Great advice! In addition: If you want to divert from the standard tavern formula, try introducing a sport the locals are crazy about and gather to watch, a public bath, a tea house, a theater troupe visiting the town, a village storyteller, a cloister that rents out rooms and brews beer, a tourney ground, an annual magic festival, a night club, a gambling hall, a stranded ship that’s been turned into a snack bar, etc.
These are all really cool suggestions. I personally always like having at least one city with a tournament ground and some kind of guildhall that also does games of chance.
In this book I got a few years ago, a small hamlet out in the desert has chariot races sponsored by a company that has its fingers in every town from there to the coast.
I love the thing with public baths, since you can easily combine it with the goddess Sune whose tempels are about making you beautful and they also have baths! I imagine a roman like bath within the temple, which would be the place to discuss things, chill and talk to people
For a metropolis, you don’t have to go massive on it. You can use the exact same method for creating wards and neighborhoods within the city. Each of those wards can fulfill a singular part of the whole for the rest of the city, like a temple district, a government ward, a foreign quarter and the like.
You definitely can! You can also do a house or faction style breakdown too where each district has their own subset of all 6 of these buildings as each faction tries to be almost autonomous from each other (if you want to make things intentionally separated and self sufficient).
@@lootgoblinmarketplace Dwarves, Drow, goblin hordes and military camps in feudalism all look the same in that regard. There is more blending in large cities, but it's essentially the same. Even the small villages outside of the walls of a major metropolis are miniature wards or districts of the metropolis. That's the farming wards that provide food resources. A major city will have multiple walled sections, showing how the city grew outside of its walls repeatedly. That makes it look like multiple fortifications clumped together. Ed Greenwood has videos on RUclips about the wards of Waterdeep, as an example.
One thing I would recommend is, you don't need a fire service, police service, court, a king and a government. You can just have one building that is the government center across the town or city and live with that. I've seen a few campaigns where people have tried having guards as more of a modern police force than a medieval guard assigned and loyal to their lord. Or they'll have a constitutional monarchy instead of a full- monarchy or constitutional government. Yes, constitutional monarchies are great in real life, but in D&D they can become confusing because you don't know if you should go to the king or the mayor to try and find missions.
Town Guards will carry some sort of polearm, like a billhook because spears/pikes are easy to teach and the curved hook can be used in fire response to pull at weakened walls and roofs to stop the fire from spreading further.
My dude if creating complex political systems just confuses your players, you might wanna change how you run complex political systems. I’ve run campaigns that take place in kingdoms that are actively splintering into civil war and chaos and the players never got confused about what needed to be done/where to go for what (outside of what’s appropriate for, yknow, being a confused citizen of a kingdom that is splintering into civil war).
The wall guard consists of townies on rotation. All townies have a few hours of militia service each month and a couple days of crossbow training that's partly a get-together with beer. The only full-time guards are an officer and a clerk and a couple sergeants/instructors.
I love the guard formula this is so efficient and understandable a lot of guides to making towns always feel bloated but this like is just enough to get the point across and be helpful too.
Glad it was helpful! I think that a lot of the time just having point of interest like this is a great way to get started. You get to fill it in as much as you’d like or keep it simple while still covering the essentials!
Hey this is great! Reminds me of the SPICE method for analyzing ancient cultures I learned about back in high school: Social, Political, Interaction w the Environment, Culture, and Economic
I do have to ask, why is culture in there, arent you already defining and or analyzing the culture therefore making it redundant to add (Like trying to define a word while using said word in the definition) or is it the descendant form of the culture that is being noted for the analysis?
2:53 - I liked how there was the meme-face (I don't know the actual name for that genre of memes) versions of 4 different "Heroes of Baldurs Gate" shown to represent the party in the example scenario
Something to consider with Thorps is that they will have all of these same traits, but will operate on such a smaller scale that they will look very different. The community is small enough that there may not be an official "Government", but everyone makes decisions, and turns to an elder for guidance. Defense would probably rely on the whole town taking up arms, but would have a rotating job of lookout, who's job it is to sound an alarm for everyone to prepare a defense. An alter may just be a small shrine, or a talisman held by the elder. Etc.
Also, in some locations, a town elder may serve as the local religious leader in the absence of an "official" representative of a deity. That same elder may be the primary governmental leader as well, and an interesting point of conflict could arise if a cleric arrives and takes up residence. It could result in a political and spiritual power play by the elder, who may not want to give up some of their authority. For defenses, you could also have local hunters who keep an eye out while looking for game. You could also have a Shire Reeve (from which we derive Sheriff) who is responsible for multiple settlements, but doesn't have enough personnel for the job, and now has a problem that he can't solve on his own. Characters passing through become valuable assets. This is especially true if they have political aspirations (ala the Sheriff of Nottingham from "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves"), and a major point of conflict could be the character was just given a title and lands that place them above the Sheriff, who now sees the characters as road blocks to their ambitions. Even more intriguing, your underworld contact could also be one, or both, of the individuals above. Edit: Grammar
For a thorp I would make the tavern the centre of everything. It could be the only larger building in the thorp and therefor being used for public announcements, meetings of the elders council, and travellers would meet local craftsmen there in the evening socialicing with everybody. Same for that shady guy serving as the thorps underbelly - where else would one find unsuspecing travellers who not yet know better than staying away from dealing with them and their shady business? Making the tavern the one most important building gets across that the party is visiting a small thorp much better, than having them visit several buildings for the different functions.
@@achimsinn6189 For something the size of a thorp, a "tavern" likely would be the center of everything, as a communal area where people would eat and relax makes sense as a meeting place. However, unless it was on the larger side, it wouldn't be a tavern in the sense of "a business where food, drink and lodging is provided at a price". It would be more akin to a large, sheltered firepit where there may-or-may-not be food available to those who are welcome. Link a big communal lodge with a firepit in the middle.
@@robertaylor9218 I think we are thoroughly entering flavour territory here. Depending on what the campaign is calling for the thorp could be a trade post with an actual inn, a clan outpost with just a village hall or maybe even just some houses with meetings being held under the large tree that grows in the center of the settlement. I actually also had the idea of a nomadic clan who would only build up the "large tent" if a meeting of the elders was supposed to happen nd if not they just wouldn't bother with that, but again that is part of the individual flavour you're going for and there is a lot of ways one could build on these ideas.
For context on settlement size; England used to say that to qualify as a village a community had to have a church. I think that helps put into context how complex communities are at village and below.
When tallying up resources, don't stop at the farms and mines the resources are collected from. Add storage buildings and workshops. Then decide if the resource or finished good is kept here or sent to market in a larger town. Now you've got an entire regional economy and low level parties make great caravan guards.
I am running a campaign and the party just finished repairing an old mill and started milling the local wheat. Now they run a caravan to the nearest small city with flour. Good times. And they ignited the flour dust to fend of some baddies, good times for all.
With a big enough place that should have at least one I do a "streetwise" (investigation, charisma) not to see if it is present but rather what quality they find. Different DC results for that one roll.
never say no as a dungeon master, say: yes, but: * ; no kills off paths you can use in endless ways, make a flip next time if its a undead or a ghost blacksmith instead
@@rail7646 Definitely filter on the side of yes as often as possible, but to NEVER say no as a DM is just as bad as always saying no. Not every town has a smith, not every town has an enchanter or magic shop(and not every magic shop has super powered magic items), not every town has a mystery to solve or monster to kill. "No, but" and offering an alternative is a much better use IMO. Is there a blacksmith in town? "You're not able to find a blacksmith, but in your search for one you did notice the general store had a couple of basic weapons and tools on display." Is there a magic shop in town? "Asking around, you're advised that there is no magic shop here, but one of the tavern patrons mentioned they just came from the town just west of here and recalled an enchanter having a merchant stall set up near the bakery at the north wall. It's less than a day's ride should you want to visit after your business here is complete." and there-in lies the beauty of D&D different strokes for different folks I reckon!
Towns don't necessarily need underworld activities to function. You can have a town that criminal organizations and black marketers don't care about, either because it's too small or too much of a hassle to operate in to be worth it. Sure, you lose some of the interest that town might have, but IMO not every town needs to be the most interesting place in the world. Not every quaint village in a river valley has to have some dark secret. Some can just literally be a quaint village in a river valley, and the hook for that town might instead be that a lich has set themselves up in a tomb deeper in the valley and the village makes a good "home base" for the party while they investigate the tomb. In this case, the underworld activity is replaced by a nearby point of interest and the town exists as a convenient place to stay rather than as a plot location in its own right.
There's an acronym I've heard about regarding worldbuilding like this: SPERM. Social, Political, Economic, Religious and Military. This one includes the underground element, which is definitely important, and I guess it's less embarrassing to say for some people. Well done.
I’ve heard of Spice before too, and I’ve seen Sperm. I definitely feel like this one is easier for me to remember. And it’s definitely easier to say in public 😂
Just an advice for your map building if you want to make it looks like a medieval city : Don't try to organise their locations like shown on the first map of the video. This looks like somethinge made by an American. Inspire yourself from cities in Europe
Thanks for pointing it out, I was squinting the whole time to realize why it felt off😂 looks a bit too organized to be an organically established over time.
This is sosososo helpful. I've been worldbuilding for a campaign I'll be running and this is a wonderful way for me to organize some quick info on the different settlements.
