How to Explore Cities in D&D 

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My players love the cities and villages I give them. They're all well mapped and look extremely realistic in their layouts. How do I do it? I trace portions of real world city street maps and add my own buildings. Is that cheating? I dunno. All I know is that it is fast and it works.

One thing as a viewer is putting time stamps in your videos for when you switch topics. It really helps as a reference if you want to go back to a video multiple times to listen to a specific topic. I love your content, keep em coming!

The quality of the information in your videos is the best for OSR.

The dragon in the city could be a dragon in mortal guise. This would be hidden from the players, but could be a way to introduce a particular mover or hint to a quest or something.

Traders, enslaving, undead is the plot of the 1st Edition module "Egg of the Phoenix" an Illusionist makes them look like weird humanoids and they sell them to the people of Nimbortan. Pure luck that you hit on one of the best mods there is!

Merchant worshiping a veteran- sounds like a good opportunity to add some lore about a saint or hero of the city 🧐 Awesome video as always, will definitely implement some of these ideas going forward

In the Chaosium book for Sanctuary known from Thieves' World, you get a random encounter roll every 15 minutes starting from the moment you walk out the door on the morning. The city is packed with people. Whatever you do, there's a chance some idiots are going to walk by. Most are not even going to be hostile, unless the PCs look like they're good-for-nothing paramilitary bums. You can use the other variations on encounter charts. A d12 roll for daytime, and a d20 roll at night. A different chart for "regions" or neighbourhoods of the city. Weekly city events that affect the place as a whole. Rumour tables with less obvious city information. Most cities can be traversed in less than a day. Getting someplace isn't hard, the game becomes essentially a pointcrawl. The PCs point at the city map (local city maps are not hard to find) and a few random encounter rolls are made depending on which areas they need to cross. Most of the city will not be mapped, unless the players and the DM really want to sit there and roll up how many bakers a street has. Which is what you did in Sanctuary from Chaosium. Mordheim is set in a city that is definitely hostile and hard to traverse where warbands need to move from building to building as they search a warp-torn ruined and half-inhabited place for loot and warpstone.

Brilliant- Loving the idea of roll tables for city encounters!

I got a big city coming up to run, perfect timing. Thank you!

I've been on the lookout for something like this! It's a rather simple perspective change from a GM standpoint and one I'm kicking myself for not landing on personally ages ago. I've always been intimidated at running city crawls for some reason, likely because i'm a homebody that doesn't leave his apartment much, lol. But I've been floating an idea in my head for running an adventure that lands the party in a place like the old Walled City Kowloon, but D&D-fied: small, tight alleys that twist and turn endlessly, leading you up and down floors and balconies of tightly packed apartment high-rises, with "shops" being nothing more then a unkempt dwarf in a wife beater with an outside facing apartment window open, hawking silver baubles he's smelting/molding/hammering in his living room, scorch marks and tools all over the place. Or a halfling couple running a bar in their small family kitchen as their kids run around the patrons' ankles, with the eldest making frequent trips to their distillery: a converted bathroom (or worse yet, an unconverted one). elderly elves sit on the rooftops in a listless daze for days on end, smoking pipeweed they harvest from the few plants found in this open area, having long lost themselves to this tired and compact world and recounting the "good old days, before the town lost it's soul" of centuries past to whatever soul is around. the sewers are just packed densely with kobolds doing maintenance while creating new tunnels and blocking off collapsed ones, animal messengers are seen bouncing across the laundry lines slung between buildings to pass along messages. Goblins live among garbage and use weapons and armour made from salavaged trash shoddily stitched or hammered together. almost like the area is a living megadungeon, but more tightly packed, chaotic and fluid in nature. Now toss in lots of minor magics and fantastic elements: street preachers of long-forgotten gods peddling minor cure wounds at exorbitant prices, hedge wizards selling shoddily made everburning torches that glow with the strength of a candle, thieves selling heavily diluted monster poisons mixed with partially fermented fruit juices as street drugs to anyone looking for a quick buzz while making crazy claims on it's origin, etc... Throw in gangs from different cultures and walks of life vying for power: an old orc warboss with a makeshift street gang made up of anyone with a weapon looking to prove themselves, some elves who run a tightly run russian-mafia-esque ring of corruption among various community leaders allowing them to trade in illicit affairs, etc... Toss in a few problematic parts to shake up the already powderkeg of a status quo like some newly arrived cultists looking to gain a foothold in this potentially acolyte-dense area, a viral outbreak of ghoul fever occurs in this densely populated area, an entire building just disappears and leaves a hole in the ground giving access to multiple sub-basement/underground areas, members of both the community watch AND local gang are going missing and they're blaming each other... Listening to this video, it never really hit me to run it similar to how i would a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl. I'm thinking to run it with each "hex" being a couple stories of a given city block or something, and just layer it atop itself for small patches of communities or districts. outside of specific "hex-tricts" being put aside for specific NPCs or organizations, i could setup a random encounter table and just have the PCs take "dungeon-turns" to roughly explore a hex and get a feel for it's particular vibe (which i could roll to see if there's anything of note, like i would with any outdoor hex), if they get lost in the maze of alleys and uninhabited places used as thoroughfares, as well as if they run into any local or situation.

