I'll Ask Again: What Do We Want a Town Map For?

Now would be a good time to tie some threads together, bringing us back around to a city map.  The image on the right, as judgmental as it is, offers far more suggestion to the imagination than what me might see on an RPG product.  Without a single building ~ and the streets not being needed either, though they are there for people who know New York ~ we can visualize the landscape from our personal experience and our relationship to the description given.

So ... with the first post in this series, I ended with some discussion about how urban settlements are time sinks, and how many smaller places might not have the things you're looking for ... without quite making the point that you could spend time looking for something in a town or city that doesn't actually exist.

With the second post, I wrote about how settlements accumulate organically rather than by decision ~ and in certain geographical locations, dictated by access, happenstance of the terrain and necessity.  With the third post, I wrote that settlements accumulate inside the boundaries of the settlement as well, as labor and the need for survival causes poorer people to gravitate to parts of the city where they have the potential to earn money, while money that has been accumulated is collected into places that isolate themselves from the poor.  This can be plainly seen on the map above, in the way that Very Rich People and Super Rich People exist apart from Grime, Sludge, Irony and Old People.

Finally, with the fourth post, I wrote about how the substructure of the urban environment needs to be reconstructed so that adventures can happen without fear of dogpiling by half the population.  The question remains, how do we make an urban adventure fit into a structure that can behave in a proper functional manner, like the wilderness does with its open spaces, or the dungeon does with its dystopian claustrophobia?

Ah, that's where I'm heading.

Remember that I said a town has an open framework; as an entity within its boundaries, you can move through most of it without infringement.  Yes, there are private places, inside buildings, behind locked doors, built behind high walls with guards, nasty pets and magical glyphs.  But if we consider the map above, if you want to walk among the rich people, or if you want to see the dead people, or if you want to wander among the ducks, you're free to do so.  Some neighborhoods will be risky; others will judge your clothing and disdain your presence.  There are lots of places where you won't make friends.  But you can go there.

Suppose, however, that you did not have the map above to help you.  Imagine that you did not have a lifetime of hearing or reading stuff about New York, or seeing movies filmed there, or having it explained to you by urban designers or historians.  Suppose you did not know one damn thing about New York ... just as a 15th century resident of Yorkshire would not have known one damn thing about London.

Suppose you enter from the top center of the map, where it reads "Canada."  What does Jazz, Great Southern Food and the appearance of smart kids on the street tell you about what you might find in the rest of the city?  Could you guess?

Now imagine that there are no cars, no trains, no modern services of any kind ... and that only the very wealthy have access to horses.  This is the 15th century, so even a coach service doesn't exist.  Like people in the country who would live their whole lives within seven miles from where they were born, people in the city could live their whole lives within seven blocks.  Thus, none of these people you meet on the edge of the city would be able to tell you what the rest of the city contained.

Now remove the street signs.  And most of the business signs.  The bakers would tend to congregate on one street, the leather workers on another ... and in a given part of the city, that street would be known as Baker Street ~ but there would be no sign.  In a city as big as New York above or London (and nothing really was, but if we remove most of the high rises, it's arguable that Beijing, Lahore, London or Paris sprawled as much as the above example), there might be a dozen or more "Baker Streets" ... known locally as that by the nearby inhabitants.  Don't laugh.  How often does "High Street" appear in America?  Or "Garden Street", or "Lakeside" whatever?

Everyone knows where the butcher lives and where the cobbler lives.  There's no need for big, showy signs designed to attract attention.  Everyone has as much work as they can manage anyway, as everything is hand made.  More customers does not make more time in the day, nyet?  [sorry; using Russian is probably not desired just now, is it?]  So a particular kind of shop might have a little sign next to the door, something the size of a hand-span, reading something like, "J.M. Dodd, Esquire."  But what is that?  A solicitor?  A jeweler?  You'd need to poke your head in the door to find out.

An Inn or a Tavern might have a bigger sign, but signs cost money; and after a few years, the paint wears with the rain and is bleached by the sun, until it can barely be read from the street.  Most of the people there know it's "The Aged Keg," but you, dear stranger to this place, might walk past the building three or four times before realizing it's the place where you're supposed to meet your contact.

Of course, you're thinking you'd recognize it by the bright lights, and the shouting and laughter, and probably the music.  Perhaps on a warm night in the summer time, but likely not if the weather is foul.  And candles cost money too, except when Hollywood can use electric light to fake them.  Nor are the locals likely to sing much, as they're working fourteen hour days. They only want to drink to deaden the feeling in their muscles, just as people now choose to do.

So you shouldn't count on the fellow passing by on the street to give you much information about the city beyond his small piece of it. He's busy, anyway, hauling something for his master, or collecting rents, or heading off to meet his mistress, or whatever he's doing that's keeping him from his rooms, his duties or his master's service.

When I think of strangers coming into a town, I think of this:

[feel free to ignore the music]

Given time, the locals will come around (which is played up in order to make the musical work), but for the most part they don't like strangers.  This, too, is a barrier to knowing how a city or town is put together.

If it hasn't occurred to the reader yet, what I'm saying is this: like a dungeon, cities require exploring.  Really big cities are filled with open areas, gutted neighborhoods (from fires or disasters, see "oil spill"), strange isolated cultures, forces for good or evil, etcetera ... but isolated by distance and the obscurity that comes from really a lot of buildings and roadways, not from stuck doors or difficult descents.

