Village Hit Points

I think you'll like this, it's very simple but allows for interesting stuff to be layered on top.  So, give your villages a small number, 1-6, to indicate their "health."  This number, like character hit points is abstract and encompasses a lot of things- sanitation, safety, and economic and social wellbeing. 

Each session the players visit a village roll a d6.  If it's under this Health Score*, the village has grown a bit.  If you are using these Easy Villages, I would say it's grown by one, 1 pip hut.  Growth is beneficial to players because more huts means more opportunities for hirelings.  And more 1 pip huts means more opportunity for food.  You could tie more benefits in with a villages size too.  (If you roll over the health score I would keep the village the same size to prevent it from fluctuating too much).

Now make certain things modify this village health.  The terrain and climate it's located in could affect the starting score.  If there is a monster lair with a day's travel -1.  War or plague affecting the region -1.  Tyrannical or insane reeve or headman -1.  If these negative modifiers bring the health score into negatives the village will shrink by a hut every session the players visit.  And this would be in addition to non-abstract losses, players killed by cultists or werewolves, for instance, will also be noted and reduce the village size.  However, eliminating threats, bringing livestock, building mills or dovecotes can all give a bonus to the health score, making things better.

I mentioned this as an idea I had to my player on Friday, just as an aside really.  And they got quite excited.  They understood the simple premise and could see why doing things to help the locals would benefit them.  And they immediately set out peppering me with ideas of possible improvements.  I had to rein them in a little and make sure they knew I didn't intend for them to be able to turn these villages into town or cities, just help them become thriving villages.  They were still excited.

This could be an easy way for the lord of a domain to affect how many troops he/she could draw from an area-- healthier villagers mean more serfs to carry pikes.  You might have the villages affect each other, with a village of health 6+ giving all villages within ~ a days travel a +1 to their health.  And vice versa, a struggling village could be a drag on all others nearby.  I could make a list of simple improvements to show my players and make clear what the improvements would require.  So maybe a dovecot would take a wagon load of stone and a wagon load of timber.  That way the players could go about getting the supplies rather than just plopping down a set amount of gold.  Serfs might be hired to cut roads or drain swampy areas.

Maybe players shouldn't know the actual score of a village unless they visit it or talk with someone that has just come from there recently.  But the last known score could be put on the map so players can easily asses the state of the sandbox as they know it.

*I think Health Points is a better name for this than Hit Points but figured by putting the latter in the title you would immediately know what I was getting at.

Easy D&D Village Maps

The post on my blog that gets the most traffic by far is on village maps.  What that says to me is that there is an unmet need for village maps to be used in dungeons and dragons.  The sad thing is, that post of mine is about me wanting village maps too, so anyone hitting it looking for a map before Friday night's game is going to be disappointed.  Let's rectify that.  I'll show you an easy way to generate village maps and then give you a couple.

As with most good ideas this is just a mash up of great ideas by other people.  Take roads shaped like letters and dice tossed to represent village inhabitants and we're off (I'm simplifying 1d30's approach a bit).

So, first step, draw a road shaped like a letter.  Here's C:

 Toss d6 to represent huts:

Trace them and record the pips in the traced squares.  If it looks too skimpy toss some more:

I want my villages to be a little more medieval so they are mostly subsistence farmers in huts with few of any other type of building.  But they will have churches, tithe barns to store the crops they owe the feudal lord and maybe a manor house for a reeve to live.  I tossed some dice to represent those buildings:

And that all gives you an organic-looking village like this:

By using alphabetical village names, you'll never forget what the general layout of a village is.  You can have sets of names ready for different cultures and use their geographic meanings to help.  Caerdon, in our example, means "hill fort" so I can make its road run around a central hill.  The Church and Tithe barn are some of the oldest buildings and also at the highest elevation.

By making the pips represent people we can see at a glance the population of a village.  We can use some simple guidelines to figure out some other useful information.

Defenders
If we say two pips is a married couple, any number after that can be their children.  We can make things easy and say only one spouse from any household is combat-ready and children don't fight.  But, large families will have older children that can help defend the village.  So +1 for every die, +1 for any 5s and +2 for any 6s gives us a plausible count for who can bear arms in the village.  For Caerdon that gives us 16 (+1 for each die) +6 (no 5s but we have three 6s) for a total of 22 peasants to raise if orcs attack or PCs start setting things on fire.

Provisions
If you are leaning more medieval and don't have shops, you may need to determine "Can players get food for themselves here?"  An easy way to figure this is to suppose single pip households have extra food and that for each they can provide rations for one person for one day.  (Single pips could also be the elderly and infirm, but with the bigger families I think it will all average out and we're trying to keep things simple).  So for Caerdon, there are 6 single pip households, food and drink would be available for 6 dungeoneers if they have something worth trading.

