“Where are we again?”: Creating Unique Fantasy Cities and Towns
Sometimes creating a believable city or town is one of the hardest parts of building an adventure or campaign. You don’t want all your towns to look the same and you definitely don’t want to get stuck in the generic “fantasy town”, consisting of a tavern/bar, inn or other lodgings, magic shoppe, etc.
Below I’ve gathered a list of web resources to help provide city building know-how and inspiration. Enjoy!
- City Overseer 3D. Software to help you build cities for your game. I haven’t tried it, yet. If anyone else has, I’d love it if you wrote a review for me. If it’s well-written, I’ll even publish it here!
- City Rant Part One & City Rant Part Two. Some great ideas for city building basics, including details usually overlooked, like what are the conditions of animals in the city and using sound to describe your city.
- Culture and Curfew in Fantasy City. More an article on the darker side of Liverpool, London. But it does ask questions and bring up points useful for adapting to a fantasy or SF city.
- Fantasy Cities – Wizards Community. A forum board with some great advice and example of building fantasy cities.
- Fantasy City Project. A collaborative fantasy city being built on-line and you can join in.
- Free fantasy city generator downloads. A download site for free software designed to help you create a city. I have no idea of the quality of safety of this software. Use at your own risk.
- How to make the “shantytown” in your city REALLY gritty/scary. A forum discussion about ways to “dirty up” your city.
- How to Plan a Country or Region in a Fantasy RPG World. While not focused on city creation itself, this article does give some step-by-step advice on creating RPG settings that could easily be applied to cities.
- How to Start a Campaign: City Building (The Harrow: The RPG Collection). Some good ideas for setting up the basics of a new city.
- Shared World’s Top Five Real Fantasy/SF Cities. Fantasy and SF authors pick real-world cities that would make great locations for stories.
- Welcome to the Page of City Resources. A list of links useful for creating fantasy cities
- What might help me create the history of a fantasy city-state? A question posed to Yahoo! Answers. The reply brings up some good points to consider when creating your city.
Here’s some listing of world-building sites who’s information can be adapted for city creation:
- 30 Days of WorldBuilding. A step-by-step guide to creating a fantasy world
- Creating the Fantasy World
- Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions Part 1. A listo f questions to answer as you’re creating your fantasy setting.
- How to Create Fantasy Worlds
- Magical World Builder
Related Posts:
- Location Worksheet
- Meadowbrook. Details of an example fantasy city
2 Responses to ““Where are we again?”: Creating Unique Fantasy Cities and Towns”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Interesting Thoughts from Other Gamers (1) « Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal - [...] resources for City Building over at Evil Machinations. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)A test runMy Starbucks [...]
- Cartography & Maps Tool for mapping a city wanted - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine - [...] @TheClone I just stumbled in this blog post and though it might be useful for you, particularly the ...
Leave a Reply
Sponsors
Product
Want to write your own adventures?
You can learn to write good adventures and The Adventure Creation Handbook will show you how.
Product
Having player problems?
Without your players, you don’t have a game. Yet, it’s your players that often cause you the most grief. The GM's Field Guide to Players can help solve player problems.
Gamer Lifestyle
Drive-Thru RPG
 Hottest New Title  Rogue Trader: Stars of Inequity |
Some very useful resources there, thank you for gathering them up for us.
.-= Sean Holland´s last blog ..Borusa – the City of Scholars =-.
Your quite welcome. My life’s experience is that if I’m needing something, chances are there’s someone out there who needs it too. I’m glad to help.