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Doomboy911
2013-08-16, 05:24 PM
So I'm working on a campaign idea and part of it is bothering. Essentially I've got a kingdom that rules a country. There's small pockets of a dark forest, an area that's essentially a necropolis. The problem I've got is I want this kingdom to be one giant city but still feel big. I'd like it to take a week to get from one end to the other but I'm having trouble thinking of how they'd be connected with such a big distance.

Ravens_cry
2013-08-16, 05:38 PM
So I'm working on a campaign idea and part of it is bothering. Essentially I've got a kingdom that rules a country. There's small pockets of a dark forest, an area that's essentially a necropolis. The problem I've got is I want this kingdom to be one giant city but still feel big. I'd like it to take a week to get from one end to the other but I'm having trouble thinking of how they'd be connected with such a big distance.
You'd need to solve some logistics issues first. How is everyone being fed for one. Even with modern tech, we still need vast amounts of land for feed people. For the city to take up the kingdom, unless the kingdom is the size of a more normal city, it would have to dominate huge areas in order to feed itself, basically making it an empire.
Alternatively, you could pull out some Tippy-verse solutions, but that opens up another whole set of cans of worms.

Avaris
2013-08-16, 05:48 PM
Zwischenstadt.

I did my dissertation looking at a theory about how cities are evolving. Essentially, the theory is that as cities grow they are merging with their neighbours into larger conglomerations. The Zwischenstadt is the result of this: areas which are neither city nor country, as they have elements of both. Essentially, where once we had cities surrounded by countryside, we now have countryside surrounded by urban areas.

For your city therefore, think about what makes a city a city. There is a certain way of life about it, and probably a style of architecture. Reduce the density, add allotments, parks and fields, and work out where the densely populated hubs are and where the less densely populated areas are.

Doomboy911
2013-08-16, 05:53 PM
You'd need to solve some logistics issues first. How is everyone being fed for one. Even with modern tech, we still need vast amounts of land for feed people. For the city to take up the kingdom, unless the kingdom is the size of a more normal city, it would have to dominate huge areas in order to feed itself, basically making it an empire.
Alternatively, you could pull out some Tippy-verse solutions, but that opens up another whole set of cans of worms.

I've got the city broken into three areas via defensive walls. The first ring is guarded by clerics, wizards, paladins and other militia behind the ring is where all the agriculture lies. The land is sort of barren for plot reasons so wizards and nature clerics work towards producing a ton of food. After that ring is the shopping district and where craftsmen and artisan stay. These are just the folks who pick a craft outside of farming. The ring after that has the really important stuff, military and mage academies a plenty, along with most churches and the king's castle. The churches don't exactly get along but they all have to chip in for the sake of everyone.

kyoryu
2013-08-16, 06:34 PM
Try dropping down to "street level".

You're a dude in the city. A baker maybe, or a guard, or just a menial laborer. What's your life like? Where do you live? Where do you go to work? Where does your food come from? What impacts your life?

All the high level stuff is good, but if you don't have answers for that kind of low-level stuff, it will probably come off as artificial. Most cities are a result of organic growth more than deliberate, high-level planning.

Look at it this way - the city has these rings, and takes a week to get across, right? So if you're not a merchant, you don't live in the merchant ring. Maybe you live in the inner ring. How long does it take you to get to the merchants? If you're at the exact center, it'd be 3.5 days to hit the outside wall. So maybe, what, 2.5 to 3 days to get to the merchant ring from the center? So take off a day or so, assuming you're not in the very center and, what, still a day and a half of travel to get to the market?

Also, a good key for making something "feel" big is variation. As humans, we tend to use variation to really emotionally feel size, distance, or time. A day where you do lots of different things usually feels longer (outside a few scenarios) than one where you do only a couple. So if you want the city to feel huge, you need to come up with different areas, with their distinct feeling, and make sure the characters deal experience them.

Lorsa
2013-08-17, 04:34 AM
You can also have wall-off neighborhoods in the city, possibly even built by a community itself to distance itself from other parts of the city. For a mega-metropolis that size you can't just have 3 rings, you need a chaotic sprawl of walls, streets and neighborhoods where one is different from eachother (and sometimes not, they might just think they are). A poor person could probably live most of his life in just one small portion of the city, so you need to make sure every neighborhood has access to basic living stuff (some shops everywhere). Add in some underground levels that possibly stretches out even further and you can easily get an almost infinite feel. Also, don't forget to name your districts, all large cities have neighborhoods with their specific names and cultures. Only in dystopian scenarios are they named "City block C12" etc.

