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The idea of a ultralopolis built by air, fire, Earth & water elemental monarchy in which the goal is to fuse the elements into a paradise......would it be a tropically shaded paradise of crystals? 🙃
19:00 minutes in about ripping off travel guides, I use the magazine " Better Homes & Gardens," and other house floor plane magazines to run haunted houses with. Or front door to back doors from one house to another to create mega dungeons with.
I like the idea of "roll a different die type for each faction, and see which numbers match", but if I was going to implement it, I would be tempted to reverse the order of die types. Powerful factions (government, powerful temples, primary mercantile concerns, etc.) get a d4, while less consequential factions (street gangs, minor guilds, etc.) get higher die types. This reflects the fact that the movers and shakers of the city interact with great frequency, while those of less import are less likely to rub up against other factions.
It seems like Web DM comes out with content just as I need help with the exact point they are discussing. This is by far my favorite channel for improving my games as a DM.
@@dallenmeche6587 thanks for the reply, Matt is also great. His most recent video on when to say no is a breath of fresh air. It was nice to have someone with his experience and clout acknowledge that it is ok for the DM to push back against player ideas and ask for compromise when those ideas would significantly alter the tone, world, or plot of the game.
I’ve listened to this on the Patreon podcast three times. One of the best conversations I’ve listened to on D&D in a while. Or maybe I just want to focus on urban campaigns more lately. It’s a very good discussion.
I recommend cool names for the districts. Instead of the "Mages District." You could call it something like "The Sonorous Spires." and have it be a bunch of stone shaped spires formed by Geomancers. Or instead of the "Market District." call it "The Gildstreets." so named because of the sheer amount of money that changes hands each day. Cool district names make for more interesting cities, they give em some character.
It was mentioned in a previous episode when they were talking about a city they built inside of a dead God and I think they also mention Guardians of the Galaxy
When you mentioned a bar for wizards, the name that popped into my head was The Wipsy Tizard. Now I want to make a counselor sphinx that gives advice on people's problems. I liked Pruitt's suggestion of joining a fight out of spite for one party and not specifically to help the other. Great advice and tips, as always.
@@josiebianchi3481 I share nothing online I dont want stolen. By all means use it! In my current game the party has one of the Flowers with them, the dice have consistently determined that she isn't great in combat but with 20 cha, Actor and specialization in deception and performance shes a brutal infiltrator (they may get to use her soon lol)
"Welcome to the five courts of assassins." He gestures to the chairs assembled around a circular table. "There sits the lord of blades, there's the lord of arrows, and there sits the maiden of flowers. Next to her is the seat that bears the lady of snakes, and there..." He stops at the last seat. "Well. We don't really associate much with the lord of the barbed phallus."
I love building the city through many sessions as the PCs make allies and enemies, require services, hear rumors or need to seek out information or items. But, even more than building the city, I love it when the adventurers make contacts with NPCs and have an effect on the city with regards to business or politics. Great conversation, as always. Well done!
Here's a quick map mking trick I learned that can scale up to a city: 1) draw a tic tac toe board, 2) draw a Tetris piece in the middle of each of the 9 squares, these are your 9 encounter locations. Now add one more tetris piece in any square you want that is your boss battle location. 3) draw the 'correct' path that leads from the starting point to the boss battle, this is your 'main path'. Make dead connections off the main path to make sure characters can reach each location and some will be dead ends. 4) Skin, scale and describe as appropriate.
As for Travel Guides, I wanted a city that was atop a plateau. I did some googling and found "Civita di Bagnoregio" in Italy and fell in love with the layout. The city is gorgeous. It's a HEAVY tourist destination. I yoinked down the maps and rough ideas of what buildings were what and have been using it for the last three sessions. It's got all these cool narrow winding roads and has this "old village" feel to it. Go to Google Street view and look around the town, it's amazing.
Guys, I just want to say that I've yet to see a video of yours that I didn't enjoy thoroughly! These longer ones are definitely my favorite. I'm a trucker and y'all keep my (probably) ADD brain sane on the long runs that make up my job. Míle buíochas!
Holy shit, the discussion of the firefighter factions being the ones involved in the conflict, but their patrons have only a vested interest in their success, made me imagine it as a kind of cold war. You can just keep zooming out, faction by faction, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, nation by nation, and you'll find the same interplay of power politics being acted out on a larger and larger scale. Those who are involved in a conflict, and those who have a vested interest in each side's success.
I think I may have made some of my cities too interesting. Players are like, "We will stay here" it has kinda turned into a urban campaigne. Im running more of a "sandbox" game.
I am surprised it got to 36:00 before sewage was discussed. That is where I begin all city development. City builders. D&D. War. Everything is based upon food intake and outtake. No food. no persons. no sewers. no food. Just like Irl, always make friends with the people serving your food and those cleaning it up after you. because they hear everything as near invisible entities in society. The Honeydipper was a lucrative business in medieval times. Separating uric acids and human fertilizer for their various purposes. Preservatives such as alcohol, salts, ammonia all can be acquired utilizing human urine. You can make leathers and dyes. And then obviously the seeds pregerminated from yesterday's lunch fueled the beginnings of the science of botany. Nitrogen for soils... And if you let it sit and rot you get all sorts of plagues and disease outbreaks that could render the Cleric structure of your city overwhelmed...and now I somehow made it back to 2020. sorry guys.
My favorite method for Creating a quick random city is draw the shape you want square circle ect. Pick a general theme so commerce capital small ect. Grab dice assigned ideas to different colors so greens are temples red is criminal establishment. Blue is political ect. Number of dice indicated a how strong or powerful a given location might be. So a 1 green is maybe a minor cleric feeding the people. While a 12 is the main temple of a god ect. Generates a good scope for a city pretty quickly
Some ideas on campaigns in The Big City: Develop a make-sense table for your PCs who will INEVITABLY say: "I duck down an alleyway." As a DM, that is a big challenge in a city, actually. What if there are NO nearby alleys? Is your map going to be so detailed as to include them? If no alleys, what do the residents do with their garbage, etc.? Have a "I duck down" table for each city district, if necessary. Trust me - it really helps and adds some randomness for you to enjoy as a DM. And of course, for a good DM, any challenge is an opportunity. How about the PC ducks into an alley, and randomly triggers ANOTHER encounter? Two encounters at once? Also be ready for your PC's to open doors and climb walls. Do people leave their doors open? Locked? What about windows? Which buildings have balconies? Hanging laundry? Are there foot bridges? Climbable drainage pipes?
