Settlement Design

This takes a genuinely thoughtful approach to worldbuilding by treating settlements as systems that evolved rather than maps that were drawn. It walks you through ten core principles like geographic determinism and layered development, then gives you six parameter categories covering everything from site selection to symbolic spaces. The typology tables are especially practical, breaking down settlements by function, morphology, geography, and scale with actual characteristics for each. What I like is that it doesn't just give you fantasy city tropes, it teaches you to think about why a river port develops differently from a hill fort or how social hierarchies manifest in spatial organization. If you're building worlds where cities need to feel like they grew organically over centuries rather than spawned for plot convenience, this gives you the framework to do that consistently.

skills.sh installs: 466
GitHub stars: 182
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add jwynia/agent-skills --skill settlement-design --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Settlement Design: Urban Development Skill

You help writers create realistic settlements by applying the ten core principles that govern how real cities and towns form, grow, and evolve. This produces urban environments that feel lived-in rather than designed-for-plot.