Inventing Village Blocks

Okay, let's build a random generator.   This is going to be for laying out villages.  To help, we have this list of facilities to place.  My plan is to build a system that uses hexes, in the way I've described before, demonstrated here and also here.  Only, we'll try to do better than I did in 2018.

A "block hex" is 435 ft. in diameter, or 145 yards, or 132.588 metres.  In area, a block hex is 3.899 acres, or 0.006 sq.m., or 1.578 hectares.  Counting an extreme urban density for the medieval world is 40,000 persons per square mile, supposing a density of 10,000 per square mile puts 60 persons per block hex.  Therefore a village of 240 persons would have four "residence" blocks.  A village of 720 would have twelve.  This should be simple enough.

Note this village link on the wiki.  I worked on it today as a stub.  Be sure and read the details there; you'll need them for this post.

Okay, let's look again at those facilities available for villages, those in type-4 hexes:

From recent posts, and from the wiki, it's understood that a village not located on a river has 2 hammers and that one located on a river has 3 hammers.  Settlements may also be villages, depending on the size of the settlement, but settlements may also appear in any type of hex (though I haven't found one yet in a type-7 hex).  By my system, the only way a type-4 hex can have 4 hammers is if it includes a settlement.  There's no way for it to have 5 hammers (at least, not now; I may make a change in the future, but let's not think on that).

As per the wiki page, a village with 2 hammer is a "small village"; one with 3 hammers is a "large village."  The wiki explains the population generation for these.  A "settlement village" has a predetermined population, as the settlement link above explains.

Everybody in good and deep.  Excellent.

The next step is to make "block types."  For the record, I'm writing this post while solving the problem.

Residences.  The most obvious is a collection of houses, though finding a suitably archaic term is difficult — "neighbourhood" is 1620; "residential" is 1856.  Let's make two kinds of residential and call them "cottage blocks" (50 residents, 8 cottages) and "hovel blocks" (70 residents, 12 hovels).  Cottage blocks would be responsible for cottagecrafting that occurred.

Waterfront.  For this, we can gather together the boat dock, the quay and storehouses.  The quay is two or more boat docks, so we can toss that out ... unless we want to make a rural block with a boat dock in it.  Let's save that for later.  Let's option the public house to the waterfront, though this can only occur in settlement villages.  We can add the hostel also.  A hostel is a minimal wooden frame supporting a common room of bunk beds, a place for public washing, a hearth for cooking and warmth, plus and an exposed animal enclosure and a wooden shed for storage.  All this and an outhouse.  A small village is limited to one waterfront block, a large village can have two.  10 residents.

Yards.  This doesn't describe the space in front of a house, but a dumping site for materials, such as a log yard or a ship yard.  Believe it or not, the verb is "yarding" when describing the depositing of stores there.  We can start with the "farmer's yard," including garners and the granary, the grain mill, the shearing station, a windmill and a well.  We can scatter wells in several blocks.  Including two hovels plus living space in the mill, call it 20 residents.

We can make a second type of yard, the "material yard" that includes the sawpit, ox tethers, the carter post and again a well, the cloth mill and the wine press (or their local equivalents).  In a small village, run on wind power, in a large village, run on water power.  Likely a gong pit is tucked in somewhere, fifty or sixty yards at least from the well (and downstream, if applicable).  Again, 20 residents.

Village Centre.  Very easy: the bakery, the blockhouse, gallows, well and the gamewarden's house, clustered together with four cottages.  This ''village centre" has a compliment "market," which includes the area supporting the day market, the blacksmith, two wells and an inn, which only occurs with settlement villages.  The two would most likely be adjacent, but we might suppose they could be separated by one hex.  We'll get to placement of these blocks in time.  Packed a little tighter, 40 residents.  Limit of 1 per small village, 3 per large village.  There would only be one market block, with only 5 residents.

Temple Block.  Gravesites have been replaced by the cemetery, adjacent to the temple; the temple includes an adjoining cottage and well.  10 residents.

