Starting from scratch, pt IV

The Appetizer Round

In my last installment, I promised that in this one I'd get to the New Campaign's first adventure.  Alright, that turned out to be a modest fib.  Before I do that, I want to talk about how to play NPCs.

What I am is a method actor; I put myself into the shoes of damn near every NPC.  Part of this is acting like real people do, and not like faceless red shirt existing only to provide unyielding opposition towards the PCs, or speaking like a pompous 50-year-old college professor.  If the words in your mouth sound stilted and wrong, it's probably because they're coming off stilted and wrong.  Beyond that ... 

1)  Real people don’t fight to the death en masse; it’s an enduring military truism that a force sustaining 25% casualties will probably break, and a unit sustaining 50% casualties will almost certainly break.  Many systems have morale rules ... use them!  If they don't, fake it.  Let's say a low roll means an individual will surrender or bug out, a high roll means he's holding the line.  Add simple modifiers where appropriate -- if the other side's got a Conan-type who's covered in the blood of the NPC's comrades, if the NPC's side has a strong leader rallying the troops, if there's a hereditary enemy involved.  It's easy to figure out.

2)  Real people don’t stolidly respond “I dunno” to a PC’s questions; most everyone knows something, or think they do, or at the very least will shoot their mouths off to appear that they do.  Not even a dumb mook wants you to believe he’s a dumb mook.

3) Give every mook, and I mean every mook, one or two personality traits.  “Old Jon” is a stereotypical sailor in a red striped shirt, always with a concertina or a dirty bottle of rum, and is always willing to help newbies learn the ropes.  Larghos has an odd cowrie shell charm he claims came from his “mermaid wife” and protects him from drowning.  Natyzha abandoned her home and family for the sea due to crushing debt and means never to return.  There are user-submitted sites full of lists of folks like that, and automatic NPC generators on the Web that can do that much too.  It really helps, it doesn’t take much work, and you can easily recycle the lists.  The first time you see a mook go down in a battle, and another screams and runs and flings himself on her body sobbing, well ... the PCs might finish them off anyway, but many of them will pause and reflect.

4) As far as the mechanics go, acting is like any other skill ... you get better by practice.  I do a lot of different voices, and it’s to the point where I can voice several different NPCs sequentially and folks can distinguish them easily, but I’ve had a lot of years of practice at it.  It’s pitch, intonation, cadence and the use of idiom.  Heck, it doesn’t take more to establish a very formal, snooty, upper crust NPC than to use a measured, even tone and decline to use contractions or slang!

5) On the female front ... I speak with a somewhat modulated, quieter voice and employ some body language, but of course my female characters come out as contraltos; I’m not descending to Betty Boopesque caricature.  That being said, the problem of most male GMs nervous about portraying women might be not so much that they come off as creepy or whimsical, but that they're convinced they are out of self-consciousness.  My advice is not to worry about it.

6)  Stick in a viewpoint NPC.  I've editorialized about it in this blog post, which pretty much covers it.

And with that out of the way, I seriously will put the dinner on the table next time out.  Promise.

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch, pt III

Setting the Table

I can’t quite call myself a “zero to hero” partisan.  To a large extent, being a GURPS GM mitigates against that.  In stark contrast to many a game system, beginning GURPS characters can be competent in a number of skills, or very good in one or two.  It takes a pretty high level of tactical idiocy for a beginning party in GURPS to get rolled by a handful of mook spearmen.

But that doesn’t mean a GURPS fantasy campaign can’t start low-key.  A game setting I admire is Columbia’s Harnworld, which is the closest I think the hobby’s ever going to get to an honest, accurate, gritty representation of medieval life.  Harn keeps beginning equipment sparse, coinage scarce, social mobility low and introductory adventures very low key indeed ... a scenario where the payoff is the price of a single new sword is considered pretty decent for newbies in Harn.

And that’s the way to go, I believe.  Start a party dripping with gear, start them off rescuing the Kingdom from certain destruction against the Hordes of Evil, where do you go from there?

So ... in my campaign, I start players off with 500 silver sinvers.  That’ll get you a broadsword, a suit of cuirbolli armor, the equivalent of a riding mule, some camping basics, and that’s about it.

But you could get even more restrictive.  Remember that small town I suggested as a starting point in the first SFS post?  Use that, and that’ll help solve a classic problem with new campaigns: why are all these people adventuring together, and how do they get together in the first place?  The quandary leads to sorry-ass cliches of the You-All-Happen-To-Be-In-A-Tavern type.  They were lame in 1975, and they’re full of dry rot today.

Instead, make the party members townies who’ve known each other all their lives; this cuts short the usual angst over how these disparate people get together and why they’re supposed to trust one another.  The party members reflect the demographic: teenagers eager for Adventure.  You’ll have the children of hunters, skilled in the wild and used to privation; the herbalist’s apprentice, who knows a good bit about healing; the son of the village’s wacky eccentric scholar, who turns out to be a mage; the granddaughter of a retired long-term soldier, who taught her little girl something about battle; the altar boy or girl who serves the village priest, and whose simple and deep belief has caused him or her to be touched with the fingerbrush of divinity ... Enforce the paradigm.  This is the type of character they’re permitted to take, period.  They likely know a great deal about one another, and the gestalt works a lot better if they do.

Indeed, it’s an excuse to cut back on initial equipment further. It’s not a rich village, and the players aren’t going to be outfitted with much: hunting bows, slings, boar spears, leather jerkins and caps for armor (maybe), belt knives, camping gear.  One or two might have Grandmother’s sword off of the mantlepiece.  Horses represent significant material wealth, and it’s far likelier that they’d get away with an ornery pack-donkey at best.  Magic?  Alchemicals?  Hah.  Lily’s been made to help compound in her mother’s shop since she was old enough to work a pestle, so she’s got a few packets of useful herbs.  Clots wounds, reduces fevers, put a pinch of that in a fellow’s mug and he’ll be out cold in a half hour, that sort of thing.  (Never mind that pack of spices ... the trail cooking will actually be tasty for a few weeks!)

It also gives you an excuse to keep skill levels down.  However naturally talented, someone whose healing skills come from holding towels for the village midwife just is not going to be an expert surgeon.  However physically gifted, a teenager whose combat skills come from the retired one-armed soldier putting her through her paces a couple times a week after the farm chores are done is not going to be outdueling warlords any time soon.

And that’s how the table is set for the group’s first adventure.  I’ll get to that next installment.

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch, pt II

In my previous "Starting from scratch" post I talked about some basics of setting design.  The second installment concerns an element that probably has the highest ratio of importance for a setting to settings in which it's done badly: religion.

Faith Manages

If you have religion, make it matter.  If the PCs aren't devout followers of the god Upuaut, his priests will have nothing to do with them, and their healing magics will not work on them.  If locals of the farming district all attend temple, and the outlanders conspicuously don't participate, they'll be viewed with suspicion at best.  Shut the whole town down for the saint's parade, and man, don't they have a lot of those in the spring months?

A generic "Oh, Naseer is the God of Goatscrewing, and his priests all wear green and silver and have a goat brand on the right wrist, and their symbol is a green X, and they're Chaotic Evil, and their temples are always made of basalt" is about as far as many settings go, and is the sort of thing anyone can roll up on a Random Deity Generator.  (I recommend Chaotic Shiny's, if you like random generators.)

We’re working from two basic principles that color the creation of your setting: that you should keep things simple, and that you’re starting with a region away from it all.   Want some tips?  Funny you asked:

* Honoring the first principle, just have a handful of faiths: the white light good-guy religion, the pastoral/agricultural deity, the fire/forging/war deity, the death/magic/power deity.  It’s less work, and less for your players to have to remember.