I, myself, am a new DM trying to find some players and time to play; but I must say WebDM has been an absolute gift for me with helping me out. I consider you guys to be an essential channel to follow. Thanks for all the help guys! Y'all are awesome!!
This is such perfect timing for me. Wrapping up the intro arc for my players right now, and its mostly been on rails. When we resume after the holidays, I'm taking the rails off after they're sent to the major capital of our world. So. this. helps. THANK YOU
@@WebDM loved it. Comparing it to human anatomy helps a lot. My custom world is based on the colonial philippines, so there's a lot here to lend to the idea of districts and the coming and going of different groups, migrant workers, etc. My players are dealing with the spread of a magical disease, so this helps me question how will that work in crowded areas, what conflicts come up between the districts and social classes? It also helped me link how this can connect to an arc after this- what outside forces are influencing politics and unrest in the city? Do the players venture out to deal with that, or do they hunker down and deal with the immediate problems? We'll see soon enough! Thank you so much for your content!
One of the major cities in my D&D world is called the Blue Coast. I created it in a game called Kingdoms and Castles. It's a nice little game for building cities and it's about $15 on Steam. I recommend it for anyone who wants a fun way to build a city and doesn't want to do a lot of work. Another perk to the game is it has randomly generated names for all the people living in it, so you can just use that if you want to! It definitely helped me a good deal in my last game I ran.
The first thing I define with any city in a campaign is: Why is it here. What function does this population center have in the campaign. Is it a hub of travel or trade? Is it an transition point? A major port or the point where a highway meets a border? Is it an industrial center? The hub of a region full of precious metal or gemstone production? Why are these people gathered in this place and what is the focus of their lives? There should be no generic cities, each should have their own character and you should feel that purpose in everything that happens in that City. Yes this town has great brothels and a market where you can buy just about everything but what makes it different from the other half-dozen cities in the game? I also write a solid paragraph about how this city came to be and what it's endured in it's history. This is what ties this city to the world in a way that makes sense. Next I define the rulership of the City, not always the Noble that rules the area but the decision makers that regulate the market and abdicate the rules. Are they skilled? Incompetent? Are things getting better or worse for their efforts? Are they draconian? Or skeezy? Do they hire subordinates that are competent or those that tend to kiss their ass? This is how I determine how the city acts around the players. Next what features are unique about this city? Are there crafts or goods that are very cheap here? Are there aspects of the city that are restricted to a specific caste? Is the city divided unusually with travel restrictions? Is there an underground for light-sensitive creatures? Are there racial slums? Are there districts dedicated to industry like the Fishing Docks or the cloth dying district? Are the town guard magically powerful or able to detect lies or any other unusual feature? If my players go a few months without visiting this town and it comes up in the campaign again these are the things my players should be reminded of about this city. Next I identify locations players will be interested in. There may be a dozen taverns in a large city but there's only two that matter to the players, The info tavern and the party tavern. There's going to be one tavern or tea shop or squid-fry restaurant where the bartender has quiet conversations with patrons or that shadowy finger holds office in a corner, where you go to for news or information. And you need the big drinking hall where Bards are always in line to play with the cute flirty bar maids and the perpetually happy bartender. The prices are high here but the food is AMAZING. You can't afford this place when you're scraping and when you hit it big this is your first stop. This is where you meet your rich patron or quest giver. I always have a land-mark type location that makes the city district, a fighting pit, or a market district for magic items and it always goes back to that purpose of the city, this isn't a defining feature of the city but something defined by it, a thing that couldn't be anywhere else in the world. And I'll have something like this in just about every town or hamlet. Players like something like this that's a hand-hold for remembering locations. I usually put a unique "character" shop in any settlement in my game. Just a named-shop that has a little more character than others and sells something cool the players may want. Every location in a setting always has an named NPC with some character written in and ideally some abstract motivation for what they want and what might motivate them beyond just their business or posting. Lastly I create a cast of characters that will make your visit to the city more fun, bawds, harlots, fops, bullies, theives. I always define the guard captain because my players will always have a run-in with the law. I do my best to make these characters unique. These characters should be invested in the city, involved with a larger organization, not random agents. So if the players have conflict with them, it's not just someone they beat up, it's a conflict they have to deal with in the city. These characters may have plot hooks or just moving motivations that would encourage them to work for or against the players.
21:18 "Sweet basilisk meats and cockatrice hot wings" That is why we play this game, folks. Edit: All organic basilisk meats with no added artificial basil.
I just recently shared this with my buddy who is running an OWoD Dark Ages, Masquerade game. Tons of good information here. I like how y'all focus on the "why" the city is there; it's essentially a story element, or as y'all say, it's almost a Character in and of itself.
WAIT, I THOUGHT THIS WAS AN OLD EPISODE I was literally JUST researching medieval Italian city-states (Venice specfically) and got this as a suggestion and thought I had definitely seen it before but a refresher would be great. But holy crap, what perfect timing lmao
Watching this is making me want to design a campaign and city where each district is built around a school of magic, and each district is capped by a tower in the inner ring of the city that houses that guild's arch mage...
I LOVE real cities with the serial numbers off. I have one party in New Orleans (with a hill based on Geneva's old city), another in Aberdeen, and I regularly use Grado and Venice as locations. At some point, I'll need to put up an adventure in Kinshasa, which has wild looking geography if you ever get to visit.
I am about to run an Urban game, and it will be my first time DMing a full adventure. I had really hit a low point in my writing and afraid I was going to have to scrap the idea. Thanks to this and the Mystery videos, I'm back on track and more excited than ever. The long-form content is really helpful.
Some of the best tools to build cities that you probably already own: 1. The Guild Artisan background in the Player’s Handbook has a d20 list of professions. Use this to create a bunch of shops. 2. The group patrons chapter in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Mine this chapter for the "powers that be" in the city. Then determine how the powers compete with each other.
