Any City System Plans

[Zephalon]

Are there any Plans from any D20 Publisher to publish a generic city book? I think, that is missing right now. Of course we have a lot of very detailed D20 Cities out there, but nothing generic.

Something with:

a) flavor text about medieval fantasy cities, giving some ideas for fleshing out cities in your own campaign.

b) crunchy encounter tables for different city types, like

different climates
- cold, temperate, arid...

locales
- underground, above-ground
- port, inland
- mountains, hills, forests...

cultures
- militaristic
- commercial
- scientific/magical
- religious

population
- different races

generic areas
- docks
- slums
- high society
- markets
- crafters quarter

These rules could be further fine-tuned by factors like crime rate, commercial power, military power etc.

c) relevant stats for generic NPCs, for example
- sailors
- townguard
- thieves
- beggars
- merchants

d) crunchy rules for PCs spending some Non-Play time in a city. For example:

- earning money/XP with different professions / jobs, with skill checks vs. a variable DC and some negative outcome on a failure
(this could be a jail sentence for a rogue, a serious wound for a fighter, a lab explosion for a wizard).

- long-time encounters, i.e. some encounter roll each month to make this down-time more believable and exciting. Long-time encounters could include getting robbed, making a new acquintance, falling in love, finding something, get mistakenly accused of a crime, angering the local thieves guild or the city authority...

e) A lotta city-adventure ideas


Hope to convince someone to do it

 

[drnuncheon]

You might want to check out Expeditious Retreat Press' "Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" PDF. It's not all about cities, but it's got plenty on them.

J

 

[Zephalon]

I'll look into that, thanks...

BTW, I always thought the DMG city population rules were kind of too generic. Since now, they used them for every WOTC city I've seen. It is strange, if you see the city stats for a magic-hating barbarian village and realize, that about 10% are wizards, sorcerers, and adepts.

 

[mearls]

I'm right at this moment working on a book that does all of that. It's called Citycraft, and it's being published by Fantasy Flight Games. I think you'll like it, given that everything you asked for is in there. It comes with a complete system to create all sorts of cities, new classes for urban campaigns, notes and ideas for running an entire campaign in a single city, tables and systems for creating random buildings and their contents, and so on. If you take a look at Dungeoncraft from Fantasy Flight (in stores now, I believe) you'll get a good idea of the sort of stuff that's in Citycraft.

 

[Zephalon]

Sounds good to me! I'll definitely wait for that one. When does it come out? May?

 

[mearls]

I think it's slated for an early summer release, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Should be fantastic. Chaosium had an old book, Cities I think, that allowed you some great random encounters and a catch up chart. Good stuff all around.

The old Lejentia books by Flying Buffalo, while not books on making your own cities allowed you to use some fully developed cities.

 

[Zephalon]

I believe there is an audience for these kind of supplements. It's even not too D20 specific, and as such usable by every DM.

I know of a german RPG company which had a great city book for "Midgard". This stuff was really good. Players enjoyed staying in the city and seeing what happened to them.

 

[annadobritt]

Cool. Looking forward to the release. (Cities happen to be my favorite places for adventuring.)

 

[kaiscomet]

I would also like to see something like this as well. Especially if it had several points of interest that were already created that could be inserted into an existing campaign.