8 Town Layout

Alright, time for the hard part, I tell myself. Laying out the town efficiently. When I try to figure out the layout for the town three things immediately stick out to me: Guard stations, the lord's manor, and the main road. Immediately I put two guard stations next to either town gate. That way in the event of a crisis, the guards can be close to defending the town as well as have a place to rest when it's not their shift. I then put the lord's manor in the middle of the town, and the main road going straight from gate to gate, only stopping to curve around the lord's manor along the way.

Immediately, this seems wrong. If the main road goes along the lord's manor, then that means that in order for anyone to cross the town they should pass by the manor, which means there will be constant foot, horse, and carriage traffic past the house. The lord would not like this. With constant outside noise and traffic, the lord would be lucky to be able to get any actual work done, let alone have any privacy. So the middle of the town won't work.

If I move the manor anywhere along the main road though I run into the same issue: A lot of traffic will pass the manor on the way across or out of town. So that leaves one of the corners perpendicular from the town entrances. Can those really be called corners? How else do I describe the positions at a ninety degree rotation from the two entrances without sounding overly technical or precise?

No one will put their house along the town wall. The other thing to consider is that a lord's manor comes with all the nobles and rich people quarters as well. The lord controls how money is distributed throughout the town, so those that are rich will naturally live closer to the lord in order to better influence his decisions. The issue that then occurs is that if I have all the rich people on one side of the town, the other side of town will be progressively less rich and will be in danger of becoming slums as time passes.

It is unreasonable to assume that the rich will distribute across the town evenly, but if the rich are all in the center of town, at least the poor will not be all concentrated in one place. With the town as small as it is, those that are poor on the edges of town will always be close to someone who is not as poor as them, which means that the poor will have opportunities to work their way up, or at least the poor will become poorer slower than if they were all bunched in one section of town. Yeah, that makes sense. I should do that.

So if the lord's manor has to be in the center of town, the problem must be the main road. The road should bring traffic away or around the rich people's quarters so that they can focus on government or work as well as shelter them from thieves and ruffians. Additionally, it doesn't make sense for the road to go straight from one entrance of the town to the other - their is only a minor pier for small time fisherman, almost no one is just trying to walk through town to go to that one pier. If people wanted to go to the beach from outside the town they wouldn't need to enter the town.

The road now forms a large circle around the central quarters before branching off to the exits of the town. The problem is now how big should the circle be? Too big, and the disparity between the rich and poor will grow quite large. Too small, and then I will run into the initial issue all over again.

I just don't know. Let me sleep on it. I'll flesh out the details tomorrow.