Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I have a low-tech fantasy kingdom, isolated from the rest of the world due to accidents of geography, history and magic. It is intended to be self-sufficient at TL 4~ and so can thereby be assumed to have a minimum population of 700,000 using the numbers on (GURPS Space, pg 91) as a guideline. The available geography for said kingdom is 3,472 square miles of arable land. With a minimum population of 700,000, this gives a minimum population density of 202~.

I'm not sure that is a reasonable number. If it is reasonable, how high can I take it before it becomes unreasonable? If it isn't reasonable, how low should I reduce it to? Sources so I can figure this out for myself are welcome!

(At 700,000~ population, it has a per-capita income of G$12,480, Average Wealth and an economic volume of G$8,736,000,000. It doesn't have a trade volume as it has no trade with outside kingdoms. Average Wealth's monthly income is G$800, a CR of 3, a MBF of 2% and so it has a G$11,200,000 monthly budget for the kingdom's military and police forces.)

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Do a google for: medieval demographics easy ross

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

That kind of population density might work if 100% of the land was arable. Otherwise, I just don't see it. I think with S.J. Ross's Medieval Demographics, you could get an area that was 66% arable and population densities of 120~.

Edit: here is an automated version of the Ross thingie

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

And here is the proper link. I didn't have time to find and post it earlier.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I personally suspect that the population required to maintain TL 4 in isolation is in the tens of millions (see: Hellenistic/Roman Mediterranean, Tokugawa Japan). You can have towns and muskets with a much smaller population, but not amazing art and huge libraries and cities with hundreds of thousands of people and pocket multitools and large amounts of good steel armour and all kinds of specialists and ships of a thousand tuns burden. So you will need much more land, or a lower TL.

To give an idea, 700,000 people is one large TL 4 city like Ptolemaic Alexandria, imperial Rome, Queen Anne's London, Tokugawa Tokyo, or any of several Chinese capitals.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Yes, but Magic.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Thanks, both of you.

I was attempting to determine if it was reasonable prior to factoring in their magics. Looks like it isn't. Too high of a population density for their arable land at that level of technology, too low of a population to maintain said technologies. I can adjust the population values up and down, but the arable land available is a fixed value.

Ah well.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

What then do you consider the minimum population to maintain TL 4~?

Not develop it (as they didn't develop it themselves in the first place), but maintain an existing body of knowledge and the infrastructure necessary to make use of it?

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I'm late to the population density party, but there's an article in Pyramid #52 which covers land use and support of urban centers. You can use that to figure out population densities in a GURPS-friendly way.

I suspect you'd need a population of several millions, if not tens of millions, to do TL4. In addition to encompassing a great many craft industries, those industries imply a lot of specialized extraction and processing industries, which in turn imply the need to cover a lot of space and to be supported by a vastly larger population. Moreover, without a large and well-populated setting, some of the hallmarks of TL4 civilizations (elaborate architecture, various navigational developments) won't be practice, and since these are things which are generally transmitted by what amounts to oral tradition rather than by reference books, they'll vanish if they don't get used.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Ah. Thanks for the reference, I'll poke at it when I'm next able to grab something from the store.

TL 4 is noted as starting in the 1450s. Europe had around 50 million people at that point in time and the British Isles around 3 million people. If we cut the British Isles of the 1450s off from the rest of the world, you are saying that the Isles wouldn't be able to maintain their technology base but would instead revert down to ... TL 2 or so?

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Unfortunately all I can contribute to the discussion is some semi-educated
guesswork, I did not have the time for any research, but perhaps it shows
one possible way to approach the problem.

First, a TL 4 society needs a lot of different specialists to function. I do not
have a reliable number, but I think that 500 types of specialists (artists, bu-
reaucrats, craftspeople, merchants, physicians, scholars, etc.) is not too far
from the truth.

Second, a single specialist is not enough to serve the society and keep the
tradition of the specialty alive, so each specialty will need a small communi-
ty of its specialists. There are specialties where comparatively few people
are required, for example astronomers, and specialties where a lot of people
are needed, for example bakers. Lacking reliable data, I would think that an
average of 100 people per specialty could do. With 500 specialties and 100
specialists each we would get a total of 50,000 people.

