5 MORE Steps to Create Cities & Build Towns | D&D City Builder Part 2 

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You approach the massive cave entrance beside the Beast King's keep. Locals warned you away, but the old Archdruid of the city gave you permission to explore, making you swear an oath not to disturb anything within. You walk among massive spikes of stone, easily twice as tall as your Goliath companion, each one creating long, jagged shadows as your lantern light weaves its way through. You soon realize they're growing larger, further apart, and in a single row. The earth beneath your boot quivers and the mountain above you groans. The floor begins to curve, downward along either side as you go deeper and deeper. You see stairs along either side of the cave worked into the stone as it opens into a larger cavern. You descend and find that the cavern drops some thirty feet before ending in a wide, circular cave. A massive hunk of stone some three stories tall juts into this cave and nothing more. (player with highest passive perception) You stare at the stone form and something about is bothering you, the shape is too even to be just a rock. Suddenly, as you bring your lantern closer, the stone twitches and and eye as tall as a man opens. This isn't a piece of stone the size of a tavern... its a creature's head! The pupil dialates and focuses on you and the mountain quakes for a moment before hundreds of sigils burst into silver blue fire. As they do, the creature's eye rolls and its eyelid the size of a wagon droops and closes. The creature sighs deeply, its torso wide nostrils flaring and sending a wave of air strong enough to push you back a step before falling back asleep. "Now you see," a voice echoes down at you. Looking up you see the aged, hunched form of the old Archdruid. "Now you see why no one is allowed down here. This is the Tarrasque... and it has slept here for many centuries. Its dreams are what attracts the animals to this city and the lifeblood of our town. But... the magic that keeps it asleep is fading. I need your help."

The concept of not having “good and evil” rather wait for the party to interact is something so easy to conceptualize but for some reason never crossed my mind. Thanks DC!

making the world feel lived in and real really helps out with player buy in. getting players to care for your creation is always a fantastic feeling!

Having tables to roll or just as a reference is very helpful. And including multiple ways of looking at different factions is great.

I have tried to make my own cities and have felt like it was too tedious. Your simplification of the process is helpful for me. I prefer to utilize my time on encounters or adventure hooks rather than world building

I absolutely fucking dread building cities, so this is massively helpful! Good shit, coach!

This was so much more useful than the part 1 video.

I think your channel is about to blow up.

Fantastic! I’m in the middle of creating a couple cities. I was using the S. Social P. Political E. Economic R. Religious M. Military method. Your video gave me a lot to think on and add/remove!

7:41city Looks like a growling dog, theme is on point 😁 Also, just wanted to say that I love your content, it's enthusiastic, good to digest and very informative as well as inspiring,keep it up 👍 Edit: 9:08. ... 😲 😂

Awesome advice, Coach! Citybuilding has always been really fun for me so I'm glad to have so many more tools to help me.

Comment for the algorithm Edit now that I've watched it: One thing I need to work on for sure with cities is the random encounters within them. I often neglect that part and keep to the quest they are on.

Amazing video. Really enjoyed the flavor of the city and enjoyed the stark divide within it

It's just..... The delivery feels like an infomercial

Joined! Always searching for additional imagination stimulation. 😉

For me I usally make a bunch of npcs, there are a lot of great portrait builders that work well for any human like race, dwarfs, elfs, haflings teflings, goliath, nomes. Then I take and give the portrait a name and a handful of goals and anti goals, and quarks. They want to become a barber and have there own little shop, the always try to see the local festival. (Goals) Their daughter died so they dont ever want to do anything that would hurt a little child even if it got in the way of their desire to be a barber (anti-goal) They like pizza with clumpy cheese. Quark Then if my players want to get to know a random npc better, I pick one made and use there goals as a jumping off point for. How they would act and what they would do. Does one of the characters have amazing hair, the npc may be really excited to talk to them, did one get annoyed and yell at a child, the npc will treat them bad. The goals and anti goals give me a strong anchor point for them and can be used in almost all situation. The minion of a bad guy, town guard, the queen. The I add major factions to an area the same way. and the npc can be in one of those factions or none of them. The faction gets goals and anti-goals 2 and that informs all there actions.

I'd really like to see a whole video on factions.

Amazing tips ❤

Recently discovered you through some other D&D creators. Love everything i’m seeing, but I got a question. Where did you get that shirt?

Your city looks like a dragon head! :D

man, you just double your muscle mass with every video

I never make any have factions/groups be either wholly good or bad. Instead I plan on them having good and bad things that are going on in the groups. Depending on how things go, I can easily lean more into one side or the other, but both sides will always exist. As an example, perhaps there is a thieves guild (bad side pretty obvious), but they actually do a lot to protect and help the poor in the city, who might not even be able to survive without the help.

