Build a Fantasy Town in D&D | The G.U.A.R.D.S. Method
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2024
- Have you ever wanted to build a fantasy town in D&D? There are a lot of different ways to make dnd towns. When I'm creating fantasy worlds, I start by taking your standard ttrpg town and applying a system that I call The G.U.A.R.D.S. Method.
Help me build a town at: / lootgoblinmarketplace
Hopefully you want to see more dungeon master tips because I really enjoyed explaining a quick way to make dnd cities and dnd towns of any size for your d&d campaign.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
0:42 The G.U.A.R.D.S. Method
3:33 Government Buildings
4:06 Underworld Activities
4:43 Altars
5:13 Resources
6:26 Defenses
7:04 Social Hubs
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These are some fun TTRPG words that I’ve seen DnD Shorts and MonkeyDM utilize (plus a few of my own):
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#dnd #dungeonsanddragons #dungeonsmaster
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Special Shoutouts!
➡ Loot Goblin is drawn by Hybbart, her commissions are amazing and you can see more here! www.tumblr.com/hybbart
➡ My music is licensed from a fantastic musician named Alexander Nakarada and you can check out his whole catalogue of songs on www.serpentsoundstudios.com
➡ The town that I used as an example comes from Crosshead Studios and you get it by becoming a subscriber here: crossheadstudios.com/ - Zábava
One thing I would recommend is, you don't need a fire service, police service, court, a king and a government. You can just have one building that is the government center across the town or city and live with that. I've seen a few campaigns where people have tried having guards as more of a modern police force than a medieval guard assigned and loyal to their lord. Or they'll have a constitutional monarchy instead of a full- monarchy or constitutional government. Yes, constitutional monarchies are great in real life, but in D&D they can become confusing because you don't know if you should go to the king or the mayor to try and find missions.
I definitely agree that less can be better, especially for a small town! A sheriff’s office sometimes is the only defense and government building!
Town Guards will carry some sort of polearm, like a billhook because spears/pikes are easy to teach and the curved hook can be used in fire response to pull at weakened walls and roofs to stop the fire from spreading further.
My dude if creating complex political systems just confuses your players, you might wanna change how you run complex political systems. I’ve run campaigns that take place in kingdoms that are actively splintering into civil war and chaos and the players never got confused about what needed to be done/where to go for what (outside of what’s appropriate for, yknow, being a confused citizen of a kingdom that is splintering into civil war).
@@Lucas-df4ht or they might just be new players. Newbies usually need a lot railroading
The wall guard consists of townies on rotation. All townies have a few hours of militia service each month and a couple days of crossbow training that's partly a get-together with beer. The only full-time guards are an officer and a clerk and a couple sergeants/instructors.
Great advice!
In addition: If you want to divert from the standard tavern formula, try introducing a sport the locals are crazy about and gather to watch, a public bath, a tea house, a theater troupe visiting the town, a village storyteller, a cloister that rents out rooms and brews beer, a tourney ground, an annual magic festival, a night club, a gambling hall, a stranded ship that’s been turned into a snack bar, etc.
These are all really cool suggestions. I personally always like having at least one city with a tournament ground and some kind of guildhall that also does games of chance.
or in a real small city like hamlet its just a bunch of dudes chillin in uncle Joe's house with old swords
In this book I got a few years ago, a small hamlet out in the desert has chariot races sponsored by a company that has its fingers in every town from there to the coast.
For a metropolis, you don’t have to go massive on it. You can use the exact same method for creating wards and neighborhoods within the city. Each of those wards can fulfill a singular part of the whole for the rest of the city, like a temple district, a government ward, a foreign quarter and the like.
You definitely can! You can also do a house or faction style breakdown too where each district has their own subset of all 6 of these buildings as each faction tries to be almost autonomous from each other (if you want to make things intentionally separated and self sufficient).
@@lootgoblinmarketplace Dwarves, Drow, goblin hordes and military camps in feudalism all look the same in that regard. There is more blending in large cities, but it's essentially the same.
Even the small villages outside of the walls of a major metropolis are miniature wards or districts of the metropolis. That's the farming wards that provide food resources.
