lisahartjes.com

Designing A City

February 21st, 2008

Today we have our first “guest blog”. I subscribe to a vsat number of mailing lists, one of which is one for ProFantasy and their products. Bill Wire wrote a very good article/message about designing a city, and I got his permission to post it here. If you have any questions or comments, please do it below. I know we’d both enjoy a discussion about fictional city design.

If you can get a hold of it, the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas (FRIA)has many cities - real cities in it. Waterdeep in particular is a very large city that should be a suitable model for what you’re speaking of.

My suggestion is to in a piece of paper, start with the *sketch* of a hamlet. Think about why it’s there, and how the people made their living. The roads, if there even are any will go around trees, hills and large rocks. There’ll probably be a “village green” or something, etc. Either keep using that paper, or a duplicate if you want to keep history, grow the hamlet into a town Make it bigger but don’t change a lot of the original portion. Think about events in the history of the city - has it ever been sacked? If so, destroy a few things.

Now you’ve got a town, time to grow again into a small city. Put in some walls, destroy parts of the town to make way for public works like “city hall” etc. Straighten some of the roads that wandered around things like trees and rocks - leave the ones that wandered around hills, destroy buildings as needed to do this. Occasionally, just leave the twisty way there, AND make a straight one too. Build more buildings, and more and straighter roads. Remember, people don’t really like walking around the block to get to the other side, so leave spaces and back yards in your city at this stage.

Time to crowd your city. Within the walls, start filling in empty spaces with buildings and more buildings. What used to be back yards and paths to “cut across” blocks become alley ways between new buildings only feet from each other. You should still be thinking about the primary industries going on in the city, but there should be other industries moving in as well by now, so allow for them. As the city grows, so will its commerce. If it’s coastal, add docks and warehouses, and “dive bars” along the waterfront. Rip down things as needed to make room for them. If that leaves a blind alley, so be it.

Now the city is too crowded, build more city close to the walls & gates outside. Destroy some random spots in the city, build something new. Leave a little “ruins” in some of the more crowded sections of town. People want their space, and want protection, but they can not have both. Inside the walls is still more desirable than outside, tear down large swaths of “individual” buildings and construct row-homes instead. This will result in alley after alley that used to cut across the block instead ending at the back of a building. Wealthy merchants will likely take over a block here & there, clear the block & put up a wall & nice house. They tend to congregate together for security to to associate with their peers – keep them clustered.

Time to grow some more, The city planners decide to build a new wall. New walls are expensive, so they’re going to build it as small as they can get away with while still leaving a little room for expansion. Draw a new city wall, Breach the old one in lots of places as the stone will be scavenged for other construction projects. You may even turn the old wall into a road. What was previously poor land outside the walls along the main roads is now expensive land, The poor are shunted away from the main roads - build “shanty” town in between the main gates. Consider whether there is enough external threat to have the city build a fortress somewhere. If there is a large enough threat, a fortress may even exist prior to this point. The rich will move out into the larger spaces, so convert some of their older good places to live into multiple “middle class” buildings, and a few of the closest to the “rest of the city” into solid masses of buildings tacked onto the original main house.

Just keep growing in this manner until you get to the size you want. Keep in mind changes in government, the “revitalization projects”, “public works” like fountains and parks, and the acquisition of properties by the wealthy. Erase & overwrite as you go. Don’t be shy. Bear in mind that old fortresses can be abandoned and new ones built elsewhere, but it’s expensive. More likely, the old fortress will become a city guard barracks, prison, or other “public” building. Also, somewhere along this time, the city will realize it needs to do something about sanitation. The open-channels in the streets in the “old city” might have been OK when the city was small, but out here, they’re going to build sewers to do things right while they have the chance. They may even extend some of them through the old city if there’s a port, river, or other good way to get things “flowing out of the city” off in that direction - or if there’s a particularly wealthy merchant still over there.

Keep reusing the same paper (or copies). The sketch will become more and more detailed. As it does, it will come to the point when it’s time to put it into CC just because it’s easier to edit there than to keep erasing paper. I like to think out the whole life-cycle in broad terms before I sit down in CC so I know where the tangled mazes of alleyways are, where the planned streets are, where the “rich” live, and where things are not so pleasant. The REAL / CURRENT roads are actually simply a result of how the city grew. Where did people need to travel between to do their business, and what was the current shortest route at each stage of the cities life?

What I’m basically saying is that a truly large city is an incredible amount of work. But when you’re done, you know WHY any given part of the city looks the way it does. In one city, “Taris” I even went so far as to make a coordinate system and and index of every business and place of note in the city, listing the coordinates in the index, and having a cross-reference to the page number of the place description. 154.5×12 = Golden Eagle Inn pg:33. 155×12 = Harls Blacksmithy pg:38. etc - with the place descriptions themselves listed alphabetically and noting their coordinates on the map. Unfortunately for me, that was long before CC-DOS even came out and it’s just a huge binder of paper I hadn’t the heart to redo. Taris has been used at one point or another in 5 campaigns.

I did do a town to this detail - Garvuns Rest. But that campaign died out when the entire party of first level adventurers all killed themselves trying to cross a series of 20′ deep pits with undead at the bottom. Why they didn’t destroy the undead from above (shooting fish in a barrel) before trying to cross the pits, I don’t know… …they had the time… …and when the player says “I can only fail my balance check on a 1″ well… …Murphy is always listening.

Or, alternatively - you can try to go straight for the end-run. I find I’m much happier knowing why the city is laid out as it is, and that you wind up with more “real” mazes of alley and streets if you “grew” the city instead of just “building” it. If you go for the end-run, start big and get smaller and smaller. Which sections of the city are more open? Which more crowded? Draw mazes of streets, then fill in every nook and cranny with a building to create your alleys and dead-ends in the crowded areas of town. As you go, plan - how do the people living on this block make their living? Where do they work? Where do they get their food? Where do they go on a date with their girl/boyfriend?