You need to remember how few people there are in Ravenland

The book doesn’t explicitly say how many people there are in Ravenland, but we can work it out in a few different ways.

Talent distribution

Let’s say that for game balance reasons there are 4 people with rank 3 for all of the magic talents, so it’s challenging but possible for the PCs to find a teacher. A power law usually applies for stuff like this, so let’s say there are 10 people at rank 2, and 30 people at rank 1.

There are 7 magic talents, 18 profession talents, and 46 general talents. Generously counting 50 people per talent, and assuming no overlap, that means about 3,500 people, not counting children or general dogsbodies. Let’s be really generous and call it 10,000.

Adventure sites

Most villages have fewer than 100 people, but the larger villages skew the numbers upwards. Population will also observe a power law, and it looks like in practice the average village size is going to be about 100. (The median is much smaller - probably something like 30 or 40.) There are a bunch of dungeons and castles as well; let’s be generous and say that there are villages surrounding them as well, and up the average population to 150. With 23 villages, 29 dungeons and 20 castles, that also gives us about 10,000.

Peak population before the third Alder war

Alderland’s army in the first Alder war consisted of 7,000 men and another 7,000 support troops, and triumphed, so let’s say they were at 12,000 at the end of that war. The dwarves mobilised, and called in their orcs, and that pushed the humans back, so let’s say they had 20,000 troops. That pegs the amount of people in Ravenland able to support an army at something like 100,000, tops. That’s before demons start killing people left, right and centre; and then you have the Blood Mist.

Each village ends up isolated, which means that at best a well-run village’s population is capped by the Malthusian limit of how many people can live off a very small amount of land (go far enough away from the village and the Bloodlings will get you). Political strife, disease, natural disasters etc. will have caused countless casualties over the 260-odd years. It’s a really lucky village whose population has stayed the same. On top of the large ruins like Wailer’s Hold, Falender and Alderstone, the random encounter tables say there’s about a 1/36 chance of any non-settlement hex on the map being a ruined village. That’s easily another 23 villages on the map: half the villages that once existed are now gone.

What this means for population density

Bear in mind that Ravenland is about 360km x 250km. (Each hex is 10km across; because of tesselation, every second hex starts 1.5 hex width’s along, and 1 hex height’s down.) That’s about a third of the size of England, which during Roman times had about 1.5 million people. Even if you say that my numbers are outrageously out, you’re still talking about 1/10th of the population density of a pre-medieval society. OzymandiasBootis on the Year Zero discord reckons you’re looking at something more like pre-Columbian North America.

This means stuff like landed nobility, commonly-recognised coins and standing armies are going to be really hard to justify.

To a first approximation, everyone is a subsistence farmer, and nobody has coins

Towards the end of Raven’s Purge, Vond has about 800 fighters outside and inside; Haggler’s House has about 100 fighters. There’s about a dozen adventure sites within protection racket distance of those two sites on my map, so we can be pretty confident that the Rust Brothers are hard at work at squeezing the villagers to feed and outfit all of these troops. This small subset of Ravenland - basically all of the rust-coloured highlands in the south-west corner - probably has significant numbers of troops enforcing the law and keeping roads safe.

This combination of available troops and specialists makes fungible currency a possibility: in this small subset of the Ravenlands, you can probably genuinely buy things with coins and both parties will be happy with the result. This unlocks all sorts of economic efficiencies, but it’s only possible if Zytera has enough people to back and protect their coins.

People carrying around small, valuable coins makes theft more lucrative, so you need police to thwart that. You also need to patrol the roads, because merchants carrying goods can be robbed, the goods then sold to someone else, and who’s to say whether these goods (or the coins the fence paid for them) were legitimately acquired?

You also need to produce coins in significant enough quantities that everybody will use them, make sure that robbers don’t steal them from you when you move them from the mine to the villages, and spot counterfeiters making fake coins from cheap metal. Oh, and you need the discipline of not debasing the currency and crashing the economy.

(Still, I bet you Katorda mints his own coins. He wants his face on money.)

The Hollows, meanwhile, has a population of about 100, with only the blacksmith, matron, gamekeeper, brewmaster and fisherman mentioned as specialists. And it’s a large village - the median village might have a handful of people who are noticeably good at anything other than farming the land to grow crops, but they nearly all also farm the land to grow crops. The economy will almost certainly be based on barter or, at best, some kind of scrip, e.g. people know that Fred works for Bob’s farm, and Bob supplies Gordo’s inn, so Fred gets a pint and a meal from Gordo from time to time.

What this means in practice is: nobody uses coins. Certainly not in a way that’s transferrable from one village to another. The rules might mention copper, silver and gold coins, but that’s a way of saying how hard it is to get anything. You’ll have to work hard and/or do people favours for a good while to get the equivalent of money.

This is not a medieval-Europe economy. This is a post-post-apocalyptic economy.

Edit: follow-up posts: what things therefore don’t and do happen compared to standard fantasy worlds?