Fantastic Toponymy: Inventing Place Names

When we invent a place for a game, we need to name it. We can just mash together some syllables until they sound cool, or we can try to make a name that seems to have history, that sound natural and hints at the culture of the place by using real elements from real cultures. Or if we're really adventurous, we can invent sounds that have invented meaning, and use those to build our place names - like Tolkien famously did.

"Toponymy" is the naming of places, from the Greek "topos" place and "onoma", name. The places all around the Old World have names that have developed over centuries or millennia- names usually derived from a simple description of the place.

The New World, by contrast, is named far more recently, with names that are usually simple, current language terms that are easily understood, or native names perhaps spelled poorly by the settlers. Both follow similar conventions once you look into the language.

Reflecting culture

Where is this place you're naming? What are the people there like? Are this a place of familiar, homely folk, or do you want to invoke a feeling of "otherness" about your invented place?

The names of the British Isles are familiar sounding to we English speakers (even those outside the UK). They can seem homely, even rustic and Olde Worlde (especially to those outside the UK!).

Similarly, the names of other nations' places, made up as they are by different language elements, can seem foreign, but familiar - "Porto Nova" reflects that it's inhabitants speak some Mediterranean, Romance language, so we have a handle on the sort of culture we might find there, just from the name.

A place called "Klak'amtuu" or "Shissiissii" tells us that this is a culture we are not familiar with.

Be careful not to just borrow real world names directly for your fantasy locations, though. Those have cultural baggage that you probably don't want in your game.
Of course, if you deliberately want to bring in the implications of a real-world name to your game, that's up to you - just be sure you're aware of them!
Calling your pseudo-Britain "Albion" (as in the popular CRPG Fable) is fine if you include all the people of Great Britain - the Cornish, English, Scottish and Welsh), but not so good if you just treat them all as English. We have whole political parties here in the UK dedicated to independence for those nations.

Settlements and other places 

Since you're reading this in English, I'll start by looking at English place names.

Nottingham is a worn-down version of "Snotta-ingas-ham", meaning the settlement ("-ham") of the people ("-ingas") of Snotta (a Danish chieftan). That "-ingham" ending is all over England.
Canterbury is from "Cantware-burgh", meaning the Kentish ("Cantware-") Stronghold ("-burgh"). Again, that "-bury" ending, and the related "-burg", "-borough", and "-burgh" ending are all over the British Isles.

So armed with this knowledge, your invented place could be called Notesbury ("Snotta's Stronghold"), or Cantingham ("Settlement of the people of Kent") - some other combination from the name elements appropriate to the culture.

There are plenty of resources for such elements of British place names on the web, so I won't just reproduce a list here.

Similarly, you can find that sort of list for other cultures: Here's a list for Japanese place names, and a short list for Maghreb toponyms.

From these examples, you can see that place names tend to be derived from a few common parts:

• geographical feature (river, hill, valley, forest, etc)
• type of settlement (farm, fort, village, town, etc)
• direction or position (north, south, upper, middle, etc)
• person of note (founder or clan leader, saint, etc)
• description (dark, cold, red, windy, etc)

It can be helpful to make up a plain English name with such elements, and then translate it into whatever language is appropriate - for example: Hill Fort Town might be "Lawtonbury" in pseudo-Britian, or "Okajo Machi" in pseudo-Japan.

Country and regional names 

Nations and regions are often named for who lives (or lived) there (usually this is the name given to the place by its inhabitants), or a descriptor of the region (usually this is a name given by outsiders to the region).

Thus we get Scotland, the land of the Scots; France, named for the Franks; and Afghanistan the place of ("-istan") the Afghans, and so on.
While on the other hand we get Cameroon, the land of shrimp (Portuguese "Camaroes", via French "Cameroun"), from the abundance of shrimp found by European explorers in the Wouri River; and Wales, named by the Saxons for the foreigners ("Welisc") who lived there.

This can be useful - dual names for a place can help show historical enmity between the natives and the outsiders who imposed the other name.

Here's a list of country names and etymologies - and a list of regional names for places within countries that aren't on the former list.

You can see from those lists that national names - in the Old World - tend to be derived from a few common elements:

• people's or tribal name (Franks, Angles, Danes, Sicels, etc)
• description of people (foreigners, bearded ones, etc)
• geographical description (green, forest, mountainous, etc)
• place indicator (place, land, home, etc)

So again using your language of choice to reflect the culture you want to imply, you can name your region in a similar manner to settlements and places, but using these elements.

