Let's create a city from the ground up

- You arrive to Berloduhr, the dwarves’ capital city. There you can see several rock made houses and to the corner what seems to be the marketplace, with an alchemy store, a blacksmith, a tavern and an inn visible from your position.
- Doesn’t this place look just like the previous 3 cities we were in? Let’s do the usual then. We go sell our stuff, get a room at the inn and stay the night
- And I’ll go look for some church or chapel. There must be one from my god.

Maybe you did a ton of work as a DM in your city, but when told to your players they end up feeling like a capital city should have way more (even though you invented like 22 different interesting places for your players, each with their own npc). They won’t care about that, and I’ve learnt that the hard way.

Today I’m going to tell you how to create a city from the ground up with little to no effort. Sounds impossible? It’s actually much easier than it sounds! You know when a magician performs a magic trick, and because you were being distracted, you didn’t notice him/her performing some weird sleight of hand movements to pick the card you were thinking about? You need to do a similar task, but in a much easier way. But let’s not jump so early into that, we’ve got ourselves a city to build!

 D&D: Dragon Heist, from WotC

The location

This is one of the most important factors when creating a city. Depending on where it is located you can easily discard the type of people who would live there. Elves don’t usually live in the mountains, deserts or open areas, just like dwarves normally live near mountain areas and away from the sea.

Taking into account you are making a city for a fantasy setting, try going for breathtaking sceneries, unless your intention isn't for it to be that way. A gothic city in the swamp around numerous dead trees, having the whole city be in the top of a great tree, or on the border of a great cliff leading to oblivion are excellent choices. 

The locals

How are the locals like? This might heavily depend on the location of the kind of city you are looking for. Are you looking for a western-like town? Make your NPCs weary of their surroundings and ready to hand a gun and start shootin’. If you intend it to be an elven citadel, you might want most of the locals to be high elves, well dressed and with high standards, not wanting adventurers to meddle with their lives, or using them to take care of the problems they don’t want do deal with.

If possible, try creating different factions or ways the locals can be divided in. Clans, houses or guilds work perfectly well for this, and can give more life to your creation. If it is a little town or ville, there might be groups of people with different beliefs. This kinds of things work great to give your players adventure hooks. Page 11 from the DMG has a section with the different kinds of religions that can fulfill your cities. Try taking a look at it as it is some really good inspiration source.

What makes this city special?

No two cities or towns are the same. People have different customs, great statues could be standing in front of it, a nauseating port smell could be filling it, or maybe it’s the place where the best festivals are held. Create one or two things that stand out from your city to make it different from the rest. This might give your players a reason to get from one city to to the other, or be enough to impress them with your city descriptions.

A great example can be found in the just published adventure from Wizards of the Coast Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, where there  are great statues that stand in the middle of the city said to once have been alive, or the dinosaur races taking place in Port Nyanzaru in Tomb of Annihilation (also published by WotC).

The name

Naming the city is also really important. You want the name to be easy enough for your players to remember it, or so weird it will make your players say it constantly as some kind of joke (we all have that one player that ruins everything we DMs take a lot of time to name). In the medieval times cities used to have names conformed of two or more common words that easily described it. Take the things you already created for it into consideration while doing this. “Seaport”, “Rock Valley”, “Hillview”, “Dreadtree” are good examples for human establishments. For otherworldly cities, such as dragonborn, elven, dwarven or goblin cities I just invent words that sound as I Imagine words in their language would sound like. Mixing syllables of different words usually can generate this effect too.

If you want some reference from real names for ancient cities to use in your game, try looking at the ones from this webpage. I’ve found them extremely useful.

Shops, markets, inns, temples...

Depending on the size of your city, or town they might have different places you can visit. Of course you can think ahead all the different ones, each with their own NPC running it, but as I promised I wanted to give you MY way of creating this kind of stuff, taking away a great weight from the DM’s shoulders. This is where the magician's tings I was talking about before take place. The first step is to normally create the key places you would like the city to have. For example, if you want this one to have a great thieves’ guild, you can create the tinkerers’ shop that hides its secret entrance, and the inn where those troublemakers reunite after a day’s work, each of them with their own NPCs.

Second step: Get a great list of names (FantasyNamesGenerator is usually the best place to do this, or the Names section in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything), each organized in a way you can differenciate them in categories such as male, female, elf, dwarf, drow, etc. for quick access.

That’s about it! By the time your players reach the city, give them a general description of how it looks like mentioning a few places you created beforehand, and ask them where they would want to go. If you feel like that place they mention would normally be in your city (an inn for example), write it down for later use, including the descriptions you make about it (you need to be at least a bit good at improvising for this) and if the NPC running the shop presents itself, use one of the names we looked for before. With that and some tips I’ll be talking in a later post about creating memorable NPCs on the spot, you should encounter no problems at all.

As usual, this is something that should mostly be used at emergencies. The more places you can think about beforehand the better, as you’ll have more time to make them unique. With some time, your improvisational skills will improve and you’ll be able to reduce the amount of work put into this.

Last but not least: The 5 senses

If you’ve ever visited a city different from your own you might know what I’m talking about. Most places feel different from one another. Use the 5 senses in your descriptions and see your players easily get immersed in it:

• Sight: How does your city,  town or ville look like? Is it placed on top of a mountain giving a great scenery to all their citizens of the depths below? Can you see great amounts of people or caravans moving through their streets? Does it look heavily guarded? Is there a great building dividing the city in half? Which materials are most houses made from?
• Hearing: Is the city always loud with noise coming from the streets? Is there music being performed at the tavern? What is that news kid shouting about? Can you hear some trumpets sounding in the distance, marking something important is going on?
• Taste: Does the smell in the air leave a bad taste in your mouth? Is the jalapeno being sold in the street spicy enough for the players? How does the food at the inn taste like?
• Touch: Does the weapon being sold to you feel good to the touch? Is it raining outside? Or is it a suffocatingly warm day? Can you feel the wind pushing you away from the harbor?
• Smell: How does the noblewoman’s perfume smell like? How nauseating does it smell in the tavern? What’s the first thing you smell as you enter the city? Does the roses aroma reach your players as they walk near the flower vendor? How good is the smell coming from the near inn?

You don’t need to use all of them all the time, but try to add this kind of descriptions as more as possible.  It makes a great difference, and impact towards your players, while also being great to generate roleplaying moments.

Have you ever used one of these tips before? How good did it go? Do you know of any other good tip you’ll like to share? Tell me in the comments below to get some discussion going!