Listening through your back catalogue has been my new comfort activity for the past week or so. This is the first new notification I've clicked!

Awesome tables at the end. I will use them for my sandbox campaign. Thank you ❤ Also a good add-on for running cities is „Cess and Citadel“ or Vornheim.

first time ever running a crawler, the players are stuck in a city where a portal to the feywild has been opened and the city is warping around it. This video came in at the perfect time!

I highly recommend 'The Nocturnal Table' by Gabor Lux for city adventures. We are lucky, in Hungarian, the Day Tables are also available, I hope he is translating it for you soon.

Doing a full city adventure has always been a holy grail of a campaign that I've wanted to try, but never had the opportunity as a player or DM. The adventure module Baldur's Gate Descent into Avernus has a surprisingly robust section on adventuring in Baldur's Gate, even though most of the module takes place in Avernus.

I used Atelier Clandestin's City Pointcrawl Generator for a huge city that I have coming up. I'm also planning on using Judge's Guild Ready Reference Sheets for random encounters there. The party is looking for a kidnapped person and the city itself is run by hostile warlords and an evil church. They are trying to fly under the radar. Should be interesting.

I live in a fairly walkable city. It's over 3 million people, so walking from one side of the city would take hours, but in general, I could walk from one district/area to another in 10 to 20 minutes. There are just a lot of districts! I think 10 minute turns are still appropriate to a city crawl game, especially for the default medieval sort of setting most D&D games use. Cities aren't going to be that large, and it shouldn't take hours to get from one district to another. Other than that, I think you've got a lot of great advice for city adventures.

This is a genius idea. Not in a hundred years I would ever come up with this. I love it!

channel seems to be steadily growing! I love it how hyped you are in the first five minutes talking about city campaigns. heck yeah city crawls!

Awesome video Daniel. Very much enjoying your channel and the amazing advice offered!

I just subscribed. I needed this video months ago when my players kept getting lost in a magical forrest!

I generally GM Modern Superhero games but something drew me to your channel. I realised how I could use this to randomise plots. This type of villain is in town to do this to this type of citizen. Very cool.

Another great video. Super relevant to one of my upcoming Metropolis City Campaign. Perfect timing.

Interesting setup i useally just make it up as i go this seems to randomly build interactions with NPCs thats a good Way to interduce new NPCs ❤

Great thumbnail as usual, makes it really easy to identify you quickly!

I love city adventures! I'll definitely be using some of your suggestions in my next campaign.

Great video! Love the idea of using passers-by llike dressing in a dungeon. When you describe it, dungeon crawl procedure works really well in urban scenarios: You walk slowly looking into the windows and the alleys and inspecting places of interest, and this behavior can bring attention of unwelcoming dwellers. I wonder if it is enough to play as a sheriff, patrolling streets every day.

Excellent video. I've always been saying: cities are the same as dungeons, its just a different ratio of threats vs. Friendlies. From a storytelling perspective to be clear.

That Walled-Cityesque illustration reminded me of something I've always wanted to try.

I'm working on building an urban setting for my next Pathfinder 2e campaign, this was a big help! Thank you!

Brilliant video! Using basic/expert to make the city come alive.

This really is a good video example of rolling for random people you meet and what they do!

Great stuff. I would love to see you apply some of the adventure creation elements in the rule book that you have done in the past to a city setting.

I'm running a game of RIFTS (Savage Rifts, to be exact) and I've been avoiding going to Chi Town because I really don't know how to do it in the game. I never thought of doing it like a dungeon crawl. Nor have I considered it like a hex crawl. This is brilliant.

Great video!

Invisibility and fly spell are so very useful in these sorts of settings.

Never seen you or your channel before. Something about the video preview (thumbnail or title or combination thereof) hinted me that when you say "D&D", you don't mean D&D by WotC/Hasbro. And this is why I clicked.

I've done kind of a point crawl with the official Lankhmar stuff transplanted to a motte and bailey castle floating in the center of the celestial sphere in my Spelljammer campaign

Damn, two different city related videos by two different dnd youtubers on the same day? Just as I'm planning for some city stuff for my next session? Well I'll be

Monte Cook's Ptolus is a great example of city exploration.

