Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="edemaitre" data-source="post: 3166047" data-attributes="member: 3372">I've also got both Cityworks and Cityscape, and I agree that they're complementary. Cityscape indeed has nicer production values, with full-color illustrations of example cities and the standard WotC D&D3.5 trade dress. Both do a decent job of describing the typical neighborhoods in a fantasy city.However, I've found Cityworks slightly more useful in designing a city from the ground up. It has somewhat more "crunch," and the modular ward design is better than Cityscape's mere numbering of identical type neighborhoods in different cities. What happens when the temple district is next to the poorer part of town? Or the necropolis near the nobility?Cityscape provides good examples of trade, military, religious centers, but why not provide maps of example demihuman and humanoid cities? Both provide prestige classes and new feats and spells, but how about an explanation of the great variety in real-world cities driven by environment, culture, and technology? Arabian cities were different from Chinese ones, partly because of the accretion of history. How are urban N.P.C.s different from those encountered in smaller towns? A party stronghold or safehouse is another potentially good location to describe. Minas Tirith is different from Edoras or Moria...I would also have liked floor plans for typical urban buildings: a theater, a guild hall, a guard tower, some sewers, or an urban church or magic school/library, for example. Dungeon Masters shouldn't have to go to other books for them. It would also have been nice, but not necessarily expected, if examples of urban centers should look/feel in steampunk (a la Eberron), high-magic (Forgotten Realms), modern/science fiction (various WotC and D20 licenses), and low-tech/low magic (Kalamar) settings. That said, I definitely recommend both books to D.M.s running urban scenarios.</blockquote>

Verification