Best Homebrewed Towns

[Quickleaf]

Great topic!

Which towns/cities have your players most enjoyed? (including published?)

Sigil, bar none. Magic lantern bearers, wererats scheming for domination from beneath the streets, razorvine covered merchant houses, ramshackle buildings made of exotic imported materials, mysterious servants of an equally mysterious ruler... My players loved solving the portal puzzles I'd make up and using their portal knowledge against their enemies. We had a fight where the PCs knocked a bad guy through a shifting portal, reactivated the portal and leapt thru, cast a spell to cause the portal to shift so that when the bad guys entered the portal in pursuit they shifted to another plane entirely. Lots of fun.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Yeah for published cities nothing will beat Sigil. It is my favourite and best planar city both published and homebrew.

PCat your city reminds me of one city I had made up, but hadn't put into game yet:

Doesn't Have a Name Yet: Once the region was a desert region covered in dunes with various caravans and towns canvassing the region. However sudden weather change caused swamps to develop between the dunes. The dunes themselves becoming death traps of quicksand.

One town survived to become a trade beacon; its merchants and scouts knowing the only trade routes through this swamp-desert. It uses shallow river boats, camels and giant fleas (stolen from Morrowind) to transport goods.

The city itself has a central keep and town centre half swallowed from the swamp; the lower regions now underwater. Ringing it is a town of floating walkways and stilt buildings. The humid environment has meant that both the stone structures and wooden ones are rotting and algae grows off everything.

The people themselves seem to be rotting, still wearing heavy fabric and clothing the algae and rot cling too. To keep the smells away spices and vibrant smelling plants are abundant across the whole city.

 

[Maldin]

My most extensive homebrew city is the City of Melkot, for which my website is named.

The City of Melkot is a walled town of approximately 4000 people. On my website is a history, description and indexed map of the city.

Built on the summit of an extinct volcano overlooking the city is Melkotia Castle, a major castle last occupied by a tyranical archmage and then abandoned. Other features of the city setting include a destroyed temple of Heironeous (now occupied by an evil cult called the Sons of Marchanter), in perhaps the darkest, claustrophobic "thieves' quarter" in the Flanaess, as well as the abandoned headquarters of a secret psionics guild, a powerful wizards guild, and a large cemetary. Over time I'll continue to add more details about these and other features of the city.

I was honored to have my original city rendered "official" by its inclusion in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer (both mentioned in the text, and added to the new map of the World of Greyhawk), as well as added to Paizo's huge 4-part World of Greyhawk maps published in Dungeon Magazine. It has also been mentioned in Dragon magazine and the Living Greyhawk Journal.

Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
Loads of edition-independent Greyhawk goodness... maps, magic, mysteries, mechanics, and more!

 

[Piratecat]

Maldin, that's unbelievably cool.

PCat, do you have any more details on the water witches?

Sure! They're witches.. and, uh, they do stuff with water...

Seriously, I always pictured them as elemental-focused druids and sorcerers who focused on earth and water spells. The city pays them a huge amount of gold not to get all shirty and sink the city, and in return they control tides while policing independent operators to make sure no one messes up their profitable operation. Several times a year they use spells to flush out all of the canals, dumping accumulated muck and sewage out of the city and into the bay. That becomes a festival similar to Siena Italy's Palio, marked by each house having their own racing gondola as they try to cross the city on the artificial white water without killing themselves. Cheating is outlawed, and rampant.

 

[Mallus]

Click the 2nd link in my sig. The thread's about the creation of our homebrew setting, based around a port city on Astral Sea after the apocalypse. May I anti-humbly add that it's a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

edit: the 1st link in my sig is the Story Hour for our old 3e campaign. It take place in CITY, which, coincidentally enough, also an urban setting. It's mostly in the form of fiction, but there might be some ideas you can mine out of it. It's... odd... like an (unintentional) mash-up of Discworld and New Crobuzon, or so I've been told.