Players should have it explained that walking straight through the middle of a city along the busiest avenue won't yield much information.  Without signs, without the features we recognize in our day and age, which wouldn't be recognized by a stranger of its own time, cities are huge baffling maelstroms of people.  The busier the avenue, the more people have to do, the less time people have to talk.  The loafers with time to chat are out of sight, in back lanes, seated around small flophouses, bitterly resenting strangers who have the money to walk around in armor while they carry weapons.  Cities and towns aren't friendly, in either the congenial or the interfacing sense.  They're complicated, cluttered, deceptive, hard to know ... and must be explored one block at a time, diligently, if they're to give up their secrets.

If we want a map, we want one that will emphasize THAT.

Dogpiling

Continuing upon the theme of the last post, the Steady Urban State, let's talk about players interacting with the town culture as described.

Within the coded storybook framework, where the DM creates the narrative in advance and then moves the players through that narrative, the town serves as a supply depot, for both equipment and easy exposition, or elaboration of the party's goals.  The party is organized to speak to specific persons in the town, who have specific information to give, before being shuttled out of town into an environment where the players are able to act upon their knowledge.

For this, the town needs to be nothing more than a series of stalls where the players stop temporarily to get their assignments.  They don't have to interact with a living, breathing town ... and this works for most games.  With the introduction of a sandbox game, however, we have problems: suddenly the occupants of the town have their own agendas.  They don't exist to assign anything to the players.  They exist because they exist ... and the players are forced into a minefield where anything they might do has the potential to conflict with that existence, which is bound to end very badly.

I've watched this play out many times.  Players don't know what to SAY to ordinary townspeople.  They don't know what to talk about, or even how to start conversations.  They don't understand what townspeople want, or how to make townspeople interested in the player's wishes or interests.

Just like in real life.

Put a typical D&D player into a town setting, where the town is not an engineered-knowledge dispenser for adventure giving, and the players will find themselves in a situation very like their own personal experience as a social leper.  For most D&D players, if they had a sense of how to interact with real people, who have real goals, they wouldn't be D&D players.  Making them play in a world where they need to produce full sentences that sound like they have a purpose is like rubbing a player's nose in their own inadequacy.

This is part of the reason why so many players deal with town and/or social situations by drawing a weapon and killing the nearest person.  It's a tactic that works great in a dungeon, but not very well in a town.  A dungeon is a compartmentalized environment.  If we kill these orcs in this room, there's a very good chance that the orcs in another room, fifty feet and a stairwell away, won't know what we've done, unless one of these about-to-be-dead orcs gets out yon door and manages to set off an alarm.

It is impossible, however, to start a fight in a town without someone knowing about it.  The walls are too thin, the lines of sight on even a back alley are too numerous, there's far too much motivation for even a common individual to rush down and inform the guards (it might be worth a coin or two) and, on the whole, no one in a town likes it when fighting happens.

Too, in a dungeon, there might be ten or twenty orcs in this room.  Or maybe a few hundred, if it is a big lair ... but the shape of the dungeon allows a certain queuing in a line, before the hall can clear enough for the back ranks to get at the party.  But a town has thousands of people ... any of whom might be willing to throw a roof tile down on a running party, even if they don't have the nerve to fight face to face.  The Greek general Pyrrhus died that way.  Stunned by a roof tile, he fell in the street and two common people dragged him into a doorway and cut his throat. Even for great generals, towns are dangerous.

So, if the party wins a round or two against the arriving guard, it just happens that more guards arrive and the dogpile begins.  I know that many DMs will engineer the situation so that a fleeing party will miraculously flee a town, or find an ally standing in a doorway calling out, "Hide in here!" ... but these are DM-interventions, designed to preserve the party from their own folly, or from having to face the real consequences of what a town is designed to do: destroy threats.

When the party pulls a weapon in a town, or tries to steal something, the party is the threat.

A lot of DMs recognize this; and they HATE the intervention tactic, as they feel it's not their job to wrest the party out of their own stupidity.  So the rule comes down: NO town adventures.  Ever.  Problem solved.

I've never made that rule, but at the same time I don't press the town adventure idea, either.  Unless the players are strong enough to take on the entire town, towns are just too dangerous ~ and players get that.  Getting the sense from me that I won't help them, that I'll just let the dogpile take them down, they will typically behave themselves ... excessively.  They'll buy some equipment.  They might get some advice from a particular shop owner; get something made; or something checked; but they won't start something.

Which is fair.  Players, being presented with the clear fact that the town won't hesitate to crush them underfoot if they don't toe the line, have no interest in testing that line by taking a step over it.  The consequences are too severe and the evident gain apparently out of reach.

Still, much of this is due to players not knowing enough about a town, or town life, or how things work, to circumnavigate the dogpile, as people obviously do in towns, even the most dangerous towns in the world.  And this is because we as game designers haven't fashioned towns and other urban spaces clearly enough to make such navigation possible.  That is what this series of posts is struggling to achieve: the reformulation of the town, both in our imaginations and in concrete, definable ways, so that adventure in towns is not only possible, but legitimately desirable.

Let's have another look at that Cracow video I linked yesterday:

It is so clean.  And while the historians who put this video together are well-aware that the streets would be much less pristine than presented, they are concerned with something other than verisimilitude.  But our imaginations are weakened by this sort of presentation.  Let me take a game example: the village of Hommlet:

Again, clean.  Yes, there's a lot of apparent detail, but remove the trees and shrubs and it can be seen that the depiction of Cracow and that of Hommlet are virtually the same.  As anyone who has ever wandered around in a small town knows, the maintenance of any like space is never this neat and tidy.  Vegetation is not neatly trimmed, as shown.  The building walls are never this straight and grid-aligned.  Shit piles up.  Houses are abandoned.  People never have such clear titles as "farmer" or "teamster."  Distractions happen.  People don't live together in peace, but ambivalence, tolerance and outright hostility.  There are people in a town who could be killed in the middle of the street and no one would care.

