To start world-building for a fantasy rpg, I’m going to start with the minimal social unit, which can be a village (or a neighborhood if I wanted an urban setting) but I’ll go with the village for now. The point is to create a base for low-level characters and give them a framework to create character background.
I’m going to base my village on information Life in Norman England by O. G. Tomkeieff. I figure I’ll describe a mundane village first and then in later posts start extrapolating what the introduction of magic and demonstrably real divine power would do to change it.
But Life in Norman England isn’t giving me a figure for village population, so I’m pulling the number 300 out of my … uh … thin air.
The climate and geography is going to be Southern England. The village will be ‘well-sited’ as described by Tomkeieff:
“[The village has] low-lying land near a stream… [O]n the outskirts of the village itself, between it and the arable land, there would be on or more hams, pastures reserved for certain people and limited in the number of animals allowed... within each field the villagers had their plots, in the form of long narrow strips, a furlong or furrow long and as wide as a double furrow.”
