Demographics and Microeconomics of an Early Modern Fantasy City

This booklet is a microeconomics and town demographics add-on for SAKE (Sorcerers, Adventurers, Kings, and Economics): SAKE Full Book.

Preface

Webpages and articles about medieval (fantasy) demographics aren’t anything new, and while working on this, and previously other parts of SAKE, I’ve come across many of them. They’ve all been great inspiration for worldbuilding.

So why make another one?

Most of the ones I’ve come across are more like raw data – useful as starting points for worldbuilding or game design – but not much help for day-to-day game prep without a lot of extra work. (That said, this booklet still includes one of those raw lists also.)

This booklet is meant more as a GM tool. Mostly for SAKE TTRPG, of course. But the numbers here can be easily translated to other systems, especially the town size and professions present kind of information.

One thing to note: SAKE (and this list) assumes a lower-magic setting, and the Asteanic nation described here is kind of East Asian- and Mediterranean-flavoured.

Also, the ready-made town examples might be helpful for any GMs who just want to drop something straight into a campaign: PCs arrive in a town of 2500 people, and by checking the example, you can easily describe what’s going on – everyone is already listed.

The extra rules for small-scale economic activity are written for SAKE.

And while this booklet is fully usable on its own, it also serves an advertising purpose. The material here will later be part of a bigger supplementary book for SAKE TTRPG: “The Gilden Sea Cultures,” which will be completed and released after the Kickstarter campaign.

So, if you’re interested in more of this kind of thing – or maybe a full campaign set in SAKE’s homeworld, the Asteanic World – then here’s the KICKSTARTER LINK.

Rainer Kaasik-Aaslav
May 2025