Super useful... currently 3 sessions in to running a long term campaign, and while I had bullet pointed landmarks/important areas, the layout was a huge mess. Still struggling with scale/mapping, but just hearing other humans mention their ideas helped spark a lot of the organizational stuff, districts and so-on. Thanks!
One of the most useful questions you can ask to make a city feel believable is "why was this city built here?" You can come at it from a lot of directions too. You can start with a place and develop a purpose, or start with a theme and flesh out its surroundings. Might be for trade, maybe agriculture, maybe strategic defense, or religious significance, but people always settle in a specific location for a specific reason. The city doesn't even need to actively serve its original purpose either, it could be an ancient city from a long dead culture that has been settled again,
The handful of locations advice is so profoundly important that it really is the basis for all you need when running a city campaign. I like to take it one step further. Pick a tv show you want to base the overall tone of your campaign on. Then pick the five or six major locations that show up over and over on that show. Start writing down combat and non combat encounters that can happen in each of those places. Marvel's hell's kitchen shows = courthouse, abandoned building, enemy faction's drug filled warehouse, police department, dive bar. Law and Order = courthouse, docks, loading bay of a trucking company, fish/butcher's or other outdoor market, police department, back alleys, CEO's office, boutique or high end gallery business. Buffy the vampire slayer = nightclub, back alleys, sewers/caves, graveyards (have 5 or 6 of these alone), abandoned warhouse/factory, gothic mansion, school. Once you have your main locations and about 10 to 20 events for those locations you then have enough random encounter tables to fill in the gaps between whatever over arching plot you want to throw at the party.
Geezer here.... LOL.. That intro described my settings greatest city to a tee. Basically its a human colony/arcology that was indeed built with earth elementals, magic and yes bards are key. They kept the colonists from going looney tuns along the way. Game on.
@@leem4386 Thanks for the encouragement. It seems everyone is interested in broken/dark world dystopia these days. I think a mega city with almost uncharted wilderness a few weeks away will provide more than ample opportunity for adventures.
I'll never forget when my DM running Out of the Abyss told us about a "Deep Gnome City" and I instinctively said "WE DEEP GNOME CITY. WE DEEP GNOME CITY ON ROCK AND ROLLLLLL"
As someone running an urban campaign (For two different groups!) this is good. I've already had Wintercrest as a working city for a long time and I love it
The PERFECT episode for my game tonight! 6 games into a magical noir mystery homebrew game set in a Silverymoon that I've fleshed out and mapped into distinct districts and neighborhoods, all with a mapped-out political and economic structure that can be seen and interacted with, set a few centuries past the contemporary timeline where advanced arcana-powered technology has only just begun to flourish in Faerun. Giving my players a lot of depth for their characters and their stories that are woven into the settlement and surrounding area and they are diving right in! And you guys are always in my ear during prep sessions! Thanks for all you do!
This is a great video... I tend to run high exploration games around my world, but I am finally running a campaign that focuses solely around a large city and the advice of this video has been immensely helpful
Great info! A city needs the guild/city council (same guys), bailiff (not mayor), county sheriff (constable in a town), county judge, arms merchant, & a few inns and taverns, plus a bad guy of some sort. Magic items should only be bought & sold thru a special dealer who is maybe only in the capital city. No public library, but maybe a sage, scribe, or priest with a few books. And a coroner.
Faction interaction dice, I like that. As far as wilderness factions, it makes me think of fortresses of colonizing soldiers, indigenous tribes, wizards and/or hags working and living in secret (unbeknownst to the soldiers and tribes), underground civilizations, goblin caves, kobold caves... including a sort of civilization vs. wilderness campaign where the player characters ran afoul of the law trying to get some spicy dirt on the local colony lords, and got ran out of town, but were already established enough to get enough footing with the help of the most relevant wilderness faction. This can be like a part gold rush, part 'psuedo' revolutionary war... part... Weird West pioneer campaign, but with DnD monsters, an Underdark, and other planes of existence.
In my cities, I usually assign each shop a want or need on the fly. Like the potion master wants some giant clippings for something he is working on. Or the trinket shop, is need of large ocean shells to sell. Or the black smith is trying to work on something magical, but needs a patron to Sponsor it. Or the seamstress is looking for a particular silk. I’ve always felt that you can build a cool city lay out, cities by volcanoes, or sky fall cities, but it’s the people inside it that make it memorable, the settings just makes it a bit intriguing. I also believe that players that explore within the confides of DM knowledge always have more appealing games, versus just trying to wonder for wondering sake. But ya my cities for the most part are mapped out and usually I only have about 5 cities in an entire world because the are darn hard to create.
This is a wonderful topic that intersects with things I have going on in my current campaign. I love the content you all are putting out. I've been a long time listener but finally joined your Patreon just as soon as I could afford to. Keep rocking.
I think this is now one of my favorite Web DM videos. And boy, do I think one could make a great worldbuilding game out of this. Think Microscope, but with rules focused on City Building and the City's History.
I'm only half way through but so far I'm finding this video very inspiring. I apologize if you guys already talk about it later in this video, but I would love some ideas for where and how to start a campaign in a city instead of in a small town which is what a lot of people tend to suggest.
Oooh nice to hear my hometown get a shout out! But yeah, it makes it very difficult to make old medieval streets sound exotic and interesting when all my players are from York too!
I'm running an Exandira campaign (explorer's guide to wildemount but a different continent), and I made a city that was an enclave/floating city that went into hiding before the calamity. Think a city of mages & clerics in a huge cave under a mountain. But its upside down because the mountain itself was the flying city (proctiv's move mountain esque)
Putting some stuff together here's an idea: A Major Questgiver NPC is a high level magic user who pays the characters to hunt monsters and bring them back soe alive, some dead. The mage of course uses the bodies as components in spells and potions. AND the age also runs a restaurant, where they cook up and serve all the non-magical parts of the beast, and they sell its manure to be used to make magical crops. The characters get paid in gold, food, and potions that probably work.
