Let me credit Curtiss Hadley for inspiring this idea. He wrote me a note asking for some help with his designs. He wanted to create towns in which his players’ characters could adventure, but every time he started to do this he kept getting very simple straight line grids. Is this what towns are really like? It seems so boring–and, in a sense, so unlike the towns in which we live. How do you design a town which is realistic, which strikes us as the way towns are, and still makes sense?
What occurred to me as I mused on this is that the layout of the town is a problem in the design of roads. Thus that which is involved in creating a town also applies to creating a world map–you are once again working with roads. Indeed, if you are designing a dungeon (as opposed to a cave complex–a very different idea), you have many of the same features at work. Why are the roads, or the tunnels, straight, and what causes them ever to be anything else?
I lived in the northern half of New Jersey through the younger years of my life, and then in the southern half after college. Upon moving, I noticed almost immediately that the roads were very different. In the northern half of the state, a road that isn’t a highway (and even many that are) tends to meander a bit, curving here and there. Southern roads are dead straight for miles. I thought it was silly and boring at the time, but then I had not then considered why roads were the way they were.
Roads are generally as straight as makes sense. The road that runs from Salem to Woodstown goes as straight as it can from one town to the other, completely straight if that is possible. But it will not go straight if it has to go around something. Roads fail to go straight if there is an obstacle in the way.
Obstacles can take many forms. If farmer Smith has a huge plot of land between Salem and Woodstown, and he shoots at trespassers, the road will be built to go around his farm. Generally, such a road begins as the path people take to get from one place to another, and over time becomes recognized as such, and improved into a road, so farmer Smith’s protection of his property rights has become the cause of the course the road takes. Similarly, if there is a swamp between Salem and Woodstown (as indeed there happens to be), the road will go around the swamp–unless the swamp is so vast it makes more sense to build a dike across it and travel the top of the dike. A road will usually go around a mountain rather than over it–the reason the roads in north Jersey are so curvy, as that end of the state is littered with small mountain ranges and their large foothills. If the passes are so high or the mountain so large that it is not practical to go around, a tunnel might become a viable solution. As with mountains, most people will walk around a steep hill rather than over it, so in hilly country roads tend to meander along the lower ground.
Old roads tended to cross rivers at fords; fords are shallow places in the river, but because they are shallow they are usually also wide. Ferries will run across rivers, but not anywhere near fords, because they can only cross where the water is deep and slow–and again, that usually means wide. Bridges are usually built where the river is narrow and has solid rocky shores which will support the road right up to the edge of the water. The water under the bridge may be swift or very deep, because it has been forced into a narrow channel at the point that the river narrows. It is possible, but less common, for bridges to be built over wider areas where the water is not so deep or not so swift, in which case the builders are planning on using pilings or other supports from the riverbed to hold up the bridge. Because of rivers, the road from Salem to Woodstown might go some distance out of its way to reach a point at which the river can be crossed, going straight from Salem to the bridge, or the ferry, or the ford, and from there straight to Woodstown.
The river is an obstacle; but the bridge is a slightly different reason for a road to bend. Sometimes the road which goes from one place to another does so by connecting the dots, going from one place to another along the way. One can easily see this with a desert caravan route. Although there is no sign of a road beneath your feet, the path you take must run from oasis to oasis if you are to get from Persia to Egypt; you cannot take enough water for your men and animals for the trip. Similarly, if you are moving herd animals or even using pack animals, the road will follow well-watered grasslands and come frequently to whatever streams cross it, because the beasts at least will need food and water. Wells and waterholes are always landmarks in less developed worlds, and the road will take you to them. It may be that the road from Salem to Woodstown passes by the inn that has been there since before either town was founded, or goes through the land that was once Oldmans but is now abandoned. There may be a mansion that belongs to a wealthy family somewhere outside town, and the road curved to pass near enough to serve them without infringing on their lands or their privacy. The road from Salem to Woodstown might have many stops along the way, some of which make no sense at all to the modern traveler but which were important to his ancestors.