Hommlet's secret is that something evil is going on behind the veneer of the village ... but an adventure here need not be so overtly dramatic.  Clutter and hard feelings go a long way towards isolating one part of an urban place from another.  We've all run games where we've let the players climb into a sewer so they can have a fight in town ... but why not a simple basement?  Or in a slum court, too poor for the guards to bother about?  The guards exist to protect all that potential money from being plundered ... but they don't care what the lower classes do among themselves.  This is why crime thrives, and why it is particularly hard on other criminals ... because other criminals don't enjoy the protection that the rich do.

To circumvent the dogpile, the players need approach the problem of town adventures with two things in mind: a) how to isolate the fight away from the attention of people who care to stop it, or in a way that it won't be heard or noticed, or in a way that the participants themselves will all want it kept quiet; and b) the party needs to fight things that the authorities want fought and killed.  That's the idea of Hommlet.  No significant authority outside of Hommlet will mind if most of the people in Hommlet are killed, once the evil is brought to light.  No one would mind if the players found and killed a dire wolf being hidden by an owner feeding it the occasional drunk.  It's okay to clean out a nest of vampires.  People will reward you for doing it.

It is the responsibility of the DM to create the urban environment that makes this possible.  An environment with hidden holes and isolated stone houses; with gutted places destroyed by fire, where undead might be lingering; with natural insulation, making the sound of a quick sword duel practical; with clear rules that tell the players, and non-players, that if you break off the fight within four rounds, it doesn't matter who hears and sees, the participants will all be gone before the guards arrive.  The fight can then be continued again on another day, right?  Everyone knows this.  NO ONE fights for five rounds.  That would be stupid.

If we can make the environment clearer to the players; if the DM can make the environment conducive to play; if the players can then trust the DM; and if we can designate the spaces in the town in some way that the players can SEE what's going on, so that it isn't just a mass of meaningless houses and castles, as we usually see in a game map, there's room for real adventure.

Not just walking around talking to people about things.

The Steady Urban State

The above is a screenshot from a two-part Polish youtube video, quite obviously describing the Galician town of Cracow as it once appeared (Galicia is in south Poland, east of Silesia and bordering on modern day Slovakia).  I post it to denote the openness of the city's layout, even within the walls, as shown in the video.

I have another example, much more descriptive and in depth:

Granted, the model and presentation is out of another time, circa 1950s and 60s, but the detail rendered here is archeologically and academically supported, which is a rare thing on the internet.  Note how much open space exists: farmland, grass for forage, space for play and gathering, trees, trampled ground isolating the town industries.  Compare this with a crammed generation product that I linked a few days ago, or with George RR Martin's 2012 popular depiction of King's Landing:

Did not do the fucking research.

The above is so ridiculously out of keeping with reality that it makes the traffic/supply problems of ancient Rome look ideal in comparison.  I've seen the bought version of this map; there's no green space inside the walls, which would mean that every gram of food would have to be brought into the city every day to feed the enormous population.  If you consider that the walled city of Constantinople had access to water on three sides, while King's Landing hasn't enough enough waterfront to fill even one side, no doubts the streets and houses in the center of this town have long ago been abandoned for lack of provisions.

And this is my subject today.  The reader may remember that in my last post, Putting Down Roots, I talked about how accumulation and assembly of towns occurred organically, due to the nature of the terrain, access to water, a need for defense and so on.  The principle applies inside the city as well. Cities were not, as they are now, built a neighborhood at a time, with every house the same and the roads carefully designed for the suburban commuter.  A system which, incidentally, is already starting to break down, even though it has been in place only fifty years (watch this whole video, it is well worth the time and it will reshape your thinking).

If the food comes in by the docks of the urban center, the population will naturally gravitate towards the docks, in order to have access to the best food ... and take advantage of the continuous demands for labor that a dock will provide.  A new ship may arrive any day; and though the wharf may be ready with an established labor force to unload a ship a day, what will then do when three or five ships all come in at once?  Hire temporary labor, of course ... so that poor people will drift to the town's port on the off-chance that they will work one day in seven, enabling them to survive.

The same is true of the gate through which most of the agricultural produce arrives, or the fringes of the toolsheds and mills, as shown in the Birmingham video.  The poor will flock in whenever something unusual happens ... a caravan arriving, the first cartloads of grapes at harvest time, the slaughtering of the spring lambs, the aftermath of a storm blowing in from the sea or a fire that has engulfed a city block ... like the people picking garbage as shown at the end of this piece of Ron Fricke's Samsara.

The above video showing all kinds of modern urban cultures.  The key factor here is money: which we should clearly see as acting on an urban environment in two forms.  We might describe these forms as "kinetic money" and as "potential money."

The garbage pickers, for all the unpleasantness of it, are participating in the kinetic form: the acquisition of money, the environment that makes the transfer of money possible (in its absolute lowest form, as people sustain themselves with refuse that can still be made useful), and what we would think of as being paid for labor in a traditional sense.  Farming, whether through garbage or growing things in the field, is kinetic.  Money is moving from one person to another, or from the environment into someone's possession.  In order to get money, the population of a town moves towards those places where the movement of money allows some sort of acquisition.

Potential money looks like this:

This is also from Samsara ... here, the money just sits.  The owners of these towers and flats are also in the business of accumulating money, but in a different part of the city than this place, where it is stored.  We can think of potential money as stored money, the same way that potential energy is stored energy.  As you stretch an elastic between your fingers, you "store" energy into the elastic, where it remains stored until you release the elastic, at which point the potential energy becomes kinetic.

