Population Coverage in Civilized Lands

[S'mon]

If the prevailing form of transportation is ox cart, then settlements tend to spread out to about 8 miles apart. And if your prevailing form of transportation is horse drawn carriage at the time the region is first settled, then they tend to spread out again to about 20 miles apart.

In farmable land, people are going to want to farm all, or at least most, of the land - some areas may be kept 'waste' for firewood and livestock, but much will be arable. In the absence of mechanised agriculture, farmers will not want to travel 10 miles to their fields; around 3 miles/1 league/1 hour's walk is a practical maximum in most cases; this might be pushed a bit in extremely dangerous frontier territory where farmers cluster in walled towns at night & travel during the day, but I think it's a good rule of thumb: practically speaking, in farmable land you are very unlikely to see settlements more than about 6 miles apart.

For a 12-mile hex you will thus encounter at minimum 2 villages while crossing the hex. More typically would be 1 village per 2 miles, or 6 across the hex. If the whole hex is farmland around 30 villages in the hex would be typical for good land; as few as 7 or 8 in rugged, poor farmland.

Here's a 1575 map of Suffolk, an area of mstly good, rolling farmland:
http://www.foxearth.org.uk/Maps/firstPrintedSuffolkMap1575.jpg

 

[Celebrim]

In farmable land, people are going to want to farm all, or at least most, of the land - some areas may be kept 'waste' for firewood and livestock, but much will be arable. In the absence of mechanised agriculture, farmers will not want to travel 10 miles to their fields; around 3 miles/1 league/1 hour's walk is a practical maximum in most cases; this might be pushed a bit in extremely dangerous frontier territory where farmers cluster in walled towns at night & travel during the day, but I think it's a good rule of thumb: practically speaking, in farmable land you are very unlikely to see settlements more than about 6 miles apart.

This is all good thinking, but you need to take it one step further.

Assuming we have a uniform stretch of arable land, each farmer will want to minimize the distance between the themselves and their fields. Thus, what you will tend to see is a uniform distribution not of settlements, but of individual farms. What clusters is not farms, but markets - that is the place where farmers go to exchange their goods for goods that they cannot produce themselves. Since farmers don't need to go to market every day, markets can afford to be up to one day's journey away from a farm. If the market is any further away, it risks loosing market share to a market that develops closer.

An example of this in the USA might be someplace like Kansas or Iowa, where you have uniform arable land across a broad region. Settlements in those regions occur about every 20 miles, which is the run of a stagecoach at the time they were settled. The farm houses themselves are more uniformly distributed, and were probably even more uniformly distributed before mechanized transport changed the behavior and requirements of the farms.

More typically would be 1 village per 2 miles, or 6 across the hex.

One village per 2 miles is very typical of Europe, but is a not an approximation of settlement generally. Hamlets are much more typical of settlement in the Northeast USA, for example, than they are of settlement patterns in the USA generally.

 

[Kaodi]

As a side note: It has been said before, but it is absolutely insane how little of Khorvaire is shown on the maps in Eberron. Considering that Breland is supposed to have 3,700,000 people, given that the Eberron Campaign Setting and Five Nations leve 3,383,616 unaccounted for, and given that number is supposed to be low for the size of the place... It is mind-boggling.

 

[ComradeGnull]

This is all good thinking, but you need to take it one step further.

Assuming we have a uniform stretch of arable land, each farmer will want to minimize the distance between the themselves and their fields. Thus, what you will tend to see is a uniform distribution not of settlements, but of individual farms. What clusters is not farms, but markets - that is the place where farmers go to exchange their goods for goods that they cannot produce themselves. Since farmers don't need to go to market every day, markets can afford to be up to one day's journey away from a farm. If the market is any further away, it risks loosing market share to a market that develops closer away.

An example of this in the USA might be someplace like Kansas or Iowa, where you have uniform arable land across a broad region. Settlements in those regions occur about every 20 miles, which is the run of a stagecoach at the time they were settled. The farm houses themselves are more uniformly distributed, and were probably even more uniformly distributed before mechanized transport changed the behavior and requirements of the farms.


One village per 2 miles is very typical of Europe, but is a not an approximation of settlement generally. Hamlets are much more typical of settlement in the Northeast USA, for example, than they are of settlement patterns in the USA generally.

A medieval fantasy world is probably going to be more like Europe than the US, however. For instance, isolated farms are common in the US, but historically were much less frequent. More typical was a cluster of peasant houses located near shared fields and pasture land- the large shared fields were subdivided among the peasants, with part of the land belonging to the local lord, and allocations were regularly rotated in order to equalize the distribution of higher-quality land (flat, good soil, well drained, etc.). Particularly in an area where there might be marauding bandits/orcs/blargle beasts, people are going to tend to stay close together in order to improve their protection.

Expeditious Retreat press has a book called "A Magical Medieval Society" that goes into a lot of detail on this sort of thing- I've not seen the current edition, but the older one included stuff on how to place settlements, largely structured along the transportation-dominated lines S'mon and some others have mentioned. Supernaturally dangerous wilderness is going to encourage higher population densities- people will endure famines in hard years rather than expand into an area that they think is dangerous/haunted/whatever.

 

[Hand of Evil]

The problem most GM has is keeping real world stats out of fantasy. the best think to think about is what races are going to make up your population base, this could be human, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, gaints, etc. Now assign a percentage to each, this is their break down in your campign area.

Why do this? Because all of these races are completing for the same enviroment and resources.

