"Cities, towns, and sometimes even large
villages provide the setting for highly interesting,
informative, and often hazardous
affairs and incidents,?" says the PH. True enough. However, when it
comes to creating a medieval town for a
fantasy gaming campaign, many DMs don't play the role of builders very
well. Most people have a vague idea of what
a typical town in the Middle Ages was like,
but in order to create one for use in your
game, you?ll need more than a vague idea.

We?ve campaigned in one fantasy medieval
town which had all the necessities: a
town wall, complete with a gatekeeper just
waiting to be bribed; plenty of inns and
taverns scattered throughout the town; dark
alleys; and suspicious folk ? but it also had
wide streets, huge warehouses and empty
buildings where characters could meet in
secret, a vast prison with large roomy cells
for everyone (one person to a cell), and
large, grassy parks. It was like a Minneapolis
suburb in a time-warp.

Granted, the key in fantasy role-playing
is fantasy, but it is fantasy based on historical
fact. One of the major points of the
game is to experience what your characters
would have experienced if they had lived in
the Middle Ages, had magic been possible,
and had dragons roamed the land. With
these guidelines, you should be able to
visualize a medieval town more clearly and
enjoy the experience of building one for
your own game and playing within it.

The DMG offers the
DM very little help with creating a town
campaign. That makes the DM?s job twice
as difficult, because almost every party of
adventurers encounters a town at one point
or another. Most player characters buy their
equipment in towns. Others search for
followers there, and still others enter towns
to seek directions. If characters have to visit
a town, they may as well have an adventure
there, too.

Before the players can enjoy a town campaign,
the DM must create a town. Although
the DMG recommends using a
vague town map, a detailed map makes the
campaign more interesting. A town adventure
can be as exciting as a dungeon or
wilderness adventure, with a little planning. 

Community size and location
The difference between cities, towns, and
villages lies in population size. The average
medieval town held about 2,500 people,
although a large town might contain as
many as 20,000. A huge city such as Lon-
don or Paris boasted 50,000 to 100,000
inhabitants. A Russian village consisted of a
family group of two to four generations
clustering together, 40 to 100 people, with
the clan head being the eldest member.
When the population of a Russian village
reached about 100 people, the village divided
itself in half. One group of people
remained where they were, and the other
group left to seek a place to found a new
village. (Imagine meeting them on the
road!) Often the new village was established
close to the original site, so the move wasn?t
a great hardship. The causes of such splits
varied, but the usual reason was that the
clan leadership of the village became ineffective
after the population reached a certain
size.

Other villages split for religious, economic,
or political reasons. After Henry
VIII's mandate made England a Protestant
country, Catholics who refused to accept the
change found the need to create their own
communities -- or lose their lives. Some of
these pockets of Catholicism still exist in
England today.

Cities grow out of towns, and towns grow
out of villages. The French village of Bardou
remained small because it could not
support more than a handful of people at a
time. But, London's population grew from
33,000 in 1500 to 400,000 in 1650. The
reason for the increase was not London's
beauty. (Medieval towns were filthy places.)
London grew because of its geography. It
became a viable commercial center for trade
to Antwerp (the commercial center of medieval
Europe), Italy, and France, and its
central location made it easy for goods from
other countries to reach remote portions of
England. This made London the only important
English city in the Middle Ages.

The location of a settlement was determined
by a number of things. Peasants
tended to cluster around a lord?s castle for
protection and to serve his needs according
to their feudal obligations. Villages sprang
up at a crossroads or at a shallow ford in a
river, where some entrepreneur would set
up a shop to sell ale to thirsty travelers. A
blacksmith might then set up shop to shoe
horses or repair carts, an innkeeper might
come, and so on. Merchants tended to
cluster around shrines and holy places,
selling trinkets and holy relics to pilgrims.
People also considered the defensibility of a
potential village site, important in a time of
marauding bandits, bloodthirsty wild men,
and mercenary armies (not to mention
orcish hordes or vicious demons). A group
of builders would usually seek a strategic
site, such as a hill near a river, and set up
their village there.

