City Builder Introduction
Following is the Introduction to the Skirmisher Publishing LLC's best-selling sourcebook City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities. It is available as both a single book and as individual thematic volumes, as described below.
Characters in a typical fantasy role-playing game setting spend much of their time trudging through teeming wilderness, exploring forgotten ruins, and risking the hazards of subterranean dungeon complexes. Before and after such adventures, however — and sometimes even during them — characters often visit a wide variety of places to buy and sell weapons, armor, and other equipment; consult with or hire mercenaries, tradesmen, scholars, and various sorts of specialists; and participate in training and other activities related to their vocations.
The various types of communities where adventurers perform these and other functions is the subject of this book. It has not been written with any particular game system in mind and is intended to be useful for Game Masters building a wide variety of ancient, medieval, and fantasy communities.
In many game campaigns, visits to such communities and the essential places within them are often given short shrift, and dispensed with in the most perfunctory way. Not every visit to such non-adventuring venues needs to be played out, of course, and it is perfectly appropriate that many not be. Periodically roleplaying visits to various essential places, however, can serve a number of useful functions.
Communities of various sorts often serve as the starting and ending points for all sorts of ventures, and uncounted parties of adventurers have begun and ended their quests in the marketplaces and taverns of the villages, towns, and cities of the game world. Communities themselves can also serve as locales for exploits of all sorts, especially those involving skill use and roleplaying rather than battle, with encounters and characters much different than those typical of the usually more-dangerous wilderness and dungeon environments. Even campaigns encompassing long overland travels or voyages at sea will likely involve occasional stops at settlements or ports to obtain supplies and services beyond what characters in a party can carry or provide for themselves.
Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes a campaign from an unrelated series of dungeon crawls can be the downtime between adventures. Many parties will return again and again to a well-established base of operations, a place where the adventurers can heal up, resupply, and train. Providing a detailed community in which to perform these tasks establishes a sense of continuity, provides a stronger rationale for player characters’ progression in competence and ability, and helps tie together adventures into a cohesive whole. Game-world communities are, unfortunately, often not as interesting or unique as they could be, and the intent behind this book is to provide Game Masters with a resource for making the communities in their worlds more plausible, memorable, and exciting.
Visits to places that have been given interesting details and added dimensions can reinforce the feeling that the characters live in a real, vital, interconnected world. This will seem especially true if various fundamental places and the people associated with them are affected by the same sorts of factors present in the milieu as the player characters are.
Finally, Game Masters can often use communities and the relevant places within them both as locales where player characters might meet non-player characters who might be useful to them or otherwise influence their fates, and as opportunities to insert adventure hooks of various sorts.
Chapter 1: Communities discusses villages, towns, cities, and other locales and covers such things as types of communities, regional and racial influences on them, and the sorts of calamities that can affect them and their inhabitants. This chapter’s section on “Physical Characteristics of Cities” contains some material derived from Wizards of the Coast’s v.3.5 System Reference Document, which is used under the terms of the Open Gaming License. Content in each of the other 10 chapters in this book is completely new and original.
Chapter 2: Craftsman Places explores the locations associated with people who make things and to which characters must frequently go when they need to purchase or commission armor, weapons, clothing, and any other kinds of custom-made or special items. Places it covers in detail include Armories, Arsenals, Blacksmithies, Carpenters, Clothiers, Glassmakers, Jewelry Shops, Leatherworkers, Sculptors, and Stonemasons.
Chapter 3: Entertainment Places visits the locales to which people in the game milieu may go for leisure and recreation. Specific places of this sort that it covers include Carnivals, Menageries, Museums, Parks, Racetracks, and Theaters.
Chapter 4: Professional Places discusses institutions that characters might need to visit in order to advance in their vocations, or to which others might need to go for information or various services. Specific places of this sort described in this chapter include Guildhouses, Hospitals, Mages’ Lodges, and Training Halls.
Chapter 5: Tradesman Places examines places occupied by various sorts of specialized individuals that player characters might periodically need to visit. Specific places described in it include Apothecary Shops, Breweries, Lumber Camps, Mills, Slave Pens, and Tanneries.
Chapter 6: Mercantile Places deals with wealth in its various forms and the locales where characters go to liquidate, spend, and safeguard the loot they acquire in the course of their adventures. They are, naturally, among some of the most visited places in many campaign settings. Places of this sort described in this chapter include Banks, Brokerages, General Stores, Marketplaces, Pawn Shops, Trading Posts, and Warehouses.
Chapter 7: Service Places covers locales that characters visit to fulfill their needs for things like food, drink, sleep, and personal hygiene and include some of the most quintessential places associated with fantasy role-playing games. Such places described in this book include Inns, Taverns, Barbershops, Bathhouses, Hostels, Kitchens, Livery Stables, Restaurants, and Rooming Houses.
Chapter 8: Scholarly Places looks at places characters go to ask questions of their knowledgeable inhabitants or purchase goods and services from them. Places of this sort described here include Academies and Colleges, Alchemists, Fortune Tellers, Libraries, Scriptoriums, Scrollshops, and Wizards’ Towers.
Chapter 9: Religious Places describes locations characters can visit to fulfill various spiritual needs, meet with the people associated with them, or try to commune with the gods or their agents. Such places described in this book include Cemeteries, Monasteries and Convents, Shrines, and Temples.
Chapter 10: Governmental Places examines sites associated with and controlled by the ruling powers of a community or state. Characters might decide to visit such places for any number of reasons, but might also find themselves summoned or unwillingly taken to some of them. Specific places of this sort described in this book include Audience Chambers, Barracks, Guardhouses, Harbors and Harbormasters’ Offices, Jailhouses, Manors, Municipal Courthouses, Palaces, Prisons, and Workhouses.
Chapter 11: Underworld Places describes those venues associated with criminals and the seamy underside of society. Places of this sort that adventurers might visit for business or pleasure include Brothels, Gambling Dens, Pit-Fighting Rings, and Thieves’ Guilds.
Overall, the intent of this book is to provide Game Masters with concrete information about how to create communities and places within them for use in their own fantasy roleplaying campaigns and to inspire them to develop places that are believable, colorful, and exciting for their players’ characters to visit.
City Builder has also been written so as to be fully compatible with the various existing Skirmisher Publishing LLC OGL print and electronic publications, including Experts v.3.5, Warriors, and Tests of Skill v.3.5.
