(This post is ~15,000 words long, a roughly 55-minute read for the average person. Sorry. It could probably have used an edit, but then I'd never have been done.)

I came into the TTRPG hobby with 2014 5e.

Hm. OK, hold on, I came into the TTRPG hobby by making a game or two of my own based on a freeform version of the Fighting Fantasy engine with elements from Warhammer and Minecraft (yes, the post about this is still coming), and then a combination of rules hodgepodged from 3.5, 4e, 5e's starter set, and the homebrew D&D wiki, which I was playing at roughly the same time as another friend was introducing me to a slew of strange Forge-era games which myself and my associates were wholly unequipped to treat seriously. However, I wanted to be playing Dungeons & Dragons TM, and the edition that I would buy the most product for from around 2015-21 was 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons TM: The World's Greatest Role-Playing Game. If other things hooked me into the hobby, 5e was my first gaming love.

When I was getting out of 5e, I read a lot of blog-posts about earlier editions, and was fascinated by efforts to extrapolate settings from their texts. This could take the form of thinking about how a setting's magic would realistically shape its society, as in 3.5's Tippyverse, or discussion of what is to be found within the setting as described in its own texts that a GM who only skimmed the books, or expected generic fantasy from them, might miss, as found in the OSR classics.

Hopefully you see where this is going. 5e has its own books full of flavour, random tables, ideas about what its 'generic' setting looks like, all of which are interesting. If we ran it by-the-book, what would the setting it produces look like?

5e has some ideas about this, expressed at the beginning of the first chapter of the DMG in a set of 'core principles' about the setting.

In a slightly altered order, this series of posts aims to work through those principles, first to last, exploring what the books actually have to say about these topics. The current planned order is:

Much of the World is Untamed (this post)
Gods Oversee the World (nearly complete)
The World is Ancient (mostly written)
Conflict Shapes the World's History (mostly written)
The World is Magical (unwritten)

Originally, the series was entitled 'The Implied Setting of pre-Tasha's 5e is actually... Wildly Cool?' but honestly I think you, a person who hasn't been injecting this concept into their veins for several years (see mention of the '5thcrawl'), can make that judgement.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER! This post deals with 5e as it existed before the release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. I quite like Tasha's Cauldron. I bought it on release and read it cover to cover. For my money, despite some criticisms of its brevity, it is pleasingly conceptually dense. I love its Supernatural Regions and faction rules, and if I'd been playing default 5e by the time it came out I would love to have used them. I do not hate the removal of ability score modifiers for races and I think the arguments back and forth about doing it largely showed those who supported it in a better light. I'm picking Tasha's as a cut-off because A) it marks a point where the aesthetic of 5e notably shifted towards a higher fantasy setting, aimed more at a different (younger, more actorly, more progressive) audience*, and B) this is where I stopped playing 5e really.

*Nominally including me? But I'm a bit aesthetically picky so I was doing my own thing by this point anyway. If you're new, hi, I live somewhere between the Weird and Queered fringe of the OSR, High-Trust Trad, the indie RPG scene, and the persistent effects of being raised on long-noughties-era Warhammer.

Principles and Sources

Compliance - sometimes malicious compliance, but compliance - with the letter of what 5e says. We're not going to lawyer the language into saying something it doesn't, in other words, but taking it with perverse literalism is very much on the table.
We have no assumptions as to what the setting looks like beyond those provided by the books. If the most reasonable-in-a-vacuum reading of a statement implies something that sounds ridiculous in the real world, we aren't letting that stop us.
We take recommendations - "you might want to," "in many/most worlds," "it's often helpful to" etc. - from the books, but not open suggestions - "you could," "some DMs like to," "in some worlds". If something's presented as the generic option, we take the generic option.
We're examining the world, not the plot. We might be interested in instigating events or in the types of plots a given villain might engage in, but we're primarily focussed on what the world looks like before the PCs walk through the door.
We can interpret to explain why the decisions made make sense, but not add additional material. This is a bit open to interpretation, of course.
The hypothetical person reading these books has no access to the internet or to any 5e books EXCEPT those printed texts publishing (at least partially) setting-neutral information, before the release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. We therefore have access to:
The Player's Handbook (2014) - cited PHB [pg#]
The Monster Manual (2014) - cited MM [pg#]
The Dungeon Master's Guide (2014) - cited DMG [pg#]
The Dungeon Master's Screen (2014) - cited DMS [pg#] which, yes, this does include some unique info. Normal information-design.
The surprisingly few setting-neutral bits of Sword Coast Adventurers' Guide (2015) - cited SCAG [pg#]
Volo's Guide to Monsters (2016) - cited VGtM [pg#]
Xanathar's Guide to Everything (2017) - cited XGtE [pg#]
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (2018) - cited MToF [pg#]
Appendix A: Of Ships and the Sea in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (2019) which I'm frankly shocked to learn comes so late in this list, given how formative a part of my 5e experience it was (I started 5e in 2014) - cited GoS [pg#]
Contradictory information given in later books overrules earlier ones. Specific beats general.

"Much of the World is Untamed"

The thing that kickstarted this post. Does 5e have a 'default setting' in the sense usually used by the OSR? A wilderness map one could generate from first principles? Yeah :)

Per DMG 14, 'A single sheet of hex paper with 5 hexes to the inch is ideal for most maps. Use a scale for your map that's best suited to the level of detail you want. ... For the most detailed areas of your world, use a province scale where each hex represents 1 mile ... province scale is a useful scale for mapping a campaign's starting area'

No mention of how big the hex paper is, but we do know we're talking about an area traversable in 1 day over clear terrain, so 30 miles or 30 hexes in any direction from the centre, 60 hexes across.

'The ground cover of this area will include broad stretches of one predominant terrain type, broken up by other isolated terrain types.' DMG 14

The text also notes that only once you get to Kingdom scale do you need to worry about mapping the coastline, implying our starting region is landlocked.

DMG 25 notes that we want to near-centre our 'home base' when creating a campaign-starter map at province scale - 'a small town or village at the edge of the wilderness.' So we know that some parts of our map are wilderness, and some aren't.

This fucks severely though I wonder whether anybody playtested it before making this the default??

We don't have a terrain type generator, but we do have a proxy for one: the dungeon location table. (DMG 99) If our players are in a region with dungeons, presumably we can use the table for dungeons to determine what terrain types are around. But to do this we need to know how many dungeons there are going to be in our area. DMG 25 says we should 'Fill in the area within a day's travel - about 25-30 miles - of the home base. Pepper it with 2-4 dungeons or similar adventure locales.' So we need to know what possible 'similar adventure locations' might be taking up slots.

What else is in the region? DMG 14 and 108 make several statements. Critically, on 108, we learn that 'a dozen [settlements, strongholds, ruins, or other sites such as monster lairs, monuments, and weird locales] scattered over an area roughly 50 miles across is a good start.' That's all a quote, square brackets for jumbling. Of the set provided, monster lairs and ruins are implied to be dungeon-equivalent adventure locales - the former need 'an appropriate map and [to be stocked] as you would a dungeon', the latter are 'perfect sites for adventures'. Of monster lairs, 'a wilderness area approximately 50 miles across can support roughly a half-dozen monster lairs, but probably no more than one apex predator such as a dragon.'

Hm. Already more than the number of 'dungeons or similar adventure locales' we're meant to introduce in an area 60 miles across. But wait - 'a wilderness area'! We know already that our starting settlement is 'on the edge of the wilderness'. Let's have a look about what we know about...

Settlement levels.

'A settled region mapped at province scale might have one town and eight to twelve villages or farming hamlets. A wilder region might have only a single keep, or no settlements at all. You can also indicate the extent of the cleared farmland that surrounds each city or town. On a province-scale map, this will show as a belt a few hexes wide surrounding each town or village. Even small villages farm most of the arable land within a mile or two.'

''Kingdom scale[:] a large region, about the size of Great Britain or half the size of the state of California ... might easily have eight to twelve cities or large [no indication of what this means] towns.'

'A continent might have eight to twelve large cities that deserve a place on the map'

DMG 14

'The area within a day's travel - about 25 to 30 miles - of the home base ... is likely to have one to three additional settlements as well as the home base, so give thought to them as well.' DMG 25

'When you get down to province scale [our scale] think about paths of travel - roads, passes, ridges and valleys, and so on - that can guide character movement across your map.'

'Settlements exist in places where food, water, farmland, and building materials are abundant. A civilized province roughly 50 miles across might have one city, a few rural towns, and a scattering of villages and trading posts. An uncivilized area might have a single trading post that stands at the edge of a wild frontier, but no settlements.'

'A wilderness area approximately 50 miles across can support roughly a half-dozen monster lairs, but probably no more than one apex predator such as a dragon.' DMG 108

This creates an implicit hierarchy of settlement levels:

Civilized province: 1 city (usually smaller), 'a few' towns, 'a scattering of villages and trading posts' per 50-mile diameter circle. Because of the city numbers, 8-12 such areas of 50 miles across per 80,823-81,850 (based on GB and half-California sizes) square miles, or 29% of landmass at the very high end (remember that the city/large town count does include large towns). Even at the lower end of all-cities, with 8 in a half-california, that's only 19%. Probably that's a pretty realistic upper bound.
Settled region: 1 town, 8-12 villages or farming hamlets per 48-60-mile diameter circle
Uncivilized area: 1 trading post 'at the edge of a wild frontier' per 50-mile diameter circle.
Wilder region: 1 fort or nothing per 48-60 mile diameter circle. ~6 monster lairs, with 'no more than one' being an 'apex predator'.

