Beginning with an empty piece of land, how would a small village form or come together?

This is more of an exercise for me than to be used in-game but I thought it might be good because I'm hoping I'll have a rich little history about the place.

So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

Quote from: briansommers;1106811Beginning with an empty piece of land, how would a small village form or come together?

This is more of an exercise for me than to be used in-game but I thought it might be good because I'm hoping I'll have a rich little history about the place.

So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

This is a very broad question, but I think typically an village would start either by a resource like a mine or ranch; or as an outpost or fort along a trade route. A ranch would typically be on good grazing area. An outpost or fort would be by a strategic location like a bay for landing, or a ford point along a river.

Either of these typically take resources to start out - so started by at least somewhat rich people, but most likely as a project from afar rather than living there. They'd pay people to go out and start mining or start a ranch in a remote area. If it's very successful, then more and more people will go there. It definitely wouldn't start out with a manor - that would only go up once the area is important enough and nice enough to live there. There are exceptions where a family will actually go out and make a successful homestead that attracts others. Settling Iceland was often like that, but I think more typically it's directed from afar.

An outpost or fort starts by a strategic point, and someone sets up a point to trade there, and/or a fort to defend it. People are attracted to the trade and security, and may try to live nearby.

Quote from: briansommers;1106811So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

If we're talking antiquity, either some family settles there (the alternative was living in the ubiqquitous forests), indeed, or a rich person (a roman, in case of european history) comes in and raises a villa, a central farm around which other farms later gather. But these were not true villages, since land was so plentiful that later farms would be a fair distance away. Usually raised on fertile lands in a valley with a nearby river. Actual villages, as opposed to occasional hamlets, were somewhat rare even into the early middle ages.
It was only during the high middle ages that population would grow and forests were cut down, mountain ranges and less fertile lands would be cultivated. But this was still insufficient and so population expansion would cause hamlets to grow into villages, usually with a scattered layout. But at that time, new villages would also start being planned by feudal lords, which would take on a more regular layout with houses lined up along a road, for example. These would be founded on newly gained farmland (usually cut down forests or dried up wetlands). Hard work but the settlers would be rewarded with greater freedoms and lower taxes and fees in return.

There's also an option that it was started by refugees, or some self-ostracizing group... setting out to find their promised land (away from those folks who oppressed them).
 
Still, like jhkim says, there's likely some geographic features that make it appealing. My own city is in the middle of a blazing hot desert... hundreds of miles from other towns. There's no obvious reason for it being there. But its name means 'The Meadows' and there were meadows... a very small patch of them... around a small spring. Not that you'd ever know that from looking around these days, as the city has expanded far far beyond whatever settlement that bit of water would have supported.
There was also a river, a day's travel away... and some farms did build up there, but then the city people damned the river, flooded the farms, and started shunting the water over the mountains to themselves.

[video=youtube;_4E_924b9SU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4E_924b9SU[/youtube]

Quote from: briansommers;1106811Beginning with an empty piece of land, how would a small village form or come together?

This is more of an exercise for me than to be used in-game but I thought it might be good because I'm hoping I'll have a rich little history about the place.

So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

So far, my most original idea came from one of the numerous historical wars in my world. During the XXth Orc War, while the army was in pursuit of the humanoids, a small detachment of guards was told to stay with the wounded who were no longer combat capable and then forgot about them. The wounded healed up, and along with the guards created an outpost which evolved into a village over the years.

Quote from: S'mon;1106829[video=youtube;_4E_924b9SU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4E_924b9SU[/youtube]

Hell Yeah!

Quote from: briansommers;1106811Beginning with an empty piece of land, how would a small village form or come together?

This is more of an exercise for me than to be used in-game but I thought it might be good because I'm hoping I'll have a rich little history about the place.

So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

More information is needed about the world and the empty piece of land. The usual D&D wilderness is so dangerous that you would probably only get a village in a barony cleared out and defended by a high level character, or something equivalent; any village without that sort of protection gets wiped out by monsters. Otherwise, what is the reason that a village would be there? That reason would motivate the first person there, and likely the village started as a seasonal camp, to trade at the junction of trade routes or to collect some natural resource or to guard an important point during the military campaign season, where they eventually built more permanent structures and then started staying year round.

Quote from: briansommers;1106811Beginning with an empty piece of land, how would a small village form or come together?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

Depends greatly on the region.