Geographical feature names

The great geographic features of the land were often named long long ago, in languages far removed from everyday. The new folk invading or colonising a place would just use the local name, not knowing or soon forgetting what it meant.
The River Avon in England means the "River River" - "avon" is derived from an ancient British word for river.

Alternately, the name may be clear and descriptive in the current common language - the Misty Mountains in Tolkien's Middle Earth, for example.

Features like mountains, rivers, lakes, marshes, and headlands will usually include some element that means just that - "mountain", "river", "lake", etc. Together with that element, there will usually be another part that simply describes the feature - "misty", "dark", "wide", or similar - or perhaps the name of a person or tribe.

Once again, we end up with the same sort of naming method, choosing from a this set of word elements.

Alien and bizarre places

To suggest a strange an exotic place, you can use language elements the players will not be familiar with, or invented languages like Klingon, or Quenya - or even your own invented gibberish sounds.

So in Middle Earth, we have Imladris, meaning "Cloven Valley" for Rivendell, and and Hithaeglir meaning literally "Towers of Mist" for Misty Mountains.

One could with relative ease invent a range of place name word element and use them consistently for a new culture. This could work particularly well in contrast with a region of familiar sounding names - for example, Crick Hollow, Buckland, Chetwood, and Weathertop giving way to Khazad-dum, Lothlorien, Gondor and Cirith Gorgul as we progress further away from the homely Shire with Frodo and Company.

Similarly, this technique works even with names that while relatively familiar, don't have that homely feeling created by names like your local region's names - so English name elements giving way to Germanic and Scandinavian names, or Latin names will create an atmosphere that evokes those lands, and all the assumptions that go with them.

Conclusion

Because place names can be evocative, and can be laden with culture, we should be careful not to just use them at random. Names and style choices in game settings will create an atmosphere. With only a little research and work, you can bring life into a place just by speaking its name.

Fantasy settlements - part 2.5: Location, location, location!

People don't just throw a stick in the air and build a town where it lands - at least, those who do don't meet with enough long term success for your player party to encounter such a shambolic shanty.

What makes a good location?

A good location is one where the settlement can thrive. At its base level, the location provides something that other locations do not. That may be some physical resource, like water, or it might be a geographic resource, like a meeting of transport routes, or a social resource, like a holy site.

Here's a page where the topic is summarised nicely for high school level studies.

What can I add to that? Not a lot really - except some fantasy specific examples and possibilities.

Bridge point
The Twins - A Song of Ice and Fire
Osgiliath - The Lord of the Rings
 

Osgiliath by AbePapakhian (Deviantart)

Thandol Span / Dun Modr - Wetlands / Arathi Highlands, World of Warcraft

Nodal point
The Crossroads - Northern Barrens, World of Warcraft

Inter-dimensional and inter-planar portals - a town around the entrance to the Underworld


Dry point
Swamp Castle - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Thousand Needles (post-Cataclysm) - mesas as islands in a now flooded valley, World of Warcraft

Atlantis (post sinking) - often depicted as an air bubble under the sea

Wet point
Ramkahen - Uldum, World of Warcraft

Ramkahen - Surrounded by desert

Defensive

Stormwind - fortified prominence, World of Warcraft
Minas Tirith - The Lord of the Rings

Minas Tirith guarding the narrow point between the mountains - Encyclopdeia of Arda

Aspect
Winterfell - hotsprings protect against the worst of winter, A Song of Ice and Fire

Shelter
Blackrock Mountain - a safe solid haven in a land of fire, Burning Steppes, World of Warcraft 
Light's Hope - a holy haven in a diseased land, Eastern Plaguelands, World of Warcraft

Resources
Nordrassil - magical resource - The World Tree of Mount Hyjal, World of Warcraft
Keep on the Borderlands, OD&D - a town supporting adventurers flocking to newly discovered dungeons or crypts

The growth point of a settlement will tend to set the form of that settlement: Aspect and Resource based settlements will often have dispersed buildings; Bridge and Nodal point settlements are frequently linear (clustered along one of the strips), and other settlement types tend toward the nuclear (closely gathered around  the central point).

As successful small settlements expand, their original purpose may be lost - they'll begin to attract people for the protection that comes from large numbers and the opportunities of towns and cities. These larger settlements become nuclear around the original centre.

EDIT - some additional examples:
From the various forums where I trawled for comments, a wealth of additional suggestions have popped up.

