Developing the Sandbox: Villages, Hamlets, and Thorps

This post is part of my series on developing the sandbox. You can read other posts in the series here. The series will, when necessary, go into detail on the development of my sandbox for Dungeon Module B1: In Search of the Unknown, but will also discuss sandbox development more generally. You can read play reports from my B1 campaign here.

The subject of this post is the development of villages, hamlets, and thorps - that is, small settlements. For larger settlements like towns and cities, see my earlier post on the subject. The process of developing a small settlement will look similar to that for developing a large settlement, so it's worth it to revisit that post before proceeding.

Villages, hamlets, and thorps are the bread and butter of low level D&D. This is, I think, because they are relatively small environments filled with simple people with simple problems and a relative lack of agency in solving those problems themselves. It is much easier to come up with a low level adventuring hook like "Kobolds are stealing chickens" or "Bandits plague the roads" when there aren't high level character-type NPCs around to solve those sorts of problems themselves (although as I've argued in past posts, there are plenty of reasons why these powerful NPCs would not deal with these problems themselves).

Players characters tend to have more agency in these environments, regardless of their level, which makes them a great place to start adventuring, relative to towns and cities. Their actions have more impact in small settlements - they can offer immeasurable aid to its inhabitants, push them around, and make the places theirs, for better or worse.

That isn't to say you don't also need towns and cities. The latter offer a more complex, fantastic, and dangerous urban gameplay experience, alongside greater utility. It doesn't make much sense for the player characters to be able offload their vast sums of treasure in a poor village, hamlet, or thorp. There probably aren't many henchmen in such a place, nor are there likely to be high level NPCs to offer training, or sizeable factions to contend with. That's what towns and cities are for.

I don't find true-to-life medieval demographics to be much use in D&D, but they can occasionally serve as a helpful reality test. Take donjon's Fantasy Demographics generator, for example. Here is an example of what sorts of tradesmen might be found in the average AD&D thorp (population 50):

I don't really care how many chicken butchers and rugmakers there are in my D&D game, but things like blacksmiths, furriers, inns, jewelers, locksmiths, magic shops, spice merchants, and taverns can all be extremely relevant.

Here is an example representation of the average AD&D hamlet (population 250):

Here is an example representation of the average village (population (population 750):

And finally, for comparison, here is an example of the average town (population 4,000):

It's not until you get up to town-sized settlements that you start to have most of the trades reliably represented. Again, most of this is useless for your D&D game, but it is a handy reference point when conceptualizing these locations. If the player characters are truly in need of some specific good or service, they can't count on a village, hamlet, or thorp to have it. They must seek out the town or city.

What then are villages, hamlets, and thorps for? As stated previously, they are a great place for the player characters' adventure to start. They offer low level hooks and agency. They are a training ground for the more complex urban gameplay environments to come.

As with towns and cities, the first step in developing these locations will be to create a minimalist sketch including the settlement's population, any character-type NPCs who live there, who rules there, and the general population or ruling power's initial attitude towards the player characters. You can do this exactly the same way as you would for towns and cities. The population will be smaller, which means fewer character-type NPCs, which means less work for you.

The only settlement of this type in my B1 sandbox is Ebongrove, a thorp of about 30 people. There are 26 humans, 2 dwarves, 1 elf, and 1 half-elf. There are no character-type NPCs. I'll make a point to detail the four demihumans that live here, since they will stand out. If there were character-type NPCs, I'd detail those as well, and since there would be so few, I could really go into detail if I wanted to.

Since the thorp lies in the shadow of a castle to the north (Fayette's Hold), I decide that it is under that stronghold's protection. However, the stronghold has been taken over by brigands, who have imprisoned its ruler. The brigands are agents of Lambrecht (the Evil wizard who rules Timbershore) but are now in conflict with him. They lord over the thorp and terrorize the surrounding countryside. I place a detachment of 20 brigands with a 3rd level fighter leader in the thorp as an occupying force.

Another thing which distinguishes these locations from towns and cities is their size. Obviously, they are smaller. Unlike towns and cities, where the player characters must crawl from district to district and from one location to another within each district, possibly incurring random encounters, these settlements are all basically one "district", and the player characters can travel from one location to another more or less as they please. Nonetheless, I like to have a few locations and their relations to one another laid out, like so:

This is a small settlement in AD&D, so of course there are trifling treasures buried in cellars and gardens and hidden in taxidermized animals, saddlebags, and under floorboards. I also note where NPCs can be found at different times of day. There isn't really any rhyme or reason for the number of locations or nodes, aside from the fact that I wanted a seven-node "flower".

Since the thorp has a population of 30, I decide there are three militia people among them, which the party can recruit to help fight against the brigands:

The "-2 to recruitment attempts" is just an interpretation of a standard reaction roll. In this case, I rolled either a 4 or a 5 for this NPC, which is an "unfriendly" reaction. As you can see, I justified this modifier by leveraging the NPC's relationship to another NPC in the settlement.

Here, then, is the list of the remaining NPCs:

Because these settlements are smaller and more tightly knit than towns and cities, we get to zoom in on these otherwise unremarkable NPCs and focus on their relationships with one another, the small favors the player characters can do for them, and the favors the NPCs can offer in return. Player characters can earn the NPCs' aid by simply going up to them and asking them (which is where the modifier/reaction roll comes in), by doing them a favor, or by earning another NPC's trust (similar to how militia people are more likely to lend their aid if their family members have already been helped). This creates a web of relationships which is much denser than what I would prep for a town or city.

This is ultimately what distinguishes small settlements from larger ones. Because there are so many people in large settlements, we have to focus on the most important ones, and the rest become fuzzier as a result. Small settlements offer a different sort of "slice of life" gameplay wherein even woodcutters, charcoal burners, and shepherds become important. The player characters can show up and simply fight the brigands and run them out of town (or thorp, in this case), but they also have a bunch of places where they can get help, if they need it.

Again, there's no real rhyme or reason to the number of NPCs I've chosen to detail here. Including the militia (and not including the brigands' leader), I've detailed 14 here, which is almost half the thorp's population. That's probably a bit much, but I just tried to think of who all might be here and what sorts of aid they might be able to offer. Five or six NPCs might have been a perfectly fine amount.

Also worth noting are single dwellings, which are home to just 1d12 occupants, but appear in 3% of all hexes according to the AD&D stocking method. These may seem rather dull and unimportant, but they're a lot of fun. With just 6 or 7 occupants on average, you can really flesh these out as homesteads with either multiple families or as single family dwellings with lots of children, elderly parents, adult siblings, hired hands, and the like. 

These places are extremely vulnerable to depredations by monsters, so you can have the same sort of "Kobolds stealing chickens" hooks, or even something like "Our kid wandered off and there are wolves out there." There's also always at least a 1% chance that any of these people can be character-type NPCs. One of these days I'm going to roll up a single dwelling with just a 20th level wizard living there inexplicably and it's going to be awesome.

Since my B1 sandbox has just the one thorp, you can check out my B2 sandbox for an example of a village and some single dwellings or my B3 sandbox for a bunch of villages and a hamlet, albeit much less fleshed out than the example provided here. You can see how I'm able to give each of the character-type NPCs just a little bit more detail as a result of there being fewer of them overall.

Hopefully I've demonstrated how villages, hamlets, and thorps differ from towns and cities. It may be tempting to include just a grand city to cover all your bases, just a village because it's easier, or just a town because it sits in the sweet spot in between, but different types of settlements offer different things, both in utility to the player characters but also in terms of gameplay experience. Not every sandbox will have both. Not every sandbox needs both. But the variety will make your sandbox - and the gameplay which takes place there - richer for everyone.