5 Easy Steps To Building Cities
5 Easy Steps To Building Cities
Cities are a cornerstone of any great world. They are where people live, where quests are given out, and where hard-earned coin is spent. But, building a city can be a tricky proposition. There’s a lot that goes into making a city, and it can be difficult to know exactly where to start and what makes sense to include.
This article outlines the quick process I use when I start building a new city, town, hamlet, or really any type of civilized settlement. It’s not necessarily meant to give you a completely fleshed-out city, but instead to give you the bones to build from. In many cases, the details you define here will be plenty to run a city in a game or include it in a story. In the cases where it’s not, then it gives you a solid foundation to build from that I find far easier than starting from scratch.
I like to treat this process as sort of a rough draft. I’m not thinking too much about any given step, but more of just jotting down what comes to mind. I find this helpful to get over that initial block and gives me enough that I can refine as needed. It also prevents you from writing too much. I find it very easy when world building to get carried away with interesting, but not necessarily important, details.
Let’s jump right in. Grab a notebook, a pen, and let’s start building!
1. Why It Exists
The first step is to determine why the city exists, what purpose caused people to found it? There are a lot of options you have for this. A couple of ideas include:
- Resources like lumber, ore, or gold.
- Important for trade, such as along a navigable river.
- Near an important religious sight or along a pilgrimage route
- Important for war or defense
The exact specifics can often be hand-waved at this point. What’s more important is understanding what brought people here and caused them to stay long enough to put down roots.
Keep this in mind as it will play a role in pretty much every future decision. If your city was founded because of valuable ore nearby, then you’d expect there to be lots of industry and people involved in mining and processing to also be present in the city, as an example. This then guides the future steps of characters and points of interest.
2. Key Characters
Next, I like to define a handful of the key characters that are important to the city. These include things like the mayor/ruler and other powerful figures, but also includes those who are important to the story I’m telling, like the innkeeper.
Think about the people who are most important to your story and focus on them. You, for example, probably don’t need to flesh out the succession line of the past hundred years; it might be enough to simply say the current king comes from a long line of nobles.
You want to spend the time on what your story demands; there’s always time later to come back and flesh out the rest. I like to start with 5-10 characters, depending on the city size, and come back later to see where I might need to add more.
3. Points of Interest
The next step I take is to start defining points of interest. The goal here is that if my players enter a city and ask, “What do I see?”, I have a clear answer ready to go. This step is also heavily tied to the previous one; many of my key characters are often related to the points of interest I create. So, don’t be afraid to approach these two steps in tandem.
Depending on the size of the city, I might do this as simple locations or start with districts and narrow down from there. Both approaches are valid, but the larger the city, the more value I find in the district-down approach.
4. The Core Conflict
Next, I like to define the key, overarching conflict that the city is facing. This could be something completely unrelated to the story upon arrival, but it always has an impact on how I build the city and how the players interact with it.
I like to define this as it has an influence on how the city and its citizens behave. For example, if the city is going to war, it’s going to be the talk of the town. People might be preparing to either leave to do battle or hunker down to survive a siege. The leaders are also likely preparing with actions like increasing taxes and stockpiling essential supplies.
This also doesn’t necessarily have to be something immediate either; sometimes the conflict is in the future. The threat of war several months in the future can have its own impact that can be just as interesting to explore.
5. Side Quests/Hooks
Lastly, I like to define a handful of side quests, hooks, and random encounters that I can drop in as my players explore. As I do this, I like to keep in mind how large the city is and, by extension, how long I expect to spend in the city. The larger the city, then, in general, the more side content I’ll put together.
I like to do this as it smooths out those moments when my players go off my plan, which, if you’ve ever run a game then you probably already know, is constantly. Having some ready-made content makes running games so much easier and prevents those momentum-breaking moments where you have to scramble to put together something.
It’s also a great way to make your city feel alive and independent from the specific story you’re telling. Having townsfolk go about their daily lives with their own list of problems and goals is much more immersive than a static backdrop.
What Next?
As noted at the start, in many cases you’re done. You’ve got a rough skeleton of a city, but that’s often enough to start playing and exploring.
Of course, you can always go back and flesh out the pieces that need a bit more depth. The more key to your story the city is, the more likely it is that you need to do this.
The good part, now that you have this skeleton, adding in those other details is much easier. You already have a base to work from, and you can refer back to the answers you wrote down here and use them to help guide the rest of your work.
Hopefully, my process for building a city has been helpful for you. There are countless ways to approach this, but I find this approach helps me get details down quickly, and focuses on the most important elements of building a city.