Third, these 50,000 people have families, with parents, partners and children.
Since magic is available to fight diseases, the number of children per family
can be lower than in our world's history, but I still think that the average fa-
mily should have 5 members. Which gets us 50,000 specialists with 5 family
members each, a total of approximately 250,000 people.

Fourth, now we have got the specialists and their families, the core of the
urban population. Someone has to feed them, to create and transport the
various raw materials, and all that. I would assume that at least 80% of the
entire population are of that kind, so the 250,000 people mentioned above
are no more than about 20% of the population. If 250,000 people are 20%,
the entire population should be approximately 1,250,000 people.

My gut feeling (again, I have no reliable data) is that my numbers are on the
conservative side, so for one of my own settings I would think that 1.5 milli-
on people as the base of a TL 4 society could be made plausible.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Yes. Without Britain's extensive overseas trade routes there is no way that it could have maintained a TL4 society.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Something like that. The effect wouldn't necessarily be a direct link between population/geography and technology, but the economics of the situation would doom higher TLs. Without long-range and high-volume shipping, navigation decays along with related mathematical disciplines. Without a lot of people with a lot of money (made by trade with the continent), there's nobody to pay for clocks or fancy Gothic architecture, so those skills die out. There's also less call for advanced accounting techniques like double-entry bookkeeping and even letters of credit, so those fade away. Without imports, they're cut off from specialized materials like alum, the lack of which hurts a range of other trades. They could maintain things like more advanced crop rotation schemes, since you don't need a particularly elaborate economic and geographic context to do that, but for the most part, over a couple of generations, they'd become essentially indistinguishable from TL3 or even TL2.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

As I said in the post which you quoted, I think that an isolated society with similar capabilities to the Roman empire in Marcus Aurelius' Day, Britain in Queen Anne's Day, Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns, etc. requires tens of millions of people. If you just want muskets and affordable books and lots of towns, you can probably make do with a few million people.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

That's nonsense.

Britain has always been a pretty rich place. Even at the height of the Empire trade accounted for less than half the economic activity of the country (for 1900 per capita income 44 L, per capita trade (imports + exports) 18L 14s). Sure losing 42% of your economy would be really bad news, but it's not dropping several TLs bad news. The Great Depression knocked 30 to 35% off global GDP without doing much to the global TL.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Since this is fantasy, I would think if it's your own world/creation, you could have whatever population density you want. I've used the online medieval demographics site, and I think it's great for getting in the ball park for earth-like conditions. But I'm sure there are worlds out there that break all the rules. Just some up with some reason why a really high population density can support itself. Unless, of course, you are looking for earth-like realism. If that's the case, disregard what I just said, go with what everyone else is saying! :)

Tim

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

There is a huge difference between a decline in trade for five to ten years and being completely isolated from your trade partners, correspondents, cultural influences, etc. indefinitely. Matthew Riggsby gave a good list of examples of the things which would fall out of use or become more expensive. Some things work when you have tens of millions of people on three continents to sell to, buy from, correspond with, study with, etc. but not when you have a few million people on a cluster of islands.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Especially using magic.

Just the double-harvest from Bless crops could radically change your population ratio.
Instead of each farmer feeding roughly 1.25 people, you can now feed ~2.5 people/farmer and you have gone from 80% farmers to 40% farmers.

Taking the 250K specialists/townsfolk from Rust above, you now only need ~170K farmers instead of 1 million farmers, thus putting you inside your 700K target population.

This also happens to coincide well with towns/cities being relatively close together as depicted in many fantasy settings.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I think most of them are nonsense too. And become more expensive isn't really a factor. With 60% of your economy still there, there's little reason at all to expect nobody to be able to pay for clocks, and none at all to expect them to give up financial instruments. There are substantial alum sources in Yorkshire, though historically they aren't actually developed until mid TL4, and don't supply a majority of British alum until well into the 17th century, apparently largely for financial reasons connected to Royal monopolies abolished by the Commonwealth.