• To launch an offense - campaign headquarters may become permanent given a long enough conflict
• Military base - town supporting a military base, perhaps a training ground rather than a strategic point. This becomes significant with standing armies, rather than the predominant medieval muster of knights and militia.
• Religious - loads of examples. Probably fits the resource categor, under tourism. Pilgrims making devotional journeys to religiously significant sites were common in medieval times.
• Accidental / catastrophe survivors - refugee camps become permanent over time
• Victory / battle site - in the Excalibur movie, Camelot is founded on the site of a great victory
• Slave city for massive monument - the pyramids' construction was supported by a massive city of workers

• temples around the site of fissures that give off psychoactive fumes
• mage schools around areas where the boundaries between the planes grow thin
• mountaintop laboratories to catch the lighting
• village of vassals to a nearby dragon
• small settlements of people trying their luck at removing the sword from the stone
• summer/wintering grounds in the path of prey migratory paths
• boom towns/ghost towns - some enormously valuable resource has been discovered, and people are flocking to exploit it (boom), and the aftermath of the drying up of that resource (ghost town)
• outcast/leper colonies
• campsites for academic expeditions

Fantasy Settlements - part 2: Distribution

How often will you find settlements when travelling, either in civilised lands, or the wilderness?

Or, more to the point in fantasy gaming, if I randomly teleport the player characters to the middle of a country, how far are they from the nearest town?

Population density

How often you find settlements will depend on how densely populated the area is.

According to the 2007 Demographic Year Book of the United Nations, there were 49 persons per square km in the surface area of the world. Among the continents, Asia - with a density of 126 persons per square km - was the most densely populated continent, followed by Europe (32), Africa (32), Latin America (28), Northern America (16) and Oceania (4). [Source]

We can use these figures to give us some bench marks for the population density of the fantasy lands we're inventing.
Is our fantasy land crowded, like India? Or sparsely settled, like Australia?

Of course, these figures are from recent times - you might be planning a setting more like medieval Europe, or feudal Japan. We can use historical data to tweak our number fairly easily. For example, here's the Wikipedia entry for historical population - from which we see in the 14th Century, the global population of earth was about 300 million - about 5% of today's population - so for a simple formula, you could divide those figures above by 20...

Except that as we can see from these maps showing population through the ages, we've tended to cluster round some prime habitable area for most of known history. If we're going to assume that a populated area is going to be attractive to live in, then we shouldn't just arithmetically cut the density by 95%. Let's call it half instead, and add a "Wilderness" category, where practically no-one lives.

For a bench mark, I'll set the following density levels:

• Very high density population: more than 200 per square mile
• High density: 150 - 200 per square mile
• Medium density: 75 - 149 per square mile
• Low density: 30 - 74 per square mile
• Sparse density: up to 30 per square mile
• Wilderness: no random population

(I'm mixing my units in this entry, sorry, but population per square km is about one third of the population per square mile - and fantasy games prefer miles. So I've multiplied all those sq km figures by 3.)

Clumps of people

Where is that population, though? Populations are rarely distributed at random. People tend to settle in clumps - that's the technical term, honestly.
We're not just a blanket of people spread out over our respective countries, one per football pitch-sized bit of land. We gather together in settlements.

Urbanisation
As I mentioned before, the d20 fantasy rules seem to steer us to a relatively urbanised population.

In modern times, about 50% of the world's population live in urban areas. In the early stages of industrialisation, 10% of the population lived in towns and cities.
Before industrialisation, however, between 1 and 2% of the population lived in town and cities - the slower transport links of this era meant that 50 to 90 farmers were needed to support just one city-dweller. [sources]

For a typical fantasy setting, a 1% level of urbanisation would be appropriate - travel is by foot or horse, so getting fresh food into urban centres requires a close network of rural population: plenty of villages, hamlets and farmland.

Of course, in some high fantasy settings, magic can take the place of industrialisation, so that the early industrial or even modern distribution might be appropriate. Consider the level of magic, and the ability to rapidly travel. Food production might even be magically achieved. It might even be possible to exceed our real-world modern level of urbanisation.

I'm going to stick with a typical, pre-industrial feel for the fantasy setting. I tweaked the settlement categories so they would shake out to give a more rural population:

• Metropolis (25 000 +)
• City (5 001 - 25 000)
• Large town (2001 - 5000)
• Small town (501 - 2000)
• Large village (201 - 500)
• Small village (61 - 200)
• Hamlet (21 - 60)
• Thorp (up to 20)

I've crunched through the maths to find the percentage of the population that lives in each type of settlement, for an arbitrarily large population (large enough to fill all the categories).