Good to know the language of the frontier hasn't died since D&D was a western (eyeroll). But OK, we've been told on pg. 25 to use a small town or village 'at the edge of the wilderness', and place 'one to three additional settlements' within a 60 mile diameter. We have an explicit category for places 'at the edge of the wilderness', the uncivilized area. If we were in the middle of a settled region we'd expect 9-13 other settlements in our area, not 2-3. That suggests to me that what we have within our 60-mile diameter is mostly an 'uncivilized area' of 50 miles across bordering on a 'wilder region' with the edge of a 'civilized province' or 'settled region' to its back. If we read 'edge of the wilderness' loosely as 'within an easy day's travel (18mi) from the edge of town we get something like this:

2 uncivilized circles sit beside each other, mostly but not wholly on the map, each with a settlement; our players' home base is a small town, the other one a village. To the South sits a settled region, green, about 1/8th of it, with one more village (about right for 8-12, if we assume the main settlement is central) giving us our average settlement number of 3. Each has an appropriate farmed area. Then to the North are two wilderness circles, red, 1/4ish of one and less than 1/8th of another, one with a monster lair - again, about right for 1/4ish of an area meant to have 6, assuming any apex predator is central or deeper. We've also placed a ruin - there's no indication of the ruin:dungeon:lair ratio given the only numbers we get for dungeons are in a starting area, so I'm assuming 1:1:1 which gives us 3, the average of DMG 25's numbers. That gives us one dungeon. We're told to map the lair as we would a dungeon, which I'm choosing to believe means we generate terrain type like a dungeon.

OK, so what are the chances on our patches of terrain? We turn, as discussed above, to the random dungeon terrain table (DMG 99).

8% of a city - buildings in it or sewers or catacombs beneath
4% of farmland, in a farmhouse
8% of any settlement, in a graveyard or temple - there's no indication anywhere of non-urban temples that aren't themselves dungeons
10% of being beneath a ruined castle (6%) or city (4%)
8% of being in a chasm or gorge, which I suppose could exist anywhere on land
4% of existing in the hills, mountains or coast - on a cliff face
4% in a forest
4% in a desert
4% in a glacier. IN a glacier? That can't be good for structural integrity
4% in a jungle
8% in the mountains - half in passes, half on peaks
4% in swamps
8% on mesas or sets of connected mesas??? cool
8% definitely coastal in sea caves or on promontories (I suppose the latter could be megalacustrine)
4% on islands
5% underwater
5% in exotic locations such as the branches of trees, active volcanoes etc., of which

5% hills or mountains (waterfall)
5% any land with trees (branches of giant tree)
5% desert (buried in a sandstorm)
5% swamp (sunken structure)
5% oceanic (floating)
30% otherworldly, underworld, moving or skyborne and so unmapped
5% 'in an area devastated by a magical catastrophe'
5% volcanic, so presumably island or mountain
30% any land

This could get really interesting if you started extrapolating out to a larger map from those numbers... but not today. Splitting the 'anys' between their respective sections we get the following chances, giving us a picture of a broader landscape perhaps dominated by large craggy peaks dropping precipitously to climatically varied lands below - or perhaps just a place where lots of dungeon-builders like the mountains (and mesas??), coasts and cities and avoid what's inbetween.

10% city
2% town
2% village
2% hamlet
4.75% farmland
10% ruin
4.75% forest
4.98% desert
4.73% glacial
4.75% jungle
10.11% mountainous
4.75% swamp
1.15% hill
8.75% mesa
9.76% coastal
5.88% islands
5% underwater
0.98% floating on the sea
0.98% magical devastation

DMG 230. All art is drawn from the 5e books and cited in accordance with the conventions used in the rest of this piece. All credit to the artists ofc.

We have 2 'isolated patches' of terrain, and our most likely are mountains followed by a ruin or city. We have a ruin, so if we plot that we're left with one adventure location still going, but let's note down that there's a dungeon under it - and it's probably a ruined castle. If we change our settled area to a civilized province we can add a city and another settlement (for plausible distribution) whilst staying within the limits of settlements, and it'd be hard to add a 'patch' of coast so we go with an urban dungeon for our remaining adventure location. Given the wilderness is presumably wild, it makes sense to put the mountains there. We also need abundant building materials and water for settlements, so I add a river flowing between the largest town and city (I think that counts as a patch) and a small forest in the frontier region and near the edge of the settled region.

(We could just set forest as the dominant terrain type, but given it's such a small portion of the table whilst the 'grassland' terrain from XGtE/the Druid and Ranger class just doesn't appear on the table, I think we're meant to read grassland as the default. One can assume the settlements' inhabitants are also coppicing offscreen).

These are each no larger than the threeish hex upper limit for farmland, which I think is a pretty good basis for an 'isolated patch'. Notably, it produces a good 6-mile hex on the kingdom scale. The terrain is meant to be 'isolated', so I don't add any foothills - clearly a lonely mountain type situation

Our area is about half again the size of the 50-mile area used for point of interest numbers, but we still only have six - generously seven, counting the dungeon under the city - of the recommended dozen (scaling up to eighteen) points of interest. To refresh us on the list, that covers settlements (capped out), strongholds (not placed), ruins (capped out), monster lairs (capped out), monuments (not placed), and weird locales (not placed.) So we want 11 or 12 more, call it 12. I split these evenly:

4 strongholds - each wilder area can have 1 or 0, so I put 1 in the clearer bit, leaving the setting vulnerable to whatever's in the mountains thus generating some adventure, as well as adding one guarding each frontier settlement and the city. Marked with coats of arms.
4 monuments - most likely an 'intact obelisk etched with a warning, historical lore, decication, or religious iconography', 'intact statue of a person or deity', 'ruined or toppled statue of a person or deity', and 'ruined or toppled obelisk'. I put one in each quarter.
4 weird locales - most likely a dead magic zone (antimagic field), 'battlefield where lingering fog occasionally assumes humanoid forms', planar portal, and 'haunted hill or barrow mound'. Wait isn't the latter an adventure location? If it is, I guess it's taking us up to our four. Who knows... I put each in a vaguely sensible place in one quarter of the map

We need to consider paths of travel, so add some roads. The DMG also recommends mapping ridgelines as paths of travel, but I forgot to do this when making this map and I didn't version it. I'll do it later...

Whilst it doesn't have the prettiness of a pre-given map, this seems to be a pretty average picture of where 5e thinks you're starting. You're on the edge of civilization, but not so far from a major centre. 'The wilds crowd in'. You're in a great big wide open grassland patched by a couple of settlements and bits of terrain - and the grassland itself is plenty interesting, as we'll see - but if you want to venture into the seriously gnarly wilderness you'll likely have to venture away from your starting area. 'Few know what lies beyond ... unless they've been there themselves'. Various minor weirdnesses dot the landscape, and there are sort of four places you could adventure - something in the city, under a ruined keep, a monster lair in the hills or a haunted barrow. Here and there are reminders of fallen past civilizations. We'll talk about them more in 'the world is ancient'. For now, let's talk about the landscape itself.

Locks - antimagic zone; clouds - haunted battlefield. Portal and barrow mound hopefully obvious. Monuments are target signs.

Wilderness

The DMG is very wishy-washy about how often to check for random encounters, with the roll-based version varying from 1/day to 1/hour depending on how 'busy' the environment is, so we can't really do monster demography based on random encounter tables. We can, however, talk about the kinds of things that live in each environment. XGtE provides tables of encounters for us to look at, usually divided into 5e's 4 tiers of levels 1-4, 5-10, 11-16, and 17-20.

(SIDEBAR: DMG 85-6 gives 3 tiers of "do we get a random encounter" roll rarity: 1/hour, 1/4-8 hours (1d5+3?), and 1/day + 1/long rest. You could easily enough map these onto the tiers of settlement type if you wanted, though you'd always have the issue that really you want different densities for 'societal' vs 'natural' [Bruno Latour's soul screaming at me right now] encounters and this model doesn't give that. Anyway look we're not here to make 5e make sense we're here to unpack it and it's saved us squaring this circle by giving us too little info to do so).

How common are higher-tier encounters?

Annoyingly, XGtE gives us nothing on this. Not even a comment on whether high-tier encounters ought to follow PCs around, be confined to higher-tier areas of the world, or what. This is a generic world without a special party of narrative foci though, so here's my best general logic: by determining how common high-level characters are meant ot be in 5e, we can scale the presence of high-level encounters in the world to that level without actually needing any characters running around.

5e's 4 tiers are described on DMG 37 as follows:

"1-4: Local Heroes
... even 1st-level characters are heroes, set apart from ordinary people ... the fate of a village might hang on the success or failure of low-level adventurers"
"5-10: Heroes of the Realm
... The fate of a region might depend on the adventures that characters of levels 5 to 10 undertake."
"11-16: Masters of the Realm~
... characters are ... true paragons in the world set well apart from the masses. ... The fate of a nation or even the world depends on momentous quests that such characters undertake ... The fate of a nation or even the world depends on momentous quests that such charaxters undertake. ... At this tier, adventurers make their mark on the world in a variety of ways .... Characters of this level construct fortresses on land deeded to them by local rulers. They found guilds, temples, or martial orders ... They broker peace between nations or lead them into war."
"17-20: Masters of the World
... Ordinary people can hardly dream of such heights of power - or such terrible dangers. ... Adventures at these levels have far-reaching conseuqences, possibly determining the fate of millions in the Material Plane and even places beyond."

