Districts and Downtowns: Service Provider NPCs and a Procedure to Generate Them

Quick Reference (or, TL;DR)

The purpose of this post is to provide a quick reference sheet to allow immediate (or perhaps on the fly) indication of service providers in base towns and procedural generation of NPCs to fill those service provider roles. To provide that quick reference, when generating an NPC: roll a fistful of dice - 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d%, and 1d20 - combine the results on the following grid, and enjoy your new NPC.

For a more comprehensive review of the motives, rationale, and explanation for the table results, read on into Districts & Downtowns below.

Public domain artwork respectfully pilfered from the National Gallery of Art on or around April 5, 2020. Attributions in alt text.

Verify Common Adventurer Services per Town Population

Blacksmith: 1 per 1,200	Inn: 1 per 1,200	Leveled Healer: 1 per 3,600
Wood Worker: 1 per 400	Tavern: 1 per 1,200	Porter or Laborer: 1 per 400
Leather Worker: 1 per 400	Merchant: 1 per 1,200	Fletcher: 1 per 1,200

Generate an NPC!

1d6 Sex 1-4 Male 5-6 Female

1d8 Race 1 Dwarf 2 Halfling 3-6 Human 7 Halfling 8 Elf

1d12 Level 1-6 Normal Man 7-9 Level 1 10-11 Level 2 12 Level 3

1d4 Class* 1 Thief 2-3 Fighting Man 4 Magic User

1d% on your preferred name table.

1d20 Physical Characteristic* 1 Has a speech impediment, or is mute, making it difficult to communicate. 2 Has a lingering injury: such as a bone break that didn't heal right. Likely impacts their day to day life. 3 Has a pallor to them - may fall ill more often than most. 4 Has a hump or hunch. May impact mobility or first impressions. 5 Has sensory issues - perhaps problems with vision; hearing; or smell. 6 Has noticeable dandruff - or acne. 7 Has gauged ears or otherwise atypical body modifications. 8 Is left handed. Eww. 9 Has a rotund physique. 10 Has a lean physique.

1d20 Physical Characteristic* (cont.) 11 Has atypically long hair. 12 Has a distinct scar or scarring; does not otherwise impact day to day life. 13 Has a distinct tattoo or distinct tattooing. 14 Has heterochromia iridum. 15 Has abnormal facial hair to the norm. In women, perhaps it is simply its presence. 16 Is bald. 17 Can't sit still. Heals more quickly than is considered normal. 18 Has a rugged, ruddy complexion. Likely does not fall ill often. 19 Has six fingers on one hand; perhaps granting circumstance bonuses to attempted slight of hand. 20 Always smells nice. May impact reaction rolls or similar situations.

* Optional or conditional roll.

Districts & Downtowns

Without cities, settlements, and bases of operation, adventuring becomes quite the short endeavor, lacking places to recover, re-train, and spend your hard-earned gold! Depending on your setting, you'll likely have several settlements - but any game generally speaking has to have at least one: the keep to your borderlands.

Trying to figure out how many buildings there should be, figuring out how many of a given service type should be available, deciding demographics - all of these activities factor into the generation of the town: and all of these activities take time and thought. If you are like me - you like to make towns unique, to make the NPC population memorable: something that draws out the town-creation process and postpones play.

Better, then, that a town should have a mechanism to procedurally generate its occupants the same way that dungeons have procedural mechanisms to populate them. Better then to have a set of rulings that define the population, its demographics, the services available to them in an organic way: producing a unique cast from which an emergent environment can be embellished.

Provided here are the mechanisms I use.

Procedural Generation of the Township

Town Population

Towns spring up because people gather together to exchange goods and services. For that reason, the population of the town should be used as a vague guide on the availability of services. Conventional wisdom gives the following guidance on town populations based on a size descriptor:

Town Size	Population Range
Village	1,000 or fewer
Town	1,001 to 5,000
City	5,001 to 15,000
Metropolis	15,001 or more

The population of the town is up to you - although I have a system  that I use for that, too, said system is outside the intended scope of this article.

Service Availability

Service Probability

Services in town - including weaponsmithing, food and drink, lodging, etc. - and their availability are based on the population of the town in question: as more people means more economic activity, and thus more demand for them.