• Metropolis 0.5%
• City 1%
• Large town 2.5%
• Small town 4%
• Large village 5%
• Small village 12%
• Hamlet 25%
• Thorp 50%

(Notice that over 90% of the population live in rural settlements - most live in communities of just a couple of dozen people... but we still have scope for some huge cities and metropolises.)

Now, from those percentages, for the benchmark densities above in an arbitrarily large area, I worked out how many settlements of each category there would be - from which I worked out how many miles there would be between each settlement...

Settlement distribution by density category

• Very high density
• Metropolis - up to 200 miles
• City - up to 100 miles
• Large town - 30 miles 
• Small town - 15 miles
• Large village - 7 miles
• Small village - 3 miles
• Hamlet - 1 mile
• Thorp - 1/2 mile

• High density
• Metropolis - 250 miles
• City - 125 miles
• Large town - 33 miles 
• Small town - 15 miles
• Large village - 7 miles
• Small village - 3 miles
• Hamlet - 1 mile
• Thorp - 1/2 mile

• Medium density
• Metropolis - 300 miles
• City - 150 miles
• Large town - 50 miles 
• Small town - 25 miles
• Large village - 10 miles
• Small village - 5 miles
• Hamlet - 1 1/2 miles
• Thorp - 1/2 mile

• Low density
• Metropolis - 450 miles
• City - 250 miles
• Large town - 75 miles 
• Small town - 30 miles
• Large village - 15 miles
• Small village - 5 miles
• Hamlet - 2 miles
• Thorp - 1 mile

• Sparse density
• Metropolis - 750 miles
• City - 350 miles
• Large town - 100 miles 
• Small town - 50 miles
• Large village - 25 miles
• Small village - 10 miles
• Hamlet - 4 miles
• Thorp - 2 miles

Random settlement finding

The thorp is the most frequent settlement type, so the distances between those are smallest. But this is also the minimum distance to any settlement. If you randomly appear anywhere in a sparsely populated region (let's ignore true wilderness for the moment), then you are no more than 2 miles from some kind of settlement.
What kind of settlement? Usually, that'd be a thorp - a clump of families, some little ranch and its cowpokes, a remote chapel with its attendant monks, or a country house and its family and staff. But it could be a metropolis, a city, town or village.

We've got a set of percentages of settlement types, and that turns quite neatly into a table. First we check how far away the nearest settlement is, then we roll to see what type of settlement it is.

Once we've got that nearest settlement figured out, the other types of settlement are randomly placed around about. The nearest city will be 350 miles away, the nearest large town, 100 miles, and so on.

		Miles to next
d%		very high density	high density	medium density	low density	sparse density
1-50	Thorp	0.5	0.5	0.5	1	2
51-75	Hamlet	1	1	1.5	2	4
76-88	Small village	3	3	5	5	10
89-93	Large village	7	7	10	15	25
94-97	Small town	15	15	25	30	50
98-99	Large town	30	33	50	75	100
00	roll 1d4
1d4		very high density	high density	medium density	low density	sparse density
1-3	City	100	125	150	250	350
4	Metropolis	200	250	300	450	750

Caveats and tweaks

If you're rolling randomly for an utterly new region, this system will work nicely enough - but take a look at 2.5, next, where I discuss location selection by desirability: people tend to build settlements where there's some resource to make the settlement worthwhile.

But if you're designing a setting, you'll probably have some ideas about where the capital city is, and where some other key major places are. (These are almost certainly placed in the most desirable spots - be sure to check out 2.5 next time!)

Remove metropolises and cities from the table - they only count for 1.5% of the total, anyway. You'll be left with town, villages and smaller settlements - just the sort of size of place for you to quickly put together some notes and wing it.

Fantasy Settlements 1.5 - Excessively Urban?

Since last Fantasy Settlements blog post, I've not been idle - I've been digging around in population data and settlement models, and making spreadsheets.
Despite how dull that seems, I think that some of what I found may be interesting!

D&D demographics are post-industrial
D&D and derived d20 fantasy games give us a bunch of settlement types / names to work with, as I mentioned last time:

• Metropolis, large city, small city, large town, small town, village, hamlet, thorp

These settlements are assigned population sizes, purchasing limits, and so on.
Notice that we only have three types of rural settlement, and 5 types of urban.