So the impression we get is roughly that - working backwards, for reasons that will become obvious - a Tier 4 party are probably one of the most powerful groups in the world, a tier 3 party the region, a tier 2 party the region, and a tier 1 party the village. Without worrying about whether some areas are left without heroes or others have multiple rival groups, we can scale this to the map scales given in the DMG to give us a ratio. The largest map scale is continent-scale per DMG 14, and a map at this scale is given as the largest you might start with, so I think it's fair to set 'masters of the world' at this level. (If you disagree you have to solve the 'how many continents does the game expect you to have' question, which I can find no evidence for in the books either by apparent size of world or a direct statement). A Kingdom-scale (Realm) map is 10x smaller, and a Province-scale (Region) map is 6x smaller than that. Settled regions have 8-12 (avg. 10) villages, 'civilised' ones have 'a scattering' (let's say the high end of the above at 12), frontiers have 1, and wilderness has none, as already discussed. We know that civilized provinces are 19-29% of landmass; if we said a quarter and each of the other types was also a quarter, that'd give (12+10+1+0)/4 = 5.75 villages per province on average. So the tier ratio goes 345 T1: 60 T2 : 10 T3 : 1 T4

So if we want to determine a random encounter, we roll d416. Seems reasonable enough. Rolling more frequently once we get into 'wilderness' will produce more higher-tier encounters there anyway.

If one stays in an area of wilderness long enough to have 41,600 encounters, one will therefore in theory have each %-encounter on the XGtE encounter tables once. I'm... not going to list that, but a few highlights for our three terrain types.

Grassland

Navigation DC: 5; Difficult Terrain: No; Encounter Distance: 6d6x10 ft. (DMG 112, PHB 182; DMS)

Most common creature type: Goblins. Tier 1: 2% 2d4, 4% 1d6+3 on wolves, 2% of either (which I interpret to mean 50/50, so functionally 1%) a boss and 1d6+2 with (not on!) 1d4+3 wolves or d3 thri-kreen; Tier 2: 2% a boss with 2d4; Tier 4: 9% 2d10 bugbears with 4d6 goblins and 2d10 wolves. Plenty of the other goblinoids appear too.

Interesting monsters: chimerae - up to 12 in one place at Tier 4; gorgons - up to 10!; couatls - as many as 2 of these staggeringly rare (?) beasts at tier 1; weretigers and wereboars. Phase spiders, ankhegs, cyclopes, and bulettes are pretty common across the tiers. Scarecrows, hippogriffs, manticores, and centaurs all pop up. Young gold dragons from tier 2, adult and ancient from tier 3.

Interesting NPCs: At tier 1: d3 druids 'patrolling the wilds'. At tier 2: A tribe of 2d20+20 tribal warriors on horses who are nomads following a herd of antelope, 'willing to trade food, leather, and information for weapons'. Also 1d4+1 mounted veterans at the same level; mercenaries? It tends to state if they're soldiers on patrol. Small groups of orcs wander, topping out at 9 with an Eye of Gruumsh at tier 2. Gnolls are an occasional appearance, specifically interesting because of the possibility of meeting 2d10 of their CR 4 Eyes of Yeenoghu, a kind of priestly caste who rip out an eye to earn divine favour, at Tier 3. Some kind of Gnoll conclave?

At tier 3, A witch in a crude hut who's a mage will offer consumables in exchange for food and news.
You can also find 1d6+1 adventurers of average level 1d6+1 at Tier 4. This would be really useful for working out how common adventurers were meant to be if my calculations for tier frequency didn't already key off a best guess at how common adventurers are meant to be!

Interesting flora and fauna: Dinosaurs! Lots of dinosaurs! Enough dinosaurs that they included 'hyenas feeding on a dead dinosaur' for a bit of flavour. Notably, tyrannosaurs sometimes seem to form packs - d3 at tier 2, 2d4 at tier 3, and 1d6+2 at tier 4. Oh to play a druid naturalist chasing the fabled 8-tyrannosaur sighting across the open plain! Elephants, lions, tigers, giant boars, regular boars, giant vultures, elk, and goats. Giant poisonous snakes. Gazelles, of course, but only ones that're being hunted.

Flavour: At tier 1, you can find (5%! quite common!) a circle of standing stones where the air is perfectly still within, or find flowers that emit soft light when you walk through. Old battlefields and tornadoes appear at tier 2, so I guess you need to watch out for tornadoes when crossing the plains. Maybe that's what the circle of standing stones is for - a magical tornado shelter! at Tier 3, rare crop circles, sinkholes into caves, or 2d8-mile stretches of disused road can be found. At tier 4, completely dead valleys are found and fiery chariots race across the sky. Ominous.

The general vibe is definitely not a comfortable and tidy eurofantasy, though it has something of the orientalistically European about it at times; quite African Savannah meets the Great Plains as imagined via Boys' Own Adventures, with a lot of large predators and humanoids mixed in. AND DINOSAURS! AND TORNADOES! (The tornadoes apparently rarely approach urban environs - they 'touch down 1d6 miles away and tear up the land for 1 mile,' so it is theoretically possible.) There are no huge armies of monstrous humanoids and no really dangerous dragons, so it's perhaps comparatively safe, but it is quite densely populated by medium-sized (~CR 2-5) creatures in large numbers and many of them are not what you'd call friendly. Apart from the single entry that includes scarecrows, there's little indication that this is meant to be farmland, which leads me to think that probably farmland is meant to be cleared and patrolled enough to be relatively safe barring specific intrusion or lurking monstrous presence. 'Farmland' is also listed as a separate terrain type (with no encounter table equivalent, and with the same encounter range as grassland) on the DMS Encounter Distance Table. This also provides a tornado buffer, if we're getting silly with it.

Hm. You know, there are also no random encounters for roads. One can assume monsters from the surrounding area prowl onto them, perhaps at a much lower frequency given they'll be periodically patrolled... but that does also mean that there's a lower chance of a tornado appearing nearby if you're on a road. This probably produces a strong taboo where you only go from the farmland to the adjacent grassland via the roads (or other safe, guarded routes) if you know what's good for you, lest the Air Elementals get angry and Descend. It'd be pretty rigidly enforced, because that tornado doesn't hit you, it hits a spot within six miles of you. Gods help the strangers who nobody saw arrive in town if a tornado touches down nearby.

Why would this work? IDK, The World Is Magical innit. I'm going to move on before I start trying to argue that the origins of agrarian civilization in the 5everse can be traced to Plains Druidic development of constructed sites as a tornado ward like some kind of cyclonically-obsessed Terence McKenna.

Sidebar: wait, what is a monster?

A miserable little pile of omens and warnings, but this is no longer of any help at all, if it ever was. More seriously, a topic much-debated in one trillion blogposts which, let's face it, you already know about if you're reading AEHElm. None of which exist for the purposes of this post! Here's 5e's official stance:

That said, the book has appendices for 'miscellaneous creatures' (including some animate plants) and 'Non-Player Characters'. I'm mostly using those categories here. Anything that's a playable race in a form resembling its MM stats (yuan-ti, kobolds, orcs...) is an NPC. The nature-culture distinction is doubly absurd in a world where some dragons are as smart as the cleverest humans, but the categories, fuzzy as they are, were helpful to me in writing this. Still, always remember that essentially, everything is a monster. The text also seems to imply that the majority of beings inhabiting the world are threats to the PCs society, which as we'll see in part 4 of this series about aligns with the alignment distribution of the setting.

MToF 115

Forest

Navigation DC: 15; Difficult Terrain: Yes; Encounter Distance: 2d8x10 ft. or 2d6x10ft. if jungle (DMG 112, PHB 182; DMS)

Most common creature type: By frequency, gnolls. At tier 1: 1% of 2d6, 1% of a Pack Lord with 1d4 Giant Hyenas, 1% of a Fang of Yeenoghu. At tier 2: 2% of a Pack Lord with 2d4 Giant Hyenas, 1% of 1d6+2 Fangs of Yeenoghu. At tier 3: 3% of 1d3 Fangs with 2d6+3 Gnolls. For numbers, though, goblins win again. At tier 1, 1% of 2d6+1 and a Boss, 1% of 1d4+3. Tier 2: 1% of 3d6 and a Boss, 1% of 4d12 under the command of 3d10 Hobgoblins and a Hobgoblin Captain. That is, and please check the details above if you don't believe me, a Small Army. Again, that's not counting the other goblinoids, with which added goblins are handily on top.

Interesting monsters: Lots of fae-type things here: green hags, satyrs, unicorns and centaurs from T1, dryads from T2. Pseudodragons and faerie dragons, sprites. Plenty of stirges beneath the eaves. Owlbears. Couatls show up only in the day - again from Tier 1. I do not believe these things are dying out. Banshees, however, show up only at night. Awakened trees show up at tier 1, and treants at tier 2, never reaching especially impressive numbers. Shambling mounds and blights round out the more monstrous side of plant monsters, with multiple mounds possible at Tier 3+. All types of were-creature are present, with wolves (1% of either 1 or 1d8+1 worgs), tigers (1% of 1d3), and rats (1% of 1d4) at tier 1, weretigers being the ones most disproportionately powerful there. At tier 3, 2d4 Oni prowl the woods, which is pretty scary, and guardian nagas appear at tier 4 for some additional couatlesque action. Where the extradimensional beastie of the grasslands is the phase spider (which does sometimes appear here, 1% at T1), in the forest it's instead the displacer beast (and blink dog from T2, which appears in packs of 3d10!). Gricks, ettercaps, (T1+) and trolls (T2+) round it out with some relatively boring things that nevertheless mark a difference from the plains. Everything that appears in unusual numbers has been discussed above or will be discussed below.