I've been working on building a city-based campaign - I feel like lately I've wanted a campaign where the players can really get attached to the setting over time
Having played a game in sigil. It's rough to try and Improv in a city. If you've planned and you know the basics of how your city should work and what the districts mean you can do it. But the more you plan the more you will be rewarded
I had an amazing campaign idea. Well 2 that go together but one that specifically relates to this video. The first was an aquatic, seafaring campaign. A world of ocean, islands, and archipelagos. But I plan on having a background mystery. A massive island, near continent size (though the current inhabitants only know the term through old stories before the flood), that is surrounded and hidden by a veritable labyrinth of mountainous islands, volcanoes and whirlpools and if they ventured far enough in, protected by a massive force field. If the campaign gets to grindy/dreadful/boring or if they finish the main story, whichever comes first, I plan on having a major event drop the shield and have the story lead to the island, a massive city of magitek marvels and secrets. A megadungeon that also served as a city, and thus needs to be planned as such. Worse comes to worse I just stick with having the city portion be a completely separate campaign and just rebalance the levels to start earlier. I plan on having the players expand into the city as NPCs eventually settle further inwards, having to contend with rival factions, the world-spanning Thalassocracy, and the city's own defense systems (and possible residents of unknown origin?) I got the idea for the city based on Alexander from Final Fantasy, specifically FFXIV as its lore states it was meant to be a massive city for the intelligencia to live and travel in. In the raids we got to see some of the city, but much of the exploration was in the inner-workings, legs and reactors and such. I plan on having the city itself be both inside and out the structure of the great robot, with the immediate goal being to reach the center of the city's outside, as it's believed to be the capitol building, where items of import are thought to be stored. As the defense mechanism were activated centuries ago and segregated the various sections and rings of the city, they have to crawl their way through the city and discover what still remains. And this vid will be a great way to figure out how to fully flesh out city streets and figure out what kinds of loot, locations, and items of significance could be found! As well as where people who come settle the city would want to set up. Plus it'll help me figure out how to populate the islands in the first campaign so even if my rather grandiose plans falter, I can still make that first campaign go over smoothly in terms of having cool locals.
An excellent resource for how specific guilds can is the Livery Companies of London. There's 110 of them including separate ones for Wax Chandlers and Tallow Chandlers.
I guess I should have expected a Starship reference from the guy running the Spelljammer game. Also, and I know no one asked, the game Godbound has a free version on DrivethruRPG, and it includes somereally useful charts for building noble courts, crimminal organizations, and governmental bureaucracies that help you identify who the primary power players are in any organization that the PCs might have to deal with, as well as important but less powerful NPCs. Great stuff for city building!
Talk about timing. I was pondering all last night about a city-based campaign, and when I went to start writing, BOOM this video appeared from the ether.
I'm running a cyberpunk red campaign soon and the map of night city isn't very detailed. The neighborhoods and districts aren't detailed at all infact. This video helped out a lot. I also drew some inspiration from waterdeep, after running it. It has a lot of juicy lore and what all goes into running a city, at least in a fantasy setting. Just gotta port it over to the cyberpunk future. I can easily turn magical things into technology things. I mean, they're virtually indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Especially in a world with artificers. You guys are the best!
The earth elementals take the form of spheres that the city was built on and the spheres allow the city to move across the plains because ... We Built This City On Rolling Rocks!
I have a concept of city cleaning being done by an army of wizard apprentices with prestidigitation. As they study, they learn more, and finally take on their own apprentice to teach prestidigitation to, freeing them from having to clean the city an hour every day.
Thank you for watching! Use the code WEBDM and get 10% off an annual premium Dungeon Fog subscription! Click: www.dungeonfog.com/webdm/ Help us Make the Show and Get WAY MORE: patreon.com/webdm
The idea of a ultralopolis built by air, fire, Earth & water elemental monarchy in which the goal is to fuse the elements into a paradise......would it be a tropically shaded paradise of crystals? 🙃
19:00 minutes in about ripping off travel guides, I use the magazine " Better Homes & Gardens," and other house floor plane magazines to run haunted houses with. Or front door to back doors from one house to another to create mega dungeons with.
I like the idea of "roll a different die type for each faction, and see which numbers match", but if I was going to implement it, I would be tempted to reverse the order of die types. Powerful factions (government, powerful temples, primary mercantile concerns, etc.) get a d4, while less consequential factions (street gangs, minor guilds, etc.) get higher die types. This reflects the fact that the movers and shakers of the city interact with great frequency, while those of less import are less likely to rub up against other factions.
I love this implementation.
Yoink.
It seems like Web DM comes out with content just as I need help with the exact point they are discussing. This is by far my favorite channel for improving my games as a DM.
Thank you so much Sean!
This is awesome and great. You should try Matthew colville too.
@@dallenmeche6587 thanks for the reply, Matt is also great. His most recent video on when to say no is a breath of fresh air. It was nice to have someone with his experience and clout acknowledge that it is ok for the DM to push back against player ideas and ask for compromise when those ideas would significantly alter the tone, world, or plot of the game.
Let's test this. For next week, you *really* need help picking winning lottery numbers... ;)
I’ve listened to this on the Patreon podcast three times. One of the best conversations I’ve listened to on D&D in a while. Or maybe I just want to focus on urban campaigns more lately. It’s a very good discussion.
Thank you Jeff!
I recommend cool names for the districts.
Instead of the "Mages District." You could call it something like "The Sonorous Spires." and have it be a bunch of stone shaped spires formed by Geomancers.
Or instead of the "Market District." call it "The Gildstreets." so named because of the sheer amount of money that changes hands each day.
Cool district names make for more interesting cities, they give em some character.
i'm literally in the process of trying to build a city for my session in 6 hours, lol. time to watch
Perfect!
Same boat
I'm building a city that may or may not be the entire campaign setting for my next campaign.
dont forget the continual flame street lights :-P
My players are two sessions away from making it to the main city of my homebrew campaign. This timing saved a lot of us lol🙏🏼
"We built this city of D6 rolls!"
Oh that's good too!
XD lolol
Or with how most of my groups go:
“We built this city on nat. One. Rolls!”
@@ConnorSinclairCavin see this is a good one the others were cringe 😂
@@garrettvise4732 thx for reminding me of this, i wanted to do the full song as a city’s theme
As soon as I read the title my brain said “on rock and roll” I’m so glad y’all used that in the intro, you are definitely my people lol
Welcome
For Jim's question about a body that is a city, I kept thinking about 2001 Osmosis Jones and waiting for it to be mentioned, but it never was.