A major city will have multiple walled sections, showing how the city grew outside of its walls repeatedly. That makes it look like multiple fortifications clumped together.
Ed Greenwood has videos on CZcams about the wards of Waterdeep, as an example.
For context on settlement size; England used to say that to qualify as a village a community had to have a church. I think that helps put into context how complex communities are at village and below.
When tallying up resources, don't stop at the farms and mines the resources are collected from. Add storage buildings and workshops. Then decide if the resource or finished good is kept here or sent to market in a larger town. Now you've got an entire regional economy and low level parties make great caravan guards.
Infrastructure to refine and make finished goods is a great call out!
I am running a campaign and the party just finished repairing an old mill and started milling the local wheat. Now they run a caravan to the nearest small city with flour. Good times. And they ignited the flour dust to fend of some baddies, good times for all.
Something to consider with Thorps is that they will have all of these same traits, but will operate on such a smaller scale that they will look very different. The community is small enough that there may not be an official "Government", but everyone makes decisions, and turns to an elder for guidance. Defense would probably rely on the whole town taking up arms, but would have a rotating job of lookout, who's job it is to sound an alarm for everyone to prepare a defense. An alter may just be a small shrine, or a talisman held by the elder. Etc.
Also, in some locations, a town elder may serve as the local religious leader in the absence of an "official" representative of a deity. That same elder may be the primary governmental leader as well, and an interesting point of conflict could arise if a cleric arrives and takes up residence. It could result in a political and spiritual power play by the elder, who may not want to give up some of their authority.
For defenses, you could also have local hunters who keep an eye out while looking for game. You could also have a Shire Reeve (from which we derive Sheriff) who is responsible for multiple settlements, but doesn't have enough personnel for the job, and now has a problem that he can't solve on his own. Characters passing through become valuable assets. This is especially true if they have political aspirations (ala the Sheriff of Nottingham from "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves"), and a major point of conflict could be the character was just given a title and lands that place them above the Sheriff, who now sees the characters as road blocks to their ambitions.
Even more intriguing, your underworld contact could also be one, or both, of the individuals above.
Edit: Grammar
For a thorp I would make the tavern the centre of everything. It could be the only larger building in the thorp and therefor being used for public announcements, meetings of the elders council, and travellers would meet local craftsmen there in the evening socialicing with everybody. Same for that shady guy serving as the thorps underbelly - where else would one find unsuspecing travellers who not yet know better than staying away from dealing with them and their shady business?
Making the tavern the one most important building gets across that the party is visiting a small thorp much better, than having them visit several buildings for the different functions.
@@achimsinn6189 For something the size of a thorp, a "tavern" likely would be the center of everything, as a communal area where people would eat and relax makes sense as a meeting place. However, unless it was on the larger side, it wouldn't be a tavern in the sense of "a business where food, drink and lodging is provided at a price". It would be more akin to a large, sheltered firepit where there may-or-may-not be food available to those who are welcome. Link a big communal lodge with a firepit in the middle.
Yeah, a thorp is really just a few extended families whose houses are close together.
@@robertaylor9218 I think we are thoroughly entering flavour territory here. Depending on what the campaign is calling for the thorp could be a trade post with an actual inn, a clan outpost with just a village hall or maybe even just some houses with meetings being held under the large tree that grows in the center of the settlement. I actually also had the idea of a nomadic clan who would only build up the "large tent" if a meeting of the elders was supposed to happen nd if not they just wouldn't bother with that, but again that is part of the individual flavour you're going for and there is a lot of ways one could build on these ideas.
Hey this is great! Reminds me of the SPICE method for analyzing ancient cultures I learned about back in high school:
Social, Political, Interaction w the Environment, Culture, and Economic
I’ve seen that one used before and for top level civilizations I’ve used it!
I do have to ask, why is culture in there, arent you already defining and or analyzing the culture therefore making it redundant to add (Like trying to define a word while using said word in the definition) or is it the descendant form of the culture that is being noted for the analysis?
I love the guard formula this is so efficient and understandable a lot of guides to making towns always feel bloated but this like is just enough to get the point across and be helpful too.