One thing I kind of added in is to call it the "guards 2 guard". Following the acronym of the first I add it in a second time with different focuses. G - Government (How is this town or city governed on a local basis? Council, elected official or is their an appointed leader). U - Unity (Is the town more of a collectivized group, Individual or are they split? Or are they against the leadership?). A - Advancement (How advanced is this town compared to others? are they seen as more of a backwater or do they have stronger development into localized specialty? eg. fishing village making a fish farm) R - Rationality (Is this place going to be perceptive to having their ideas challenged? or are they going to see the half-orc in the party and tell you all to get out) D - Dazzle (Why would you want to go to that town? what does the town offer that no where near by offers compared to it?) I set it as separate as a way to develop and then use the second to kind of focus on a more social aspect. Having the second in mind when making a town/city/kingdom can really help flesh out some of the more difficult to think of part with roleplay. A town mayor being a council that one is trying to get your help to win over the others to allow in stronger development of the mine can come very naturally.
Nice, I've been using Dael Kingsmill's SPERM method (Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Military), it's great and very easy to remember 😉This system makes a great compliment to it, as this encourages me to think about the underground element as well. Thanks for sharing. Also where did you get that map? It's really nice looking and I'd love a generator that can output something that high quality.
Settlement planning is something I've struggled with for a long time. Condensing it down into a simple, step-by-step formula, will make things *so* much easier for me. Thanks for that!
I find formulas like this are a great starting point. You can abandon it once you feel comfortable or skip parts that don’t feel right, but it forces you to get the process started!
Rather than (only) adding buildings for those functions, do also create at least one NPC for each function, so one NPC who is the major (or if the major is unavailable acts as his replacement), a shady guy who represents the underbelly of the village and depending on how it goes a crimelord leading that underbelly, a priest or dedicated believer of the deity they worship, a guild leader for the local fishermen or a storeowner where you buy their stuff, a sheriff or guards commander and obviously a tavern owner or an innkeeper. The buildings are putting stuff in context, but the NPCs are what brings the city to live.
I started using GUARDS as soon as I learned about it. It's a great template to quickly make a town when the party gets zoomies like a tabaxi and has a sudden need to be "over thatta way". Just remember to write down the names of all the NPCs you call into existence. The most one-off throw away NPC you make is the one the party wants to adopt.
Writing down the names of NPC's the players interact with (like Thom, the Guard Captain of the village of Raven's Cove), is a great way to name drop them later in the campaign when interacting with another NPC somewhere else. "Thom my cousin from Raven's Cove has told me about you and your friends."
This was exactly the information I've been looking for. All the things jumbling around in my head finally laid out in an ordered systematic form. Thank you. Liked and subscribed
This makes a lot of sense and I really appreciate for sharing this. I will try to build my next towns with it. But I personally don’t think that everything is necessary in small villages: Thorps (and maybe hamlets) don‘t necessarily need defense. Or their defense can be found in the next bigger village/ city. The same goes for government and underworld.
Town halls and churches a lot of times can just be the same building (or not a building at all). In a lot of poorer communities, there might not be the skilled labour available or time to put up anything but the homes people live in. I don't know about elsewhere, but in my country you're more likely to see one or more nice big purpose built churches in any given town, while the police station and doctors office are just repurposed residential homes. My town doesn't even have a council. With feudal societies generally all laws and resources were governed by a single lord ruling over possibly many townships. So anyone with the know how to build a sizable town hall, was probably devoting their life's work to building a castle for the richist employer around. Rather than giving any priority to a village elder.
I use a similar method when designing a town, but I also include a chart (From pathfinder 1e settlements system) to quickly gauge the worth of items for the party and what levels of characters they may find. eg: Thorp: Less than 20 people and no formal church. 50gp items are the base value (So rope and blankets are easy to buy and sell, wands and magic swords not so much), the economy supports 500gp total in trade (So maybe hold onto that heavy looted art piece until we get to a larger town). Magic items are rare at only 1d4 minor items total (likely lvl 1 potions). Guards 1 Formal guard (likely sheriff), Militia that can be called upon for emergencies 1 (deputy), Spell casters are likely only level 1, if there are any they will be the same number as guards (1). Small Town: 201-2000. 1k gp of base value goods (Fine wares, masterwork items, etc), 5kgp in total trade. 3d4 minor magic items and 1d6 moderate magic items are available (Indicating a formal magic shop), 20 Guards on duty at all times, 100 militia that can be formed to defend the town, 10 spell casters at max level 4 (likely 1-2 lvl 4 as leaders and most as lvl 1-2 apprentices). This chart helps me set the scale of industry, the worth of common homes, the number of nobles and criminals, the threat to the party for interacting aggressively, and the scale of the threat the location faces. a Thorp can absolutely fear Goblins in the woods, a small town could easily send a mob to wipe them out, but a pair of owlbears might be beyond them.
You don't need altars. Those are purely flavor. You do need places for horses, other types of mounts, and livery stables, and if near water you need docks. You do need market areas.
i would recommend add another S "G.A.U.R.D.S.S." ...S for Specialty: purpose, function, unique quirk of the town: port town, portal town, export/fish/log/ag town, mining town (econ unstable), commercial/fair/market town, smithing town, bank town, mercenary town, fortress town, military support town, temple/monastic town (brewery & cotton), magic material town, cemetery town (land of scadu), transport/rail/road town (in-between network), hotspring town, tourist/resort town, naval defense town, border/gate town, nomadic town
Go to the library or other resource near your place. Look up a historical map for towns in France or Serbia or Thailand. Use the map as a basis for the town layout and features. If your historical map has a graveyard or pagoda or barber guild hall you let it be right there.
Do you find it's best to cover all of the GUARDS steps even for the smallest towns? Would a thorp, absent an underworld connection, be more immersive or would the reality just get in the way of the story? Do you have a scale or any tips on determining city guard population and level? Do you ever have the town react to the villagers appearance? Maybe disliking some races or some worshippers of other deities? Seems like there could be some fun stories there.
You don’t always have to include a structure from each part of the system, but you can definitely play up the absence of that to the players. In a small town with no defenses, does that mean the village survives because of pure luck or just one particularly strong resident? If there isn’t an altar, what do the locals rely on during hard times? If there isn’t a government, how do the residents resolve disputes? Sometimes the absence of that structure can be its own great hook! It’s hard to say exactly how many guards should exist for each town size. If it’s like 1 for every 200, that means a small town may have only 2 dedicated to defense. And I feel like it’s fair to have a higher level and lower level one. If the town is known for its military might the average guard might be over represented by that number and a few levels higher than a normal guard. I feel like most people in a town are levels 1-3 (the more important thing is that the average commoner shouldn’t outpace your party even in a major city, but it’s totally okay to have pockets of the town where they are stronger than the party), and after the town grows you are likely to get more and more people who are higher level.
Neat! This is a nice resource! Thank you for posting this. It’s a good structure to use for town building in games and even writing. Also I love that map 😮 🥰
The thing I must add is that a hamlet or smaller gathering might only have one or two people working as guards/sherif/police, and likely wont have any priests or nuns of their own, but a place within 1-2 days walk (less on a horse) priest would be the one traveling there to give cermons. Also with less than 500 people there isnt an underworld as everyone knows everybody, but might be a guy who knows a guy to sell things to, or buy things from kind of grey market would be the only thing working. The place would be simply too small for anything more.
This is very useful indeed. Keeps it simple, but provides everything a travelling group of adventurers needs without going too deep into an origin story for every little settlement.
I like this. Gave me some ideas for fleshing out a starting town I have that I felt was lacking something, and did it indirectly...but the method seams to have the bases covered for what makes good RP/what people want from RP in a town. Made me think to add more underworld hubs in the starting town I have, namely one to a movie theater that had contraband films in the basement...but idk I feel like this would also be good for fleshing out one's existing game-world and towns that don't quite feel all that there...even if you have a great plot for an adventure there and know exactly how the local climate impacts crop production outside the city and the local economy plus the social influence of dwarf and tiefling merchants migrating there 200 years ago mixed with the policies of the current kingdom effect local attitudes....ya might be missing something this covers.
Something to keep in mind with underworld activities is you can just have it be a small faction or group that has an activity the overall culture doesn’t approve of. It doesn’t have to be bad or even illegal! Just some kind of outcast with an activity that might catch the party’s attention!
If the settlement is the focus of the campaign, another important factor could be to consider the potential dynamic between each of these GUARDS variables for enriching the story one might want to tell. Maybe the Government officials are of no help to the adventurer because their pockets are lined with underworld funding, or the altars of the settlement are well protected and difficult to operate within because it's tradition for those in the military branch to be devout worshippers. I love this GUARDS method. So many complex features that go into creating a fleshed-out setting simplified into an understandable manual.
I love this method, very easy to remember too. I wasn't struggling filling in my own town but this simple method helped me refine everything and add to it a bit. Appreciate it!
I like the formula but I would add that the choices don't have to be so, well, formulaic. There doesn't have to be a mayor, there can be a council of elders or guild leaders, or the town can be ruled by the high priest, or paying tribute to cruel merfolk lords. The defenses can include magical wards, trained beasts, a friendly tribe of werebears or a squadron of wyvern riders. You don't need to do it with every single letter of GUARDS, but you really don't want to populate your world with Generic Fantasy Villages Number 1 Through 12. Give your players something to remember and get invested in. A sea creature attacking fishing boats is fine. A sea creature attacking divers gathering enchanted pearls or demanding the return of its father's bones (which now form the altar of the Sea God) is BETTER.
