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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / World Building

Building a City

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 140
Even if you decide to take a broad-strokes approach to campaign design, eventually you’ll need to get down and gritty and start creating an environment on the level at which your PCs will interact with it. Likely the best place to start is the major city or town closest to your campaign’s focus—as with every aspect of building a setting, how much work you spend on a location should be commensurate with how likely players are to spend time there, and it’s nice for both the GM and PCs to have a base of operations. Along with the natural lures of healing, buying gear, and selling loot, you can use memorable characters like mentors or patrons and favored restaurants and taverns to help make the city feel like home. (These details also raise the stakes significantly if you later threaten the city’s existence— it always helps if the PCs have some sentimental attachments to give them a personal stake in a region’s defense.) Bear in mind that players are fickle and may become attached to unexpected people or entirely ignore characters you expected to become linchpins. Don’t be afraid to roll with the punches if they prefer the halfling pickpocket to your paladin laden with adventure hooks. In fact, it’s often best to wait until you see where player characters focus before fully exploring any particular NPC.

Creating a city can follow a pattern similar to that used when creating nations. Start with the natural geography and the locations of the borders and the most important elements, which are likely inherently tied together (see pages 146–147 for further information on how geography informs a city or nation’s layout). From there, work out the government, cultural institutions, economy, and so on. Try working on your city both from the top and bottom, letting the middle shape itself out as you go. For example, while you should know who the highest potentates in the city are, unless your players will be interacting with them immediately, it’s probably best to put this aside and spend more time on the level of the common people, the streets where most people live and work.

If you’re just starting a campaign, this city may be the best place for you to introduce the underlying themes of your setting. Figure out how to immerse your players in it—how can these themes play out in the first session? How can their early interactions foreshadow and set them up for their coming adventures?

Once you’ve got the big picture for your city, it’s time to start filling in details. Don’t panic! A city has a lot of space to fill, but you don’t need to know what every dot on your map is. Create a number of colorful locations, characters, and connected plot threads—but don’t pin them down. Remember, you only have to detail as much of the city as your characters can interact with. If your characters head east from the town square looking for an inn, give them a few choices. If they instead head west—give them the same choices, but turn that waterfront bar into the best inn on the hilltop. If you want them to run into a certain character, they can do so whether they head to the market or the boatyard. While such tactics might feel like “cheating” to some GMs, roleplaying has an element of solipsism to it, and if your players never experience a given location, it effectively doesn’t exist. Change names and ad-lib where you need to—in this manner, you can populate an entire city with just a handful of businesses and characters, and ensure that your favorite creations (whether NPCs or adventure hooks) get the airtime they deserve.

For more information on building cities, as well as important questions to consider, see pages 156–157 and page 209.

Archives of Nethys

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Building a City