* Please, please do me and yourselves a favor and don’t do what 90% of gamers do: mimic the medieval Roman Catholic church, in all its intricate, baroque hierarchy.  (I've been alerted to a delicious TV Tropes term for the syndrome -- Crystal Dragon Jesus.  Too funny.)  I’ve always found this slightly bizarre – if fantasy faiths have so many interventionist deities as all of that, why do they require massive, convoluted hierarchies and rigid, top-imposed doctrines?  Wouldn’t the deity him or herself instruct the priesthood?  Might there be a heavily decentralized situation (e.g. Presbyterianism)?  Most faiths either lack a Vatican, or pay far less attention to their putative central authority than said authority appreciates.

* Consider some questions that direct how a faith works: why are we here?  Why do we suffer?  How are we supposed to conduct ourselves in our daily lives? Where do we go when we die?  What happens to apostates or unbelievers?  How do we believers interact with the authorities?  With those of other faiths?  Is divine revelation complete, or are there more prophets (or a messiah) to come?  To what degree do the secular authorities interfere with how the faith is run ... or with the faith's right to exist at all?  How does the faith's view of the supernatural mesh/clash with the secular world's view?

* Consider having splinter sects, deep divisions in the faith’s ranks, or outright heresies.  A recent historical event in my own gameworld was the (seemingly permanent) appearance of two new moons in the sky.  This has caused a detonation in the faith of the Moon God, and the factionalism and infighting are strong and ongoing. 

* Pen some simple prayers.  Alright, I might be a writer and a poet, but I don’t expect you to be.  One of my faiths has “Lead us on the path” as a quick prayer by the devout; it’s the shortened version of the chorus of a multi-verse chant.  “Holy Fire, hold my oath” is another one, referring to the sacred flame devout worshipers of my fire god keep in their homes, and over which they cook all their evening meals.

* Put together a few holidays.  Don’t worry so much about the genuine religious significance of them – holidays seem overwhelmingly to be about the folk customs.   Think about the Catholic example: for every twenty of you -- even those who aren't Catholic -- who recognize that waving palm fronds and painting hardboiled eggs are well-known elements of that time of year, there might be one of you who knows off the top what religious meaning those elements have.

There are all manner of folklore books that include examples of holiday folk customs: certain foods that are ceremonially prepared, fairs held around the key dates, rents and hiring done on traditional dates, ritual observances.  There’s nothing like a party coming through a small village just as a fair is in session, or seeing the youngsters out dancing on the cliffside in feathered costumes to celebrate a special day.

Now here’s your secret weapon in all of this: Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is, in my entirely biased opinion, heaven’s gift to GMs seeking exotic setting detail.  Want to have a regional cuisine (say) that isn’t bastardized Ren Faire fodder?  Terrific.  Type in “Indonesian cuisine” – for example – and you’ll get all manner of exotic stuff.  (The custom of a “rice table” – a banquet featuring many dishes, all with rice as a base – being one.)

And you can do the same thing here.  Go to the Shinto article -- for example -- and you’ll see all manner of fodder.  Ritual purifications?  The offerings to make?  How you properly enter a shrine?  Sacred dances?  Protective amulets?  Just file off the serial numbers and put them right in.

* The final question, and this is an important one: why should your players bother?  Yeah, yeah, characters may well pay lip service to a faith in which they were ostensibly raised.  But religion is like every other element of roleplay -- if you want your players to be engaged with it, you need to make it worth engaging.  If they get nothing out of their characters' involvement with a faith beyond hassles, if an atheist or an apostate can get the gods' favor all the same, they're not going to engage.

It’s a bit of work, yes.  But it’s also one of the foundations of your setting, and a gold mine of rich roleplaying opportunities.  Why not get it right from Day One?

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

Starting from scratch (pt I)

A turn of phrase that runs through gaming forums is “lazy GMing.” This isn’t meant as a pejorative by its advocates.  They seek an approach that imposes as little work as practical on a GM, and that approach has many facets.

I’m not particularly in their camp.  I’ve done, over the years, a massive amount of work on my sandbox setting, and have details available in insane amounts.  It’s not merely that I have blurbs on over a thousand businesses in the great capital out of which my campaign operates ... it’s that I’ve also got a dozen or two blurbs for every significant village within two days’ ride of that capital, and as many as a hundred for every significant city in the kingdom.  I know who rules every province, something about that person’s family, and the same about every subordinate fiefholder.  I know the order, rough power level and location of every wizard of journeyman level and above in the kingdom.  I know all these things about many of the other major realms around too.

But I’ve also had over three decades now to work on this.  People ask me, at times, how to start a long-term campaign from scratch, and not out of some game company’s shrinkwrap either.  I can’t hand them my own approach – that’d be silly and counterproductive.  If you’re running a campaign (say) set in colonial Massachusetts, why waste time on statting out Philadelphia just on the off-chance the party might go there someday?  They’re in Plymouth now.

I’ll give my answer over a few columns.

Opening Gambit

Design a small town and about thirty miles in every direction, with as much detail as possible, because the players are going to pester you with questions if they’re anything other than hack-n-slashers.  Put the town on the outskirts of a frontier province, well away from the run of national politics and wealth. 

It’s also best to make the country isolated, behind natural barriers, and unlikely to be hip deep in worldspanning politics.  Sorry, I don't need a detailed timeline for the history of the land going back a thousand years, something a lot of even professional game designers waste time and ink putting together. With very few exceptions, no one cares that Empress Lynessia III was the last monarch of Vallia to personally lead troops in war, winning the decisive battle of Fourth Council Rock against the Avanari 174 years ago. It's enough to say that the empires of Vallia and Avanar are traditional enemies and have a turbulent, heavily militarized border, the last full-scale war being seventeen years ago.

I've seen a few too many gazetteers filled with little beyond what any GM with a Random Kingdom Creation Table could crank out. A name-population-principal product-name of leader deal, that’s not of a lot of interest to players, who usually want to know if it’s a large town or a small town, but don’t give a damn that the population is 2517 as opposed to 2403 or whether there are 20 fishing boats or 40. 

Give me, instead, two or three pressing problems or notable conflicts about a town or district. Give me a folk custom or two prevalent in the area; the wearing of the color blue by men is considered bad luck, or that every business takes a fiesta between noon and 1 PM.  Give me things beyond mere demographic nuts-and-bolts.  I like to know, for instance, whether your frontier town has a reputation as a cultural trendsetter, and locally-trained musicians have a cachet for hundreds of miles around, or that it has historical significance far beyond its political or economic weight (a Plymouth, MA, say).

Businesses?  Well, you’ve got my previous article on town building.  Write a paragraph or two on each.  Here’s an example from a small village in my campaign:

• Sign of the Red and Blue Pot:  With the death of the previous owner, her last surviving relative by marriage, a foreigner, Kesem kin Swallowflame, has taken over this well-stocked general store, which has a good array of housewares, tools, bulk grain and provisions, and textiles.  While he is a decent enough merchant (-13, various scholarly subjects-14/15), he has been trained to a scholarly life and educated at a great university, and somewhat resents having to take a menial job in the countryside.   Postings for foreign philosophers are not plentiful, but Kesem still pours his meager profits – he’s wont to let customers run up a tab – into books brought in from the capital, trying to keep up with new teachings and still hopeful of scholarly preference.

And there you have it.  What, no stat block?  No weapons skills?  No magical items?  Of course not.  The PCs aren’t going to fight this guy, and we don’t care what his Health or Move are, whether he has Climbing skill, or how much damage he can do if he clouts you over the head with that grain flail leaning up against the corner.  What they’re going to want from him is to fill up their packs with smoked sausage and biscuit for their adventure into the forest, and if they find out he’s a wannabe scholar, whether he can read that weird text they found.  What you’re going to need from him is an insight into his personality so that you can play him effectively as a vivid NPC, and we can all see the image that arises: a fellow starting to show grey hairs, somewhat fussy, somewhat distracted, somewhat irritable, possibly dressed grander (if shabbier) than the village standard, always with his nose in a book, and excited only when travelers come through town with books to sell.

