Balderdash, we all know agriculture is impossible in Pennsylvania, what with all those white tail dear roaming about
D&D General Need wheat. Too dangerous. (worldbuilding)
Yes, but that was because the difference between a village and a town was not the size but if it had a wall or not.
Faolyn
(she/her)
And the entirety of Barovia. In Curse of Strahd, I practically wept at not only the lack of farms, but that they said one town survived on wine and wolf meat. <shudder>
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Nu!Ravenloft is apparently intentionally designed not to make sense, so we're not supposed to care about that.
Faolyn
(she/her)
Well, this is CoS, which came out a long time before they decided Ravenloft relied on nightmare logic.
Hussar
Legend
Snort, yeah, because Ravenloft was always designed to make sense and this is just an issue with current D&D products.
Hussar
Legend
Not in the English language. Town and village are defined by population.
Use manpower to build physical barriers ( put them dwarves to work on special commission from the king!)
Use magical power to build physical barriers ( wall of stone, plant walls, force fields)
Use magical power to build magical barriers ( zones of anti monster types such that they feel shocked when crossing the boundary)
An entire troop type dedicated to agriculture guarding ( not just city wall guards but field guards) to protect, possibly in conjunction with one of the other above ideas
or maybe the fields are grown elsewhere ( a regular place on the mountain tops where monsters don’t easily reach, and the transport to civilized lands is magical), or maybe the fields are in a pocket dimension inside a globe thus easily portal and safe on someone’s mantle in their city home …
Use magical power to build physical barriers ( wall of stone, plant walls, force fields)
Use magical power to build magical barriers ( zones of anti monster types such that they feel shocked when crossing the boundary)
An entire troop type dedicated to agriculture guarding ( not just city wall guards but field guards) to protect, possibly in conjunction with one of the other above ideas
or maybe the fields are grown elsewhere ( a regular place on the mountain tops where monsters don’t easily reach, and the transport to civilized lands is magical), or maybe the fields are in a pocket dimension inside a globe thus easily portal and safe on someone’s mantle in their city home …
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
No the difference, at least in Medieval times was that a Town had a cathedral (where people would come together) and which then were chartered as Market Towns. Of course most settlements big enough to have a cathedral were also able to afford to build walls but some still only had pallisades.
Even Villages had pallisade fences for security.
What a lot of people miss though is that the walled/fenced area of many towns wasnt a full wall nor did it surround the entire town. Indeed there was often a much larger area outside the wall (as Hussars second pic shows).
Cochester had a walled town around the castle and chapels, and another wall around its abbey and priory. However the port and most of the town lived outside the wall.
Personally I always say a rural towns center sits on 120 acres but the towns settlement covers a square mile (including farms, fields, abbeys, forests, rivers, watchtowers and various tiny hamlets that PCs rarely see since they far too small to have a tavern or useful shops).
Urban Settlements cover the same square mile but the whole area is built on and its influence extends out beyond that. (Colchester in the 14th century covered an area of over 2 square miles)
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Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Greenfields in STK was entirely devoted to farming. But it was like... 25-50 miles away from Waterdeep, who was their largest customer. I don't know. It really doesn't make sense. I'm with the OP.
