Medieval Demographics Made Easy. Fantasy worlds come in many varieties, from the "hard core" medieval-simulation school to the more fanciful realms of high fantasy, with alabaster castles and jeweled gardens in the place of the more traditional muddy squalor.
Despite their differences, these share a vital common element: ordinary people. Most realms of fantasy, no matter how baroque or magical, can not get by without a supply of ordinary farmers, merchants, quarreling princes and palace guards. Clustered into villages and crowding the cities, they provide the human backdrop for adventure. Of course, doing the research necessary to find out how common a large city should be, or how many shoemakers can be found in a town, can take up time not all GMs have available.
To the end of more satisfying world design, I've prepared this article. Wilderland Demographics. I originally posted this on the Necromancer Games Judges Guild forum in 2007 This info is taken from Triumphant Grand Tactical and Demographics found in Wilderlands of High Fantasy (old) and the Ready Ref Sheets some definitions 1 able bodied men = 4 to 5 people or 1 household.1 sq mile will feed 320 able bodied men1 sq mile needs 30 able bodied men to utilize at 100%1 5 mile hex has 13,856 acres1 5 mile hex has 21.65 sq miles1 5 mile hex has 625 .2 mile hexes1 .2 mile hex has 22.17 acres1 .2 mile hex has .035 sq miles1 5 mile hex, with 100% utilization, can feed up to 6928 people.1 5 mile hex will require 650 able bodied men to utilize at 100% Note the book give 6400.
This looks like a math error unless they are making note you are never going really get 100% utilization. 1 .2 mile hex will feed 11.085 able bodied men1 .2 mile hex will require 1.039 able bodied men Finally I use this as a guide to plot how large the settled areas of the map area. Wilderlands Demographics: Pastoral Cultures. I sat down with Harn Manor, Wikipedia, the Department of Agriculture website, and some other sources to crunch some numbers on Pastoral societies.
Herding animals is more productive than growing crops. But there are several catches. It is more labor intensive particularly if you are herding swine. While different herd animals (cows, goats, sheep, etc) have useful secondary products (milk, fleece) nearly all your food value is going to come out of a annual slaughter just before winter/dry seasons. You are going to have to feed the remaining animals. Living Forgotten Realms. Specials Special adventures (sometimes referred to as Core Specials) are designed to be challenging, but fair and fun, experiences where the players must work together in order to successfully complete the entire adventure within the time limit.
These adventures always premiere at major conventions, so the real-world slot time is usually a significant design consideration (as a rule of thumb, we put in about 120% of the content that a normal LFR adventure of the same length would have; the idea is that a group that is really on their game can make it through, but less-effective groups might not). Special adventures generally give greater rewards (in terms of XP and treasure) than other LFR adventures do, and are generally more difficult than a typical adventure (this might be due to harder combats, more combats, or other elements of the adventure that pose challenges of a different sort than those normally encountered in LFR).
DCC. Giant in the Playground Forums - View Single Post - Articles Previously Appearing on GiantITP.com. A Lightweight System for Random Encounters: d10+d10 - Gnome Stew, the Game Mastering Blog. For my Bleakstone hex crawl, I decided I wanted a random encounter system that met the following criteria: SimpleConforms roughly to the baseline 1/6 chance of an encounter/day in Basic D&DCan be weighted by terrain, region, PC activity, etc.Not entirely predictable by my players I couldn’t find a system like that in any of my books, or online, so I built one.
The spectrum My baseline was Labyrinth Lord’s system (which is the same as Moldvay Basic D&D, which LL clones): Roll d6 once a day, and there’s an encounter on a 1. That looked too simple and too predictable for my tastes, because it ignores terrain (etc.) and players can count on 0 or 1 encounter/day when traveling. How to make a Fantasy Sandbox. Unlike a Traveller Sandbox making a Fantasy Sandbox is less straightforward.
This is because Traveller at the stellar level has a uniform geography while a fantasy setting can have any type of geography imaginable including the fantastic like lands floating on shards of a shattered world. If talking a fantasy setting I would do the following Using one page sketch a world or continent mapLabel important regionsWrite one page of background giving no more than a handful of sentences to each region.Pick an area roughly 200 miles by 150 milesGrab a 8.5 by 11 sheet of hex paper. This is being expanded in the following posts.
Combat Manager.