So I'm Going To Be Running A Game And Need Some Advice On City Building

[JNAProductions]

I'm making a city that will include five main guilds, each one run by a player. Does anyone have anything that's good for making maps of the city, and any advice on how to make plenty of interesting events for the guilds to deal with?

[Nobot]

Interesting idea!

For maps, I think you're always best of by just drawing them by hand, at least at the beginning. If you want something a little more fancy, I've heard good stuff about Campaign Cartographer (https://secure.profantasy.com/products/cc3.asp) (which is not free). If you have some talent and enjoy drawing, you could also consider just drawing maps in Inkscape or some other Open Source solution.

As for ideas, I always just start writing a city's history (not to infodump at players, but to make it a living place). When was it founded? Why? Access to resources? Trade? How did it develop from a few hovels to a few streets with a marketplace. What role does it fulfill that other cities didn't? Was it ever caught up or made redundant by another place/technology/magic? What did it do in response to that? What have been and are the nearby threats and how does the city defend itself against those?

You could easily weave your guilds into this plan. A mercenary guild because the city is close to trade routes and caravans require protection; a thieves guild because the rulers are in league with them and never clamped down on guild-associated thieves; a mage's guild because the city has relatively relaxed laws on spellcasting; a carpenters guild because the city has a large population; a cooper's guild because it's a shipping city; and so on.

[jqavins]

What sorts of guilds are you thinking of? In mediaeval Europe, the guilds were, kina sorta, part academy and part union and were all about trades. They may or may not have physically or legally stopped non-members from practicing the trades, but they kept most non-members from being much good at them by keeping secrets.

I've seen so-called guilds in fantasy settings that were actually political parties, social clubs, corporations, secret societies, and probably other things.

So, are you thinking of true (or approximately true) trade guilds, or something else? Your wording "plenty of interesting events for the guilds to deal with" makes me suspect the latter. I'm not here to say that's wrong, just that it's hard to offer anything without knowing.

[JNAProductions]

Probably not true guilds, then. Just organizations.

[jqavins]

Ok, but still, what sorts of organizations? Political? Social? Baseball teams?

[JNAProductions]

Varying. We've got an assassins' guild, a knowledge seeking guild, a "rat catchers'" guild, and I'm not sure who the final five are going to be.

[Orcus The Vile]

Try, Hexographer, cityographer or rpg maker.

They make good maps.

[Rift_Wolf]

Where's the town situated?
Mountains: Miners Union, Foundry Union, Steelworker Guild
Port: Dockers Union, Shipwright Guild, Navigator Guild, Diplomatic Embassy
Forest: Woodcutter Union, Carpenters Guild, Hunting Club.

I've used 'union' for unskilled labour, 'guild' for skilled labour with trade secrets. Not sure if that's the right appellation.
Otherwise look at cities in Italy like Sienna; they were dominated by guilds for a few hundred years and have quarters for the different professions.

[jqavins]

How about "guilds" for each deity's church? (I'm assuming typical fantasy polytheism.) Membership would be clerics from all of the deity's temples in the city, as well as paladins or paladinoid holy warriors, and lay VIPs, with the leaders most likely being chosen from among the higher level clerics.

There could be the historically real trade guilds, and also guilds of the magical trades (wizards/sorcerers, alchemists*, perhaps others) that only exist in fantasy. If you like, the sor/wiz guild could be instead be separate conjurers', evokers', etc. guilds, depending on how closely each group chooses to guard its secrets.

A musicians' guild, consisting both of those with bard levels and simple entertainers. As with the church guilds, the leaders would probably be those with significant class levels.

And those are all more or less profession based. How about a "guild" of butterfly collectors (which may or may not practice any serious Lepidopterology.) Or a "guild" or artists, who may or may not make art a profession. A reading "guild," which today we'd call a book club or coffee clutch. A football "guild," which organizes street teams into a football (soccer) league and tournament. (Yes, Unseen Academicals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_Academicals).)

I could go on.

* Yes, I know, there really were alchemists in history, but we all know what I'm talking about.

[brian 333]

For radial cities, (like Paris or New Orleans,) I used to use a random contour map, find an interesting feature, and draw the streets out following the contour lines, then I'd draw streets from a 'city center' outward so that my city map would have an organic feel to it. Grid cities such as you find in the Great Plains of North America are an artifact of high technology.

I'm a fan of hand-drawn maps for D&D campaigns. It gives one the feel of actual character-drawn maps, and the crude features you draw only add to the charm of the map.