Cool video, I liked the idea of putting a sage deeper into a lost part of the city But I'm not quite sold on the idea of city crawls still

You can also treat large groups of NPCs as environmental hazard. Not even the strongest barbarian can walk around the Kaaba the wrong way round without being trampled or taken by the flow. As you were talking about the uneventful NPCs moving trough the city kind of as tapestry, I had to imagine a central square or a city block where 3-4 large streets meet with some offset, so that during the daytime or a least during rush hour, a kind of natural malstroem of people forms. Maybe it's clockwise in the morning and anti-clockwise in the evening with people streaming in and out of this or that district. Maybe it even forms eddies of some sort at corners or market boths. The same rules can apply to large populated marketplaces. Ever wandered a Christmas Market in NYC? Sometimes, you just gotta go with the flow and make a round around the ice rink to return to that sweet hot toddy place, because you just cannot move those 3 meters against the flow. And rightly executed, a party runs the risk of being separated and individual party members getting lost, which can make a whole scenario, especially when filling / compensating for player absence. Thanks for the inspirations in the video.

Another great topic and video, sir. This channel should have million subscribers.

I run a Sunday 1e Lankhmar Campaign each week, My (7) Players never leave the city, 2/3 of the enemy are Humans, This is a Thief city with Faction Gangs, a Thieves Guild, City Watch, Normal Pedestrials, and a huge Sewer system as well, if a Monster its normally found in there, the players made all human except 2 Half-elves I allowed, were about 3-4 months in, and 2-3 Level ... Besides all the Adventures Ive come up with I also have all the TSR, DCC, and Savage Worlds Lankhmar stuff for inspiration. MY Lankhmar Citie Wandering Monsters: Pedestrian (they may overhear a Rumor), adventure Party (very Small chance), Thieve (Is there a Bounty on their read or the thieves' leader want them), Guard & Bounty Hunters (Do they have a Wanted Poster on them).

Found this video in time

One confusion I had is, the undead on your roll table aren't any less (or more) common than anything else. If you're only rolling one die, each result has the same chance. If you're rolling 2 or more and I missed it, then 1 needs to come off the bottom😂

Your comparison of cities to a dungeon seems very accurate, i always play a barbarian so i avoid cities like the plague they are 🤔

Yes, dr. Banner hides here in brasil 😂 some neighboors looks like dungeons sometimes with weird inhabitants too.

The Incredible Hulk from 2008 starring Edward Norton takes place partly in Brazil, where Brice Banner is hiding out.

I concluded that cities worked best as point crawl, and just narrate the travel for flavour. There should be a hundred taverns in a 25000 person city. This just didn’t justify mapping etc to me.

In city crawls obstacles are social, not geographical. It's factions and people that you want to reach, not locations, really

I appreciate the use of older systems. Not as much love for them as they deserve these days.

To paraphrase Chris McDowall (of Bastionland-fame): The city is not a hub. The city is not a main menu.

As a Brazilian I can relate to moving through a city and feeling like dungeon crawling hahaha

I don't actually like random encounters, so I tendo to plan them more like side missions. Also, if the city is big enough, I make public and private transportation available to move through it so the plot is not delayed because the pc's have gotten lost. As an example of both points, I had the pc's, who usually moved along the city riding on a chaotic version of a subway, have a subway accident that left them stranded in a not-actually-uninhabited cavern complex under the city complete with its own ecosystem, insidiously dangerous flora, two different creature settlements at war with each other over resources, the ghost of a lovely lost dog and, at the end of it, some look at the homeless and disposessed and homeless surviving indide the crevices of "civilised" society

Are there any good City creation books? Full of random tables and events, etc. Thanks.

I go back and forth over "map, or no map". Having a map on the table damages verisimilitude, but improves player agency.

❤

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I dunno, i think if you want to keep it a little more medieval most cities are actually very very small, tho I will still this for my campaign where there are a bunch of abandoned buildings,

I don't get the purpose of treating a city like a dungeon. It doesn't really matter how long it takes the heroes to get from their inn to a sage's house or whatever. Just have a few NPCs prepped for the players to talk to when they need to (street vendors, a town crier, an official, a guard, a beggar, some kids). And have several shops handy, so you can say "you pass some shoemaker shops; up ahead are stationer shops." (Craftsmen in the same trade always lived near each other in medieval cities, for some reason.)

Around 13:40 I was taught to use a deck of cards

Is there a sub-table to randomly generate types of prostitutes?