I've mentioned this site in another thread, but my current Adventurer has recently come to a large walled town (a '+' place), which she had to travel half way around before sighting her first living sentient (and only some chickens, etc, before that).
The spearsman, when asked, then proceeded to tell me of
one hundred and five troublesome beings that he considered it worthwhile for me to terminate with extreme prejudice. Actually, I just remembered that I had started to write something about this...
105 targets, with 120,003 prior kills attributed to them
Nine Outlaws (one a prolific vampire), five Outcasts, thirteen Necromancers
Forty are (nominally) human, thirty-seven are (mostly) dwarvesm, thirteen are goblins, , fifteen are already standard beastmen/women.
There's sixty-two vampires (one more famous for being an Outlaw), Seventeen are werebeasts, thirteen have taken to the Dark Arts, thirteen have merely assumed a rank.
"Gravegerbil" is likely to be an empty site, with 31,773 known kills coming from its noted pests (one less prolific vampire in the temple that needs accusing, five sewer-inhabitting vampires and two outcasts, one in the sewers, the other in the dungeons).
"Uttercrest" has seven vampires in the sewers (22,824 kills to their collective names), three in the general population (with the remainder of the 23,480 total noted kills), and three standard beastpersons outcast into the sewers, but there's no information about their kill tallies of course.
"Glidedhowl" has more sewer-vampires (14,158 killes between them) and only two that require accusing (3974 attributions), so maybe there's still suffucient general population to appreciate any efforts I shall be making there.
The current site ("Wealthypad") has 12,685 kills-worth of vampire inhabitting its "Fetidchappel" sewers. (Is that enough to virtually empty the town?) It also has 11 caves within spitting distance, most of which have troublesome tennants, and abutting settlements come with their own problems.
Aha! Just discovered some more varied sewers! So /that's what they're supposed to look like. Full of skeletons (of underground civ beings), but it probably needs more time to check....
So, anyway, after abandoning the above analysis, I adventured round further, and discovered a handful of traders (for trinkets and meat, generally, but specialising in nothing I particularly desired to trade in, while the weapons shop that I particularly wanted to offload a load of looted weapons looks 'active', but appears to have no owner in residence, at any time of day or night), and then on entering the keep I found the big cheese (who declined to give me any quests) and his lady wife (who, totally without regard to the above-mentioned 105 parties, gave me the task of slaying a local dragon).
Delving beneath the keep, I found (and dispatched) two separate groups of hostiles that
nobody had asked me to deal with, and so I looted
their weapons (and abandoned ones) as well, plus gems. Which I optimistically packed into several coffers and chests that I similarly 'obtained', thinking that I might later retrieve some of these once I find a trading opportunity somewhere else.
Currently, said Adventurer is touring the various caves, beyond the bounds of the town, and has largely annihilated their residents (some, as with the dungeon crowd, never having been on my quest-list), although the forays into the sewers that I've so far made have revealed that the walkable parts (and the submerged bits as far as I could observe prior to the point of no return) are seemingly devoid of the various local vampiric targets. (I've just remembered that I've neglected to check my master-list for local vampires that need accusing. I know there's one in the next village over, one world-tile away.
Anyway, overall I'm not surprised that this place has so few residents. And something similar may have befallen
your settlement, OP. Or, of course, hostile raids (there's the necromancer towers, some distance away, on my list of places to visit). I maybe ought to check out Legends, to confirm my suspicions, but that's always the last thing I think of.