How to best describe settlements depends on your aim: is this just a short stopover for the characters, is it their home base or is it a place to adventure in? Like always, it also depends if it is intended to be published for the use by others, or scribbled notes for your own campaign and world. And it depends on how large it is -- you may be able to describe every house and inhabitant in a thorp, but not in a city.
Town Map of Northflag is licensed under
CC-BY 4.0.
Published Villages
Keep on the Borderlands, the granddaddy of pulished home bases treats the entire keep like a dungeon level: each building has a key entry, like a room in the dungeon, with NPC stats and treasure. Militrary forces are given in detail along with defense strategies. His later Village of Hommlet, intended as a default starting village for new groups of adventurerers, treats the village in the same way. Major builings like the inn, temple, guard tower get separate, more detailed maps. The are also multiple examples of this style in Dungeon adventures, e.g. in Redcap's Rampage or Horror's Havest (both by Chris Perkins, both with a circular layout, inn on the lower right, and a candlemaker ...). This made sense in an oldschool world where the characters might decide that plundering the village would be an easier way to riches and experience than braving the dungeon. But this apporach does not scale to larger settlements. Nearly all of the ones given here, along with Cult of the Reptile God, have an adventure going on under the verneer of the village, they are not separate places to recover.
Published Towns
A common way to present towns with a larger number of builidings is as a uniform map with highlights, gazetteer or tourist guide style. Normal houses are nondescript or generic, and a handful of buildings are described in more detail. This works well, especially if those are related to an adventure. An example is Chris Perkins' Scalabar in “Scourge of Scalabar” (Dungeon #74). A simple map, still showing each individual house, half a page of background and an encounter table highlighting situations to underscore the port-town vibe, plus short descriptions and NPC stats for a few key locations related to the adventure or frequented by adventurers -- the harbor, fortress, warehouses, temple and three residences of NPCs. The embedding in the adventure made the city believable on just a few pages.
Published Cities
At the top end of the scale are major metropolises, such as the City of Greyhawk (which has very little to do with Gary's City of Greyhawk), or Monte Cook's Ptolus, a city description several hundred pages long, and written like a tourist guide, with history, fatctions, dungeons, write-ups for every quarter -- a work of beauty.
The problem with using these at the table is that you'll never be able to remember all that, even if you invest the time to read it, and little of it will help your game. I found the City of Greyhawk boxed set near unplayable, and the play experience with Ptolus only worked because there is a string of starting adventures in one of the back chapters. It is the same Wall of Text problem adventures have, only worse. You need to have description economy also for cities, towns and villages.
A better approach for published cities and towns is to provide them as backdrop information for an adventure or campaign. This is done with Waterdeep in Dragon Heist, which is an excellent mix between city write-up and city adventure, or with Port Nyanzaru in Tomb of Annihilation. They capture the atmosphere of the town or city, and provide detail on locations and NPCs encountered in the adventure, but they do not exhaustively detail the rest. Once you played these adventures, all those sites are familiar, and you can expand upon them and add to the city.
An alternative approach is to zoom in on just one ward in the metropolis, as is done in the adventure Thirds of Purloined Vellum (Dungeon #88). The adventure provided a city stat block for the city as background, and, instead of describing the entire city, focused only on the district where the adventure locations were placed. There, every house was distinct, and for the ones where the action happens (break-ins etc) there are detail floor plans with key.
Building your own city
You are not Monte Cook, Gary Gygax, or Chris Perkins, and likely do not have the time to replicate their achievements. And you do not need to. The key insight is that all the rich detail of their cities came from playing in them for years, placing adventures there, and adding to them as needed over time.
Gygax describes how to economically develop cities, by focusing on the services that the players need first. This is spot on. To then bring the city alive, pick some city adventures, and put them in there, so the players will get to know the place through adventuring. It becomes more than a rest and recuperation area between dungeon or wilderness sorties. When you play for a long time in the city, additional adventures and their associated NPCs and factions will make the city come alive.
Gary reported that as much play happened in the city as in the dungeon, and players loved it, but unfortunately, no detail was given about the nature of the adventures there. From the stories about the striped mage's tower, the player-run Green Dragon Inn or henchman agency (that spied for the player for valuable dungeon looting opportunities), it seems as much of the city intrigue and action was created by the various players and play groups, with the DM playing along, as by the DM himself.
City Description
Don't waste a lot of time on describing the city in detail. You may need factions later on if you want adventures to develop there, but nitially, the players just want to:
- Safely sleep, eat and drink
- Get healing and curses removed
- Buy, trade or sell (magic items, weapons, armor, equipment and provisions, coins and jewels).
- Obtain information (adventure leads, monster weaknesses, item identification)
- (Maybe carouse, train, craft or do other downtime activities)
In my experience, as general equipment is available in every town or city, the focus in a new city will be on what magic items or services might be available there.