When a riot occurs in a city, we have the same sort of mechanical framework in place.  The buildings above are raided, pillaged and burned, becoming a different sort of garbage pile for the raiders to pick over.  If an urban environment does not sufficiently provide enough kinetic money to exist in the system, increasing the potential collection of money, sooner or later those people without money or food, who are starving anyway, will force that potential to become kinetic.  Sooner or later, you will have to release the elastic band.

This is a good way for you to view the raw, thrumming energy that exists behind the veneer of houses and streets that form the city.  It isn't necessary to go so far as creating city-wide violence every time you want to create an in-city adventure for your players.  The transfer of potential money to kinetic money goes on all the time, on a small scale: robbery, muggings, forced prostitution, kidnappings, isolated murders (even between rich people, trying to get each other's potential money), witch burnings to place the victim's money into the pockets of the church or the authorities and so on.  And the reverse also happens, the daily efforts to ensure that potential money remains potential: clubbing poor people in the streets, enslavement and deportation for debt, free food, lands open to common settlement, restoration of prostitutes to their families, anything that will keep the population passive and happy to do little more than pick over garbage.

If we're going to make a city map that means something to gaming, we need to take these two things discussed above into account.

That the city has to exist as a much more open environment than we suppose, with gardens and fields that may exist even inside the city walls, where food can be grown inside the city, not only for siege purposes but also because the loss of an occasional apple is a good thing for the passive steady state that keeps the urban system from collapsing in riot.  Free space gives employment, it gives room to breathe, it makes for a happier population and it provides a valve for change, where a former field can be turned into another neighborhood, until such a time as the city needs to extend beyond the walls so that more fields can be incorporated into the system.

This ideal lasted until the industrial revolution, when labor took a whole new form and what made the system stable was a whole new environment: one where materialism brought new pleasures, where many more jobs could be sustained in much smaller spaces, where the accumulation of kinetic wealth could enable the tight, packed-in cities with which we're much more familiar.  Without the industrial revolution, without factories and mass transport, cities could not sustain so many people without the need of a lot of space.

This space made contentment possible; life was still hard for the poor, who could steal an apple but might spend three days in the stocks for it (which gives another escape valve for hatred and anger, directed at a prisoner instead of the authorities).  But the hard life was sustainable for those better able to make use of the shifting, changing, seasonal job market.  You might be a temporary day laborer, barely surviving, but with the right attitude you might be the temporary laborer who found a permanent job once some more trusted fellow was injured or killed.  There was room for advancement, for change, for luck, if you found some opportunity in that city that was missed.  So you wandered the streets, looking, looking, adventuring even, ready to turn to even crime if it could be made relatively safe and sustainable.  Which is what we'll look at with our next post.

Putting Down Roots

The comments upon the previous post, What Good are Town Maps?, brought up some points I mean to take up ... but I feel I need to make it clear that the reason why this "town problem" has not found a solution has much to do with the way the game is approached.  The functionality underlying some issues and circumstances of the game cannot be properly handled by fiat, ass-pulling and winging it: they are too complicated and just too damn needful of research, preparation and solid data that can be reviewed often for game use.

I've run towns in all my games like anyone else: with a little intrigue, with some mystery, with an occasional opportunity for a street fight or a spontaneous small dungeon in the town sewers or catacombs, but this has all been happenstance and shallow in design.  I'm only now beginning to see a bigger picture because I've been building a number of different structures for the past decade ~ cities, hex design, the concept of development vs. geography, etcetera ~ to where I am beginning to see how a city can be deconstructed for what it IS and what it needs to provide in terms of adventuring.

Understand, however ... I'm still wallowing here.  My process for building structure is to think about it, research, talk about it on the blog, think some more, write it into the wiki, then run it in a few sessions, then tweak the blog rules.  So that should explain where I am right now.

Since it has come up in the comments, let's set aside the services that a town provides for a moment and talk about how towns happen.  For this, we should turn to those people who study the formation and lay-out of towns:

Let me quote a piece from the video description:

"Here a new approach is furthered, which argues that rather than seeing towns as planned or as organic, that they are emergent - places become urban as social relations are played out at multiple scales. Towns are more than buildings and streets, they are social assemblages which are reiterated and transformed as the people, materials and things interact within and around them. Utilising the concept of ‘lines of becoming’, this paper traces trajectories of urbanism, to view towns as dynamic processes rather than static plans ..."

And from the video itself, regarding the town of Andover:

"I think that materialized in the plans as it were, we can perceive of two sets of interactions come together ... so we can see a localized reiteration in the performance of place, the marketing activity, the worship, which has got the dignity of the administration, which has gone on here for centuries, colliding with a more dispersed network, which we could call royal activity ~ and money, really, was the key thing which flowed between these two scales.  So we can see that money is finding this dispersed royal network, with this localized performance of place; and maybe it's in this tension that we can conceive of the agency for the guild merchants to be founded emerging ... and in 1205 the granting of the borough charter following ... now the concept of plantation implies that a decision was made to build a town; but if we think about how the flows and goods and people and money had passed through this place, I think rather we can see that this isn't town foundation by decree, but rather we see the agency for town urbanization as emerging from these processes."

I put this up as an academic example, to give my arguments weight; I have been thinking of towns in this way for quite some time, certainly since 2004, as I began to map out the thousands of towns on the 20-mile scale maps I had designed.  Towns were clearly "accumulating" in places, rather than appearing at random ~ which is what MOST towns do when placed on a map by an RPGer who hasn't taken any time to consider exactly why a town should be there, except as a convenience store for adventurers returning from the local dungeon.  Personally, I think accumulation is a better noun here than assembly; we need to think of the mass of people moving over a landscape, affected by the money that exists to be made, tempered by who controls the money, accumulating at river fords, on passes between hills, upon natural harbors and so on, just as the water in a stream will pile up deep an slow in some places and run fast and shallow in others.  The land itself, resources, ease of travel, supplies of water and food, defines which places will accumulate humans and which will not.  It is out of our hands ~ once we understand that we as a species are prepared to subject ourselves to our wants and needs.

