If you’re going to run a Dungeons and Dragons adventure in a city or a large town, this video is for you. Today I’m laying out the system I use to prepare and run D&D cities.
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Music Credits: “Sky Mall” by Nerdius Maximus Studios
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Magnificent stuff, mate! So, when can I move into the city? xD
Jokes aside, I generally tend to make an overhead map of the town with some locations of interest (nothing secret or hidden stuff yet) and let them go where they want, with me often giving them directions and naming many of these locations at the gate through the medium of a guard or merchant they meet at the gate, who will give them a reason to know where they can find these locations and people.
"Creating a bunch of villages, sticking them next to each other and papering over the gapes between them". That's an awesome city building strategy. I've never thought of it that way.
Great video. I'm always a fan of breaking big problems into small solutions. Treating the districts as villages is a perfect way of handling it.
Get on this man's Patreon. The amount of quality content he puts out, he should charge 2x as much as he does.. So much of his content is easily put into any campaign you need.
Great video! I wish I’d had advice for building a city that was this concise when my players first reached a major city. While I’m running a pre-written setting (Wildemount), and the city was already separated into districts, I do worry that I haven’t done enough to really sell how large and diverse it is. The way you’ve framed city building in such a simple way will help it feel more authentic when they return!
Want to draw cute dwarves?, then make 'em spiders xD
Again nice tipps for worldbuilding and DMing aswell^^
Love your videos king!
Thats so helpful! As someone with adhd I often get overwhelmd by cities but this helped me so much!
To add on to your great advice: to make sure you create a feeling of walking through a city, you can make a location-to-location flavour description about a faraway landmark from a different district, so to connect the districts. Any other ideas?
Holy shit what a freaking video. I need this advice, sincerely. Even in a setting like the forgotten realms this is so useful! You can even take this and apply it to ruined cities.
I've been struggling with this exact issue recently and this video came out right on time. I've been thinking how I'd make districts in my setting's main city, and this has given me a good starting point without getting overwhelmed. Thank a lot!
This is such a great tip, I've felt a bit overwhelmed by city making
Great video! A very overwhelming topic explainrd in a simple and still hugely helpful way. This makes it easy for me to retain the information to use in my games. Thank you! You keep getting better at making your videos more streamlined and to the point which in my opinion is very helpful. Legend 🙌
Wish I would have watched this year's ago! Could have saved me soo much time.
Above hour
This. Is. Brilliant!!! Why didn't I know ths years ago, I could have avoided so many prep headaches!
the only city i ever had to make from scratch was Neverwinter, because for some reason 5e has multiple sword coast campaigns but STILL have nothing for Neverwinter. the good news: there's plenty of material to steal. the bad news: the districts have changed over the editions. @~@
🥳🫂👍🏿
Our table has been playing in a metropolis the last few months and really enjoying it – we’ve got boroughs and districts and neighborhoods with particular blocks plus key points – I’ve been using a travel system with random urban encounters plus the Dortoka random block creator to good effect – once, the party ran into a bunch of ricksha racers and filled in for for one of them – they ended up winning and made friends with the group – later, when they needed to help a moving company, they went back and found their drag racer friends and got them to help out by returning their trophy 🏆
I use:
Size, theme, description.
Social, political, economics, religion and military.
At least one place and key npc for each.
Flowchart in journal. Bullet points.
Edit: Defence for description
Great vídeo as usual. I feel more prepared now to handle prepping cities. Thanks!😊
This is great! Thanks for breaking it down into easily digested chunks. Perfect!
I love this system! It adds a lot of "character" and realism to the city.
We use a similar system for the cities and planets in our Krunken Worlds setting.
Even with the asteroid made of dung we did the system still works its magic.