I was thinking of Pathologic, but nice reference. I loved Osmosis Jones as a kid.
It was mentioned in a previous episode when they were talking about a city they built inside of a dead God and I think they also mention Guardians of the Galaxy
When you mentioned a bar for wizards, the name that popped into my head was The Wipsy Tizard.
Now I want to make a counselor sphinx that gives advice on people's problems.
I liked Pruitt's suggestion of joining a fight out of spite for one party and not specifically to help the other.
Great advice and tips, as always.
Nice
My Assassin's Guild has internal "Courts" based on their preferred methods. The Blades, the Flowers, the Arrows, and a few others
cool so i'm stealing that idea, it's going right into my games, because that is one of the coolest things I've ever read
@@josiebianchi3481 I share nothing online I dont want stolen. By all means use it! In my current game the party has one of the Flowers with them, the dice have consistently determined that she isn't great in combat but with 20 cha, Actor and specialization in deception and performance shes a brutal infiltrator (they may get to use her soon lol)
@@vallynblackleaf u should think about contribution to the whole community, they help GMs like us (younger and unwise) to become better ;)
"Welcome to the five courts of assassins." He gestures to the chairs assembled around a circular table. "There sits the lord of blades, there's the lord of arrows, and there sits the maiden of flowers. Next to her is the seat that bears the lady of snakes, and there..." He stops at the last seat. "Well. We don't really associate much with the lord of the barbed phallus."
@@greylithwolf "Wouldn't that just be a mace?"
"No, no. See, he also sometimes goes by The Lord of Gerbles."
26:05, “The Dogmatic Temple of Aughra”.... did Pruitt just drop a Dark Crystal reference? Solid.
I love building the city through many sessions as the PCs make allies and enemies, require services, hear rumors or need to seek out information or items. But, even more than building the city, I love it when the adventurers make contacts with NPCs and have an effect on the city with regards to business or politics. Great conversation, as always. Well done!
Thanks Wally!
Here's a quick map mking trick I learned that can scale up to a city: 1) draw a tic tac toe board, 2) draw a Tetris piece in the middle of each of the 9 squares, these are your 9 encounter locations. Now add one more tetris piece in any square you want that is your boss battle location. 3) draw the 'correct' path that leads from the starting point to the boss battle, this is your 'main path'. Make dead connections off the main path to make sure characters can reach each location and some will be dead ends. 4) Skin, scale and describe as appropriate.
You're always right on the pulse of what my group is up to and are constantly saving my hams with tips 😅. Love Web DM Wednesday.
Glad to help save hams!
I've been meaning to flesh out some of the cities in my homebrew world. This video has given me a lot to think about. Thank you.
As for Travel Guides, I wanted a city that was atop a plateau. I did some googling and found "Civita di Bagnoregio" in Italy and fell in love with the layout. The city is gorgeous. It's a HEAVY tourist destination.
I yoinked down the maps and rough ideas of what buildings were what and have been using it for the last three sessions. It's got all these cool narrow winding roads and has this "old village" feel to it. Go to Google Street view and look around the town, it's amazing.
I never watched a better more entertaining and knowledgeable D&D channel than Web DM. Thank you guys for all the videos you make.
Guys, I just want to say that I've yet to see a video of yours that I didn't enjoy thoroughly! These longer ones are definitely my favorite. I'm a trucker and y'all keep my (probably) ADD brain sane on the long runs that make up my job. Míle buíochas!
A brand new Web DM episode, what a perfect birthday gift! Thank you guys for all that you do!
Happy birthday!!!!
@@WebDM Thank you so much!
Holy shit, the discussion of the firefighter factions being the ones involved in the conflict, but their patrons have only a vested interest in their success, made me imagine it as a kind of cold war. You can just keep zooming out, faction by faction, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, nation by nation, and you'll find the same interplay of power politics being acted out on a larger and larger scale. Those who are involved in a conflict, and those who have a vested interest in each side's success.
I enjoyed the idea of Cockatrice beak soup, I seem to recall a story about stone soup I read somewhere...
I need to make sure I have a notepad available everytime I watch your videos. Even just some of your throwaway ideas I think sound very fun
I think I may have made some of my cities too interesting. Players are like, "We will stay here" it has kinda turned into a urban campaigne. Im running more of a "sandbox" game.
Please teach me 😂😭
That intro joke put a smile on my face.
''Built this city on rock and ro-ooooool''
So such a cheesy joke it borders on genius.
That dwarf pirate city sounds so coool! I wanna live there :)
I've wanted this episode for six months. Thanks so much!
As a person of Budapest I really appreciate you pronounced it the right way! Thank you :)
I'm always obsessed with pure urban campaigns! Doing Waterdeep, Dragon heist right now!
I am surprised it got to 36:00 before sewage was discussed.
That is where I begin all city development. City builders. D&D. War. Everything is based upon food intake and outtake. No food. no persons. no sewers. no food.
Just like Irl, always make friends with the people serving your food and those cleaning it up after you. because they hear everything as near invisible entities in society.
The Honeydipper was a lucrative business in medieval times. Separating uric acids and human fertilizer for their various purposes.
Preservatives such as alcohol, salts, ammonia all can be acquired utilizing human urine. You can make leathers and dyes.
And then obviously the seeds pregerminated from yesterday's lunch fueled the beginnings of the science of botany. Nitrogen for soils...
And if you let it sit and rot you get all sorts of plagues and disease outbreaks that could render the Cleric structure of your city overwhelmed...and now I somehow made it back to 2020. sorry guys.
A+ pun in the intro.
My favorite method for Creating a quick random city is draw the shape you want square circle ect. Pick a general theme so commerce capital small ect. Grab dice assigned ideas to different colors so greens are temples red is criminal establishment. Blue is political ect. Number of dice indicated a how strong or powerful a given location might be. So a 1 green is maybe a minor cleric feeding the people. While a 12 is the main temple of a god ect. Generates a good scope for a city pretty quickly
Great video as per usual! Glad you mentioned Blades in the dark, it really is a master class city/faction game.