Glad it was helpful! I think that a lot of the time just having point of interest like this is a great way to get started. You get to fill it in as much as you’d like or keep it simple while still covering the essentials!
Player: Is there a blacksmith in this town
Me: *flips coin* no
Honestly RNG truly is the best impromptu system
With a big enough place that should have at least one I do a "streetwise" (investigation, charisma) not to see if it is present but rather what quality they find. Different DC results for that one roll.
2:53 - I liked how there was the meme-face (I don't know the actual name for that genre of memes) versions of 4 different "Heroes of Baldurs Gate" shown to represent the party in the example scenario
The face is called "Wojak" if I recall!
I started using GUARDS as soon as I learned about it. It's a great template to quickly make a town when the party gets zoomies like a tabaxi and has a sudden need to be "over thatta way". Just remember to write down the names of all the NPCs you call into existence. The most one-off throw away NPC you make is the one the party wants to adopt.
Writing down the names of NPC's the players interact with (like Thom, the Guard Captain of the village of Raven's Cove), is a great way to name drop them later in the campaign when interacting with another NPC somewhere else. "Thom my cousin from Raven's Cove has told me about you and your friends."
"The most one-off throw away NPC you make is the one the party wants to adopt" OMG, this.. 1000% this. This is ALWAYS TRUE.. hahahaha
There's an acronym I've heard about regarding worldbuilding like this: SPERM. Social, Political, Economic, Religious and Military. This one includes the underground element, which is definitely important, and I guess it's less embarrassing to say for some people. Well done.
I’ve heard of Spice before too, and I’ve seen Sperm. I definitely feel like this one is easier for me to remember. And it’s definitely easier to say in public 😂
@@lootgoblinmarketplace I haven't heard of SPICE, what's that one?
@@Myzelfa Social; Political; Interactions between humans and the environment; Cultural; Economic is what it stands for!
This is.... i feel like you took a complex university course and condensed it into a formula.
I appreciate it, I hope to drop more like these in the future!
@@lootgoblinmarketplace I look forward to them.
I use a similar method when designing a town, but I also include a chart (From pathfinder 1e settlements system) to quickly gauge the worth of items for the party and what levels of characters they may find.
eg: Thorp: Less than 20 people and no formal church. 50gp items are the base value (So rope and blankets are easy to buy and sell, wands and magic swords not so much), the economy supports 500gp total in trade (So maybe hold onto that heavy looted art piece until we get to a larger town). Magic items are rare at only 1d4 minor items total (likely lvl 1 potions). Guards 1 Formal guard (likely sheriff), Militia that can be called upon for emergencies 1 (deputy), Spell casters are likely only level 1, if there are any they will be the same number as guards (1).
Small Town: 201-2000. 1k gp of base value goods (Fine wares, masterwork items, etc), 5kgp in total trade. 3d4 minor magic items and 1d6 moderate magic items are available (Indicating a formal magic shop), 20 Guards on duty at all times, 100 militia that can be formed to defend the town, 10 spell casters at max level 4 (likely 1-2 lvl 4 as leaders and most as lvl 1-2 apprentices).
This chart helps me set the scale of industry, the worth of common homes, the number of nobles and criminals, the threat to the party for interacting aggressively, and the scale of the threat the location faces. a Thorp can absolutely fear Goblins in the woods, a small town could easily send a mob to wipe them out, but a pair of owlbears might be beyond them.
This is very useful indeed. Keeps it simple, but provides everything a travelling group of adventurers needs without going too deep into an origin story for every little settlement.
Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Military. Easy to remember and funny to explain.
This is sosososo helpful. I've been worldbuilding for a campaign I'll be running and this is a wonderful way for me to organize some quick info on the different settlements.
Saving this because I've been struggling with world building, and this video and the comments are the guidelines I've been looking for! Thank you!
You got this! I’m glad you found the video helpful.
This is so immensely helpful and such a simple way for me to keep my fantasy setting consistent while also feeling realistic enough to be immersive.
