Is Boldhome Overpopulated?

[Leingod]

Sartar is usually described as a pretty rural place, with a relatively small urban population; Sartar: King of Heroes, for example, claims less than 10% of its populace live in cities. But the numbers seen in the Guide to Glorantha don't seem to line up with that portrayal, and certainly not with that proportion. Those numbers are 25,000 urban and 100,000 rural, which would mean that a full 20% of Sartar's population are living in cities, a much greater proportion than many places that are described as being very urban.

Now, part of this is because it's counting the 5,000 people living where they work at the New Lunar Temple, but even if we throw that one out, that's still 20,000 and 100,000, meaning 1/6th of Sartar's populace is urban, and that's still a lot for a supposedly rural "barbarian" kingdom, and that in turn raises the question of how you could support that many. And most of that is down to Boldhome having a population of 11,000.

So, is the answer that Boldhome is just dangerously, unsustainably overpopulated? Has its population swelled by thousands over the course of the Lunar Occupation, for example? How are they keeping that many people fed, when the city is built into a mountain and there's really only so much you could possibly buy or take as tribute/taxes from the surrounding tribes?

[John Biles]

Kingdom of Sartar has Sartar as 183,000 people.  I see the Guide trimmed that down.

If you assume that yields are higher in Glorantha than the real world thanks to fertility magic, I think it's not a huge problem.

They're within a short distance of the biggest Ernalda temple in Sartar.  Perhaps it massively boosts productivity of agriculture.

But also, Boldhome is the capital and taxes on trade probably boost the city's economy.

And it being the center for money being poured into the province to support the military.

(During the Civil War, Richmond tripled in size to 110,000 people from 40,000, becoming one of the largest cities in the US)

 

[soltakss]

Boldhome is the capital of Sartar and was built in a day.

On its own it would not be sustainable but is supported by the surrounding clans.

[Akhôrahil]

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

On its own it would not be sustainable but is supported by the surrounding clans.

I think the argument is that 20% urbanization is huge. Probably unreasonably so. This is higher than England in 1800, higher than the U.S. in 1850.

 

[Leingod]

10 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think the argument is that 20% urbanization is huge. Probably unreasonably so. This is higher than England in 1800, higher than the U.S. in 1850.

 

Exactly, thank you.

In fact, a larger proportion of the overall population are city-dwellers in Sartar than in much of the Lunar Heartlands, such as First Blessed (whose proportion of city-dwellers to rural folk is a little over 1 in 6), and is only really beaten out by Silver Shadow (just under 1 in 4). And unlike the Lunars, the Sartarites aren't using blood-soaked corn rites and winter-blocking Heroquests to support those kinds of numbers.

So even by Gloranthan standards, Sartar seems to have a lot of its overall population dwelling in cities for a polity that's consistently characterized by people both within and outside of it as a backwoods, "barbarian" kingdom inhabited by quarrelsome hillfolk, which you wouldn't think would be able to support a city of 11,000 that doesn't even have a river running through it (meaning all goods shipped in have to come in overland).

[Eff]

If you want to trade anything from the Oslira watershed to Kethaela, you have precisely three options:

1. Shipping it via Bagnot or Dunstop to Queen's Post, then across the Dragonspines to Rich Post and down to New Crystal City
2. Bagnot through Dragon Pass proper, around the Upland Marsh, to Duck Point and down to New Crystal
3. Slavewall to Alda-Chur, Alda-Chur to Jonstown, and then a variety of routes to either Duck Point or Wilmskirk, from either of those down to New Crystal or Karse.

Meanwhile, the two primary roads through Prax come through Jonstown and Swenstown. They offer (long, dangerous) land routes to Kralorela and Teshnos as well. Meanwhile, the Royal Roads all connect to Boldhome at their near-center, and are so heavily improved that curving around the Quivin Mountains to the east is almost certainly better than the direct route via Two Ridge and Runegate to Duck Point.

