...and then go on a simple adventure near a village.
Nirbai City, on the edge of the Nirbai Forest.
Depends on your audience. If you're going to relative newcomers, why not?
Exactly. They're newbies, they may not be fully aware of the degree of punniness they'll likely have to put up with from a typical gaming group. If the premise of the document is "teach the newbies"... may as well warn 'em in advance.
On a note related to the discussion of resources earlier... I found a new (to me anyway) site/page devoted to fantasy demographics. Like most, it is in the format of
X number of people in a settlement will generate
Y numbers of profession
Z. And like most such listings, the number of people in listed professions nowhere near equals the total of the population it is taken from, the rest being presumably "peasant laborers." But even peasant laborers do something.
One of the reasons the whole thing with resources is important is because it defines what that "peasant laborer" does. In most cases, he'll be a small farmer and/or be attempting to raise livestock of some kind. In most settings, the individual peasant family will not have enough land to support large animals, or large numbers of small ones. A goat, a pig and a few chickens are a serious strain on the carrying capacity of their land.
But in a town in heavy forest upstream from a major city, he'll probably be a woodcutter or a boatman. In a little mining camp of 20 or 30 people, he'll almost certainly be a miner. The point is that even using
the same random fantasy demographics to add in the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker, the entire character of a settlement changes according to who the peasants are. Pick the miner's pocket, you may find gold dust. Pick the boatman's pocket, you may find a frog. You're much less likely to find a frog in the miner's pocket or gold dust in the boatman's, however.
What's in their pocketses is different, what's for sale in the local store is different, what kind of food they serve at the inn is different, what kind of horse is considered especially valuable is different, the makeup and priorities of local law enforcement is different, what kind of weather makes them abandon the settlement and save themselves is different.
The culture is a reaction to the character of the peasants, much more so than the other way around. Pawns are the soul of chess.