That Andover is a much larger city than nearby places like Thruxton or Finkley was inevitable, just as London would end in being a much larger city than Andover - and the largest urban area in Europe, even now.  Acknowledging this, we need to investigate reasons why accumulations occur, to have a list we can turn to, as a tool that we can have in our minds when plopping a sizable town or city on a map, striving to set a scale for ourselves why it should be this big and not bigger.  Thankfully, I already have such a list, from a 1990 textbook I picked up in university, which is still conveniently at hand (I use it often): Bruce Marshall's The Real World.

Searching for a google link, it's clear the book is not much cherished; my copy appears exactly as the Amazon page, without a cover (which I've provided for the post from an image search).  For D&D, it is a fantastically useful book, as it strives to explain how towns and geographical humanity emerges, what problems we face, how we structure our environment through urban planning and the lack of same, etcetera.  The whole book describes urban assembly from the ground up ... though in a coffee table format, as it was meant for a 300-level geography course [second year].

Be that as it may, I would like to have a picture from the internet to show here, but the best I can do is a composite from my phone.  This is a copyright violation ~ but judging from the lack of the love the book has online, I don't think anyone is going to care.

Sorry I can't do better.  What's funny is the two images were shot one second apart but even moving the phone over a few inches changes the light quality. It must be hell to be a photographer.

The reader can see numbers on the map; and on the bottom, some of the explanation for those numbers, each with a little green icon all its own.  I won't produce the little icons (though I suppose they might be useful, it will take too much time just now), but I will write out the intro for the map and the descriptions next to the numbers.

"Certain sites in the landscape are more likely to attract settlements than others.  London, for example, was established at the narrowest fordable part of the Thames, and was also on the Roman route north.  The main part of the city developed along the outside meander of the river, thus allowing easy access to fresh water.

"The advantages of the favored sites tend to fall into one or more of the following categories:"

1. In some cases, the physical conditions of a settlement site are of overriding importance.  In a mountainous area, for example, where winds are strong and most of the land is steep and rugged, the floor of a river valley may provide the only protected level site for a village.
2. In a like situation, it may be advantageous for a settlement to develop on a gentle slope ~ in the northern hemisphere, sites on south-facing slopes benefit from more sunshine (in the southern hemisphere, north-facing slopes are warmer).
3. Topography may also have a symbolic significance; a prominent hilltop my become the site for a religious center and its associated settlement.
4. Villages are often located within easy reach of a key resource. In such cases, the priority is to reduce the daily expenditure of time and effort.  Miners and their families, for example, may choose to settle close to where mineral deposits lie.
5. A dependable water supply is another vital resource, used for drinking, cooking, washing, irrigation of crops, and often for industrial purposes.  Hence, settlements may develop along a river, particularly on the outside of a meander, where the water is deeper and land is less likely to be marshy.
6. In the desert, a settlement is more likely to prosper at an oasis.
7. The siting of settlements is influenced by trade routes, whether passage is by land, sea or air. Settlements may emerge at any point on a route, but places where routes converge, or where the flow of traffic becomes concentrated, are prime sites.  The confluence of two rivers is one such place [and here the book begins to give some examples] ~ Duisburg, Khartoum, Kuala Lumpur, Montreal, Phnom Penh.
8. Or railway junctions.
9. Or river crossings ~ Budapest, Frankfurt, Kansas City, London, Omsk.
10. Trans-shipment points ~ where boats must load and offload their freight ~ are also favored sites.  Protected deep water harbors, for example ~ Cape Town, Havana, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Vladivostok, Wellington.
11. Which may also be found on the inside of bays ~ Maracaibo [my example].
12. Or river estuaries ~ Antwerp, Banjul, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Montevideo, Oslo.
13. Ports are often located on the first solid ground on the margin or head of a delta ~ Alexandria, Astrakhan, Cairo, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai.
14. Other trans-shipment points that may spawn settlements include the mouth of a lake.
15. Or the highest navigable point on a river ~ Basel, Louisville, Minneapolis, and [my example] Smolensk.
16. Or at a portage point, where river freight must be transferred over land to another waterway ~ Chicago, Moscow.
17. Settlements often originate at sites that are readily defensible or which provides strategic protection for resources.  Many otherwise desirable sites have been impossible to build on because of the threat of invasion.  In such cases, the ability to protect the site may be the first priority ~ immediate personal comfort is a secondary consideration.  An isolated crag or hilltop can provide a commanding view over the surrounding plains ~ Athens, Edinburgh, Jerusalem, Luxembourg, Madrid.
18. A site at the entrance to a mountain pass can give strategic control over a vital cross-country route ~ Kabul, Peshawar, Sion.
19. The most easily defended sites are those partly or completely surrounded by water.  Such locations include a hill around which a river meanders ~ Berne, Dhaka, Durham, New Orleans.
20. Or a peninsula ~ Bombay, Boston, Helsinki.
21. Or an island in a river ~ Leningrad, Paris, Seoul, Stockholm.
22. Or an offshore island ~ Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Lagos, Mombasa, Venice.

Okay.  That is enough to think about for the present.  I'm not done, but I'll leave off until the next post.

What Good are Town Maps?

As I write this, I have 22 pages left to move from the old wiki to the new; with 1,136 pages moved.  Hard work accomplishes miracles.

