First off, the noble. Though the town will ultimately only have a population of about 200, the surrounding countryside would have a much larger population, in the several thousands. So now we have the widowed Alice Redding, younger sister to the noblewoman Erica Northcliff, and cousin to one of the setting’s key NPCs, Lily Northcliff. Along with the noblewoman, we have her daughter and the household staff.

Please ignore the missing comma and instead here’s the estate. I decided to keep it rather small in part to leave plenty of room for the rest of the town, but also because there’s good precedent for smallish mansions, such as the President’s Mansion in Tuscaloosa and the Strathmore Mansion in North Bethesda.

Moving back to the town’s working class, we have a dwarf family that runs a goat farm and a cheesemaking business.

The Gours are the closest the town has to a second noble family, at least in terms of estate as Rami has created for himself an impressive hall, though it likely goes without a great amount of use.

Nearby is also a tea farm, likely to be the last farm actually located within the town.

And finally some folks who do business with the tea farmers, the Godwins and their House of Comfort teahouse.

So that’s it, another 24 people, bringing the town’s population up to 63, nearly a third of the way to completion. But, a quick eyeball tests looks like more than a third of the map is filled so future additions will need to be a bit more conservative with space.

This addition also brings in a bit of the politics of the realm. The head of the church, Trueseed Ainsley, is the town speaker’s only political rival. However, the town is too small to really be the source of much political intrigue. Among the staff of the church is also the half-elf Eliza Whisp-of-rye. Though more senior that Ainsley, the realm has a strong streak of human chauvinism. Elves and half-elves are revered, but largely prevented from taking the top positions in any predominantly human organizations.

When building the Chauntea church grounds, I had to also deal with the question of what the clergy do all day. In a town that will only have around 200 people, there’s just not that much demand for clerical services. I ultimately decided on having the church run a bakery, funded largely by donations from Chauntea-worshipping farmers. So, the church has a bakery next to it, along with a separate house with the Whisp-of-rye family.

This group triples the non-human population of the town, going from 1 to 3 with the addition of a half-orc couple. And with them, the first character who is not a fluent Common speaker.

The fish camp ended up taking up a lot more space than I had anticipated. The average fishers themselves don’t take up much space, getting the most meager accommodations in town, little more than a bedroll and footlocker. But, the camp needed a common workspace for cleaning and prepping fish as well as a couple market stalls.

In hindsight, the camp needs a couple clotheslines and a washbasin. Otherwise, working all day with fish and living in such close quarters would just get unbearable.

This addition includes the first non-human character, the half-elf vintner Marielle Fiddlehead, as well as the first spell caster, the vigneron Holwice Eggerley.

This update also has the first of what I think of as the minor NPCs. They’re not shopkeepers, bartenders, religious leaders, or anyone you’re likely to think to interact with in a normal D&D session. But they’re also most of the people in the world and key to building up an entire town. So, here we have the six farmhands for Barnhaven Vineyard.

There’s also now a weird demographic imbalance. In a town of 23, there are 4 old ladies and 0 old men. There’s some good reasons why in a medieval setting where adventuring in a profession there’d be few old men, but still, I need to add a few soon, probably when I get to the fish camp.

Until then, here’s the vineyard, with most of the farmland conveniently off the map:

These additions naturally put a few more people on the to-do list, as there is now need for a vigneron to manage the vineyard and a vintner to run the winery, along with any other laborers those operations require. And that last bit I think will prove one of the more interesting challenges in this exercise — how to populate a town when maybe the majority of the population are fairly uninteresting common folk. But, a problem for a future day.

The map now contains both the Commonhouse (which also serves as the Skibold residence) and the small winery that serves the locals.

I think the Commonhouse does a fair job in representing the relative affluence of the family. A challenge with the winery is how to properly represent that the floor is below ground level. I haven’t messed around too much with Inkarnate’s options for shadows and lighting, so that’ll be something to come back to as I get some more experience with the tools.

I started this addition with Tom Joyce, the Watch’s representative in town. As a small town, I didn’t think it warranted more than just the one soldier, and in this case an officer with some administrative duties, not just keeping the peace — which really keeps itself.

His presence naturally gave rise to the question of where he would live, and I didn’t think it appropriate for him to have his own home. I see him as being stationed there perhaps for a few years, but not a permanent resident. I didn’t really feel the inn would be appropriate either. Instead, I turned to the most underrated amendment, the Third Amendment, which doesn’t exist in this setting, and so Tom is quartered in a civilian home. But, this isn’t an oppressive, punitive quartering, so the Watch is paying a small fee for the service.

I decided to pair him with an elderly woman for the interesting dynamics it could produce. She’s a bit grumpy, which can clash in Odd Couple fashion with a young man who presumably likes to drink and carouse (to the extent the town provides such opportunities). But as an officer, he’d need a serious side, and could probably get along with a bit of a grump. And of course, a woman her age with no children listed creates some opportunities as well, whether she never wanted a family and now has a son figure, or if she had kids and lost them.

Here is the modest home that they share, with a small pen for chickens that Tinny presumably uses as the source of feathers for her fishing lures.

The boarding fee is a small, but I think important detail to quickly add depth to the setting. 1gp is the amount needed to support a squalid lifestyle according to the PHB, or just 10% of what it costs for a modest lifestyle. So, it’s a good bit below what would be a fair market rate, representing either the government’s budget, it’s treatment of its people, or perhaps Tinny’s willingness to take in a companion.

But on the other hand, I started to wonder just what it’d be like to completely populate a small village or town, a place the size of Phandalin or Leilon, roughly 200 population. And the only way to find out what that would be like is to find out.

So, welcome to Barnhaven, a quiet country village, getting louder by the day.

I’m building the town on Inkarnate, using MidJourney for character art, and writing (very) brief bios for the characters. Most of them will be pretty flat, with only a few details, but I think just enough to go on to be functional NPCs.

First up, the folks running our general goods store, the Tulson family:

5 down, 195 to go. And there you’ve got some basic biographical details, their role in the town, etc. I’ll probably need to spell these out for myself for sanity’s sake later, but I’ve got just a couple presumptions, with notes when things differ: By default everyone is in the lawful/neutral range and folks are generally the equivalent of Christmas-Easter Catholics when it comes to religious practice. And come to think of it, common should go without saying; though on that point, I’m noting with an * when someone is conversational but not fluent in a language, as we have with Marvus speaking Dwarvish. He can get by for business purposes, but if adventurers have found a book of Dwarvish poetry, he’s going to be of little help. Might be getting too granular, but it’s one of the details I happen to enjoy with characters.

For the town, I’ve got a massive 600 sq ft canvas and am just going to build piece by piece as folks move in. So to start, here’s the very humble Tulson General Goods:

It’s blurry because I’m working with the smallest scale on Inkarnate and this is very zoomed in. Doesn’t look like much, but I think it’ll come together nicely when there’s more on the map, sort of cheerleader effect or how a mediocre Warhammer army looks pretty good from 10 feet back.