Number of Buildings in a Village, Town, City, etc.

[WastedTime]

This is a question that is causing me difficulties. Although the DM's guide provides us with a nifty table of population sizes for the differing co0mmunity sizes, I find this of little utility. I am presently designing a town and am fumbling with how many buildings should be present. I had considered just dividing the average community size by the average household size (whatever that means, e.g. how does a business building and a household relate?) to determine the average number of buildings in a community. However, even at large household sizes this seems to produce a considerable number of buildings.

For example, a small town on average has about 1500 people. Taking an average "household" size of 5 produces 300 buildings. Perhaps my conception of size is off, but this seems like a lot of buildings for a town. Anyway, any suggestions from the esteemed community? Thanks all

 

[BiggusGeekus]

You could increase the assumed size of the families, combine mechant's buisnesses with their homes, or shrink the size of each dwelling. That will probably give you the result you are looking for.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

PS: You may also want to check out Mideval Demographics Made Easy. And welcome to the forums!

 

[Kilmore]

Another thing to think about is what kind of buildings are in this village? For what most of us think of for a medieval "town" there will probably be larger two or three storey buildings housing twenty or more people apiece, with shops on the ground floor. Let's say there's about fifty of these buildings, and the rest of the town is one or two family residences, from rundown cottages to a noble's summer palace. About fifty of these.

Finally, we have monks staying at monastaries, soldiers in barracks, students in dormatories, priests at temples, etc. Maybe about 15 other buildings like this.

This is all my unscientific, unresearched opinion, but it sounds reasonable to me.

 

[jmucchiello]

Don't forget the rich families with mansions housing 2-3 generations of the family (5-12 people) and their servants (8-20 more people). Cuts down on the number houses, fast. Also, remember a town's populations probably includes any farms within a mile of the town. So not all 1500 people are within the town proper.

As the population of the town shrinks, the wider that area around the town becomes. A thorpe's population might include a farm 5 miles away.

And do read S. John's demographics article. It's very good.

Joe

 

[willpax]

A very good book relevant to this subject is Life in a Medieval City by Gies (sp?). It's a very well written account of a city that hosted an annual fair in Medieval France. It describes life in a merchant's household as well as other mundane details of city life at the time.

 

[alsih2o]

also look for "daily life in holland in the year 15??" it is a great book that outlines how cities worked, and didn't

 

[Sir Edgar]

If you are staging this campaign in a medieval-type setting, you'll have to keep in mind that health care was not readily available or nearly as developed as it is today. The infant mortality rate was very high. In some cases, half the children of a couple could die in the first year of life due to sickness, starvation, accident, or other causes. So, couples would have many children as an insurance policy against the likely deaths. Please remember, there was very little in birth control methods at the time and not much education in terms of family planning either.

Also, rural farming families had many children because this provided free labor for their farms. Even today, if you look at agrarian societies in India or Africa, there are often families of 10 or more children living with extended members of the family, too. In fact, you can still find grandparents on both sides, an unmarried aunt, a couple of cousins, and even a friend's child all living under the same rood. The concept of a nuclear family is a recent phenomenon, indeed.

Thus, families were often times much larger than they you may expect. In addition, sometime, multiple families would share an inhabitance together. So, it really depends on what the location is (i.e., rural farming village vs. trading city). In a village of 1,500 or so, I would guess to say that there would be as few as a couple hundred houses or even less, which would technically make it a very large village (most likely a small or even large-size town).

For comparison, from what I recall, London had only about 20,000 people living within the immediate area during the early Middle Ages.

 

[geezerjoe]

I've also recently run into this problem ... while I haven't read the article listed above (but plan to ) I set some of the following criteria for my town of 1000 plus I THINK that the DMG city-builder generates the number of adults in the city/town, then you need to generate the number of children based upon that

1st I determined that for my city that about 25-50% of the townsfolk were farmers. Some locations would be more agricultural than others and this loc was a little more out of the way than others ... but was able to be selfsuficient with little to no surpluses. I simply chose 1/3 or 33% for simplicity's sake.

2nd After determining how many people I had in the city proper (base number - number of farmers) I determined how many of those people were staffed in large complexes ... city guard, militia, inns, large residences, schools, etc ... for a new city population.

3rd I used a value of about 1.8 and divided the new city population by that value. That I used to determine the number of independent households in the city on top of the number of previous buildings. While 1.8 seems to suggest most of the families are married households, I determined that many households are lead by single parents and others are multiple family households.

4th a number of the independent households I determined would be also be places of business. I determined the number to be really high, 90%, for that city. The remainder of the buildings would be just households.

5th some buildings would have to be included for warehouses, businesses, and such. Many business would be located near the owner's residence but that's not a hard rule ... just fast

Finally, there would be a good number of people living in other locations ... rangers and druids in the woods, thieves in the sewers, etc ... just about anything you can think of.

What I would like to find is a demographic of what kind of crafts and professions are more likely to be found in a general populations.

l8r

Joe Too Old

 

[jgbrowning]

just a tid-bit for you, in medieval times anywhere from 10-20% of the population in cities were beggers.

im writing a book right now about this subject, if all goes well it should be finished by the end of january and then a month of editing/layout/reading than off to the printers. i 'd like it to be out next spring. i know that doesn't help you now, but keep your eyes open for it. it should have everything you need.

It will have information regarding density, number of structures, a building system so you can price your structures, a profession generation system, a random building generator for on-the-fly building creation based upon what ward your in, information for determining guilds and power centers, % breakdowns of professions in cities, and how magic affects the concept of a medieval environment.

heh, i look forward to having it done.. its a monster..

joe b.
Expeditious Retreat Press