These last nine weeks, I've had to put my creativity on hold.  I haven't created any new content for said wiki, I've made no maps, I've stopped running my on-line game (which will be the first thing I correct, if there are anything but crickets there) and I've been unable to write anything even remotely inventive.  I've pushed myself to write some posts for the blog; but these have been observational, not operative.  I've introduced no new concepts, no formulas, no functional apparatuses.  I miss having some new concept to describe.

But I'm feeling the pressure fall away.  For a long time, I worried about losing my focus before the wiki was even half moved.  I worried about becoming sick of the process.  I worried I wouldn't have enough time.  But the wiki will be done and finished tomorrow.  I will be deleting it the end of April, so that I don't have to pay my monthly fee to wikispaces again.

I feel an urge to be creative.

So before I spend the rest of my day fighting with the Audacity program and the next podcast, I'm going to write a post about city adventures.  And yes, as I write that, I can feel the wet blanket of ennui fall on the head and shoulders of the Gentle Reader.  Gawd, why even bother writing about such a loathsome and utterly useless subject.  Town encounters don't work, they're boring, we're sick to death of mystery runnings and please, can we just drop it before we start?

Believe me, O Reader, I agree with you.  But let's try, anyway.  I have some ideas.

Some many months ago, I came across this map generator, which will create random map images such as this one:

Which will get comments like, "Thanks for sharing it. It's awesome and super helpful," "You made at least one person happy" and "This will make a fine addition to my collection."

Seriously, what am I missing?  This map is useless.  Try hitting the generator a few times and it is soon evident that the map "generator" is capable of producing the most banal, useless, generic collection of blocks and grey squares imaginable.  Yeah, I know a town has streets and buildings ~ but how is something without labels, without context, without a scale, supposed to be helpful in the least way?

But I confess, what would it matter anyway?  If the map above had every building meticulously named, if we knew the exact scale of the main avenue running through the town, if we knew how many ships the wharf was capable of handling, what good would it do us for actually running a game?  Would it be helpful to tell the players, every time, that the apothecary, with name and all, was three blocks west and one block over?  Who cares ~ as long as I can go to an apothecary's.  What do I care what it's called?  Or who runs it?  Or any of the other unsupported meaningless information that a town might potentially offer to me, the user?

If you're a DM, you've run into this problem many times.  Perhaps you've tried to make a party negotiate a town; perhaps you've tried to fill the houses with interesting people for the party to talk to; perhaps you've tried giving nice names to the taverns and inns, the theatre, the keeps and castles, etcetera ... but I'm sure you've found the players don't care.  Players care about two things where it comes to a town: where is it; and can I shop there?

Realistically, you can't map every town in your world; and that is where the generator seems like a needed support tool.  But the generator is as uniform as a small black dot on your general map.  It doesn't help me adventure.

Cities are not dungeons.  We can't just smack down a bunch of roads and buildings and pretend that we've created the same formula that a dungeon creates.  Dungeons are designed to resist movement; and they're filled with death dealing dangers and vicious monsters.  Urban centers can't afford to stop the inhabitants from moving around freely and the absence of danger is the point.  None of the characteristics that make a dungeon work as a dungeon exist in a city.  So the map itself is useless.

A real map, for real people, matters because we can't handwave travel in the real world.  But we can in role-playing and it makes sense to do so.  Why in the hell would we want to force players to stumble over every curb, turn every corner, walk along every by-way?  It's fucking boring.

And so we ought to ask ourselves, do we need a map at all?  I can tell you honestly, no.  We don't.  I haven't had an urban map in decades and no player has ever requested one.  We force urban maps on players because we think they create a sense of space and relevance.  And they might, for a minute or two; but then the next time the players hit a town, or the time after, and there's no map, the game doesn't suffer.

To justify an urban map, we must first create a need for one.

What does this map suggest?

This is Millau, in the south of France.  I've chosen it because it's old and because, like much of the rest of Europe, it has not seen modern war in any sense.  Thus, the old town, identifiable from all the red roofed buildings, is intact.  Likely, the layout of this town has not changed in a millennium.

The width of the map is all of 1300 meters, from the left side to the right.  From that, I deduce the first important thing from this map: at a good pace, taking into account the lack of a straight and easy route, to cross the map from left to right would probably cost about 20 to 25 minutes.  To walk the tree-lined, pear-shaped route in the map's middle, about 1600 meters, would take about the same amount of time.  And easily triple that if we take into account the other passersby, the need to look at shop windows, taking a rest on a bench, staring at a statue or two, having an appetite and so on.  In fact, if we were to go to Millau today, and start in the morning, we'd probably still be at it by dinner time.  Without even covering all the side streets inside the loup.

So the first thing we can get from the above it how much time does it take to explore?  It doesn't matter that the characters can move throughout the town freely ... that doesn't mean they have the will to walk that far or the wherewithal to know what lane to walk down to find that really important thing they have to buy.  If you or I wanted to locate the critical bookbinder in the town, we need to know how long that would take?

The other question the map above answers is "What's there?"  Not in the sense of where is it, but rather denoting that it does exist.  Most of the above consists of residences ~ useless for play.  We're not kicking our way into those unless we're pillaging the town or robbing a place ... and we don't need a map for the latter.

There's are restaurants, a pharmacy, plenty of hotels, a museum, a government office, even a dentist; but there's no waterpark (it's about twenty miles away, up the valley), or fountains, or airports.  At a glance, we can see that there are places where the party can't go ... it doesn't matter how free their movement is. The things themselves don't exist.

That may not seem relevant; or necessary to map.  But when we think about towns, we need to have it clearly in mind that although they offer services, they don't offer ALL the services that might exist.  Nor is it a matter of saying that bigger places have more services; that waterpark is near a small village called Compeyre.  Yes, the bigger places have a better chance of having more ... but that doesn't mean that something crucial, like a gourmet winery, a precision tool maker or the greatest sword-maker in the world won't be in some terrifically obscure place.

