Settlement Sizes

[Corneel]

I've turned away from settlement sizes as given by the 3.5 edition DMG. And this for a very simple reason. I'm working on a game & setting based in an alternative version of late medieval Europe. So I base my settlement populations at least in part on historical figures. Now that puts me in a bind if I were to use D&D and especially 3.5 D&D numbers. Any settlement with more than 25 000 adult inhabitants is supposed to be a metropolis. Now that means that even at a fairly large number of children, I still got at least three metropolises in a territory that is as small as current day Belgium (FYI, they are Ghent, Bruges, and Tournai; Brussels and Liege are close). So I redefined the population brackets for settlements, with moreover imposing a simple rule: the top of a bracket should be the double of the bottom of a bracket. There are two slight exceptions and this to arrive at round numbers. Also, numbers are for total population, not adult population. I both give the Dutch & English names/approximations.

Level 0: <100: (Thorpe) small settlement / kleine nederzetting; several types possible: steading, thorpe, shrine with community etc.
Level 1: 100 - 200 Hamlet / Gehucht; possibly other types: Shrine with attendant Abbey, Fortress/Castle
Level 2: 200 - 400 Small Village / Dorpje; Small Burgh / Kleine Burg (if a castle or fortifications present)
Level 3: 400 - 800 Village / Dorp; Medium Burgh / Middelgrote Burg
Level 4: 800 - 1500 Large Village / Groot Dorp/Vlek; Large Burgh/Grote Burg
Level 5: 1500 - 3000 Small Town / Kleine Kleinstad
Level 6: 3000 - 6000 Medium Town / Middelgrote Kleinstad
Level 7: 6000 - 12000 Large Town / Grote Kleinstad
Level 8: 12000 - 25000 Small City / Kleine Stad
Level 9: 25000 - 50000 Medium City / Middelgrote Stad
Level 10: 50000 - 100000 Large City / Grote Stad
Level 11: 100000 - 200000 Small Metropolis / Kleine Grootstad
Level 12: 200000 - 400000 Medium Metropolis / Middelgrote Grootstad
Level 13: 400000 - 800000 Large Metropolis / Grote Grootstad
Level 14: >800000 Megalopolis / Wereldstad

It might be useful for other people, so I'm dropping it here.

[Malimar]

Neat.

But here's a genuine question for you: What purpose is served by the high granularity of your system? I could see maybe if you want there to be that many levels of nobility, but even real life has at most 10ish levels of nobility.

I, too, more or less ignore the DMG's recommendations. But I separate settlements into basically four categories:

• hamlet: less than 500, not worth noting on the map or the wiki page
• village: 500-2500 people
• town: 2500-25,000 people
• city/capital: 25,000+ people

(This is for a relatively low-population, post-apocalyptic world, though.)

Here's a fun rule of thumb I learned in an urban geography class: in any given region, the nth-largest settlement will tend to be 1/n the size of the largest city.

I recommend reading Medieval Demographics Made Easy: Numbers for Fantasy Worlds if you haven't already, it's interesting and helpful for this sort of thing. (I just discovered an automated thingy based on that, which looks neato (I'd use it but I've already pretty much figured out all that stuff for all my setting's nations).

[PhoenixPhyre]

I recommend reading Medieval Demographics Made Easy: Numbers for Fantasy Worlds if you haven't already, it's interesting and helpful for this sort of thing. (I just discovered an automated thingy based on that, which looks neato (I'd use it but I've already pretty much figured out all that stuff for all my setting's nations).

My issue with that page (which I've used) is that it assumes that <setting> settlements will look very similar to earth medieval (and one particular part of the medieval period, in one sector of the world) despite that being highly path-dependent and the presence of magic can drastically change the assumptions underlying it. It's a good place to start, but shouldn't be taken as the final word.

[Corneel]

Neat.

But here's a genuine question for you: What purpose is served by the high granularity of your system? I could see maybe if you want there to be that many levels of nobility, but even real life has at most 10ish levels of nobility.

