How big are the biggest cities in your campaign world?

[Peter BOSCO'S]

I am running Traveller right now. I am not aware on any canonical cities in the Third Imperium with more than a few tens of billions of people. Since we are out on the frontier, the Spinward Marches, the biggest is likely only a few billion people. The biggest city that my characters have encountered yet, in the Regina subsector, was likely under a hundred million people.

[Insert obligatory "Space is big" Douglas Adams quote here]

 

[Krachek]

When I place a big city I force myself to figure out,
how they feed? How they get ressources?
My rule of thumb is that a big city need x10 rural population, village and small town to feed it.

 

[Fifinjir]

The thing with x10 rural rule is that, while close enough to reality, it also means I now have a metric heck-ton of villages that I certainly can’t flesh out or even name. This isn’t exactly a problem, but I still feel weird leaving it all in Offscreelandia.

 

[Alzrius]

The thing with x10 rural rule is that, while close enough to reality, it also means I now have a metric heck-ton of villages that I certainly can’t flesh out or even name. This isn’t exactly a problem, but I still feel weird leaving it all in Offscreelandia.

Villages of that size not having a name seems appropriate, though. Since most of them would be little more than collections of huts which supported a manor where their governing lord lived (who in turn would sell the excess produce to the nearby city), they'd just be called something like "Lord Emrick's territory" or "the lands around Lady Tirona's estate," etc.

 

[Krachek]

The thing with x10 rural rule is that, while close enough to reality, it also means I now have a metric heck-ton of villages that I certainly can’t flesh out or even name. This isn’t exactly a problem, but I still feel weird leaving it all in Offscreelandia.

In a fantasy world you can state that the big city is feed by some powerful magic, and those who control this ressource has an immense power…

 

[the Jester]

There is, at present, only one remaining city. There was a recent chaos apocalypse in game, which the pcs staved off at great cost. Pre-chaos apocalypse, the city had approx. 40,000 people; now it is significantly reduced, I want to say to around half that but would have to dig out some notes from a while back to verify actual numbers.

 

[GrimCo]

Depends on setting/genre of game.

For D&D, there are cities like Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad with population of 1-2 millions people and decent amount of smaller cities with populations of 100-500 000 people, depending on what region of the world they are. There are also backwater parts where largest cities barley top 10 000 people. And yes, in my world, gnome inventor managed to make magitech version of replicator.

For modern urban fantasy, i just use real cities.

In SF, they range from farming backwaters with couple of hundred people strewn across wide plains to planet sized hive cities like Necromunda with population in excess of hundred billion.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

In my very old Etan campaign the three biggest towns/cities are Glygorf (5000), Robono (15,000), and Sal-Hy (25,000). These numbers don't include the outlying suburban manors/estates/villages which add quite a bit to the populations. There probably are a few larger cities in "off the map" areas, but I haven't detailed those.

 

[Squared]

For 3.x I never allowed mass custom wondrous item designs for PCs or world background, so no 1/round create food and water dispenser. Or equal level and cost 1/round fireball throwers either. Such items blow away every existing item and spellcaster for efficacy and balance.

The guidelines in the srd are directed at pricing a DM's new item concept, not a system for characters to craft anything by simple application of the formula the way wands and scrolls and potions are set up to generally do any spell within their limits.

The closest for efficiency would be a clerical wand of create food and water which would be 50 charges per creation.

Or the sustaining spoon which feeds 4 humans with gruel per day for 5,400 gp.

A 3.5 cleric can spend 10 minutes and a third level create food and water spell to create daily bland food for three people, enough for a small party or for higher levels really dedicating themself exclusively to it enough for a small group, but not really enough to support even a small village on their own.

So blind cave fish farms and fungal factories for my dwarven undermountain kingdom.

While I appreciate more thought put into it than, “a wizard did it.” It boggles my mind the vast underground seas teaming with billions of fish, they must be getting their food from somewhere as well, perhaps underground/underwater volcanoes, an entire mountain range of them? And then acres of vats producing thousands of tons of fungus a day.

I am curious as to why nobody in this thread considers the solution that the ancients used to supply their mega cities. Being major ports at the center of rich and vast empires allowing them to buy and import the vast quantities of food needed for those cities.

So a simple solution would be for your dwarven city to have a port on a major river with large barges filled with grain, cattle, wool, and/or cotton. And he dwarves then sell cloth and beer to pay for the food.

The dwarves would , of course, also need a large and feared army to protect their sources of food should it become threatened.

^2