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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 4751787" data-attributes="member: 2">I have a tremendous amount of fun designing cities. I used to find running a city campaign to be tremendously intimidating. I finally sat down and read the old Waterdeep boxed set about five times, until I started to get a feel for the city. Then I started noting what I liked and didn't like, and built from there with my own cities. You guys don't want to know how long I kept my PCs stranded in backwaters because I couldn't adequately run a city.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Nowadays, here's how I decide a city. I'll use the city of Sayre, which I designed for a recent Dungeon module, as an example.1. What makes it memorable? For Sayre, I wanted people in my world to think it was freakin' gorgeous. It needed to be a place that artists and craftsmen flocked to, painted, and talked about. That affected my architecture and landscape. I added a waterfall, a lake, a gorgeous view and a lot of white marble monuments and buildings. 2. Why is it there? Cities exist and grow for a reason, usually related to trade. That adds a ton of plot possibilities, as miners or loggers or whatever can have lots of things wrong with their operations. The old module "Of Sound Mind" I wrote had a town famous for its finely crafted bells and its copper mines. Sayre, on the other hand, exists due to a university and because it's the epicenter of the finest artisans in hundreds of miles. That affects how the town feels; it's fairly intellectual, and will have more elves than dwarves.3. What are the neighborhoods? I make a bunch of circles on a piece of paper, each one representing a neighborhood. Each neighborhood has its own feel. For instance, the part of town where the fishermen live floods a lot and borders the market, where they sell their catch; the government neighborhood is full of huge monuments that are starting to go to seed, put up by a former insane governor who emptied the coffers to build them. The university neighborhood borders a part of town where all the dance halls are.Remember to include slums. Adventurers and monsters/bad guys love slums.4. Who controls the power? Who are people afraid of? Who do people want to get to know? This decides who the movers and shakers are. It may be rival merchant families, or secret police, or a single strong ruler who makes people beg for his attention (or whose attention no one wants!), but a great plot is watching what happens in town once leadership falls apart. You can't do that until you know who's running the shop, and who wishes they were.5. Give the PCs a potential base and a friendly NPC. Let them get to know, and love, a neighborhood. It makes them care about the town.</blockquote>

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