I, too, more or less ignore the DMG's recommendations. But I separate settlements into basically four categories:

• hamlet: less than 500, not worth noting on the map or the wiki page
• village: 500-2500 people
• town: 2500-25,000 people
• city/capital: 25,000+ people

(This is for a relatively low-population, post-apocalyptic world, though.)

Here's a fun rule of thumb I learned in an urban geography class: in any given region, the nth-largest settlement will tend to be 1/n the size of the largest city.

I recommend reading Medieval Demographics Made Easy: Numbers for Fantasy Worlds if you haven't already, it's interesting and helpful for this sort of thing. (I just discovered an automated thingy based on that, which looks neato (I'd use it but I've already pretty much figured out all that stuff for all my setting's nations).

You can reduce the granularity of my system easily:
<200: Hamlet or less
200-1500: Village
1500-12000: Town
12000 - 100000: City
100000 - 800000: Metropolis
>800000: Megalopolis

The thing about the site that you linked is that it averages things over a far too diverse environment. It's something I noticed because I have at the moment mapped out two very different environments: Ireland and the Low Countries. In the one I have a difficulty of finding settlements of a size large enough to make political or economical centers, in the other I have to cut out town sized settlements because you can't just put a town in every friggin' hex.

[Malimar]

My issue with that page (which I've used) is that it assumes that <setting> settlements will look very similar to earth medieval (and one particular part of the medieval period, in one sector of the world) despite that being highly path-dependent and the presence of magic can drastically change the assumptions underlying it. It's a good place to start, but shouldn't be taken as the final word.

The thing about the site that you linked is that it averages things over a far too diverse environment. It's something I noticed because I have at the moment mapped out two very different environments: Ireland and the Low Countries. In the one I have a difficulty of finding settlements of a size large enough to make political or economical centers, in the other I have to cut out town sized settlements because you can't just put a town in every friggin' hex.

Yeah, there are a fair number of assumptions you need to tweak to make the linked sites work best. For example, my setting is in the early aftermath of a 500-year global flood, so the surface settlements are more immediately post-apocalyptic than assumed, and the undersea settlements are sort of post-whatever-the-opposite-of-an-apocalypse-is. So I had to tweak the numbers a lot in both cases. Still, a good baseline.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I've blogged fairly extensively on settlements in fantasy games - not for a long while now, though, but a few years back I wrote a series of posts about urbanisation and sizing, distribution, location, resources, and was planning more but never got round to them.

I think the biggest trick is to understand what drives settlement in reality, so that you can consider how that would change in the fantastic setting you're imagining.

Regarding there being a settlement in every hex - yes, in some regions there probably ought to be! Generally people live no more than (or not much more than) a day away from other folk, so that they can trade their produce and good and services. Of course there are exceptions to that - the steppes of Mongolia, the Australian Outback - but even then, you'll find that often someone lives in a given 24 mile hex, even if it's only one family.

[Kaptin Keen]

I feel the whole settlement size thing is ... I mean, it's fine, but it's also absurd. It's not that there's anything wrong with a village of 250 people - it's just that, that's not what it's about. It's about Golden Acre (Guldager, in the real world), which is an area of jutland (where I was born, obviously), and was dotted since time out of memory by numerous little villages, farming hamlets and fishing communities.

Point being that it's an area maybe 20x20 kilometers, holding maybe 30 or more villages within a days walk of each other. So while the village may hold a couple hundred people, the region holds 5-6k.

Now, in terms of a fantasy setting, rather considerable levies and taxes can be raised from 6000 people. They generate rather a lot of trade. Meaning that if you focus on the single village in isolation, you simply don't get the right picture.

I'm unsure whether such nitpicks matter to anyone but me - but there it is =)

[Beneath]

I think part of the reason settlement sizes are as small as they are (vs late medieval numbers) is because D&D is modeled more on early medieval numbers than late; if you go with that, then yes, you'll have more major cities and your criteria for a major city, a metropolis, will have to be higher.

