Help creating an urban campaign

[Dugong]

Hi everyone,

I'm writing an urban campaign for levels 10-16 (ish) but World building has always been a weak spot for me (as my only experience as DM was doing a RHOD module). Considering how high level the campaign is and I want to have some high level npc's and enemys to fight, I was thinking of making the city a metropolis. But there are lots of little things I don't have a clue where to start, like say the size of the police force guarding the city, how big the city is to support the population, residentual/commercial areas and a million other little things a city needs to feel alive.

Does anyone have any advice on how to build the nuts and bolts of a city for an urban campaign?

[Enguebert]

Well, level 10-16 is pretty high for an urban campaign.

The problem is that at this level, your players must face either high level NPC or high CR monsters. This doesn't fit with normal cities.
Even if you put them in a capital and focus on political intrigue, the number of possible opponent is rather limited and usual city forces will not be able to keep your players under control.

Your best solution is to play in an extra-planar city, where most inhabitants are extraplanar creatures.
Automatically, city guards, city officials will be high level because they must be able to keep control on high CR citizens :smallsmile:

[zephyrkinetic]

You're basically going to be talking about comic book superheroes at those levels, so you might take some inspiration from things like that. Honestly, a lot of work might already be done for you; just go steal some statistics from a major city. I'm sure with some decent google-fu you can come up with population, demographics, emergency service response times and capabilities, etc.

[incarnate236]

You might look at one of the city centric books like Towers of Sharn or City of Stormreach as a baseline and then up some of the NPC levels.