Question about one of our rules in the PDF Opal made:

DMs are not allowed to include time travel in their adventures, change the timeline, or have an

adventure take place in the past or future. The chronological order of all adventures shall be the

order in which they were played.

What does that mean? I get the majoraty of it, but "DMs are not allowed to include travel time in their adventure." Does this mean I 'expidite' the travel from Gold Bar to Pembria, if I want the adventure to be there, or do i provide a reason for us to be there during downtime, so the adventure starts there?

Also, I wanna look at one thing more: population per square mile, both in 'cities' and in rural environments.

Basically, I'm designing a Large City (so 10,001-25,000) and I'm curious about how that works. Lets say 15,000 people, to give us a number. Is this the population of just the city, or is it the population of the city and its outlying farms (rural people in the 'city limits', so to say). If this is the number in the city, how big (square mile wise) does the city have to be to just be liveable (one website was saying 100ppl per square mile, and this seems so very few!). The city of lynnwood (now, mind you, this is present day) is about 7sq miles (city limits), with a population of almost 35k. >.<

What am i doing wrong? what seems viable, what seems right? I am so confused, why am I putting so much effort into this?!?

I suppose, after looking at that website closer, it said that, in medieval society, 1sq mile could support 100 people. so i suppose that if my "city" had the population of 15000 people, and some of them were the farmers working around the city to support it, it could be a 12 mile by 12 mile area as the "city" and its farmers, supporting its population. then only some of the 15,000 people would be in the city proper, and many would be around it in the 12 mile area.

for Question 1:

We meant no time line discontinuities.  We are not adventuring in the past, nor are we going to "fast forward" by 100's of years into the future.

Travel time between two cities is ok.

Question 2:

For Orlean, I had 3 populations.

1) Permanent population inside the city.
2) Temporary population (merc, traders, etc).
3) Rural population.

If you need the farmland decreased in size, just voice it.

OR!

I suppose i could keep the population of the city proper 15,000, and have a support area huge around the city (more like 25x25, rather than 12x12)

Ok cool. Naw I'm not critizing your work on Orlean at all, I'm just way overthinking what I'm doing. Ty for the input.

Do you think the "population" of a city should include its support farms, or not? Is the population of Orlean (in terms of city size) the Permanent population inside the city, or Perminant Pop plus Rural pop, or Perm plus Rural plus Temp?

For clarification: when determining city size, is the population (pulling from numbers in your post): just 1, or 1+3, or 1+2+3?

Paladin: could i get your response on the above post? at least your interpretation of it.

population of hte city is just 1.

Transients don't count, and the rural poulation I didn't figure in for Orlean.

http://severantos.webs.com/apps/forums/topics/show/11830998-population-of-orlean-revisited

Edit:  rural doesn't count towards item availability.  Think of the rural as a sister city that supplies all the food.