Quick City Building

[Stux]

Does anyone recommend any particular resources for DMs for quickly putting together a small city? Lists of locations/NPCS/mini encounters/shops that sort of thing that can be cherry picked.

I have a party who will arrive at a new city next session, and it is a relatively minor location in campaign terms, so I'm loathe to spend too long creating everything from scratch, but at the same time it would be nice for it to have at least a little depth.

Oh, it happens to be a subterranean city largely populated by kobolds. But I can adapt regular city stuff on the fly.

[Uncle Pine]

The Tome of Adventure Design has tables for pretty much everything a DM could need when making plans for an adventure (bar monsters and NPC stats). It also has a series of tables to randomly generate cities and I usually use them when I can't come up with something good. Or when I just happen to have some free time and the urge to roll a random city starts to rise. :smallbiggrin:

Either way, be careful when building your city, because unless a big part of the adventure is set inside of it a bunch of notes could be all you'll ever need to run the city. You mentioned that it'll be a minor location in campaign terms. If the only reason the characters will pass through the subterranean village of the friendly kobolds is to buy equipment, get healing or find information about the dungeon they're looking for, it doesn't make sense to prepare stat blocks, motivations and the entire family line of every shopkeeper of the town: a couple of details about the city or village will be enough.
For example, the local kobolds could be famous (or think that they should be famous) because they are able to breed supersized rothe. Maybe (probably) the characters aren't into big wooly oxes that much, but most players will probably like a couple of mechanically useless details like that because they build up atmosphere in the long run.

[Stux]

Nice advice thanks!

Yeah, I don't need a massive amount of detail, just some inspiration for some random non-combat encounters and things to flesh it out a bit and make it not seem too 2D.

[Coidzor]

There's a couple (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/re/20020715x)of things (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/re/20040909x)like that on the WOTC site.

[Stux]

Amazing! Yeah those are exactly the sorts of things I was looking for, thank you!

If anyone else has similar compilations of mini-encounters I'd love to be linked :smallbiggrin:

[Coidzor]

Amazing! Yeah those are exactly the sorts of things I was looking for, thank you!

If anyone else has similar compilations of mini-encounters I'd love to be linked :smallbiggrin:

There's more in that series of articles that I'm sure I missed in skimming through the list, and there might be something in one of the three web enhancements for cityscape... I know there are sample cities in a couple of the Web Enhancements...