Now that I’ve figured out how to calculate the demographics and military forces of my D&D campaign world (Part 1 and Part 2), it’s been a very quick process to finish up the rest of the human, demi-human and bestial lands.
With that, I’ve come up with some interesting tidbits (at least to me) and some history or current events for my kingdom. For example:
The “Central Kingdom” area, known as Regnum Central, is the size of India, and has a population of nearly fifty million. I’m pretty comfortable with that, after looking at the history of India and it’s population, which was estimated to be 100 million in 300 BC!
Not surprisingly, the King has the largest army, with the potential army of 1.2 million from a general call-up. Given the coffers of the kingdom, and the state of affairs with The Doom, though, it’s going to be far less than that. The fearsome King’s Legion numbers a little over 8,000 men, but would be a formidable force to face. They could face huge odds and still survive, such is their training and ability.
The poor Duchy of Dawn, which has borne the brunt of the Bestials attack and lost almost 50% of its former area, is the least populated with a meager population of 2.5 million souls, and a possible force of just under 95,000 soldiers. Even though it is the size of New Zealand. A good number of the former population has fled to the Duchy of Pisces, which lies to the south, or to the Southron Duchy.
The Bestial forces are a formidable foe, consisting of the Orcs, Goblyns and Ko-balds. Since The Doom, they have begun breeding at a prodigious rate, and can quickly replace their losses from disease or casualty. With a population of 33 million, and a possible force size of just over four million, they can easily match the combined sizes of the humans and demi-humans. The reason they can use more of their forces as front-line troops? They enslave the areas they conquer, or the orcs force the goblyns and ko-balds to do more of the menial and economic labor.
Overall, I’m really happy with doing this exercise. It’s given me an idea of the relative size of the forces that each Duchy can field, and it’s given me a starting point for expanding my campaign and games beyond the small areas being explored the players in my tabletop and online campaigns.
I’ve been following an overall outline given by Tony Bath in his book “Setting up a Wargames Campaign”:
- Draw map outline
- Fill in nations
- Determine cities/towns/places
- Map Main roads (Class 1, between cities, Class 2 from outlying to cities) [
- Determine population figures
- Determine regular armies for areas
All of these steps are now done. As a final step, I created a color-coded picture of the entire continent to make it more obvious who was where and what. I’ve create a “situation map” that shows where the Bestials area, that’s my-eyes-only. I think I’m about ready to rock and roll!
One of the first situations I’d like to explore is the ongoing push by the Bestials (Orcs/Goblyns/Ko-balds) into the Duchy of Dawn and the response by the Southron Duchy and Duchy of Pisces. That will involve coming up with some new NPCs for generals/leaders, determining forces and following along both Tony’s rules for the campaign and looking at some of the advice from William Silvester in his book “The Solo Wargaming Guide.”
I have to admit, I’m a bit curious to see what my players are going to think of all this, and where they might want to go and what they might want to do. As I’ve been fleshing out the various duchies, I’ve found opportunities for some very interesting stories and have planted seeds in the campaign wiki for later use.