Madfellow
2013-08-17, 07:45 AM
From a logistical point of view, you could try the Tippyverse solution: People are fed by the Create Food and Water spell when crops are insufficient.

Another good source of ideas could be the Ravnica setting from Magic: The Gathering. It's an entire plane that is almost completely covered by cityscape. In the card art, you just see hundreds of gothic "skyscrapers" that go on all the way into the horizon. The city has catwalks, elevated streets, gigantic cathedrals, enormous greenhouses, industrial centers that look more like active volcanoes, underground oceans, and a vast subterranean tunnel system (where the undead like to hang out). The setting feels big because it looks big. Everything is on a grand scale.

Oh, and one more interesting nugget about population logistics: In Ravnica, to feed the enormous population, an entity called the Golgari has developed. Their job is to collect corpses and waste from all corners of the world and use it in their "rot farms." Basically, they use the waste for fertilizer and the corpses for food for various species of fungi. It's their job to grow as much cheap food as possible to feed the masses, and they don't mind getting their hands dirty. One more detail: most of the Golgari are undead. Just let that sink in for a moment.

TheStranger
2013-08-17, 09:16 AM
I think it would take a few days to walk across some of the larger real-world metropolitan areas, so that's one possible source of inspiration. The lazy (and therefore best) way to do this is to go to Google Earth, take 4-5 of the largest cities in the world, drop them down next to each other, tweak them so the major roads match up, smooth out anything that doesn't quite work together, alter any obvious features that would break immersion, and make sure the "feel" of the cities translates to your setting. That will give you literally hundreds of unique neighborhoods, arranged in a way that doesn't seem contrived, and it shouldn't take too long.

But if you really want to build it from scratch, think of how the city grew over time. Nobody just sat down one day and said, "I think I'll plan out a city of 10 million people in this uninhabited area." For a realistic feel, start small and work your way up. Lay out a kingdom with a central city and a few farming villages. Name these places - you'll want those as neighborhood/borough names later. Expand the city outward along existing roads. Add new service centers in the suburbs as the city gets large enough that people can't go to the city center easily. Fill in the gaps as the city continues to grow. Think about how people and goods are moving into, out of, and within the city. What will they need access to? What will they build to make that happen? How have the powers that be tried to encourage, discourage, direct, or control the growth of the city? What areas have been torn down to make room for palaces, roads, marketplaces, and the like?

Designing an entire city is a huge challenge, just because of the density of interesting features. I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy city map that wasn't on the scale of a small town.

SarahV
2013-08-17, 06:05 PM
A body of water can add a lot of natural detail to a city and help break it into natural-feeling neighborhoods. Most of the world's great cities are on or near a river or ocean (or both). I'd find it very odd to have a huge city without a major body of water.

It can add lots of interesting elements, like islands, peninsulas, canals, bridges, docks, ships, etc. It would also make an unusually large city more practical because you could take a boat to get from one end to the other fairly quickly if necessary, and move goods around on barges and stuff.

It also helps you figure out where different things should go. The palace or center of government could be somewhere easily defensible (peninsula, island), manufacturing can be near the docks, anything producing a lot of waste is downriver from the city, etc. The rich folks can be up on a hill away from the smelly river full of waste. The poor folks are down in the swampy area that floods sometimes.

If you want it to be really enormous I'd probably design 3-5 standard-sized large cities and merge them together, with patches of more residential areas in between city centers. This is how large cities tend to form. If you look at real-life large cities they tend to have multiple centers for shopping, finance, and even government.

Doomboy911
2013-08-17, 10:54 PM
Alright let me get into the history of this place. Long before this city was built they had a kingdom built into a valley. Unfortunately it was below sea level and many think the king or the nobles had done something to anger the gods because the valley flooded. The castle was swiftly destroyed and with it the mage academies and churches rose to power trying to gain control of the kingdom. The military schools stepped in while they were fighting and moved most of the farmers who survived the flood to a new area where the kingdom would later be developed. Church and wizardry began warring amongst each other in the old sunken kingdom trying to prove who was mightier. Again the army stepped in, they convinced the two sides that getting each other killed wouldn't serve anyone and that the best way to prove their might is not through destruction but through construction. Whichever side is doing better for the city should be in charge. They agreed. Construction began with building a giant wall separating the dark forest from the farmers. In time after people settled from the disaster a king was put in place.

They decided to put the king's castle at a high point to prevent a similar disaster and proceeded to build the rest of the kingdom to prevent any sort of flooding. Areas are commonly split between serving the church and their gods, serving arcane practices and serving military which work towards maintaining the law and the peace.