Cool, been a gamer over 45 years, always had trouble trying to figure out what sorts of buildings/people to include in a town. I have a variety of supplements, but many are very unwieldy.
I like how GUARDS works, but I was hoping for something more like how many buildings of each type for different sized settlements. How do you determine how many people live in each building?
There are several facets missing from this method. I grant that this method touches on facets which mesh with game-play; however, in falling short on other facets, it leaves many other options behind. For instance, using your table, a "small town" would have between 901 and 2000 people. The image used seems to be being portrayed as a "town"; however, there is no way that even 901 people are living in that town -- there are just not enough residences for them. Also, with the resources being pegged as "fishing", it leaves off the nice looking forest on the left side of the picture. With 901 people, there will be a diverse set of people with a draw for all sorts of resources. There would likely be someone hunting in the woods... others gathering plant based foods from the woods, others getting building supplies from the woods.... There are also mountains portrayed... Mining? There needs to be enough "industry" to "feed" the vast majority of the population. Also, as a "travel hub", it would likely have one (or more) inns due to needing to synchronize arrival and departure times of the different modes of transportation. Another factor is that many population centers are portrayed as "everyone is inside the walls". Smaller population centers tend to serve more people who live OUTSIDE the village/town/etc than those living inside. This would tend to be support enterprises for the population center -- farming, livestock, etc and other industries deemed "offensive" ... manure comes to mind... Thus portrayal of a population center which is large enough to have a wall, should likely have a second diagram/map showing the surrounding area with various annotations. A last downside of the G.U.A.R.D.S. method is that just because the players might WANT something (like a place to sell their robbery proceeds) doesn't mean that the village has such a place. Especially on the lower size of things. The lower end of things is where this system really falls apart. In a medieval setting, a population center of 20 - 30 people is very unlikely to have a dedicated guard who does nothing but "guard". There might not even be a "government" building... or you could say that the leader's home doubles as such. The "leader" probably is busy with their own harvest or blacksmith shop... or whatever...
Something else to think about as well: cultural advancements. London in 1100 was somehat over 15,000. Still a very large city, even a metroplolis in that day. Go two hundred years, and the population boomed to 80,000. Then the plague hit, and in 1400 the population was almost halved, to around 45,000. So in world building, what is the capital of your kingdom? Has there been an outbreak of plague or other such disaster? How have events like that affected your world?
Now I just need a truly good settlement building system I can use in any RPG that is system agnostic. Not overly complicated but also not too simple and vague. I know finding a balance is a challenge though. Example: Players want to build a tavern in their small village. Many town building systems have this. Some are rather complex like Pathfinder Kingmaker (first version) said it takes a single lot of space but is also symbolic of 250 population increase... why? But in other systems it gives a +1 economy boost and has has no balance and I could actually build 200 of them with a population of 30 people and each one gives +1 economy.
roads the amount of time i saw some made up fantasy maps its just US grid style with arenas smack in the middle of the cross roads blocking transport of goods with horse cart like comon or no organic layout they are allways stiff and idk. on the Settlement size i found some intressting thing wich is why i disagree. Hamlet = Settlement should be the lowest pop since you just start settleling Thorp sound similar to german word Dorf wich is Village keep in mind that all languages were closer together once but split away over time accent/dialect isolation. some example would be: Swedisch Stridsvagn / German Streitwagen / Englisch Chariot. or Windows Win-dows today even tho it was Wind-ows ows being old english for eye wich in german would be Auge wich in my dialect would be more like owgeh. or names: Lawrence, Lorenz, Lorentz, Lorens all the same but first looks out of place untill you compare pronounciation. for the actual town displayed i'd say 7-8 out of 10 trees to close to Wall, its flat terrain so no need to keep them for erorion control. Towers flush with outside wall no way to cover from tower to tower (not talking about Starfort style) no central / public well (the place were the satue is would be a good spot) wich also located near Market areas. no backyard within the Grid. there were alot more space needed for chicken or other Animals or just a place to work. be it unter full cover ( a roof) or just exposed. vegitation - some massiv old tree with wide reaching branches ancient gathering spot wich turned into modern gathering spot and emergency firewood during siege. bushes for berries and so on. a small row of willow as living fencing for feeding lifestock and source of material for baskets and such. over all hard to find something better and alot more easier to find worse.
Not to say this is wrong, not at all. But medieval towns were not always the same and that is important to have in mind. First of all I think that you should think the "Why" key part. Why do people DECIDED to live here? Water source? Stone source? Wood source ? Ancient origin? In the middle of a commercial route? Holy place? That pretty much will decide the size and complexity of the town itself. For example a town that is near a stone extraction site should be quite important and probably would have defenses and more people.but a town that was just refugees running that found water and food nearby would be small probably withouth defenses. The richness of the lord if there is one also directly influences the level of the town, wood defenses for a less rich place for example, also just as an extra tip in medieval times inns were very rare and people.would often sleep with other people in their houses as guests. And the few inns often had 1 room for many people, like room with 1 or 2 bed was very rare. In general try to make a town using common sense and logic, people builded EVERYTHING from.the ground in most cases from 0 so why? And how? Then the history of the place or whatever u want to add for the story enters too
So I think you should have a mid sized town on your chart as well using the population of your large town, and then just up the population of everything else up a stage, after all the population of Londiniuem circa 100 ad is estimated to have been between 30k and 60k, and Rome at that time is believed to have had more than a million permanent residents with Alexandria being between half and three quarters of a million, other major cites are estimated to have had a population ranging from 350k to 500k.
~Nope. I reject these. A lot of these things do not exist in a lot medieval or classical cities. And the probably with "underworld activities" is that most people think those things are like thieves guilds. In fact, I think most depictions of crime in fantasy are rather boring and stereotypical. Bandits are almost never just randoms camping the woods -- they exist for reasons if they literally aren't the local community or lord exacting tolls or waylaying travelers. If slavers exist, they almost always do so with tacit social permission. Organized police forces are a modern concept as is an organized civic bureaucracy for literally every little dot on the map. In most cases, the military is mobilized for martial law, but since most things don't escalate to that, laws tend to be lawsuits you have to petition for, mob justice or just one of the many odd jobs of a "shire reeve" or something.
The thieves' guild in Marienburg is an in-world pun. There is no central guild. It is a mafia-style commission where the gang leaders can sit down and hopefully sort out disputes and territory before it escalates so much the blackcaps pay notice. Low-intensity violence between the gangs where the blackcaps only fish out a few bodies a month from the canals is normal. There is no guild trappings, no guild charter, no guild teachers. The street gangs have their own hideouts and operations. My friends modelled their Moon cities on urban street gangs of antiquity. The garrison and secret police of the city focus on crimes against the city and the satrap. The aristocrats have their private retinues who only focus on guarding their person and property. Everyone else pays protection to a neighbourhood street gang. Your street gang looks out for other gangs, arbites disputes and catches pickpockets. The danish embassy in our campaign quickly figured out that while the might of Denmark could squash every single gang, it was more convenient to just pay one off. They get free meals at our lunch stand now and then.
In One Ring and some other games you can play shirriffs of the Shire. There is very little crime in the Shire and very little work for them. For Smeagol to murder another hobbit is a calamity practically unseen. There are the bounders, people who watch the borders and deal with unruly visitors. Usually it means they calm down a drunk tall-man who doesn't understand she's knocking stuff over or chase off a stray troll who looks to steal pigs. One of my friends wanted to test out british murder mysteries, Shire-style. In Esoteric Enterprises you play modern day criminals exploring a mysterious, magical megadungeon underneath the city. The kind of world where a step through that door on the subway no-one ever opens leads to cave bear lairs, the goblin market, latvian mafia slave rings and troglodytic hunter-gatherers. Since it's a modern day setting, this means the city above is patrolled by the police with the backing of a fully armed and operational state. It changes how the players must operate. Your best protection against the state is to keep out of its attention. Don't throw around magic at the KFC, don't swagger around with glocks, don't sell crack on bus stops, don't rant about your dark god outside the library. When the state knows you, it escalates hard. Nothing in the underworld is scarier than the state.
@@SusCalvin Nope, historically sheriffs had work. They were odd jobs men tasked with various administrative tasks. When I say cops are a modern invention, that wasn't just me saying random shit. States-side, they started as slave patrols and were little better than a gang themselves after slavery. The standardization and professionalism is a more recent development.