And anyway, he doesn't even touch what are probably the two biggest distinguishing innovations of TL4 - guns and printing. Nobody is going to give up guns, and individual smiths are entirely able to manufacture them. Though I will admit powder is likely to get more expensive - England *has* sulphur sources, Bath for instance, but a lot of TL4 production comes from Sicily. A society with nothing Roman villagers don't have except flintlocks and printed Bibles probably still looks more like TL4 than TL2.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

This is one of the questions where justifying my professional opinion would take more time and work than I have space for in a forum post. The basic problem is that the technologies of travel and trade and overseas war, and the materials and goods and ideas and workers imported, tend to be key to a society's most advanced and specialized technology. So let's look at your example of the British Isles in 1450 suddenly being cut off from the continent.

For raw materials, we already discussed alum (and disagreed about it ... I don't have time to research the question). Without the mines of the Tirol, there would also be problems with gold and silver shortages. Some specialized ores aren't available any more, and even if they can be found the English must invent how to work them since much of that knowledge is in the heads of foreign guildsmasters. On the bright side, there are no more foreign luxuries like silk to buy with silver anyways.

The best armourers are in Flanders, the Germanies, and Lombardy. England can produce plenty of common armour, but new suits for the rich will be inferior to the old, and it has to take work away from other tasks to produce as much armour as it used to consume. When English kings wanted to improve their industry, they imported workers from the Low Countries and the Germanies, but this is no longer possible.

The key developments in gunpowder technology were on the continent, although the English were not bad at gun-founding. Elizabeth's England depended on overseas powder mills and arquebus makers, which was a problem when she got into her Spanish war. Once again, when Elizabeth or Henry VIII wanted to improve their native powder and smallarms industry, they imported workers from Flanders and the Germanies. This is no longer possible, and with only one island chain's wars, buyers, and tinkerers improvements will be even slower. With less and worse armour, the arquebus loses a key advantage over the longbow.

The limitations of gunpowder technology and the end of trade across the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean cut off a lot of exciting developments in shipbuilding, rigging, navigation, and so on. The experts call this a North Sea technology for a reason ... it was developed all around the North Sea and Baltic with developments by individual captains and shipwrights influencing others in different countries.

The collapse of trade and the end of continental wars also devastates port cities like London and the Cinque Ports. With just fishing and coastal trade and pirate-fighting, their population is likely to shrink. England was already rustic, and it gets more so.

A lot of the best cloth mills were in Flanders, so England loses its comparative advantage in wool production and has to weave more of its own cloth. Without any export market, these probably won't be as advanced as the best Flemish mills. Pasture falls out of use, and men who were doing other things turn to weaving.

A lot of the most exciting developments in scholarship are happening in Italy and Flanders. These vanish: no more people like Tito Livio, and no more correspondence with Poggio Bracciolino or authors-turned-spies picking up the latest tricks of the storyteller's trade in Milan. England is on its own culturally, and doesn't have a flood of new classical texts. It will never rediscover the Greek classics, because nobody in England in 1450 can read Greek, because most of the manuscripts are in other countries, and because there are no more enthusiastic Greeks and Italians to encourage English scholars to learn it. Its access to Arabic and Persian literature ends, and the exiled Jews just over the channel and their learning are gone too. Without Italian, Flemish, and Dutch paintings to use as an example art history develops differently. Without wandering master builders from the continent, buildings are less sophisticated.

The printing press was about to be invented. The idea may have reached England, but without a proof-of-concept on the continent (and Flemish paper mills to import from) it may never be developed.

Hopped beer was being developed around this time because it could be shipped from the Germanies to England without spoiling. Without this demand, the English probably stick to small beer brewed on a small scale. (See Richard Unger's Beer in the Middle Ages).

So the result is a poorer Britain without the latest gadgets and cultural innovations. It does not have libraries of tens of thousands of codices, cities of hundreds of thousands of people, large oceangoing ships, and other technologies which characterized the societies which I said that this kingdom could not resemble (I am not using TL jargon here, because I consider it useless for serious discussion).