One could also take maps of actual cities, towns, and villages from, say, a Rand McNally Road Atlas, and redraw them for their own needs. An example would be to take Chicago and its surrounding suburbs and reduce the scale so that Gary and Skokie are part of the city, with their boundaries being internal city boundaries, such as guild holdings or whatever. Conversely, you can excerpt a piece of a city map and leave the outskirts blank or as farmland or whatever.

The thing you must consider when building cities is that no city anywhere sustains itself. A city can only exist by taking in resources from elsewhere. This means roads must be adequate to carry the goods needed to feed the city; dairy farmers need to get their milk to market quickly and efficiently, cheesemongers need warehouses with adequate roads to the dairy farmers, stockyards require access to swine and cattle farms, vintners need access to vinyards, etc. A city without a surrounding agricultural region which supports it will soon wither, and the city's roads must extend like arteries and veins into the surrounding terrain. The limit on the size of any city, town, or village, is dictated by the tonnage of materials it can move on a daily basis.

[TheFamilarRaven]

I'm making a city that will include five main guilds, each one run by a player. Does anyone have anything that's good for making maps of the city, and any advice on how to make plenty of interesting events for the guilds to deal with?


Varying. We've got an assassins' guild, a knowledge seeking guild, a "rat catchers'" guild, and I'm not sure who the final five are going to be.

The rat-catchers's guild is commissioned to catch a nasty were-rat in the sewers. the were-rat hires the assassins to kill the rat-catchers, and the knowledge seekers are trying to figure out why rat-catchers are being murdered. Hilarity ensues.

For realz though. Make sure your players create guilds that will either compete with eachother, or cooporate with each other. If one players wants to be the head of the blacksmith's guild, he/she is not going to be doing much other than "hey, buy my stuff." And then the mercenary guild will be like, "Sure, I'll buy your stuff". But if your players are running competing guilds.... Then things become more interesting.

encourage your players to make underhanded dealings to get ahead of the competition. Sabotage other guilds. In other words, ito increase your 's all about the money and power. It doesn't sound like their will be a lot of adventuring, so up the scale of the intrigue of your game. Have them try and buy out the local government. Maybe hire a band of orcs to raid other parts of the land to increase there own prestige.

[Inspector Valin]

My big thing would be wider political context to the city. Is it a city-state, or dependent on some external Empire? Either way, is there an independent ruler who could keep the guilds in check? Have any of the Guilds done something innovative or far reaching enough to get foreigners to invade the city? Could you trick one of them into doing something that'd get foreigners to invade the city? :smallwink:

[Amblehook]

For a quick and easy way to map a city, I recommend the roleplaying city map generator:

http://inkwellideas.com/worldbuilding/roleplaying-city-map-generator/

It seems to be completely randomly generated, so there are some weird roads that don't totally fit, but overall it offers a solid way to generate a map with minimal input.

[sktarq]

A few questions that as you answer should help you develop the place and "guilds"

How does the city "eat". This question asks both for how enough food, water, and consumables like metals (in finished or unfinished goods), Fiber (for clothes etc), Building materials (and figuring out what kind and where from will help shape your cities aesthetic), Waste Displacment (a way of looking at the dumping of waste to be good/service that city has to bring to it but should be clear enough), population (cities were mostly net consumers of people as poverty and cramped condition illnesses killed many people off) but also how does the city "pay" for these things. Now governance, culture, religious reasons are all semitangible reasons that wouldn't show up on a trade ledger but concrete goods/services may well also be part of it. If the city is importing food how it has the gold to pay the farmer/merchant is important or there is a net outflow of gold.

On a smaller scale-how does each guild pay for rent/dinner? Assassination may be expensive but how many are needed each year in the city? And only so many people are going to be able to reach the guild (let alone afford it) so a very large population would be needed to support more than a small handful of guild members. Perhaps a larger economic region would be needed to support them (providing death on demand in the larger nation/regionand being to prime provider in order to get enough business). And Information providing? What kind of info and who is asking? That could be a scouting service, ratings agency (like Moody's or Fitch), land surveyors, a polling company, a spy network (which has similar small market issues as an assassination guild), or a dispersed set of wizards using message to trade weather and market prices (don't knock it that would make a mint)

Figure out who the customers are, how they make their money, what regulates their growth (government, locals don't like them, others eat at their resources (including specialized labor), or market size are all examples), and who doesn't like them and acts against them, how they weather slow periods (or not)

There lots of ways to develop the city-but I find the key is what kind of stories to you want to tell and how do you want it to feel are going to be the first things to to pick out. Threatening? Cramped? Luxurious? Fantastic/Fantasy like? Dirty/Clean? Ordered/Chaotic? Etc and create a place and a history that support that kind of city.

