Its been a year since i played dnd... a while ago my group came togetter and decided to create a new setting...
Um since everyone in the group likes to dm every once in a while we desided too create our own worlds and link them with "ancient gateway artifacts" - If the party ventures off into a new world the dm's character could play a guide (knowledge over some local history, places of interest... nothin to fancy) of some sort.
The basic idea behind my world is a central city (not to big though) with alot of smaller villages at some miles around... I just dont have any idea how to create a city... since i want it really detailed (i want it to be a constant in the world, a place the party will visit every time).
I've been thinkin about a lil bit of history for the city (its an old steampunk city, but during "an apocalypse of some kind" alot of technology was lost... leaving alot of "artifacts" like old guns, broken trains, a huge mine/sewer system under the city etc...
A hundred years after the event the city turned into a normal fantasy setting city...
But how do i manage to build it and throw detail on it? I just cant start on it for some reason...
any help is welcome!
That lists common structures in a village/town/city so that should help you achieve detail.
If you want to create a good city with good detail, make a good map and label it well. That's my best idea because knowing ahead of time who and what is there will help you really create the effect of a living city full of real people instead of just a bunch of stuff you threw together at the last minute.
If you want to make a really nice map, search "Zombienirvana" and "Fantasy cartography" on YouTube or just look up ZombieNirvana.com. They have a GREAT series of video tutorials on how to make really super fantasy campaign maps with Photoshop. Takes a lot of the work out of it once you get the idea of how to do it.
If you have trouble coming up with tavern names, shop names, names of shop keepers and NPCs, don't feel ashamed to use generators! By the time you create your city and get it going, no one will even be able to tell you used a generator!
A few good ones:
http://www.rpghost.com/dungeon_gen.shtml
http://www.aarg.net/~minam/npc.cgi
http://www.aarg.net/~minam/towns.cgi
http://www.aarg.net/~minam/treasure2.cgi
http://rinkworks.com/namegen/
http://www.angelfire.com/rpg2/vortexshadow/names.html
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/ <- Great generators for EVERYTHING
There ya go! Hope that helps!
Shei
Kudos!
An excellent source of info would be searching for machinery types from our own history, industrial revolution type material. An excellent source I've found is a book series
"Audels Engineers and Mechanics Guide" covering Modern Engineering Practice, these books were published circa 1921 but have extensive information covering steam-power and early "high-victorian" style implements
I got them at a book sale for $.25 each (6 books)
Sometimes our own history belies the foundations of the fantastic.
1. Resource Traffic
A Population requires resources continuously imported.
Fuel: (5 wagonloads of firewood per year x Adult community Population)/days in year = minimum number of wagons employed in movement of firewood in a single day. If you population is using Peat then the Fuel equivelent is 14 Wagonloads. Riverboats carry four tons.
Grain, vegetables, and meat: (1/2 Wagon load per year x population)/ days in year = wagons bringing in food
ex. Veluna City (population 30,000) requires 83 Riverboats bringing in Fuel each day from up river (Forests of Keoland), 42 Wagons bringing in food from the surrounding Farmlands in a single day.
2. Death, Corpses, and Burial
Not getting all that fuel and food you require to survive, results in disease outbreaks so between that, plague, and the executioner there should be a steady growth in corpses in the streets.
(((population in famine each year - Canibalism%)+(people executed per year)+(Victims of Canibalism, murder))/days in year)/20 bodies per wagon= wagons of dead each day moved through city (50% children).
Graves require a peasant and a cleric to dig and bury a single corpse so if the rate of dead exceeds grave diggers and priests consider mass graves.
ex. the city of veluna is suffering from famine as 1% of the population starve, 5% of whom resort to canibalism (of 300 starving to death-15 who resort to canibalism to survive)+(115 criminals including assorted cannibals get executed)+(780 victims of cannibalism)/days in year/20 per wagon=1 wagon load of dead every 6-7 days. So the dead are still burried in single occupant graves. Still there is a loss of 10 children every week which is a tragedy.
The earliest settlements emerge in the Neolithic as gatherings of families and soon grow into a Commonwealth - Large villages of families governed by family heads. They band together in common defence yet retain a propensity to family self-sufficiency. The Commonwealth Period gives way to inequality based in Specialization. Centralized Government and Religion begins its rise to the detriment of the Commonwealth. Unfortunately Specialization has its failings.
SPECIALIZED INDIVIDUALS
Within a community it creates a dependency amongst everyone in the community. Everyone must do their job but they require access to a common communication network to function within the community. Communities become divided with specific families devoted to certain tasks. Eventually these family divisions of labour can become geographical boundaries within the limits of the community.
