Greetings!

How do you go about developing your campaign villages? What trades and crafts do you include in them? How commercial do you make them?

I sometimes think about this. Often, actually. *Laughing*

The typical presentation in game books and modules has, as some have noted, a very modernistic spin on them. Lots of elements from the 17th century and onwards are presented as typical, standard elements in villages and towns.

However, historically, elements such as Inns, hotels, even taverns, were not found in most villages and even towns much of the time before the 15th and 16th centuries. Towns and villages were much less *commercialized*

Of course, embracing more historical elements makes ordinary life and travel for the Player Characters much more difficult. I get it. Throwing in highly commercialized elements of complex market squares, elaborate Inns, Taverns everywhere, as well as dozens of other businesses and trades make everything smoother, easier, and faster. Much more convenient.

It is sobering though to consider the social dynamics involved in many towns and villages, historically. There were no Inns, no complex markets, no Taverns. Think about that, right?

Yeah, it means that you really do need to have family connections, friends, and tribal connections. Failing that, you need to get good at meeting new people, and making new friends, fast.

Then, consider that in much of the world, commercialism and a complex, coin-based economy was not embraced. Yeah, you had to barter for everything. Goods, resources, services, and oaths and commitments were what made up most of how anything and everything was done. You want a place to stay at for a few weeks or more?

You must negotiate chopping firewood and helping run the farm. That's how it was done. Or promise to hunt down and kill the local gang of bandits, and you can stay here in this woman's barn or something, and she will cook you meals everyday. Maybe her oldest daughter can be convinced to do your laundry.

And like in most of Eastern Europe--there were no private latrines or private baths. You had a Banya--a communal bathhouse. Yeah, men and women, together, in the bathhouse.

Most "public" eating facilities, such as they were, were more like everyone gathered into a large, open cafeteria and eating communally from huge platters and pots of food. It wasn't like you read a menu and get some meal made just for you. You eat rubbing elbows with strangers all around you, and you get to eat from the main meal that is laid out for everyone to eat.

Imagine how that impacts the social dynamics and routines of everyday life?

It is a very different vision of social life than what is depicted in most modules and game books.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

You raise a good point Shark.

And damn if I don't agree with you on a lot of campaign design ideas.  Do you run a VTT game I could join?

My take, when I was GM'ing regularly was that unless a village was on a regular trade route, there were no 'facilities' for the travelling adventurer.  You want to sleep, negotiate with that farmer that may have some space in his barn.  You want to eat, cook it yourself.  You want to trade, ask around and be prepared to pay through the nose.  Hell, you might even get told 'we have nothing, move on', because you (as the adventurer, and a stranger) wouldn't be welcome.

I got some complaints from a couple of players that I was being hard nosed.  But, as you say, look historically at the difference between a village and a market town.

Ag.

I split the baby.  I have a few successful areas with a network of villages, a few larger villages, and maybe even a small to medium town.  Not every village has even a blacksmith or tavern, but there is a scattering of such services over several such villages.  It's a rather dense network, with usually under half a day's walk from one village to the next.    There aren't many such areas.

The majority (or close to it) of the world is either wilderness, controlled by usually hostile monsters, or is abandoned due to conflict.

Then the remainder is all dark-age style/influenced isolated and/or fortified mines, fishing villages or otherwise somewhat self-sufficient communities.  Usually, they barely have any services either, though they may have an individual or three with some locally useful service skills.

This kind of setting favors the kind of system I want to run, which favors generalists over specialists in the day-to-day living in the world, while still providing a place for the specialist to exist.  (Or more accurately, the specialist is more valuable, but the setting can only afford to support so many of them.)  Coins matter, but there are lots of places where you need to trade for some food or goods, and not many of the inhabitants will value the coins over something tangible they need right now.

Then I sprinkle in a few nomadic herders, dangerous but highly profitable trade routes, itinerant clans (often with tinkers and other such services), and a few other bits of such glue to explain how this society even works.  It probably isn't enough to explain how it would be relatively stable, but it is enough for a game to have some consistency.

