Living Towns and the Medieval Mind

There has been a lot written about creating good sites of adventure, and some written about building good cities, and even a few articles here and there about building good towns. This falls into the latter category, since town-building is something that I do often.

When I was first introduced to D&D it was by reading the supplements for things like Forgotten Realms. I always felt as though my own personal creations should strive to match things like the Guide to Shadowdale in terms of completeness and detail. Thus, even from a very young age as a DM I liked to map out my towns and to write down the names and some details about the personalities of all the major NPCs. If I miss anyone or anything important, I name them in play and immediately add that name to the list of town-NPCs for later so that the next time PCs come to that place the NPCs haven't radically changed.

One of the tools that I've found extremely helpful is the (by now probably very well known) article on Medieval Demographics by S. John Ross. It serves as a good tool of approximation for many kinds of amenities a town, village, or city might have. However, without some basic knowledge of how a medieval township might have operated, you're as good as spitting in the wind: you may hit what you want, but more likely you'll just wind up covered in spit.

Again, we approach the problem of the sliding or mobile time-period. There's nothing that is steadfastly "medieval," since the medieval encompasses so many different periods, developments, etc. For myself, I focus on the 12th and 13th century for the central kingdoms of Arunia, with more far-flung places tending either towards totally fantastical formations or things more redolent of the 8th and 9th centuries.