[Bobbybobby99]

I like using Hexographer for maps, myself, but that's just me.

[Trickshaw]

A really good resource to consider would be the Birthright campaign setting of old.

It contains ideas and mechanics for player owned and operated societies, clans, guilds, businesses etc. I'm sure you could find a PDF floating around the web or an old boxed set on sale somewhere. If you're looking to have a player run a church, another player run a merc band, another lead a thieves guild, another run a merchant guild and another head up the local military ward... there's a ton of info and ideas in Birthright to at least get those juices flowing.

[brian 333]

I think, as far as organizations and such go, that I would require far more detail on the designer's intent. However, in writing that fluff, you would find yourself filling in the details you are asking for here. As an example, say I want to create some guilds:

How do the guilds relate to the government itself? Are they the basis of governmental power? Or do they exist with the consent of the powers that be? I decide they are the power, and a guild council actually rules the city, no matter the titles granted to nobility or what not. So, having decided that, I create a City Council where each member is leader of a particular guild, save for the single seat reserved for the Honorable Mayor, who is selected from the members of the Patrician class, who are the families which trace their ancestry to the founding of the city.

Now, what does the city need? Is it an importer of goods and an exporter of law and order? Do they manufacture goods for sale elsewhere? Are they a port city or caravan stop?

I propose that my city has several manufacturing enterprises which generates the wealth of the city, and several enterprises which service the needs of the city itself. My city sits on a deposit of fine quartz which is perfect for glassmaking and there is a subset of this guild who are lens crafters. While this guild is small, the quality of glass and lenses is such that their wares are sought worldwide. Thus, the Guild of Glazers is highly prestigious and wealthy.

The same goods that go into the support of the glazers offers metalworkers in the city the luxury of cheap fuel and as a result, there is a very well developed metalworking industry, a subset of which is the tool and die makers who specialize in the support of glass blowing. However, there is no native supply of metals to work, and these must be imported. There are foundries, but ore smelting is done elsewhere and the raw materials imported. As a result, the metalworkers focus on decorative and detailed work as opposed to raw production of iron goods. While there are smiths who can shoe a horse in the city, and they are guild members by law, the metalworkers of the city focus their efforts either on artistic use of metals or on the prestigious tool making industry.

This leads to a need for transportation, not only of import of raw goods, but of the export of finished products. Shovels, picks, axes, and other implements must find their way to markets in the mining and smelting villages, while the ornamental and architectural metalwork and glass must find its way to other wealthy population centers. Since my city is a port located at the end of a web of overland trade roads, I decide that the majority of imports come to the city overland, while the majority of its exports go via ship. This introduces two new guilds: the Teamsters and the Merchants. They directly compete in some areas, but by and large their efforts compliment one another, and while the Merchants, being fewer in number, are wealthier, the Teamsters have more direct power due to their virtual monopoly on food imports from the surrounding countryside.

But teamsters need roads and merchants need port facilities, and these are built and maintained by the Guild of Stonemasons, who are also deeply involved in the construction of buildings. In fact, they have subsumed the carpenter's guild. As an incidental aspect of the city's culture, there is a subset of this guild devoted to ornamental architecture, and embellishments and decorative features are very common on all of the buildings. Even the cobbled streets of the city and its outlying roads have ornamental features such as mosaic patterns and street names being laid into the stonework.

You see how I use one idea to generate the next, which generates the next, and so on. Perhaps there is a guild of farmers who maintain the local marketplaces, or perhaps not. It depends on what else there is which can support the city's needs for food imports. If the Teamsters have a lock on food imports, as I implied earlier, then farmers would sell to agents in the outlying market towns rather than cart in their own goods. However, if a strong guild supported the cattle industry, for example, then milkmen and butchers might fall under their control, and a powerful guild could be built around that idea.

I recommend a brainstorming session which includes your players. Set out in the beginning that you are not simply trying to offer them a niche in the government, but are looking for ideas for guilds which would have real power in your campaign even if their character has nothing to do with it. The Rat Catcher guild idea offered earlier might be a good idea for a player guild, but what real power would such a guild have, unless the city were primarily an exporter of grain? On the other hand, grain factors make big change, and might wield real power in a city which relies upon grain import and export for its wealth, and the rat-catchers might indeed be a powerful entity in such a city.