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I am not so sure, mainly because there is the historical example of Japan, a
culture which did give up almost all of a well developed firearms technology.
As for printing, this depends a lot on the degree of literacy and the size of
the population, with too few people able to read there is simply no sufficient
market for printed books to keep the craft alive. Overall I think that an iso-
lated, low population society of TL 4 would become far more "rural" than our
world's historical examples of this technology level, with a technology deve-
lopment and slow progress focussed mostly on fields like for example agricul-
ture, mining and the basic crafts and little change from previous technology
levels in its culture and in the theoretical sciences - more a kind of slow im-
provement of the late Middle Ages than a Renaissance.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I prefer to have a reasonable baseline (a realistic flavoring, say) that I can deviate from, while detailing the consequences of and reasoning for said deviations. Also, its' easier to get information about our world, its' workings and its' history than it is to get people to work out the details of a theoretical example for me. ;)

A few million people appears to be sufficient; giving a population density of 865~ per square mile of arable land. This buffs their economic volume, even absent trade, which increases the funding available to field and maintain military/police forces. Thats' a lot of people though! ... somewhere between modern Japan (at 873) and the modern Philippines (at 846).

This specific kingdom doesn't have measurable technological progress. They inherited a large body of knowledge and decayed infrastructure, were instructed in its' use and maintenance and then were mostly abandoned to their own devices. They've spent their history since arrival (about eight hundred years ago) in the struggle to survive, adapting their broken magic to the new realities and fighting off monstrous incursions. A mostly "rural" population that further develops its' inherited technology at a glacial pace sounds fine to me!

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Advanced and specialized aren't the same thing. In a lot of ways my point is this is the same as the classic "Dark Ages" argument. There is no question Britain without trade is poorer, and stuff that depends on heavy capital investment is hurt by that, just as Dark Age Europe doesn't engage in the kind of huge projects the Roman Empire supported, but that doesn't actually mean its technology is more primitive, it's just different. Prior to the industrial revolution trade is expensive - less so for Britain than most places perhaps, because it has so much coastline with good harbors - but still very little that mattered to ordinary life comes from really far away.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

That's heavily mythologized though. Some Japanese continued to use, make, and to a limited degree even import guns. What they gave up were serious wars. Guns became hunting toys. I suppose an isolated Britain that gave up internal fighting could marginalize guns. That's going to happen.

Probably, though defining "low population" is one of the points under debate here. But sure, change the situation and different technologies become the really important ones. Though some guesses how that goes tend to be way off. For example there is quite a stretch of European history in which rural villagers were more literate than urban populations - probably a function of a distributed literate priesthood with a teaching mission and children with free time during the agricultural slack season.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

One reason why TL2 Rome was so freakin' huge was because it owned Egypt, a ginormous granary, and was able to move insane amounts of grain by sea.

As GURPS Low-Tech explains, moving stuff on rivers is about 5 times cheaper than moving stuff over land, and moving stuff over the sea is about 25 times cheaper than moving it over land.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

But you don't necessarily need a single kingdom or single empire that large. Multiple smaller ones ought to be able to achive or maintain TL4, provided there's stable and reasonably free trade between them, as long as the total population is the required millions or tens of millions. It just needs to function, trade-wise and intellectually, as a single realm. And a lot of things can interfere with that functioning, including religious intolerance, greedy barbarians (e.g. Vikings) or even language barriers.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Over time, yes. I don't know how quickly Matt thinks it'll happen. If it'll drop 1 TL in 5 years and a 2nd TL after another 10-15 years, or if it'll take hundreds of years, or something in between...

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

M.A., I am completely comfortable with saying that anywhere in western Europe in 600 CE was less technologically capable than Italy in 200 CE. This is especially true from a gaming perspective, since there were far fewer and less cool toys for adventurers in 600 than in 200.

A Romanist whose name escapes me (edit: Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization) uses the example of kitchenware and roof tiles. Lots of ordinary people had attractive, durable, easy-to-clean kitchenware, and roofs which lasted a long time without leaking or rotting, under the empire. Then quite suddenly in Late Antiquity this vanishes, and people go back to thatched roofs and more expensive, harder-to-clean, uglier pots made by their neighbours.