Sartar should not be thought of as a rural polity that's away from everything. Sartar is the lynchpin that connects Prax, Peloria, and Kethaela together via roads. (Note that if Delecti didn't exist, the Dragon Pass route would be much easier to trade by, so we can assume none of the Princes honestly tried very hard to get rid of him.) Sartar is one of the main trade clearinghouses of two segments of the continent. Goods from the Seshnelan and Ralian and Teshnan and Loskalmi trade funnel through Sartar to meet goods from the Pelorian and Kralori and Pentan and Praxian trade. Boldhome should perhaps be thought of like Chicago in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, grown disproportionate over its position as a transport hub drawing in so many goods from the "interior" with a near-direct connection to the "exterior".

So with that in mind, Boldhome is large, but Boldhome isn't a city of Sartarites, it's a city of Sartarites and everyone who's got enough fingers in the trade going on to want to keep a permanent eye open there. It's a city which undoubtedly has substantial warehouses and thus needs people to mind those. It's a city that undoubtedly received a great deal of discreet investment from Belintar, a bit from Rikard Tiger-Hearted, a great deal from the Lunars, a substantial quantity from Tarshite families, Gold-Gotti, Esrolian Great Houses, the Talar of God Forgot, undoubtedly hefty chunks from Praxians... (Perhaps even sources not usually suspected as having business interests of the conventional kind discreetly fund things- the Grazelanders, Ethilrist, the Shaker Temple, the Beast Men, Delecti, Cragspider, Isidilian the Wise, the Inhuman King...) There's a lot of money here. Perhaps that's what the prophecy Sartar fulfilled was.

In any case, my new campaign, "The Wolfrunners of Wall Street", is planned to begin starting in April... 😛

[Akhôrahil]

Land transportation is awful though, so only luxury gods or other lightweight, valuable items are candidates for long-distance trading, and even then only if there’s no local substitute. Trading through Dragon Pass is a bit like the Silk Road, only with far smaller populations at either end, and with less geographical divergence.

And if the city populations are sustained by trade, they will get a very nasty shock once we get decades of more or less constant warfare from now on...

Edited January 5, 2021 by Akhôrahil

[Eff]

14 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Land transportation is awful though, so only luxury gods or other lightweight, valuable items are candidates for long-distance trading, and even then only if there’s no local substitute. Trading through Dragon Pass is a bit like the Silk Road, only with far smaller populations at either end, and with less geographical divergence.

And if the city populations are sustained by trade, they will get a very nasty shock once we get decades of more or less constant warfare from now on...

Well, let's look at the Slavewall-Duck Point run, as Furthest to Slavewall and Duck Point to New Crystal are all by water. 

I count, using the Argan Argar Atlas hexes and following rivers as much as possible, 504 kilometers of distance to cover. 184 km of this is by land, 320 of it is by water. Going by the Runequest Glorantha numbers for land travel (taking an average between good and bad weather) and the Stanford ORBIS assumed values for riverine travel, it would take 22 days to ship goods from Slavewall to Duck Point. RQG uses somewhat higher numbers than ORBIS does for land travel, about a third higher. Assuming this applies to upriver riverine travel as well, the shipping time would be only 14 days. 

The overall freight charges, using the ORBIS assumptions, indicate that the price of grain would about double from being shipped this distance. (By comparison, shipping grain from North Esrolia to Duck Point only increases its price by about 20%. Shipping a fine wine like Vinavale Red that distance only increases its price by 2.5%! Salted pork would rise in price by 5% over that distance, while shipping it from Slavewall would bump its price by 20%) So it's just at the edge of tenability for excess Tarshite grain to flow into Sartar. Happily, however, shortages of labor in Sartar seem likely, and the historical result tends to be the adoption of more capital-intensive production practices. Less happily, the response of many Sartar elites was to welcome the arrival of slave-worked latifundia as a means to keep wages out of the countryside, it seems. More happily, the latifundia are all burned now.

More extended analyses (what is the price to ship from Glamour to Nochet, etc.) will require substantially more time and the stitching together of multiple AAA maps. But overall, the price of high value-added goods doesn't seem to be a daunting one for profitability- even as basic a condiment as raw garlic would only jump in price by 67% if it were shipped from Slavewall to Duck Point. 