Some ideas on campaigns in The Big City:
Develop a make-sense table for your PCs who will INEVITABLY say: "I duck down an alleyway." As a DM, that is a big challenge in a city, actually. What if there are NO nearby alleys? Is your map going to be so detailed as to include them? If no alleys, what do the residents do with their garbage, etc.? Have a "I duck down" table for each city district, if necessary. Trust me - it really helps and adds some randomness for you to enjoy as a DM.
And of course, for a good DM, any challenge is an opportunity. How about the PC ducks into an alley, and randomly triggers ANOTHER encounter? Two encounters at once?
Also be ready for your PC's to open doors and climb walls. Do people leave their doors open? Locked? What about windows? Which buildings have balconies? Hanging laundry? Are there foot bridges? Climbable drainage pipes?
Guess I have to watch a bunch of Web DM again :D
I, myself, am a new DM trying to find some players and time to play; but I must say WebDM has been an absolute gift for me with helping me out. I consider you guys to be an essential channel to follow. Thanks for all the help guys! Y'all are awesome!!
This is such perfect timing for me. Wrapping up the intro arc for my players right now, and its mostly been on rails. When we resume after the holidays, I'm taking the rails off after they're sent to the major capital of our world. So. this. helps. THANK YOU
Awesome!! Tell us what you think
@@WebDM loved it. Comparing it to human anatomy helps a lot. My custom world is based on the colonial philippines, so there's a lot here to lend to the idea of districts and the coming and going of different groups, migrant workers, etc. My players are dealing with the spread of a magical disease, so this helps me question how will that work in crowded areas, what conflicts come up between the districts and social classes? It also helped me link how this can connect to an arc after this- what outside forces are influencing politics and unrest in the city? Do the players venture out to deal with that, or do they hunker down and deal with the immediate problems? We'll see soon enough! Thank you so much for your content!
One of the major cities in my D&D world is called the Blue Coast. I created it in a game called Kingdoms and Castles. It's a nice little game for building cities and it's about $15 on Steam. I recommend it for anyone who wants a fun way to build a city and doesn't want to do a lot of work.
Another perk to the game is it has randomly generated names for all the people living in it, so you can just use that if you want to! It definitely helped me a good deal in my last game I ran.
Thank you so much for this video, a huge help as a new DM building a city. I love the dung Gnomes lol
The first thing I define with any city in a campaign is: Why is it here. What function does this population center have in the campaign. Is it a hub of travel or trade? Is it an transition point? A major port or the point where a highway meets a border? Is it an industrial center? The hub of a region full of precious metal or gemstone production? Why are these people gathered in this place and what is the focus of their lives? There should be no generic cities, each should have their own character and you should feel that purpose in everything that happens in that City. Yes this town has great brothels and a market where you can buy just about everything but what makes it different from the other half-dozen cities in the game? I also write a solid paragraph about how this city came to be and what it's endured in it's history. This is what ties this city to the world in a way that makes sense.
Next I define the rulership of the City, not always the Noble that rules the area but the decision makers that regulate the market and abdicate the rules. Are they skilled? Incompetent? Are things getting better or worse for their efforts? Are they draconian? Or skeezy? Do they hire subordinates that are competent or those that tend to kiss their ass? This is how I determine how the city acts around the players.
Next what features are unique about this city? Are there crafts or goods that are very cheap here? Are there aspects of the city that are restricted to a specific caste? Is the city divided unusually with travel restrictions? Is there an underground for light-sensitive creatures? Are there racial slums? Are there districts dedicated to industry like the Fishing Docks or the cloth dying district? Are the town guard magically powerful or able to detect lies or any other unusual feature? If my players go a few months without visiting this town and it comes up in the campaign again these are the things my players should be reminded of about this city.
Next I identify locations players will be interested in. There may be a dozen taverns in a large city but there's only two that matter to the players, The info tavern and the party tavern. There's going to be one tavern or tea shop or squid-fry restaurant where the bartender has quiet conversations with patrons or that shadowy finger holds office in a corner, where you go to for news or information. And you need the big drinking hall where Bards are always in line to play with the cute flirty bar maids and the perpetually happy bartender. The prices are high here but the food is AMAZING. You can't afford this place when you're scraping and when you hit it big this is your first stop. This is where you meet your rich patron or quest giver. I always have a land-mark type location that makes the city district, a fighting pit, or a market district for magic items and it always goes back to that purpose of the city, this isn't a defining feature of the city but something defined by it, a thing that couldn't be anywhere else in the world. And I'll have something like this in just about every town or hamlet. Players like something like this that's a hand-hold for remembering locations. I usually put a unique "character" shop in any settlement in my game. Just a named-shop that has a little more character than others and sells something cool the players may want. Every location in a setting always has an named NPC with some character written in and ideally some abstract motivation for what they want and what might motivate them beyond just their business or posting.
Lastly I create a cast of characters that will make your visit to the city more fun, bawds, harlots, fops, bullies, theives. I always define the guard captain because my players will always have a run-in with the law. I do my best to make these characters unique. These characters should be invested in the city, involved with a larger organization, not random agents. So if the players have conflict with them, it's not just someone they beat up, it's a conflict they have to deal with in the city. These characters may have plot hooks or just moving motivations that would encourage them to work for or against the players.
21:18 "Sweet basilisk meats and cockatrice hot wings" That is why we play this game, folks. Edit: All organic basilisk meats with no added artificial basil.
I just recently shared this with my buddy who is running an OWoD Dark Ages, Masquerade game. Tons of good information here. I like how y'all focus on the "why" the city is there; it's essentially a story element, or as y'all say, it's almost a Character in and of itself.
WAIT, I THOUGHT THIS WAS AN OLD EPISODE
I was literally JUST researching medieval Italian city-states (Venice specfically) and got this as a suggestion and thought I had definitely seen it before but a refresher would be great.
But holy crap, what perfect timing lmao
Has Jim heard about the Willow series?
Yeah we had a big freakout
Watching this is making me want to design a campaign and city where each district is built around a school of magic, and each district is capped by a tower in the inner ring of the city that houses that guild's arch mage...
Kind of sounds like ravnica
I LOVE real cities with the serial numbers off. I have one party in New Orleans (with a hill based on Geneva's old city), another in Aberdeen, and I regularly use Grado and Venice as locations. At some point, I'll need to put up an adventure in Kinshasa, which has wild looking geography if you ever get to visit.
