#I am once again making the Thedas scaling issue your problem as well as mine

[exhausted-archivist]

Thedas Scaling vs Real World Scaling

I am once again bothering everyone and their mutuals about how small Thedas is scaled and how it is roughly 200k miles (321,869 km) bigger than Greenland, and 65, 998 miles (106.2k km) larger than Algeria.

A continent that is supporting at least 10.01 million people who range from 4'9 - 8' (1.44 - 2.43 m) in addition to all the mega fauna (dragons, giants, great bears, wyverns, wandering hills, ect.)

To be clear, I'm not saying that a land mass this size couldn't support 10.01 million people. It likely could if you reference the pre-plague numbers of England of which Ferelden is the approximate size of, and Thedas is roughly 12 Fereldens. The population estimate for England was around 1.5 million or more in 1086 and grew to between 3.7 million and 5–7 million. If we go low ball and go with the 1.5 million with the high ball of 7 million, Thedas could potentially support 18-84 million people.

There are many issues with this though, the first one being that when you consider the fact that a large swath is uninhabitable or are unsustainable for large populations; Western Approach, Silent Plains, the Anderfels, and a portion of blighted lands between Antiva and Rivain. Which knocks out roughly 1 Ferelden worth of land. So, subtracting the respective amount leaves us with 16.5-77 million of potentially supported population.

The second issue, is again the mega fauna. Dragons need large amounts of food. Their drakes go out and hunt for food for them, their brood, and the drakes themselves while the high dragon is in her nest. She then goes and eats in vastly larger amounts before she lays a clutch. Considering the size of dragons and that we know there are/were at least 12 at one point. That's a lot of land they'd need to support themselves and their brood.

Then you have giants, wyverns, regular bears, great bears, pheonix, quillback, hyenas, and more. If we focus on bears, such as the great bear which preys on wyverns and dragons and their size, along with the much larger than the average Thedosian bear - which are larger than the largest bear irl who's shoulders average at 5' (153cm) which would be as tall as Varric whose game model is 5' (153cm). The bears themselves would need massive amounts of space to forage and/or hunt. Especially in preparation for winter.

This makes it so Thedas couldn't support the minimum population size it would have of 10.01 million people with the amount of mega fauna it has without extreme clashes near daily without them being hunted to extinction. Which we know they almost did with dragons.

But these are a lot of numbers right? And really how big are those countries I mentioned? Well, here is Algeria (Blue), Greenland (Green), and America (Orange) overlayed over Europe for perspective using The True Size site.

For clearer idea of what this looks like on an individual level:

Greenland vs America

Algeria vs America

America vs Europe