I didn't know the term "thorp"... that was new to me. I'm researching thorp and it seems simply a way of saying hamblet in medieval English, something like a synonym for hamblet not a category below that. As I knew, a hamlet could be a group of 5 peasant houses (probably a family that went to live there after a marriage installed the first house there). Where do you get those numbers from? I really have a hard time taking D&D or Pathfinder numbers seriously, that a small fishing town like Sandpoint has 1000 inhabitants... especially with the map showing the number of houses. In small towns there doesn't have to be guards. I've seen that D&D and Pathfinder have the occasional table with numerical relationships like "2 guards per 500 inhabitants" or something like that. But the guard was not like the police, the vast majority of settlements were devoid of defenses and only when there were serious problems did the noble owner of the local lands, usually a Count or a Baron/Mayor, send a small militia force led by some of his knights (the closest thing to a permanent army at that time were the knights). But most of the time that intervention only happened when the peasants rebelled and the local nobleman sent people to "pacify" them. Most of the time the people of most villages were left to their own and had to solve their problems themselves. Mayors were figures that only existed in cities, and in fact they were like small nobles or sometimes Barons, towns did not have those figures, and those Barons were in charge of the entire territory of a barony but mostly to collect taxes (more than nothing in food or materials, no coins) or if necessary, in charge of recruiting levies from all the towns of that barony and all of those, who were usually knights of a Count, met before him in the castle of the count's province. There was the notion that peasants should serve the nobles and they offered protection, but this was fulfilled in situations of war or raids by barbarians, such as Vikings for example. And that was very common. In Spain, the derogatory term "villain" became popular, which in reality only means "person who lives in a village" because the bandits who robbed the roads were included as the commoner/peasant people of those towns. The nobles saw the "villains" as the lowest and did not hesitate to kill them, and the negative connotations of the term villain still persist to this day. Why are the protagonists noble in all medieval stories? Or like in ancient Greece they were princes or soldiers. Because you couldn't be the protagonist of anything if you were a commoner, you were the lowest of the low, you were worthless, no one trained you in weapons or anything (because you had to be at least a low noble to enter the church). Even the wealthy bourgeoisie had a very difficult time being taken into account by the nobles who only out of necessity ended up giving in to obtain money from them. A commoner could be whipped or killed for even daring to speak to a nobleman, enough to be considered disrespectful. Why didn't the peasants reveal themselves more often then? Because in addition to the fear of the nobles' ability to raise troops, there was all the religious indoctrination that served the interests of the nobles that instilled in the commoners that they had to suffer submissively because life was only a test to earn heaven, that and the speech that the nobles, especially the king, were there directly by God's dictate. And if all this were not enough, there was the idealization that naturally occurs when there is an elitist class, or dictators, who are given better education, better clothes, etc. And even the church brought oppression by condemning to the death penalty, burned alive at the stake, anyone who dared to even possess a Bible without being a member of the church (in case the very rare case of a peasant who knew how to read Latin were to occur) and in addition people were also sentenced to death for just translating the Bible into a language other than the restricted Latin, even members of the church itself, priests, were burned for heresy for simply wanting to translate the Bible into another language. With all this, the commoners were kept ignorant and manipulable.
This feels like a good jumping off point for quick creation. But last year I was in Vegas for a writer’s convention and got to attend one of Luke Gygax’s talks on worldbuilding. He recommended a system from his time in the military that struck me as brilliant for story design. The PMESII-PT system which is used by the military for understand unfamiliar terrain or locales. PMESII-PT stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical environment, and Time. It’s been really invaluable for my writing as well as my DMing. Though in the future, if I need a town in a rush, I’ll def use GUARDS
I’ve heard people talk about the SPERM method and this definitely looks like the advanced version. I think that would be great for a deep dive in the world building process!
What did you use for that map? Is that nothing you drew? Or a program maybe? Just asking because if you made it that’s amazing, if it’s a map maker program thingy got a link?
One thing that I would suggest to your Resources element is some means of support. Making a town feel organic involves more than simply giving the party something to do. For example I look at that map of the coastal town in your video and all I can think is "What the hell are these people eating?" There are no farms, no gardens, nothing. Nor does there appear to be any source of potable water. You cannot support any sizeable, non-nomadic population year round solely on fish and game and you must have a readily available source of fresh water. Particularly in medieval periods (which most fantasy settings seek to emulate) grains and some vegetables formed the foundation of most diets and death due to contaminated water was a real threat. In our modern era, we consume a much greater amount of protein than was the norm for most of human history. We also have the technological and economic infrastructure to transport vast amounts of food and potable water but that simply wasn't possible in earlier times. At the very least there should be a stream, creek or river and some fields surrounding those walls. On the subject of Defenses, a GM or author should take the time to identify the need for those defenses. Sticking with the example of the town shown, why are there walls surrounding the town? those appear to be some sort of stone or, at the very least, planed wood. Even a simple post and wattle wall is a LOT of work. A town isn't going to put up a wall without some reason for doing so. That, in turn, is going to influence the character/tone of the town and its inhabitants. In other words, don't just stick a wall around your town because it looks good. Ask why the town felt the need to spend the money, time, and effort building the wall and how that impacts the town and the party.
I would love a character creation equivalent of this I have written down ideas for characters, but it's just a bunch of random anecdotes in random order as I come up with them
I usually go with the population number, often divided into age sections or family-sized chunks. Here is a handy chart I made for a general region's population: Population Division: -45%: Peasants -Poor: 20% -Working Class (Area's Main Trade): 10% -Artesans: 5% -Builders: 4% -Caretakers: 3% -Entertainers: 2% -Hunters: 2% -Clergy: 2% -Scholars: 1% -Merchants: 1% -Logistics: 1% -Officials: 1% -Soldiers: 1% -Nobility: 1% -Criminals: 1% After that it goes to placing the above mentioned groups into buildings, districts or other locations around the town.
I kind of figure that Fantasy towns would be nothing like real world Medieval towns. With all the monsters in these worlds, every settlement would need to be solidly fortified. Cant really have a nice little cottage in a secluded area without the inhabitance dying horribly to the first random encounter.
I was stuck on settlements because I want to make a settlement where the king gathers guidance religious leaders, nobles and commoners and trying to make it a better and safer city even if they have doubts of each other
My girlfriend, who had NEVER played RPG before, drew the attention to the fact that the lighthouse at the halfling coastal village was pointless for defense if the pacific village had a total of ONE inhabitant responsible for protecting the population. And even though I had prepared everything ELSE about this mine village...the guards just flew over my head.
Just use the pathfinder 1e settlement system it has clear rules and everything you need for a working settlement and npcs are good and detailed in the system and they are their own people with stories and arent there to be abused and mishandled by jerk pcs in dnd 5e and arent used as disposable one sided cheap personalities .
This is a brilliant mnemonic. In the town I designed I rechecked it with this method and found the only one I hadn’t included was the altar piece. It’s a very small village so I can easily correct that with a shrine.
i would recommend making some aspects of GUARDS combined. In Islam for example, the Altar and Social hub would both be the Mosque. In a marshal land, Government and Defense would be closely linked. So on and so forth. Consider how it changes the culture of the town, to make very memorable and different towns and cities
I definitely will say that combined sections make sense for smaller settlements where they need 1 person to do multiple tasks or in a case where the settlement highly values those two things together. The altar and social hub being combined for a deeply religious town makes sense.
Fun (stupid) fact, here in the UK whether a settlement is a city is not determined by its population but by royal decree. This means there are towns with larger populations than some cities. For example the City of Westminster only has a population of about 204,000, where as the Town of Reading (redding) has a population of about 218,000
That’s actually really interesting! Definitely can be a neat piece of lore for a fantasy setting too! Have a smaller town that has a strong presence and a unique title due to their government’s decree.
Depending on how feudal you want to be, most places should be manorial. In which case the government is the lords manor. The defense is based on the non-serf population. And the social hub is almost entirely based around church attendance. Resources are agricultural. Mineral extraction with mines were just something that didn’t really happen in the feudal world
![KAYTRANADA - Witchy (feat. Childish Gambino) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jGK3YVmGZ3Y/mqdefault.jpg)
Great advice!
In addition: If you want to divert from the standard tavern formula, try introducing a sport the locals are crazy about and gather to watch, a public bath, a tea house, a theater troupe visiting the town, a village storyteller, a cloister that rents out rooms and brews beer, a tourney ground, an annual magic festival, a night club, a gambling hall, a stranded ship that’s been turned into a snack bar, etc.
These are all really cool suggestions. I personally always like having at least one city with a tournament ground and some kind of guildhall that also does games of chance.
In this book I got a few years ago, a small hamlet out in the desert has chariot races sponsored by a company that has its fingers in every town from there to the coast.
I love the thing with public baths, since you can easily combine it with the goddess Sune whose tempels are about making you beautful and they also have baths! I imagine a roman like bath within the temple, which would be the place to discuss things, chill and talk to people
For a metropolis, you don’t have to go massive on it. You can use the exact same method for creating wards and neighborhoods within the city. Each of those wards can fulfill a singular part of the whole for the rest of the city, like a temple district, a government ward, a foreign quarter and the like.
You definitely can! You can also do a house or faction style breakdown too where each district has their own subset of all 6 of these buildings as each faction tries to be almost autonomous from each other (if you want to make things intentionally separated and self sufficient).
@@lootgoblinmarketplace Dwarves, Drow, goblin hordes and military camps in feudalism all look the same in that regard. There is more blending in large cities, but it's essentially the same.
Even the small villages outside of the walls of a major metropolis are miniature wards or districts of the metropolis. That's the farming wards that provide food resources.
A major city will have multiple walled sections, showing how the city grew outside of its walls repeatedly. That makes it look like multiple fortifications clumped together.
Ed Greenwood has videos on RUclips about the wards of Waterdeep, as an example.
One thing I would recommend is, you don't need a fire service, police service, court, a king and a government. You can just have one building that is the government center across the town or city and live with that. I've seen a few campaigns where people have tried having guards as more of a modern police force than a medieval guard assigned and loyal to their lord. Or they'll have a constitutional monarchy instead of a full- monarchy or constitutional government. Yes, constitutional monarchies are great in real life, but in D&D they can become confusing because you don't know if you should go to the king or the mayor to try and find missions.
I definitely agree that less can be better, especially for a small town! A sheriff’s office sometimes is the only defense and government building!
Town Guards will carry some sort of polearm, like a billhook because spears/pikes are easy to teach and the curved hook can be used in fire response to pull at weakened walls and roofs to stop the fire from spreading further.