Events in the outside world also influenced
the development of villages. Bardou
came into existence during the Roman era
because of the site?s proximity to iron
mines. When the mines died in the 4th
century, so did Bardou. But 1200 years later
the village was resurrected when squatters,
following the roads as they fled city life,
decided it was an ideal site for a village.
They built stone homes, scratched out
gardens among the rocks, gathered chestnuts,
and caught game in the surrounding
forests. For three centuries, life in Bardou
remained the same. Then the call to city life
reached the inhabitants of the village. One
by one, they left to make their fortunes
elsewhere ? and Bardou died again.

Fortifications
Once the DM has decided on location
and population, the next item concerns local
fortifications. In early times, people built
settlements close together but fortified them
poorly. In the 9th and 10th centuries, villagers
began to build walls around their
settlements, which then became towns. The
townspeople took pride in their walls, since
a wall made them better off in many ways
than the sprawling, unprotected country
villages were. Most European towns had
walls made of stone; those of the northern
barbarians in Russia had wooden fortifications,
making their towns look much like
the stockades of old forts in the American
west. The Russians had no need for heavy
stone walls, because of the absence of large
siege machines at the time, and wood was
far more plentiful in the dense northern
forests than stone could ever be. Enemy
arrows ? the only real threat from invading
armies ? could be stopped by wood as
easily as by stone.

Sometimes towns were surrounded by a
circular moat, possibly with guarded
bridges <DSG> or a drawbridge. (In 1150, a tax
collector in Belgorad, Russia, went out for
an evening walk and discovered an army of
INVADERS approaching for a surprise night
attack on his city. He raised the drawbridge
himself, shouting the alarm, and saved the
town.) Townspeople kept themselves proficient
in arms and fought valiantly to protect
their town. They considered it their duty to
fortify the town, for which they received
payment and a food allowance usually of
meat, fish, malt for beer, millet, and oats
for their horses.

Although walls protected a town, they
also created problems of their own. Conditions
became more and more crowded
inside the walls as the population grew, and
suburbs formed around the town proper.
The powerful aristocratic families remained
within the well-protected areas, but the
craftsmen spread out and around the wall
where water (vital to much of their work)
was easily available.

Outside a town wall, characters might
pass through such suburbs, with their orchards
and garden patches. They may also
pass by the lazaret, the leper?s hospital
which stands outside the town walls. A
leper?s hospital doesn?t really need the
protection of the walls anyway: What army
would be foolish enough to attack a leper
colony? But the leper colony and its relative,
the insane asylum, could add another
dimension to the town adventure.

If the characters don?t get to the gates by
nightfall, they?re going to have to sleep
outside until sunrise ? or else do something
spectacular to get over the walls. But that?s
only one problem which the town gates may
hold. There may be rules that must be met
before entering the town. Or worse yet, in
most players? opinions, the gatekeeper may
make characters pay a toll. Unless your
party is very suspicious-looking, the gatekeeper
won?t pay much attention to you ?
remember, he?s bored silly from seeing an
endless stream of dirty merchants, peasants,
travelers, and craftsmen who pass by him
all day long. He might be in a bad mood,
too.

Something to remember at this point is
that people traveled a lot in the Middle
Ages. Some were on crusades or religious
pilgrimages, and the rest were traveling to
find their fortunes. The gatekeeper might
be a valuable source of information, especially
if your party is searching for a specific
person. Although a gatekeeper wouldn?t
pay much attention to most of the stream of
humanity flooding through his gates, he
might notice anything out of the ordinary
? and, for a small fee, might tell you what
he saw.

Inside the walls
If the town is relatively new, one may see
orchards, small fields and gardens, granaries,
and perhaps some marshland or ponds
inside the city walls. In older towns and
cities, all such places would be crowded
with houses instead. The upper stories of
houses crowded together in the late Middle
Ages lean out over the streets on either side,
making the streets seem like dim, stuffy
t u n n e l s .

