I'm currently working on designing a city for my current campaign. Originally I was going to make the city 30 years old. However one of my players said that a city couldn't be built in 30 years. I've tried searching the net for the length of time it takes for a city to develop, but can't find anything. Currently I've extended the cities age by 10. The first 20 years I've devoted to laying the foundations of the city, getting important sites built, power bases established, etc. The remaining twenty years I've devoted to other power groups launching plots that lead into the campaign. I'm being deliberately vague here, as some of my players read these forums and I don't want to give anything away
.Question is 40 years worth of development and history enough? Or should I scrap the idea and extend the cities history by another 40-50 years?
As for the political development and population growth, that IS up to you.
Guilds could have moved in, pioneers, the location of the city in terms of importance for trade routes, etc.
Question is 40 years worth of development and history enough?
-If you can come up with a story explaining things (and, that's not something that is extraordinary, a city being developed in 40 years), of course. You're in charge.
*If the buildings are primarily wood, you wouldn't need more than 2-3 years. Brick might take longer and worked stone for all the buildings might take a little longer. Assuming you're not talking about gothic cathedrals and stone walls forty feet high, even stone buildings aren't out of the question at thirty years.
Assuming a large number of settlers, 30 years is plenty of time for a smallish city. Castles, large temples, and stone walls will take longer, but assuming most things are made of wood its a simple matter.
A small, wooden house can be built by one family in a year. If you have one hundred families, you can build one hundred houses in the same period of time (assuming there are other people around to provide timber, food, etc).
The amish routinely throw up barns in a day. I'm not totally sure about houses, but I'm certain it would take less than a year.
In ancient times when it was common to have total dictatorial control over a population (and in some countries in modern times) it was totally possible to make a big city in 30 or 40 years. Alexandria, Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great of Macedonia by decree. Actually he founded a bunch of Alexandrias, but the one in Egypt is best known. He sketched out some rough plans and left some guys in charge of it, like his cronies Cleomenes and Ptolemy.
Inheriting the trade of ruined Tyre and becoming the center of the new commerce between Europe and the Arabian and Indian East, the city grew in less than a generation to be larger than Carthage. In a century, Alexandria had become the largest city in the world and for some centuries more, was second only to Rome.
So Alexandria, founded by imperial decree and happily inheriting the trade of a city destroyed by said empire, grew in a single generation to be one of the great cities of the ancient world. Bang!
Of course, Alexander could write a note forcibly uprooting hundreds of skilled tradesmen, laborers, farmers, etc. from wherever they were living and send them to live in his new city...
As for stonework, the pyramids of Egypt were routinely built in a single generation. I looked up the Pyramid of Giza, also in the very reputable Wikipedia
, and found it was built in "14-20" years. And that's without ogres or giants, and probably without wizards!Well Wizards or giants weren't involved in the construction, but elves and dwarves are. Also the local ruler has the financial backing of the most power human empire in the campaign world at the current point in time. The city is located smack bang in the middle of every major trade route which makes it a major port city. Also the city is the first human settlement in a newly discovered land. So immigrants from other parts of the world are flocking to it in the hopes of starting a new life.
Then yes 30 years is perfectly feasible. As long as there is power and $ behind it, no problem.
Yes this is DnD and we can create walls out of air but it doesn't explain how streets end up functioning properly. 30 is good but it depends more on the setting and how the city is being used.
Yes this is DnD and we can create walls out of air but it doesn't explain how streets end up functioning properly. 30 is good but it depends more on the setting and how the city is being used.
It seems like cities built up gradually over centuries by accretion actually "function" worse than cities deliberately created and built in a short time.
Planned cities have broad, clear roads easily navigable by vehicles in both directions, plenty of parking, transportation hubs that make it easier to find your way from place to place, business districts near those transportation hubs, proper sewage facilities, electric power and access to sufficient water, etc.
Cities that start as villages and gain mass over time through cycles of urbanization are tangled knots of tiny roads that often go nowhere. Streets are overshadowed by buildings built too close together to allow traffic to pass. No one can find parking, the streets are periodically awash in sewage because the ancillary systems are insufficient. In summer there may be brownouts from the large power draw of people's air conditioners, and in arid regions the city may drink the rivers dry.
Of course, a city 30 years old doesn't have "culture." It may lack an identity of its own and seem very generic, or it may be a wild frontier mix of a hundred immigrant cultures that pass through its gates.
Of course, a city 30 years old doesn't have "culture." It may lack an identity of its own and seem very generic, or it may be a wild frontier mix of a hundred immigrant cultures that pass through its gates.
This is of course the whole point of this city. It's a frontier city, it's not as cultured as some of the other cities in the world. However it is rich due to the resources it commands due to trade and population.
Also the local ruler has the financial backing of the most power human empire in the campaign world at the current point in time. The city is located smack bang in the middle of every major trade route which makes it a major port city. Also the city is the first human settlement in a newly discovered land. So immigrants from other parts of the world are flocking to it in the hopes of starting a new life.
Dig into the history of a couple of real-world towns and cities: it's not a question of "how fast", but a question of "why did it happen the way it did". A good-sized city (several thousand people) could easily be built in 30 years, in this case. If there's money involved, trade (a new port or rail line), natural resources (gold rush!), or imperial fiat can cause explosive growth in a city. This can either be a completely new settlement, or some change in an existing one that suddenly changes the picture.
What will it look like? Unless it's a command-and-control situation, like a garrison, a young town that has seen explosive growth will look...unfinished. Immature. Raw. There will be a lot of churn, as temporary buildings are thrown up, torn down, and rebuilt; businesses start up, grow, move, die back, move again; immigrants move in to temporary housing, find employment or trades, move to more permanent housing; etc.
There will be abrupt breaks between areas of town. A street might be cobblestones or a plank road for a couple of blocks, drop into a dirt track for a block, and take up into plank or cobbles again - because, when that block of houses was built, nobody did the road, and nobody's gotten around to going back and doing it right yet.
You'll have blocks where all the houses or shops look more or less exactly the same - they were all built at once by the same speculator, and there hasn't been enough time for individual occupants to mod them to fit personal tastes yet.
Don't worry about whether it's possible - just figure out why it's possible, and what that means.
Well Wizards or giants weren't involved in the construction, but elves and dwarves are. Also the local ruler has the financial backing of the most power human empire in the campaign world at the current point in time. The city is located smack bang in the middle of every major trade route which makes it a major port city. Also the city is the first human settlement in a newly discovered land. So immigrants from other parts of the world are flocking to it in the hopes of starting a new life.
The fact that it's in the middle of every major trade route suggests that a settlement has been there for as long as trade's been going on, which I'd guess would be longer than 30 years.
Perhaps your city began as a frontier trading post which over decades or centuries became a modest population center - this could give you some interesting cultural backdrop of certain old families, races, thieves networks etc. But the city as you now present it could have arisen in a fairly short time, particularly with Dwarven masons and architects and a royal mandate with cash.
Check out the history of Las Vegas for a town that had a slow frontier, trade-route existence and then suddenly exploded into a major metropolitan center with the influx of cash and urban identity over the course of about 30 years (1930-1960).