My dude if creating complex political systems just confuses your players, you might wanna change how you run complex political systems. I’ve run campaigns that take place in kingdoms that are actively splintering into civil war and chaos and the players never got confused about what needed to be done/where to go for what (outside of what’s appropriate for, yknow, being a confused citizen of a kingdom that is splintering into civil war).
@@Lucas-df4ht or they might just be new players. Newbies usually need a lot railroading
The wall guard consists of townies on rotation. All townies have a few hours of militia service each month and a couple days of crossbow training that's partly a get-together with beer. The only full-time guards are an officer and a clerk and a couple sergeants/instructors.
I love the guard formula this is so efficient and understandable a lot of guides to making towns always feel bloated but this like is just enough to get the point across and be helpful too.
Glad it was helpful! I think that a lot of the time just having point of interest like this is a great way to get started. You get to fill it in as much as you’d like or keep it simple while still covering the essentials!
Hey this is great! Reminds me of the SPICE method for analyzing ancient cultures I learned about back in high school:
Social, Political, Interaction w the Environment, Culture, and Economic
I’ve seen that one used before and for top level civilizations I’ve used it!
I do have to ask, why is culture in there, arent you already defining and or analyzing the culture therefore making it redundant to add (Like trying to define a word while using said word in the definition) or is it the descendant form of the culture that is being noted for the analysis?
2:53 - I liked how there was the meme-face (I don't know the actual name for that genre of memes) versions of 4 different "Heroes of Baldurs Gate" shown to represent the party in the example scenario
The face is called "Wojak" if I recall!
Something to consider with Thorps is that they will have all of these same traits, but will operate on such a smaller scale that they will look very different. The community is small enough that there may not be an official "Government", but everyone makes decisions, and turns to an elder for guidance. Defense would probably rely on the whole town taking up arms, but would have a rotating job of lookout, who's job it is to sound an alarm for everyone to prepare a defense. An alter may just be a small shrine, or a talisman held by the elder. Etc.
Also, in some locations, a town elder may serve as the local religious leader in the absence of an "official" representative of a deity. That same elder may be the primary governmental leader as well, and an interesting point of conflict could arise if a cleric arrives and takes up residence. It could result in a political and spiritual power play by the elder, who may not want to give up some of their authority.
For defenses, you could also have local hunters who keep an eye out while looking for game. You could also have a Shire Reeve (from which we derive Sheriff) who is responsible for multiple settlements, but doesn't have enough personnel for the job, and now has a problem that he can't solve on his own. Characters passing through become valuable assets. This is especially true if they have political aspirations (ala the Sheriff of Nottingham from "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves"), and a major point of conflict could be the character was just given a title and lands that place them above the Sheriff, who now sees the characters as road blocks to their ambitions.
Even more intriguing, your underworld contact could also be one, or both, of the individuals above.
Edit: Grammar
For a thorp I would make the tavern the centre of everything. It could be the only larger building in the thorp and therefor being used for public announcements, meetings of the elders council, and travellers would meet local craftsmen there in the evening socialicing with everybody. Same for that shady guy serving as the thorps underbelly - where else would one find unsuspecing travellers who not yet know better than staying away from dealing with them and their shady business?
Making the tavern the one most important building gets across that the party is visiting a small thorp much better, than having them visit several buildings for the different functions.
@@achimsinn6189 For something the size of a thorp, a "tavern" likely would be the center of everything, as a communal area where people would eat and relax makes sense as a meeting place. However, unless it was on the larger side, it wouldn't be a tavern in the sense of "a business where food, drink and lodging is provided at a price". It would be more akin to a large, sheltered firepit where there may-or-may-not be food available to those who are welcome. Link a big communal lodge with a firepit in the middle.
Yeah, a thorp is really just a few extended families whose houses are close together.
@@robertaylor9218 I think we are thoroughly entering flavour territory here. Depending on what the campaign is calling for the thorp could be a trade post with an actual inn, a clan outpost with just a village hall or maybe even just some houses with meetings being held under the large tree that grows in the center of the settlement. I actually also had the idea of a nomadic clan who would only build up the "large tent" if a meeting of the elders was supposed to happen nd if not they just wouldn't bother with that, but again that is part of the individual flavour you're going for and there is a lot of ways one could build on these ideas.
This is.... i feel like you took a complex university course and condensed it into a formula.
I appreciate it, I hope to drop more like these in the future!
@@lootgoblinmarketplace I look forward to them.
For context on settlement size; England used to say that to qualify as a village a community had to have a church. I think that helps put into context how complex communities are at village and below.
When tallying up resources, don't stop at the farms and mines the resources are collected from. Add storage buildings and workshops. Then decide if the resource or finished good is kept here or sent to market in a larger town. Now you've got an entire regional economy and low level parties make great caravan guards.
Infrastructure to refine and make finished goods is a great call out!
I am running a campaign and the party just finished repairing an old mill and started milling the local wheat. Now they run a caravan to the nearest small city with flour. Good times. And they ignited the flour dust to fend of some baddies, good times for all.
Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Military. Easy to remember and funny to explain.
Player: Is there a blacksmith in this town
Me: *flips coin* no
Honestly RNG truly is the best impromptu system
With a big enough place that should have at least one I do a "streetwise" (investigation, charisma) not to see if it is present but rather what quality they find. Different DC results for that one roll.
never say no as a dungeon master, say: yes, but: * ; no kills off paths you can use in endless ways, make a flip next time if its a undead or a ghost blacksmith instead
@@rail7646 Haha. Sometimes there just isn't a blacksmith man...
@@rail7646 Definitely filter on the side of yes as often as possible, but to NEVER say no as a DM is just as bad as always saying no.
Not every town has a smith, not every town has an enchanter or magic shop(and not every magic shop has super powered magic items), not every town has a mystery to solve or monster to kill. "No, but" and offering an alternative is a much better use IMO.
Is there a blacksmith in town? "You're not able to find a blacksmith, but in your search for one you did notice the general store had a couple of basic weapons and tools on display."
Is there a magic shop in town? "Asking around, you're advised that there is no magic shop here, but one of the tavern patrons mentioned they just came from the town just west of here and recalled an enchanter having a merchant stall set up near the bakery at the north wall. It's less than a day's ride should you want to visit after your business here is complete."
and there-in lies the beauty of D&D different strokes for different folks I reckon!
Towns don't necessarily need underworld activities to function. You can have a town that criminal organizations and black marketers don't care about, either because it's too small or too much of a hassle to operate in to be worth it. Sure, you lose some of the interest that town might have, but IMO not every town needs to be the most interesting place in the world. Not every quaint village in a river valley has to have some dark secret. Some can just literally be a quaint village in a river valley, and the hook for that town might instead be that a lich has set themselves up in a tomb deeper in the valley and the village makes a good "home base" for the party while they investigate the tomb. In this case, the underworld activity is replaced by a nearby point of interest and the town exists as a convenient place to stay rather than as a plot location in its own right.
There's an acronym I've heard about regarding worldbuilding like this: SPERM. Social, Political, Economic, Religious and Military. This one includes the underground element, which is definitely important, and I guess it's less embarrassing to say for some people. Well done.
I’ve heard of Spice before too, and I’ve seen Sperm. I definitely feel like this one is easier for me to remember. And it’s definitely easier to say in public 😂
@@lootgoblinmarketplace I haven't heard of SPICE, what's that one?
@@Myzelfa Social; Political; Interactions between humans and the environment; Cultural; Economic is what it stands for!
Just an advice for your map building if you want to make it looks like a medieval city : Don't try to organise their locations like shown on the first map of the video. This looks like somethinge made by an American. Inspire yourself from cities in Europe
Thanks for pointing it out, I was squinting the whole time to realize why it felt off😂 looks a bit too organized to be an organically established over time.
This is sosososo helpful. I've been worldbuilding for a campaign I'll be running and this is a wonderful way for me to organize some quick info on the different settlements.
This is so immensely helpful and such a simple way for me to keep my fantasy setting consistent while also feeling realistic enough to be immersive.
One thing I kind of added in is to call it the "guards 2 guard". Following the acronym of the first I add it in a second time with different focuses. G - Government (How is this town or city governed on a local basis? Council, elected official or is their an appointed leader). U - Unity (Is the town more of a collectivized group, Individual or are they split? Or are they against the leadership?). A - Advancement (How advanced is this town compared to others? are they seen as more of a backwater or do they have stronger development into localized specialty? eg. fishing village making a fish farm) R - Rationality (Is this place going to be perceptive to having their ideas challenged? or are they going to see the half-orc in the party and tell you all to get out) D - Dazzle (Why would you want to go to that town? what does the town offer that no where near by offers compared to it?)
I set it as separate as a way to develop and then use the second to kind of focus on a more social aspect. Having the second in mind when making a town/city/kingdom can really help flesh out some of the more difficult to think of part with roleplay. A town mayor being a council that one is trying to get your help to win over the others to allow in stronger development of the mine can come very naturally.
Nice, I've been using Dael Kingsmill's SPERM method (Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Military), it's great and very easy to remember 😉This system makes a great compliment to it, as this encourages me to think about the underground element as well. Thanks for sharing.
Also where did you get that map? It's really nice looking and I'd love a generator that can output something that high quality.
So Crosshead Studios is a great artist you can subscribe to on patreon and get this and many more maps!
Inkarnate
@@blefyplayswowable inkatnate is great and I love it, but it isn’t a map generator.
Azgaar's world map generator, Watabou's procgen arcana. Between these you can get an entire campaign generated.
