Kingmaker: Freeform city building

[gmflash]

My gaming group is very excited to get involved with the city building portion of the campaign. But I'm worried that the strict rectangular grid might not appeal to their desire to get creative with their towns. So I'm considering allowing freeform city design using the drawing tools in Foundry VT and Dungeon Draft.

The process I'm considering is to first create a base map in DungeonDraft. Then add special buildings in a freeform manner as tiles. Finally just draw roads using the drawing tools in VTT. Adjacency bonuses would just be awarded if applicable when buildings are connected by a road shorter than 200ft.

Then in addition to building special buildings every time they level up their city they also have to create zoned districts to reflect the attributes and skills they increased (commercial, residential, dense residential, farmland, etc). For example each level up might require 4 acres of new development. They draw them on the map using the tools in Foundry VTT and then I place normal buildings to fill in the space. No need to be super precise. Just get the right feel for it. If they alter the map too much, such as cutting down a forest, I may have to go back to Dungeondraft to get a new base map. I'm not too worried about it since I think they can do a lot just within Foundry VTT itself. There are no rules on where these districts need to be placed, it's just a way to tie city growth to in-game growth and have a bit of collaborative city design.

Here is a shot of what it might look like.
https://imgur.com/a/5RFdZYQ

To get my artwork I'm using StableDiffusion to generate new buildings to populate the town and it is working pretty well. Just draw rough shapes and let the AI do the rest. Although I have to manually extract and convert the buildings into tiles using GIMP.
https://imgur.com/a/gSip6nD

Has anyone else attempted something like this? Other than the headache of making custom maps and artwork are there any mechanical implications that I might be missing? I plan on updating this thread in a few months after we've had a chance to put it into practice.

[Plane]

It's a lot of work. You've done well here, but how much work do you all want to put into this? The provided grids are more for abstracting things for groups who don't want to put much effort in.

If you want to do something like in your pics, AND your players want to contribute, I recommend mapping software with files you can share. I don't recall how Dungeon Draft works in that regard. I use Other World Mapper which runs and saves offline in small files that can be shared. Something like this could make it very easy to delete buildings or features, add, upgrade, etc.

[LordClammy]

I also do not like the generic grid. I was thinking about using the settlement maps from the computer game and using them depending on their placement within the map. each map also changes based on the size of the settlement, adding buildable lots as the town grows, and in differing configurations.

for example here is the starting layout for the capital village:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/faqs/97/78397-17..jp

and here is when it is upgraded to a town:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/faqs/97/78397-30..jp

and again to a city:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/faqs/97/78397-19..jp

Generic settlement as a village:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/faqs/97/78397-20..jp

and then as a town:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/faqs/97/78397-21..jp

[Dancing Wind]

gmflash wrote:

But I'm worried that the strict rectangular grid might not appeal to their desire to get creative with their towns.

From the Page 46 of the Kingmaker Player's Guide

Player's Guide wrote:

If it helps your sense of verisimilitude, feel free to cut up the Urban Grid and arrange blocks of four lots in any shape you wish. For a city hugging the shores of a great bay, you could draw out the bay and simply paste the blocks in a long row lining the coastline, or in any other arrangement that suits your taste.