And heck ... if he does need to fight, a GM ought to be able to determine, very quickly, the combat stats for an average villager.  Using GURPS, average stats are 10, so if Kesem trains once a month with the village militia, he may well have ST 10, DX 10, HT 10, a Speed of 5.5, a Spear skill of 12, with (say) a leather jerkin for armor (DR 1), a Parry of 9, and does 1d-1 HT of damage with a successful thrust.  Those details, including the time it took me to type them, took me 35 seconds to work out.  So why not establish that as the standard if you need to work up the mook villagers for that large-scale bandit raid?  A strong villager?  ST 12, and that damage is 1d HT instead of 1d-1.  A nimble villager?  DX 12, and that Spear skill becomes -14, her Speed becomes 6, her Parry becomes 10, and suddenly she’s a legitimate threat in a fight.  There.  That’s all you need.

So do twenty of these: the general merchant, the blacksmith, the horse rancher, the local priest, the local squire up at the Big House, the cunning man who gathers Useful Herbs in the woods, the trapper, the sergeant of the village militia, the farmwife Everyone Goes To When Someone Is Sick, the tavern, the schoolteacher, the hedge wizard, a handful of others.

Want to spice the village up a little further?  I've two blog posts (this one and that one) setting forth a couple tables for more local color.  They're intended for cities, and a number of the entries aren't really suitable for a village, but a number are.  It may be interesting to decide that the villagers will haggle fiercely over everything but beer or spirits, or that Gossip Is King and locals scoff at the notion that anyone's business is private.   The "Small Town Horror" blogpost also has a list of local-color items (if creepy), many readily applicable to a small fantasy village.

More to come!

The Starting From Scratch series:
Opening Gambit: Your town and its NPCs
Faith Manages: Designing religions 
Setting The Table: Party composition and equipment
The Appetizer Round: Tips on portraying NPCs
The Main Course: Your First Adventure
The Dessert Round: Random tips and suggestions 

The Black Elf Follies ...

My apologies for being quiet the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been plowed under with rehearsal and concert schedules for both the ensemble I’ve been in and my college chorus’ alumni reunion concert, celebrating the conductor’s 40th year at the helm.  (NUCS forever!)  But since you’re not here to hear about my singing ...

One of the hoary old standbys of gaming discussions is the player who bucks the campaign’s premise.  I've editorialized on what many call “special snowflakes,” a term often applied to the resulting PC, but more along the lines of my distaste for the term being used as a code slur for “Anything I don’t like.”

But that doesn’t touch the original syndrome.  Allow me to quote from a post in one of these debates, which illustrates one side of things.

Whether this is a problem and who’s [sic] problem it is all depends on who's being the asshole. If the players wants to interject something cool or unusual into his character because he has a fun idea and it's going to get him into the game more and the GM pulls some sort of "No, in my world elves aren't black!" or "there are no female dwarves!" bullshit? That's the GM being a dick. That stuff is just another way for GMs to take the often reasonable "this is mostly my world and ideas" and throttle the players with it. This is also where a lot of GM horror stories come from, especially if people push their own pet peeves, control issues, or even racism and sexism through this crap.

No, screw that noise.

In joining my game, you're joining a campaign.  It has a defined game system, a defined setting and a defined milieu.  Someone agreeing to play in my campaign agrees to all of these elements. It is not "mostly" my world; it is entirely my world. Characters are created within that setting, as natives to that setting, and exist within that setting. If you don't like that setting, if you don't want to engage with it, then what are you doing at my table in the first place, instead of seeking out a campaign better suited to your needs and preferences? 

For my part, I miss where insistence on rejecting the setting helps someone "get into the game more" -- it sounds like, by so doing, the player would be getting into the game LESS -- and I definitely miss the part where (say) Being A Black Elf is the sort of make-or-break character creation decision which makes the difference between a Fun PC or an Unfun PC.  (As to that, I also miss the part where a GM is a dick for refusing to permit a character that doesn't fit with his setting, but a player isn't a dick for refusing to play a character which does.  Come again?)

Are black elves part of my gameworld?  No.  Would I prevent you from playing a black-skinned elf? No. But, by definition, you'd be playing someone wildly abnormal.  Most people would presume your PC to be accursed in some fashion ... and very likely they'd be right.  Cityfolk would more often than otherwise recoil from you, villagers would grab the torches and pitchforks, and any ghastly crime committed within a week of your arrival OR departure would be presumed to be your doing.

That's the point where most Special Snowflake players throw a tantrum. See, they're usually fine with playing their bizarre I Must Be Different Than You Peons characters ... but they're not nearly as sanguine, in my experience, with facing the fallout of their choices, and often throw out accusations that they’re being unfairly targeted or “punished” in some way.

I reject, contemptuously, this concept.  If you decide that you're going to play an assassin, you run the risk of the law and heroic types hunting you down.  If you decide that you're going to play an orc, you run the risk of prejudice and fear in areas where orcs aren't well loved.  If you decide to run a priest, you'll run into people opposed to your faith.  These are all your choices to make: I am not going to force you to play an orc, an assassin or a practitioner of an unpopular faith.  If you want to play a character that twigs as few knee-jerk prejudices as possible, you can.

There are prejudices in my campaign.  Some make sense; many don't.  People are down on one another for the many reasons this happens in real life: racial, economic, class, home town, profession, nationality, ethnic group, hair color, speaking voice, what have you.  I quite understand people who don't want to encounter prejudice in their gaming, the same way there are people out there who don't want to encounter violence, who don't want to encounter fantasy ... what have you.  You've every right to seek a campaign that meets your requirements, and I wish people the best of luck in finding one.

Let me reiterate: the players don't get to decide what is or is not true in my game setting.  I do.  The details aren't up for voting.  If I wanted a Generic Fantasy World where anything goes, I'd play one, and no doubt that campaign would attract those who prefer such settings.  I don't want one, and I don't play one, and my campaign has attracted a couple hundred players who prefer those settings.  I am no more about to change fixed details for every newbie who can't stand coloring inside the lines than I'm going to stop running GURPS because that newbie prefers to play D&D, or that I'm going to stop running sandboxes because that newbie really prefers a nice, straight railroad track.

Here’s another quote from one of those debates: "Is the consistency of the world really that important compared to all you having fun at the table and being friendly?"

Why is it that some presume that "consistency" and "fun" are mutually exclusive values? My players like the consistency just fine, and they not only have fun, but they've been having fun for many years. Three of my current players have been gaming with me for over twenty years; a fourth has been doing so eleven years.

But hang on, let's turn the question around. Let's say you've just joined my main group. There you are, with the aforementioned four players. You're the newbie at the table. Why is being inconsistent really that important to you, compared to everyone having fun at the table and being friendly?  Don't you think it's UNfriendly to decide that the setting doesn't apply to you, and that you don't want to follow the guidelines that every other player's not only followed, but have done so for many years?  Wouldn't, in fact, YOU be the disruptive one here?  Why should the fun of other people be spoiled for your benefit?

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT (Pt II)

1)    Location

Any urban area, whether village, town or city, arises out of the need for trade.  While a small town can coalesce in a prosperous inland farming district or gather around a castle (indeed, skilled labor is necessary for a castle to be built), larger towns or cities locate on navigable rivers or natural harbors.  Just as an example, how many cities in the United States before the railroad era were NOT founded on a navigable waterway?  (Answer below. †)  One of the reasons in colonial America that Boston took off as a major port and Plymouth didn't was that Plymouth's harbor is quite shallow and silts up readily.

Consider also access to building materials, wood for fuel, fresh water, and nearby arable land.  The more negative factors there are that deter growth – the site's on an invasion route, a lack of forests for fuel, mountainous or swampy terrain – there must be counterbalancing benefits that make people want to live there (there’s a large gold mine, the location is unusually defensible, the kingdom’s northern border army needs a base, it's the birthplace of the Goddess of Winter and a pilgrimage site) and/or mitigating factors (less need for fuel because the town's on the equator, the local lichen is magically nutritious, the river going through is the only decent water source within 500 miles).  Another reason Boston took off and Plymouth didn't was that the soil of Plymouth's latifundia was sandy and not hugely fertile, and Boston's wasn't.

