Fantasy: Creating a working economy/cities?

A lot of fantasy worlds are based on one historical society or another, with modifications for things like sale of magical items and services, imaginary animals, crops, and natural resources, non-human abilities and sensibilities, etc. What do you want the world to feel like?

Honestly, it sounds ridiculous, but I would start with a Dungeon Master's Guide from Dungeons and Dragons. There's tons of good suggestions/material for world building. Obviously you'll want to move on from there, but I can't tell you how many times I've referred to my D&D source books to get me unstuck.

Well, I definitely think it would help in creating a renaissance-like culture to know what technologies were available at that time, what buildings were in a typical city, what the population of that typical city was, and what were some normal cultural practices.

In my mind a culture like you are describing has travel primarily depending on horses or a similar animal, and fine horses are associated with upper military ranks and nobility. Structurally a community has a city at the center, located on either a water or land trade route. Further out surrounding the community would be lots of farms from which food was hauled in to feed the city dwellers. These farms might be grouped around either a nobleman's estate or a village controlled by a mayor.

The central community community is ruled by a hereditary leader because elections weren't that common yet. This leader probably had a religious title as well as being the head of the military either officially or unofficially. Working for this leader is a court of officials such as a treasurer, a secretary of state, advisers, judges, generals, noblemen in charge of outlying forts/castles which defend the perimeter of the country, and all the people who see to the food, clothing, and maintenance of the court and its facilities.

Militarily the invention of the recurved bow and possibly crossbows have negated the use of full plate armor although mid-weight armor like chain mail or breastplates are still worn for their benefit in melee combat. The army's major weapons are troops of cavalry and archers, but footmen are cheaper and thus there are many more of them.

Technologically, blacksmithing and glassworking exist, as do intentional breeding of animals to get offspring with desired traits and basic chemistry to create things like cement and pigments. But pretty much everything is still created by hand, there are no assembly lines or factories or anything more automated than a potter's wheel, lathe, or loom. Alas, except for public bath houses and palaces there is a general lack of hot water other than that boiled by the cauldron-ful. Understood mathematics probably includes trigonometry but not calculus. Formal universities either don't exist or are just getting started as academies sponsored by the government, a religious organization, and/or a society of noblemen and/or wealthy merchants.

There may be some social tension between the rising middle class and the hereditary upper class. Slavery might be formally regulated or might have been outlawed as the source of too many crimes and other problems. There might be an apprenticeship and guild system. The might be monasteries or abbeys. There is probably a central religious leader, who might directly serve the political leader or might be trying to be independent of the political leader. Circuses, faires, plays, musicians, tumblers and acrobats, fights (between animals or humans) dances, masquerades, feasts, and religious ceremonies account for most entertainment. Printing presses have probably been invented but movable type has not so book are still expensive.

Now, you might want to add magic into all that. Magic would make some things cheaper and others more expensive. Magic might enable some otherwise anachronistic things: sophisticated plumbing and heating/cooling of buildings, health care, "genetic engineering" of animals, "plastic surgery", possibly flying vehicles or mounts might speed travel, long-distance communication might be faster and more reliable, and magic might cause widespread small improvements to farming, mining, engineering, architecture, and all sorts of crafts.

This is a brilliant essay by Poul Anderson about just this issue. I recommend it strongly.

http://sfwa.org/2005/01/on-thud-and-blunder/

Here is a link for world building that I found really useful when planning out my fantasy world's nations and cities and religions.

Fantasy World Building Questions from SFWA

blackrose602 said:

Honestly, it sounds ridiculous, but I would start with a Dungeon Master's Guide from Dungeons and Dragons. There's tons of good suggestions/material for world building. Obviously you'll want to move on from there, but I can't tell you how many times I've referred to my D&D source books to get me unstuck.

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Glorium said:

I have this enormous world building guide I found online a while back, but it is one daunting piece of work. Well over 20 pages to fill out, which means... lots of pages when completed. Lol.

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I would also strongly recommend resources like the AD&D DMG, plus the "World Builder's Guide" (you don't necessarily need to fill out all those forms, but it will help you to design the history, economy and geography of your fictional world). There are lots of other resources out there for fantasy gamers that would be useful. You might want to also visit various RPG forums online for further information or references that would help.