If it is frontier/wilderness land then most likely it starts with a homesteader, miner, trapper, etc. Often alone, sometimes with one or two other like minded folk who made it this far. This often forms the nucleus of the local community that will eventually grow either on the spot, or at some convenient gathering spot someone eventually decides to set up shop in.

And that is another way a town can get started. The area is dotted with lone homesteads or mines, etc. And someone sets up a shop in the middle of all this. And from there it grows as more shops are added. Eventually someone wants to organize. And there you go.

Another way these used to get started was groups of people either fleeing their homelands or looking to form their own like minded community away from the rest. Some may be funded by someone. Some may be group efforts.

Another is some sort of business operation and the town is composed of the workers and owners of the operation and those who sell goods to them. These sorts of settlements sometimes only live as long as the resource they are there to harvest is there.

Another one from history is... someone got lost. Found a nice place and decided to settle there. Then others filtered in, liked it too and did the same.

Or remove the "got lost" part. Someone was exploring, came across a place they really liked and settled there. Eventually through accident or word of mouth others end up there too.

But the recurring theme tends to be you get several disconnected homesteads in an area and then someone sets up shops in the middle sooner or later. And that eventually grows.

Quote from: Omega;1106908But the recurring theme tends to be you get several disconnected homesteads in an area and then someone sets up shops in the middle sooner or later. And that eventually grows.

In England/Europe rather than the American West, often substitute "church" for "shops".

We were just in Walthamstow last weekend, which for about six centuries was the village on the edge of the marshes where you brought your cows to be fattened up after the trail before they went to the slaughter in London.
Two old feudal manors of scattered homesteads; somebody built the first church in the area on a hilltop (traditional) near the border between the two manors, and further settlement nucleated around those, particularly once one of the feudal lords built a manor house across from the church.

Then when you got wheeled transport coming through in the sixteenth & seventeenth the hill was a bit much, so a bypass road around the foot of the hill developed. Since all the through traffic went there, the past few hundred years of commercial buildings are down the hill - meaning that you still have some sixteenth-century buildings and roads and land use patterns extant on the hilltop.

We have historical examples.

Resource acquisition (a la Gold Rush) can turn an empty patch of land into a boom town seemingly overnight.  So 'who came first' is a prospector.

No matter how remote your wilderness is, you have a few hardy individuals out there either looking for 'the next score' or utilizing the difficult to access resources that exist there (like fur trades).  If the economic activity is lucrative enough, you can get enough people that service providers follow.  If you want to get rich during the gold rush, you're better off opening a general store than working a claim.  

Of course, we also have examples where it was entirely a military operation originally.  Someone decides that the border must be guarded, so soldiers are sent to a remote outpost.  The type of prospectors mentioned above might prefer to work in an area near the protection of a fort and the soldiers themselves provide  a form of market; it can accrete in the same way, but generally much more slowly.

Some towns literally started the way described in Dire Straits' "Telegraph Road". This is part of the reason for America's gun culture; you had to protect yourself when there was nobody else around. Others started with a fort or a few miners. Others again started with a king declaring that a city should be built.

Sometimes, a new city was (re-)built on top of an old one. Mexico City, churches and all, was originally the old Aztec capital.

Sometimes, small villages are planned by a landowner, for example to house tenant farmers to farm fields. Quite often, a settlement just builds up around something, a Church, an Inn, a Fort or a Trading Post. Sometimes, someone builds a house and other people build houses nearby.

Quote from: briansommers;1106811So does a wondering family move in and set up shop?
Or would a rich person come and say, hey this makes a great place for my manor and then decide they want to expand into a village?

I mean for every village it was once nothing, someone had to move in first and get the ball rolling. Who would that be?

It could be a noble with a lot of unused land encouraging foreigners to settle there, often granting them special privileges and/or lower taxes. This happened often in Eastern Germany and later Eastern Europe. Catherine the Great did this as late as the 18th century, and foreign settlers (mostly from the Germanys) founded around 100 villages along the Volga river.

Quote from: Pyromancer;1107441It could be a noble with a lot of unused land encouraging foreigners to settle there, often granting them special privileges and/or lower taxes. This happened often in Eastern Germany and later Eastern Europe. Catherine the Great did this as late as the 18th century, and foreign settlers (mostly from the Germanys) founded around 100 villages along the Volga river.