When I studied urban development and settlement theories at school, one of the key theories was Christaller's central place theory. (I suspect I remember it so well through a combination of this topic being one that my father helped me understand by getting me to explain it to him, and the fact that it lays out settlements on a hex grid...)

I'll not bore you with all the details, but simply put, he proposed (and then to some extent proved in the real world) that settlements grow according to their place in a hierarchy - the settlements that provide the most important or unique services grow largest and influence a wider area, while those with common services are less influential and grow less. That is: there are many farms (small settlements), but only a few seats of government (probably in a metropolis).
You can look up more details, of course, but the practical issue I want to talk about here is that he said that each order of settlement would be served by on average six of the next lower order: a town would be surrounded by six villages, roughly equidistant, and those villages by six hamlets, each, and so on.

When I applied this idea to the categories from the d20 fantasy rules, I found that for 1 metropolis, I had:

• 6 large cities, 
• 36 small cities, 
• 216 large towns, 
• 1 296 small towns, 
• 7 776 villages, 
• 46 656 hamlets and ...
• 279 936 thorps

The d20 settlement rules give the following guide to population sizes:

• metropolis, 25000+ 
• large cities, 10001 - 25000
• small cities, 5001 - 10000
• large towns, 2001 - 5000
• small towns, 201 - 2000
• villages, 61 - 200
• hamlets, 21 - 60
• thorps, 20 or fewer

When I put those population data into my numbers of settlements, I got the following average:

• metropolis, 37500
• large cities, 105 003
• small cities, 270 018
• large towns, 756 108
• small towns, 1 426 248
• villages, 1 014 768
• hamlets, 1 889 568
• thorps, 5 598 720 or fewer

That gave me a total urban population of 2,594,877, total rural population of 8,503,056 (rural being anything smaller than a town), in a total population of 11,097,933. In other words, a 23.4% urban population.
(This is of course based on a relatively small "metropolis" - bigger metropolises will tip the balance even further.)

Now, when I looked at real world data, I found that this level of urbanisation only started after the industrial revolution. Before that, there just weren't the transport links to make massive urban centres sustainable. We couldn't get fresh food to the city markets fast enough to support city dwellers on a large scale.
Prior to the industrial revolution, the split of urban to rural population was more like 1%, rising to 10% over the first hundred years of the agricultural revolution and early industrial era.
A 23% urban population is more like the level we saw in Europe around the mid to late Victorian era.
[source:http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050993.files/2-15%20-%20Kingsley%20Davis%20-%20The%20Origin%20and%20Growth%20of%20Urbanization%20in%20the%20World.pdf]

Urban sprawls need magic or technology
So it seems that the top heavy set of settlements that the standard rules give us means that the d20 fantasy setting is out of kilter with its usual pseudo-medieval idyll. It's a more modern balance, based on a time of technological advancement, railways and mechanised farming.

Of course, maybe a wizard did it.

In some high fantasy settings, magic can take the place of industrialisation, so that the early industrial or even modern distribution might be appropriate. Consider the level of magic, and the ability to rapidly travel. Food production might even be magically achieved. It might even be possible to exceed our real-world modern level of urbanisation.

But I think it's important that if you decide to have a wizard do it, you know what they have to do.

Next: Population density
Back to my intended schedule, in which I put some of this research into practice.

Fantasy Settlements - part 1: Resources

Players have a habit of treating settlements like vending machines for equipment, so let's indulge that tendency, and look at what you can get from a given size of settlement.

D&D 3rd edition gave us 8 categories of settlement: Thorp, Hamlet, Village, Small town, Large town, Small city, Large city and Metropolis. I'll use those terms, as they're as good as any.

Normal life experiences tell us that less goods and services available in a three family thorp than are available in a village of 100 families, and that even more choice will be available in the city of several thousand families.

How can we reflect this in game?

Simple cash limit
The simplest method is to apply a cash limit to each settlement category - and this is what D&D 3 did. It's a reasonable enough method, and easy to implement.
But in actual play, a straight use of these rules can lead to odd situations: a rural thorp might have several swords available to buy, but no horses - or a large port town might have magical armour for sale, but no sailing boats.

Categorised cash limits 
It seems obvious to me that we need to have differing cash limits for different goods and services.
The GM can of course make ad hoc rulings to deal with this - but I'd like to at least make some guidelines.