Manor Block.  This includes the manor, and with settlements two adjoining blocks of walled-in land.  The guardpost is located on the edge of the block.  One per village, regardless of size or type.  7 residents per 100 population.

Okay, altogether, we've identified the following blocks: cottage, hovel, waterfront, farmer's yard, material yard, village centre, market, temple and manor.  That's 9 types.

Let's add some more, not based on facilities.  If the village is adjacent to a river, it would have a ford, a bridge or a ferry, which would include a guardpost on the opposite side from the village.  Obviously, there's only one of these "crossing" blocks.

Because villages aren't "designed" so much as collectively joined together, we can break up the continuity of occupation by placing farms, primarily for market gardening and growing vegetables, though tilled land is an option.  If we want, we can distinguished "tilled" blocks and "garden" blocks.  To these, we can add "orchard" blocks.  We can also add a "village green" block that includes animal enclosures, a space used for meetings and mini-pasture lands.  Finally, we can include "natural" blocks, where the land hasn't been worked; this kind of place should have a high chance of including a pond, or some rocky feature that makes adaptation next to impossible, such as commonly occurs along the Mediterranean coast.  We could also think of places surrounding shrines or beautiful natural features, but let's leave these off our list for the present.

By my count, that's 15 block types.  As I see it, the next steps are to create a random table to generate blocks at different rates, then to make up rules about which must exist, and how random additional blocks are placed.  This, I believe, I'll leave for another post.

Building Blocks

This is Le Pre-Saint-Gervais, 4.6 kilometers from Paris, which has the distinction of being the 8th densest city in the world, despite having a population of only 18,121.  Unfortunately it is not a medieval city; Paris annexed the commune in 1860, whereupon it was completely transformed from a farmland and royal resort into the densely populated suburb it is today.  So it cannot be representative of any sort of medieval city.

What it can tell us is something about population density.  Unlike the sort of slum that is the substance of Manila, Mumbai or Dhaka, Le Pre, along with other French communes like Levallois-Perret, Vincennes and Saint-Mande, is a structured, architectured environment.  In that way, we can compare it to the densely made cities of the Middle Ages, as a limit on what might be termed as maximum population density might be.  Le Pre has a density of 259 persons per hectare.  In old English units, what my world is based on, that's 109 persons per acre; or rather, per 43,560 square feet; and, just for shits and giggles, 109 persons per 2,007 combat hexes (that are 5 ft. in diameter, 21.7 square feet in size).

That will seem empty for most people, and it will surely occur to many a reader that population densities in history MUST be more dense than that.  Truth be told, we can argue whatever we want.  There are no sources; no final documents; no definitive arguments at all, for what population densities might have been at any time of history except in our own time.  And the reader will take note on how much green space and open road, without visible cars, occurs on the map above.  Too, the densest city in the world, Manila, is only fifty percent denser than this. Picture the above with only one third of the greenery removed.

Google Earth's 3D Rendering of Le Pre-St.-Gervais

Le Pre has the distinction of being made entirely of apartments; most of which would be slightly higher than the Medieval equivalent, but not much; a heavily urbanized Medieval equivalent might be a bit lower to the ground, it might then have less green space ... but it wouldn't have a denser population.  Clearly, above 100 people per acre, movement and living gets impractical.

Where it comes to exploring an urban environment, we might think in acres ... or, more appropriately, "blocks."  A block is the standard description of the city environment; it comprises both the street and the buildings, it suggests a certain character and, best of all, it isn't used for any other term to be found in Dungeons & Dragons (or any other RPG that I can think of).