Rather than making a map, then, we're better off knowing how much actual space a town covers, and what's actually there, than we are in drawing meaningless streets, plazas and back roads.  We can run those things on the fly; hell, we have more than enough examples in our memories.  Just picture the players walking down a set of roads in some remembered resort town once visited in Mexico, Tasmania, Colorado or Maine.  It's even easier for European and Asian players.

Cities: Two Rivers Together

As promised, let's talk about Cities.

In searching for examples, whenever possible I will try to produce both an American and a European example, as I have readers from both areas.  If I think of one in Australia, I'll jump on it.  I have very few readers in Asia, so I'll restrain myself from offering examples from there.  However, I would like to point out that the examples I'll be discussing appear everywhere, not just in any one part of the world.

Having started this article, I may intentionally set out to write a dozen posts, one for each major kind of settlement (the remaining 10 I mentioned yesterday are sub-categories of these 12).  That should give me something to do when I need something to write about.


This is Pittsburgh.  If you look it up on Wikipedia, you may notice that it doesn't say That Europeans founded the city, only that it was named Pittsburgh by General John Forbes. In fact, the value of where the Monongahela & Allegheny rivers met (forming the Ohio River) was well known to native Americans centuries before, as well as to French trappers in the 17th century.  Of course, Wikipedia history doesn't begin until the French and British begin fighting over it, but then it isn't as if trappers were writing stuff down.

The smaller river on the map, the Allegheny, is the important one.  It flows southwards through the west Pennsylvania plateau it created, with tributaries reaching a mere 8 miles from Lake Erie.  Those 8 miles are critical.  It allowed explorers and trappers to portage from the river system of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, through the heart of North America into the Ohio-Mississippi river basin.  Where it joined with the Monongahela allowed access into the mountains of West Virginia.

In the 18th century, Pittsburgh would grow big and rich on farm products, minerals, coal and the production of steel.  In the early 19th century, both before and after the opening of the Erie Canal, it would become a transportation hub and supply center for the development of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

This is Duisburg.  It's what Pittsburgh would look like if it had been founded by the Romans (there's a myth that Duisburg was founded by the first German in 2395 BC).

Note the elaborate terraforming of the Ruhr River, entering on the right of the picture before it joins with the Rhine.  The Ruhr has long been the richest coal-and-iron district in the world, forever competing with Silesia in Poland, Krivoy Rog in Russia and Liaoyang in China.  There is really nothing like it in America.

The Ruhr river is short, only 135 miles - but then the Monongahela is only 130 miles, so there's a definite comparison there.  It doesn't matter that these rivers do not extend very far.  They are deep and they lead into important heartlands for industry and agriculture.  The connection where the rivers meet provides fabulous opportunities for trade and exploitation, enabling the masters of these towns to grow rich through the influence they had over where the rivers reached.  Duisburg, like Pittsburgh, is set up to take advantage of trade moving through the middle of the continent.  The Danube and Rhine river systems were connected by the Ludwig Canal, completed in 1846 (and since vastly improved upon).  Of course, long before the actual completion of a joint waterway, goods were moving up the Danube since the late Roman period and being tranferred into the Main river valley.  The Main, like the Ruhr, also flows into the Rhine.

This is Mainz.  164 miles upstream from Duisburg.  It too has been around since the Romans.  The Main river, again entering from the right, is a bit longer - 327 miles.

Incidentally, my apologies to some for not listing these numbers in kilometers.  It isn't that I'm not comfortable with kilometers; I can envision them fine and I wouldn't hesitate to use metric for technical work.  It is only that for my D&D world I have gotten into the habit of using miles because metric did not exist as a measurement system in the 17th century.  As such, I torture the hell out of my players by insisting on the use of pounds, gills, drams, firkins and pottles, etcetera.  I think it is fun.  I trust most gentle readers are able to deal in both miles and kilometers - there are plenty of calculators around online if it is getting frustrating.

This means the Main river reaches deep into central Germany.  In the time of the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic Church in Rome owned the city of Mainz - they knew what they were doing.  The profits from river taxes alone served to keep the church fathers in velvet for many hundreds of years.

I have one more example.

This is Khartoum.  Recently it has grown to the size of Chicago.  That is not a lake at the bottom left of the picture, that is the White Nile River (often thought of as just the Nile).  The Blue Nile, entering from the right, is the stream full of muddy water.  Yes, that is correct: the White Nile is blue and the Blue Nile is brown.

Khartoum's history is even shorter than Pittsburgh's.  At the time Pittburgh was founded, this confluence was populated by just a few small villages. It took British engineering to make practical use of the fork's potential access to southern Sudan and high Ethiopia.

That is because without modernization, Khartoum is just too remote.  It may be perfectly located on two rivers that both reach a thousand miles into the hinterland, but this is eleven hundred miles by river from Aswan in Egypt, through some of the driest desert on earth.  Without railroads and modern shipping, it must rely on local trade - in a part of the world without industry, where agriculture is thoroughly homogeneous.

Large towns and cities are not magically made important by the confluence of rivers.  It's important to consider which rivers are involved.  Granted, any two significantly sized rivers will probably result in some sort of town anywhere in Europe, where the population is very high, but other parts of the world, not so much.  Where the Murray and Darling rivers meet in Australia (two very large river basins), there is only the small town of Wentworth.  There's no need for more infrastructure than this - and besides, it floods like crazy.  That is something to keep in mind where river towns exist.  Two rivers - twice the chance of flooding.

Consider, too, that where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet, the only significant town is Cairo, Illinois - not a big city and somewhat removed from the confluence.  It also floods.  Worse, it does not serve a significantly populated hinterland - therefore, minimal trade.