One thing I kind of added in is to call it the "guards 2 guard". Following the acronym of the first I add it in a second time with different focuses. G - Government (How is this town or city governed on a local basis? Council, elected official or is their an appointed leader). U - Unity (Is the town more of a collectivized group, Individual or are they split? Or are they against the leadership?). A - Advancement (How advanced is this town compared to others? are they seen as more of a backwater or do they have stronger development into localized specialty? eg. fishing village making a fish farm) R - Rationality (Is this place going to be perceptive to having their ideas challenged? or are they going to see the half-orc in the party and tell you all to get out) D - Dazzle (Why would you want to go to that town? what does the town offer that no where near by offers compared to it?)
I set it as separate as a way to develop and then use the second to kind of focus on a more social aspect. Having the second in mind when making a town/city/kingdom can really help flesh out some of the more difficult to think of part with roleplay. A town mayor being a council that one is trying to get your help to win over the others to allow in stronger development of the mine can come very naturally.
This was exactly the information I've been looking for. All the things jumbling around in my head finally laid out in an ordered systematic form. Thank you. Liked and subscribed
I love this method, very easy to remember too. I wasn't struggling filling in my own town but this simple method helped me refine everything and add to it a bit. Appreciate it!
You can use this is most other genres as well. It works in Numenera and Stars Without Number. Altar's might be substitute for academics.
Thanks! I like making my own solo campaigns, but I suck at world building. This is great!
First time DM. I truly appreciate content like this. Thank you
Thank you for your advice. Now I know some basic structures for creating a town for my fantasy story.
this will sure help me in my campain, thanks for the tips mate!
Nice, I've been using Dael Kingsmill's SPERM method (Social, Political, Economic, Religious, Military), it's great and very easy to remember 😉This system makes a great compliment to it, as this encourages me to think about the underground element as well. Thanks for sharing.
Also where did you get that map? It's really nice looking and I'd love a generator that can output something that high quality.
So Crosshead Studios is a great artist you can subscribe to on patreon and get this and many more maps!
Inkarnate
@@blefyplayswowable inkatnate is great and I love it, but it isn’t a map generator.
Azgaar's world map generator, Watabou's procgen arcana. Between these you can get an entire campaign generated.
My dude, that's a GOOD VIDEO, straight to the fkng point. Thank you sir!
This model is going to be very helpful in finally designing my red dragon's lair. He has his own kobold tribe and the tribe needs a small underground town, this'll help me design the facilities the kobolds need to survive, and maybe even the dragon's own quarters.
Very much enjoy this and will be using it in my TTRPG campaigns. Even the creators of vast worlds need a crutch sometimes!
This system is awesome! My mind is already buzzing with ideas!
Great video. I always enjoy seeing different takes on world building. I think this is one of the better and cleaner videos I've seen on the topic.
Glad you enjoyed it! I am going to work on a few more videos like these on my channel.
This is amazing.
I tend to have trouble working some things out and i tend to go by bulet points to make it easier for me and this works wonders
Gotta love the Baldur’s gate party visual reference.
“Go for the eyes boo! Go for the eyes!”
That method is indeed useful, but I'd add a few caveats. Each function need not be served by just one organization or structure.
Things can be distributed, particularly in a larger town, but even in a small village. The local militia, for instance, could comprise all able residents who are expected to train and maintain basic arms, even if they're mostly farmers. Yes, they have a commander, but he might also be the local blacksmith, a retired warrior, and his yard serves as their training ground.
So, some functions can overlap or be served by the same place. The inn-keeper might also be the local mayor, but she's well aware of the local shady smuggler, and deliberately keeps tabs on his activities, so she can decide what is worth thwarting and what can be let be.
By the way, love that coastal village map.
Liked and Faved by the acronym reveal. Brilliant video and it just started.
The thing I must add is that a hamlet or smaller gathering might only have one or two people working as guards/sherif/police, and likely wont have any priests or nuns of their own, but a place within 1-2 days walk (less on a horse) priest would be the one traveling there to give cermons. Also with less than 500 people there isnt an underworld as everyone knows everybody, but might be a guy who knows a guy to sell things to, or buy things from kind of grey market would be the only thing working. The place would be simply too small for anything more.
Settlement planning is something I've struggled with for a long time. Condensing it down into a simple, step-by-step formula, will make things *so* much easier for me. Thanks for that!
