost certainly die.
larger than anything else