Gold and green dragons compete here. Young 'uns of both types appear at tier 2, with adult golds at the same tier, adult and ancient greens at tier 3, and ancient golds at tier 4. Greens are more frequent than golds at tiers 3 and 4, but in practice this still makes golds the dominant dragon type in most forests where there isn't an ancient green.

Interesting NPCs: Small groups of kobolds at lower tiers, centaurs. Lizardfolk can appear in groups of 3-12 plus a shaman from Tier 1 and apparently command swarms of poisonous snakes! Orcs show up in small numbers throughout.

At Tier 1, there's a lot of human (or generic humanoid) encounters. 1% of 2d4 woodcutters, who are commoners - presumably with axes? 1% of 2d6 tribal warriors with 1d6 mastiffs, 1% of 1 scout or 2d4 guards with 1d8 mastiffs. Presumably the mastiffs are being used as hunting-dogs in the forest? 1% of a bandit captain with 2d6+3 bandits, and of 2d4 berserkers or 1d4 veterans (again, presumably mercenaries in the latter case.) 5% each of a young woodcutter looking for a lost friend (scout stats) and a crying child whose parents will reward you with 1d3 potions of healing if you return them home. I say again: close to a 20th of the time when you have an encounter in a forest it will be with a lost child whose parents will give you 50-150 gp of common magic items for their safe return. This must be a traditional gift, and must also be a nice bonus for the scouts and woodcutters (it equates to 1.5 gp/day at average encounter rates for only two encounter checks per day). But where are these families getting these potions? Perhaps the village scrapes together to pay for them, but that could quickly prove ruinous at the rate children are getting lost. Perhaps instead they trade food to a witch in a hut somewhere on the grasslands. This is the single thing I've found on these tables that I'm struggling to reconcile with any sort of plausible explanation; the witch is my best shot at it, but that only makes sense in a situation like this where those terrain types are adjacent.

Getting back to the forest tribesfolk, there's a 2% chance of 1d8+1 berserkers at T2. The same tier has a 2% chance of 1d4 veterans again, which goes up to 4% of 1d6+2 veterans at T3.

Druids here appear only alone harvesting mistletoe (commonly, at Tier 1), assisting a bandit captain and d6 bandits (at Tier 2) or (rarely, at Tier 3) in a group of 1d4 performing a daytime rite for the dead. At Tier 2 and 3, there's a 1% and 2% chance respectively of 1d4 revenants, who for those not keeping up are undead who came back to get revenge on whoever wrongfully killed them MM XX. Then at Tier 4 that goes up to a 3% chance of d10. Do wronged souls congregate in forests? Do (perhaps more likely) lots of murderers kill people in forests and then either A) stay there or B) leave and the revenants get lost? Revenants can exist in any environment, so I think the density-of-murders explanation must be true. Clearly the druids are doing those rites for a reason.

At Tier 4 there's a 3% chance of encountering '4d6+10 elves living in a small community in the treetops.' None of the lower tables do this. Are the wood elves very good at hiding? Not that good, not mechanically. Do they move about a lot? Are they just genuinely that rare? Given 10% of NPCs are elves, maybe wood elf communities are just much rarer than lone wood elves or high elves; or maybe this is specifically for a small treetop community, as against those that could be generated naturally for villages etc.

I leave the most interesting bit until last: there are lots of Yuan-Ti in this forest. Intellectually I know there just isn't a table for their usual jungle milieu, but the combination of these with very eurofantasy elements elsewhere on the table feels pleasingly Conanesque. I mean, weretigers are on here too, so I guess the forest, like the grasslands, is just climatically ambiguous. Anyway! The Yuan-Ti move in powerful groups - a Malison (CR 3) with 1d6+1 Purebloods (CR 1 each) is a 1% encounter at T1, as is an Abomination (CR 7!) wandering alone. The same comes up again at T2, except the Malison-led group has become just 2d4 Malisons. At T3, there's a 2% chance of d3 abominations, going up to 3% at T4. Even if they aren't the most common or numerous, the Yuan-Ti must be a seriously potent force in most forests.

Interesting flora and fauna: Hostile swarms, notably birds and insects, appear here in a way they don't on the plains: ravens and insects, alongside large but non-swarm groups of flying snakes, blood hawks, and giant bats at T1, poisonous snakes at T2. Regular and giant/dire wolves, owls, elk, poisonous and constrictor snakes, and boars are in evidence. (Note that per MM , the giant elk are considered by many in the setting to be disguised gods.) Giant badgers are actually more numerous than regular ones at T1 (1% of 1d4+2 against 0.5% of 1). There are also cats, baboons, hyenas, panthers, apes, tigers, giant lizards, giant frogs, giant toads, bears both black and brown, giant wasps, giant spiders, worgs, and wolf spiders, plus tigers from T2. At T3, as with most of these tables, the 'regular' animals are phased out, but giant apes still appear at T3 (3% chance of 1d8+1) and 4 (3% chance of 1d4. No, I don't understand either.)

In Grassland, flowers that emit soft light are Tier 1. In Forest, they're Tier 4. IMPORTANT BALANCE CONSIDERATIONS! This probably means something. I'm sure they thought it through.

Flavour:At T1, bodies coccooned in webs hanging from the trees and 'a stream of cool, clean water flowing between the trees'. Is the latter... not something you can find elsewhere? You can get water as part of foraging, so there must be streams in most terrain. I can't countenance its distinctive feature being its coolness. Probably the answer is that it's clean. Cross-referencing the 'diseases' section of the DMG (207) there is one that's transmitted via water: Sight Rot, which causes the victim's eyes to slowly rot out of their head. How much water is contaminated with sight rot in the wild? 100% unclear, but this stream definitely isn't.
At T2, you can find a small shack containing a cast-iron oven. Eerie. Also a face carved in a tree and a pool of water surrounded by sleeping animals. Most interestingly, there's a ruined elven archway that gives advantage on Perception checks if you walk under it. At T4, the elven architecture theme develops with a massive statue posed as if telling you to turn back.

At T3, preternatural features become supernatural. Peals of silvery laughter peal from the distance, unlocatable. You find a pool full of illusory coins. Also, a small wooden shrine to a cult called 'the Siswa' can be found, which I believe is a reference to B7: Rahasia. Similarly, at T4 you can find 'a cairn set atop a low hill' which I'm sure references some adventure but sorry, not here it doesn't, cairn-building is just an incredibly rare practice clearly. Or maybe the cleanly-defined terrain abhors a low hill in the woods.

The forest is... creepy. Sometimes in the sense of folk horror, sometimes in the sense of slowly realizing a lot of people have died here, sometimes in the sense of OH GOD THE INSECTS. The tribal inhabitants go about in small groups, and are prone to berserk rages. The druids are morbid, and collaborate with the bandits that haunt the region. Many, many monsters shapeshift or hide or come at you from an unexpected angle. It's also diverse, packed with a multitude of agencies sharing its short sightlines. There are far more entries than for grassland, and fewer of them are big bulky monsters. Lots of medium animals and NPCs. Actually, more NPCs than the grassland, maybe because of the lack of dinosaurs and tornadoes. The forest isn't safe, but it's definitely a good place to hide and do whatever business you're about. If you're going to venture out of your village, and you haven't wronged any revenants lately, go to the forest. You might get wrapped up by spiders, but think of the child-recovery bonuses! Just... maybe don't trust the mostly-unsnakelike people whose boss won't take her hood off to show you the way out.

We also learned that drinking at least some foraged water will make your eyes rot.

DMG 320

Mountains

Navigation DC: 15; Difficult Terrain: Yes; Encounter Distance: 4d10x10 ft. (DMG 112, PHB 182; DMS)

Most common creature type: Orcs - 6% of 2d4 of them, 2% of an Orog and 2% of an Eye of Gruumsh (a priest) at Tier 1; 2% of 1d6+2 and 2% of an Eye, 1d6 Orogs and 3d6+10 Orcs at T2, and then they vanish at the higher tiers as do basically all humanoids except a force of 100 Dwarfs guarding a mountain pass at T4.

Interesting monsters: At T1 there's a 1% chance of a lot of different lone monsters - half-ogres, ogres, perytons, manticores, griffons, basilisks, cyclopes, trolls, hell hounds, galeb duhr, air elementals, bullettes, chimerae, wyverns, stone and frost giants. All of these except the specific giants are pretty generic, but we get from them that the mountains are home to a lot of lone creatures compared to other terrain types. A lot of these just get marginally larger groups at higher tiers (Ettins go 1>1d4>1d8+1 at T1-3 for example), but this isn't in itself especially interesting. At T2, there's a surprisingly high 5% chance of 2d4 harpies, and at T3 there's a 5% chance each of 1d8+1 manticores or 1d10 air elementals, but these aren't as massive as some of the surprising numbers we've seen elsewhere. Flocks of 1d4 rocs at T3 and 4 and 1d4 red dragons at T4 are the most interesting in terms of pure numbers. In terms of perhaps-surprising presences, we have air elementals and galeb duhr but no earth elementals - presumably, unlike their terran cousins the galeb duhr, they prefer to stay deep underground. The mountains are definitely core giant territory - stone, fire, frost and cloud giants can all be found, with frost and stone being about as common as each other (identical at the first 2 tiers, stone slightly more common after that).