Each service, or good provider, has a service probability threshold.
The service probability threshold is the number of people typically required to sustain one instance of the given business.

For each service that the player characters might utilize, divide the total population of the town by the service probability threshold of the service in question.

• Any whole integer represents a single option.
• Then, roll 1d% - if the result is equal to or less than the remaining decimal (rounded to the nearest hundredth), another option has sprung up.

Thus, in a town of 4,300 people, a blacksmith, say - with a service probability of, say, 1,200 - would have 3.58 active blacksmiths - 4,300 divided by 1,200 - or, 3 blacksmiths guaranteed and an 58% chance of a third blacksmith.

 

What Should my Service Probability Be?

For the purposes of simplicity, common services the PCs might be interested in can be grouped into several key categories: Village services, Town services, City services, and Metropolis services.

• A Village service is a relatively common need that requires some degree of specialization to successfully produce. Thus, home-industrialists will only rarely fill these roles and a specialist who can produce it will frequently be found in most villages.
• A Town service provides for a need that is still relatively common, but may be more easily reproduced by home-industrialists or rely on a higher throughput of customers to sustain it: thus, it is unlikely to find one in country villages, but fairly common among towns at crossroads or along highly traveled routes.
• A City service is thus a service that is likely to be found in cities, but not smaller communities.
• A Metropolis service, lastly, is a service that is likely to be found only in the largest communities.

Service probability suggestions and a list of common examples for service types is provided below:

Service Level	Service Probability	Non-Exhaustive Examples
Village	400	barber, clergy, clothier, healer, leatherworker, porter
Town	1,200	blacksmith, inn, lawyer, physician, tavern
City	3,600	engineer, jeweler, locksmith, sage, winery
Metropolis	10,800	bookseller, magic shoppe

External Resource Shout Out

There was an absolutely fabulous world-building resource I had bookmarked ages ago that broke this down based on an actual census of Paris in the middle ages. These numbers were used to genereate the service level probability categories - but the original resource had broken it down much more so, based off of profession - giving a specific number for bakers, for shoe-makers, for illuminators...

After a couple days of on and off searching, I am unable to find the original resource. There are a dozen programs that appear to randomly generate kingdom data using the information from said resource - and I have written down in a Word doc from 2010 the relevant formulae - but I do not have the URL handy. If you know the site I'm talking about and have it bookmarked, please send it my way. Would be doing the world a service to provide one more link to it!

2020-05-23: Update!
The following PDF was linked to me, as hosted on Donjon:

Medieval Demographics Made Easy by John Ross
It is not the original web site I remember - as the site I recall, when randomizing population, used d8s rather than d4s - but it does contain all the same information I appear to have pilfered for my Excel sheet in 2010! As I said, the world has been done a service - if you are interested in a more deep dive into medieval demographics, specifically a guide for determining Service Probability, the linked PDF is a goldmine of information and appears to the source material for most of the automatic kingdom generators I've found.

NPC Generator

For each service provided, at least one service provider should be generated. Consider, also, supporting staff based on throughput - for example, a blacksmith in a town where there is a significant mercenary population is likely to have an apprentice or journeyman assistant. A good guide for this is the percentile roll:  

If the town has a 22% chance of having another service provider, but does not have another service provider, it is more likely - perhaps 22% likely - that the service provider has an assistant to keep up with the volume.

Additionally, some services have naturally more staff. Our aforementioned blacksmith can manage their own business - but a tavern master, or an inn keeper, would need support staff: bar staff, cleaning staff, kitchen staff, etc. In terms of how much staff - again, the percentile roll can serve as a guide based on how much business tends to move through the establishment versus how much moves through the competition.

Once the number of necessary NPCs has been determined and their roles preassigned, specifics regarding the so-far blank characters can be rolled.

1. Race

Roll 1d8 and consult the provided table to determine race. The primary races in my home setting, the Caanish Archipelago, are Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings. Halflings are more common than other demihumans, commonly residing side-by-side in Human settlements. For your setting - or for settlements not primarily Human in demographic - adjust the table accordingly

1d8 Result 1 Dwarf 2 Halfling 3-6 Human 7 Halfling 8 Elf

2. Sex

1d6 Result 1-4 Male 5-6 Female

Roll 1d6 and consult the provided table to determine sex. In the Human regions of Caan, men are overrepresented as adventurers and in trades - if your NPC is filling a role, however, that is more dominated by women, invert the result. Conversely, if you don't want gender disparity in your setting, roll odds/evens instead.