I probably wouldn't use powers of two for rankings though; it's mathematically simple, but the question is less "what looks good mathematically" and "what works best to classify what role these settlements have". For that you don't really need more than a few levels: villages (any place you can get food, firewood, ale, and a roof to sleep under, maybe basic provisions like rope, but not a whole lot else and what you can get will be under informal arrangements), castles (defensive bastions not much larger than the villages they oversee), and cities (places where you can get basically anything), maybe with some intermediate levels or multiple levels of city. Dungeon World has Towns as an intermediate between villages and cities. ACKS has six levels of market to differentiate Rome and Byzantium from provincial cities.

If you have a good reason to, sure, go finer-grained, but it's a waste to go finer-grained than you actually need to.

Delta, a blogger I read, came up with a system where, depending on his map scale, in settled areas there is usually a settlement in every hex, backed by his own set of real historical numbers (but you can back anything with real historical numbers by changing when and where you get your numbers from); his solution matches what you came across of dropping settlements small enough that there's one in every (inhabited) hex from the map.

[Corneel]

I've blogged fairly extensively on settlements in fantasy games - not for a long while now, though, but a few years back I wrote a series of posts about urbanisation and sizing, distribution, location, resources, and was planning more but never got round to them.

I think the biggest trick is to understand what drives settlement in reality, so that you can consider how that would change in the fantastic setting you're imagining.

Regarding there being a settlement in every hex - yes, in some regions there probably ought to be! Generally people live no more than (or not much more than) a day away from other folk, so that they can trade their produce and good and services. Of course there are exceptions to that - the steppes of Mongolia, the Australian Outback - but even then, you'll find that often someone lives in a given 24 mile hex, even if it's only one family.

Just to clarify: when I'm talking about putting a town in every hex, I'm talking about a (hex)map for a campaign world, so you don't want a town in every hex of your map (even if there actually are towns in almost every hex). Moreover the hexes are more like ten kilometer across. And I still have a series of four cities (so 12 000+ inh.) that are each only separated by a single empty hex from the following city (Leuven-Brussel-Mechelen-Antwerpen). If I used 24 mile hexes, some of those would have to share a hex despite being major size settlements.
On the other hand in Ireland (and now in the Highlands of Scotland where I'm working on) I had difficulty of finding settlements of any size in certain regions.

[Tvtyrant]

Just to clarify: when I'm talking about putting a town in every hex, I'm talking about a (hex)map for a campaign world, so you don't want a town in every hex of your map (even if there actually are towns in almost every hex). Moreover the hexes are more like ten kilometer across. And I still have a series of four cities (so 12 000+ inh.) that are each only separated by a single empty hex from the following city (Leuven-Brussel-Mechelen-Antwerpen). If I used 24 mile hexes, some of those would have to share a hex despite being major size settlements.
On the other hand in Ireland (and now in the Highlands of Scotland where I'm working on) I had difficulty of finding settlements of any size in certain regions.

I don't see the problem there. By D&D terms Ireland and Scotland are barbarian regions, with small populations and dominated by clan structures. Scottish highland territory in particular is as wild as the steppe or desert regions, being marginal farmland and sheep raising focused.

Change hex sizes by type of region. When in not!-Scotland the hexes are 10x as large as in not!-Niderland, giving them a similar population amount.

[Corneel]

I don't see the problem there. By D&D terms Ireland and Scotland are barbarian regions, with small populations and dominated by clan structures. Scottish highland territory in particular is as wild as the steppe or desert regions, being marginal farmland and sheep raising focused.

Change hex sizes by type of region. When in not!-Scotland the hexes are 10x as large as in not!-Niderland, giving them a similar population amount.

As said, it's a campaign map in hex format (using hexographer). Not a map for hex-adventures. So one map. I can't change hex sizes from one area to the other. Also, Scotland looks already bad enough with the current hex size, bigger hexes is going to make it worse.

Also also, it's more like alt!-Scotland and alt!-Low Countries... so there's not much I can do about the shape.

Lastly: screw you, Scottish shoreline, screw you!