 

[Gregor]

Here is a quick run-down of a city I recently thought up for a homebrew I'm writing.

Cog Town

A human and dwarven city built on the side of a mountain range where a number of strong glacial waterfalls pour down into smaller lakes which overflow and form new waterfalls. This continues for hundreds of feet until the many waterfalls reach the bay below.

Cog Town is named for the great water wheels and cogs of stone that eternally spin under the weight of falling water. The dwarves and humans who settled here found the wheels standing sentinal over the mountain side, spinning and groaning under the contstant waterfalls. Were these the tools of an advanced ancient civilization now extinct? Who knows, but the crafty dwarves learned to harness the power of the great cogs through great feats of engineering.

Today, a town has flourished here, carved from the face of the mountain in progressive steps spanning from the first waterfalls all the way down to the bay. Mines holding rich veins of metals have been discovered, and every day another strange piece of ancient machinery is dug from the rocks. Wizards flock to Cog Town, eager to piece together the mystery of the ancient machines. They form tight guilds, each dedicated to one theory or another and compete academically with competitor guilds to solve the mystery. Industry flourishes in Cog Town as the great cogs now power mills, ore crushing, bellows for blacksmiths, etc. Cog Town is constantly covered in the smoke of industry and the polluted waters from industry flow ever downward. They have a saying in Cog Town "the more waterfalls above your home, the poorer you are" for only the poor live far down the mountain, their homes surrounded by the now grey and brown waters from up above. Great elevators raise and lower along the side of the mountain as the cogs help to bring cargo and society to different parts of the vertical city. Ore from the lower mines is brought up to be processed in the upper reaches of the city, lowred to the middle to be crafted in the craftsman's tier and then lowered down to the harbour in the bay for shipment to lands beyond.

Cog Town is ruled by a council of dwarves and humans who seek prosperity and industrial dominance.

Adventure Seeds in Cog Town

Recently, environmental and social concerns are coming to light in Cog Town as the residents of the lower reaches of the city seek recompense for their polluted living environment. Druids and others have recently come to the town to plead for less pollution, some even taking matters into their own hands.

One of the Wizards' guilds has claimed to solve the mystery behind the ancient and ever turning Cogs. They believe to know the location of a number of "missing" pieces of machinery that need to be retrieved. Unfortunately, they believe this pieces to be deep within The Rift, a deep vertical shaft into the earth that was found during a mining operation some 50 years ago. Those who are guilty of crimes in Cog Town are sentenced to banishment into The Rift, and are lowered down in great iron platforms that are raised and lowered by the power of the Cogs. Some say that vile monsters travel the tunnels in The Rift, others claim that the prisoners over the years have formed their own society deep within the tunnels.

 

[Jack7]

I like a lot of these towns and cities. Some are very interesting.

For me and my stetting by far the most popular city/urban environment has been Constantinople. We play with the setting timeframed circa 800 AD.

See the section on Constantinople.

When I was a kid our favorite city was the ruins of the Capital City of Pesh.

 

[Maldin]

Maldin, that's unbelievably cool.

Thanks, PCat!
My mission this summer is to try and get more of 130 pages of material I have on the city up on the website, including digitizing more of the maps of the 600+ room castle. Unfortunately, there are also so many more areas of my website that need adding to! I need to retire so I can have the time to do everything I want to do.

Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Dartmouth.

It's a huge city with more than 1,600,000 inhabitants, supported by an ongoing magical industrial revolution. It's also intended to serve as a "home base" for the PCs. And its politics and government structure are messed up enough to give the PCs considerable freedom...

 

[Jack7]

Dartmouth.

It's a huge city with more than 1,600,000 inhabitants, supported by an ongoing magical industrial revolution. It's also intended to serve as a "home base" for the PCs. And its politics and government structure are messed up enough to give the PCs considerable freedom...

That's a nice piece of work Jürgen. You usually do nice work.

But have you considered a Brown-Dartmouth rivalry in your setting?
Or at least a Cornell, Columbia, or Princeton rivalry?