Towns are noisy places. Bells toll constantly
from countless towers, to tell the
time of day, to rejoice, to mourn, to announce
war or peace, to announce the
election of a new leader, to call the people to
church, or to warn of danger. Street vendors
roam the streets singing their wares (as they
did in the musical Oliver!), and screaming
crowds gather around entertainments, such
as cock fights or jugglers.

In addition, town criers shout important
messages, the time, or local gossip. These
criers were often the town ale-testers, too,
since their throats got so parched from
shouting. Paris had six master criers appointed
by the provost, each with a number
of assistants who were sent out to the crossroads
and squares of various quarters to
announce official decrees, taxes, fairs, and
ceremonies, houses for sale, missing children,
marriages, funerals, births, and baptisms.
When the King?s vintage was ready
for sale, all the taverns had to close while
public criers twice a day cried the virtues of
the royal wine.

The town?s narrow streets are usually
crowded with people going in all different
directions. Chances are, inside the gate, one
may encounter a traffic accident. Carriages
often sailed through the streets without
regard for anyone in their way. That led to
many carriage collisions, as well as the
deaths of hapless pedestrians. Traffic jams
were also common, especially when pack
mules laden with baskets met street vendors
carrying their trays or porters bent under
loads of wood and charcoal.

If you manage to get past the street hazards,
you will probably see a great many
miserable people, some who have suffered
real tragedies and some who are simply
fakers. The fakers know ingenious ways to
make it appear that they have large, festering
wounds on their arms and legs, using
these fake miseries to make money from
almsgivers. Lepers may wander the streets,
ringing their bells and asking for mercy
from the gods and from those who have
been luckier than they. Lepers aren?t turned
away from most towns, but they are required
to buy anything they touch.

Towns are good places to encounter wererats,
as well as wights, shadows, and ghasts.
The wererats will be human by day, of
course, and could easily join an adventuring
party. The wights, shadows and ghasts will
probably be encountered at night, near
charnel houses and graveyards. Charnel
houses will be found either just inside the
town wall or well away from the wall on the
outside.

No teeming mass of humanity would be
complete without thieves and pickpockets.
Some such encounters will be with relatively
high-level thieves ? after all, with so many
travelers, thieves would gets lots of practice.
Vagabonds wander here and there, along
with merchants, pilgrims, friars, and peddlers.
Traveling shows of minstrels, tumblers,
magicians, dancing bears, or actors
performing bawdy plays compete with the
old standbys of bull-baiting and cockfighting
for the crowd?s attention. An occasional
out-of-work bard may be standing on
a street corner strumming his melodies.

As if the crowd isn?t enough, the average
traveler may also encounter several religious
processions. Such processions are
common occurrences, becoming more frequent
when times are worse than usual.
Churches celebrated saints? days, feast
days, and holidays.

The chance of encountering a festival,
procession, or other celebration is even
greater in a village. Village life was tied to
both the seasons and the local religion.
Every village had its parish feast day, as well
as special fairs and festivals centered on
church-reformed pagan traditions. Other
standard holidays in medieval times included
Christmas, Twelfth Day, Shrove
Tuesday, Easter (a week-long celebration,
often more pagan than Christian in nature),
May Day, Whitsun, and special harvest
observances. Northamptonshire in England
celebrated 82 wakes (festivals centering on a
saint?s day or special parish holiday) between
late September and early November.

All of these people, carriages, and carts
must fit on a main street which is only eight
to ten feet wide. An alley is only a yard
wide. Principal streets usually run straight
toward the center of town, where the marketplace
is usually located, but the alleys
form a haphazard, aimless maze. Alleys are
often paved and well-traveled near the
streets, but as you go farther, the paths
become dusty and aimless, sometimes leading
to the middle of a field or dead-ending
at a blank wall for no apparent reason. It?s
easy to see that a town could make as interesting
a labyrinth as a dungeon does.

The town?s streets are usually paved with
cobblestones, if they are paved at all. In
northern lands in our own world, townsmen
paved their streets with wood. They laid
three or four wooden poles lengthwise along
the street and notched split logs of pine,
laying them across the new street so that
poles fit tightly into the notches to make a
?boardwalk? type of street. This pavement
provided protection from freezing and
thawing, and from the muddy muck that
occurred every spring. In wintertime, people
traveled along these roads with sleds.