[MOB]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Land transportation is awful though, so only luxury gods or other lightweight, valuable items are candidates for long-distance trading, and even then only if there’s no local substitute. Trading through Dragon Pass is a bit like the Silk Road, only with far smaller populations at either end, and with less geographical divergence.

Unlike the (much, much longer) RW Silk Road though, the routes through Dragon Pass can utilise Sartar's beautifully-engineered Royal Roads which greatly facilitate the movement of goods.

[Jeff]

1 hour ago, MOB said:

Unlike the (much, much longer) RW Silk Road though, the routes through Dragon Pass can utilise Sartar's beautifully-engineered Royal Roads which greatly facilitate the movement of goods.

Also, I've been doing a lot of reading into settlement patterns in the Ancient World. 20%+ urbanisation happened in quite a few places, particularly along the Silk Road during the Hellenistic period. Maybe the problem is assuming that Sartar is "a pretty rural place" is wrong. The original WBRM game should make it clear that Sartar is at least as urban than Tarsh (and probably more urban given its geography).

[Joerg]

At first glimpse the degree of urbanisation in Sartar does appear to be untenably high.

Boldhome probably would be in an untenable position without the royal highway expanding the isochrones (lines with equal travel time to the market) far out into Killard Vale. While the city area itself has a few areas actually under the plow, it probably lacks the rural population that the tribal confederation cities and even more so the Colymar towns have. Clearwine and Runegate are counted into the urban population, but probably half or more of the population are actually engaged in agriculture or horticulture as their main occupation. Possibly up to a third of the populations of Wilmskirk, Jonstown and Swenstown will pursue activities on fields, pastures or orchards/vinyards nearby, likewise profiting from the royal highways easing access to slightly more remote areas.

Bulk transport of grain into the cities is a rather normal phenomenon anywhere, and while waterways are a natural choice for bulk transport, few waterways will allow direct access to the markets or storage silos.

Grain is the main bulk food that limits urban population, and in order to judge feasibility, one may have to look at the grain distribution in Sartar. I would assume that the Earth temples play the dominant role in this. After harvesting and threshing the grain, some may be re-distributed for winter seeding (provided that this technique is usted - winter seeding has the least loss in seed material as the seed already winters as a grass, as opposed ot summer seeding which means that vermin and mold have all of winter to get at the storese of seedstock, reducing quantity and possibly quality).

Seed storage for summer seed probably is part of the economic function of earth temples. Stocking up grains for food is the other most important part.

What containers or special buildings do the Heortlings use for grain storage and transportation?

My knowledge about grain storage is mainly anecdotal.

The harvested and threshed grain needs to be dry to be left more or less unattended in storage. Blocking access from mice or rats is pretty hard (although a warding for the storage place would protect against more than simple vermin). Sealed containers need to be absolutely dry to avoid mold.

Grain transport by ship in Hanseatic times required a constant aeration and re-shoveling of the cargo to avoid mold setting in. The grain was transported openly in the hold.

The dust from moving dry grain can be explosive. Modern grain silos have vents designed to minimize damage from dust explosions - without those, an exploding grain silo could devastate the surrounding area for hundreds of meters.

Pithoi (ceramic storage bins) appear to have been a standard technology in Mediterranean cultures, and amphorae are known cargo containers for just about anything handled by Greek and Roman merchant vessels, and probably also in road traffic.

Christian travelers to Egypt in the Roman Empire and Arab historians would accept the pyramids of Giza as plausible remains of the granaries of Joseph. The same Wikipedia article also shows contemporay Egyptian depictions of granaries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph's_Granaries#/media/File:Egyptian_Granary_Thebes.jpg

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by Joerg

[Akhôrahil]

6 hours ago, MOB said:

Unlike the (much, much longer) RW Silk Road though, the routes through Dragon Pass can utilise Sartar's beautifully-engineered Royal Roads which greatly facilitate the movement of goods.

