The Fall of the North Planning/Discussion Thread

[Nuranar]

From page 2 of the discussion:

In reference to Saurreg's comment that only 100 of the Rearguard are left:

Originally Posted by Nuranar

Point of information: If there's only about 100 fighting men left, how many civilians are there? And how many of these are councillors/courtiers/something to do with government?

Originally Posted by Kransha

There are more civilians than soldiers, but not much. The exact number is up to you or anyone else who cares to throw a number about, as long as its not too many (remember, a lot of the poorer civilians lived in the outermost sanctum of Fornost, which was completely destroyed, and many in the second level were slain. All courtiers and ministers save a few survived, though. There are probably 50 people who have ties to the King (courtiers, etc), but that's not definitive.

Originally Posted by Nuranar

And thanks for the answers, Kransha. So, there's around 100 military types, around 50 king-civilians, and, say, 75 plain civilians? I can work with that.

Those numbers for the civilians were estimates to help me in visualizing the situation. I reach them by a sort of mental algebra:

1. Kransha said there are more civilians than soldiers. Thus the Number of Civilians (X) must be greater than 100. So X > 100.
2. 50 out of the X are courtiers and so forth. Logically, the ordinary civilians would outnumber those. So the Number of Ordinary Civilians (X-50) > 50.
3. I arbitrarily chose (X-50) = 75. Therefore X = 125. (X-5) is significantly larger than the number of courtiers, and X is larger than the number of soldiers. Therefore X, total civilians, outnumber the soldiers, but not by much, as Kransha stipulated.

Keep in mind, these are round numbers - approximations only.

If we take Saurreg's estimate of only 50 soldiers left after the orc-fight, we're down to a total of 175 people, with the civilians now forming more than 70% of that. However, that's not calculating any civilian deaths along the way. Illness, poor and diminishing food, harsh weather, continuous travel and exertion, and accidents, just to name a few, should have killed a number of civilians - particularly young children, the weak/sick, wounded, &c. The cumulative nature of most of these factors will mean that more are likely to die. ALSO, these are far more likely to be plain civilians than courtiers. After a little consideration, I'd say we'll have lost a good 10-20 civilians, only a couple of them courtiers. This could easily be more, if accounted for by an outbreak of a specific illness. By specific, I mean something contagious and exacerbated by cold and weakness (influenza??), instead of simply lots of pneumonia.

How's that for trivializing the momentous and complicating the obvious?