SPECIALIZED COMMUNITIES
As Settlements and City-States become Nations encompassing many communities, they begin to specialize in certain tasks where other settlements specialize in an adjacent task.
As a consequence a community devoted to one specialized task requires communication with others who produce what they require and require what they produce.
Settlement vulnerability stems therefore from a dependency on the continuous function of the specialized system and its structures.
SETTLEMENT SPECIALIZATION
Specialization of the community (as opposed to specialization of the individual of the community) creates a dependency on those dwelling beyond the walls of that single community.
There are many such functions and their presence defines where they need to be located, what they must have access to, and how they function.
• Dispersed holdings – isolated independent farms with a selection of skills necessary to support their independent nature. There is little social interaction .
• Local market – a centralized community focussed on the collection and distribution of local produce. This type of community can function in isolation while access to a communication network is vital for the export of surplus produce .
• Industrial – a community concerned primarily with the processing of raw materials into manufactured goods. Some will specialize in a single end-product. They have access to the resources necessary to process raw materials including labour, power (water for mills). Industrial communities require a communication network to function .
• Commercial – a community involved in trade and financial activities (banking and money lending). They do not require traded produce to pass through the town and may be sophisticated enough to deal in document based trade and financial transactions. A communication network is critical to the survival of this community .
• Mining – this is involved in the extraction of minerals. It will be located where the minerals are and that can be anywhere. It requires access to a communication network .
• Administrative – this is the seat of government, whether the capital city or a local administration. This community will sit at a centre of a provincial or national communication network .
• Culture/education – these are centred on universities and colleges. They are centres of learning and have a selection of appropriate crafts to support the development, recording, and storage of information. There is some need for access to a communication network .
• Ecclesiastical – religious centres drawing pilgrimage, or housing religious associations or shrines. These require access to a communication network .
• Primary Residence – this is the residence of a Ruler (Whether President, Emperor, King, Duke or Baron). It is a palace or castle and requires some access to a communication network .
• Resort – baths, recreational districts, retreats. They require a favourable geographical location that provides both safety and healing. Resorts function on a communication network .
• Port – located on the coast as a fishing community, a centre of sea trade and travel or located on a river for the movement of goods and people by river. A port requires communication networks that extend over water and land .
• Residential – these are designed to provide urban peoples with housing away from polluted, corrupted, or expensive urban centres. This specialization requires a second specialized centre in close proximity .
It is because many of these specializations require access to a communication network to remain functional that they might easily become isolated and fall. Roads might be cut by armies or other disasters causing a land-locked community to decline. Ports on the other hand have access to communication networks over water and land and loosing one is not a total disaster.
MULTIPLE FUNCTION SETTLEMENTS
More familiar is the Specialization of groups or families within the settlement. A Large Community might be a port, a seat of a monarch, an administrative centre, a cultural centre, an industrial district, a commercial district, with ecclesiastical centres and outlying residential areas all rolled into one.
CRAFTING A SETTLEMENT
We blend the basic information available to us in the Dungeon Master’s Guide with our information to produce several different Settlements.
• The Farming District of Andemun. This “Village” consisting of some three hundred and twenty people (+20% children) where the most expensive item in the district is farmer Erasmus Shaw’s magnifying glass - which amounts to about a hundred gold pieces in value. Applying dispersed Settlement, Mining, and Port to our “Village”, we have a multifunction settlement occupying a reasonably safe region (mainly because a dispersed settlement is far more vulnerable to hostile intrusion than a centralized settlement – it is for this reason that our “Village” is not too isolated). Its level of isolation offers us a community upriver from the capital and down river from a major river port controlling a substantial farming district. There is regular traffic on the river offering regular news (perhaps a week old at most) from the capital and the port upriver. It is a settlement in its own right. Farms harvesting timber for firewood; a small granite quarry (employing five stonecutters) with a river siding where a merchant house from the Capital has arranged to buy direct from these “Farmers” straight onto its riverboats. Our “Village” also has a prospect for the future. At the current rate of forest clearing, the district will be ready for dairying in ten years. There is little happening here and when it does it is going to be pretty minimal. Perhaps the PCs might find themselves employed to run off some predators bothering the farmers to be paid in produce for their trouble.
• The Blackdog. This roadside Inn sits on a crossroads with access to a communications network (basically a regularly used corridor of information transfer). Information may come in and out from an assortment of locations on a regular basis and it sits on a trade-route where supplies can be bought from passing merchants and then sold to travellers for a marked up price. For adventurers it offers a respite before deciding which direction to go, or a bolthole where they can wait for information to fall into their laps.
