Best Fleshed Out Cities for use with fantasy TTRPG


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The Thieves' World boxed set from Chaosium, was one of the better fleshed out cities, I loved that.
Not to mention the fact that you can refer to the anthologies for loads more detail from a character perspective, which never hurts.

DCC has a Lankhmar set that details the city pretty well, so there's another famous literary city for folks.

Flying Buffalo's city books have been rightly mentioned, but I'd single out their unrelated (and largely forgotten) Lejentia books as well. It's a pretty unique setting in general, and both the port of Skully's Harbor and (in book two) the military outpost of Fort Bevits are covered in some detail. Less generically useful than the actual City series, but they've got a charm of their own.

Also thought the Rock of Braal in the TSR Spelljammer box was quite good. There's enough detail on the asteroid city to be immediately useful and enough creative elbow room (ie buildings without full descriptions) for the GM to personalize it to taste, and it's got enough potential adventure sites and plot hooks to keep you going for levels without ever setting foot on a ship. Not as specific to SJ as it might first appear, since it could easily be moved to (say) a transit plane, a suitable pocket dimension, something like Savage Worlds' Shattered Skies setting, a Hollow Earth skyscape - I even saw a GM stick it in a really, really large cavern with funky gravity in the Underdark one time.

Almost afraid to know what WotC did with the Rock in 5e.
 



MNblockhead

A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
WFRP 4E has 3 dedicated city supplements released so far: Altdorf, Middenheim, and Salzenmund. The Starter set also includes a guide to Ubersreik.
Further, Cubicle 7 has released them for Foundry. This sets them apart from many of the great classic city settings for those who run games from a VTT.

I've found having the content prepped in Foundry to be a game changer for me in that it makes it so easy to integrate and cross link the city setting content to my GM notes. I also love all of the little suggested adventure hooks that the WFRP team has put into their setting material.

VTT or not, the Ubersreik information in the starter box really sets an already great starter set apart from most TTRPG starter sets. It also helps experienced GMs turn the quite railroady starter adventure into a sandbox. Many people complain about how much the starter adventure "Making the Rounds" is a railroad. And it is. It is designed to be like a video game's tutorial, guiding your through the rules. It can really help a new GM. But with the extra adventures and the excellent Ubersreik city setting material, an experienced DM can totally turn it into a sandbox. Add in the two Ubersreik adventures books and you can create an entire campaign.

I haven't purchased Salzemund yet, as I don't know if it will ever come up in my current campaign, but Cubicle 7 has really knocked it out of the party in creating VTT versions of city settings with Ubersreik, Altdorf, and Middenheim.
 

Vast, ruined city built by giants..
Well, the outer walls, anyway - which are giant slabs of solid stone instead of individual brickwork mortared together. The interior construction was mostly more human scale before mostly razed. And then you've human-built Pavis right outside the walls, which is really a fair-sized town (and huge by Praxian nomad standards) but looks puny by comparison.

Visual aids really help with this one:

image-asset.jpeg


That's Pavis with all the buildings there, butting up against part of the Big Rubble's walls. Note where the newer walls and the Pavis temple half-pyramid come up to the giant-built fortifications, and the cultivated farmlands on cleared ground within it.

The overhead view helps too.

pavis-big-rubble-maps-covers-c.jpg

That's Pavis' street layout on the left. Big Rubble takes up most of the right map, with all of Pavis being that little dark nub sticking out to the northwest next to the river. You can also see the Troll Breach to the southeast, where they actually managed to collapse part of those monstrous walls.

One of the most distinctive urban areas in all of gaming.
 


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