The local dragons are red and silver, appearing from T2. Young and ancient silvers are a little more common (though only young reds can be found in groups of 1d4), but adult reds are more numerous than their counterparts. Possibly this population pyramid is a result of higher red rates of violence against their own young and the artificially foreshortened lifespan of more destructive and threatening monsters? This said though, red young seem to be the more collaborative given they appear in groups. Only reds can be spotted high above the peaks in the distance (see below) which indicates that they might be more prone to risky arrogance in adulthood.

Interesting NPCs: Plenty of generic NPCs at the lower tiers. Tribal warriors (3% of 1d10+5); You can also run across kobolds, winged kobolds, aaracokaara, and of course orcs. Berserkers - 3% of 1 at T1, 2% of 1d10 at T2. At T1 there's a 1% chance of a druid, making mountain druids some of the rarest. Scouts (2% of 1d6+2), who also appear at T2 but are now dwarfs - apparently dwarfs use scouts less?2% of a veteran at T1 and 2% of 1d8+1 at T2. By T3 the only NPCs are a 2% chance of 2d6 veterans - only skilled warriors travel into the more dangerous parts of the mountains, and only rarely and in force. At T4 the only things you could call humanoid NPCs are the dwarf army above (5% ) and a 5% chance of a valley of elves who tell of their tower-dwelling wizard master. Actual wizard towers aren't super common in 5e (wizard dungeons, as we'll see, being far more frequent) so this is cool and interesting. In general, the mountains are an environment where humanoids are relatively scarce.

Interesting flora and fauna: At T1 regular and giant eagles and goats are about as common as each other. At T2, relatively large groups of the giant versions (1d8+1 goats, 1d10 eagles) appear. Lions and sabre-toothed tigers both prowl the peaks. More interestingly, flocks of blood hawks (2d8+1) and pteranodons (1d6+3) plus swarms of stirges (2d10) have a 3% chance at T1. Swarms of insectile critters like stirges seem a little surprising in the mountains but they're apparently here! The giant elk can also be found. At T3-4 there aren't really any natural creatures, and there are no mentions of the plant life.

Flavour: At T1 there's a 4% chance of finding a pointless staircase leading nowhere, a 2% chance of finding a ledgeside shrine to a Lawful Neutral god (suggesting that the mountains are a place Lawful Neutral beings revere or perhaps even gather - the alignments of generic NPCs are of course not given), a 3% chance of giants' footprints heading 'into the peaks' and a 5% chance of a 'sparkling' - but not necessarily clean! - stream. Ruined gates closing off ravines can be found at T2, which I take to be a sign of the fact that the mountains are something of a warzone because one of the other bits of flavour at that tier is "a row of 1d10+40 stakes upon which the bodies of kobolds, dwarves, or orcs are impaled. The fact that these three appear seems to suggest that they're all involved in this grisly practice - or perhaps only the kobolds and orcs are? But I think probably they're all using it as deterrent against each other. There's also a 5% chance of steam vents and a 5% chance of spotting a mountain that looks like a tooth. At T3 you can spot some creatures: "a red dragon gliding through the sky above the highest mountaintops", or two stone giants tossing a boulder back and forth (hobbit reference!) Environmental effects include a 5% chance of d6 hours of heavy snowfall and a 5% chance of a misty crevasse. At T4 you might find "a massive boat perched atop a mountain" or a multi-hundred-foot waterfall, both at 5%.

The mountains are less conceptually dense than the other territories. So much here is enormous and lonely that not much interaction seems to emerge. There are, however, intriguing implications of a tree-way war between kobolds, orcs, and dwarves, with the dwarves having lost control of some territories whilst humans push in around the fringes, giants rule the most dangerous areas of the peaks, and dragons wheel in the skies above. There's a grand simplicity to most of it that's quite pleasing. Hints of the Tolkein legendarium and its inspirations.

What do roads do?

The primary function of the 5e road is given on PHB 181:

In non-open terrain types, travel speed is halved. Additionally, if you're not on a road then per DMG 111-2 you must make navigation checks or risk getting lost. But these are DC 5 in grasslands, so a level 1 character with 14+ Wis and survival (or with Survival Expertise) will automatically pass, as will the cr 1/2 scout creature from the MM. Roads in plains therefore provide little benefit, and are therefore probably mostly desire-paths improved to allow wagon passage. (Not that 5e states that wagons are incapable of traversing rough ground). They also charge tolls! A mighty 1cp whenever you want to use one.

Per DMG 19 they 'might be menaced by bandits or wandering monsters', and so merchants often hire guards. At the same time, a sidebar on DMG 34 implies they might be a safe fast-travel space. There's no road-specific random encounter table, and so little to no implication that they're patrolled, but for what it's worth the scale of encounter-check frequencies suggests to me that a road in at least settled areas ought to be less likely to trigger an encounter check than the surrounding terrain, as described in the tornadoes section above.

Most Monsters are Nomadic

As you may have noticed, monster lairs are relatively rare, with one in our starting area. However, the wilderness is full of random encounters. They're not necessarily massively frequent but they're definitely there. Walking across the wilderness for a day, if you're checking once per 4-8 hours (say once per 6, or 4 checks), you've got a 47% chance of one or more and a 10% chance of two or more encounters. There's nothing to suggest you're more likely to encounter a monster near their lair, particularly, and the encounter table rolls, as we've seen, are very diverse with relatively low odds even for the most common creatures. As such, most monsters you meet in an area aren't seuper likely necessarily to be the lairing monsters in the area - they're just passing through.

Lairs

If we assume that our lair in the mountains is inhabited by the most common creature type there, we get an orc camp. Conveniently, this is a rare lair where we have any idea at all of what it looks like other than 'generate it like a dungeon', as one of these is described in VGtM 89-91. They're mainly found in mountains (yay!), 'around and within deep caves or crevasses in the rock', ideally underground. Followers of the 'normal' orc gods dwell in the open, around the central war-hearth of the chief god Gruumsh, whilst those of the disease god Yurtrus and the shadow god Shargaas (whose followers ride giant bats!) hide in darker crevices. Most camps exist only for a few months or a year, as the orcs raid the surrounding terrain until its resources run out. Unlike the longer-lasting stronghold example given in VGtM, our orc lair is one of this more common sort, meaning the orcs are both A) a recent arrival and B) a calamity for local inhabitants. MM 244 notes that they send out scouting parties to find a new lair site once the old one's territory is depleted, so there's a pretty clear cycle for this.

Per VGtM 85, 'the territory that orc war parties cover can extend for many miles around the lair, and any encampment or settlement of elves, dwarfs, or humans in that area is at risk' - especially elves, against whom orcs give no quarter. (MM 244 adds that they deliberately ensure these are within range to attack nearby settlements.) The orcs keep a wagon filled with loot which is essential to their chieftain's prestige. Most in the tribe raid, and all the remainder (mostly followers of the fertility goddess Luthic, or Yurtrus or Shargaas), are expected to guard the lair.

Normal orc tribes number up to 'a few hundred' (VGtM 86). The fact that such a small (in historical terms) army can live in this cycle of raiding and migration suggests that there's no real central authority able to rally a large army to stop them. Let's say there's about 200 orcs in our lair. The exact division between cults of the different gods is ambiguous. Since, 'rejecting notions of racial purity, they often welcome ogres, trolls, half-orcs, and orogs into their ranks', (MM 245) we can assume there are also some of them. The same page also notes that orcs 'often' offer their services to evil giants, whose power they respect, either 'as guards or soldiers'. Since this common occurrence is never represented in the random encounter tables, let's say it's happening at this lair, with the orcs having teamed up with a small Frost Giant group that's using them as soldiers to undermine nearby civilization and leave it weakened for future raids.

I wanted to talk more about lairs here but this post is already [checks wordcounter] LONG so this is perhaps something for the general review of wilderness types.

Settlements

DMG 115

Per DMG 18-9, Government type is determined by 'nation or city', not individual settlement. The most common (14%) is feudalism, implicitly decentralized because 'monarchy' is another option (second most common at 10%). 'The monarch's powers are limited by law, and the ruler serves as the head of a democracy, feudal state, or militocracy'. Hierarchy (8% - yes a lot of these types of govt. are bullshit) can also be feudal. So some sort of feudalism is by some way the most likely option, and really who cares if there's a monarch somewhere or not? Not you, yet. Our default setting is feudal. There's a hierarchy (waow) of titles going knight, baronet, baron/ess, viscount/ess, earl or count/ess, marquess/ise, prince/ss, duke/chess, king/queen, emperor/ress, and absolutely no mention of what they do, other than that 'the vassals provide soldiers or scutage (payment in lieu of military service) to the lords, who in turn offer protection to their vassals'. We'll discuss these governmental types more in a future section.