 

[Celebrim]

A medieval fantasy world is probably going to be more like Europe than the US, however.

Perhaps, but in terms of available technology, fashion, and architecture - with the exception of gun powder and firearms - most campaigns I've been involved in tend to be closer to 18th or even 19th century than they are to more remote and less well known and understood medieval era.

For example, most viewers probably don't realize that on the basis of the art the setting of virtually all the Disney fairy tale movies (Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, etc.) is roughly the 19th century. Likewise, much of the urban setting so popular in D&D tends to be heavily influenced by Dickens and the Victorian era. Likewise, most of the social assumptions in a typical game are much closer to the 19th century than to the 11th. My point being that while medieval understanding (or misunderstanding!) may inform most games, that you can't by any means assume that the game societies directly parallel European medieval and in many cases they intentionally don't.

Particularly in an area where there might be marauding bandits/orcs/blargle beasts, people are going to tend to stay close together in order to improve their protection.

Keep in mind that the American frontier - where those isolated farms - existed, had actual mauraders, bandits and dangerous beasts. The clustering you are describing is occurring in part for political reasons - the villagers are serfs and not free lander holders. However, slavery and serfdom also tends to be rare, or at least a rarely used trope in D&D save when the nation in question is serving in the role of explicit bad guy.

 

[S'mon]

One village per 2 miles is very typical of Europe, but is a not an approximation of settlement generally. Hamlets are much more typical of settlement in the Northeast USA, for example, than they are of settlement patterns in the USA generally.

As ComradeGnull said, I was only thinking about a medieval feudal situation, where villages are the norm.

Isolated farmsteads are actually historically a pretty rare settlement pattern, though. Only the Germanic and cloely related peoples seem to have gone for this; AIR Tacitus remarks on the strangeness of the Germans, who can't stand to see the smoke of their neighbours' chimney. And in the USA it's most common in the northern midwest where there was a lot of German settlement.

 

[S'mon]

Perhaps, but in terms of available technology, fashion, and architecture - with the exception of gun powder and firearms - most campaigns I've been involved in tend to be closer to 18th or even 19th century than they are to more remote and less well known and understood medieval era.

Hm, the only fantasy setting I'm familiar with where that really holds true is Pathfinder's Golarion, large swathes of it are 19th century, from 1800 Revolutionary France to 1860s Prussia.

But lots of settings have 19th century (& later) setting elements mashed in along with bronze age, Roman empire, Dark Age etc tropes jostling the medieval paradigm. Actual medievalism is a bit more common in British stuff than in US RPGs, though.

 

[Celebrim]

Hm, the only fantasy setting I'm familiar with where that really holds true is Pathfinder's Golarion, large swathes of it are 19th century, from 1800 Revolutionary France to 1860s Prussia.

If we just looked at published settings, Faerun is fairly explicitly 16th century from the cannon and newly designed man-o-wars to to the recently discovered New World. Eberon the full swath of Victorian and Edwardian tropes right down to the railroads. While Ravenloft as a published setting was a patchwork quilt, many of the core regions have much later than medieval tech levels suitable to the period when Gothic fiction was actually written and Mask of the Red Death was set in Edwardian era. And, Iron Kingdoms is steampunk.

But a lot of it that shows up is a lot more subtle than that. Most games I've been in had sailing technology that was much later than Medieval, and a generally cosmopolitian world where Marco Polo's travels wouldn't be that remarkable. They feature strong monarchies with unified nation states and generally professional bureacracies and nationalized standing armies. They have printing presses or at least bookshelves with large numbers of books aren't unusual. They have relatively flat social structures and the characters status as non-nobility doesn't seem to hinder their social or legal freedoms to the extent that they can walk around wearing arms and armor and no one comments on it. Merchants and rakes carry rapiers, and urban dress, furniture, and architecture could all be taken from the 19th century. Palace life is imagined as that of the Louis the XIV's Versailles and is as much Dumas as any thing else. Practically every street urchin and back alley comes from Dickens. Cities are huge sprawling affairs with 10's if not 100's of thousands of inhabitants. And so forth.

 

[Kaodi]

If we just looked at published settings, Faerun is fairly explicitly 16th century from the cannon and newly designed man-o-wars to to the recently discovered New World. Eberon the full swath of Victorian and Edwardian tropes right down to the railroads. While Ravenloft as a published setting was a patchwork quilt, many of the core regions have much later than medieval tech levels suitable to the period when Gothic fiction was actually written and Mask of the Red Death was set in Edwardian era. And, Iron Kingdoms is steampunk.

But a lot of it that shows up is a lot more subtle than that. Most games I've been in had sailing technology that was much later than Medieval, and a generally cosmopolitian world where Marco Polo's travels wouldn't be that remarkable. They feature strong monarchies with unified nation states and generally professional bureacracies and nationalized standing armies. They have printing presses or at bookshelves with large numbers of books aren't unusual. They have relatively flat social structures and the characters status as non-nobility doesn't seem to hinder their social or legal freedoms to the extent that they can walk around wearing arms and armor and no one comments on it. Merchants and rakes carry rapiers, and urban dress, furniture, and architecture could all be taken from the 19th century. Palace life is imagined as that of the Louis the XIV's Versailles and is as much Dumas as any thing else. Practically every street urchin and back alley comes from Dickens. Cities are huge sprawling affairs with 10's if not 100's of thousands of inhabitants. And so forth.

This is definitely quite interesting when you put it down quite explicitly like that. Especially to me since one of my non-gaming ideas has involves extreme and jarring anachronisms...