Can you give an area of material culture which you think saw changes between equally good systems?

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

OP did specify an isolated kingdom, though, isolated from the rest of the world. Hence, for this thread, you'd really need that single kingdom to be big enough.

A valid point for a more general case, though.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Would it not be easier to give them more land area than to force the desired population into a fixed area? That also gives you an excuse for them to have all the key ores and minerals. A few thousand square miles of farmland is not much ... something like the arable parts of mainland Greece south of Thermopylae. More land is also more fun for adventuring purposes, since it introduces the possibility of travel, multiple polities and subcultures, isolated forts and villas, and so on.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

But there needs to be wet roads for trade, either rivers (and navigable rivers) or else usable coasts. Otherwise moving stuff from place to place gets really expensive, as per GURPS Low-Tech.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I'm working this from the other direction: It is a player-requested setting element, and so its' design is constrained by the details of the request. One of those constraints is that its' size has already been defined, "about the size of the Yellowstone National Park in our world". Y'all have explained that it isn't reasonable for a TL 4~ isolate to maintain itself within that size constraint.

The constraint isn't flexible, and so I've started looking for ways to make it reasonable. The answer is likely going to be one of the other requested details, "who practice an alien form of magic"; the idea of enchanted 3D-jigsaw-puzzle boulders acting as terraforming devices has been floated for my consideration.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Would your constraints allow the people to practice a form of agriculture that is drastically more productive than European open-field seasonal agriculture in a cool temperate zone? With adequate water and labour, tropical rice agriculture produces several times more food per hectare per year, and I think there was a system in Mexico that was also far more productive than European practices: chinampa.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

She didn't specify their food sources. I've been assuming an oceanic 'warm' temperate climate, with easy access to plentiful sea food. Rice should be acceptable. What is "champa"? (Google tells me about a Hindu kingdom and that it is a named location in Mexico, but nothing I can find about an agricultural method.)

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Chinampa. The Aztecs built networks of artificial islands on the lake around Tenochtitlan and grew a mix of corn, beans, and other plants. It was quite enormously productive. Arguably, that may have had less to do with the specific technique and more to do with the facts that a) it involved maize and 2) it was done in a near-tropical climate rather than Europe's more temperate zone, but it still did produce a lot of food.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

You make a much stronger case that innovation stops or significantly slows down than that there's significant technological backsliding. Many of the things you mention are about stuff that's being invented, discovered, or developed elsewhere, and then never reaching an isolated England. But there's a difference between that and losing access to technology that's already present.

Which, it seems to me, is consistent with what actually happened in Edo period Japan, although they didn't cut off all foreign trade, and they did seem to have a significantly higher population (estimates seem to be 20 million-ish in 1650).

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Lets' see.

http://irri.org/ indicates that the biological nitrogen fixation due to the flooded fields effect allows stable yields up to 3 tons per-hectare per-crop without requiring additional fertilizers. Crops are harvestable about 120 days after establishment; roughly three crops a year then.

Saethwyr has an arable land value of 3,470~ square miles, which is 898k~ hectares. Assuming no more than 20% of the available land being used for such purposes, that gives 179,600 hectares. At 3 tons per hectare and 3 crops per year, that works out to roughly 1,616,400 tons of rice per year.

WolframAlpha says that roughly a dozen servings of wild rice per day would meet the 2k calories daily requirement. Assuming seafood and other foodstuffs is used to make up the difference in calories, minerals and vitamins ... thats' 1,968 grams of rice per-day per-person. There are 907,185 grams in a ton.

1,616,400 (tons per year) * 907,185 (grams per ton) / 1,968 (grams eaten per day) / 365 (days per year) = 2,041,393 (people fed 2k calorie diets per year).

Hmm.

Ah. Thanks. Looks interesting, and pretty.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Edo period Japan is the closest thing which I can think of to the situation in the OP, but it had much more land and people. Possibly Tibet or parts of Afghanistan in some periods ... although I would argue that they were not really TL 4, just medium-rich, medium-organized societies with horses, ironworking, literacy, towns, and muskets.

