yo /tg/ i'd like to put together a lil setting to have one-off adventures in with my friends w/ villages and farms and forests and that sort of junk but i'd also like to put more thought into this than a bethesda game
problem is don't really know shit about this topic. does anyone have any good resources on the really broad level of how people were organized back then - not just like, how was a town laid out, but rather how villages might be grouped near each other, or how they were organized under some sort of larger authority
literally all i know about this comes from one middle ages england class i took which devoted a minor amount of time to talking about how lords ran their shit so any help appreciated
in the meantime i'll post setting inspos
>>54665734
>problem is don't really know shit about this topic. does anyone have any good resources on the really broad level of how people were organized back then - not just like, how was a town laid out, but rather how villages might be grouped near each other, or how they were organized under some sort of larger authority
What time period are you going for and what's the world vaguely like?
I ask that because there's basically, like, two periods of medieval times: Ye olde pre-plague times where smelly peasants were obligated to work for lords, lords were obligated to protect and fight for them, and then the king and church at the top whom were obligated to lead and pray for them.
But then you've got Ye olde post-plague times where all of this fell apart because the plague killed 70% of everyone and now you had more food, higher unskilled working wages, and the societal class order collapsing cause they all thought god didn't like them anymore... So now you've basically got a 'middle class" n' such.
If it's not a western fantasy, though, ignore all that.
Or do you mean more in the sense of how... Uuuuhhhhmn, Towns and Villages built themselves and why they were here, there, etc?
Because that's easy: They're all next to rivers, and each one is about 25-45'ish km's away from each other with numerous small or pissy one-horse villages inbetween. The exceptions are places with a really valuable immobile resource like salt, precious metals, pitch, and other such warcraft/age of empires style stone or metal quarries. In these such cases; the rest of the world usually comes to THAT village and trade routes and roads form out of it because everybody wants what they've got and that community in turn needs stuff they can't produce due to being a 1 thing economy.
>>54666484
Thanks for throwing out some ideas, firstly.
I was personally thinking about getting inspo from late medieval stuff - I've been reading a lot of history from that period recently which has been interesting and making me feel inspired. But unfortunately the dudes writing down their feelings on divine right didn't go "... oh btw let's just do some urban planning and development work in the margins too"
but ofc since it /is/ fantasy (tho lower fantasy is more my jam) there's a certain amount of handwaving/"worldbuilding" that can be done to make things work
I know a bit about the politics, broadly speaking - iow "there's econ changes, political thought is shifting" - but nothing on the organizational side beyond the simple stuff.
Thanks also for the bit on just general village building - reminded me of some resources I think I read once off reddit or somewhere else, I'll have to go hunting.
>>54668651
Here is a general example of a manor. What >>54666484 was talking about before the plague devastated populations
>>54665734
Read "A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe", it will refresh your memory on lords and as a plus it will teach you how to add magic to that. It is intended specifically for D&D but it's still useful for other systems with a little bit of tweaking.
>>54665734
https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
Hey OP
Here's some town and village maps for a game called Haarn. Haarn is (was?) basically a no fantasy game about not!medevialEngland. The maps are very accurate to what an actual village would look like
>>54670636
>forgot link like a tard
http://www.aedificium.org/Maps/LocalMaps.html