I find formulas like this are a great starting point. You can abandon it once you feel comfortable or skip parts that don’t feel right, but it forces you to get the process started!
Just at the time i need it most! Thank You!
Excellent method. Thanks for the info.
Now this was amazing, thanks!
If the settlement is the focus of the campaign, another important factor could be to consider the potential dynamic between each of these GUARDS variables for enriching the story one might want to tell. Maybe the Government officials are of no help to the adventurer because their pockets are lined with underworld funding, or the altars of the settlement are well protected and difficult to operate within because it's tradition for those in the military branch to be devout worshippers.
I love this GUARDS method. So many complex features that go into creating a fleshed-out setting simplified into an understandable manual.
Great info. Always have a hard time finding a starting point.
As someone preparing to be a first time DM this is great, thanks.
That was very useful!
Neat! This is a nice resource! Thank you for posting this. It’s a good structure to use for town building in games and even writing.
Also I love that map 😮 🥰
Crosshead Studios has been my favorite map maker for some time!
@@lootgoblinmarketplace Thank you! I’ll look into it!
Great video. I'll definitely reference it when I make my next town.
Man, this is really helpful. I'm gonna need to figure out how to adapt this idea to a sci-fi setting I'm working on.
Another tip I would give is that (depending on how fleshed out you want the setting) you should have multiple instances foe each category. My general rule of thumb is "every 500 people". Each example doesn't need to be significant, but a little variety goes a long way to making the setting feel more lived in. Government could be as important as the town hall, or it could be as simple as the local homeowner's guild. Likewise, resources could be the logging company that operates in town, or the band on tour who are the village's small claim to fame because some of the members happen to be from there. Social gathering hubs could be a popular (or otherwise) bar, the fairgrounds, or the next AA meeting. Variety is the spice of life, and the spice of worldbuilding!
fam this video is perfect. this is like the perfect check list
good shit
Amazing video! I would also love to see some example towns in a future video.
funny enough i actually needed this to start fleshing out my world a bit more, thanks LG!
I’m glad I could help!
Great Video! Thank You!
Very helpful, thank you for sharing this
This was really cool. Hope you do more videos like this!
That's the plan!
Super useful and informative
:) Excellent, this will definitely make things much quicker and thourough.
I like a good mnemonic. Well done.
One thing I love about this method is that you can probably make a solid campaign by just this one method because you can directly target each part of the method to create a cohesive story
This is really cool!
Nice! Thanks I will use this!
Go to the library or other resource near your place. Look up a historical map for towns in France or Serbia or Thailand. Use the map as a basis for the town layout and features. If your historical map has a graveyard or pagoda or barber guild hall you let it be right there.
Good method. I like it!
No joke, I once used the game "Banished" to make a starter town. It worked out pretty well.
This seems like a good method. I'll try it out in my dnd campaign
This is neat and seems pretty simple and intuitive to work it all
Thank you!
10/10 Great advice and a great system
Good shit gobbo man, keep it up!
I like this type of video, well done!
Glad you enjoyed it! I want to make more like it.
This was very helpful! Thank-you. Creating a city of Cloud Giants for my stream tonight.
That sounds really cool!
Excelent advice
This feels like a good jumping off point for quick creation. But last year I was in Vegas for a writer’s convention and got to attend one of Luke Gygax’s talks on worldbuilding. He recommended a system from his time in the military that struck me as brilliant for story design. The PMESII-PT system which is used by the military for understand unfamiliar terrain or locales. PMESII-PT stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical environment, and Time. It’s been really invaluable for my writing as well as my DMing. Though in the future, if I need a town in a rush, I’ll def use GUARDS
I’ve heard people talk about the SPERM method and this definitely looks like the advanced version. I think that would be great for a deep dive in the world building process!
This makes a lot of sense and I really appreciate for sharing this. I will try to build my next towns with it.
But I personally don’t think that everything is necessary in small villages:
Thorps (and maybe hamlets) don‘t necessarily need defense. Or their defense can be found in the next bigger village/ city. The same goes for government and underworld.
In most villages I tend to have the village government reside in the local tavern since it tends to be only a few people and do not meet on a regular basis. It also means one less location/encounter I have to design or plan for.