It is much the same with a town. If the town is designed and the roads built first, and then the buildings added, the roads will generally be straight; if the buildings were all placed haphazardly in the area, and then the roads built to connect them, they will accommodate the buildings. Most towns have a little of both–there were a few houses built by the first arrivals, and then roads connected to them, but over time new immigrants built on the existing roads, and new roads were built to create space for new residents. If part of the land is hilly, or marshy, or otherwise disrupted, roads will go around these problems, but otherwise they will tend to go straight. The town will be built around landmarks, even as seemingly insignificant as a three-hundred-year-old tree or a very large boulder; roads will go around these, but in a way that leads to them and away from them, such as a circle around the park from which spokes radiate, or a main road that comes to it and then leads elsewhere.
Rivers and mountains often create contours against which the roads are formed. If a river snakes back and forth, the road may at times veer around protrusions on this side. If it only meanders, though, or if it makes a slow bend, the road may follow it quite closely–particularly if it was once used by animals pulling barges. It may be that the roads which parallel this one may do just that, following the same contour as the main road. On the other hand, they could as easily jut off from this, a dozen side roads which parallel one part of the river road but terminate at another, or roads which are perpendicular to the river, but cross each other at odd angles. If the road cuts the corner as the river bends away and back, there may well be many side roads jutting into that peninsula, at angles that make more sense viewed from the river than from the road.
But what, my correspondent asked, do you find in such a town? It is certainly helpful to say that the roads will connect the buildings and the buildings guide the roads, but why are there any buildings at all, and what is in them? Certainly there are homes, enough homes to house whatever number of people actually live in town. But what are they doing here, in town? You can’t really grow enough vegetables and raise enough chickens in your back yard to survive. What do these people do? Why are they here?
Much of this depends on what might be called the core concept of the town. Why is there a town here? People would be here because there was something here which attracted them.
The obvious attractors are economic, the equivalent of industry. During the industrial revolution, cities exploded in size because there were jobs there, and people needed jobs. It didn’t matter that there weren’t enough jobs for the people; there were enough jobs that from a distance it was easy to believe there were jobs. But few of us run games during that period. There are other kinds of industry. Fishing villages grow because fishermen do better working together, and good harbors are needed for the trade. Thus you get a lot of fishermen in one place. But all fishermen really can do is fish, tend nets, and make minor repairs to their boats. Someone else has to build the boats and make the nets. So there are jobs for craftsmen. A fisherman who is sitting in town selling his fish is not doing what he does best; he could be out on the water catching more fish (or home resting for the next effort). Thus someone else can find a job buying fish from the fishermen and selling them to others. Even fishermen need to eat something other than fish, so we need to bring vegetables and grains, meat and dairy products, from the surrounding farms to feed people. Clothes, houses, beverages, tools, even entertainment are all needs for these people, and some will want some of the finer things in life–jewelry and art. The more fish there are here, the more people there will be.
But sometimes an economic attractor is a lot less obvious. Let us suppose that on some long road an enterprising son of a local farmer realizes that travelers need a place to stay. He builds a well and an inn, hangs up a shingle, and soon people are stopping to rest on the long journey. One of those who stopped was on his way south looking for work; but he has some money, and realizes that these same travelers could do with a decent drink–after all, the innkeeper may be feeding them, but people need a place to kick back and relax. So he opens a tavern across the street. Soon there is a stable for horses, a restaurant, a blacksmith and a carriage repair shop, and these expand to selling horses and wagons for those who need them. Since food is needed by all these people, farmers start bringing their produce here, and a farm market is established. The people who run these businesses build homes, and other merchants move in to provide for these. It moves from being a stop on a trade route to being a town.
Not every town will have everything. Consider how far it is to the city. If a trip to New York is only a day trip, the department stores, jewelers, furriers, clothiers, and many other businesses there will be visited regularly on weekends by the townspeople. Only necessities and perishables will do well in town. If it’s a week to Hoboken, the town will probably have a small jeweler, a furrier, furniture, clothing, and some other less necessary businesses, often in combination (a dry goods dealer will handle clothing, furniture, leather goods, and tools, for example), because people will pay extra not to have to make the trip. In primitive worlds, the majority of people are farmers, and the rest offer goods and services farmers can’t easily make for themselves, or facilitate trade by buying the unusual items from one and selling to another.
Although it’s not a perfect match, if you’re trying to design a town of a certain size, find a real town that size and see what is there. Then consider how it would be different if it were in your milieu, in the place you have chosen in your setting. You’ll find the roads and buildings will rise quite naturally from each other, once you know what is already there.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