Thanks! I like making my own solo campaigns, but I suck at world building. This is great!
Settlement planning is something I've struggled with for a long time. Condensing it down into a simple, step-by-step formula, will make things *so* much easier for me. Thanks for that!
I find formulas like this are a great starting point. You can abandon it once you feel comfortable or skip parts that don’t feel right, but it forces you to get the process started!
Rather than (only) adding buildings for those functions, do also create at least one NPC for each function, so one NPC who is the major (or if the major is unavailable acts as his replacement), a shady guy who represents the underbelly of the village and depending on how it goes a crimelord leading that underbelly, a priest or dedicated believer of the deity they worship, a guild leader for the local fishermen or a storeowner where you buy their stuff, a sheriff or guards commander and obviously a tavern owner or an innkeeper. The buildings are putting stuff in context, but the NPCs are what brings the city to live.
I started using GUARDS as soon as I learned about it. It's a great template to quickly make a town when the party gets zoomies like a tabaxi and has a sudden need to be "over thatta way". Just remember to write down the names of all the NPCs you call into existence. The most one-off throw away NPC you make is the one the party wants to adopt.
Writing down the names of NPC's the players interact with (like Thom, the Guard Captain of the village of Raven's Cove), is a great way to name drop them later in the campaign when interacting with another NPC somewhere else. "Thom my cousin from Raven's Cove has told me about you and your friends."
"The most one-off throw away NPC you make is the one the party wants to adopt" OMG, this.. 1000% this. This is ALWAYS TRUE.. hahahaha
No joke, I once used the game "Banished" to make a starter town. It worked out pretty well.
This was exactly the information I've been looking for. All the things jumbling around in my head finally laid out in an ordered systematic form. Thank you. Liked and subscribed
Very much enjoy this and will be using it in my TTRPG campaigns. Even the creators of vast worlds need a crutch sometimes!
This makes a lot of sense and I really appreciate for sharing this. I will try to build my next towns with it.
But I personally don’t think that everything is necessary in small villages:
Thorps (and maybe hamlets) don‘t necessarily need defense. Or their defense can be found in the next bigger village/ city. The same goes for government and underworld.
Great info. Always have a hard time finding a starting point.
fam this video is perfect. this is like the perfect check list
good shit
Town halls and churches a lot of times can just be the same building (or not a building at all). In a lot of poorer communities, there might not be the skilled labour available or time to put up anything but the homes people live in. I don't know about elsewhere, but in my country you're more likely to see one or more nice big purpose built churches in any given town, while the police station and doctors office are just repurposed residential homes. My town doesn't even have a council.
With feudal societies generally all laws and resources were governed by a single lord ruling over possibly many townships. So anyone with the know how to build a sizable town hall, was probably devoting their life's work to building a castle for the richist employer around. Rather than giving any priority to a village elder.
I use a similar method when designing a town, but I also include a chart (From pathfinder 1e settlements system) to quickly gauge the worth of items for the party and what levels of characters they may find.
eg: Thorp: Less than 20 people and no formal church. 50gp items are the base value (So rope and blankets are easy to buy and sell, wands and magic swords not so much), the economy supports 500gp total in trade (So maybe hold onto that heavy looted art piece until we get to a larger town). Magic items are rare at only 1d4 minor items total (likely lvl 1 potions). Guards 1 Formal guard (likely sheriff), Militia that can be called upon for emergencies 1 (deputy), Spell casters are likely only level 1, if there are any they will be the same number as guards (1).
Small Town: 201-2000. 1k gp of base value goods (Fine wares, masterwork items, etc), 5kgp in total trade. 3d4 minor magic items and 1d6 moderate magic items are available (Indicating a formal magic shop), 20 Guards on duty at all times, 100 militia that can be formed to defend the town, 10 spell casters at max level 4 (likely 1-2 lvl 4 as leaders and most as lvl 1-2 apprentices).
This chart helps me set the scale of industry, the worth of common homes, the number of nobles and criminals, the threat to the party for interacting aggressively, and the scale of the threat the location faces. a Thorp can absolutely fear Goblins in the woods, a small town could easily send a mob to wipe them out, but a pair of owlbears might be beyond them.
You don't need altars. Those are purely flavor. You do need places for horses, other types of mounts, and livery stables, and if near water you need docks. You do need market areas.
My dude, that's a GOOD VIDEO, straight to the fkng point. Thank you sir!
Government buildings
Underworld activities
Altars
Resources and services
Defenses
Social hub
Liked and Faved by the acronym reveal. Brilliant video and it just started.
Man, this is really helpful. I'm gonna need to figure out how to adapt this idea to a sci-fi setting I'm working on.
funny enough i actually needed this to start fleshing out my world a bit more, thanks LG!
I’m glad I could help!
Great video but my mind boggled when I realized where you got the background music from :D
I could not write towns until I saw this. All the other videos are way to complicated Thanks!
This was very helpful! Thank-you. Creating a city of Cloud Giants for my stream tonight.
That sounds really cool!
Saving this because I've been struggling with world building, and this video and the comments are the guidelines I've been looking for! Thank you!
You got this! I’m glad you found the video helpful.
i would recommend add another S "G.A.U.R.D.S.S." ...S for Specialty: purpose, function, unique quirk of the town:
port town, portal town, export/fish/log/ag town, mining town (econ unstable), commercial/fair/market town, smithing town, bank town, mercenary town, fortress town, military support town, temple/monastic town (brewery & cotton), magic material town, cemetery town (land of scadu), transport/rail/road town (in-between network), hotspring town, tourist/resort town, naval defense town, border/gate town, nomadic town
That was very useful!
Go to the library or other resource near your place. Look up a historical map for towns in France or Serbia or Thailand. Use the map as a basis for the town layout and features. If your historical map has a graveyard or pagoda or barber guild hall you let it be right there.
Great video Thank you!!
Do you find it's best to cover all of the GUARDS steps even for the smallest towns? Would a thorp, absent an underworld connection, be more immersive or would the reality just get in the way of the story?
Do you have a scale or any tips on determining city guard population and level?
Do you ever have the town react to the villagers appearance? Maybe disliking some races or some worshippers of other deities? Seems like there could be some fun stories there.
You don’t always have to include a structure from each part of the system, but you can definitely play up the absence of that to the players. In a small town with no defenses, does that mean the village survives because of pure luck or just one particularly strong resident? If there isn’t an altar, what do the locals rely on during hard times? If there isn’t a government, how do the residents resolve disputes? Sometimes the absence of that structure can be its own great hook!
It’s hard to say exactly how many guards should exist for each town size. If it’s like 1 for every 200, that means a small town may have only 2 dedicated to defense. And I feel like it’s fair to have a higher level and lower level one. If the town is known for its military might the average guard might be over represented by that number and a few levels higher than a normal guard. I feel like most people in a town are levels 1-3 (the more important thing is that the average commoner shouldn’t outpace your party even in a major city, but it’s totally okay to have pockets of the town where they are stronger than the party), and after the town grows you are likely to get more and more people who are higher level.
@@lootgoblinmarketplace 😍
This is really cool!
Gotta love the Baldur’s gate party visual reference.
“Go for the eyes boo! Go for the eyes!”
Amazing tool! Is this town yours? Did you design it? The art style is great I'd like to see more!
So Crosshead studios made it, there is a link to his work in the description!
Imagine if there was a town that deliberately had none of this and you had to figure out why
I definitely would love to see that. I’d start to worry that it’s some kind of trap because maybe their source of food is lost travelers
Neat! This is a nice resource! Thank you for posting this. It’s a good structure to use for town building in games and even writing.
Also I love that map 😮 🥰
Crosshead Studios has been my favorite map maker for some time!
@@lootgoblinmarketplace Thank you! I’ll look into it!
The thing I must add is that a hamlet or smaller gathering might only have one or two people working as guards/sherif/police, and likely wont have any priests or nuns of their own, but a place within 1-2 days walk (less on a horse) priest would be the one traveling there to give cermons. Also with less than 500 people there isnt an underworld as everyone knows everybody, but might be a guy who knows a guy to sell things to, or buy things from kind of grey market would be the only thing working. The place would be simply too small for anything more.
This is very useful indeed. Keeps it simple, but provides everything a travelling group of adventurers needs without going too deep into an origin story for every little settlement.
You can use this is most other genres as well. It works in Numenera and Stars Without Number. Altar's might be substitute for academics.
I like this. Gave me some ideas for fleshing out a starting town I have that I felt was lacking something, and did it indirectly...but the method seams to have the bases covered for what makes good RP/what people want from RP in a town. Made me think to add more underworld hubs in the starting town I have, namely one to a movie theater that had contraband films in the basement...but idk I feel like this would also be good for fleshing out one's existing game-world and towns that don't quite feel all that there...even if you have a great plot for an adventure there and know exactly how the local climate impacts crop production outside the city and the local economy plus the social influence of dwarf and tiefling merchants migrating there 200 years ago mixed with the policies of the current kingdom effect local attitudes....ya might be missing something this covers.
Something to keep in mind with underworld activities is you can just have it be a small faction or group that has an activity the overall culture doesn’t approve of. It doesn’t have to be bad or even illegal! Just some kind of outcast with an activity that might catch the party’s attention!
Government Buildings
Underworld Activities
Altars
Resources
Defenses
Social Hubs
If the settlement is the focus of the campaign, another important factor could be to consider the potential dynamic between each of these GUARDS variables for enriching the story one might want to tell. Maybe the Government officials are of no help to the adventurer because their pockets are lined with underworld funding, or the altars of the settlement are well protected and difficult to operate within because it's tradition for those in the military branch to be devout worshippers.
