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Back in May I posted the “5 Fantasy City Supplements You Need” which focused on products about cities as a whole – of them 4 were about specific cities, and one was Fantasy Flight Games’ “City Works”. I used City Works this week to write up and map out the basics of Cruar’s Cove, a city in my campaign setting.
But once you have a city to play in, there are a lot of books out there that are great additions to your urban game. Books of floorplans, encounters and ideas for great urban adventures.
Here’s my picks for this week:
Flying Buffalo’s Citybook series
With 7 titles in the line, this is the grand-daddy or modular city designs for D&D games. Each book focuses on a certain style of establishment and encounter that you can use in your urban scenes. Each has between 13 and 25 locations (typically businesses) with detailed NPCs and adventure ideas, hooks and plots. Reading them for me is like a trip into the third D&D campaign I played in – I remember at least a few from each book that we ran afoul of during our adventures in the “City of Nine Blades”.
Dark Quest Games’ City Guides’
Basically the same as the Flying Buffalo line, but written for the d20 system and only available in PDF. This line ran for almost the entire run of the 3.x D&D production and the earlier books include material written by names that later became prominent with other d20 companies. Very affortdable and full of little encounters, stores, businesses and detailed streets and alleys that you can pull out as needed.
Foul Locales: Urban Blight
Published during the d20 rush, this book details a collection of urban encounters and locations with excellent maps by Ed Bourelle of Skeleton Key Games. The layout is horrid, but there are 18 encounter locations where “encounter” means a place where something interesting can and will happen. From a sewer ambush to a magical clock store, this is an awesome addition to any d20 fantasy game, and can be plundered for info for any fantasy game if you get it at the right price. Effectively this feels like a compressed version of the above two product lines.
City Streets Series
These PDFs by Generic Universe Publishing detail a single business in each release, but do so with incredible detail along with background information on the business and the employees, adventure hooks and story ideas. They are under $2 each, and there’s at least one freebie over at drivethrurpg that you can check out. Overall they aren’t quite as cost-effective on a “dollar per business” model as the other lines here, but go into much greater detail and are well written and nicely mapped.
Game Mechanics City Quarters Series
These three PDFs (and two are / were available in print through Green Ronin) detail a thieves’ quarter, temple quarter and “arcane quarter” that can be inserted into a fantasy city. More importantly, they detail sections and places in these quarters that are even more easily dropped into your city on an as-needed basis. Of the three, the Thieves’ Quarter is the most ‘portable’ although the arcane quarter can be the most useful to D&D game masters because of the lack of similar supplements or examples of such environments in other game lines.
What books would you add to the list?
And a footnote for those making fantasy cities at home who want to get that extra level of detail further than what I did with City Works this week – check out the free “Guide to the Creation and Depiction of Fantasy Cities” posted over on the Cartographer’s Guild forums. It is a brilliant and beautiful 20 page PDF to help you work on your fantasy city.
Flying Buffalo’s Citybook series
With 7 titles in the line, this is the grand-daddy or modular city designs for D&D games. Each book focuses on a certain style of establishment and encounter that you can use in your urban scenes. Each has between 13 and 25 locations (typically businesses) with detailed NPCs and adventure ideas, hooks and plots. Reading them for me is like a trip into the third D&D campaign I played in – I remember at least a few from each book that we ran afoul of during our adventures in the “City of Nine Blades”.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
Those Citybook series were epic. I loved the maps. I’m glad you like Patrick Lawinger’s work. He’s a good guy.
Well, the obvious one would be Ptolus, but I don’t know how useful it really is.
Back in the day, White Dwarf ran a series of articles on Marienburg, a city in WFRP; each article took a street or square, and described the notable buildings and residents in that area, leaving plenty of space for GM additions too. Shortly afterwards, Games Workshop topped publishing WFRP, and by the time the actual Marienburg sourcebook came out from Hogshead, it had quite a different, and in my opinion inferior, format. I’d imagine that everything could be dropped in to an existing campaign too, to be used as generic locales.
Going further back, the same magazine ran a set of articles on a D&D city called Irillian. The format was similar to the later WFRP stuff, but it was also tied to a small campaign, which worked well to introduce the locales, factions and personalities of the city, so when the provided plot was done with, the GM had plenty of information to create their own Irillian adventures.
While I think Ptolus is a pretty sweet city book and setting, I don’t find it to be that great of a sourcebook for adding flavour to an existing city.
That said, I need to go through my ancient White Dwarves to find thos articles.
Irillian is in the really early ones, #42-47ish. Marienburg was in #118-135, roughly.
This is really great stuff. Thanks for your recent series of posts. I have some of the items previously mentioned. Additionally: (1) For a really big city, check out Oathbound: Domains of the Forge. Not sure how useful this is for most of us, unless it actually gets used as a campaign setting. It does contain a casserole recipe; (2) Cityscape (D&D 3.5)–I find this book very frustrating as where I want details, they provide summaries and where I would want less, they give more; (3) The old time Judge Guild Ready Ref sheets, which can be purchased as a PDF. This was my DMG for a while in the 70s before the DMG was released. It has some interesting urban tables and encounter ideas, but less on building an urban campaign setting. It might give a nice counterbalance to “City Works.”
My non gaming books include “Life in a Medieval City” by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies (which I wouldn’t site in a doctoral dissertation, but its a quick read) and “Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium” by Jonathan Harris.
Oathbound was a really fun campaign setting. I ran a game focused primarily around the giant desert part of the game (Arena) and the huge city built up on the ruins of at least a million years of older cities. Pretty awesomely huge. Of course, now I can’t remember the name of the uber-city.
@dysonlogos: The City of Penance. Uber is an uber understatement.
The Cartographers Guild link is broken – here’s a more recent one:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2844&highlight=creation+depiction