Comment for your algorithm

2:00 I'm going to try not to harp on points that I covered in you last city building video, but I've got to say this. I didn't really bring this up as an issue in the last video as the point of your approach there was to make cities that would likely be one time use and forgotten, so focusing on trade in a non sensical way to make the city pop was a legitimate tactic. However, if you want this city to be fleshed out and something characters spend lots of time in then it's going to need to have depth. That means exports and imports cannot be so simplistic as one thing defining the whole dam place all the time. This won't work. It needs to be more fleshed out. 2:44 agriculture and beasts are not going to be found in the city in mass. You get your cows and wheat from the fields not the streets of cities. The only people buying it will be the local population, food is not something you exported in mass back in the day. Meats and dairy are usually collected in the field, then preserved and shipped into the city. Cities then used artisans to further process these goods for local consumption. 2:46 any beast taming that involves actual domestication of animals is going to be magical. There's a reason bears were never domesticated, it's literally impossible. Tamed animals are still only safe in cages or beyond reach of civilians, so riding tamed bears is literally not a thing, you have to domesticate them which is going to require magic. So this will be a subset of magical studies and pursuits at the arcane college, not it's own dedicated thing. 3:12 there's a reason we didn't use bones for swords in medieval times. There's a reason that's a caveman thing to do. Steel is better, it just is. No one buys bone swords for anything other than display. 3:27 I had another thought. Where the hell is this city located that it can collect all these materials. Like if any city could be profitable doing this, they all would, so presumably this city is located someone special, but it can't be exotic because it's a city it needs a large surrounding population to support it. This already begs the question where it's finding all these animals then. That's a problem. As for your idea, no. Medieval life was too harsh to have those kinds of considerations. You slaughter as needed. What you're asking for is a very modern and privileged perspective, something medieval or renaissance times will not see. 4:15 infantry is much better at defending cities than mounted warriors. You get less mounted troops for the same cost and time investment and those troops mobility relies on open space, something not found easily in a city. So this probably wouldn't pan out so well. Using unattended animals to guard is also an issue as how the hell do they tell friend from foe or traveler? They need trained attendees, plus they can't be everywhere, so you still need walls. 7:38 With so much forest and so little farm it's going to be awfully hard to feed that city considering that large food imports weren't really much of a thing and a population of that size lives on grain not meat. 7:46 Where do the merchants live then? Merchants live in a city, where do they live? They need to be next to their shops. The marketplace is going to be different then the general shopping area. Generally merchants lived nearby their stores, only the poorer ones lives in their own stalls. But no one lived at the marketplace, only setting up once a week or month. 7:55 What's in between? 8:10 Yeah for a city size population you need a farm area like, 10000x-100000x bigger. I think you vastly underestimated how much grain a city needs. Meat doesn't feed anything close to what grain does. 8:24 I mentioned it in your other video, but it needs to be mentioned again. Having your lord, king, or w/e close to your city walls is asking for assassination. There are too many spells available to bypass barriers. Putting them in the center with lots of barriers to overcome then warding the palace is a much safer idea. The resource requirement to overcome that is much higher, so much less potential for assassination from outsiders with magic. 9:33 how the hell is a paralyzed man able to be a blacksmith? 13:06 For a city to rely on any degree of hunting to survive careful selection of hunting is important. Those that would hunt recklessly doom the city and they would be thrown out. So hunters guild would simply be doing what was needed to be done. They're not going to be the bad guy. If anything the animal rights activists are probably the trouble makers. The city is having a hard enough time getting food as is and these people want to make it even tougher? That's unreasonable and so they would probably be the bad guys. If they're not the bad guys then hunters guild simply involves the activists to help them police their ranks and their kills. The only bad guys would be bad eggs working together to cheat the system and make extra money for themselves while screwing over hunting practices and putting the city's population in danger. So there wouldn't be a "side to take". I have other questions though, like with a city this size you need magical support. Where are your mages? Where is the waterfront for that lake, you need a harbor district. Where is it? What about Administration like court and guard. What about military, is there any district in here? There are a lot of issues, unanswered questions, and unanswerable questions. So yeah, you can smash a city like this out pretty fast, but it's believability is fairly shoddy.

Question, my setting is a lot more modern. So it features a lot of mega cities. Can you do a video discussing how to build for those? Tips like a city being built around just one trade is fine for smaller cities, but mega cities with diverse economies are more complicated.

Adventures and adventure hooks are definitely one of my weaker points. I am fine at the overall story of my game but small side adventures or things like that I have a hard time coming up with something that isn't like fetch quests.

to be honest it didn't look like your logo to me i saw a wolfs head

I don't know about you, but I am not in the habit of pulling buildings out of my butt. ;)

Nothing personal to you or your videos, I really like the videos and the tips you are giving, they have helped me through some serious writers block when Im planning a campaign. But I cant get over the fact that you kind of talk like a con artist, or a how to get rich scheme guy, I dont know why, it just rubs me the wrong way. Im just saying and nothing against you, I think is just a personal thing.

*Nope.*