I love this GUARDS method. So many complex features that go into creating a fleshed-out setting simplified into an understandable manual.
I love this method, very easy to remember too. I wasn't struggling filling in my own town but this simple method helped me refine everything and add to it a bit. Appreciate it!
I like the formula but I would add that the choices don't have to be so, well, formulaic.
There doesn't have to be a mayor, there can be a council of elders or guild leaders, or the town can be ruled by the high priest, or paying tribute to cruel merfolk lords.
The defenses can include magical wards, trained beasts, a friendly tribe of werebears or a squadron of wyvern riders.
You don't need to do it with every single letter of GUARDS, but you really don't want to populate your world with Generic Fantasy Villages Number 1 Through 12. Give your players something to remember and get invested in.
A sea creature attacking fishing boats is fine. A sea creature attacking divers gathering enchanted pearls or demanding the return of its father's bones (which now form the altar of the Sea God) is BETTER.
Cool, been a gamer over 45 years, always had trouble trying to figure out what sorts of buildings/people to include in a town. I have a variety of supplements, but many are very unwieldy.
I like how GUARDS works, but I was hoping for something more like how many buildings of each type for different sized settlements. How do you determine how many people live in each building?
There are several facets missing from this method. I grant that this method touches on facets which mesh with game-play; however, in falling short on other facets, it leaves many other options behind. For instance, using your table, a "small town" would have between 901 and 2000 people. The image used seems to be being portrayed as a "town"; however, there is no way that even 901 people are living in that town -- there are just not enough residences for them. Also, with the resources being pegged as "fishing", it leaves off the nice looking forest on the left side of the picture. With 901 people, there will be a diverse set of people with a draw for all sorts of resources. There would likely be someone hunting in the woods... others gathering plant based foods from the woods, others getting building supplies from the woods.... There are also mountains portrayed... Mining? There needs to be enough "industry" to "feed" the vast majority of the population.
Also, as a "travel hub", it would likely have one (or more) inns due to needing to synchronize arrival and departure times of the different modes of transportation.
Another factor is that many population centers are portrayed as "everyone is inside the walls". Smaller population centers tend to serve more people who live OUTSIDE the village/town/etc than those living inside. This would tend to be support enterprises for the population center -- farming, livestock, etc and other industries deemed "offensive" ... manure comes to mind... Thus portrayal of a population center which is large enough to have a wall, should likely have a second diagram/map showing the surrounding area with various annotations.
A last downside of the G.U.A.R.D.S. method is that just because the players might WANT something (like a place to sell their robbery proceeds) doesn't mean that the village has such a place. Especially on the lower size of things. The lower end of things is where this system really falls apart. In a medieval setting, a population center of 20 - 30 people is very unlikely to have a dedicated guard who does nothing but "guard". There might not even be a "government" building... or you could say that the leader's home doubles as such. The "leader" probably is busy with their own harvest or blacksmith shop... or whatever...
Something else to think about as well: cultural advancements. London in 1100 was somehat over 15,000. Still a very large city, even a metroplolis in that day.
Go two hundred years, and the population boomed to 80,000. Then the plague hit, and in 1400 the population was almost halved, to around 45,000.
So in world building, what is the capital of your kingdom? Has there been an outbreak of plague or other such disaster?
How have events like that affected your world?
What about more than a metropolis something like a dwarf main glory city
Now I just need a truly good settlement building system I can use in any RPG that is system agnostic. Not overly complicated but also not too simple and vague. I know finding a balance is a challenge though. Example: Players want to build a tavern in their small village. Many town building systems have this. Some are rather complex like Pathfinder Kingmaker (first version) said it takes a single lot of space but is also symbolic of 250 population increase... why? But in other systems it gives a +1 economy boost and has has no balance and I could actually build 200 of them with a population of 30 people and each one gives +1 economy.
roads the amount of time i saw some made up fantasy maps its just US grid style with arenas smack in the middle of the cross roads blocking transport of goods with horse cart like comon or no organic layout they are allways stiff and idk.
on the Settlement size i found some intressting thing wich is why i disagree.
Hamlet = Settlement should be the lowest pop since you just start settleling
Thorp sound similar to german word Dorf wich is Village keep in mind that all languages were closer together once but split away over time accent/dialect isolation.
some example would be: Swedisch Stridsvagn / German Streitwagen / Englisch Chariot. or Windows Win-dows today even tho it was Wind-ows ows being old english for eye wich in german would be Auge wich in my dialect would be more like owgeh. or names: Lawrence, Lorenz, Lorentz, Lorens all the same but first looks out of place untill you compare pronounciation.
for the actual town displayed i'd say 7-8 out of 10
trees to close to Wall, its flat terrain so no need to keep them for erorion control.
Towers flush with outside wall no way to cover from tower to tower (not talking about Starfort style)
no central / public well (the place were the satue is would be a good spot) wich also located near Market areas.
no backyard within the Grid. there were alot more space needed for chicken or other Animals or just a place to work. be it unter full cover ( a roof) or just exposed.
vegitation - some massiv old tree with wide reaching branches ancient gathering spot wich turned into modern gathering spot and emergency firewood during siege.
bushes for berries and so on. a small row of willow as living fencing for feeding lifestock and source of material for baskets and such.
over all hard to find something better and alot more easier to find worse.
Not to say this is wrong, not at all. But medieval towns were not always the same and that is important to have in mind. First of all I think that you should think the "Why" key part. Why do people DECIDED to live here? Water source? Stone source? Wood source ? Ancient origin? In the middle of a commercial route? Holy place? That pretty much will decide the size and complexity of the town itself. For example a town that is near a stone extraction site should be quite important and probably would have defenses and more people.but a town that was just refugees running that found water and food nearby would be small probably withouth defenses. The richness of the lord if there is one also directly influences the level of the town, wood defenses for a less rich place for example, also just as an extra tip in medieval times inns were very rare and people.would often sleep with other people in their houses as guests. And the few inns often had 1 room for many people, like room with 1 or 2 bed was very rare. In general try to make a town using common sense and logic, people builded EVERYTHING from.the ground in most cases from 0 so why? And how? Then the history of the place or whatever u want to add for the story enters too
So I think you should have a mid sized town on your chart as well using the population of your large town, and then just up the population of everything else up a stage, after all the population of Londiniuem circa 100 ad is estimated to have been between 30k and 60k, and Rome at that time is believed to have had more than a million permanent residents with Alexandria being between half and three quarters of a million, other major cites are estimated to have had a population ranging from 350k to 500k.
~Nope. I reject these. A lot of these things do not exist in a lot medieval or classical cities. And the probably with "underworld activities" is that most people think those things are like thieves guilds. In fact, I think most depictions of crime in fantasy are rather boring and stereotypical. Bandits are almost never just randoms camping the woods -- they exist for reasons if they literally aren't the local community or lord exacting tolls or waylaying travelers. If slavers exist, they almost always do so with tacit social permission. Organized police forces are a modern concept as is an organized civic bureaucracy for literally every little dot on the map. In most cases, the military is mobilized for martial law, but since most things don't escalate to that, laws tend to be lawsuits you have to petition for, mob justice or just one of the many odd jobs of a "shire reeve" or something.
The thieves' guild in Marienburg is an in-world pun. There is no central guild. It is a mafia-style commission where the gang leaders can sit down and hopefully sort out disputes and territory before it escalates so much the blackcaps pay notice. Low-intensity violence between the gangs where the blackcaps only fish out a few bodies a month from the canals is normal. There is no guild trappings, no guild charter, no guild teachers. The street gangs have their own hideouts and operations.
My friends modelled their Moon cities on urban street gangs of antiquity. The garrison and secret police of the city focus on crimes against the city and the satrap. The aristocrats have their private retinues who only focus on guarding their person and property. Everyone else pays protection to a neighbourhood street gang. Your street gang looks out for other gangs, arbites disputes and catches pickpockets. The danish embassy in our campaign quickly figured out that while the might of Denmark could squash every single gang, it was more convenient to just pay one off. They get free meals at our lunch stand now and then.
In One Ring and some other games you can play shirriffs of the Shire. There is very little crime in the Shire and very little work for them. For Smeagol to murder another hobbit is a calamity practically unseen. There are the bounders, people who watch the borders and deal with unruly visitors. Usually it means they calm down a drunk tall-man who doesn't understand she's knocking stuff over or chase off a stray troll who looks to steal pigs. One of my friends wanted to test out british murder mysteries, Shire-style.
In Esoteric Enterprises you play modern day criminals exploring a mysterious, magical megadungeon underneath the city. The kind of world where a step through that door on the subway no-one ever opens leads to cave bear lairs, the goblin market, latvian mafia slave rings and troglodytic hunter-gatherers. Since it's a modern day setting, this means the city above is patrolled by the police with the backing of a fully armed and operational state. It changes how the players must operate. Your best protection against the state is to keep out of its attention. Don't throw around magic at the KFC, don't swagger around with glocks, don't sell crack on bus stops, don't rant about your dark god outside the library. When the state knows you, it escalates hard. Nothing in the underworld is scarier than the state.
@@SusCalvin
Nope, historically sheriffs had work. They were odd jobs men tasked with various administrative tasks. When I say cops are a modern invention, that wasn't just me saying random shit.