Great video but my mind boggled when I realized where you got the background music from :D
This is a brilliant mnemonic.
In the town I designed I rechecked it with this method and found the only one I hadn’t included was the altar piece. It’s a very small village so I can easily correct that with a shrine.
was going to say small villedges might not even have a official altar but more of small statues in individual houses.
@@Zack_Wester yes, depending on your culture, they might have the practice of household patron deities.
I like this. Gave me some ideas for fleshing out a starting town I have that I felt was lacking something, and did it indirectly...but the method seams to have the bases covered for what makes good RP/what people want from RP in a town. Made me think to add more underworld hubs in the starting town I have, namely one to a movie theater that had contraband films in the basement...but idk I feel like this would also be good for fleshing out one's existing game-world and towns that don't quite feel all that there...even if you have a great plot for an adventure there and know exactly how the local climate impacts crop production outside the city and the local economy plus the social influence of dwarf and tiefling merchants migrating there 200 years ago mixed with the policies of the current kingdom effect local attitudes....ya might be missing something this covers.
Something to keep in mind with underworld activities is you can just have it be a small faction or group that has an activity the overall culture doesn’t approve of. It doesn’t have to be bad or even illegal! Just some kind of outcast with an activity that might catch the party’s attention!
Thanks for the content.
My pleasure!
Interesting. Thanks.
merci, bons conseils, agréable à regarder
I like that one dude with the purple tat had a small critter :> also great advice my guy!
Rather than (only) adding buildings for those functions, do also create at least one NPC for each function, so one NPC who is the major (or if the major is unavailable acts as his replacement), a shady guy who represents the underbelly of the village and depending on how it goes a crimelord leading that underbelly, a priest or dedicated believer of the deity they worship, a guild leader for the local fishermen or a storeowner where you buy their stuff, a sheriff or guards commander and obviously a tavern owner or an innkeeper. The buildings are putting stuff in context, but the NPCs are what brings the city to live.
Very good, thank you
Thank you for watching!
great video
You have a incorrect url for your Patreon link in the Show More. Great video.
So I think you should have a mid sized town on your chart as well using the population of your large town, and then just up the population of everything else up a stage, after all the population of Londiniuem circa 100 ad is estimated to have been between 30k and 60k, and Rome at that time is believed to have had more than a million permanent residents with Alexandria being between half and three quarters of a million, other major cites are estimated to have had a population ranging from 350k to 500k.
I kinda wanna make my own fishing village after watching this village
This is genuinely a brilliant short guide to making a town when you're short on time. (and lets be honest, making a town TOO detailed tends to backfire for a GM, so brilliant in general is probably more accurate.)
The hell, I didnt know Gelu was working as an adventurer!
This is a great little tool
I’m glad you like it!
This system is also useful for writers when we're in need of creating a settlement of some sort for our characters to visit or pass through, not just DMs/GMs or TTRPG players for their characters' backstories.
I definitely feel like some of the best D&D worldbuilding advice I’ve seen has come from traditional fantasy writing tips and tricks
I usually go with the population number, often divided into age sections or family-sized chunks.
Here is a handy chart I made for a general region's population:
Population Division:
-45%: Peasants
-Poor: 20%
-Working Class (Area's Main Trade): 10%
-Artesans: 5%
-Builders: 4%
-Caretakers: 3%
-Entertainers: 2%
-Hunters: 2%
-Clergy: 2%
-Scholars: 1%
-Merchants: 1%
-Logistics: 1%
-Officials: 1%
-Soldiers: 1%
-Nobility: 1%
-Criminals: 1%
After that it goes to placing the above mentioned groups into buildings, districts or other locations around the town.
Nobility includes the Royal Guards, visiting Courtiers or Diplomats, and often royal servants.
