Demographics of Dragon Warriors

How often does it come up that a player wants to find an NPC that belongs to a specific profession (or, sometimes, at a specific rank within a profession)? The Hirelings table on p. 116 of the Rulebook already provides some information for finding a first-rank knight or barbarian (10% in a village, 15% in a town, and 30% in a city), but it is just as likely that an adventuring party will be looking for some more "specialist" help - perhaps that which can only be provided by a sorcerer, mystic, or assassin, for example.

How Many Progessional Adventurers?

The Bestiary helps us to answer this question, wherewithin it has tables for the percentage of adventurers that belong to each profession (p. 17) and the percentage of adventurers that are of a certain rank (p. 18). Multiplying all of this out, we get a simple table:

But that table does not quite give us the whole picture, so here is where we need to diverge from the canon rules and make some reasonable assumptions.

• The first is straight-forwards – what percentage of sorcerers are demonologists? It would figure that demonologists are exceptionally rare, so we can assume only 5% of sorcerers are demonologists. For sake of simplicity, let us assume that demonologists become so as first-rank sorcerers - to complicate the tables with percentages of demonologists that turn at each of a sorcerer's first four ranks would be pure guesswork and unnecessarily complicate this essay.
• Secondly, 6% of adventurers are 7^th to 10^th rank, split 3% to each of the 7^th to 8^th rank and 9^th to 10^th rank categories, so we can assume that the proportion of adventurers across 7^th to 10^th rank is fairly even - 25% each (or 1.5% of total adventurers for each of ranks 7, 8, 9, and 10).
• Lastly, the Players' Guide did not update the Bestiary tables when introducing the new professions (Knave, Priest, and Hunter), so there are no official distributions for these professions within the adventuring professions. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to exclude these professions.

What does the table look like now?

What Percentage of People are Professional Adventurers?

We have two data points to help us answer this question - the percentage of first-rank knights and barbarians in a village (10% chance of 1-2), and the percentage of adventurers that are first-rank knights or barbarians (16.8%).

With 16.8% of all adventurers being first-rank knights or barbarians, even with just 2 adventurers, there is a 30.78% chance that one or two of them will be first-rank knights or barbarians [1 - 0.832²]. For there to be only a 10% chance of a community harbouring 1-2 first-rank knights or barbarians, there must only be 0.325 adventurers per village [10 / 30.78]. If we assume a village contains about 100 people, then adventurers therefore account for about 0.325% of the population.

Putting it All Together

We now know what percentage adventurers comprise of the overall population and we know how many adventurers are of each profession and rank, so if we now assume a population of Albion to be approximately that of England, and Wikipedia tells us that England had a population of 1,710,000 in the year 1086, then we can calculate the distribution of adventuring professions/ranks across Albion would look something like this (A total of 5,558 adventurers in Albion):

Conclusion

The demographics persented in this essay are very Ellesland-specific because that is the land on which most of the canon content focuses. Indeed, even within Ellesland, the distribution of professions may need to be tweaked for different countries - the introduction to sorcerers on p. 30 of the Rulebook indicates that elementalists are more common than sorcerers in Thuland, for example.

And what else might these numbers tell us? The first surprise is that sorcerers are the second most common adventuring profession after knights, implying that such "scholarly" magicians are much more embedded in Albish society than people may realise. For there to be so many scholars, there must be places where they can study and access to tutors, for example. And what of the fewest professions, like demonologists and assassins? How might being so few in number across all the land affect them - might they languish in isolation or would they seek out peers to share knowledge and for protection? The whole point of knowing more about the Lands of Legend is to make it a richer place to explore and discover, so hopefully this essay inspires some otherwise overlooked cultural nuances into your games.