States-side, they started as slave patrols and were little better than a gang themselves after slavery. The standardization and professionalism is a more recent development.
I didn't know the term "thorp"... that was new to me. I'm researching thorp and it seems simply a way of saying hamblet in medieval English, something like a synonym for hamblet not a category below that.
As I knew, a hamlet could be a group of 5 peasant houses (probably a family that went to live there after a marriage installed the first house there). Where do you get those numbers from? I really have a hard time taking D&D or Pathfinder numbers seriously, that a small fishing town like Sandpoint has 1000 inhabitants... especially with the map showing the number of houses.
In small towns there doesn't have to be guards. I've seen that D&D and Pathfinder have the occasional table with numerical relationships like "2 guards per 500 inhabitants" or something like that. But the guard was not like the police, the vast majority of settlements were devoid of defenses and only when there were serious problems did the noble owner of the local lands, usually a Count or a Baron/Mayor, send a small militia force led by some of his knights (the closest thing to a permanent army at that time were the knights). But most of the time that intervention only happened when the peasants rebelled and the local nobleman sent people to "pacify" them. Most of the time the people of most villages were left to their own and had to solve their problems themselves. Mayors were figures that only existed in cities, and in fact they were like small nobles or sometimes Barons, towns did not have those figures, and those Barons were in charge of the entire territory of a barony but mostly to collect taxes (more than nothing in food or materials, no coins) or if necessary, in charge of recruiting levies from all the towns of that barony and all of those, who were usually knights of a Count, met before him in the castle of the count's province. There was the notion that peasants should serve the nobles and they offered protection, but this was fulfilled in situations of war or raids by barbarians, such as Vikings for example. And that was very common.
In Spain, the derogatory term "villain" became popular, which in reality only means "person who lives in a village" because the bandits who robbed the roads were included as the commoner/peasant people of those towns. The nobles saw the "villains" as the lowest and did not hesitate to kill them, and the negative connotations of the term villain still persist to this day. Why are the protagonists noble in all medieval stories? Or like in ancient Greece they were princes or soldiers. Because you couldn't be the protagonist of anything if you were a commoner, you were the lowest of the low, you were worthless, no one trained you in weapons or anything (because you had to be at least a low noble to enter the church). Even the wealthy bourgeoisie had a very difficult time being taken into account by the nobles who only out of necessity ended up giving in to obtain money from them. A commoner could be whipped or killed for even daring to speak to a nobleman, enough to be considered disrespectful. Why didn't the peasants reveal themselves more often then? Because in addition to the fear of the nobles' ability to raise troops, there was all the religious indoctrination that served the interests of the nobles that instilled in the commoners that they had to suffer submissively because life was only a test to earn heaven, that and the speech that the nobles, especially the king, were there directly by God's dictate. And if all this were not enough, there was the idealization that naturally occurs when there is an elitist class, or dictators, who are given better education, better clothes, etc. And even the church brought oppression by condemning to the death penalty, burned alive at the stake, anyone who dared to even possess a Bible without being a member of the church (in case the very rare case of a peasant who knew how to read Latin were to occur) and in addition people were also sentenced to death for just translating the Bible into a language other than the restricted Latin, even members of the church itself, priests, were burned for heresy for simply wanting to translate the Bible into another language. With all this, the commoners were kept ignorant and manipulable.
This feels like a good jumping off point for quick creation. But last year I was in Vegas for a writer’s convention and got to attend one of Luke Gygax’s talks on worldbuilding. He recommended a system from his time in the military that struck me as brilliant for story design. The PMESII-PT system which is used by the military for understand unfamiliar terrain or locales. PMESII-PT stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical environment, and Time. It’s been really invaluable for my writing as well as my DMing. Though in the future, if I need a town in a rush, I’ll def use GUARDS
I’ve heard people talk about the SPERM method and this definitely looks like the advanced version. I think that would be great for a deep dive in the world building process!
What did you use for that map? Is that nothing you drew? Or a program maybe? Just asking because if you made it that’s amazing, if it’s a map maker program thingy got a link?
:) Excellent, this will definitely make things much quicker and thourough.
One thing that I would suggest to your Resources element is some means of support. Making a town feel organic involves more than simply giving the party something to do. For example I look at that map of the coastal town in your video and all I can think is "What the hell are these people eating?" There are no farms, no gardens, nothing. Nor does there appear to be any source of potable water. You cannot support any sizeable, non-nomadic population year round solely on fish and game and you must have a readily available source of fresh water.
Particularly in medieval periods (which most fantasy settings seek to emulate) grains and some vegetables formed the foundation of most diets and death due to contaminated water was a real threat. In our modern era, we consume a much greater amount of protein than was the norm for most of human history. We also have the technological and economic infrastructure to transport vast amounts of food and potable water but that simply wasn't possible in earlier times. At the very least there should be a stream, creek or river and some fields surrounding those walls.
On the subject of Defenses, a GM or author should take the time to identify the need for those defenses. Sticking with the example of the town shown, why are there walls surrounding the town? those appear to be some sort of stone or, at the very least, planed wood. Even a simple post and wattle wall is a LOT of work. A town isn't going to put up a wall without some reason for doing so. That, in turn, is going to influence the character/tone of the town and its inhabitants. In other words, don't just stick a wall around your town because it looks good. Ask why the town felt the need to spend the money, time, and effort building the wall and how that impacts the town and the party.
I would love a character creation equivalent of this
I have written down ideas for characters, but it's just a bunch of random anecdotes in random order as I come up with them
I usually go with the population number, often divided into age sections or family-sized chunks.
Here is a handy chart I made for a general region's population:
Population Division:
-45%: Peasants
-Poor: 20%
-Working Class (Area's Main Trade): 10%
-Artesans: 5%
-Builders: 4%
-Caretakers: 3%
-Entertainers: 2%
-Hunters: 2%
-Clergy: 2%
-Scholars: 1%
-Merchants: 1%
-Logistics: 1%
-Officials: 1%
-Soldiers: 1%
-Nobility: 1%
-Criminals: 1%
After that it goes to placing the above mentioned groups into buildings, districts or other locations around the town.
Nobility includes the Royal Guards, visiting Courtiers or Diplomats, and often royal servants.
I kind of figure that Fantasy towns would be nothing like real world Medieval towns. With all the monsters in these worlds, every settlement would need to be solidly fortified.
Cant really have a nice little cottage in a secluded area without the inhabitance dying horribly to the first random encounter.
You can also call it "Social. Politics. Economics. Religion, Military". ... ;)
for population and to make it more accurate you might want to halve the numbers. 500 people is a small town in medieval times
this will sure help me in my campain, thanks for the tips mate!
Was there a specific tool or software you would recommend for map building?
Did you design that town? If yes, which software did you use? If no, how do I find assets like that?
I was stuck on settlements because I want to make a settlement where the king gathers guidance religious leaders, nobles and commoners and trying to make it a better and safer city even if they have doubts of each other
My girlfriend, who had NEVER played RPG before, drew the attention to the fact that the lighthouse at the halfling coastal village was pointless for defense if the pacific village had a total of ONE inhabitant responsible for protecting the population.
And even though I had prepared everything ELSE about this mine village...the guards just flew over my head.
What is the thumbnail from? That looks like a great map maker
Just use the pathfinder 1e settlement system it has clear rules and everything you need for a working settlement and npcs are good and detailed in the system and they are their own people with stories and arent there to be abused and mishandled by jerk pcs in dnd 5e and arent used as disposable one sided cheap personalities .
I kinda wanna make my own fishing village after watching this village
You have a incorrect url for your Patreon link in the Show More. Great video.
I have a low population world in my campaign. So there are less people in my cities and towns
I like that one dude with the purple tat had a small critter :> also great advice my guy!
The hell, I didnt know Gelu was working as an adventurer!
You forgot to include why the town is even there in the first place
This is great because you can just use this to add districts to major cities
This is a brilliant mnemonic.
In the town I designed I rechecked it with this method and found the only one I hadn’t included was the altar piece. It’s a very small village so I can easily correct that with a shrine.
was going to say small villedges might not even have a official altar but more of small statues in individual houses.
@@Zack_Wester yes, depending on your culture, they might have the practice of household patron deities.
What your players ask questions?! :DD
Is that a hand-drawn map? Or did you use software for that?
i would recommend making some aspects of GUARDS combined. In Islam for example, the Altar and Social hub would both be the Mosque. In a marshal land, Government and Defense would be closely linked. So on and so forth. Consider how it changes the culture of the town, to make very memorable and different towns and cities
I definitely will say that combined sections make sense for smaller settlements where they need 1 person to do multiple tasks or in a case where the settlement highly values those two things together. The altar and social hub being combined for a deeply religious town makes sense.
Fun (stupid) fact, here in the UK whether a settlement is a city is not determined by its population but by royal decree. This means there are towns with larger populations than some cities. For example the City of Westminster only has a population of about 204,000, where as the Town of Reading (redding) has a population of about 218,000
That’s actually really interesting! Definitely can be a neat piece of lore for a fantasy setting too! Have a smaller town that has a strong presence and a unique title due to their government’s decree.
Elected mayor? State of your aristocracy
Depending on how feudal you want to be, most places should be manorial.
In which case the government is the lords manor. The defense is based on the non-serf population. And the social hub is almost entirely based around church attendance.
Resources are agricultural. Mineral extraction with mines were just something that didn’t really happen in the feudal world
That’s a good point. In some cities one of more of these roles may be fulfilled by the same entity.