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City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities (OGL) PDF

Skirmisher Publishing

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City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities is a manual specifically designed to help guide Game Masters through the process of creating exciting and compelling urban areas and other sorts of communities and places within them for their campaigns. It is a universal resource that is not specific to any particular game system and is intended to be compatible with the needs of almost any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, fantasy, or other role-playing milieu.

An Introduction that describes the scope of the book and how to use the material it contains
A chapter on Communities that examines the Characteristics of Communities, including thorps, hamlets, villages, towns, cities, military bases, and plantations, along with regional and racial influences on their development; Buildings; the Physical Characteristics of Cities, including fortifications, lighting, and conditions on, above, and below city streets; and Disasters
Chapters devoted to 10 specific sorts of places, including Craftsman Places, Entertainment Places, Professional Places, Tradesman Places, Mercantile Places, Service Places, Scholarly Places, Religious Places, Governmental Places, and Underworld Places
Descriptions of nearly 70 different sorts of places, including eight created specifically for this book that have never before appeared elsewhere
One to four Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place
An appendix on Guilds that discusses Guild Organization and Common Guild Regulations and includes a series of tables for Random Guild Generation

City Builder has also been written so as to be fully compatible with the various Skirmisher Publishing LLC OGL publications, including Experts v.3.5, Warriors, and Tests of Skill v.3.5.

The contents of City Builder were initially released in 11 different volumes; these have been combined and expanded in this unified edition of the book.

"City Builder is one of the most useful city building tools to come around in this half of the decade," DriveThruRPG staff reviewer Nathan Collins wrote of the individual volumes. "Strong writing accompanies fantasy element nicely. Whether you need to develop one isolated building the PCs are set to encounter, or a city that needs to 'pop up' quickly, there is something in this set that will greatly help you."

The PDF edition includes low-resolution screen-friendly and high-resolution printer-friendly versions of both its cover surfaces and interior pages.

Product Availability

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Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at store@paizo.com.

SKP0925E

Hmmm... are there any previews on your site? Or can you post something here? I'm definitely interested, but ordering this at my FLGS will cost me 25 euros, so I'd like to know at least *something* about the contents (because, sadly, I'm not familiar with the individual products the description mentions).

Anyway, sounds like my kind of book! :)

J B Collins

Jan 31, 2010, 09:09 am

I'm in agreeance with Asgetrion - it sounds like a great product but it would be nice to know more about it before buying it. S'pose we'll just have to wait for braver souls to give it a go and write reviews...

Starglim

Jan 31, 2010, 03:26 pm

I'm not sure if I can attach a preview file here, but RPGNow gives samples of the complete book and each chapter (which we're still selling as separate PDFs) that should give a good idea of the look and feel, as well as a bit of content, for example:

City Builder
City Builder Volume 8 (this is an earlier version of Chapter 8 of this product)

Scroll down to "Full-Size Preview".

Jeremy Smith 63

Jan 31, 2010, 04:58 pm

hhmmm... looks interesting, but looking at the preview, I still don't get a good sense of what the meat of the product is going to look like. Personal reviews will indeed go a long way to helping me make up my mind.

Asgetrion

Jan 31, 2010, 06:23 pm

Starglim wrote:

I'm not sure if I can attach a preview file here, but RPGNow gives samples of the complete book and each chapter (which we're still selling as separate PDFs) that should give a good idea of the look and feel, as well as a bit of content, for example:

City Builder
City Builder Volume 8 (this is an earlier version of Chapter 8 of this product)

Scroll down to "Full-Size Preview".

Wow, based on the table of contents this is *exactly* what I have wished for! Believe it or not, I was going to include a harbormaster's office and an apothecary in an upcoming adventure, and I wasn't completely sure I have them "nailed" (one of the players is a history teacher, so details are important for me). Looks like my large town would benefit a LOT from this book, so consider me sold! :)

BTW, does the book include any maps, for communities and "typical" buildings/shops (for example, the two businesses mentioned above)?

Starglim

Jan 31, 2010, 06:31 pm

Good to hear! I hope it's useful.

Asgetrion wrote:

BTW, does the book include any maps, for communities and "typical" buildings/shops (for example, the two businesses mentioned above)?

We have some historical floor plans for Temples, a Monastery and an Alchemist's Workshop IIRC. We didn't map each kind of place as a matter of course.

Asgetrion

Jan 31, 2010, 06:47 pm

Starglim wrote:

Good to hear! I hope it's useful.

Asgetrion wrote:

BTW, does the book include any maps, for communities and "typical" buildings/shops (for example, the two businesses mentioned above)?
We have some historical floor plans for Temples, a Monastery and an Alchemist's Workshop IIRC. We didn't map each kind of place as a matter of course.

Well, maps are not mandatory for me -- if there are descriptions along the lines of "This is how a typical harbormaster's office looks like and this is how he conducts his business" I'm more than satisfied! :)

MerrikCale

Jan 31, 2010, 07:34 pm