Other Buildings
Villages might have a blacksmith to make tools and if they're by a waterway they might have a mill to grind their grain.  Some villages might not have these buildings and will have to cart their grain to a nearby neighbor to grind it.  If you want a simple way to see if this particular village has one or the other without having to add more steps or extra dice you could say: "If two adjacent huts are the same number, one is a blacksmith."  For Caerdon, with two 6's and two 1's, that's a yes.  Alternatively, you could make it two adjacent odd numbers or adjacent even numbers, whatever helps you get the village done and feeling real for you.

Size
Obviously the more dice you throw the bigger the population.  I was rolling 8d6 just because it works well for tossing them.  Then, if it looked sparse I rolled more.  I think once you get up around 20d6 on a single page of paper things will be getting cramped.  If you want bigger villages, just add another piece of paper.  You could do it lengthwise to make a long village that follows a road or waterway or make a square.  A square of four pages with the density of dice I was using on each, will get you to populations that would probably be hitting the upper bounds of "village" and start moving into "town."

Here are two other villages I whipped up, Ashborough:

and Brey:

The forms of the letters and random layout of the huts can give you lots of ideas for what the village does or its history.  You can see, for Brey, I decided that the back of the "b" was a bigger, older road.  The lower loop is a little sparse in huts, but maybe it's a village green.  Maybe this village gathers livestock there before driving them to market.

I made Ashborough's central stroke a road, but it could have easily been a waterway with the village straddling it.  In fact, I was thinking of making all the vowels in my village alphabet explicitly on waterways.  That's fewer than normal probably, but it's easy for me to remember.  Here, have a second version of Ashborough:

I apologize for the crappy psuedo-isometric view.

Well, there you have it.  It's quick and simple, but I think it will help me populate my world with at least 26 villages that look distinct and have an organic feel to them with some history implied.  Hope this helps.  And if you want to come up with 26 village names in a different culture to share, link them in the comments.

26 Village Names

Let's take another shot at this.   I used this chart:

 which is just a simplified version of this Wikipedia page.
 
I tried much harder to make names that, while plausible, are not the names of prominent places.  I mostly did this by doing Google and Wikipedia Searches.  I may have missed some.

I want one name for each letter of the alphabet, mostly for mnemonic reasons (more on this soon).  I also wanted variety in both sounds and geographic features, assuming some of these names would actually be placed on a map near features that match their name.  I also tried to be careful about puns and awkward sounds, being aware that players and DM's will actually be saying these aloud to each other.

Eventually I think it would be cool to have a similar list for other languages/cultures, especially those that are more commonly associated with our psuedo-medieval worlds.  So German, French, Italian-- maybe slavic languages next, even Hungarian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese.

The point is a small number of plausible names ready to go.  If you can provide names from one of those languages have at it.  In the mean time here's what I came up with:

Ashborough     (fort among ash trees)
Brey                   (hill island)
Caerdon            (hill fort)
Dunmouth        (bay fort)
Exeley               (clearing by water)
Finkirk             (holy church)
Gilworth          (ravine)
Holmden          (island hill)
Inverstead       (at the mouth of a river)
Jill's Green
Kelding            (people of the spring)
Langbury        (long, fortified enclosure)
Moss End        (in a swamp)
Nancarden      (ravine with stream and thicket)
Olchester        (old fort)
Polshaw          (wood by a lake)
Queensgate    (on a road)
Rutleigh          (woodland clearing)
Stanfield         (stony)
Tilly                 (hillock)
Ukney              (island)
Vale of Fearn  (valley)
Whelworth     (a mine)
EXeley-on-the-Wold (different Exeley by woods)
Yulcombe       (valley)
Zaywick

(Ashborough is there as a stand in for my own Fresno.  There's a 75% chance they'll steal your wagon if you visit.)

Anyway, I'd love to see you come up with 26 names of your own.  Maybe based on the area you live, your own constructed language, a different genre (like science fantasy or steam punk).