• The Drift-port of Shadow has no real fixed population but numbers about five hundred on average. It drifts somewhere in the Rip (a Sea that flows north or south between the Island Kingdom of Ingoil and the Iron Kingdoms (this edge of the continent of Grun – The Rip is known to change direction)). It is a commercial centre and port involved in the trade of pirated loot and money-lending. At any time the Drift-port might consist of up to thirteen ships lashed together as the core trading port with up to thirty docked in port.
• The Temple of Dhurn, now buried under a landslide was dedicated to the forgotten God. It was a centre of Pilgrimage for its many practitioners and they brought many weapons here (which were dumped into the Peatbog) in sacrifice. In its day it had a population of six priests and thirty servants who tilled farmland in the valley of Penn to produce food, and tend the clergy’s every need. Currently it is un-active – being abandoned when the hillside washed down on it a thousand years back.
• Maidenshead is a small town of nearly two thousand citizens.
- The Serfs Quarter has around one thousand serfs who are crowded into many of the small, tightly packed mud-brick dwellings that dominate this large walled in part of the town – they toil in the fields, cut wood, and excavate clay from extensive diggings beside the river.
- Apothecary Row where several herbalists have residences/shopfronts to one side of a narrow, walled lane.
- The Baron’s Castle where the Baron, family, and some servants and administrative staff live and work.
- The Garden of Ash seems impersonal and abandoned considering it is a walled in bare gravel piece of land with ash, and charcoal marks where bodies are simply piled up with wood and burned.
- The Dogwall, (a walled off residential area providing a class with residential isolation from the urban centre) a walled ghetto where the Halfling populace of Maidenshead are forced to reside. Previously it was used to kennel the War-dogs of an early baron. Currently there are under a hundred Halflings crowded into the Dogwall and the gates are locked at sunset, and opened at sunrise each day. The only access to the Dogwall is direct to the Merchants Quarter.
- The Merchants Quarter is dominated by artisans involved in Pottery, and there are numerous Charcoal production furnaces and large scale Pottery Kilns burning (in some cases) all day.
Maidenshead sits on a clay brick mound on a plain of cleared ground at the outer edge of a river bend and while it over looks the river and any traffic there, it does not have a port (although travellers by boat might pull their vessel easily onto the bank and walk to the town. Maidenshead is linked to the Capital by road only.
THE DEBRIS OF ABANDONED SETTLEMENTS
When settlements are abandoned, due to what ever reason, many components are left behind. These components are often the hardest to remove (they are also characteristic of the settlement purpose) and will last centuries beyond the abandonment of the settlement.
• Carved Stone Obelisk, Steele, Monument, and Statue.
• Mine, Quarry, Smelter Pottery Kiln, and Blacksmith’s Forge, Charcoal Production Furnace.
• Stone Well, Irrigation Canal, Agricultural Field, and Plantation Crop.
• Stone Docks, Bridge, Stone Paved Road, Causeway.
• Cemetery, Barrow Mound, Outdoor Altar Stone, Shrine, Buried or Concealed Temple, Druid Grove, Ancient Tree, Ring of large Stones.
• Signal Tower, Watch Tower, Lighthouse.
• Fortified Cave, Bunker, Dungeon, Torture Chamber, Underground Laboratory, City Sewer, Catacombs.
• Castle Ruin, Foundations, Fitted Stone or Re-used Rock Wall, Chimney, Fireplace, Partially-buried Brickwork.
Consider the previously mentioned settlement of Maidenshead. Five centuries after the Baron was overthrown, all that is left is the foundations of a ruined castle with buried dungeons and treasure vaults, and the village of Dau’wal which is now located by the River. The old stone walls have been stripped down to their foundations (they are now used as road-ways separating extensive clay-diggings) and the rubble used to build a substantial trade dock and village foundation. Most homes are a mix of Adobe and fired brickwork representing the descendants of the original Slave and Halfling Population.
EVERY POINT OF LIGHT, ITS MIDDEN
By its nature we are as likely to find the forces of evil present within the dispersed settlements of our Civilization as loitering in the mud beyond its walls.
• The Barony of Melina is being terrorized by a “huge black wolf”. The predator is attacking lone travellers along the road that skirts the western edge of the hunting preserve of Baron Rugen along with the occasional peasant caught out on moonless nights. It makes its lair in the caves beneath Castle Witch-grave which sits atop the mountain. This hound shaped Iron Golem is bound with the soul of a werewolf, forged for Baron Rugen.
• Living on their isolated farm by the old road, the Jandemos are known to be the oldest farming family in the district and are greatly respected for it. No-one knows that the Jandemos have spent centuries abducting and eating stray travellers - their victims’ remains they dump in a deep cave on the ridge above their farm. Travellers go missing all the time in these parts but the Jandemos continue to go about their way of life without drawing much attention.