Tapestries serve both a functional and aesthetic purpose in castles. Tabletop roleplaying games leave out visual decoration all too often.
Tapestries also imply a wool industry: sheep herding and shearing, weaving, dyeing, et. al.
Whether rare or common occurrences, a campaign world will and should have places that are former battlefields. Things to be encountered there:
Meat is readily available on the menus of every inn and tavern in your campaign world. Where does it come from?
I already asked about ranches. Those are a relatively recent invention, though.
“From the time of the Norman conquest to the middle of the last century, any traveller in Wales might find his way blocked by hundreds of cattle, large herds of sheep, pigs and flocks of geese. From the eighteenth century, turkeys were added to the stream of beasts on their way east to the rich men’s markets.”
Where there are cattle there should also be cattle rustling.
Granaries are buildings of specialized design and necessity. Even villages will have one.
Tangentially, where are all the breweries?
More importantly, where are all the water mills? Water mills can be much larger than windmills, and are capable of doing more than just grinding wheat into flour.
Civilization’s first automation.
Prompted by the excellent essay Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What’s a Guild?
In addition to the real world guilds, having separate wizards guilds in every city would make things interesting. Thieves Guilds are already treated that way, in fact.
Roleplaying games rarely address flaws like poor eyesight. Or hearing.
The only case I know of is the pre-generated magic-user character in the H1-H4 Bloodstone Pass series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons modules. He is near-sighted and has eyeglasses. His character description lists a die-roll penalty for vision-related actions performed when not wearing the eyeglasses.
I already asked about horse farms.
There should also be ranches for food animals such as cows, chickens, and/or pigs.
Addendum: oxen.
Kingdoms/states/realms that field armies need hundreds if not thousands of horses. Not just mounts for cavalry troops but draft horses for wagon teams.
I have a soft spot for fantasy political structures that are pre-Medieval. Every city should be a city-state with its own king. Its own polity, I should say. Theocracies, magocracies, et. al.
Celtic Britain had the office of High King because there were so many petty kings—many of them ruling over nothing larger than their tribe/clan.
The 5e class description of Monks says
“Small walled cloisters dot the landscapes of the worlds of D&D, tiny refuges from the flow of ordinary life, where time seems to stand still. The monks who live there seek personal perfection through contemplation and rigorous training. Many entered the monastery as children, sent to live there when their parents died, when food couldn’t be found to support them, or in return for some kindness that the monks had performed for their families….”When you actually look at official D&D settings, this very clearly seems not to be true for most of them. Classes like wizards, clerics and druids tend to be incorporated directly into the fabric of their settings. Magic schools and organizations, churches and temples of various gods, and druidic circles are all present and accounted for, providing easy hooks for players of those classes to directly attach their characters to core elements of the setting.
But monasteries that produce D&D style monks? They’re basically nonexistent. If a setting has some ersatz-[East Asia] equivalent, there might be some suggestion that many monks hail from there, but this notion of monasteries that “dot the landscapes of the worlds of D&D” is plainly not true. If there is a monastery, it is far more likely to be a western-style religious institution that produces clerics than a shaolin-style haven for martial arts mastery….
It all seems like a pretty major disconnect to me between the supposed official lore on monks that they come from these monasteries dotting the landscape, and the reality that basically no creators of official D&D content for most settings has bothered to incorporate them in any way.
Author’s emphasis. I could not have said it better, myself.
One important thing (almost) always missing from RPG outdoor maps are mines. Gold doesn’t grow on trees!
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