#5 - City Creation Mastery!
The act of creating a city for your D&D campaign is often seen as a chore. It feels like a huge hassle to have to come up with all of the places, interactions and townspeople that the characters are likely to run into - especially when you consider that the characters will never go where you expect them to go and they'll never do what you expect them to do.
There are, however, many tools and resources available to assist you in the creation of the towns, villages and grand capital cities that your players may be traveling to.
The first and most obvious of these is the pre-published cities and towns that come as stand-alone supplements, or as part of a larger adventure. Plus, these can often be reused from previous adventures, even if they need to be reskinned (especially if there was hardly any time spent there in the past). Good examples of this would be something like Phandalin from Lost Mine of Phandelver or Iskandar from MT Black.
However, even published comprehensive material can't encompass the full range of places, activities and people that the characters are likely to interact with. All of them will likely need to be fleshed out, expanded or revisited. To that end, here are a series of books and websites that I have found useful in the creation and/or expansion of my D&D worlds when I am using a packaged adventure in a published campaign or when I’m homebrewing everything from scratch.
This is the book we introduced in our latest Table Talk episode and I have quite enjoyed working with it. It has a lot of random generators for a new or existing town or city. These generators are great for creating all sorts of interesting ideas or odd combinations - they really make something unique. It also has a lot of good explanations about how a particular feature or choice would possibly affect your world and this allows you to more easily add history and depth (and therefore, realism) into the world itself.
This is a very similar book published by Nord Games. It has more tables and less explanations, but it also includes a large sampling of pre-generated cities towns and villages.
One of the advantages of both of these books is (as I show in the podcast) an excellent way for you to engage your players in your world. Having them roll all of the random tables and then discussing how those results could fit into this new city or town you are building increases their vested interest. Also, from a purely thematic point of view, it would sort of reflect what their individual characters might know about a city (even if you don't keep all of the random roll results in your final creation). Those changes can be explained because what they rolled simply reflected what the character believed to be the case, not necessarily what is the case.
Beyond books, there are some amazing websites you can use to flesh out some of the details of your city:
This one is amazingly detailed. It creates a name, race and occupation for every single person in your town village or city up to 25,000! You can choose various settlement sizes, the inhabitants and incorporate some geographical situations.
I lump these two together because they are both amazingly flexible and have many useful tools for the creation of treasure, NPCS, towns and villages. I use and support Kassoon, but the things created in Donjon are equally as interesting. Both include a medieval demographics generator so that you can see what sort of people would be in the town or city; for example, a medium sized town may have one cobbler, four cobblers or no cobblers – which of course doesn't matter until it does.
Donjon also creates a listing of other adventurers currently in town. This can be very useful for long term urban campaigns.
This one has several tools to help with your urban design. First up, we have the city & town generator itself with a bunch of different options; it will auto create neighborhoods, roads, etc. Secondly, you can generate detailed street maps of specific areas in the city. Third, they also offer a great little region generator if you are completely homebrewing your own space to provide extra detail in the local area.
This one is a bit more about ideas and concepts of things that are important to the culture of a city.
There are literally dozens of published cities, other online generators and resources that can be used to make sure your city-building is more about creativity, and not about any sort of drudgery. For those of you who have been building cities for years (or maybe have just gotten excited about using some of the tools above), please feel free to head to our Discord and post examples here!