Village Names

I wanted to make a list of village names based on real geographic naming conventions.  I wanted them to sound plausible and capture some old British flavor with out being distractingly famous.  I just wanted 26 alphabetical ones for now.  Here's what I came up with:

Astwyth           (east)
Bradford         (broad ford)
Corby       
Drumchapel    (ridge)
Eastbourne     (stream)
Formby
Guildfirth        (wood)
Howe
Innbury
Jill-on-Weyr    (on a river)
Keld                (spring)
Langdale        (valley)
Monminster   (monastery)
Nantwich       (ravine with stream)
Olchester
Pendle            (hill)
Queensgate    (on a road)   
Richfield
Stamford        (stony ford)
Tunstead
Ukney             (island)
Villhurst         (wooded hill)
Whelworth     (mine)
EXley-on-Sea   (on the coast)
Yulecombe      (valley)
Zaywick          (bay)

Obviously I had to stretch a bit for the less common letters.  So, Brits, or any knowledgeable types, do they sound right?  Do some sound too big to be little villages, more like towns?  Do some sound too new to be medieval?  Some more famous than I realize or just distracting for other reasons?

Villages & Maps

I wrote previously about my current task of fleshing out the local sandbox for my players and my difficulty with map scale. I'm still working on that. But in my daily rambling through the internets I ran across the D&D Doodle blog and something clicked in the way this map is drawn.


Apparently this is the base town from the 4e Dungeon Masters Guide. The style is a teeny bit too cartoony for me, but then, that's part of its style, and what made me stop to look at it. It reminds me of a Disney style attraction map that I loved as a kid. On seeing the buildings presented isometrically, I knew that that's how I want to draw all my towns and cities if possible.

I've also been researching medieval villages and recommend Life in a Medieval Village by Frances and Joseph Gies. It gives enough meat for me to understand the dynamics at play in a village without getting dry and scholarly.

I know now, for example, that villages will tend to cluster around 1) the manor house 2) the church 3) the road 4) all three. I also know the person living in the manor is not the lord but the man working for the lord, the reeve. Why does this matter?

It doesn't. I'm sure you can whip out a map of a village in a few minutes that we could use as a adventure base and we'd have fun. But somehow, constitutionally, I want to know how things work underneath. Once I know the reasons and underpinnings, then I can make changes as I need. Part of it probably has to do with confidence, but part of it is probably related to curiosity-- I really do want to know what it was like living in a medieval village. So, here I am reading about the construction of cruck-houses, in order to have a feel for the buildings that make up a village, in order to make a map of a village that my players may spend a night in. Haha.

It's kind of sad. But it's interesting too, did you realize that people in Northern Europe had forgotten how to use rafters?! This was something the Romans knew. So the villagers regressed to these cruck-style roof supports (at least circa 1200-1300).

Needless to say, all this research takes some time. But I'm hoping once I have it under my belt and feel comfortable with this knowledge, that I'll be able to, not only whip out maps of villages, but handle any questions players might have: "Oh, those peasants are carrying barley to the tithe barn," or "It's night, so the sheep are all in the lord's sheepfold" etc.

So, combine the cool isometric map view and the realistic detail and you have what I want in a village map. I went hunting around the web and found this!


This is so cool, exactly what I'd love to look at as a player in a campaign. I found this here. Which is apparently from a book by John Simkin. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the book for sale online. And it's only one image. So I pulled out some paper and pencil and I'm trying to emulate the style. But I'm not a trained artist. This is the kind of thing I'd love as a product. Give me five generic villages drawn in this way, with the briefest of keys just listing the types of buildings-- tithe barn, mill, tavern-- and I would pay good money for it.

I suppose this it what the hobby is about: scratching our own itches, houseruling the way we want, designing our own dungeons etc. So I realize this might not interest you at all, but I would love a project that set as a goal to map and key a variety of historically realistic settings: a village, an abbey, a castle, a town. I know each of these have appeared in various levels of realism scattered through various modules and articles, but I think it would be cool to have the set together as a realistic baseline. Then if you wanted to add some fantastic elements or gonzify it you could.

I stumbled across Midkemia Press' free download of Towns of the Outlands and I like it quite a bit. Its almost what would satisfy me. I love the different themes of the settlements: there's a mining town, a tribal fort, and a smuggler's cove, for example. But it has that generic D&D supplement feel to it, like somebody who knew no more than I do about mining technology in the 1300s plopped down and pulled something out of thin air. Well . . . I can do that.

I suppose what I'm looking for is all the complexities and niggling details of expertise in the subject boiled down into a simple product I can use, knowing the expertise is behind it.

I wonder if I'd been born in the UK or somewhere in Europe if I'd be this fascinated with these things. You have to keep in mind that where I'm from 100 years is oooooold. That in elementary school I studied Chumash indians, which was cool, but somehow grinding acorns between to stones doesn't capture my imagination like a castle under seige.

Update 7/24/09: Added the link to the Yalding page. Thanks Chris for pointing it out. The site is worth poking around at. Here, for example is a map of Caerphilly Castle.