City Building Tips: Give cities flavour with districts By Johnn Four
1. Divide Your City Into Chunks Cities are large beasts that can i ntimidate GMs trying to plan and design them. There are so many people, locations, and things to think about it makes a GM cry in his battlemat. However, a successful, time-tested approach is ye old divide and conquer. Break your city into digestible chunks and plan one chunk at a time. The obvious city chunk is the district. Grab your city map and divide the area into sections. These will be your districts. ---- Sidebar ---This planning method also provides great session structure for your city adventure or campaign. If you are a typical game master who fleshes out the setting while the campaign is being played, then you will want to keep the PCs interested in sticking around the parts of the city you've detailed so far. So, when you sit down to plan next game, what should you do? Answer: design hooks and encounters that play up the desired locations you want PCs to visit. Perfect planning guidance. ---- Sidebar ---If you're looking for a new angle on districts, try this list for inspiration:
Neighbourhoods
Wards
Burroughs
Cantons
Diocese
Precincts
Quarters
Sectors
Turf
Zones Return to Contents
2. Give Each District A "Capital City" Many worlds are divided into countries, and each country has a capital city. This location is the administrative administrativ e centre for its region. Laws, politics, budgets, policies, organization, and big decisions come out of this place. A capital city city is often a cultural and community community epicentre as well. It will will have a higher population population density than other region locations, and leading trends, social issues, and ideas will emerge regularly to influence other parts of the country and the world. Most important, at least for gaming purposes, is that capital cities are power bases. They are natural breeding grounds for the biggest conflicts, toughest villains, and neediest victims. They attract wealth, challengers, ambition, and struggle.
If you give each of your districts some kind of capital, your city will inherit all these benefits as well - and not just once, but for every district. This opens up all kinds of awesome plot and encounter possibilities, in addition to great city design guidance. Here are some example ways you can give your districts a capital city-type location:
Multi-story building
Underground hanger or cavern
Huge warehouse
Palace or castle
Tower
Section of the sewers
An intersection (great example: Gangs of New York movie)
An open square between buildings (great example: The Wire TV show)
A park
A maze-like section
Large church
Guild hall of a powerful guild
A section of the docks
Cemetery
Hidden area
A special inn
A restaurant
Tavern Return to Contents
3. Give Each District Personality While thumbing through The DM Campaign Record from Goodman Games this week (an excellent product, btw), I spotted an NPC per sonality table with 20 entries. Instantly, I thought this chart would make a great tool for assigning a basic personality to each district in the city I'm building for my current campaign. This leads to the tip of applying the methods you use for crafting great NPCs to build interesting districts as well. Give city sections:
Quirks
Goals, motives, and dreams
Alignments
Fears
Loyalties
Prejudices
Jealousies
In addition, you can add personality to districts with:
Terrain Age, history
Weather
Population density
Architecture style
Leadership type
Conflict type(s)
---- Sidebar ---If you think weather might be a far-fetched way to make city districts interesting and distinct, do not worry. When I lived in Vancouver, various sections of the city would have "signature" weather and different weather all the time, even though Vancouver has much smaller land area than many other cities. For example, the North Shore area receives about twice as much rain - as much as a rain forest some years - as any other part of the city, and far less sun. Also, fog would regularly creep up the channel, sometimes climbing higher than office buildings downtown, though it would be clear and sunny in other areas. ---- Sidebar ---Goodman Games DM Campaign Record Return to Contents
4. Create Distinct Encounter Tables For Each District To further enhance and communicate the personality of your districts, craft custom random encounter tables for each. Aim for a 7/2/1 ratio: 7 entries of regular folk who live and work in the area 2 entries of visitors from other districts 1 entry for something unusual If the PCs see or meet the same types of folk over the course of a few sessions, the district's personality will soon take hold in players' minds. In addition, this becomes a handy tool players will use to orient themselves and envision each district better. After awhile, these regular encounters can become pillars for your plots and encounters. For example, the unusual entries will stick out due to the high contrast - and you won't need to make a big deal of it to get the players to notice. The regular folk become the baseline and player e xpectation, giving you an opportunity to play with that as a n encounter design or NPC design opportunity. The DM Campaign Record mentioned earlier has a chart for NPC Social Class/Occupation that worked well for my campaign's district encounter charts. A twist on this idea is to create typical encounters based not just on who the NPCs are, but on what the NPCs are doing. For example, a business district will have a lot of merchants. So, you craft a chart with 14 different types of merchants the PCs will typically encounter, 4 visitor types from neighbou ring districts, and 2 unusual NPCs (these entries actually point to a sub-chart of several unusual NPC options). However, you realize you have three merchant areas in your city, and you decide that crafting three separate charts with 42 total merchant types is either unrealistic for your city, or a pain in the butt.
Instead, you design:
Merchant district 1: merchants do business in a shared, open area, are aggressive, and yell out advertisements and e nticements. Merchant district 2: merchants dwell in separate buildings and shops, and quiet window shopping is the norm. Merchant district 3: merchants are living infomercials, offering free demonstrations, free samples, and operate out of demonstration booths in a trade show-like area. Return to Contents
5. Districts In My Campaign The city I'm currently designing for my D&D campaign is called Carnus. It has 6 districts, each governed by a powerful warlord. Rather than dividing the city up according to function (i.e. merchants area, temples area, law and a dministration area, slums, etc.) I'm putting all the typical city elements into each district. Each district is sort of like a mini city and fairly self-sufficient. District 1 has merchants, rich, poor, barracks, the warlord's base, and so on, as do Districts 2-6. Oddly enough, I'm using the Trivial Pursuit board game as inspiration for Carnus. The city is roughly round and districts are somewhat pie shaped. I'm using th e board as a mapping of the political structure, but I haven't found a use yet for the player pie pieces (do you have any ideas?). Each district's personality is based loosely on the categories of the Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition:
Geography: blue
Entertainment: pink
History: yellow
Art & Literature: brown
Knowledge and nature: green
Sport & Leisure: orange
I'm basing the "capital city" of each district on the flavour of the category:
Blue: Huge palace (multi-cultural)
Pink: Theatre
Yellow: Old, maze-like castle
Brown: University
Green: Park
Orange: Gladiatorial arena
In each of these locations are open or secret areas where the elite of each district conduct their (un)lawful business. For example, the theatre is a large building over 100 years old. It is the pride and joy of local residents and the focal point of the district's culture and social venues. However, in the back offices and in a secret area high above in the rafters (known as The Heavens) the rich and powerful conduct their business and engage in deadly political manoeuvres. Carnus has only one official capitol, but each district's "capital city" serves as interesting, conflict-ridden, local power bases sure to spawn numerous plots that will entangle the PCs. For encounter tables, I'm using the table straight out of The DM Campaign Record from Goodman Games, but tweaking results depending on what district the PCs are in:
District colours theme clothing and buildings.
District theme and leadership style tinges personality and interaction style/type.
Example: District 1 is nearly a police state, while District 2 has a strong code of honour. So, a lamplighter in District 1 will glare suspiciously at the PCs and report unusual behaviour unless discouraged. A lamplighter in District 2 will perform his job with pride and skill, and if his honour is questioned or tarnished by a PC, he'll immediately head to The Hall of Champions and hire a champion for one hour to duel the offending PC.