This certainly does help, but it’s still a matter of logistics. Transporting foodstuff using animals that in turn eat foodstuff very quickly becomes impractical, for instance. In Rome, the cost of transport from Ostia to Rome was comparable to the cost of transportation by sea from anywhere in the Mediterranean to Ostia, and that was a mere 15 miles. Roman roads were primarily military installations (but of course great for any personal transportation) - even with good roads, land transportation is a major hassle.

If it wasn’t overshadowed by other events of the HeroWars, the opening up of the Janube as a trade route into the Lunar Empire (by the Thaw) would have been massively disruptive to Dragon Pass trade.

Edited January 5, 2021 by Akhôrahil

[Akhôrahil]

9 hours ago, Eff said:

If you want to trade anything from the Oslira watershed to Kethaela, you have precisely three options:

1. Shipping it via Bagnot or Dunstop to Queen's Post, then across the Dragonspines to Rich Post and down to New Crystal City
2. Bagnot through Dragon Pass proper, around the Upland Marsh, to Duck Point and down to New Crystal
3. Slavewall to Alda-Chur, Alda-Chur to Jonstown, and then a variety of routes to either Duck Point or Wilmskirk, from either of those down to New Crystal or Karse.

It's also often questionable just how navigable a river is. When the Creek-Stream River rises into Dragon Pass, there's every risk of cataracts (and there's even something that looks like a set of them in the AA mapwork at "Runnel", p. 29), and even if they can be bypassed in various ways (including getting lifted over by undines), every such solution adds to the cost. 

[scott-martin]

Top thread! Who knows where the day takes us but just want to star one of the lines:

10 hours ago, Eff said:

Boldhome isn't a city of Sartarites, it's a city of Sartarites and everyone who's got enough fingers in the trade going on

IMG this is worth reinforcing. "Sartar" is not a conventional country so much as a novel exploit of location and global relationships. It's a lens for higher-order economic math built out of local accidents of language and social structure. This naturally allows for statistical extremes that may not apply anywhere else in our fantasy bronze age: more coinage, bigger towns, more spells, more scrolls. More important people (runes), greater monster density. Maximum fantasy.

Among other things, Boldhome is Nochet without so much commodity baggage. It's the Miracle Mile, a kind of holy country. The question of how sustainable the project was and under what conditions it persists is for the Hero Wars to decide. And how it scales.

It will be interesting to see if other regions can find their inner Sartar and give us a similar high-density encounter table. In my heart I would like that but I know that the tragedy of Time is that most of the best resource sites were discovered, developed and abandoned early on. Maybe in the Dawn Age. Maybe along the great watersheds that tie regions together and keep "obvious" short portage opportunities on the margins.
 

[Akhôrahil]

53 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maximum fantasy.

I think this is a big part of it, and it's absolutely endemic in fantasy RPGs. The city should be this big, because that's cool. The dragon hoard must look big and impressive, even if this amount of gold to make it look this big is completely unreasonable. There must be dungeons everywhere, because where else would you adventure? Monster ecosystems don't seem credible. It's more important that weapon selection maps to original D&D than that it's historically accurate. We must have tight ranks of troops and medieval castles, even though easy access to fireballs and flight ought to make this tactically silly.

Glorantha is less bad at this than most fantasy RPGs - it usually does its best to draw the conclusions from the logic of the setting.

Edited January 5, 2021 by Akhôrahil

[scott-martin]

36 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

The city should be this big, because that's cool.

Oh yeah. And it's 30,000 years old (cool!) with an uninterrupted written record of occupation to prove it. Local government runs similar to Chicago only with a centaur (cool!) for a mayor [sic].

Everyone on this thread knows Glorantha can be a challenge because it supports deep data-driven modeling as well as these flights of dream logic. Sometimes the dream confounds the data and forces us to do a little creative adjustment, but it's complicated. The best way to experience the place with authority is to go there in some sense, and then the dream logic tends to take over.

I love the way RQ keeps the dream tethered within shouting distance of the data. Sartar is an explicitly weird place even by Gloranthan standards.

