Re: [HoE] Populations [Kind of long]

[Machine-gun Kelly <mgkelly@axom.com>]

>  People are
> talking about villages of 500 and this would be astronomical in my game.
> Am I doing something wrong by having the largest settlements be only one
> hundred to one-fifty?  And having the average be around fifty people?
> What population statistics do you all use in your games?  

Five hundred is definitely a huge settlement. Maybe Junkyard has that
much. It would be difficult to eke out enough food to feed that many
people. I think 50 to a hundred is probably best. The world population
is supposed to be about 11 billion people by 2050, but that's in today's
world. All the brushfire wars, not to mention wars like those in Europe
and occasional skirmishes between the North and South [and other wars
over Ghost Rock] would probably keep the population down. I remember
something about how many people were killed in The Last War in 'The
Junkman Cometh' and it was obviously several billion. Then Reckoners
came through and slaughtered millions more. Maybe not as many people
died out West, since there weren't as many population centers [always a
good target for nukes. Makes for less potential soldiers], but there's
still not a lot of people left, since cities there were also nuked. Out
of, let's say, 8 billion people before the Last War and the coming of
the Reckoners, I would figure that there *might* be a billion left.
Scattered all over the world. A big place for [relatively speaking] such
few people. I'm not sure of the dimensions of the Earth, but it's pretty
safe to say that there's probably no one left east of the Mississippi
[living at least] and they probably didn't get a chacne to move West as
the bombs dropped. Several more nukes on cities out West [Deseret.
Denver. LA. Et cetera], the Reckoners and their hordes of Plague
Zombies, Walkin' Dead and so on, plus those killed by marauding bandits
and abominations, doesn't leave a lot of people left to form
communities. Probably a lot of the settlements left were isolated towns
before the war, augmented by a few stragglers that townspeople let
settle there [which would probably be very few, since food is hard to
find and they may not be ablet o afford to feed another mouth.]

But, that's just my .02¢ and I talk a lot....

MGK
-- 
"It takes 42 muscles to frown, but only four to pull a trigger."