Then we turn to the DMG's rules for random settlement generation. Across 4 places, 2 will be experiencing racial harmony, one tension, and one most likely will have a conquering racial majority. Looking at the table of NPC species in XGtE, the most common is of course humans, and looking at encounters one can have in the Grasslands in the same book, the most common type is Goblins, which are playable as of VGtM so let's say the humans have conquered the Goblins in that case. For the other settlements, tension should probably be between humans and the second most commonly generated races, Dwarfs, Elves, and Halflings. (XGtE 73, 100)

One will have a respected, fair and just ruler, one a feared tyrant, one an 'iron-willed but respected' leader and one a religious leader. There's a d20 table of 'notable traits' and 'known for its...' with no specific probabilities to them, though they do still highlight some commonalities. It's as common for a town to have venetian-style canals as to be built on a river! I don't even know how that works, clearly some precursor empire was very into their canals. About 1/20 places has a 'grand temple' or 'large fortress' - these are the big ones, so don't limit our general fortress placement, but will be relevant for later assumptions. The most interesting of all to me is 'worship of all gods banned' - 1/20 settlements are militant followers of antitheistic or self-divinizing philosophies, which will be discussed in the next post in this series, 'Gods Oversee the World'.

A settlement is 'known for' something, and most of these are neutral or negative descriptors ('greedy merchants', 'dark magic', 'political intrigue') which again lends to the strong sword-and-sorcery sense. There's also a table of 'current calamities', with the most common at 10% being ;plague or famine sparks riots' and 'marauding monsters', with the rest all equally common. Every settlement apparently has a current calamity, feeding into a sense of a world in crisis which we will definitely be exploring later.

All of these, by the way, are unmodified by size or rulership type, though it explicitly says that they 'assume you've already determined' these traits.

With no guidance from the book (including the section on different uses for settlements) on what threat profile different types of settlement 'should' present, I assign these as follows, randomly generating options where no probability is higher than another, as well as giving out generic English-ish names because we aren't given any kind of name table:

Central starting town: Forton. Racial harmony. Respected, fair, and just leader. Awful smell from tanneries and open sewers. Known for its strong drink. Beset by marauding monsters - presumably mostly goblins.
Bottom right village: Silwich. Racial tension between humans, elves, dwarfs, and halflings. Religious leader (presumably stoking that fear). Houses a notable library or archive. Known for its artists and writers. Currently on the brink of war (internal? Or might some external supporters of the different factions be being invited to intervene.)
Bottom right city: Devinston-on-Dower. Racial harmony. Feared tyrannical leader. (Note that per MM 348, under such a tyrant 'evil priests might work openly'. Notable trait: River divides town (notably only a 1/20 chance! 5e settlements are much more likely than those in our own world not to straddle a river, it seems). Known for its dark magic. Famine is currently sparking riots here.
Top right village: Pucksby. Conquering human majority oppresses goblins. Iron-willed but respected leader (presumably responsible for holding together the settler-colonial project here; presumably also respected only by the humans.) Site of many battles. Known for its high fashion (bemusing but whatever). A new cult seeks converts here. I roll on the random table for cults in the Dungeon section of the book (DMG 100), re-rolling results that have them as worshippers of a deity because the table distinguishes these from cults, and find that it's an Elemental Fire cult.

Apologies for the near-illegibility - you get the idea

It's not a picture of a thriving society, is it? The frontier is clearly a site of substantial conflict, with a long history of violent opposition between the monsters and humans that dwell there driving a deep hostility. 'Civilization' is starving (or plague-ridden), riven by ethnic tensions, and full of dark magicians and tyrants. Cults creep in to take advantage - and oh boy, do they.

On that note, lets talk about the buildings in a town or city - these are mentioned as for use if PCs duck into one at random, so we can be pretty sure they're 'meant' to be representative when the rules are read literally. Villages are not mentioned, so I assume this doesn't apply. These are generated by a series of d20 tables nested inside one big d20 table, which gives the following buildings per average 400 buildings:

200 residences, of which...

20 abandoned squats
60 middle-class homes (apparently the 5e world has a large middle class)
20 upper-class homes
50 crowded tenements
20 orphanages (!!!)
10 hidden slavers dens (!!!!!! - I think I have to assume these slavers are mostly linked up just to stay economically viable, and that each den is a safehouse more than a wholesale base of operations. Unless somebody is paying a lot for slaves? Maybe all those dark wizards.)
10 fronts for secret cults (!!!)
10 lavish, guarded mansions

40 religious buildings, of which

20 temples to good or neutral deities
4 temples to false deities, run by charlatan priests
2 homes of ascetics
4 abandoned shrines
4 libraries devoted to religious study
4 hidden shrines to fiends or evil deities (note that other types of cults do not operate hidden shrines, only front buildings -a more protestant approach for the followers of Elemental Evil?)

60 taverns, of which

15 quiet, low-key bars
12 raucous dives
3 thieves' guild hangouts
3 gathering places for secret societies
6 upper-class dining clubs
6 gambling dens
6 taverns catering to specific races or guilds
3 members-only clubs (How do these differ from upper-class dining clubs? Cheaper, maybe)
6 brothels

40 warehouses, of which

8 empty and abandoned
4 heavily guarded with expensive goods
8 with cheap goods
8 with bulk goods
2 with live animals
4 with weapons or armour
4 with goods from a distant land
2 with secret smugglers' dens

60 shops, of which 3 each of pawnshops, herbs/incense, fruits/vegetables, dried meats, pottery, undertakers', books, moneylenders, weapons/armour, chandlers, smiths, carpenters, weavers, jewelers, bakers, mapmakers, tailors, ropemakers, masons, and scribes.
Not mentioned from the PHB's list of guilds for the guild artisan background: Alchemists and apothecaries (unless that includes herbalists?); brewers and distillers; cobblers and shoemakers; glassblowers and glaziers; Leatherworkers, skinners, and tanners; Painters, limners, and sign-makers; Shipwrights and sailmakers; Wagon-makers and wheelwrights; Woodcarvers, coopers, and bowyers. I think it's fair to assume that alchemists and apothecaries and shipwrights and sailmakers can't be found in every town, whilst most of the others practice simple and low-paid crafts, so perhaps they work in their homes then hawk their wares at market stalls instead. But what of the wagon-makers and wheelwrights, or the glassblowers and glaziers? Surely these are crafts requiring a workshop. Maybe it's just that they have a middle-class home with an integrated workshop, and only work to commission. At any rate, their wares will be harder to find.
Meanwhile, note that herbalists (possibly), grocers, meat-sellers, undertakers, moneylenders, chandlers, tailors, and ropemakers all lack guilds according to the PHB list. This makes these professions less powerful at their apex, but also probably means PCs are free to set up in them without worrying about somebody kicking their door down.

DMG 261

Family Planning (XGtE 62-3)

XGtE has rules for determining your character's family size. Of the 65 options on the d100 family table which specify your number of carers, 25 have 2 parents raising a child and 40 only 1. Extrapolating this to the options which have you with a nebulous guardian, adoptive or related family, we can determine that the average number of parents in a household is 1.23.

The average number of siblings is given by a nested table with a 20% chance of each of: none, 1d3 (2), 1d4+1 (3.5), 1d6+2 (5.5), and 1d8+3 (7.5). (2+3.5+5.5+7.5)/5=3.7. There's not a great way of determining how many of these are in the home at any one point, so rather than mucking around with the older/younger determiner and current status ('alive and well' does not tell us much!) I will simply assume that spouses, partners, servants, and ne'er-do-wells account for the difference. At an estimate, then, the average 5e household is 4.93 people.

If we assume that the average household or tavern has a population of 4.93, and squats, tenements, orphanages, and lavish mansions (with live-in servants and guards) have about 25, that gives us a population of 2,993 for this 400-building block assuming nobody lives in shops, religious institutions, or taverns, which probably isn't a good assumption. If we instead assume an average family size for each of those (seems a little high to me) we get 3781.8 people for 400 buildings. 2990-3780 is therefore probably a pretty fair range. Neatly in the middle bracket for a town - which means, note, that this is what you can expect from a typical town. ~1250 people live in crowded tenements, almost half the population. There's at least a ring of slavers, smugglers, as many as fourteen secret cults (depending on if cult fronts and evil shrines are managed separately), a thieves' guild with several hangouts, multiple priestly libraries which seem to be much more common than regular ones, 3 secret societies, and around 500 orphans.* If the good or neutral temples are nominally the most common, they sit atop a festering pot of chaos and vice. Speaking as a fan of chaos and vice myself: this is too much chaos and vice. All the more so when you note that, per DMG 114, 'a frontier town might rely on adventurers or its citizenry to apprehend criminals and fend off attackers.' If the slavers, cultists, thieves, and smugglers all descend on you at once, I sure hope the other half of the citizenry has your back!!

Yet it's also an advanced society. 3 bookshops! Moneylenders! Warehouses full of goods from distant lands!

* The XGtE family table suggests that only 2% of PCs were raised in an orphanage or similar institution, which if generalized to the whole population would mean that out of 2993 people only 59.3 would have grown up in orphanages, and some of those would now be adults. But that isn't nearly enough to support 20 orphanages in town, even if we factor in adjacent village populations, so I think we have to assume that these numbers are intended to say something about the kind of background that leads you to become an adventurer. This after all is a profession you tend to start out in with a lot of money

Events and the meaning of Urban-ness (DMG 114-5)

Random Urban Encounters happen in cities and towns. Not villages, apparently. These are slightly more specific in when they happen than most random encounters (of which more below): check 'at least once per day, and once at night if the characters are out and about. Reroll the result if it doesn't make sense given the time of day.'

