How do you go about building cities in your world?

[Eldred the Grey]

Now let me preface that I can build towns, villages and smaller settlements my problem comes with creating districts and such in cities. Now some are built because of geography, some by gradual time and others are by template. So what I am asking is how do you do it?

EtG

[Eldred the Grey]

For reference I plan on building a city using this picture to giving me a starting point to build from.

EtG

[Coidzor]

I guess the first thing I ask myself is why a settlement was founded there and then the next thing I ask myself is why it became a city.

Then I ask myself what its notable features will be.

I tend towards the school of thought of leaving plenty of blank space to be filled in whenever players actually go there or interact with the city or go looking for something.

Unless you're talking about what my order of operations would be if I was going to design a city using the Kingdom Building rules?

[Quixote]

Instead of explaining it all here, I'd just redirect you to the Angry DM. Look past the (semi) false ego to the wisdom within. It's good sense, and stuff that no one else has talked about. At least, publicly.

[Yqatuba]

Out of wood and stone mainly (sorry, couldn't resist).

[ErichAD]

That's old Sarum, a castle more than a city. It would have had a central tower on a hill, a small village within the outer walls, an enough land cleared that the castle tower had good visibility. It wouldn't have had districts so much as areas you could live in, and areas that were needed for mustering troops near the gate, or needed to be kept clear so the keep's walls couldn't easily be scaled. I would guess this castle served an agricultural community.

For something more like a city, you need the city to serve multiple needs. Think of it as a bunch of little villages all built around their own industry that have all grown together. Any industry that needs to be at the edge of town would leave a tail as that industry grew along with the boarder of the city. So you'd have merchant, trading, and warehousing corridors along major thoroughfares.

If you wanted this style of castle, you'd likely have a mercantile corridor extending from any entrances into the outer walls. The small city inside the walls would be gone and replaced with more government and military buildings. The mercantile tails would extend toward any other business hubs, like going to a river, heading toward mines, or pointing toward another city. It's also possible that the old central tower would be out of use and a new taller tower would appear within the central keep in order to extend visibility for the new city. After you have your corridors drawn, use them to generate a hypocycloid shape; sort of a concave rectangle using your out roads as points on the rectangle. Do this for each industry in the area, and fill in the empty spaces with large residential projects like temples.

[Eldred the Grey]

Thanks Erich that's quite helpful and sort of what I was after. Was planning on using old sarum as the basis for a city with the location of old sarum as the highcity ie the government district or city core if you want. So having three roads as the basis for the outer districts should give me areas to work with. As I said towns and smaller settlements I build round geographical sites but cities are different beasts with the thought of growth over time or was it purpose built.

EtG

[Watery Soup]

Coidzor wrote:

I guess the first thing I ask myself is why a settlement was founded there and then the next thing I ask myself is why it became a city.

Then I ask myself what its notable features will be.

I tend towards the school of thought of leaving plenty of blank space to be filled in whenever players actually go there or interact with the city or go looking for something.

I agree. Look at reasons real life cities exist. They exist near sources of fresh water. They exist near natural resources. They exist near places where people have reason to stop.

Everything grows out of that. A harbor city should have a safe place to park boats and a seaside feel; they probably disproportionately eat fish and don't build enormous vertical structures, for instance. People in a trading city may interact more with other cultures and religion may be mixed, the skyline might have two competing cathedrals dominating the skyline.

[Mark Hoover 330]

After asking the realistic questions: why was the city sited here, who built it, and what natural resources does it have, I then find myself falling back on random generation. I grab the Settlement tables in the GMs Guide, roll some dice, and decide what the qualities are, overall alignment, etc.

Sometimes for individual districts I might roll those up like smaller Settlements within the city instead. Like, say I'm going to divide a Large City into 6 districts; I might roll one of those up like a Village or Small Town, with a quality or 2, the district's general alignment, make up 3 interesting NPCs and so on.

Honestly I don't put a ton of planning or thought into them lately since my players don't really care. Consider what your players are actually going to use the city for, and how they've used other settlements in the past, then add that level of setting detail. If players see a Large Town in your game as "the loot exchange where we get rumors and missions from our Gather Information checks" then it won't matter how meticulously you've planned your districts.

On the other hand if your players doodle images of noble pennants hanging over NPC castles, take copious notes on the history of your setting and generally memorize every shop owner they encounter, it might be worth your time to lay out your city with care.