Edited January 5, 2021 by scott-martin
extra cool

[David Scott]

19 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I love the way RQ keeps the dream tethered within shouting distance of the data.

Along with urbanisation numbers, I'd also advise not looking at any population growth modelling based on numbers at the Dawn (Guide page 707):

https://www.metamorphosisalpha.com/ias/population.html

or this one: https://ncalculators.com/environmental/exponential-population-projection-calculator.htm

use K = 0.012 (1.2% growth rate - roughly the world at the moment and play from there)

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by David Scott

[Jeff]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Oh yeah. And it's 30,000 years old (cool!) with an uninterrupted written record of occupation to prove it. Local government runs similar to Chicago only with a centaur (cool!) for a mayor [sic].

Everyone on this thread knows Glorantha can be a challenge because it supports deep data-driven modeling as well as these flights of dream logic. Sometimes the dream confounds the data and forces us to do a little creative adjustment, but it's complicated. The best way to experience the place with authority is to go there in some sense, and then the dream logic tends to take over.

I love the way RQ keeps the dream tethered within shouting distance of the data. Sartar is an explicitly weird place even by Gloranthan standards.

As an aside, the assumptions about urbanisation rates in this thread are contradicted by quite a few archaeologists of the Near East. See Millar's The Roman Near East, Leick's The Babylonian World, Bryce's Ancient Syria, Liverani's The Ancient Near East: History, Society, and Economy. By some accounts, the city of Rome alone may have been between 10% and 20% of the total population of Roman Italy (that number is probably high, but not because it would make Rome too big to be supported, but rather that the area enclosed by the walls of Rome was too small for that many people). 

There is a huge danger over-relying on Northern European or Medieval points of comparison. 

Boldhome gets most of its grain from the Killard and Toena valleys, as well as from the lands around Swenstown. Praxian animals, of which there is a seemingly limitless supply of, is a major part of the diet in Boldhome. And as Nick has pointed out, Boldhome is serviced by a paved road system that makes wagon transport far easier than you might imagine. 

[Jeff]

Just now, Jeff said:

As an aside, the assumptions about urbanisation rates in this thread are contradicted by quite a few archaeologists of the Near East. See Millar's The Roman Near East, Leick's The Babylonian World, Bryce's Ancient Syria, Liverani's The Ancient Near East: History, Society, and Economy. By some accounts, the city of Rome alone may have been between 10% and 20% of the total population of Roman Italy (that number is probably high, but not because it would make Rome too big to be supported, but rather that the area enclosed by the walls of Rome was too small for that many people). 

There is a huge danger over-relying on Northern European or Medieval points of comparison. 

Boldhome gets most of its grain from the Killard and Toena valleys, as well as from the lands around Swenstown. Praxian animals, of which there is a seemingly limitless supply of, is a major part of the diet in Boldhome. And as Nick has pointed out, Boldhome is serviced by a paved road system that makes wagon transport far easier than you might imagine. 

As a further aside, if you want to talk about how much food can be carried by animals for how far, and you aren't referencing Donald Engels, then you are just spitballing.

[Scorus]

Would Clearwine have been the biggest urban location in Sartar before he built the cities? I've been assuming it was Orgorvale's capital.

[Sir_Godspeed]

After reading Jeff's various comments on how Sartar works in other threads, my own mental shortcut is that Sartar is a case of "what if Kwarazm, but in the Caucasus?"

It does have a weirdly high urbanization, which is sustained by intensive overland trade through geographical necessity. The wealth that flows through it is probably used to sustain food imports and/or intense landscape-reshaping in its nearby areas to sustain agricultural practices that would not have been even attempted if it weren't for the fact that some rich people were financing it in order to stay put (although I don't know any specific mentions of the latter, possibly the funnel sacrifices into the Earth temples to ensure statistically improbably, but not outright impossibly good harvests year after year.)

 

I also think we need to reconsider a few things:

Boldhome's footprint is, to the best my by knowledge, massive. It's not actually super-dense. It's a walled-in valley, with its own interior grazing areas (and possibly grain fields?). I don't know how much food it produces itself, but it would presumably offset the needs for import, if only a little. Secondly, many of those who "live in" Boldhome will probably also be farming the hillsides and valley floor directly outside the valley. Admittedly, this is true for anywhere in Glorantha and in history, so it might not explain much.