Yes, exactly... My Saxon German ancestral clan, the Bears, settled into northeastern Germany near Pomerania and Poland, and emigrated from the central Northern German Forests near Denmark, and then traveled east to resettle Baltic Coastal lands near Poland that had been emptied by Mongol and Hun horse lords periodically from the 3 c. BC to about the 7th c. AD.

Real history provides some really great guidelines for this...

Agree. Mines, valuable metal, mineral, stone, wood, or ore deposits almost always attract people who then find a place close to the resource with a sourced of fresh water first to camp, which then turns into a permanent settlement over time. Sacramento is a great example of this and a central location where the big supply camps were setup, to supply mining the mining expeditions that traveled upstream into the Sierra Nevadas looking for gold.

In Europe during the stone ages, the people of the Karamov culture would setup a clan house on a grassland slope overlooking a river. In the grass hills the Karamov peoples cultivated wheat, spelt, and emmer, they grazed their livestock on the hillsides, they would go down to the river basin to hunt, catch fish, and for fresh water. They were simply out of sight from invading tribes or clans by not building settlements on hilltops or in highly visible locations. These were mostly a peaceful people though, and there is little evidence that they engaged in large scale warfare.

Later during the early Iron Age when the Mongol Horseclans invaded into Europe, the Europeans united in opposition to the invaders and started building fortified settlements on hilltops, and other high places which afforded them good guard and watch locations to provide early warning of large scale invasions. and good defensive locations to repel attackers. The best high altitude settlements were first located next to high basin natural springs, or lakes, and also close to rivers and streams where there was a plentiful mountain snow runoff, Aventicum, and Augusta Raurica, Roman settlements in the high Alps first constructed in the 1st-3rd Century a.d. are prime examples of fortified provincial capitols in the high mountains that provided Rome both early warning, and bought them time, when Germanic invading tribes from Northern Europe struck South towards Rpme and captured Roman Territories that were located on the periphery of the Roman Empire.

In the Dense wilderness of North America, most ancient native American settlements would be found in River Basins, because the rivers were really the superhighway of the ancient era. Where  I'm currently located in Indiana was once a native settlement located along one such river. Here the ancient Adena peoples would load up their dugout canoes with Flint as well as Obsidian to make arrowheads, blades, and axes. They also mined precious metals like copper, and bronze alloys, as well as gems, and trapped beaver and muskrats and other mammals, then cured the hides to make clothes and rawhide string with. They loaded their canoes with these goods, and then would make an expedition after the last Springtime snows, first down to the Ohio River, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi river, and then all the way down the Mississippi and into the gulf of Mexico. There they traded their midwest goods for beads and shells, fishbone fishhooks, dried seafood and fish, colorful and exotic abalone shells, sugarcane, as well as other exotic goods and wildlife that could commonly found in the Gulf of Mexico, which they would then hand carry or on travois drag back upriver to the Midwest Mound settlements returning in the autumn where they would trade for food and other comforts that would carry them through the cold winters.

Some other sacred sites of religious, spiritual, or natural significance became focal points for settlements. Natives for example settled in Detroit within sight of the sacred Niagara Falls, known as a place not good for hunting or fishing, but the falls drew medicine men, priests and shamans. The same can be said for the native settlements of the Manitou (Mountain Spirits) tribe located in canyons just adjacent to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. There are sacred caves in the Canyons close by, and the entire area around the Garden of the Gods is a spiritual haven for Native Americans, even now in the modern age, I experienced a rather profound encounter while visiting there in 2014. The same can be said of Yellowstone, and the hot springs in Wyoming, Grand Canyon, The Black Mesa, The Black Hills, Mount Shasta, Pagosa Springs, Crystal River Mounds in Florida, The Bear Mounds in Iowa, the Natchez Mounds in Loiusiana, The Jeffers Quarry, The Giant Springs, and Medicine Tree in Montana, The Emerald Mounds in Mississippi, Shiprock and Petroglyphs National Monument in Utah, The balanced rock in New York, Serpent Mound in Ohio, The Wizard's Isle in Crater Lake, Oregon, Snoqualmie Falls and Mount Rainier in Washington, The Snake Mounds in Ohio (man-Made sacred spot), Devils Tower, and the Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming. All these are examples of unusual locations where native Americans gathered and setup temporary and permanent settlements. The Cherokee had their famous Seven Sacred mountains on the Caroilina Tennesse border, and I have visited in the great trade vales where all of the Cherokee people would gather to play games, trade, and exchange news regularly during the Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter solstices.