City on the Coast
Dak
🖼️ 37 images Surveyor
Hi Everybody,
In my campaign atm there are two major cities and there have been mumblings of going to one of them, so I thought I'd best do a map. Here is the city of Coulois, a modest city of about 6,000. It is renowned for its craftsmen and craftswomen, and its culture and learning academies.
I also love putting Easter eggs into my maps, and I'm going to claim the biggest Meta-game Easter egg in the history of RPG's on this map.
Dak
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With all my fantasy cities I always check population density. So you are at about 12 people per structure. So most would have to be multistory. Dependant if the base of the building was a family business. So four stories would be close to the average.
Mind you if you have an average of 6 to a family then a three story with a business main floor would put that to average 3 story buildings.
But if you added a whole area of buildings outside of the walled city, you'd really lower the average persons per building.
That's just my opinion on city structure and density.
What about farms? Are they close enough to count?
Assuming that the town relies on farms for all of its food, then with a population of 6000, it would need 6000-12,000 acres or 9.375 to 18.75 square miles.
I always do a little hand-waving and assume that in addition to the small number of farms close to the town or village, the municipality is sustained by many more remote farms farther out that didn't make it onto the map.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by far out. I don't take them to be far out, just not on the map. A day or two ago, I decided to try and make a town realistic. I forgot how many people, 400 maybe. I made the map to have the town and the farm land. The town took up a tiny little corner with most of the map being farms. It was not a very interesting map, so I stopped. Maybe on a regional map showing the amount of farm land is a good idea, but I don't think it works well for a city map.
I guess a lot of the logistic would stem from your governmental systems. Whether or not they include rural population into the city population.
Never thought about how many farms and acreage it would take to supply populations, so that was a great point by Julian.
Even if you included 1 000 farmers, farmhands and their familes, your building density would be about 10 per.
If you exteneded your map and put in 200 houses it would be perfect. I do like those cities that spill out side of the walls, showing that the cities growth exceeds it's ability to protect them all with a wall.
You could also keep that fact hidden from your players. Send them on a quest, and they have to go outside the walls of the city into the less well to do areas. That could be an awesome twist. Have them arrive dock side so they don't even notice the other part of the city.
There are many stories (and adventures based on them) that have lots of content outside the city walls. For example Mistborn, Murder in Tarsis (I think this is the one. If not, Murder in Halruaa.), or anything in Baldur's Gate. This is one of my favorite twists on the standard adventure/plot.
I have not read those two....Murder in Cormyr is one of my fav realms books, I read it every other year. (I have the whole FR collection)
Dak noted: In my campaign atm there are two major cities and there have been mumblings of going to one of them, so I thought I'd best do a map.
Well, if that isn't the catalyst to have them go visit the OTHER city, I don't know what is 😉!
Hilarious.
1000 percent this is going to happen. Hopefully you described the cities to look alike, so it can be either city!
Don't you just know it, Wyvern?
I could articulate the map north/south and change the names 90 degrees. Ta Dah a new city.
We played today and I heavily sold the city as the place they may need to go for the info they are after, so fingers crossed.