 

[Eff]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

It will be interesting to see if other regions can find their inner Sartar and give us a similar high-density encounter table. In my heart I would like that but I know that the tragedy of Time is that most of the best resource sites were discovered, developed and abandoned early on. Maybe in the Dawn Age. Maybe along the great watersheds that tie regions together and keep "obvious" short portage opportunities on the margins.
 

Handra, which has grown up into a city from a collection of fishing villages since the Opening (and has only gotten bigger since the time of the Guide as Quinpolic refugees flow in), seems like another crux of intersecting locations and exploitations to play with. 

[scott-martin]

2 minutes ago, Eff said:

Handra, which has grown up into a city from a collection of fishing villages since the Opening (and has only gotten bigger since the time of the Guide as Quinpolic refugees flow in), seems like another crux of intersecting locations and exploitations to play with. 

Handra's wide open and would be in my top priority handful for JC treatment as it "drains" an eclectic but under explored slice of ecosystem. Fay Jee is of course another but they're older and weirder.

Maybe the way in is to do a survey of major river deity quests.  As we know the watersheds in this part of the world have seen their share of engineering and shocks. Figuring them out is going to be somebody's mission.

[Tindalos]

19 hours ago, Leingod said:

Sartar is usually described as a pretty rural place, with a relatively small urban population; Sartar: King of Heroes, for example, claims less than 10% of its populace live in cities. But the numbers seen in the Guide to Glorantha don't seem to line up with that portrayal, and certainly not with that proportion. Those numbers are 25,000 urban and 100,000 rural, which would mean that a full 20% of Sartar's population are living in cities, a much greater proportion than many places that are described as being very urban.

This reminds me of the guide's description of Esrolia. "Although Esrolia is primarily rural and agricultural, it has a large urban population. Nearly 200,000 people live in Esrolian cities, almost 10% of the total population."

It's kind of amusing to think that Esrolia is far less urbanized than Sartar. Even with the power of the Sartarite dynasty.

In this instance, it may be a result of the destruction of that very dynasty. Even as far back as WBRM it was known as a "ruined kingdom" that many natives left. It could be a case that there was a serious decline in population from the countryside to the cities and neighbouring lands.

Certainly, it's clear Sartar is not in a normal state in most times we see it. It's consistently made up up tribes, which it's noted (GtG 34) will collapse into clans when not dealing with outside pressure. It is possible they're a later re-emergence (perhaps after Tarkalor's defeat at Grizzly Peak when the strength of Sartar started to wane) although other sources do mention them throughout the entire dynasty's reign.

[Jeff]

14 minutes ago, Tindalos said:

This reminds me of the guide's description of Esrolia. "Although Esrolia is primarily rural and agricultural, it has a large urban population. Nearly 200,000 people live in Esrolian cities, almost 10% of the total population."

It's kind of amusing to think that Esrolia is far less urbanized than Sartar. Even with the power of the Sartarite dynasty.

In this instance, it may be a result of the destruction of that very dynasty. Even as far back as WBRM it was known as a "ruined kingdom" that many natives left. It could be a case that there was a serious decline in population from the countryside to the cities and neighbouring lands.

Certainly, it's clear Sartar is not in a normal state in most times we see it. It's consistently made up up tribes, which it's noted (GtG 34) will collapse into clans when not dealing with outside pressure. It is possible they're a later re-emergence (perhaps after Tarkalor's defeat at Grizzly Peak when the strength of Sartar started to wane) although other sources do mention them throughout the entire dynasty's reign.

Looking at what percentage of the people in Esrolia live in cities as opposed to villages as opposed to having your mind blown by the size of Nochet and the many other cities bigger than Boldhome is probably a mistake. Nochet has as many people as Sartar. And there are another four cities in Esrolia as big as Boldhome. All in an area about the same size as Sartar.