Procedural pre-industrial world builders

[madd0ct0r]

I've found some really, really good maps and natural world builder guides, but I can't seem to find anything along the lines of:
a) Mark starter village.

b) roll dice.
on a
...1) increase popualtion by food around them
...2) clear forest around them
...3) add a village with half the popaultion at mid point of longest trade route section
...4) invade neighbouring village, merge territory,
...5) establish trade route to next largest village
...6) roll a religion or tech advance c) repeat for next largest village
Is there anything like this out there?

[Formless]

Sorrrrrrt of.

Do you have a lot of dice? This one focuses on social and spacial relationships between the houses and families in the town. You can literally look at where the dice fall and place buildings at each one, then follow the procedure for reading the numbers and see how the townfolk interact with eachother. It also gives you information about unusual features that separates this particular town from other towns, like unusual architecture or haunted wells, and so forth. But nothing about economics I'm afaid. Again, though, you are going to need A LOT of dice (including some polyhedra!)

A quick internet search also found this, but I don't know whether it suits your needs.

Economics and history is a bit of a hard thing to just randomly generate (unless you like playing Dwarf Fortress), because its intertwined with geography, geology, and ecology; consider for the moment the difference between a mountain village near a small river and a town situated in a desert oasis. That's why I don't know of many such generators that have what you are asking for-- at least, not at the level of the city or village. If you want to make an entire country, assuming that you know the ecology and assuming that its a feudal society, then the best resource I've seen is Medieval Demographics Made Easy. It uses research about medieval France and touches on all sorts of topics from how many towns/cities of a certain size you would expect given the overall population size, how many active strongholds and fortresses you expect to find, how many castles and fortifications have been abandoned or ruined given the age of the nation (information that can be used to create Dungeons for games like D&D), how many people in a given profession would be found in a given town or city, and even how much livestock there should be. A lot of details are up to you, of course, as the writer expects you to fill in details that cannot be accounted for by merely looking it up on a reference table, like whether there is a navy (landlocked nations obviously would not). But overall its a great reference and many details seem to accord with what I've researched, and the guidelines are potentially useful even if the society isn't European (the population statistics seem to also match up with estimates I've seen for various eras of Feudal Japan, for instance).

If you want that in a more convenient computer generator format, see The Doomsday Book, which cites the essay as the source for its statistics. Just plug in the numbers and the computer does the rest for you, except putting the numbers into an environmental context.

Alternatively, on the same track there is Low-Fantasy Populations, which contains very similar information except that the researcher based it off of Welsh history rather than France. Again, there is a matching piece of software that goes with it (as far as I can tell, the output is very similar, so go with whichever you prefer).

[madd0ct0r]

That's a fantastic reply Formless, and while not quite not I need I think I've got all the bits now to start putting things together.