So all you need is as the Alexandrian
puts it is a map and gazetteer key for "useful shops, taverns, inns, and important public locations". You can encapsulate a settlement in a vignette like this, similar to the city stat block above:
- Name
- Number of inhabitants (with dominant races)
- A brief evocative description to give it a feel, alliances and relations (optional)
- A gp-limit: a useful tool from 3rd edition, see below
- Law enforcement
- authority figure (lord, sheriff, mayor, etc.)
- guard (total number, patrols, stats) to enforce authority's will
- optionally, powerful organizations of note (thieves guild, knight order, wizards guild etc.)
- Locales for services of interest and who provides them
- inn or tavern (poor, moderate, high-end)
- temples or shrines for healing (possibly resurrection, healing potions)
- wizard for magic related services (identification, maybe magic items, especially scrolls)
- shops: armorer, weapon smith, equipment and provisions
- money changer or jeweler
- castle, gate, bridge, dungeon
If you want adventure in the city then you also may need
- Map [this is optional, you can pick one from the web, e.g. Dyson Logos']
- Factions (and their relationships to each other) with NPCs
- Plots (what is going on - gang wars, trade embargoes, a murder series)
- Buildings (to break into, rob, or protect, with defenses and floor plans)
- Rumors (drawn from the above, or the surrounding countryside or dungeons)
: third edition introduced a quantification for the idea that the larger the town or city, the more expensive and rare goods and services you can sell or buy there with an overall gp limit - how much gp worth of loot can you sell before the market is saturated, a price base - how costly is the most expensive equipment you can buy, and a caster limit - how high level spells are available at best from spell casters. While 5e dropped this, I find it a great way to succinctly describe the economic freedom of a given settlement. Here is the table I use (and have in my DM screen - I actually think the gp numbers from 3e are too high at the lower end, adjusted here):
Settlement Poplutation Base gp gp Limit Caster Level
Thorp <20 5 100 1st
Hamlet 21-60 20 300 2nd
Village 60-200 50 1,000 3rd
Small town 201-2,000 1,000 5,000 4th
Large town 2,001-5,000 2,000 10,000 5th
Small city 5,001-10,000 4,000 25,000 6th
Large city 10,001-25,000 8,000 50,000 7th
Metropolis >25,000 16,000 100,000 8th
In a thorp or hamlet, you'll have difficulty to buy even basic equipment: there is no merchant, all you can buy is what the peasants are willing to sell -- food like milk, cheese, maybe a dog or an axe. You may make an exception for farm animals like horses, but most of the time, peasants will not want to sell these as their lifelihood depends on them. The peasants have little money to buy expensive weaponry and no use for it either. You might find a hedge wizard or lay priest if you are lucky, but if you are looking for someone to break a curse, you'll need to get to at least a village.
In a small town you get nearly all normal equipment, short of full plate or, if they can be bought in your campaign, magical weapons. To purchase those or raise the dead, you have to go to a large town or city. Finally, in an metropolis, with the right connections it will be possible to get high level magic and esoteric items. (There are people that argue the population numbers are too low for anything but the dark ages).
Factions. This is what will drive adventure in a city. A secret evil cult, warring underworld gangs, rival noble houses, guilds at odds with the feudal lord over taxes, and so on. Provide leader and enforcer NPCs for the important ones, who works for them, which of them are allies or enemies. These tensions between factions can provide you with ideas for plots.
Plots. To make a town real, run adventures in it. This goes beyond just procedural generation. Adventures will inform you which sites or buildings you flesh out with floor plans: mansions to break into, thieves guilds to infiltrate, a cemetaries to negotiate with the ghoul elder, the castle dungeon to free your friend before execution, the vanished mage's tower.
In my mind a great way to do city adventures is to run two or three adventures in parallel. With that, it does feel as if many things are going on independently of each other in the city, as it should be. Not everything is centred around the PCs. You can make this feel even more like a living city by running multiple play groups in the same city, so they can hear news and see the effects of each other's exploits (Gygax did this in Greyhawk, and Monte Cook did it in Ptolus).
Rumor tables are highly useful, they help to create lively conversations, chatter and make the city feel more alive and multi-dimensional. The can share information about factions, plots, NPCs and provide adventure leads inside or out of the city. The classical table has rumors on the dungeon the players want to explore, too, or on the wilderness.
In a town or city, your targets are connected, and your actions will have longer term repercussions of making friends or enemies, who may help you, ask for your help or send a few thugs to beat you up or assassins to take you out.