Yes, this really is more specific than the normal random encounter rules. Those (DMG 85-6) present the following options:

DM triggers random encounters by fiat, considering doing so when 'the players are getting off track and slowing down the game'; when the characters rest; when a journey is 'long and uneventful'; or when 'the characters draw attention to themselves when they should be keeping a low profile'.
DM rolls 'once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest - whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is'. Encounter occurs on an 18+ on D20

There's an interesting question as to what the urban encounter table means by 'check for'. This could mean you just roll d12+d8 for a random urban encounter automatically, or that you check using one of the above two methods. (in our case, the latter, as our simulated world lacks a true DM). In favour of the former 'check ... reroll the result if it doesn't make sense' seems to suggest that you're re-rolling the result of the check, with no other roll mentioned, which suggests that the check is a random encounter roll (though those are never called 'checks' in their own section). In favour of the latter, but for an oxford comma that seems to suggest urban spaces are less busy at night (fair enough) the 'check [to see if you roll an encounter] at least once a day [rolling a separate die]' formulation is substantially the same as 'check [to see if you roll an encounter] between once per hour and once per day, rolling a die'.

Something that I think helps resolve the tension is that XGtE 110-2 also presents a random urban encounter table, and it's very different. Where, as we'll see, the DMG encounters are mostly events, and the encounters are generally fairly low-level setpieces, the XGtE table is a much more standard random encounter table of mostly combat and a little bit of momentary flavour, scaling up to big threats like a Tarrasque or uh 1d4 archmages no no more on that in a moment we have theory to do. GIVEN that these two very different tables exist, and that the XGtE one is explicitly meant to be used with the standard DMG random encounter rules (XGtE 192) I think this tilts the balance of a literal reading in favour of assuming the DMG random urban encounters are meant to provide flavour alongside this, and therefore that 'check' refers to a direct roll on that table, representing the daily texture of urban life rather than the stranger and more dangerous things one might come across within it.

What's actually on the urban encounter table?

ENCOUNTERS: 1.04% chance of escaped animals, which 'could be anything from a pack of baboons to an escaped circus bear, tiger or elephant'; 3.13% chance of a brawl or street battle of some sort; 4.17% chance of 3-6 bullies 'harrassing an out-of-towner' - all are commoners; 8.33% chance some of the guards harrass you, and call for help from others or nearby citizens if 'threatened'; 5.21% chance of seeing a peaceful protest against a new law or decree, watched by the guards

FIRE: 8.33% chance of a fire! How is the town still standing? I guess this is an encounter a lot of people have at once, so there aren't really loads of little fires everywhere, but still.
FLAVOUR: 2.08% chance of an announcement being made; 7.29% chance of finding a humanoid corpse; 8.33% chance of finding a trinket; 6.25% chance of witnessing a funeral or festival procession, presumably from all of those temples; 2.08% chance of some kind of street entertainment including royal visits or public executions
INCONVENIENCES: 6.25% chance of 'an impromptu contest - anything from an intellectual test to a drinking competition - or witness[ing] a duel'; 8.33% chance of being drafted by a watch member to solve a problem, but they might secretly be a criminal trying to rob you; 7.29% of a pickpocketing attempt; 4.17% chance of a runaway cart;

NPCs: 5.21% chance of approach by an interested local, who 'might be a spy sent to gather information on the adventurers'; 8.33% chance a drunk mistakes you for somebody else; 3.13% chance of 'a shady transaction between two cloaked figures'; 1.04% chance that 'a street urchin gloms onto the adventurers and follows them around until frightened off'.

If our assumption is correct, NPCs in urban settlements go through their lives surrounded by violence, discrimination, dead bodies in the streets, and of course fires, encountering one or more of these things each day. Even if it's only a check once or more per day, they see these things about once per week. Nor can the forces of law and order be trusted, because almost every guard you meet is either a bully or a potential criminal in disguise. The fact that urban protest remains peaceful (or is allowed) is frankly remarkable.

DMG 86

Serious Encounters

Now it's time to look at the bigger, nastier urban encounters described in XGtE's tables. We'll adopt basically the same principles as our wilderness biome reviews above, since, as we'll see, the city holds the potential of running into just as many monsters. Caveat that 'monster' and 'NPC' are even more narrowly divided than usual.

Interesting Monsters: Predictably, a lot of shapechangers and human-lookalikes live in urban spaces, but it might surprise you how common they are. At Tier 1, you're already meeting wererats and mimics (2% of 1), succubi/incubi, oni, cambions, and couatls (1% of 1), and doppelgangers (2% of 1d4), all of which become more common and numerous later. Then there are elemental beings that can disguise themselves in the urban scenery: invisible stalkers, water weirds, and gargoyles all appear from T1; I suspect the presence of smoke mephits (as many as 1d6+2 at T1) was meant to complete the elemental quaternary, but they lack the disguise abilities of their counterparts so you can just see them hopping about betimes. Clearly 5e's cities are smoky places! At least more than they are dusty, muddy, icy, etc. Gray slaad and rakshasas appear from T2, as do vampires (joined by their warrior and spellcaster counterparts at T3, and growing in numbers to 1d4 at T4). Silver dragons show up at T3 in droves: 2% of 1d4 young, 2% of an adult, 1% of an ancient. The undead are strangely common too, perhaps reflecting a common practice of necromancy by urban dark mages or simply the concentration of death: 1% of 1d12 zombies and of 1d8+1 skeletons, 2% of 1d4 ghouls, 2% of a ghast, 2% of 1d4 spectres, 2% of 1d10 shadows, 2% of a will-o-wisp, 1% of a vampire spawn, ghost, wight, and revenant at T1. Given that both the wight and shadow can make more of themselves when they kill creatures, I think we have to assume they're under some sort of control either via the brute force of periodic purges or via necromantic overlords, elsewise there wouldn't be a settlement at all. Their numbers swell at T2, to as many as 4d10 zombies, and by T4 we're getting 3d6 vampire spawn or 1d10 revenants. There are also a few generic beasties - pseudodragons, half-ogres, and at T4 D&D's best generic lump of HP, the Tarrasque! (1%). When that thing wakes up, it's either underneath or headed for a town somewhere in the world, which is good to know.

Interesting NPCs: There are a lot of generic humanoids with no description of what they're up to, sometimes riding or keeping an animal of some sort. Most are unsurprising, or at least unsurprising given we already know the city is riven with cultists and slavers. Entire bandit groups of 3d6 have a 2% chance of showing up at Tier 1, with another 1% being joined by their captain, which says little for local order. Their numbers go up to 2% of 3d8 and a captain at T2, or 4% of 5d10 and a captain at T3, making a bandit patrol the most numerous group it's possible to encounter. Nobles who ride the streets do so in groups (1d3+2) with guards (1d10) (at T1) or get robbed by bandits (T3). T1 also has a 5% chance of a heavy-laden peddler or a prophet of the apocalypse - who, as we'll get into in a later part of the series, is quite likely correct. Cult fanatics (1% of 1d4+1) mildly outnumber priests (2% of 1). Large, organized groups of 'establishment' figures - 2d4 priests, 4d4 acolytes on draft horses or 1d4 knights on warhorses - are rare, showing up only at T2, at which same tier groups of 2d10 cult fanatics prowl the streets. At T3, the group of 1d10 knights on warhorses that can appear has been infiltrated by a doppelganger. Only at T4 can you meet 2d10 guards conducting ... a search. For 'something'. The guards do not seem to be very efficient.

Living alongside the default humanoid population described in XGtE's random NPC race tables are small groups of other urban humanoids less well-liked by 5e's narrative voice: Kobolds (1% of 3d6 at T1, 2% of 3d6 winged at T2); kenku (1% of 2d4 at T1, 2% of 1d10 at T2); and yuan-ti purebloods (2% of 1d4 at T1, 3% of 3d6 at T2). Powerful NPCs are quite common even from low levels: gladiators, assassins, and mages, all of whom are roughly comparable to depowered 7th-10th level PCs, show up with 1% frequency at T1. Archmages and mages with shield guardians appear at T2, so clearly these powerful wizardly figures are relatively common in urban spaces. At T3, groups of 1d8+1 gladiators, 1d4 assassins, or 1d4 mages with 1d4 shield guardians (clearly a known status symbol amongst the magical community) can be found, as can an archmage fleeing from and blasting at some presumably-quickly-dispatched guards. Archmages are quite common at T4 - a 3% chance of a witch-Archmage on a Broom of Flying, and a 1% chance of 1d4 archmages having some kind of meeting. Heaven help the person who upsets 4 17th-level spellcasters out for a stroll! Meanwhile, Assassin numbers go up to 1d10.

Some more interesting figures at higher tiers include an urchin who wants work as a guide for 1sp, a fortune-teller charging the same, and an actor advertising a show (T2); a punch show, a commoner making a shady purchase, or an assassin disguised as a brawling farmer (T3); and a parent seeking help for a child lost in the sewer or a merchant who claims the finest silks in the land (T4).

Interesting flora and fauna: At Tier 1 - so on the same order of magnitude of commonality as regular commoners going about their lives in a somehow encounter-y way - we get groups of 1d6 cats, 2d10 rats or (just as likely) 1d6+2 swarms of rats or 3d4 giant rats, a raven or 1d8+1 swarms of them, a swarm of insects, 2d4 mastiffs, a lone warhorse, 1d6+6 flying snakes, 2d4 giant centipedes, a giant wasp, 1d3+2 giant poisonous snakes, 1d4+2 swarms of bats, 1d3 giant spiders, 1d8+1 phase spiders, or a crocodile. The streets of the city are a veritable menagerie, clearly, with various exciting creatures periodically escaping to roam about alone. At T2, many of the same appear again, with giant centipedes being especially common - 2% of 2d6, 3% of 3d6! Crocodiles also begin to roam in packs of 3d6, perturbingly. There's a 4% chance of 2d4 phase spiders at T3, but otherwise 'regular'-ish creatures disappear in the higher tiers.
Flavour: Most of the flavour in the tables is 'a person does something', which goes under NPCs. The exceptions are a 5% chance of a cart blocking the road at T1 and a 3% chance of an explosion on the other side of the community at T4. Massive urban explosions - not off the table, though pretty rare!

