How to Craft Your Fantasy Cities - Part 2 - Businesses

If you missed it, the last post was about crafting city neighborhoods instead of trying to craft whole cities and how it can make for far better role-playing settings.  You may want to read that one too.

There’s a very popular GM aide out there that gives a whole bunch of lists about how many of this thing and how many of that thing need to exist in a fantasy city.  I’ve read it.  If I recall, the author used some data from historic records (London?) in creating it, so it seems like it should be really good, right?

Before I found that product, I was trying to do it myself.  I would sit there watching TV with the yellow pages in front of me (yes, that’s how long ago it was - we actually used the physical book with yellow pages) and wrote down how many bakeries, banks, bell makers, etc. that were found in a town of 40K.  I picked that town because Rhum is 40K people, so it felt right.

And I came up with a lot of good ideas while doing it.  Clearly not everything in the yellow pages was useful in a fantasy setting, but I tried to translate.  Computer stores became enchantment shops.  Computer programmers became spell casters.  Stuff like that.  It made me think about things like - we have computer repair men; do they need magic / enchantment repair men?  Lots of decent ideas, some I actually developed.

But I never got past the “d”s, maybe the “f”s.  The deeper I got, the more futile I knew this was going to be.  Modern clothing stores were not a good translation for tailors.  Modern shoe repairmen were certainly not a translation of cobblers.  Too much would never make sense due to the Industrial Revolution.

But then I found this other book, and problem solved, right?  Yeah, not so fast.  Look, I am not bad mouthing that other book.  I believe it to be a good recommendation that you can get ideas from, and for most of us, that’s all we need.  But there’s a lot that just doesn’t work.

For example - They don’t list farriers.  (Guys who shoe horses.)  Maybe they are contained within blacksmiths, but that feels wrong to me.  Plus, they show how many blacksmiths you would need per person.  But the true number of farriers you need should be based not on how many people you have but on how many horses you have.

This is important, because some cultures will have far more or far fewer horses than other ones.  Take for example the number of boat wrights found in a city.  Well, there are no boat wrights in the city of Rhum - it’s landlocked.  However, there are a ton of them in Scaret, a major fishing port.  Overly simplistic?  Yeah, but still true.

Maybe most world builders don’t get this deep into things, but are the draft animals in this particular city or culture oxen or horses?  You don’t shoe an ox, so fewer farriers.  The point is that not every city in your world should be based on 14^th century London.

So how do you decide what businesses are needed in your city and/or your city neighborhoods?  Well, if you want everything to work like a well-oiled machine, you have to do some world building.  What do they eat?  This will tell you whether you need more fishermen, more shepherds, more cowboys, or more chicken farmers.  What do they wear?  This will tell you whether you need more thread spinners or yarn spinners, more weavers or knitters, more tailors or furriers, etc.  How do they heat their homes?  This leads to how many colliers (charcoal makers) they need vs. coal miners (and probably coke burners) vs. wood cutters just bringing firewood into the city. 

Now on that last one (fuel), those guys probably don’t live in the city.  They live in the countryside.  So then the question is how does it get into the city?  What is trade like?  Do huge trade ships pull into port and disgorge huge amounts of product?  Well, then you need warehouses on the docks.  Do caravans bring it in off the roads?  Then you need warehouses by the gates.  Do peddlers sell it off the back of wagons or in an established marketplace?  Is it like a farmer’s market or a Middle Eastern bazaar?  One of the more important questions is do the craftsmen sell their own wares or are sales handled by middle men?  Because if it’s middle men, then you have a whole new class of NPCs that need to open businesses.

These are the types of questions you need to ask when world building, or here city building.  But there are some historic issues you probably want to consider.  Bakeries - Do the people bake their own bread or buy it from a bakery?  It matters, because baking requires a lot of heat and therefore a lot of fuel.  If every house is baking bread every morning, that’s a lot more charcoal going into those ovens.  If, however, the people buy their bread in a bakery, then one guy is heating up one big oven, which is an overall savings on fuel.

Not sure which way to go?  How many of the citizens live in walk up apartments vs. single family homes?  Apartments do not have the ability to have ovens, so you know they need bakeries.  They probably need fast food joints too.  It’s pretty easy to say that if the apartment dwellers are half or more of the population, then it is probably cheaper for a family to get their bread at the bakery too, especially if they live in a hot climate where they don’t want to heat up the house.

Intimidated?  Hopefully not!  This really isn’t that big a thing to do!  You think about where (climate / biome) the city is, and what impact that has on their culture.  Then you make some reasonable guesses, based on the natural resources you already established or the natural resources you made up while trying to figure out the culture.  Write it down, so you don’t forget.  When you have some time, put a lot of this stuff into a single source - a file, a database, a spreadsheet, etc.  By comparing what you wrote for one city, you’ll see what you forgot to write for the others, plus the comparisons and contrasts will help you come up with more ideas.

What does this do for you?  What’s the benefit?  The benefit is that your different cities feel different.  There’s a fairly well known video game where the nurse in every town was exactly the same.  You don’t want that!  You don’t want every city in your world to run like London.  Nothing wrong with London, but it doesn’t belong in the desert and it doesn’t belong in the arctic forests.  Whatever you do - make it your own!

This post was written as part of the recently released The Garrison of Greassnggraus aka All About Adventuring in the Wilderness, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with wilderness adventures, but with a slant of bringing back some of the sense of exploration that FRPGs had when they were new.
We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 60 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here. 

