To give some extra personality to a city, or to
anything else in a fantasy world, I always use the same kind of lateral thinking. I use a single word as a source of inspiration which will help me shape everything, from the kind of people you're going to meet in the city, to the way the city looks, and including the kind of adventure hooks one might expert to find there.
Let's say I have to come up with a small city for my next game, and I want it to have a distinct, coherent flavor. I just pick a word, like, say, "fox", and from then on, the city is a fox. And what does it mean? Well, if the city is a fox, it's not going to be very big, for starters. Foxes are hunters, they live on small game, and they're not very picky, in other words, foxes are rogues: the city is likely to have a very active criminal underground economy. Foxes are also hunted themselves (mostly by English aristocrats on horses
), so maybe our city will be at war with larger, meaner cities, and the only way it can avoid getting destroyed is through ruse and diplomacy, since foxes are known for their slyness. The leaders of the city are likely to be cunning and full of resources, but also short-tempered and independent-minded. If you want, you may go as far as to name the city using foxes as inspiration, ending up with something like "Vulpa". You might also decide that most buildings in the city are made of the same kind of reddish stone, since after all, foxes have red fur. This little game becomes all the more fun when you build a whole world with fox-cities, cow-cities and dog-cities (or saw-cities, hammer-cities, and wrench-cities; or Beatles-cities, Radiohead-cities and Wu Tang Clan-cities, etc.)
I know that this technique sounds ridiculous. That's because, to be perfectly honest, it
is quite ridiculous. But it is also fast and effective.
Don't do all the work yourself, give homework. Allow your players to build you locations. What I do is get them to provide me, a number of locations; name, nature of business, owner, and one interesting fact. These places would interest their characters and are places they would go while not adventuring, wizards book store, fighters bars or weapon smiths. I even let them place them on their own maps!