Random encounter tables for cities are hard to do well. The key is that normal encounters in a city are not dangerous. What good is rolling die to see what burghers, nobles or city guard pass you by? Even in a city of thieves, you must be able to go to the market or along the high street to your inn, without it turning into an adventure. How would anyone live in such a place otherwise? Maybe there is a small chance to be targeted by a pickpocket. Run-ins with street gangs should be on the menu only if you go into the wrong neighborhood, at the wrong time. And if you pissed off the thieves guild and they send an assassin, it is not a random encounter. One way to do random encounters for flavor is to flesh them out as little stories, help a wench against drunk slavers, guide home a drunken sailor, etc.
No discussion of designing cities would be complete withouth mentioning the excellent
A Magical Medieval Society: City Guide, which provides discussions about the population, professions, density and city design and introduces the idea of "wards", i.e. quarters that have a dominant purpose like residences for the affluent, slums, work districts.
Some Examples
Villages
The thorp Urdingen, with an attached Ogre cave adventure, as a one-pager. The description is just the various farmers, and what they know or how they lost something to the ogre menace. In my campaign, the players put the ogre issue to rest with a sleep spell.
The village Furton, located at a ford. This served as the village for Beyond the Glittering Vale (Dungeon #31), and I ran another adventure in it in the abandoned house of deceased mage Leuchros from that adventure, who had a chest in his attic that was a gate to the frozen prison plane of the lord of the seven crypts. It just lists population and names and stats for key services (the village smith, 2 inns, cleric (also mayor), militia and a minimalistc floor plan and key for the house of the wizard.
Towns
The town of Northflag originally just consisted of the map, with about 17 keyed and named locations - the town square, inn, main church with the most powerful priest in town for healing, town mage for magical services was the tutor of the party mage, the town guard, and a few named special sights like the founders statue and fountain supposed to bring good health, with his lance nobody could pull out), bridges and gates.
Later, as needed, sage, weaponsmith, armorer, alchemist, and moneychanger were made up on the fly and marked on the map. Trading houses and merchants were detailed, as a starting point for caravan escorts and similar adventures. Finally the small underworld modeled on the charming crooks in Casablanca was added for characters interested in purchasing or selling stolen magic. The town was too small for city intrigue, an so mostly served as a home and base for adventures in the region or larger world. Even though the church was provided with a full floor plan, this was never used in play.
The lord's castle, normally in the city, was off in the countryside, and his idealistic son and the gentry's questing knights were looking to keep things in order, but rarely in town.
Westburn: a dour, small town, keeping out the wolves and undead at night. 1,000 inhabitants (human), 1000 gp/4th Level Spell Limit. Mayor Retch von Westburn (use Spy). Guard Captain Harkonn Ironscar (use Veteran). 50 town guard (use guard, patrols of four plus one seargeant (use thug with ring mail, shield for AC17, alarm horn). Stone town wall, two gates with one standing patrol each. Market place with town hall, armorer, weapon smith, gold smith (all dwarves), alchemist (Eterius Goldenhammer gnome wizard 4, also crafts scrolls), Temple of the Three Mothers with father Malachon (use priest, demands blood sacrifice d6 hp together with gold. Sells healing potions, potions of resistance, and one special talisman for 666 gp: an Amulet of Proof Against Detection and Location in the form of a mummified ear; his cult can secretly hear what is spoken nearby and knows where), Bloody Ox Inn (modest or comfortable; music, alkohol, gambling and boxing contests; keeper Hunkan. Boxing champion is Rett, the Bald Bar-6, Str 15 Dex 14 Con 18, Tavern Brawler). Brothel Jenny’s (poor or squalid; Jenny ist ein tiefling rogue). Town mage is The Widow, in hut at the city wall (Green Hag Wizard-7, appears as lovely young woman), wearing a green veil. Her servant is a troll.
This has no map as it was a town the party just passed through on thier travels, but is a good example of how you can write up a condensed city stat block.
Cities
Omt, at the border of the bright desert. This is where I located "Thirds of Purloined Vellumn", above, and you can see how the city stat block was incoroprated, together with some background about the ruler, the (harsh) laws, the dominant religion and some flowery descriptions of the bazaar, smells sounds an sights stolen from a short story from Oscar Wilde.
Monmurg was the major metropolis in my world and campaign next to Greyhawk. It had a detailed map, a player map to incite investigations, history intertwined with the main campaign arc, noble houses and factions, NPCs like the city's evil archmage and detail locations for adventure such as a secret Yuan-Ti temple fronting as a bathhouse, an al-Akhbar temple, a manor full of vampires, one of the towers of wizardry (the black tower). I then began using Ptolus, and ended up with a hypbrid of this map and Ptolus history, world background, NPCs, adventures, and sites. In retrospect, it would have been simpler to just use Ptolus, map and all.
I find it hard to run large cities, with the many, many factions and machinations going on in the background.