3. Name

Roll 1d% and consult the appropriate name table to determine a character's name.

4. Level (and Age)

1d12 Result 1-6 Normal Man 7-9 Level 1 10-11 Level 2 12 Level 3

Roll 1d12 and consult the provided table to determine the number of hit dice, by level, the NPC has. Most characters will be normal men (or women) - but the occasional classed character should reflect their profession: what did they do to earn those levels - and why did they retire?

For Age, consider the 1d12 roll relative to the range.

• If the roll is on the lower end of the range, such as a 7 for a Level 1 NPC or a 2 for a "Normal Man" - consider that this NPC may be younger than typical for someone in their role.
• If the roll is on the upper end of the range, such as an 11 for a Level 2 NPC or a 5 for a "Normal Man" - consider that this NPC may be older than typical for someone in their role.

This breaks down, of course, for Level 3 - and the table doesn't provide for NPCs of greater than 3 hit dice - but if you are tossing in an NPC of Level 4 or greater, really, that should be on purpose rather than by chance. A Level 4 NPC will be rare - and should likely be a significant community member.

5. Class

If the character has levels, roll 1d4 and consult the provided table to determine the in which class. For race-as-class NPCs, either skip this step and treat them as their racial class or roll anyway, treating "Fighting Man" as their racial class, but treating a Thief or M-U result as a background: indicating they are outliers from their typical kindred.

1d4 Result 1 Thief 2-3 Fighting Man 4 Magic User

For these outliers - why are they here? What motivated their exodus to the borderlands - and why, based on their history, would they be in their current role?

6. Persona or Flair

Roll 1d20 any number of times you see fit and consult the provided table to generate a physical characteristic or personality quirk to set the NPC apart.

1d20 Result 1 Has a speech impediment, or is mute, making it difficult to communicate. 2 Has a lingering injury: such as a bone break that didn't heal right. Likely impacts their day to day life. 3 Has a pallor to them - may fall ill more often than most. 4 Has a hump or hunch. May impact mobility or first impressions. 5 Has sensory issues - perhaps problems with vision; hearing; or smell. 6 Has noticeable dandruff - or acne. 7 Has gauged ears or otherwise atypical body modifications. 8 Is left handed. Eww. 9 Has a rotund physique. 10 Has a lean physique.

1d20 Result 11 Has atypically long hair. 12 Has a distinct scar or scarring; does not otherwise impact day to day life. 13 Has a distinct tattoo or distinct tattooing. 14 Has heterochromia iridum. 15 Has abnormal facial hair to the norm. In women, perhaps it is simply its presence. 16 Is bald. 17 Can't sit still. Heals more quickly than is considered normal. 18 Has a rugged, ruddy complexion. Likely does not fall ill often. 19 Has six fingers on one hand; perhaps granting circumstance bonuses to attempted slight of hand. 20 Always smells nice. May impact reaction rolls or similar situations.

Truthfully, this step is largely optional. By the time you have determined all of the above, often times, something likely to fill this gap will have emerged already, making additional elements simply clutter. To that end, if - by this point - the character and their relationship to the surrounding community is well defined in your head, go with what's in your head; alternatively, if they still feel flat, roll and roll with it until you're comfortable that the NPC is sufficiently organic.

Also - the table above is optional. I almost didn't include the table I like to use, as there are so many blogs and resources out there with NPC traits tables. Use this one - if you like it; use a different one - if you like that one better; or write your own.

Why all the Different Dice?

You could sub out the dice above for an appropriate percentile die - or really, a different die in a multiple, 2-in-12 being equivalent to 1-in-6 and whatnot - without changing the result. If that's better for you - do it. The reason I don't, it means I can roll all six elements at the same time and easily distinguish between them. The same could arguably be accomplished using different colors too - and again, if that works better for you, do it - but for me, I usually like to have a single set of dice at my disposal when I'm preparing a location or adventure: so essentially tossing the dice bag all at once fits my pattern and speeds up the process.

And That's That

Game on, everyone!