A place your players will spend a session in needs four things you cannot improvise convincingly: a believable size, ground that explains why it is there at all, somebody who runs it, and a thing that is going wrong this week. This rolls all four, plus the landmark you can see from the road and one local custom to make it feel foreign.
Terrain first, because terrain explains everything else
Settlements are not placed on maps by choice, they are placed by water, ground and traffic. Once you know the ground, you know why the village is here, what it eats, what a besieger would suffer and how long a messenger takes — which is most of what a table will actually ask you.
So the ground on this card is not a flavour word. It comes with the real modifiers from the strategy game this site belongs to: how fast a host crosses that terrain, how much a defender standing on it gains, and how much foraging returns. Those figures are read out of the game's own code when this page is built, not typed here, so they are exactly what a battle in that game resolves with.
The eight terrain types, with the strategy game's own modifiers. Read at build time from the game's code, not typed here.| Ground | March speed | Defender's bonus | Foraging | What that means at a table |
|---|
| Frozen Waste | 0.75× | +5% | 0.8× | Ice and snow — slow going, and little to forage. |
| Mountains | 0.6× | +20% | 0.9× | High passes — brutal to cross, deadly to assault. |
| Forest | 0.85× | +12% | 1.15× | Dense woods — cover for defenders, rich in timber. |
| Hills | 0.8× | +15% | 1× | Rolling highlands — the high ground favours the defender. |
| Plains | 1.1× | 0% | 1.1× | Open country — swift marches, but little cover. |
| Marsh | 0.7× | +8% | 0.95× | Bogs and fens — a mire that swallows momentum. |
| Coast | 1× | +5% | 1.1× | Tidal shores — trade and plenty, but open to raiders. |
| Desert | 0.85× | +5% | 0.85× | Sun-scorched sands — thirst is the real enemy. |
Use them as rulings. A marsh at 0.7× says the messenger will be late and everyone at the table will accept it, because you gave them a number rather than a mood. Mountains at +20% to the defender say, without a paragraph of history, why nobody has taken that valley fort in ninety years. And 1.15× foraging in forest against 0.8× on the frozen waste is the difference between a party living off the land and a party carrying every meal.
Populations that hold up
The commonest mistake in a fantasy setting is a countryside made of cities. Medieval Europe was overwhelmingly hamlets and villages; a town of five thousand was substantial and a city of twenty thousand was a major regional centre with a cathedral and its own law. This generator's weights follow that distribution, so rolling a dozen settlements gives you a countryside rather than a chain of capitals.
Settlement sizes and the populations this generator actually rolls.| Class | Population | What it has |
|---|
| Hamlet | 20–90 | No market, no priest, no name on most maps. Everyone is related to everyone. |
| Village | 100–600 | A mill, a chapel, one street. Big enough to have factions, small enough that they all eat together. |
| Small town | 700–2,400 | A weekly market and a wall that is mostly ditch. The market charter is the whole economy. |
| Town | 2,500–7,000 | Guilds, gates, and a garrison it resents paying for. Nobody knows every face — which is what makes crime possible. |
| City | 8,000–24,000 | Walls, quarters and its own law. Its grain comes from a hundred villages. |
The number matters because it decides what can happen there. Under a hundred people there is no market, no inn, and a stranger is news within the hour — which makes a hamlet a terrible place to hide and a wonderful place to be hunted. Above a couple of thousand nobody knows every face, and crime becomes possible for the first time. That is a setting decision the population is making for you.
What is wrong today
The field that turns a location into a session. Every entry is a slow problem rather than a catastrophe: the harvest came in at two thirds and everyone is doing arithmetic they do not like; the garrison has not been paid and has begun to requisition; two families are one funeral away from an open feud.
Slow problems are better than emergencies for the same reason ordinary clocks beat apocalyptic ones — the party can choose to ignore them, which makes engaging a decision rather than an obligation. And if they do ignore it, you have a consequence waiting for the next time they pass through, at no extra preparation cost.
The names belong to the same country
Settlement names here are built from the same morphemes as this site's castle and keep generator — the same pools, which are in turn constrained so that they can spell every seat the strategy game's nine Great Houses actually hold. On top of that sit the shapes that make real rural place names sound real: -thorpe, -cote, -worth, -by, and the Upper/Lower/Little/Great pairs that tell you a parish split centuries ago and never got a new name.
The effect is that a village, the keep on the hill above it and the family that holds both can be rolled in three clicks and still sound like one map.
Three more, rolled when this page was built
Baked into the HTML by the same engine the button runs, so the page says something with JavaScript switched off.
Blackbury-under-Driftrest
- Size
- Small town — about 1,950 souls, a weekly market and a wall that is mostly ditchA market charter is the whole economy. Losing it would end the place.
- Standing on
- Coast — a tidal shore, with the boats hauled up above the high lineCrossing it: march 1× · a defender holding it +5% · foraging 1.1×
- Run by
- two families who have divided the offices between them for a century
- It lives on
- horses, bred for the army, and everyone here can ride before they can read
- Defended by
- a bell tower, a beacon chain, and an agreement with three neighbouring villages
- You can see it by
- a walled orchard belonging to the abbey, and the best wall in the settlement
- What is wrong today
- a company of soldiers is quartered here and will not leave until the roads dry
- A local custom
- the youngest child of a household carries messages and is safe from everyone by custom
Deepmarch
- Size
- Hamlet — about 45 souls, no market, no priest, no name on most mapsEveryone is related to everyone. A stranger is news within the hour.
- Standing on
- Mountains — a mountain valley, reached by one pass that closes in winterCrossing it: march 0.6× · a defender holding it +20% · foraging 0.9×
- Run by
- a council of the six wealthiest households, meeting in the back of a warehouse
- It lives on
- charcoal for the smelters two valleys over, which has stripped the hillsides bare
- Defended by
- an old ring fort on the hill above, abandoned, that everyone still uses in a crisis
- You can see it by
- a chapel with a leaning spire, propped, and a congregation that will not hear of rebuilding
- What is wrong today
- the garrison has not been paid and has begun to requisition
- A local custom
- a stone is added to the cairn at the boundary by anyone leaving for good
Greypoint
- Size
- Village — about 340 souls, a mill, a chapel, one streetLarge enough to have factions, small enough that they all eat together.
- Standing on
- Forest — cleared ground inside old forest, the trees held back by a generation of axesCrossing it: march 0.85× · a defender holding it +12% · foraging 1.15×
- Run by
- nobody, formally — the miller and the midwife settle everything between them
- It lives on
- pilgrims, who come for the relic and leave money whether or not it is genuine
- Defended by
- a bell tower, a beacon chain, and an agreement with three neighbouring villages
- You can see it by
- a set of standing stones the ploughmen work around and nobody mentions
- What is wrong today
- half the young have gone south for wages and the fields are short-handed
- A local custom
- a stone is added to the cairn at the boundary by anyone leaving for good
Can I use this settlement?
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The rest of the table kit
tavern & inn · npc · quest hook · character backstory · campaign weather — all free, all instant, all of them working with the network switched off. The tabletop index lists the lot, and the wider tools workshop adds a coat of arms forge and five name generators for houses, castles, lords, mottoes and dragons.