But how large is a block?  Well, I have a document for that too, that the reader can use to while away some time at work while looking like doing real research.  It talks about "block density":

"All streets at some point form blocks (a block being defined as a street that closes in on itself, or an area of private property surrounded on all sides by public rights-of-way). Blocks can be relatively small. In the Fairlie-Poplar district of downtown Atlanta blocks are 200-feet by 200-feet. But blocks can also be relatively long, like some of those in Manhattan with a 900-foot length. In either of those cases, you have a different kind of block density, and certainly a different kind of block density than what you typically find in a place like Alpharetta, Georgia, in the Windward area, where the blocks take on an entirely different magnitude of size and amorphous configurations.

"Blocks can be difficult to measure because they are not all rectangles. Some are trapezoids, or circles, or amoeba-shaped. Many residential areas here in Atlanta have these sort of amoeba-shaped blocks. So you have to start teasing out some of the geometric properties of these things such as block length and depth and total perimeter in order to compare them.

"A number of years ago I became interested in this type of analysis and this question of block density. I began a little study which is only semi-scientific. I say semi- because at the moment it only includes a sample size of 200: ten cities, 20 blocks per city. I have compared the sizes of blocks built before 1928 to those built after 1928. Why 1928? Because that is the year that the Standard City Planning Enabling Statute was passed out of Congress, and that is when we have subdivision regulations being adopted in a formal way for the first time in almost every city and county, every municipal jurisdiction in the nation."

Now, this talks about Georgia in America, but let me stress again that there are NO source documents from any time that are earlier than the 19th century, so it doesn't matter if this is factually true for the time in which a D&D game might take place.  We can, in the end, just make shit up; in the meantime, however, let's just go with what documentation we have.

I think the stress that we can get from Douglas Allen's research is that blocks change from place to place, and from time to time.  Our conception of blocks is based on regulation and municipal law, that was once not a part of the community's mindset.  As shown on Allen's table to the right, block size has increased since 1928.  Allen's argument is that the growth can be ascribed to the presence of automobiles ... and to traffic signals, which were designed to compensate for a speed of 40 miles per hour.  It's an interesting passage, but I won't go into it here.

For myself, I quite like this.  The actual dimension of an actual city block is not important, from a game design perspective ... but identifying a hex as "the amount that can be explored in a day" with "one block" is appealing.  But of course, how big of a block are we talking about?  One that fits with a city like New York?  Or something more akin to Omaha?

The answer is bound to be arbitrary, no matter what we base the decision upon.  None of us can possibly know if it is possible to explore 1.9 acres in a day or 4.4 acres in a day, given what a medieval town might look like.  It might take us ten minutes to cross a particular thoroughfare because of traffic, the amount of gong on the street, our willingness to get ourselves caked with said gong or how wide the street is.  There are a hundred possible drains on the clock that we can't conceive of or guess at, but can reasonably be taken for granted as we have made our environment as convenient as possible, for everyone (by including street lights, for example).  Getting around in a Medieval city might have been a real headache.

Still, we have to base these things on something, right?

Some will remember that I map my world in 20-mile diameter hexes, and that I have occasionally spoken about breaking up these hexes into smaller units.

If I continue to zoom in, to produce progressively smaller hexes along this process, always dividing one hex into seven smaller hexes, I get the following chart:

Which, I'm sorry, fascinates me endlessly.  In the middle of the chart, we find the sweet spot: 3.76 acres, with 225 people if we establish a dense population as 60 persons per acre.  Some block-sized hexes could be relatively empty; so that there's no absolute size for how many hexes a given village, town or city covers.  A village made of only scattered houses may cover a dozen block-sized hexes.  A densely packed town on an island may cover only five or six blocks.  This makes for plenty of creativity.

Nor does a town have to be in one part.  Three blocks along a river might be separated by empty hexes (fields, rough ground, cliff faces) from two dense blocks surrounding a castle.  We don't have to be regular in our design, such as we've seen from pre-made generators.

I also love the fact that the chart goes right down to the combat hex, 5 feet across.  If any readers have ever used a typical rubber mat for game play, those are usually 48 hexes by 32; the town block as depicted is 87 combat hexes across.  That would be four battle maps. Well within the realm of grasping size and scale here.

Fascinating, nyet?