How to Craft Your Fantasy Cities

An incredibly long time ago, I started working on the World of Fletnern.  The first thing I did was decide on a name.  Fletnern means “far and wide” in the titan language.  Hey, I was creating a new world, I can create words and languages too!

The second thing I did was begin drawing maps.  A really (REALLY!!) crude map of the continents was first, but then I started working on the city of Brinston.  Brinston was to be the biggest city, and therefore the most important.  On a river delta, it would have ample water, river trade, and sea trade.  Sounds perfect, right?

Yeah, well early maps aside, Brinston was supposed to be about 1,000,000 people, I think because I heard that London and Paris both at their heights were supposed to have been that big.  No idea if that’s true, but it didn’t really matter at the time.  The problem was that creating a city of a million folks takes a lot of work.  Seriously, a lot of work!

So, by that time, I had already started to place other cities and write notes on general populations.  So I looked at the ones I had placed and one of the smaller ones was Rhum.  Rhum was a Rhoric city (think Germany or Prussia in the 1500-1600s).  Being of Austrian and German descent, that felt like something I could tackle.  (Brinston is Marilick or basically French.  I’m not.  No idea how many things I probably screwed up there!)

Rhum was a city of about 40K people.  That felt a lot more “bite sized” than a million.  And originally, that was my goal - I was going to actually map out the city that contained 40,000 people.  Each person would be named.  Each would have a home and a place of business (assuming they worked outside the home).  Plus, I lived in a town of roughly 30K people, so I should have a feel for it, right?

Sure, I had a bunch of false starts.  At one time huge portions of the city had been built into or under a hill.  You see, they were close to the halflings, and their city sort of became a huge hobbit hole.  That was all eventually scrapped, but in-game explanations were offered.  

So could I have written a city of 40K people, each named, each placed, and their homes and businesses mapped out?  Yes, I could have.  BUT! it would have been really boring!  In order to get that much data into lists and spreadsheets, I would have had to just sit down and start writing out names.  Now, I had a computer program I wrote that created “Rhoric” names for me, but still, it would not have been fun.  But, for example, I have everyone who works at any of the four major ceramics factories documented.

The most boring part of this was that everyone was starting to live in square homes on straight streets or apartment buildings.  Well, OK, that works, but it has no character.  I wanted a city that had some character.

So I changed the way I went about it, and this is the real advice this column is intended to convey:  I went back in and figured out where the main streets were.  It wasn’t that tough - I knew where the gates into the city were.  I placed a couple of landmarks that were going to be vitally important:  City Hall, the legal courts, the cathedrals.  I designated certain areas as different types of neighborhoods:  upscale, slums, residential, industrial.  None of these were exclusively one thing or the other but predominantly.  And then I stopped worrying so much for a little while.

Instead of trying to create an entire city, even one that was only 40K people, I started to focus on neighborhoods.  When I first started working on Rhum, and it has carried through many rewrites, I started on what people would see as soon as they stepped through the gates.  What did they need?  Wouldn’t smart business owners position what travelers needed most right by the main gate(s)?  It got to the point where I could see it - literally close my eyes and see what it looked like when you stepped through what is now the North Gate of Rhum. 

There’s the Cantering Colt Inn, the Happy Harpy tavern, a money changer, a restaurant, etc.  When I had designed it originally, it made sense to me how they would be clustered and to a point, I felt that the neighborhood had a feel to it, maybe even a story behind it.

Without question, this is how I think you best build cities.  Place the really important landmarks.  Sketch out the broad neighborhoods.  Then get in there and start designing neighborhoods.  In the way you link the streets up, place residences and businesses, and insert NPCs, you can focus on just this one spot.  Even if you only focus on it for a very short time, you know what you are working on:  a blue-collar residential neighborhood or whatever.  These folks don’t need a fancy hotel.  They need a bakery because few of them own ovens.  They probably don’t need a stable because they all walk to work, but then you need to make sure their place of employment is probably less than a mile away, probably a lot less.

It is this focus and the ability at this level to create connectivity between people who live in the same neighborhood that is going to give your city character.  And here’s the best part:  Characters don’t go wandering cities just to see what’s there.  At least none of my players ever have.  You can legitimately place a party in two or three neighborhoods and they don’t care what’s elsewhere.  Especially if you have the neighborhood they are in reasonably well crafted, they won’t bother going elsewhere.  They are going to start to feel at home in that neighborhood.

The point of this article is to help steer you, not to sell you.  But (there’s always a “but” after that kind of statement), if you want an example of how this type of neighborhood design works, check out the published content on Rhum.  The Warrior Guilds of Rhum details both the Soldiers’ Guild neighborhood and the Adventurers’ Guild neighborhood, and the rivalry between them.  Welcome to Rhum details that North Gate neighborhood, where we think everything visitors need can be handled.  Lost in Rhum is a collection of a lot of other places that are not in the same neighborhoods but can really give your PCs the illusion that the rest of the city is done as well.  Just for reading this paragraph, we’re going to put the bundle on sale this month in case it is something you’d like to pick up.

Next time, more on the businesses in a fantasy city.

This post was written as part of the recently released The Garrison of Greassnggraus aka All About Adventuring in the Wilderness, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with wilderness adventures, but with a slant of bringing back some of the sense of exploration that FRPGs had when they were new.
We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 60 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.