You’re also not going to get a town of any size far in the outback, away from trade routes or transportation infrastructure, no matter the benefits.  When all is said and done, the main reason people live in towns -- dirty, smelly, crowded, verminous, disease-ridden, dangerous places at medieval tech -- is to find work.  If work isn't to be had, folks aren't going to stick around.  If there are no resources and no trade, a ruler would have to be mad (and filthy rich) to subsidize a city out in the middle of nowhere, for no good reason whatsoever.  It's expensive enough, and hard enough on the soldiers, to subsidize a strictly military outpost in a forsaken outback: ask the Romans, the French, the British, or the mid- to late-19th century Americans, for that matter.

If your realm tries anyway to maintain a sizable town away from key natural resources (see below), that means you need an equally-sizable logistics train to support it.  This is easily disruptible by the realm's enemies.  (This, of course, can form the basis for plots.)

2)     Resources

A town of a thousand people will consume roughly twenty bushels of grain, around 800 gallons of wine, tea or beer, about three cattle, and about a hundred smaller livestock ... daily.  Throw in the vast amounts of vegetables common to the low-tech peasant diet, fruit, cooking oil, herbs ... Coming back to water.  A human needs about two liters of fresh water a day (or liquid equivalent) in order to survive, more to offset strenuous activity or high temperatures.  Cooking and washing use up a good deal more.  The various industries of a large medieval town or city uses roughly ten times that much fresh water per capita – for tanners, laundries, fullers, foundries, smiths, numerous others.  

(Never mind agriculture.  It takes four tons of water to grow enough cotton for a pair of trousers.  The amount of water livestock sucks up as a percentage of their food value is far more than grain or vegetables need.)

You’ll have to have market squares to hawk that food.  That means wagonloads of food and drink (the twenty-five bushels of grain alone takes up not quite two wagons) each and every day, and if your roads are impassible in winter, you need many more wagons coming through before then.  Storage?  Well ... if you keep your civic food stores dry, protected from vermin, and secure, they’ll keep two to four years without magic.  Maybe.  Say, does your gamesystem have a food preservation enchantment?  Because without that, food goes bad fast.  You don't have refrigerators, so the tomato that gets picked or the fish that gets caught needs to be eaten today.  By tomorrow it'll be iffy, and the day thereafter it'll be compost.  Those vegetables and fish -- obviously -- are NOT coming from the next province over.  They're coming from 5-10 miles away at the outside ... or, well, before they get to market, they become compost.

Also consider the stability of the countryside.  If you have continual plagues, invasions, bandit hordes and wars trucking through your lands, you’re not going to have prosperous cities, because there won’t be enough peasants left to grow enough food to feed them, nor enough traders surviving the gauntlet to provide raw materials and needful goods at economically feasible prices.  (That thousand-person town will need a minimum of five square miles of dedicated farmland, exclusive of the aforementioned peasant farmers needed to grow that food ... presuming the soil is good and the land is well watered and flat, there are no droughts, famines or civil disruptions, that the farmers employ sound agricultural practices, and that the harvest isn't whisked away to support a far-off royal capital or the realm's own marauding army.  For anyone who knows anything about medieval life -- or, indeed, low-tech agricultural travails generally -- that is a very tall order, and most medieval towns were food-importers.) You’ll also need a surplus enough to support non-productive elements, such as religious centers, universities, the aforementioned army or the bureaucracy of a capitol city.

3)    Trades

The absolute basic tradesmen without which a village doesn’t exist are a smith and a miller.  Next in importance (not necessarily in that order) comes potters, carpenters, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, coopers, and at least one tavern/alehouse. 

A small town will have multiples of the more important trades, and specialization will start to occur: extra blacksmiths turn into farriers, silversmiths and armorers; weavers into tailors, dyers and fullers; leatherworkers into saddlers and cobblers; carpenters into coopers, cartwrights, cabinet and furniture makers.  Specialized businesses appear: scribe/notaries, brokers, herbalists, shipwrights, healers, various food occupations such as brewers, bakers and butchers.  

(Psst: this doesn't mean that a bog-standard carpenter has no idea how to fashion a new wheel for a wagon, or that the country smith can't figure out how to make a broadsword.  They're just not specialists, may well not have access to specialist tools or the best possible materials, and aren't particularly practiced at making swords or shaping wheels.  Those goods may well be "Cheap", in GURPS terms: something that doesn't work as well as a specialist's creation, which will malfunction more often and break more readily.)

As a town gets larger, more specialization will be the rule.  Some towns concentrate on particular trades – the center of a wool-producing district will have a preponderance of cloth manufacturing trades (as much as two-thirds of all merchants), as well as wool merchants and factors for outside trade.  A grape-producing district will not only need vintners and distillers, but coopers and glassblowers as well.  Two-thirds nautical trades is pretty standard for any port city – chandlers, shipfitters, boatwrights, brokers, warehouses, sail lofts, ropewalks, salters, longshoremen, and the several elements of a fishing industry.  And so on.

Below is a rough outline of what businesses will be found in your population:

Village up to 500 people:

1 church (with one, maybe two clergy, and appropriate acolytes; also possibly lay-led)
1 healer/herbalist/physician (in some cultures, this would be one of the priests)
1 scribe/notary
1 inn/tavern
1 mill
1 smith

2-3 miscellaneous businesses, depending on prevailing local industries.  A seaport village might have a boatwright and a chandler, a farming village might have a tanner, a mountain village might have a mining concern, anyone might have a cartwright – especially if the village is on a highroad.

The village wouldn’t have much in the way of bureaucracy:  the mayor/reeve/headman, who’d be a respected farmer or businessman, and perhaps a single representative from the local overlord or central government.  If the village is on a significant trade route, there may be a tax/toll collector, perhaps a small barracks of a sergeant and three or so soldiers. 

In addition, most other residents will do various jobs – carpentry, pottery, basketweaving, brewing, weaving, masonry – on a part time basis.  There wouldn't be storefronts or colorful shop signs much beloved of Hollywood and Ren Faires – why, when everyone knows what everyone does? – but be more along the lines of "Eh, ma'am, if'n ye want some good jars, Goodwife Adrienne's a dab hand with the pottery.  That there's her cottage, the one wi'the gate missin' a hinge.  The smith promised he'd get t'that next week." 

Neither Goodwife Adrienne nor much of any craftsman the village has will have a plethora of off-the-shelf wares, but this is dependent on the time of year.  Low-tech villagers/farmers spent a lot of time in the winter doing up various crafts for future sale, mostly to itinerant peddlers and merchants coming around when the weather clears. The adventurers swinging by the village in March may well find those good sealed pint pottery jars they forgot to buy before leaving the city.

General merchant?  Not in anything this small.  Small town "general merchants" such as you see on TV shows or in 18-19th century reenactment museums are anachronistic to the medieval period.  Such wares that aren't made locally come from two sources: a local taking orders from his neighbors before taking his cart to the Big City to trade, or traveling peddlers coming through the area from time to time. 

Speaking of itinerant peddlers and merchants ... depending on the area, you might not have a local cobbler -- for instance -- but one riding a circuit.  Fellow's usually in town the first two weeks of May, the locals bring him cured hides, he churns out fitted good quality boots.  Probably would have no problem putting the adventurers on his list, if they didn't mind hanging out.  If the adventurers plod on through any time between June and April, no luck.

Locals also take on minor posts on a part-time basis – a village will have a constable, a handful of aldermen, and other more minor posts: a hayward, a woodward, depending on how stratified your culture is.  The village may have a one-room schoolhouse -- well, the dwelling of the teacher, anyway -- and classes might be taught by the scribe, a priest, or an educated villager.

