[Omnirizon]

ok great. what about the ubiquitous peasant village: did such things exist? what about farmsteads; were there isolated farm houses, or did people always cluster into villages? by the 1500-1700 were there things like bandits and raiders that would threaten villages and individual farmsteads?

lastly, for layout, were these things just clusterflucks? A recursive splitting algorithm (split space into two sub-dungeons, then likewise split sub-dungeons, then split sub-sub-dungeons, so on recursively until no split is larger than some set minimum on any one dimension) tends to make decent looking dungeons, and even halfway sensible city/village layouts, but they will be no means be a grid. Is this probably realistic for villages and maybe a sector of town, and then maybe some parts of towns start with a grid and randomly merge some cells?