The city is a place of profound uncertainty. Who are the people you're talking to? What is the ground you're standing on? Did that gargoyle just move? Surely that couldn't really have been a crocodile in the river. It's not big by the standards of real-world settlements, but it's dense and chaotic in a way that would probably be unsurvivable for a real-world settlement where any alternative existed. The heights of power and depths of desperation co-exist, and evil or amoral beings just must be basically an accepted fact of life for the majority. Eat your heart out, AD&D.

XGtE 153

Settlement Mapping

There's not much guidance on this except 'draw the features you think will be important and the roads' (paraphrasing). Cities have wards that each have their own distinctive character. [DMG 114]

Settlement Might and Magic

Magic is more common in larger settlements, per DMG 23, but how common is unclear except that 'an isolated hamlet might not have seen true magic used for generations' but 'people everywhere know about magic, and most people see evidence of it at some point in their lives.'

Pucksby's iron-willed leader is probably the reeve, and almost certainly has 'a small force of soldiers', whilst Silwich's religious ruler might hold a more informal power or might be a resident noble as well. The church (the temple, here) was often a major landholder in feudal societies.

Forton's lord is fair and just, and has picked a good leader. The middle class (~300 people) is represented by the town council as stated here In accordance with the numbers we generated for buildings above, there are indeed 'several' temples: 24, to be specific, along with various other religious buildings. Only good and neutral deities are publicly worshipped.

The town is on a road/waterway intersection, so it doesn't need any of these other qualities. It imports food from Pucksby and exports craft goods to there and to Devinston-on-Dower. How do we know what 'exotic' supplies are? I assume anything not neatly covered by the types of buildings generable within it - probably no alchemists, for example, and little opportunity to hire magical services. It does have warehouses of goods from distant lands, though, so at least some stuff might be available!

Notably, there is 'a sizeable army of professional soldiers'. More on this later.

We can assume the River Dower is navigable, then. Devinston-on-Dower is populated by between 6 and 25,000 people; let's keep it on the smaller side at 12,000.

'An army of professional soldiers, guards, and town watch' is in residence. How is this more than the 'sizeable army' of a town? Unclearrrrrrr. Perhaps there are as many guards and watch again.

The closest thing we get to guidance on those numbers is a table on 'maintenance costs' for different buildings in the DMG 127:

Just below this the following is noted:

Some estimated numbers, assuming 'the bulk of' means ~66.6%+:

Keep/small castle: 33+ guards and veterans

Large castle: 133+ guards and veterans

Palace: 133+ guards

Roadside inn: 3+ guards

Outpost or fort: 13+ guards

Large temple: 7+ guards

Small temple: 1+ guard

Notably, noble estates don't hire guards, which raises the interesting question of what the 'lavish, guarded mansions' in the towns section are. I resolve this by via 'specific beats general' and say that rural estates are unguarded beyond their proprietors, but a noble estate in a town has 2+ guards amongst its skilled hirelings.

Meanwhile, DMG 109 gives no real guidance on stronghold type apart from that their number depends on the value of the land they guard. Nor do we have any information on taxes to calculate on the basis of. I assume most fortifications are outposts or fort; those by towns are small castles; and those by cities are large castles. Just a vaguely sensible scaling. On that basis, and assuming 'an army of professional soldiers, guards, and town watch' means one of each, we have at least 133 soldiers (veterans and guards), 133 private guards, and 133 watch (also guards) in a city, for a defensive force of some 400 basic soldiers before we get into knights or mages or etc. Meanwhile the 'small army' of a village is 33+ guards and veterans - definitely a force PCs won't typically want to fight, and enough to deter most wandering monsters.

As previously noted, the average city is at least sometimes visited by mages and archmages in groups of up to 4. Probably given there's a 1% chance of encountering them there at least some live in the city, especially if, like our Devinston-on-Dower, it's known for dark magic or some such thing.

One thing is for certain: cities have teleportation circles. A LOT OF THEM.

Not just major temples, note - any temple, which most cities will have at least 50 of. Academies and the headquarters of arcane organizations are somewhat rarer (as are guilds, mentioned below), being generated only via the 1/20 chance on the table in the DMG, and 'prominent civic locations' is just unclear. This makes the claim above that most of the skilled hirelings of a temple are guards make a little more sense: at some point, somebody decided that every city temple should have a magical means of transport!

DMG 25

However, note carefully what Teleportation Circle does in 5e:

As you cast the spell, you draw a 10-foot-diameter circle on the ground inscribed with sigils that link your location to a permanent teleportation circle of your choice whose sigil sequence you know and that is on the same plane of existence as you. ...
Many major temples, guilds, and other important places have permanent teleportation circles inscribed somewhere within their confines. ... When you first gain the ability to cast this spell, you learn the sigil sequences for two destinations on the Material Plane, determined by the DM. You can learn additional sigil sequences during your adventures. You can commit a new sigil sequence to memory after studying it for 1 minute.
You can create a permanent teleportation circle by casting this spell in the same location every day for one year. You need not use the circle to teleport when you cast the spell in this way.

So: a permanent teleportation circle is not itself a means of transport, it's an anchor for 'normal' castings of the spell to link to. We thus avoid a 3.5-style 'tippyverse' scenario: you can't travel between cities unless you have a caster to hand, so casters, not instances of 18250 gold and a year's labour by some caster in the nebulous past, are the limiting factor on teleport transport. Nor do cities become disproportionately important: you can get to them from anywhere, but they don't provide a special ability to go from them to somewhere. Still, this provides a very obvious reason to go to cities past 9th level: if you can earn the favour of any divine cult, or other noteworthy organization, you have access to a way of hopping back to that city whenever you like. Perhaps the need for spellcasters to enable this is why mages are relatively high-level compared to priests (9th vs 5th), or perhaps the relative advancement of arcane as against divine power has produced mass teleportation-circle uptake as a means of placating the mages and tying them to church interests, or been imposed to drain wealth from the church into the pockets of the Wise. Certainly, though they don't start with Teleportation Circle prepared, the mage statblock is just of a level to cast it if it's in their spellbook.

There's no explanation of how casters gain the sequences when they learn the spell, which makes the guards make all the more sense... presumably, these things are kept very secure to minimize the risks of a hostile actor just popping in to say hi, but sometimes somebody might just randomly learn the sigil sequence, and hopefully if you have a couple of CR 1/8 guards in the way one will have time to raise the alarm before they're all slaughtered. That can't be a fun posting.

I take it from the 'many major temples, guilds, and other important places' here that these locations might have teleportation circles even if not in a city, meaning I take it that there's at least a 1/10 chance that any settlement has one, though none of ours except the city have such sites. I take it for our starting area that Silwich's library is another such 'important place'.

Sewer Plague [DMG 257]

Given it contains more 'sewers [and] refuse heaps' and 'offal contaminated by the disease' than most places, it's pretty likely that an urban space is one of the sites where you're most likely to get one of 5e's 3 non-magical diseases, Sewer Plague. It's fairly nonlethal and can usually only be spread by contact with the substances that carry it or a bite, so maybe you'll be OK... but maybe steer clear of all of those rats. And giant rats. And rat swarms. And wererats. And crocodiles.

Conclusions

There is such a thing as too much interpretation: I can't extract anything from 1d8+1 skeletons being as likely as 1d12 zombies in a city, not without opening up a level of hermeneutics suitable only for losing oneself in. But I think we can see that parts of 5e have a logical coherence, even if it is only the coherence of a work of art made by people with some strong unquestioned assumptions (perhaps this is so). In some places the vision is merely darker than one would expect from the game's aesthetic: a feudal realm full of powerful wizards, bullying guards, dark cults, smugglers and slavers, teetering on the edge of a wilderness that threatens to consume it. (More on that consumption in Part 4: Conflict Shapes the World's History). In other places, though, its emergent complexity reveals both the Weird and the Eerie: chronospatially and culturally disparate fantasies unite as dinosaurs plod between tornadoes amidst the ancient standing stones that were once the only thing that gave the people who would become the Druids shelter. Planar portals plunging into bizarre otherworlds are as common in the wilderness as toppled statues of lost emperors. Between nervously watching their backs, ordinary mortals find time for both revelry and brutality in corpse-strewn streets lined with temples themselves packed with Teleportation Circles that provide only access, not escape. And speaking of the homes of the gods, join me in ~ a month (I'm pacing these posts between others to maintain my sanity) when I will be delving into the Implied Generic Gods of 5e D&D. (No, it is not the Dawn War Pantheon).

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The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

On the Implied Setting of Pre-Tasha's 5e, pt. 1: Much of the World is Untamed

Principles and Sources

"Much of the World is Untamed"

Settlement levels.

Wilderness

How common are higher-tier encounters?

Grassland

What do roads do?

Most Monsters are Nomadic

Lairs

Settlements

Family Planning (XGtE 62-3)

Events and the meaning of Urban-ness (DMG 114-5)

DMG 86

Serious Encounters

Sewer Plague [DMG 257]

Conclusions

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