blackshirt5 said:
Also, if anybody has any tips for drawing cities and towns(I don't have any mapping programs on my computer, BTW, I prefer to do a lot of my D&D prep work by hand, usually at night sitting on my bed), they'd be appreciated too.
The best city maps I have managed to draw have taken not one, but SEVERAL maps ... drawn in chronological series.
Draw the city/town as it was when the first habitations were built there -- even if that was all of a tower and bridge, with a couple houses nearby. Don't be ultradetailed; roughly block in the buildings, zones, etc. If something is a farm field, label it "Farm"; if it's the village commons or local barracks' parade grounds, label it accordingly.
Fast-forward to the next "stage of development" -- a full village or small town, perhaps. Figure out which, if any, roads have been paved. Decide how any fortifications the aforementioned tower-and-barracks) might have been expanded -- or even mvoed. Write up a couple sentences regarding local history.
Lather.
Rinse.
Repeat.
I did this once, over a series of some 15+ maps, for a smallish city; I ended up with a VERY pleasantly organic city; you had cemeteries inside the city limits, neighborhoods of differing age (some old neighborhoods were wealthy neighborhoods, occupied by families who'd been present, and prosperous, throughout most of the city's history ... SOME older neighborhoods were little better than falling-into-ruins slums ... and so on).
It's a LOT of work, but it also gives you a good idea where there might be additional stories waiting to unfold (the "church tower" inside the cemetery along Temple Street is really the uppermost floors of the old, long-ruined tower from teh tower-and-bridge days; though the river has, in teh thousand years since then, shifted it's course several hundred yards away ... so what people THINK is the "Old Bridge" is, in fact, a wholly different and newer structure ... under the semiruined tower of the old "Soldier's Chapel" in the old cemetery, the old barracks' underground workings still exist ... perhaps leading to a small series of caverns, contianing some treasure or other, etc, etc).
