So before I set about working on my application again I wanted to say here that last night while working I had the thought that: wait, everyone's nation claims seem to be too big for their population. Assuming the Great Expanse doesn't expand further beyond and all the deleted stuff is just more water than the Pacific and the total landmass of this world is proportionally far smaller than Earth (given if it were, I'd expect things to be far wetter and the massive desert in Karakus would be far smaller; if not non-existent or in some strange semi-state where it becomes a desert for only a few months of the year because the ground water got sucked up by the plant life and now it's all waiting for a new rainy season with possibly northern winds bringing wet - cool - air back. Or if the air currents lead from the south the southern mountain chain there would just funnel everything north and it would probably just being an even larger grass lands region.

I also know this is pretty late into things to point out, probably would have been best pointed out in an interest check phase because really the thing I'm worried about more is the relationship between nation sizes vs populations. A lot of the nations here at play have populations roughly corresponding to European countries at roughly the same time in history. And assuming this world is a loose 1:1 analogue (plus or minus a few thousand or so miles) then a lot of the countries on the map take up immense space, but with populations as low as France close to the mid-century. I determined this by overlaying a map of  the Earth over top and scaling it and stretching it to match the proportions of the given projection of the fictional world and making shapes the shape of and size of existing comparable countries and moving them around. And a lot of y'all got nations the size of Europe itself.

This may not seem like a big issue but it raises a pretty major plot hole, in my opinion. Disregarding the volcanic eruption that sets the scene and we're in a period of this world's history where by the scale of these countries alone, and their over all low population density they might actually be pretty much economically independent, materially: they don't have to do anything but grow their populations. They're small enough in head count - most of them - that I imagine the forests could recover from the volcanic eruption at a rate faster than the timber can be exploited. There's a lot of open land so the population can easily expand internally.

The only thing that might be an issue materially speaking is when a country wants something that can only be found outside of itself. But because the potential for production of that may be so high and the demand for any of it so low the relative costs of that would render these commodities very cheap.

Ideologically speaking, anything like ethnic cleansing like in the Dwarven Volkish state could be answered simply by... said people walking a few miles away. Bjergavjern being just over six Nazi Germany's in 1939 (With the Sudentland, Austria, and Germany itself, the bit in Lithuania it had excluded) tall and maybe one and a half wide on a population just over Nazi Germany's population at the time. The Republic of Acrad would be in an even weirder situation being as best as I can estimate: twice the size but a little over quarter the population, not counting non-citizens; and assuming the state is accidentally more Fascist than the Dwarven fascists then I can only assume that there may be more non-Acradians than Acradians and those people can just move to another corner and exist as their own independent nation.

I raise these concerns in part because I do intend my nation to be post-colonial and I kind of want this to be better defined. Either the existing countries get cut down to be more proportional for their populations so I find it difficult to believe they're developed nations when an over all density so low. Some of these can be easily divided into thirds and work for their population, even after a cataclysmic volcanic event.

The other alternative would be to have drawn internal boundaries to mark where internal colonies of sorts would be, meaning anyone not of the original peoples. That way the borders can remain the same and all that'd need to be done is editing the populations counts of each nation by adding a zero.


Border-wise also a lot of these countries don't look like they're empires that collapsed but empires that managed to hold on and not sub-divide when the state itself couldn't hold onto things spread so far apart as they are. So to be even more reasonable to the story provided by the RP I'd really argue for greatly reducing the size of all of these countries.

Ironically, Encoded is probably the closest to the truth and if they want to keep to just 13 million it wouldn't be unreasonable to split region 20 in half.