I guess if you want me to, I'm happy to stick to that as the length, but I dunno -- it seems like we're just elevating the line of the text that gives a length figure over the body of the text that describes the creature and its function, even though the length figure clearly has at least one typo in it (the meters and feet not being consistent).
As best I can tell, the source book uses the term "city" for a population of >10,000. Almost invariably, anything less than 10,000 and more than 1,000 is called a "town." (
E.g., Keford (4,000), Jaston (8,000), Kordech (7,000).) Two communities of 1,000 are called "small towns." (The Base and Druissi.) Likewise, Yosh-ul, with a permanent population of 1,000, is a "town, if it can be called that." Sonduel Ruins, with a population of "just under 1,000" is a "village," the book's generic term for communities of less than 1,000.
There are some exceptions: Verbaar (8,000), Rarrow (7,000), Hidden Naresh (1,000), and Brodrov (1,000, "even though the city could easily house ten times that many, and once did") are all called "cities." But they're definitely out of the norm.
I'm fairly certain that the Marteling is drawing on the myth of the
Aspidochelone (and its variants), a folkloric/mythological creature (typically a whale or huge fish, sometimes a turtle) mistaken for a habitable island. Having the
biggest Martelings be moderately large age-of-sail galleons strikes me as defensible under the text (you have the 300 foot figure and the "hundreds of soldiers" line), but inconsistent with the overall spirit of the things, namely whales so huge that they can support "communities and cities of all sorts" on their backs without even noticing. While you can cram 1,000 people into a very big galleon, it's not a city: they barely survived relatively short voyages and only then when carrying provisions from a port; not remotely self-sufficient, and none of the elements of what we'd think of as a city.
Technically, the bestiary says the largest are "
more than 300 feet," so really, any number >300 is okay, right?
Click to expand...