I am about to run an Urban game, and it will be my first time DMing a full adventure. I had really hit a low point in my writing and afraid I was going to have to scrap the idea. Thanks to this and the Mystery videos, I'm back on track and more excited than ever. The long-form content is really helpful.
Some of the best tools to build cities that you probably already own:
1. The Guild Artisan background in the Player’s Handbook has a d20 list of professions. Use this to create a bunch of shops.
2. The group patrons chapter in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Mine this chapter for the "powers that be" in the city.
Then determine how the powers compete with each other.
I have been listening to this and Poke & Chill, playing a Platinum nuzlocke, and it is... the best vibe.
Super useful... currently 3 sessions in to running a long term campaign, and while I had bullet pointed landmarks/important areas, the layout was a huge mess. Still struggling with scale/mapping, but just hearing other humans mention their ideas helped spark a lot of the organizational stuff, districts and so-on. Thanks!
This is good stuff, im off to write my book, i will take advantage from these advices, you guys are the best!
Thanks for the kind words!
I'm just about to start prepping an urban campaign and am so happy to have this video TT_TT
Glad to help!
Always spot on with the cold opens😂😂😂
One of the most useful questions you can ask to make a city feel believable is "why was this city built here?" You can come at it from a lot of directions too. You can start with a place and develop a purpose, or start with a theme and flesh out its surroundings. Might be for trade, maybe agriculture, maybe strategic defense, or religious significance, but people always settle in a specific location for a specific reason. The city doesn't even need to actively serve its original purpose either, it could be an ancient city from a long dead culture that has been settled again,
The handful of locations advice is so profoundly important that it really is the basis for all you need when running a city campaign.
I like to take it one step further. Pick a tv show you want to base the overall tone of your campaign on. Then pick the five or six major locations that show up over and over on that show. Start writing down combat and non combat encounters that can happen in each of those places.
Marvel's hell's kitchen shows = courthouse, abandoned building, enemy faction's drug filled warehouse, police department, dive bar.
Law and Order = courthouse, docks, loading bay of a trucking company, fish/butcher's or other outdoor market, police department, back alleys, CEO's office, boutique or high end gallery business.
Buffy the vampire slayer = nightclub, back alleys, sewers/caves, graveyards (have 5 or 6 of these alone), abandoned warhouse/factory, gothic mansion, school.
Once you have your main locations and about 10 to 20 events for those locations you then have enough random encounter tables to fill in the gaps between whatever over arching plot you want to throw at the party.
Neat!
Geezer here....
LOL.. That intro described my settings greatest city to a tee. Basically its a human colony/arcology that was indeed built with earth elementals, magic and yes bards are key. They kept the colonists from going looney tuns along the way.
Game on.
that sounds wonderfully intriguing.
@@leem4386 Thanks for the encouragement. It seems everyone is interested in broken/dark world dystopia these days. I think a mega city with almost uncharted wilderness a few weeks away will provide more than ample opportunity for adventures.
Perfect timing! I am starting a new campaign and it is my first "non-rails" campaign. I was looking for info on how to handle cities. Thanks, guys! =)
Glad to help, Blaine!
I'll never forget when my DM running Out of the Abyss told us about a "Deep Gnome City" and I instinctively said "WE DEEP GNOME CITY. WE DEEP GNOME CITY ON ROCK AND ROLLLLLL"
As someone running an urban campaign (For two different groups!) this is good. I've already had Wintercrest as a working city for a long time and I love it
The PERFECT episode for my game tonight! 6 games into a magical noir mystery homebrew game set in a Silverymoon that I've fleshed out and mapped into distinct districts and neighborhoods, all with a mapped-out political and economic structure that can be seen and interacted with, set a few centuries past the contemporary timeline where advanced arcana-powered technology has only just begun to flourish in Faerun. Giving my players a lot of depth for their characters and their stories that are woven into the settlement and surrounding area and they are diving right in! And you guys are always in my ear during prep sessions! Thanks for all you do!
Thank you Anderson!
This is a great video... I tend to run high exploration games around my world, but I am finally running a campaign that focuses solely around a large city and the advice of this video has been immensely helpful
Great info! A city needs the guild/city council (same guys), bailiff (not mayor), county sheriff (constable in a town), county judge, arms merchant, & a few inns and taverns, plus a bad guy of some sort. Magic items should only be bought & sold thru a special dealer who is maybe only in the capital city. No public library, but maybe a sage, scribe, or priest with a few books. And a coroner.
I was literally just looking for a good city video the past few days. Perfect timing, thank you!
Faction interaction dice, I like that.
As far as wilderness factions, it makes me think of fortresses of colonizing soldiers, indigenous tribes, wizards and/or hags working and living in secret (unbeknownst to the soldiers and tribes), underground civilizations, goblin caves, kobold caves... including a sort of civilization vs. wilderness campaign where the player characters ran afoul of the law trying to get some spicy dirt on the local colony lords, and got ran out of town, but were already established enough to get enough footing with the help of the most relevant wilderness faction. This can be like a part gold rush, part 'psuedo' revolutionary war... part... Weird West pioneer campaign, but with DnD monsters, an Underdark, and other planes of existence.
The travel guide/brochure tip is really helpful
I love the idea of mephits changing based on their environment
In my cities, I usually assign each shop a want or need on the fly. Like the potion master wants some giant clippings for something he is working on. Or the trinket shop, is need of large ocean shells to sell. Or the black smith is trying to work on something magical, but needs a patron to Sponsor it. Or the seamstress is looking for a particular silk. I’ve always felt that you can build a cool city lay out, cities by volcanoes, or sky fall cities, but it’s the people inside it that make it memorable, the settings just makes it a bit intriguing. I also believe that players that explore within the confides of DM knowledge always have more appealing games, versus just trying to wonder for wondering sake. But ya my cities for the most part are mapped out and usually I only have about 5 cities in an entire world because the are darn hard to create.
I love the opening skits lmao
This is a wonderful topic that intersects with things I have going on in my current campaign. I love the content you all are putting out. I've been a long time listener but finally joined your Patreon just as soon as I could afford to. Keep rocking.