Adventuring parties may wish they had a
protection from stench spell, due to the
filthiness of the streets. Pigs, dogs, and
chickens run loose through the town. Piles
of refuse lie in the streets; the people know
of no other places to throw their garbage.
French cities were better ordered; there, the
side streets had gutters running down their
middles.

Sticking to the sides of the streets may not
help either. Somebody might carelessly
dump a filled chamberpot (the medieval
version of an indoor toilet) on the party?s
heads. King Louis IX (later canonized as
Saint Louis) took a walk alone one night
and received the contents of a chamberpot
down his back ? the man above neglected
to call out the customary warning, since it
was late at night and the streets were supposed
to be empty. The king went inside the
home, in control of his temper (he was a
saintly king, remember), and discovered
that the perpetrator was merely a hardworking
student, up late studying his Latin.
The King granted him a scholarship.

Each city had a different method for
dealing with their garbage problem. In
principle, every person had the duty to
clean the street daily in front of his home,
but few people complied. Decay, rats, and
rain slowly took care of the garbage, but not
quickly enough to keep it from accumulating.
If all else failed, a man would shovel all
the garbage off into his neighbor?s gutter,
who would then curse and shovel it all into
his neighbor?s gutter, and so on. It?s not
surprising that many brawls, quarrels, and
lawsuits arose during an annual street
cleaning. By 1564, London passed an act
that every householder had to wash the
street in front of his home with ten buckets
of water every day before 6 a.m., and then
sweep it again after 6 p.m. Few people
bothered to carry this order out.

The filth of the average medieval city
makes disease all the more likely. Many
DMs ignore the disease tables in the DMG,
which is a pity. In a town adventure, disease
is as great a threat as the pickpockets. A
DM should roll daily for a chance of infection
for each party member, if local conditions
require it. If a character gets a
chamberpot spilled on him or falls in the
sewer, his chance of catching a disease will
increase. If the weather is warm, then the
very air is dangerous to breathe, and the
only way to stay healthy is to leave the town
walls.

In most European countries, the only
buildings using stone were churches and
castles; most people, both rich and poor,
lived in fire traps. In old Russia, carpenters
spoke of cutting a town rather than building
one, since all the homes were made of logs.
The northern people found wooden homes
easier to heat than stone ones throughout
their cold winters and long, wet springs and
autumns. These log homes were built with
interlocking timbers, using few nails or
metal parts at all. Wooden furniture, utensils,
and toys filled these homes ? the vast
amount of timber in the thick Russian
forests seemed undaunted by whatever new
uses men found for it. Northerners covered
their roofs with a layer of dirt for insulation.

Since the danger of fire was so great, all
activity stopped at sunset, as most towns
forbade artificial lighting. Still, London had
four major fires in the 12th century, and the
city of Rouen in France burned six times in
the first quarter of the 13th century. Adventurers
who are ignorant of the law may find
themselves fined for lighting a torch inside
their home. One of your party could also
start a major fire simply by letting a hearth
fire get out of hand.

Good inns aren?t hard to find. On a main
road, one can spot many of them with large
signs sticking so far out into the street as to
block traffic. In many inns, guests will be
forced to sleep three to a bed, but the more
wealthy guests will receive a room of their
own, complete with bed linen ?fresh from
the washerwoman.? Freshly washed linen
doesn?t help all that much, though, since all
the lice, fleas, and ticks are hiding within
the straw or feather mattress and not in the
linens at all. Bugs carry disease; if the party
spends a night in an inn, the chance for
catching a disease increases again.

But, a handful of travelers will be privy to
certain home remedies for fleas, ticks, and
lice. Knowledgeable people will carry a
small container of fox or hedgehog grease,
since it is commonly supposed that vermin
can?t resist the smell of the grease. Smear
some grease on a stick, and all the nasty
critters will flock to it from all corners of the
room, making it easy to for you to smash
them. Innkeepers were certain that if they
placed a coarsely woven piece of white cloth
under the bed in the morning, all the pests
would drop out of the mattress on their
daily prowls and become tangled in the
rough nap of the cloth; servants then killed
the easily visible vermin on the white cloth.