The population of Edo Japan was one reason why I guessed that tens of millions of people would be required.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

What about climate? Wet rice agriculture will produce more than three crops per year, indefinitely, given a year-round growing season. But if there is a winter cold enough that plants stop growing you get only two, and if the winter is at all long and cold, only one.

Also, what about landform? Rice fields have to be level and edged by bunds so that they can be flooded, and have drains so that they can be drained. And they need water supplies with catchments and tanks and aqueducts: if the rains are seasonal water storage has to be huge. The kind of landscape actually prepared to grow three crops of rice per year has had a lot of work done on it, and is distinctive.

Java is fantastic.

It's as close as my memory came to "chinampa" without checking. Sorry.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

I am thinking Malthus here, what keeps the population in check? Shouldn't there be hunger, conflict, outright warfare?

How long has this been going on? There must be a lot of resources being depleted. It is incredibly difficult to create a self-sustaining closed system.

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

Short answer:

Monsters, and only being near-human.

Long answer:

A long time ago there was a war. Nasty thing it was. Some of the weapons from that time remain dangerous; one of those weapons was intended to decimate civilian targets, provide area/resource denial and generate disposable self-directing weapons by consuming the local ambient mana (itself a resource the designers wanted to deny their opponents). It, ah, was more successful than expected. Its' success was made even more unfortunate with the defeat and mass-slaughter of its' creators; everyone still alive, and their descendents, are all identified as enemies by these weapon systems.

And so when the local mana reaches the appropriate thresholds, monsters happen. This is a worldwide problem, mind. This particular kingdom has a very large monster problem due to the nature of their magics; their magics don't consume mana -- thereby monsters happen frighteningly often, in unpredictable patterns and at unpredictable locations. Good thing they have guns! (Heh.)

On top of the semi-regular deaths due to monstrous incursions, their reproductive strategy has been tampered with by their gods when they were placed at their present location. The details of which are complicated, but one can assume they have perfect meditation-based contraceptives available to their women that they must learn in order to become fertile in the first place. Sexual behavior is human-normal but fertility itself is a learned skill for both their men and their women. (... a religiously-mandated skill taught to everyone by the religious class as part of their welcome-to-adulthood rituals. Yes, this has caused problems before. Heh.)

Hunger requires overpopulation, bad land management or bad skill/time allocation at the population level. Overpopulation isn't going to happen due to monsters and fertility concerns; the other two might but aren't intended to be occurring during the time period I'm concerned with. Conflict does occur, both among themselves and between them and the monsters. They've had three kingdom-wide civil wars over inheritance disputes, a handful of plagues, the occasional commoner rebellion, etc ... over the length of their history.

Their history places them as being put there about 800 years ago. Resource depletion should likely be a concern, though it can be addressed through the player-floated idea of enchanted terraformers. I know I want them to have wants/needs they can't satisfy themselves in order to spur their acceptance of a trade route with everyone else once they've been discovered and the other kingdoms thereby discover firearms. (Not that the firearms use gunpowder, mind, but rather an alchemical binary explosive which requires mana-sensitive processes to create. Functions anywhere, but it'll only form under certain conditions that the other kingdoms aren't able to replicate; too many mages casting mana-consuming spells!)

Re: Low-Tech Kingdom Population Density?
 

She wishes mild winters, hot summers and much rain. I've placed them in a pocket of land on the windward side of a coastal mountain range, just south of the sub-tropical climate band. They don't have a dry season, only seasons of "lots" and "enough" precipitation. Average surface temperature for that area of the world is roughly 60 F, with winters averaging 40 F and summers 100 F.

Short, mild winters and long, hot summers with many storms and showers.

Imagine, if you will, the remains of a explosive volcanic caldera large enough that Toba looked like a poprock in comparison. The caldera is being tilted so that its' westmost section is submerged with its' eastmost section being above sea-level due to a plate collision which improbably had both plates buckle upwards rather than one going underneath the other. Its' broken, eroded, bumpy, is rather resource-rich, has plentiful flat patches near the coast, rolling hills near the mountains and a sharp climb in altitude over a relatively short distance nearest the rim where it blurs into into the World's Teeth Mountains.