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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7943153" data-attributes="member: 6796661">Lots of good advice here. Here are some things that I find helpful when DMing urban settings:1. Have a session zero, or a campaign check-in, discussionMake sure you and your players are on the same page regarding the kind of campaign you all want to play. Do they want a sandbox or more story-driven game? Do they want a more role-play/thespian or roll-play/tactical game? Do they want a more urban intrigue game or are towns just places for long rests, selling loot, and buying gear? If you don't have a good sense of this, it will be hard to take advantage of any of the other advice provided in this thread. 2. Use the Xanathar's Guide to Everything downtime activitiesXGE provides some rules-light and abstracted ways for the party to engage with a city/town/village that don't requires them wandering about and exploring the town like its a dungeon. Many settlements are not that interesting to explore in that way. Nor should they be. But I would add some flavor by having some shops and NPCs fleshed out to give some flavor to the downtime activities. 3. City SupplementsFor cities that you expect the PCs to return to often and to figure prominently in your campaign, consider getting supplement books for cities that have stood the test of time and are well fleshed out, some to consider are: Waterdeep, Balder's Gate, Ptolus, Bard's Gate, and Lankmar.   You can run entire campaigns in these places. 4. Fudge the One-shot TownNot every town, village, and even city needs to be fully formed. I used to use tools like Cityographer to randomly generate towns, but even that became overkill for prep and didn't really help to make it fun to run. Probably the best little book of tips for improving a city is Vornheim, which gives some great tips for turning a city into an adventure, with rules for creating floorplans and buildings on the fly.</blockquote>

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