I was thinking we could maybe lay down some guidelines related to magic. I've pretty much been treating the setting as Dragon Age with the serial numbers filed off, tents the ample supply of rightly maligned magic users appearing in my story.
But in both that and demographics in general, I'd like to be sure that I'm not off by several orders of magnitude in terms of the assumptions that more established threads have been making. I pegged the population of Undrek as over 6000 and with 44 confirmed witches and a dozen or so necromancers. I wrote all those chapters before looking closely at this thread and seeing how small Itheria is supposed to be.
I'll be honest, I haven't really thought of numbers for demographics such as "How many people live in Itheria?" and "How many of them can do magic?"
Overall, your population numbers seem fine, but I don't really have too much knowledge of Fantasy demographics to pull from.
As for guidelines to magic...Yet another thing I haven't though too much about.
I know in Dragon Age(At least DA:O the only one i played), magic can be used due to a connection to The Fade; which is also where demons come from. One could do something similar with The Abyss... There hasn't been too much in-depth discussion about magic so far and examples of protagonists using magic has been few and far between. So far
@Omegah2o 's Duke Magnus is the only one that has magic from the get go. Although Princess Anna has a rage-induced awakening of her magical powers in one branch of her story. Negative emotions do seem to make magic easier to use, but harder to control.
If I may throw in my two cents on the demographic issue...
In regards to the population of Itheria as a whole, I'm not sure about it, and I'd much rather leave it to
@merkros or any of the other writers to establish. The Frostpeaks however, I've thought about for quite some time, and while I've never come up with a concrete answer, I can certainly estimate based upon historical facts. (Fair warning: what follows could be very uninteresting to some people...)
According to history, a Roman Legion was roughly 5000 men strong at the turn of the first century. Using this as a basis, I've tried to estimate the Frostpeaks' military might and come to the conclusion that Duke Magus has a standing force of around three legions under his command (possibly four and at the absolute most five). Honestly, my thoughts on the subject fluctuate between them based upon my feelings at the time. The argument for three legions is fairly strong however; one legion would be stationed at The White Spire, a second at Castle Hillgard, and a third could be split up patrolling the Frostpeaks (and the rest of Itheria at the King's command). This keeps the total number of Frost Knights relatively low at 15,000 ( but possibly as high as 25,000).
Assuming compulsory military service in the south (something I'm not completely sold on but is probable) every man between the ages of ? and 25 would be in the army (this could help explain the relatively low numbers of men in Undrek). Doubling that 15,000 to account for the women in the south of that age range I get an estimated 30,000 (50,000 for five legions) people between the ages of ? and 25. Again, assuming a rather wide-base population pyramid, 30,000 people could represent anywhere between 20 - 45% of the population in the Frostpeaks. This would put the grand total of people anywhere between 66,000 @ 45% and 150,000 @ 20%. This jumps massively to 116,000 and 250,000 respectively for 50,000 people between the age range. Personally, I tend to think it's closer to the lower number, but these are very much soft numbers and nowhere near set in stone. Although 150,000 people in the Frostpeaks seems a bit much to me, 116,000 is not unimaginable.
As for what percentage of Itheria's population the Duchy of the Frostpeaks makes up, I'd rather leave that up to
@merkros to decide. I'd hazard a guess of no more than 10%, but that's just me and other people are certainly free to weigh in on the subject. I've read online that England's population in the 5th century was around 1 - 1.5 million people, but I'm not sure how accurate those reports are. Still, Itheria could be similar, England wasn't very big at the time.
Magic use is a separate matter altogether. I myself was heavily influenced by Dragon Age when I introduced the Coven of Magi (the Circle of Magi) and the restrictions on nobles with magical talent, as well as the general fear/distrust of mages by everyone. As for actual numbers of mages? I've had the idea in my head that a child born to parents who have no magical talent whatsoever, and no history of it in either family, only has about 1/1000 chance of being a mage. When one family does have a history of it, that number jumps to 1/100, and when both have a history is creeps up to 1/25 (the latter number can also be applied to children born of incest). When one parent is a mage the number jumps dramatically to 50/50; and when both parents are mages the child has around an 85% chance of being one too (again, incest can boost these numbers substantially).
Taking into account the previously established numbers and assuming an Itherian population of 1,000,000, this would put the base number of mages in the kingdom at around 1,000; the vast majority of which would belong to the Coven of Magi. But again, these are soft numbers, and certainly open to debate.
Anyway, these are my thoughts on the subject thank you for bringing the issue up
@fyreant! Everyone please let me know what you think, questions, comments and concerns are absolutely welcome. And if anyone thinks I'm overstepping myself please feel free to post that too!
. I might drop doing the whole country and simply focus on the Duchy of the Frostpeaks. If anyone else wants to try it out I say go for it!
Oops.
