City

City is a spreadsheet tool for country designers. It tries to answer such questions as

'If Freedonia is this size how many cities will it have?'

'How many people live in Minas Tirith'?

'How many cabbage farms are there around Ank-Morpork?'

Use is made of formulae devised by Ed Stephan, spreadsheets using them by Burton Choiski and equations added by Juha Vesanto. Without all three, this present work would never have been contemplated. Quite a few changes have been made but (hopefully) the original ideas are not too distorted.

Ed Stephan's book on Population and Area is well worth a look, you don't have to buy it as the whole thing is on the Net!

Burton Choiski's spreadsheets in Excel 4.0 format are available from this page which is itself an explanation of them. You will also find here extracts from the medieval economics thread that ran on the World Design mailing list Summer '96.

A caveat: this is a tool for designers, not a college textbook. If you think you can improve on something, do it.

Every time I go through City I seem to find Errors! Comments, queries, corrections and requests to hpttrsn@vossnet.co.uk.

On other pages...

City Technical Stuff tries to explain how the formulae work and what the Warnings mean.

City Setups has settings for such exotica as Japan, Egypt and AD&D^TM England.

Some links

As is often the case on the Net there are some academic sites but much of the interesting material is produced by enthusiastic amateurs.

Another (larger!) medieval price list with quoted sources.

Several role playing game systems with medieval technology have price lists available: here's two for Ars Magica. Neither are sourced however.

A Medieval Sourcebook is intended for college courses, it has links to on-line versions where possible. If you want feudal fealty oaths, viking sagas or saints' lives this is the place to go.

A page for Gothic Cathedral fans, recently revised and expanded. Part of the larger Earthlore site.

A good general links page for Medieval History and Literature. For the Byzantine Empire try Byzance, and NetSERF... OK, you guessed.

The Society for Creative Anachronism have a large site, they are an old established medieval reenactment group originally based in California but now worldwide. It's nearest British equivalent is the Far Isles Medieval Society, who are more into medieval banqueting...

Regia Anglorum - Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman and British Living History 950-1066AD is another British group, a bit early for us but an interesting site.

Here is an excellent site for model languages, by which we mean artificial ones, either serious like Esperanto or fictional like Klingon or Quenya. It includes a neat program for designing your own.

© Hartley Patterson 1997