First, I'll establish some categories:

Trade goods
General gear
Adventuring gear
Special substances and items
General tools
Specialist tools
Clothing
Mounts and related gear
Transport
Arms and armour
General services
Expert services

...and lastly - Magical

 These reflect the categories for equipment given in the D&D rules, with only a few tweaks. They're good categories, generally.
All I've done is add "Magical" and split a couple of the D&D categories: "adventuring gear" is split into "general" and "adventuring" - because despite their equal costs, I imagine that in a normal settlement grappling hooks would be less common than flint and steel, and a portable ram would be less common than a tent.
Similarly, I've split "tools" into "General" and "Specialist", because I think it'd be harder to find a disguise kit than a healer's kit, and "Services" into "General" and "Expert" for the same sort of reasons.

That's too big a list to manage all at once, though - so, I'll gather up those categories into the following groups:

Trade
General
Specialist
Magical

Trade and Magical include Trade goods and Magical goods (obviously)
General includes General gear, General services and General tools (again, obviously),  as well as Clothing, Mounts, and Transport
Specialist includes Adventuring gear, Special substances and Specialist tools (continuing our obviousness motif), Arms and armour, and Expert services

So what to do with these groups? Assign weight to them!

Trade goods should by default, use the standard  (or base) cash limit
General goods should be at 125% of the base cash limit
Specialist goods should be at 75% of the base limit
Magical goods should be 50% of the base limit
(Round off to the nearest 5 coins)

So for a Thorp in the D&D 3rd edition rules, the cash limits would be:

Trade 50gp
General goods 65gp
Specialist goods 35gp
Magical goods 25gp

Which means that the thorp might be able to sell you 5 cows, some masterwork artisans' tools, a flask of holy water or a single 1st level spell scroll - but it doesn't have a disguise kit, a stock of potions, or anyone who can put weaponised spikes on your armour.

So this option seems to do the job I wanted.

But we should retain flexibility - rules shouldn't be a straighjacket - so these cash limits for a given settlement should also be freely be adjusted up and down as the GM sees fit.
Let's say that we can adjust the cash limit of any category in a given settlement by 1/4 of the base limit.
This lets the GM set the availability of specialist goods higher or lower, as appropriate for the setting.

Local goods for local people
Of course, that list doesn't give us a chance to deal with any local bias - our port town example would still hold if we don't split water transport out from land transport and the like.
I think the best way to deal with this is to add both a "local" and "other" descriptor to the following categories:

Services (General or Expert)
Transport
Trade goods 

The GM should also be entitled to add the local and other descriptors to any other category as appropriate.
Local goods should get a 25% boost to their cash limit - it's easier to find them in the local shops and markets.

All the work you want
Of course, the flat cash limit works fine if you're not thinking too hard about it.
If there's no need to fiddle with the cash limits for a given town or village, or if there's no time, then the base limit can apply to everything.

Creating Fantasy Settlements - Introduction

Settlements in fantasy games are treated poorly.

They tend to exist and static objects, without history or style. They're often just a resource centre for adventurers - a place where PCs buy potions or armour. They're placed without thought, and have no function of their own. Or they're outlandish fantastic places that bear no relation to the settlements we see in the real world.

We all have some experience of settlements of various sizes - it's a rare person who lives without any experiences of some kind of hamlet, village, town or city. We're an urbanised population. You may have less experience of life in a tiny settlement like a thorpe of hamlet, than you do of town or city life.
So by living in these spaces, we have some ideas about how they work. We'll usually put these ideas into effect when the adventure takes the heroes to a village or city: there's a market place, a tavern, a jail, and so on.

Often, that'll do fine. The players aren't much interested in a strung out series of farms and crofts in the valley, but only really pay attention to the coaching inn where they've stopped for the night, or the spooky manor house they're exploring. Nor do they care much about the theatre and opera while they're busy trying to persuade the temple priests to heal their dead companion (he's only mostly dead, see).

But an understanding of what makes settlements tick, what makes them arise in the first place, why they are found where they are, what you can find in them, and so on - that will help the referee running the game to improvise, and answer those impromptu questions: "Is there somewhere in the village I can get a magic sword?" or "Who's in charge here?"

Knowing how and why real world settlements work will also help you make those bizarre and outlandish places like the flying castle, or the volcano city, or whatever you come up with seem more real.

So I'm going to write a series of posts on various topics around settlements. It'll be a long project, and I may post many unrelated topics in between, but I'll tag them all "Fantasy Settlements", and link to them here.

Contents:

• Part 1: resources 
• Part 1.5: urbanisation
• Part 2: distribution
• Part 2.5: location

Still to come... 

• Part 3: function 
• Part 4: zoning