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.
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