Then for fun I try to come up with some Jack Vance "Dying Earth" communities that follow the above pattern but have been isolated so long that they've developed some extremely strange customs. 

When I was running Dragon Warriors and trying to be more medieval-authentic with it, used a table to roll on for nameless villages along the way. First roll was to determine if there was a village to stop at at all. If not, then a roll for campsite (roadside, riverside, in the open, etc.). If they rolled a village, then a second roll for what kind of accommodations were available. If there was no inn, then they'd have to get a villager to accommodate them.

In practical terms, this wasn't often much of an issue for them. Dragon Warriors plays it cagey regarding time period, as many RPGs do. Its analogue of Medieval England has the politics and social structure of the 9th or 10th century, but the population density of the 7th or 8th, and the tech level of the 14th or 15th. Ultimately I left the politics as they were in the book, but stepped up the population density and treated it as roughly a 14th century setting. From what I've read/heard, getting lodgings in peacetime was actually not too hard in that period, between monasteries, hospitals, the occasional inn, and just staying in people's homes. Plus my party had a quite high-status knight with them (a very lucky roll on the background table), so he could ask for and expect accommodation most places.

These days, I've advanced social time in most of my games to somewhere around the mid-to-late 16th century, so it's less of an issue.

Incidentally, this is quite a good talk on travel in the medieval era. It's something I refer back to periodically when planning games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdguh1D-fOk

D&D modules have always been anachronistically modern; 5E adventure settings are all but the typical US college town with the serial numbers filed off.

Any casual reader of the voluminous medieval murder mystery genre would find the typical dungeon fantasy village bizarre and unbelievable.

These books are good reads on it.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-Village-Frances-Gies/dp/0062415662

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-City-Frances-Gies/dp/0062415182


The entire series is worth reading.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085Q9VCYG?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_m_mng_rwt_sft_tpbk_tkin



A baker, brewer, and blacksmith were in most if not all villages as they were needed by almost everyone.

Quote from: LordBP on April 03, 2024, 07:38:27 PM
These books are good reads on it.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-Village-Frances-Gies/dp/0062415662

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-City-Frances-Gies/dp/0062415182


The entire series is worth reading.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085Q9VCYG?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_m_mng_rwt_sft_tpbk_tkin

We need a whole thread of stuff like these. I'm going to start one.

Quote from: SHARK on April 03, 2024, 03:39:36 PM
It is sobering though to consider the social dynamics involved in many towns and villages, historically. There were no Inns, no complex markets, no Taverns. Think about that, right?

Yeah, it means that you really do need to have family connections, friends, and tribal connections. Failing that, you need to get good at meeting new people, and making new friends, fast.

Then, consider that in much of the world, commercialism and a complex, coin-based economy was not embraced. Yeah, you had to barter for everything. Goods, resources, services, and oaths and commitments were what made up most of how anything and everything was done.

While they were strictly ancient or dark ages, two out of three of my last D&D campaigns were based in barter.

My current campaign is fantasy based on the Incan empire. There is a larger social structure - and people acknowledge imperial authority. But there is no coin economy - everything is still barter. I wrote up some rules for an abstract Wealth stat like in the True20 rules, but in practice, I haven't been using it much because most of what they pay for is negotiated by role-play instead. Nothing wrong with that, but I feel a little awkward about being inconsistent. (Then again, this might just be rulings over rules.) The PCs are motivated by religious and patriotic concerns rather than accumulating wealth, so economics has taken a back seat in general.

My D&D campaign before last was post-apocalyptic, where civilization just collapsed from a plague of dragons sweeping the surface world. This eliminated any worth to gold coins, and all interactions were played out as pure barter. The PCs had stocks of food and weapons which were their main negotiation with other survivors.

Go to the best source for Dark Age villages, the domesday book:

http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/contents.html
   or
https://opendomesday.org/place/

The second one lists things down to the number of cattle. Mills, fisheries, and churches were common around 1066, but there are other interesting entries such as "Park of Wild Beasts" and "Salthouse"