Town up to 1500 people:

1 bank
3-5 scribes/notaries/lawyers (some working for the others)
2 churches (with 4-5 clergy between them and appropriate acolytes)
3 healer/herbalists/apothecaries
2 butchers
1 baker
1-2 fishers or trappers (depending on location)
1 full scale inn, 2-3 taverns, 1 brothel
3 blacksmiths (one a specialist, such as a farrier), 1 silver/tinsmith
3 cloth shops, one which is likely to be a rug or tapestry maker; 1 tailor
4-5 general merchants, one which is likely to be a specialist (outfitters, say)
2-3 mills
1 large-scale pottery
1-2 masons
1-2 carpenters, 1 cart/wheelwright
1-2 leatherworkers
7-8 miscellaneous businesses

Now we have a prosperous town, and the center of its district.  When the local farmers say "I'm walkin' t' town, be back tomorra," this is where they're headed.  The 500-person village might be in the middle of nowhere.  This town wouldn't have gotten this big if it was.

Other than general merchants and chandlers, they still aren't likely to have much in the way of off-the-shelf wares.  But ... I was struck when visiting the silversmith's shop in Historic Deerfield (replicating a mid-17th century New England frontier town).  It didn't have off-the-shelf either.  What it *did* have was a row of silver and pewter spoons, and a row of pewter plates and bowls.  They were all presentation pieces, done up with various borders, decorations and styles.  Pick a pattern, that's what the silversmith would make up for you.  This is how things were done low-tech.

A number of businesses have a DIY element.  Take a bakery, for instance.  Many a low-tech bakery was less about churning out loaves themselves than in providing oven space for the neighborhood housewives to bring their own loaves for baking, being rather more economical that way.  (This was also a sideline of neighborhood taverns, by the bye.)

This is the point where a small bureaucracy would arise.  The town would have a mayor/reeve, a captain for the local militia and who’d also be responsible for maintenance of any defenses, a tax collector and a dedicated scribe.  The mayor might double as the magistrate, if there wasn't a feudal ruler close to hand.  If a regional center of any sort, the town would attract central government staff – a district governor or noble and his staff, a couple dozen soldiers and officers – and there'd be an appropriate building housing the same: a manor house, a small keep.

For towns of over 1500 people, use the following percentages:

* Bakery: 1 per 750.
* Brewers: 1 per 1500, at a ratio of 3:1 between brewers and distilleries/wineries; obviously variable depending on what booze-producing crops you have.  Inns and taverns often brewed their own tipple.
* Butcher: 1 per 800.
* Carpenters: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between "rough" carpenters and specialty crafts such as wheel/cartwrights, cabinetmakers, coopers and carvers.
* Churches: 1 per 750.
* Clergy: 1 per 200, obviously hugely variable depending on how religious your town is.
* Dyers: 1 per 3000.  This signifies a large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Financial: 1 per 1000, at a ratio of 1:2 between banks and moneychangers/lenders.
* Fishmongers: 1 per 400 (selling fresh) in a port, 1 per 1200 (selling dried or salted) inland.
* Foundries: 1 per 5000.  Again, a large-scale industrial operation.
* General Merchants: 1 per 350, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between “country stores,” salters/spice merchants and brokers/factors/large-scale shippers.
* Inn/Tavern: 1 per 200, at a ratio of 1:5 between inns and taverns.  These neighborhood taverns are not your stereotype Giant Common Room places; a period neighborhood tavern seated about 30 with a bar about the size of a kitchen counter, and the clientele was exclusively from that block. (This aside from that a number of shopkeepers would end the business day by setting out a few stools and a barrel of brew, turning into impromptu barkeeps.)
* Leatherworkers: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 2:1 between generic leatherworkers and cobblers/saddlers/etc.
* Masons: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:2:4 between sculptors, masons and stonecutters.
* Mills: 1 per 600, at a rough ratio of 3:1 between grist mills and sawmills, fulling mills and the like.
* Potteries: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 1:4 between glaziers/glassblowers and potteries.
* Scribes: 1 per 150, at a ratio of 1:2:5 between lawyers, notaries and scribes.
* Smith: 1 per 500, at a ratio of 3-4:1 between blacksmiths and silver/tin/goldsmiths/armorers.
* Tanners: 1 per 3500.  Another large, industrial-style operation, as opposed to smaller household- or job-lot sized businesses.
* Teachers: 1 per 200, of which 1 in 4-5 are non-teaching scholars and scientists, who might nonetheless do part-time teaching and tutoring to raise some coin.  Small neighborhood schools and academies were far more common in medieval and Renaissance times than many folks imagine, and literacy rates in urban communities were 50% or better above the blue-collar classes.
* Textile trades: 1 per 100, at a ratio of 3:1:1 between weavers/spinners/carders, tailors/carpet/tapestry makers and furriers.  A town of this size probably has at least one large-scale cloth manufactory.
* Universities: These come around one to a city.  Starting at about 10,000 people, you’ll get at least an advanced institute of learning of some sort.  Capitals of any size, as well as major regional cities, will have a full-blown university.

Miscellaneous Shops: 1 per 200.  Possibilities for these:

* Common: stables, brothels, ropemakers, herbalist/apothecaries, barbers, lampmakers, painters, bathhouses, sharpeners, thatchers.

* Less common: bowyers/fletchers, ship’s chandlers, candlemakers, horse trainers, jewelers, outfitters, pawnshops, soapmakers, undertakers, messengers/heralds.

* Rare: gaming houses, perfumers, papermakers, seers, engravers, clockmakers, animal trainers, architects, cartographers, engineers, instrument makers. 

Keep in mind regional trades – for instance, a seaport would have sailmakers, at least one ropewalk, fishdryers, nautical carvers, chandlers, warehouses, specialty ship’s carpenters and smiths, navigators, steersmen, boatmakers, tattoo artists, shipwrights, and if large enough marine underwriters and freight shippers.  A mountain mining town would have specialty manufacturing shops producing mining tools and equipment, sawmills, assayers, alchemists (to produce certain chemicals necessary for mining and assaying certain ores), trappers and the like.

This is the population level where guilds will start to exist; around 4-5 similar businesses is the minimum number to form a sustainable guild.  Those aren’t the only support groups, of course; churches will have at least one sodality (and usually more than that) each.

The market square of a town this size now only sees the local farmers selling vegetables, but itinerant traders peddling just about everything else.  These are often heavily regulated and taxed, and crackdowns from town guilds are frequent.  Entertainers also exist, largely performing in the market, in front of any civic building or church, or available to play in an inn.

Towns and cities of this level have sizable bureaucracies, operating out of a civic hall.  Areas such as tax collection, records, justice and civic defense spawn whole departments.  A seaport would have a harbormaster, his staff, and naval units; any trading town would have an official in charge of weights and measures ... and probably in possession of the "standard" weights and weighbeams!  Formal military companies almost certainly exist. 

4)    Design

Cities aren’t particularly logical – the odds of having a nice grid layout, if you’re mapping it, are poor.  Consider that your city started out as a village.  It’ll have a relatively primitive tangle of streets in the center, haphazardly radiating out of the original village, which will center around the river/harbor/major road running through the middle, or perhaps around a religious center, castle or other fortification.

Planned towns did exist, but it took certain situations: a government seeking to settle an unpeopled area, a feudal lord wanting the profits and trade a town could provide.  Even so, most of them quickly spread organically from its original planned center ... those that survived.  (Many planned towns quickly failed.)  Plans were sometimes imposed upon extant towns and cities by new rulers or by the growing unsuitability of the original town; numerous cities in Europe had "oldtowns" and "newtowns" pressed together.  Another factor would be in the aftermath of a war or a major fire -- the latter being the chief danger to a medieval town -- where entire city blocks and neighborhoods might be redesigned after being razed.