Innkeepers guaranteed the safety of a
traveler?s possessions in the security of his
room. A traveler kept the key to his room
throughout his stay, even though the locks
were simple and easily picked. No matter
how closely innkeepers watched the rooms,
they couldn?t always prevent a traveler?s
bedmate from stealing the traveler?s possessions.
Other innkeepers developed a system
to take part of the loot themselves. A
wealthy adventurer who displayed his
wealth in the inn might find himself accosted
on the road by bandits, the innkeeper
having reported the traveler?s wealth
to local thieves. In return for the tip, the
innkeeper would receive a cut of the profits.

Constables patrol the towns by day, but
at night groups of citizens are forced to
form the night watch. The night watch isn?t
paid, and the people usually resent having
to perform this civic duty. People on night
watch walk together, laughing and talking
so loudly that any self-respecting criminal
with a modicum of common sense won?t be
anywhere nearby when the night watch
comes around the corner.

During its stay in the town, the party
may venture to the town?s marketplace in
search of a good deal on new weapons,
armor, or magical items. The party won?t
need to shop around much, for powerful
trade guilds usually control almost all crafts
? fixing prices, setting standards of quality,
and generally using strong-arm tactics to
enforce their rules. Merchants can be vicious
and dishonest, to the customer and to
the competition. During a salt shortage in
Kiev, the merchants sold their salt for a
high price and shared their profits with the
prince. One friar sold his salt for less, and
naturally the customers flocked to him. The
merchants complained to the prince, claiming
the friar was selling ashes instead of salt.
The prince decided to have the friar seized.
In the meantime, the merchants filled the
friar's bucket with ashes and pointed to it as
evidence of his wrongdoing. The friar was
convicted, and the merchants and the
prince started turning a profit again.

No consumer protection agency will be
able to help if (make that when) characters
get ripped-off by shoddy goods. Craftsmen
had a standard practice of showing the
customer one type of cloth, then making the
ordered garment out of far cheaper material.
Bakers often made loaves of bread with
stones in the middle so that they would
make the required weight without using so
much flour. Sacks of grain were often sold
half-filled with rocks. One baker used the
sales gimmick in which he would knead
bread dough for a customer only if it was
brought it to his shop; as he was doing the
laborious job of kneading on his special
counter, his apprentice would open a small
trapdoor beneath the counter and steal
small bits of dough to add to his master?s
own supply.

In medieval Paris, each trade occupied its
own quarter. Butchers and tanners were
gathered around the Chatelet; moneychangers,
goldsmiths, and drapers were
found on Grand Pont; scribes, illuminators,
and parchment- and ink-sellers were centered
on the Left Bank around the university.
In a town, however, you might well
pass dozens of specialized shops in the same
area ? potters, blacksmiths, coppersmiths,
woodworkers, masons, locksmiths, bridgebuilders,
armorers, jewelers, etc. Getting
some items may not be a simple task,
though. To get armor, you might have to go
to one shop to buy armor for the neck,
another shop for breast armor, another shop
for leg armor, another for helmets, and
another for shields. You have to find a
swordsmith to buy a blade, a bowyer to buy
a bow, and a fletcher to buy arrows. Luckily,
most of these craftsmen clustered together,
rather like an armory shopping mall.

Medieval towns resemble modern ones in
many ways. Street crime, overcrowding,
poverty, and traffic accidents were as common
then as they are now. The differences
rest in the level of knowledge and technology
possessed by the town?s inhabitants.
For example, we know a lot more about
disease and fire prevention than medieval
citizens ever imagined. Remember those
differences, and building a town campaign
will be much easier.

    Town campaigns can be some of the most
interesting and exciting in your game. But,
like any other adventures, they require
careful planning and mapping. Following
the guidelines in this article won?t ensure
the success of player characters, but it will
guarantee that you will have interesting,
informative, and hazardous adventures --
just like the PH promises.

JULY 1985