I think this is now one of my favorite Web DM videos.
And boy, do I think one could make a great worldbuilding game out of this. Think Microscope, but with rules focused on City Building and the City's History.
this video came out at the right time, i'm building a whole island with 11 kingdoms on it for my players to explore
I'm only half way through but so far I'm finding this video very inspiring. I apologize if you guys already talk about it later in this video, but I would love some ideas for where and how to start a campaign in a city instead of in a small town which is what a lot of people tend to suggest.
Oooh nice to hear my hometown get a shout out! But yeah, it makes it very difficult to make old medieval streets sound exotic and interesting when all my players are from York too!
And another day passes that I miss web dm
I'm running an Exandira campaign (explorer's guide to wildemount but a different continent), and I made a city that was an enclave/floating city that went into hiding before the calamity. Think a city of mages & clerics in a huge cave under a mountain. But its upside down because the mountain itself was the flying city (proctiv's move mountain esque)
Putting some stuff together here's an idea: A Major Questgiver NPC is a high level magic user who pays the characters to hunt monsters and bring them back soe alive, some dead. The mage of course uses the bodies as components in spells and potions. AND the age also runs a restaurant, where they cook up and serve all the non-magical parts of the beast, and they sell its manure to be used to make magical crops. The characters get paid in gold, food, and potions that probably work.
I've been working on building a city-based campaign - I feel like lately I've wanted a campaign where the players can really get attached to the setting over time
Great episode again. I drink every time Jim says "evocative"
Having played a game in sigil. It's rough to try and Improv in a city. If you've planned and you know the basics of how your city should work and what the districts mean you can do it. But the more you plan the more you will be rewarded
I had an amazing campaign idea. Well 2 that go together but one that specifically relates to this video.
The first was an aquatic, seafaring campaign. A world of ocean, islands, and archipelagos. But I plan on having a background mystery. A massive island, near continent size (though the current inhabitants only know the term through old stories before the flood), that is surrounded and hidden by a veritable labyrinth of mountainous islands, volcanoes and whirlpools and if they ventured far enough in, protected by a massive force field.
If the campaign gets to grindy/dreadful/boring or if they finish the main story, whichever comes first, I plan on having a major event drop the shield and have the story lead to the island, a massive city of magitek marvels and secrets. A megadungeon that also served as a city, and thus needs to be planned as such. Worse comes to worse I just stick with having the city portion be a completely separate campaign and just rebalance the levels to start earlier.
I plan on having the players expand into the city as NPCs eventually settle further inwards, having to contend with rival factions, the world-spanning Thalassocracy, and the city's own defense systems (and possible residents of unknown origin?)
I got the idea for the city based on Alexander from Final Fantasy, specifically FFXIV as its lore states it was meant to be a massive city for the intelligencia to live and travel in. In the raids we got to see some of the city, but much of the exploration was in the inner-workings, legs and reactors and such.
I plan on having the city itself be both inside and out the structure of the great robot, with the immediate goal being to reach the center of the city's outside, as it's believed to be the capitol building, where items of import are thought to be stored. As the defense mechanism were activated centuries ago and segregated the various sections and rings of the city, they have to crawl their way through the city and discover what still remains.
And this vid will be a great way to figure out how to fully flesh out city streets and figure out what kinds of loot, locations, and items of significance could be found! As well as where people who come settle the city would want to set up.
Plus it'll help me figure out how to populate the islands in the first campaign so even if my rather grandiose plans falter, I can still make that first campaign go over smoothly in terms of having cool locals.
I wish I had a group a guys like you to RPG with, Love the show!!
Have been playing on and off since 1984
An excellent resource for how specific guilds can is the Livery Companies of London. There's 110 of them including separate ones for Wax Chandlers and Tallow Chandlers.
This is nice timing. I've been mulling over the idea of running a City Focused campaign!
City based D&D is my absolute favorite D&D so much to do
I guess I should have expected a Starship reference from the guy running the Spelljammer game.
Also, and I know no one asked, the game Godbound has a free version on DrivethruRPG, and it includes somereally useful charts for building noble courts, crimminal organizations, and governmental bureaucracies that help you identify who the primary power players are in any organization that the PCs might have to deal with, as well as important but less powerful NPCs. Great stuff for city building!
Starship intro. Blank stare. Now the song is stuck in my head Pruitt !! Damn you !
Loved the shoutout to York. Gorgeous old town!
Talk about timing. I was pondering all last night about a city-based campaign, and when I went to start writing, BOOM this video appeared from the ether.
our scrying worked!!
An hour of web dm? Fuck yeah! Advice on something I literally need asap fuck yeah! Merry Christmas to me
I love the idea of body system as analogy for city building! Super helpful video as always
I'm running a cyberpunk red campaign soon and the map of night city isn't very detailed. The neighborhoods and districts aren't detailed at all infact. This video helped out a lot. I also drew some inspiration from waterdeep, after running it. It has a lot of juicy lore and what all goes into running a city, at least in a fantasy setting. Just gotta port it over to the cyberpunk future. I can easily turn magical things into technology things. I mean, they're virtually indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Especially in a world with artificers. You guys are the best!
Thanks for the love Dwayne!
My players just finished a long, arduous journey to a major city, so this will help me come up with what awaits them.
Did some research on Blades in the Dark. Well, I ordered it and cannot wait to get my mitts on it.
The earth elementals take the form of spheres that the city was built on and the spheres allow the city to move across the plains because ... We Built This City On Rolling Rocks!
This video is brought to by Sennheiser.
"Get that good Jim Davis ASMR with Sennheiser."
I'm so excited. I've been hunting for a video like this! Thank you
Awesome! Hope you find it inspiring.
I'm gonna be running a campaign with some homebrew cyberpunk-y rules (Technomancer's Textbook), and this video is perfect
HOLY SHIT! I'm currently building a city for my next game. Let's see how close this reflects my own methods xD
I have a concept of city cleaning being done by an army of wizard apprentices with prestidigitation. As they study, they learn more, and finally take on their own apprentice to teach prestidigitation to, freeing them from having to clean the city an hour every day.
The #1 thing that WebDM has taught me, make it E V O C A T I V E!!! 😅😅😅