Obviously, waterborne businesses (mills, shipwrights) will cluster around said river.  It was common for a river town to expand to the other bank, which necessitated at least one bridge.  Oftentimes the rich and poor parts of town were differentiated by which bank of the river they were on.

Low-class and odoriferous trades (tanneries, dyers, soapmakers, slaughterhouses) will cluster downwind in the “poor” part of town.  Beyond that, certain trades required a lot of space -- metalworkers, cartwrights, potters, animal trades -- and gravitated to the peripheries where land was more available and cheaper.

As towns grow larger, civic areas and buildings emerge: courts, wells and aqueducts, town halls, theaters, multiple market squares, caravanserais, jails, belltowers, stadia.

Buildings would also grow taller.  As the town got increasingly cramped, the only way to grow was up.  Townhouses gained a second story, and sometimes a third, and a fourth.  Seldom designed to take the load, with oft-mediocre building materials, and where no one had ever heard of building codes, structural collapses were all too frequent.

Psst ... don't forget canals.  Something you see in a lot of maps of low-tech cities that you do not see on maps of RPG cities are canals.  A lot of low-tech cities had a lot of canals.  It is vastly easier to haul large cargoes on water than it is on land -- much less congestion, many fewer horses, much greater carrying capacity.  (Even today, something like 95% of the world's trade by tonnage is water-borne.)  Canals also help the defensibility of a city ... and speaking of which:
 
5)    Defense

If the town is walled -- and unless your town is in a strong, powerful realm with secure borders and no internal threats (not a hallmark of RPG settings), it absolutely will be -- it may have been gotten its walls quite some time before.  If so, chances are the town’s grown beyond the perimeter.  Medieval towns were almost invariably horribly overcrowded, disease-ridden places, and while it took extreme population pressure to abandon the protection of the walls, sooner or later it happened.

Some medieval cities had several separate walls, built haphazardly over centuries, all attempts to maintain some manner of defensible perimeter.  Consider also that such construction is expensive – building a castle in just a few years took so much money few nobles managed it. The local nobles and magnates were generally taxed to pay for improving city defenses, and generally did so grudgingly, intermittently, and often only under duress.  Defenses were also expensive to maintain (it didn't help that they were often poorly built, with mediocre materials, by the aforementioned strongarmed magnates), and it's entirely possible that broad sections of the walls are in disrepair.  Indeed, the reason why so many Roman-era buildings were in ruins or disappeared entirely is that they were often cannibalized for the stone necessary to build or repair walls, in addition to other buildings. 

Beyond that, walls are inconvenient.  They make carrying goods to and fro a pain in the ass, and they're an impediment to growth and renovation.  (This didn't make the magnates any happier about coughing up the gold to build them.)  Wharves, docks, shipyards and mills are going to be on the wrong side of walls.  Gates built in sufficient number to relieve the pressure compromise the defensibility of the place.

Speaking of which, soldiers.  Standing forces, in medieval western Europe, were by our standards astonishingly small.  Take medieval Southampton, one of England's chief ports and the entrepot for the wool and wine trade between England and France in the Middle Ages, with an estimated population within the walls between 2500-2800.  Even after a catastrophic raid by the French in 1338, with the financial support of major nobles the King directed them to provide, the town struggled to maintain a permanent garrison of as much as a hundred soldiers.  Organized civic police forces just did not exist (at the time, Southampton maintained just six night watchmen), and a castle garrison might well be a couple dozen soldiers or less.

6) Personalities

A theme that keeps repeating throughout medieval annals is that towns and cities are firmly in the grasp of an oligarchy.  A small handful of families and personalities dominate local politics, commerce and social life, often for generations.  They own the guilds that matter, public posts are filled by their patronage, civic amusements are graced by their money and presence.  The laws and rules are rigged in their favor, and the culture is nowhere close to being a meritocracy.  Fail to be very, very polite to the Astirians or the Riannels, and suddenly merchants are very slow to take your orders, and the city's bureaucrats are all "out in meetings" when you show up ...

This ethos doesn't sit well with the average gamer, raised in a Western democracy relatively free of corruption and bearing at least the appearance of a meritocracy, and bringing to the gaming table the paradigm that the PCs are the swaggering masters of the earth before whom lesser mortals (read, "NPCs") all kowtow.  And it's okay if that's one of the aspects of medieval life -- along pervasive filth, disease, slavery, racism, fanaticism and sexual abuse -- you don't want to play.  YMMV ("your mileage may vary," code on many a gaming forum for "Whatever works for you is okay, it doesn't bother me if you have different preferences") is one of the more useful aphorisms to keep in mind when doing tabletop RPG setting creation. 

7) Giant Cities

Yes, I know.  A lot of gamers love giant, million-man cities.  A lot of gamewriters love them, too.  They just don't work.  A city of half a million people or more on medieval tech -- a Rome, a Constantinople, a Baghdad, a Chang'an -- requires a continent-spanning empire and awesome transportation infrastructure to survive.  Once the raiders/pirates have free run of things, once the empire falls, those cities collapse overnight.  In the course of just one century, the population of Rome fell twentyfold, and it didn't get back over a million for over 1500 years, until the 1930s.  And why bother?  A city of 10,000 will have several hundred businesses, more than all but the craziest gamers are ever going to create.  

Heck, take medieval England, the land gamewriters and settings creators love to emulate.  Only two cities in England -- London and York -- are known with a certainty to have broken 20,000 residents at any point in the medieval era.  (London topped out at around 50,000.)  Bristol and Norwich topped out at just over 10,000, and even counting the suburbs, Southampton couldn't have had as much as 5000. 

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POSTSCRIPT:  A kind reader commented on MDDR Pt I, and made a remark that provoked this postscript: that he'd read Ross' numbers, as many gamers have, but that the numbers didn't work for him.

This is important.  Let's take those 52 scabbardmakers, shall we?  That seems ludicrous, but presuming the number is accurate, there are a few possible explanations.  One is simply that there were a honking lot of swords and daggers in 13th century Paris.  (Not the rapiers and main-gauches most people think of when they think of Parisian swordsmen – those weren't invented for over 200 more years.  We don't actually know what kinds of sword for certain; the earliest known combat manual, the so-called "Tower manuscript," dates from no earlier than 1300.)

So, okay: now what happens if you envision Paris with severe weapon restrictions?

Answer: you probably don't have many scabbardmakers.

And that's the notion to have in mind when assigning numbers.  If you have an illiterate populace, there'll be far fewer booksellers, papermakers and the like.  (The number of scribes and teachers might not change – business still needs to be transacted, and those teachers might be working on rote memorization!)  If there's no native clay, there'll be more basketmakers, more turners and more leatherworkers churning out substitutes, and buildings will be made of wood, not brick.  If the Word of the Gods is that anyone who sails out of sight of land is accursed and damned, a "port" town might have a few coast-hugging vessels for bulk transport and a modest fishing fleet, and that's it.  If half the population of your town are 400-lb rock trolls, you'll need a lot more food coming in to support it.  And so on.

One last factor to keep in mind, not just for demographics but for anyone trying to tell you How Things Were In Medieval Times: we're talking about a few hundred years.  The notion that "medieval" was some monolithic state of being where everything everywhere was exactly the same for 400 years is nonsense.  Poor, chilly, backwards, thinly populated Scotland was a far different place than the rich, densely populated, glittering city-states of Northern Italy (and, as to that, both were far different places than China, India, Persia, Africa, Japan, Mesoamerica ... lands our Eurocentric myopia usually leave out of "medieval" equations).  The 11th century was a far different time than the 14th.

Heck, think of our own era, and how quickly things change.  What kind of businesses exist in our cities, and in what numbers?  In 1954, computers were giant installations that cost millions of dollars and filled large rooms; you could no more obtain them retail than you could walk into Filene's and buy an armored regiment.  In 1984, indy computer stores were popping up all over the place: I bought my first one from a dedicated Atari ST store in Boston.  In 2014, those computer stores are now mostly gone – computers are ubiquitous consumer appliances you can get in your average department store.  I doubt it'll take until 2044 for "personal computers" to be museum pieces, and everyone's using smartphones and tablets ... or their successors.

