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<blockquote data-quote="ComradeGnull" data-source="post: 5741918" data-attributes="member: 6685694">A medieval fantasy world is probably going to be more like Europe than the US, however.&nbsp; For instance, isolated farms are common in the US, but historically were much less frequent.&nbsp; 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.).&nbsp; Particularly in an area where there might be marauding bandits/orcs/blargle beasts, people are going to tend to&nbsp; stay close together in order to improve their protection.Expeditious Retreat press has a book called &quot;<a href="http://www.xrpshop.citymax.com/page/page/3906392.htm" target="_blank">A Magical Medieval Society</a>&quot; 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.&nbsp; 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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="ComradeGnull, post: 5741918, member: 6685694"] 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 "[URL="http://www.xrpshop.citymax.com/page/page/3906392.htm"]A Magical Medieval Society[/URL]" 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. [/QUOTE]

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