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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 3963430" data-attributes="member: 32164">Surrounded by farms. The Pelennor fields, where the main battle took place, was the farmland around the city. Many of the people had to flee into the city, which became crowded when they all went into it. This is also common of medieval settlements - the people from outlying farms would retreat to the keep (or walled city) when danger threatened.The thing I find funny is that people are complaining about how "unmedieval" the starting town is without having seen it. Many medieval cities had narrow roads, but there are many places in England, France, and Germany where you can still see parts of cities that aren't much changed from the middle ages. Carcasonne (a walled city) comes to mind, but York (also walled) is another good example. And yes, by American standards, the streets are narrow. But the main roads are not exactly cramped alleyways. They can handle cars - sometimes even two abreast.Big cities, like London and France, had some very wide streets. And small villages were usually more spread out.  The longer a town had to endure within a wall, the more densely populated it became. But to many of their "residents," walled towns were fortresses to retreat to, not locations for permanent residence. They often lived on their farms, and retreated to the city if danger threatened.People don't generally want to get into the issues of medieval sanitation (or lack thereof). Therefore, D&D settlements tend to be less cramped, as real medieval towns would have been if they'd had to endure without technological improvements for hundreds of years. Roman towns tended to be less cramped for sanitation reasons. And of course, because the romans knew how to build sewers, they were also cleaner than medieval cities where people emptied chamber pots out of second story windows onto the street (and the people) below.</blockquote>

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