So – YMMV.

 

POSTSCRIPT II:  If you've read this article before, you might have found it changed.  I first published it over ten years ago.  I've expanded it, tossed in a few more things, tweaked the numbers here and there, cited a book or two I've read in the meantime.  I mention this for a reason: medieval demographics and economics is a still-evolving field.  Our scholarship is better.  Our sources have improved.  New facts, new materials come to light.  Old shibboleths are found wanting and slough away.  The bias of the field in favor of western Europe fades.  Scholars of a previous era, their partisan axegrinding and feuds forgotten, are supplanted by newer ones.

And I keep reading and finding new information myself.  So why not?  Anyone writing a blog does so at least in part out of a healthy ego, but the goal, after all, is to open eyes and make it easier for you to run games.  If I point fingers at others and claim that their numbers aren't good enough, then I need to cowboy up and make my own as good as I can manage.  So drop in on this article if you have a mind, every rare once in a while.  I might have gotten a clue between now and then.

 

† - Indianapolis, and the founders thought the White River was navigable.

Medieval Demographics Done RIGHT

(January 2022:  Well, people are very interested in this information; this two-part post is responsible for nearly half of the page views for the entire blog.  It's long since gone viral, to the point that some serious researchers have taken notice, and to my enduring wonder, it makes the top page of Google Search.  This warms the cockles of my heart, but listen -- this is the product of many years' research and trying to get it right.  Please feel free to comment below if you don't think I did!)

Medieval demographics and economics have long been an interest of mine.  I minored in the subject in college (seriously), largely because I wanted to become as expert as possible in the field for gaming purposes.  Between a divorce and what’s available on the Internet, I’ve trimmed down my library on the subject to a few dozen books, but I certainly have my opinions.

My opinion is that what you’ve been taught from gaming sources about low-tech cities is almost certainly wrong.

The most influential RPGer on the topic is S. John Ross, whose Medieval Demographics Made Easy article is widely cited and quoted as to what businesses existed in medieval cities and in what numbers.  Now S. John is a smart guy.  We were once on the same GURPS APA together, and we’ve corresponded; I respect the fellow.  But his article has some critical flaws, and I’d like to present this rebuttal both as a rant and for Wednesday’s Stuff.

* For starters, let's take his number on universities: "There will be one University for every 27.3 million people. This should be computed by continent, not by town!" Heck, by 1500 Italy alone had twenty universities which survive to the present day, let alone ephemeral ones in existence back in the medieval era. France, Spain and Germany each had over a dozen in medieval times ... even tiny Scotland (est. population in the Middle Ages, between 500,000 and a million) had three.  I've no idea from where he got that number ... it's bizarrely specific for being so desperately wrong.

* His break point on the population of town vs city is 8,000, but the true figure is around 5,000; if we're going by the legal definition of a city, most cities were chartered in England at between 4,500-5,000 population.  In Europe generally, the numbers and definitions were wildly skewed: in much of Germany and eastern Europe, for instance, the great majority of so-called "Free Cities" had a population of 1,000 or less.

* He asserts that a square mile of land will feed 180 people on medieval tech.  This is, in fact, a hugely variable number.  Under ideal conditions, after the invention of the horse collar and crop rotation, on table-flat completely cleared land, in multi-crop areas like the Nile Delta and northern Italy, presuming the land's at peace, you can manage over twice that.  The presence of forests, orchards, pasture land, hamlets, buildings, roads?  A tidal wave of smallholders tilling just a few acres and not hugely efficiently?  Oxen instead of horses?  Poor soil, swampland or inadequate water?  Cold climes like Scotland or Scandinavia?  Hill country?  Your farmers haven't invented crop rotation, horse collars or heavy ploughs?  (And, oh, let's not discount politics, war, droughts, locust plagues, untimely frosts ...)  If you can manage half that number for much of Europe, you're doing alright, and you'll survive getting less.

(By the bye, there's a conceptual thing you need to get out of your head.  Most cinematic sources, many fictional sources and a whole lot of gaming products depict what I call "vast cities in a sea of empty."  Gandalf rides up to Minas Tirith, Middle-Earth's largest flipping city by a LOT, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Shift the panorama to King's Landing, the capital of a nation the size of India, and outside the walls there's nary a farm, village or tarpaper shack in sight.  Now this nonsense might appeal to directors and set designers, for whom heroic charges against the walls are a lot cleaner to film than house-to-house battles through the suburbs, but why exactly would anyone sane want to import tons upon tons of grain -- never mind the vegetables, which would all rot en route -- from hundreds of miles away in preference to growing it right there?  Seriously.  Cities are at the center of vast webs of agriculture, not lonely bleak outposts, whatever the likes of Jackson, Benioff and Weiss care to depict.)

* The real killer are the totals for businesses, which are way, way, way out of kilter.

See, what Ross -- and many a gamer who doesn’t know any better -- uses for a guide is a single source: the so-called “1292 Parisian tax roll” cited in the end notes of Joseph and Frances Gies’ well-known work, Life In A Medieval City, which purports to give a comprehensive list of the 51 types of business in Paris in that time, and produces some oddities like there being 58 scabbardmakers in Paris in that year.

Yeah, but.

For openers, Paris was a very atypical place.  For most of the medieval period through to the 18th century, it was the most populous city in Europe, the national capital of Europe’s greatest kingdom.  Your average good-sized low-tech city is a tenth the size, much less likely to have baroque luxury trades, and much more likely to be near or on the seacoast and have the nautical trades Paris lacked.

For a second thing, the Gieses heavily truncated that list.  The real list didn’t have 51 entries; it had several hundred.  (As to that, the Gieses made some errors.  The list didn't cite 58 “scabbardmakers,” there were 52. Aside from anything else, in the eyes of a number of medievalists, the Gieses' scholarship has not aged well.) 

For a third, what they were working with was itself an edited list: one a mid-19th century historian named Hercule Géraud edited from the original manuscript.

For a fourth, the accuracy of the list is in dispute.  Géraud lists 116 goldsmiths, more than the combined number of inn- and tavernkeepers, half again as many as there were coopers ... indeed more than any other profession except for barbers, cobblers and leatherworkers.  In the words of medievalist Dr. Norman Pounds, "it is difficult to explain [their] presence, unless we can assume that their market covered much of France."  It's far from the only inexplicable result: only two lawyers?  Two lacemakers?  ONE roofer?  ONE fletcher?  Huh?

Most importantly, it wasn’t what the Gieses thought it was.  Géraud wasn’t attempting to present a comprehensive occupational list.  He was presenting a list of occupations with matching surnames – the French equivalent of “Joe Smith the blacksmith,” “Karen Cooper the cooper,” and suchlike.  If you went by (say) “Bob Traynor the notary,” then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you were a Jew that went by a patronymic ("Robert ben James") – a large percentage of them – then Géraud didn’t include you.  If you went by a placename ("Bob of Quincy") or a byname ("Ravenswing"), then Géraud didn’t include you.

(If that sounds like the 19th-century equivalent of a Wikipedia-style "List of African-American jazz players from Texas," I don't blame you.  The guy researched what he wanted to research, and there must have been some reason which made sense to Géraud as to why he put it together that way.  One wonders whether late 13th century Parisian goldsmiths just weren't in the habit of going by patronymics or placenames, and contemporary lawyers, lacemakers and fletchers were.)

You can see why I wouldn’t trust that list even if I hadn’t stared at it and immediately gawked at the notion that there are twice as many scabbardmakers as blacksmiths -- the fundamental business of the medieval world, and which was underestimated on Ross’ list by a factor of six.  Certain businesses are omitted entirely; potters, for instance, and most of the nautical trades.  (These do appear on Géraud's original, but in startlingly low numbers.  Just twelve sailors?  Seriously?  For a city the size of Paris, bisected by a great river, a thousand involved in the water-carriage trade would be a bewildering underestimate.)  It's hard to look at that list without wondering what the heck the Gieses were thinking presenting that as a credible business list, even as a footnote in an appendix.