Glorium said:

I want it to have a slightly medieval feel in some areas, and then in others it would sort of seem renaissance-esque, I suppose.

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This describes the actual renaissance. The economy didn't go from primarily subsistance farming to bankrolled major investments, urbanisation and proto-industrialism over night. It took centuries. It would have felt a bit like time-travel to travel across Europe at that time. There were parts of Europe still pretty much medieval well into the 20'th century. Not only in the east.

You might want to check out The Rivan Codex, although I'm not sure how helpful it would be to someone who hasn't read The Belgariad and The Mallorean. It would also probably contain spoilers.
The Rivan Codex is a book which contains David Eddings' notes on the cultures he created for those series (which are loosely based on a number of time periods and real life cultures).
I haven't read it in a long time, but I remember he mentioned things like the way economics and diplomacy and so forth worked in his world.

Frances & Joseph Gies wrote a series of books about medieval life. Might be worth looking at.

Just as a possible approach--I've noticed a few fantasy backgrounds that were essentially taking something from the real world and tweaking it in one particular way. In the LOTR films, one person described the Rohirrim as Vikings of the plains, i.e. with horses instead of ships. The Gormenghast novels were pretty clearly inspired by the Forbidden City in China (where the author spent time as a boy) but transposed into a more-or-less English cultural background. George R.R.Martin to some extent plundered the popular ideas of the Wars of the Roses for his A Song of Ice and Fire. In terms of the Renaissance, some situations and/or cultures you might want to consider:

Italy with its city-states, all intertwined with a politically powerful Church, wars fought for the most part by mercenaries, a vast merchantile empire, and many different forms of government.

England which was struggling to become a major power, in the wake of several civil wars which had decimated the noble classes, and with a new dynasty willing to take extreme measures in order to insure their continued place.

France with its semi-autonomous provinces and a byzantine royal family intrigues, in part because the country was so relatively large and fertile while surrounded by natural barriers (the sea, mountains, rivers and very deep forests).

All of these were heavily influenced by the second biggest-schism in Christian history.

One of the things I've (personally) seen that tends to be screwy in most historical novels/fantasies/whatever is how little time it takes to create most goods.

In general, human labor was pretty cheap until the industrial era. (And it still kind of is...we just don't see that part of things.) We take for granted that we can buy a cotton t-shirt for $5, or get it as a free give away, so don't tend to think of all the steps that go into something like say, making a shirt or a pair of shoes. Or making a loaf of bread.

Taking classes on crafting things can be a great way to get a feel for what life was like. Want a new tunic? Someone's going to have to: 1) raise the sheep, 2) shear them, 3) card the wool, 4) spin the wool (this takes a long time on a spinning wheel, but even longer with a drop spindle), 5) dye the wool, 6) weave the wool (also very time consuming), 7) cut out a pattern, 8) sew the whole thing. Your protagonist may not do it, and typically the same person won't perform all the steps - but someone still *has* to do it. A tunic could easily take hundreds of hours to make - even a really simple, plain one.

Stuff was inherently a lot *more* valuable than it is in our modern world, as it took a lot longer to come by. Even the nobility didn't tend to have endless stuff. They were better off - but even they weren't tossing stuff out because it became torn or dirty. (Although they might hand it down to a lesser lady, etc.)

Things also just took longer to get done. Travel was slow, messages went slowly, and even the concept of time was often different. (For a while, the day was *always* 12 hours, whether in the middle of summer or the dead of winter.)

Poverty was extreme. Despite that people had 10 kids, regularly only 2 would live to adulthood, especially among the poor. People were filthy and sick and hungry most of the time. Regularly eating meat was something only the rich were usually able to do. Life sucked.

Your world can be better. But some of these details will make it feel more "real" and less glamorized.

In addition to the resources above, "The Time Traveler's Guide to the 14th Century" is a great way to get a feel for late Medieval England. Laura Ingles Wilder's books are also pretty good to get a feeling just for *how* people did things in a fairly self sufficient, reasonably low tech world. (Still post-Renaissance, but...)

You've been given some first rate advice, some flush with detail that should serve to further inspire.

Whatever you decide to use as it relates to structuring an economy keep this fact in mind - all trade is based upon supply and demand of goods and services.

It really is that simple.