Populating a city with leveled NPC's... Where'd I read that?

[magnusmalkus]

I cannot find the book where I had read a bit of instruction on how to resolve how many leveled npc's of a particular class were present in a community and what levels those npc's might be.

The instructions were meant for a DM who was building a hamlet/town/city/etc from the ground up. The problem I am having is that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to recall these instructions accurately and I cannot recall or find the resource I gleaned it from.

If I recall correctly, the instructions were to determine how many of the highest level PC class were present in the community. From that number, there would be double as many at half the level, rounding down.

So, if a city had two 8th level clerics, there would be four 4th level cleric underneath them and eight 2nd level cleric underneath THEM and then sixteen 1st level clerics at the very bottom.

There may have been more to the formula and my recollection of the passage is fuzzy at best.

DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND FAMILIAR TO ANYONE? Do you remember where you read it?

I'm fairly confident I got this instruction from a book I owned... it DEFINITELY sounds like a DM's resource. Among my library, I thought it might be among one of these books:

World Builders Guidebook (from the old TSR days for 2nd edition)
DMG 1
DMG 2
Ultimate NPC's from Mongoose Publishing
City Works from the Legends and Lairs series by Fantasy Flight Games

I've been thru these books multiple times now but still cannot find the passage.

Not much else in my collection would have this kind of minutae instruction on such a niched topic. I do not own City Scapes (or whatever it's titled) by WoTC, nor do I think I've ever laid a hand on that particular resource, so i'm sure that book is out of the question.


At the very least, does anyone have a particular method for populating a (from scratch) city with leveled NPC's?

Many thanks in advance,

Magnus Malkus

 

[SuperJebba]

Double check the DMG. I'm pretty sure the rules are in there.

 

[Jacob Marley]

Dungeon Master's Guide, pages 137-140: Generating Towns.

 

[Celebrim]

There are probably as many techniques for this as there are DMs. It really depends on the results you want to achieve.


Question #1: What percentage of NPC's are PC classed?
Question #2: How common is magic in your campaign?
Question #3: What do you want the average level of NPC's to be?
Question #4: How readily available do you want high level NPC services like Raise Dead to be?
Question #5: How common do you want truly high level characters to be?
Question #6: What level is a truly high level character in your campaign world?

So for me, the answers break down to something like:

#1: 20%
#2: No more than 1 individual in 100 is a spellcaster.
#3: For PC classed characters, 2nd. For, NPC classed characters 3rd.
#4: Relatively rare. Characters above 6th level are truly extraordinary. There is perhaps 1 cleric per 100,000 people of 9th level, and they are almost always a named NPC.
#5: Very rare.
#6: A 15th level character is someone the gods have certainly taken notice of, and is likely to be one of the worlds great movers and shakers.

Your answers might be very different.

Additionally, you need to decide what classes actually appear in your world. Are warlocks common? What about Dragon Shamans? What about Psions? What about Scouts? Are common soldiers warriors or do most nations and communities maintain armies well trained fighters? Again, this is very specific to a campaign world and there really aren't any wrong answers.

 

[Thanael]

Also:
Dungeon Master's Guide v.3.5 Web Enhancement!
http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-legacy-discussion/296963-3-5-city-building.html thread