Relying on a single source – never mind a single source far out of context – is poor scholarship. For example, I own a 1945 telephone directory for the city of my birth, Boston's immediate southern suburb.  It has listings for only five barbers; by contrast, it has four pages of listings for beauty salons.  Now I'm sure there are those who'd swallow that factoid whole and infer that in a city of 75,000 men wore their hair to their ankles ... or – in an era of close cropped haircuts – it might have been that neighborhood barbers had plenty of walk-up business, didn't do appointments and didn't feel the need for the expense of telephone service.  (Or, for that matter, that a telephone directory wasn't any more intended to be a complete record of every business in the city of Quincy, than Géraud's list of occupational surnames was intended to be a complete record of every business in Paris.  Go figure.)

My own take on the numbers comes from a basket of sources: Medieval Southampton by Colin Platt, Medieval Trade In The Mediterranean World by Lopez and Raymond, the renowned 14th century The Practice of Commerce by Francesco Pegolotti (Evans' translation), Streider's translation of the 14th century Palaelogus by Georgios Pachymeres, the Milanese and Genoese 12th century reductions published some years ago in the Journal of Economic and Business History,  the 13th century Florentine business list I copied from a lovely text in the BPL, The Merchants of Cahors by Denholm-Young, The Medieval City by Norman Pounds (part of the superb Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Medieval World published by Greenwood Press, which I strongly recommend), A Day In A Medieval City by Chiara Frugoni, and the magnificent corpus of work of Fernand Braudel.  And since this is rambling on a bit, I’ll save the actual chart for the next post.

Magic-as-technology, take II.

The noble paced for several moments, back and forth, before whirling on the wizard. "I have told you I need a Wand of Fireballs now, Sana!  Obey me at once, and no more shillyshallying!"

The wizard just sighed, slowly, quietly.  "Your Venerance, I have explained the problem on several occasions now.  When you commissioned me to craft a Coronet of Awesome and Tumescent Rulership, that locked me in to ten months solid of enchanting.  That effort cannot be passed on to another enchanter, even were one available.  Which there is not.  If I shift now to create so much as an enchanted tomato planter, that wastes seven months of work and the vast -- and unrecoverable -- sum of gold you have already invested."  She paused, for a long moment, before continuing. "That would of course, Venerance, be your decision to make."

* * * * * * * * *

Knobgobbler, my first kind commenter, gave me the notion to elaborate on the theme, something I would've done sooner or later anyway.

Caveat: we're talking realism here.  If you insist on million-person cities, Spelljammer-level ubiquity of powerful magics and all the trappings of High Fantasy, terrific ... just handwave what you want and have done with it.  YMMV.

Let's say you have a respectable sized city of 10,000 people.  (This really is a respectable sized city; it'd make the top five in England at most points in the medieval era.)  If wizards are as common as blacksmiths, you've got about 20.  Terrific, right?  Plenty of enchanting muscle!

Well, now, hold on.  Are all those folks practicing enchanters?  Of course not.  There are two major factors.  For one thing, most fantasy game systems require wizards to be of a certain power level to be a successful enchanter, excluding some -- or many -- wizards from ever doing it at all.

For another, why would every wizard be a professional enchanter?  Take Master Elaina, the water wizard -- sure, she’s the city’s most powerful mage, but she’s a full-time adventurer; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Mistress Syrielle is a legend, but she’s mostly retired now, and spends her time puttering in her garden from her wheelchair.  Master Ravenswing works for the Duke, mostly in divination; he’s not enchanting -- at least not commercially -- for a living.  “Whisper” is the hired mage of the richest fellow in town, and they say her telepathy and anti-thief magics are why he’s so rich; she’s not enchanting for a living.  Master Nightflame is the professor of thaumatology at the local academy; he’s not enchanting for a living.  Neither is his sister Arathena, who got stuck with the Guildmaster job of the local wizards’ chantry after Syrielle retired, and is hip deep in paperwork and disciplinary hearings.  No one trusts Master Halar the Pervert any more since he fell into the bottle; he’s sure as hell not enchanting for a living.  Whether anyone trusts Master Pando after the magical accident (he's yet to be able to cope with enclosed spaces, precious metals and the color red), he doesn't seem to be enchanting these days.  And Master Detheril is the new Knight Marshal of the city, and on the short list for a coronet the next barony that opens up; he’s too busy drilling the troops to be enchanting for a living.

So you might have ten enchanters; you might have half as many.  Just remember, though, if everyone else is an enchanter, you don’t have spare wizards for anything else.  Need someone to cast a divination spell for you?  No one available; they're all enchanting, remember?.  Want a wizard to teach your party’s wizard a spell?  Sure, spend three months in Nightflame’s next class (it’s about necromancy, by the way), and you can; otherwise, not.  Need that magical scroll written?  You’re SOL; they're all enchanting, remember?

Well, alright, half of what’s left.  Six enchanters, then.  How liberal is your game’s enchanting rules?  I use GURPS, myself (and let’s ignore that published material suggesting that only one wizard in ten be of a power level high enough to enchant at all, shall we?).  Purify Water sounds like a good, basic spell; an item that is self-powering takes 550 mage-days to enchant.  Which means that all six of those wizards, working together, can reasonably bang out an item in three months; it can purify nearly 3000 gallons of fresh water per day.  In a year’s work, they can enchant enough to handle all the fresh water needs of the city for drinking.  (Unfortunately, the cooking, bathing and industrial needs for fresh water are about TEN TIMES as much.)

But sure, they stick with it for a decade.  Now the city has plenty of fresh water, magically created!

Fair enough.  But it doesn’t have magical streetlights.  It doesn’t have magical weapons.  It doesn’t have magically created food. It doesn’t have anything else enchanted.  And even that much rests on a few very flimsy premises:

* Every enchanter is a skilled water enchanter.  Why would they be?  Is every wizard you run?  Mightn’t they just as likely be earth enchanters, or fire enchanters, or temporalists, or communications specialists?

* None of them have any better gigs going on than creating fresh water for the city.  What happens when agents for Countess Silvermist come and ask a couple of the enchanters exactly how long they plan on playing Third String Waterboy for the Duke, when they could come work for the Countess for double the pay and their own private towers?

* As I mentioned in the pertinent GGF post, nothing ever goes wrong.  The Purification items don’t get stolen and sold on the black market, the city’s enemies never decide to ruin them, the wizards never strike for more money, the city always pays on time and in full, none of the wizards ever gets sick, the Duke never concludes that the city has plenty of water already and the money’s better spent refitting his cavalry troop after they got pasted in the last battle, the fire that torched a fifth of the city miraculously missed the Water Works, or the Duke’s never an egotistical snot pissed off that Countess Silvermist’s water purification items are made of gold, so his ought to be too, ditch the old ivory ones?

So sure; there are some ways wizards can have a material impact on life in a city.  If your system has a Predict Weather spell, one forecasting mage can save the lives of a lot of fishermen.  One wizard with long distance telepathy ... well, we know what instant communications can do.  A battery of wizards, as a long term civic project, well funded, might be able to implement ONE change - pure water, magical street lights - as long as that change is simple, and nothing goes wrong.

So do the math for your own systems.  How many people get to be journeyman wizards?  How many wizards are capable of enchanting?  How many wizards do you want to task to do other things: battlemages, teachers, researchers, detectives, adventurers, court wizards, mages-for-hire and fussy old coots who just want to putter in their gardens and not be bothered.  Does your magic system encourage/require specialization?  How long does enchanting take?  Can just anyone use an enchanted item?  Can an item work without supervision?  How fragile are magical items?  Do they have charges, after which they expire?

This is why you don’t have “magical” economies.