Towns don't necessarily need underworld activities to function. You can have a town that criminal organizations and black marketers don't care about, either because it's too small or too much of a hassle to operate in to be worth it. Sure, you lose some of the interest that town might have, but IMO not every town needs to be the most interesting place in the world. Not every quaint village in a river valley has to have some dark secret. Some can just literally be a quaint village in a river valley, and the hook for that town might instead be that a lich has set themselves up in a tomb deeper in the valley and the village makes a good "home base" for the party while they investigate the tomb. In this case, the underworld activity is replaced by a nearby point of interest and the town exists as a convenient place to stay rather than as a plot location in its own right.
nice video :D
Thanks! 😁
I didn't know the term "thorp"... that was new to me. I'm researching thorp and it seems simply a way of saying hamblet in medieval English, something like a synonym for hamblet not a category below that.
As I knew, a hamlet could be a group of 5 peasant houses (probably a family that went to live there after a marriage installed the first house there). Where do you get those numbers from? I really have a hard time taking D&D or Pathfinder numbers seriously, that a small fishing town like Sandpoint has 1000 inhabitants... especially with the map showing the number of houses.
In small towns there doesn't have to be guards. I've seen that D&D and Pathfinder have the occasional table with numerical relationships like "2 guards per 500 inhabitants" or something like that. But the guard was not like the police, the vast majority of settlements were devoid of defenses and only when there were serious problems did the noble owner of the local lands, usually a Count or a Baron/Mayor, send a small militia force led by some of his knights (the closest thing to a permanent army at that time were the knights). But most of the time that intervention only happened when the peasants rebelled and the local nobleman sent people to "pacify" them. Most of the time the people of most villages were left to their own and had to solve their problems themselves. Mayors were figures that only existed in cities, and in fact they were like small nobles or sometimes Barons, towns did not have those figures, and those Barons were in charge of the entire territory of a barony but mostly to collect taxes (more than nothing in food or materials, no coins) or if necessary, in charge of recruiting levies from all the towns of that barony and all of those, who were usually knights of a Count, met before him in the castle of the count's province. There was the notion that peasants should serve the nobles and they offered protection, but this was fulfilled in situations of war or raids by barbarians, such as Vikings for example. And that was very common.
In Spain, the derogatory term "villain" became popular, which in reality only means "person who lives in a village" because the bandits who robbed the roads were included as the commoner/peasant people of those towns. The nobles saw the "villains" as the lowest and did not hesitate to kill them, and the negative connotations of the term villain still persist to this day. Why are the protagonists noble in all medieval stories? Or like in ancient Greece they were princes or soldiers. Because you couldn't be the protagonist of anything if you were a commoner, you were the lowest of the low, you were worthless, no one trained you in weapons or anything (because you had to be at least a low noble to enter the church). Even the wealthy bourgeoisie had a very difficult time being taken into account by the nobles who only out of necessity ended up giving in to obtain money from them. A commoner could be whipped or killed for even daring to speak to a nobleman, enough to be considered disrespectful. Why didn't the peasants reveal themselves more often then? Because in addition to the fear of the nobles' ability to raise troops, there was all the religious indoctrination that served the interests of the nobles that instilled in the commoners that they had to suffer submissively because life was only a test to earn heaven, that and the speech that the nobles, especially the king, were there directly by God's dictate. And if all this were not enough, there was the idealization that naturally occurs when there is an elitist class, or dictators, who are given better education, better clothes, etc. And even the church brought oppression by condemning to the death penalty, burned alive at the stake, anyone who dared to even possess a Bible without being a member of the church (in case the very rare case of a peasant who knew how to read Latin were to occur) and in addition people were also sentenced to death for just translating the Bible into a language other than the restricted Latin, even members of the church itself, priests, were burned for heresy for simply wanting to translate the Bible into another language. With all this, the commoners were kept ignorant and manipulable.
My girlfriend, who had NEVER played RPG before, drew the attention to the fact that the lighthouse at the halfling coastal village was pointless for defense if the pacific village had a total of ONE inhabitant responsible for protecting the population.
And even though I had prepared everything ELSE about this mine village...the guards just flew over my head.
What about more than a metropolis something like a dwarf main glory city
You don't need altars. Those are purely flavor. You do need places for horses, other types of mounts, and livery stables, and if near water you need docks. You do need market areas.
Amazing tool! Is this town yours? Did you design it? The art style is great I'd like to see more!
So Crosshead studios made it, there is a link to his work in the description!