My COIN Add-on uses Doskvol’s population as part of it’s mechanic. I’m thinking about 200,000.
That sound right to you? Here’s my thinking….
If we have a 6 per 1000 gang member rate (that CA’s current gang rate),
that give us 1200 gang members. Given Doskvol’s reputation, we might be tempted to bump up that rate. But given the Tier math, not sure I’d want to change that.
As I look over the listed gangs in the book and count up the ones that sound like real criminal, thugs on the streets sorts, I get about 20. Which gives them about 60 Thugs each. That matches Tier descriptions, with the higher tier gangs with larger cohorts and lower tier with smaller. Just eyeballing it, that feels close. You got maybe hundreds of unnamed Tier 0 and Tier I groups bubbling up and dying off all the time.
That leaves the other, non-thuglike, factions pulling from other parts of the population to fill their ranks. Thus Factions like the Hive or other more sophisticated type factions really are not population based, right? They are more quality and positioning based.
Blue Coats, on the other-hand, need some more clarity. Modern cities have about a 20-30 police per 1000. I’m thinking, in Doskvol, drop that to about 15 per 1000. That gives Doskvol about 3000 Blue Coats. They are tier 3, so we break up them per district. That gives them around 275 per, but that would not be an equal distribution. With the richer districts getting proper 20-30 per 1000. Leaving each district with around— and now I’m really just eyeballing, 120 Blue Coats? That would be about right for a Tier III cohort, have two gangs per?
That jive with your campaigns?
It doesn’t account for incarceration rates either… So some wiggle room still available.
COIN add-on? I’m intrigued!
That sounds astoundingly small for an industrial population center. Duskwall is a London or Bristol-analogue, and those got over a million easy.
London in 1800 was 1 million, which grew to 6.7 million by 1900
Doskvol is like the densely populated part of a city, stacked on top of another city-center, (stacked on top of another?) right?
I hadn’t ever tried any mathematical reckonings, but I guess in the limited thought I’ve devoted to the matter, I always figured around 500K counting the thousands of people that live more-or-less permanently on ships, and a 10s of 1000s of people who live essentially off the waste of the upper crust never seeing the dim glow of dusk or dawn, oh, and the ~5K who live as thralls of the Ghost Lords in the Lost District…
Point being; Why seek a consensus (much less a metric), just use what’s right for your Doskvol.
Isn’t that the spirit of Thai system/setting?
At 6.7 Million with a Gang rate of 6 per 1000 that would give Doskvol just over 40,000 gang-based criminals.
It’s going to take me some time to come to terms with the scale — not only for my Add-On/Hack, but when playing Blades in general.
Just thinking out loud, if a Tier III Faction has 5 gang cohorts (five large gangs), that’s just around 100 members; a formidable Faction.
That would mean, in Doskvol, just counting your Tier III Factions (let’s assume a bell-curve– so 10,000 of these criminals fall in the Tier III zone) you get 200 Factions. 200 factions that, each alone, could crush the Red Sashes with ease.
Before I started crunching numbers, in my head I was thinking Doskvol was around 2 Million, as that was the vibe I got from it. I might try to run the numbers for my Add-on with a 2 Million population. Though I might have to cut the districts in half so my troop tokens make sense. And it would increase my original math by a factor of 10.
Almost might make sense (both practical and mathematical) to limit my COIN game to just one District….
For reference: London in the 1870s was just shy of 3 million people.
Now in Blades in the Dark we aren’t supposed to expect realism here but I think if we are estimating population size then we can throw a few factors in that might limit population more than London in say 1870.
Since the outside world is so unlivable that means there isn’t the sprawling rural countryside farmland to support the city. Duskwall has farms for sure but they are compact by our normal standards. I would think that due to this limited farm land that food scarcity would place a limitation on growth.
Also Duskvol is if anything even more dense than London with people living on top of people literally. This means it is ripe for contagious disease and the general social tension of high population which creates stress and discord. Both of these factors would increase the death rate.
With all these factors I could see Duskvol population being closer to 1-2 million rather than 3-6 million
London is and was huge, but in Blades, London is Imperial City, right? Duskwall is probably closer to Birmingham or Manchester.