I hope this has been helpful.  Perhaps it has not been as rigorous a measurement for a 'city type' that readers had been hoping for . . . but towns and cities grow and develop for very specific, individualized reasons.  A particular fork between two rivers is made important by more than the fact that there are two rivers.  We must also consider the portages those rivers offer in their upper courses, the eventual destination of downstream, the resources surrounding the river valleys, the predilection for the area to flood, difficulties in creating weirs to defend against flooding, the length of time the city has had to terraform, the balance of agricultural hinterlands vs. mountains, etcetera, etcetera.  There are many things to consider in deciding what makes a big, important city and what makes a small transshipment dock.

Putting Down Roots

If you give any thought at all to mapping your world, you will hesitate before deciding where to place towns and cities.  It would be best if some logic were involved - but it is hard to envision the problem from your present viewpoint as GOD.  Instead, you need to imagine that you're just an ordinary person.

Towns are built by all sorts of people.  Some are built collectively - a group of settlers appear at the same time and within a few weeks a small town exists.  Other towns begin with just one house; another person comes along and builds a second house nearby, then a third and so on until the collection of houses makes a town.  Still others begin as a resource is discovered and random people converge to grab as much as they can.  Towns even emerge by Royal Decree, where soldiers appear to produce a military town or naval port out of nothing.

These methods all have one thing in common - they serve a need, one that exists before the town.  This is very important and must be understood wholly.  Towns do not create needs - though it will often seem that way.  At the heart of every town's founding - and in its growth - is a need being served and expanded.

Consider the one house in the example above.  Let us say that you are alone.  You have no family, no ties, no political motives, no plan except to live apart from other people.  Where is it you build your initial shack?

Well, you will need food and water.  Most particularly water.  Food tends to be either on the hoof and moving about, or growing near water, so it will be most convenient if you are near enough to water that the journey you take each day to get it is minimal.  That need exists already.  The house is build to service that need.

If another comes to build a house nearby, it must be that the same water source is sufficient to serve more than your needs.  If that water source is rare while the potential for food in the locality is high, more and more people who need food and water will arrive to exploit it.  The town, if it evolves, will arise to organize the distribution of food and water, to keep the locals from harming one another and ultimately to enable transportation of outside goods inwards in exchange for local surplus.

The town itself does not create this surplus.  Neither do the people.  While they do the work, the surplus is inherent in the location, whether or not a town ever existed.  The town succeeds because the surplus is possible, inducing people to arrive and work it.

When more people arrive, seeking more than the surplus can provide, we get unemployed labour and beggars - who in turn do their best to sell whatever they have that can be devised, leading to vice.  Vice is merely the result of people without traditional resources or skills taking advantage of a population to sell (or make money upon) what does not require traditional resources or skills: prostitution, theft, murder, forgery, fencing and so on.  Vice is only possible when the population itself becomes a resource that can be exploited through corruption, immorality and trespass.

Whether you are alone or in the company of other settlers (or a monarch deciding where a city ought to exist for the good of the kingdom), you are compelled to make certain judgements about the exact placement of any settlement, from a house on up.  These are judgements regarding the settlement's defense, practicality, resources (as we've already discussed), accessibility and its protection from the elements.  Choose wrong and while the town may emerge for a time, eventually it will be abandoned or washed away by nature.  Town histories are filled with tales of towns that were moved across the river or five miles further up the road, devastation by invaders, fires, depletion of resources and so on.  When a devastated town retains a good location, it is rebuilt.  When a devastated town was badly placed, the former citizens give up on it.

Some towns thrive for centuries before failing.  Sijilmasa, in modern Morocco, was arguably the wealthiest city in West Africa a thousand years ago.  Located on the edge of the Sahara, it was admirably suited for caravans departing from gold-rich Mali, Guinea, Ghana and Bornu, the perfect transshipment point from camels to donkeys before transport over the high and dangerous Atlas Mountains (camels do not like mountains).  As a result, the city grew huge - but by the mid 16th century, without much notice or fanfare, the population evaporated.  As wikipedia says, "The ruins of the town lie for five miles along the River Ziz."

What happened with the beginning of the 15th century, circa 1415 forward?  Portugal happened.  Specifically, John I.

Imagine what that must have been like as the 15th century waxed and Sijilmasa waned.  Year by year, less camel trains arrived from Mauritania and Mali.  With the founding of Arguin on the Mauritanian coast, in 1445, began a series of forts that would eventually bury extensive trade through the deserts of West Africa.  Family by family departed Sijilmasa . . . until at last the city was gone.

When I begin again, I'm going to talk about specific types of cities, why they're founded and what happens when they're successful.  It's a large task, as I count 22 specific town forms in my bucket.  For each, I will give examples from the real world.  I hope this will help expand the idea of what functions a town performs and how you should better understand the story behind the towns in your world.

The Very Old

On a whim, I thought I'd put this table together, chiefly for Chgowiz's benefit. I had done the research already, I just had to crunch it a little to find those cities that would fit the criteria.

The table below describes a number of cities founded before 1500 B.C., ranked from oldest to newest, which are still occupied today. The list isn't meant to be exhaustive or even particularly accurate - the figures merely correspond to research I've done. When it comes to dates more than 2,000 years old, there are always disagreements.

Nevertheless, if you were looking for a list of very ancient cities which might give you some ideas about the time period pre and post Mesopotamia, you could do worse. Disappointingly, the list doesn't include cities that once existed and are now long gone - which explains why there are few Mesopotamian cities listed. Most of the ones that exist today did not exist then. However, I'm sure Chgowiz already has a list of Mesopotamian cities. This might be a handy appendix to those.