City Planning Fantasy Bronze Age
Highland_Piper
Surveyor
I have not done any mapping in years so I'm finding myself rusty both at using CC3+ and just planing a massive mapping project. I'm wanting to make a adventure on the scale of Worlds Largest Dungeon or TSR's Undermountain campaign. I saw this image in a Stargate SG1 episode and was immediately inspired.
So I'm going to make three "Tower cities" that are surrounded by ruined cities and villages. Now making them to the scale of that picture is a bit much for me so I'm only going to make each one ten to fifteen stories tall (maybe more if I find it easy). To ensure they are stable they are built upon a Laccolith and the heart of each city is a Volcanic Neck (think Devils Tower but on a smaller scale). Surrounding the entire complex of the three tower cities and the ruins and farmland are a series of water canals and locks that are still filled with brackish water and nasty creatures.
So what I don't want this project to be is just a series of random rooms to fit the encounters. I want to kind of plan a city that has an ancient feel to it, albeit fantasy in origin. I'm thinking ancient Jericho, Nippur, Nimrud, and Petra to name a few. However I'm having some initial roadblocks when it comes to designing it. what width do I make the towers? I'm thinking the entire area once had a population of around 60,000. 12,000 per tower and then 24,000 for the surrounding villages and farm land. Although everytime I sketch something it doesn't have the right feel. It seems too organised compared to what you would think of for the randomness of the ancient cities.
What mapping styles do you suggest?
I made some templates in MS Word to draw out some of the planning before attacking it in CC3+
So I'm going to make three "Tower cities" that are surrounded by ruined cities and villages. Now making them to the scale of that picture is a bit much for me so I'm only going to make each one ten to fifteen stories tall (maybe more if I find it easy). To ensure they are stable they are built upon a Laccolith and the heart of each city is a Volcanic Neck (think Devils Tower but on a smaller scale). Surrounding the entire complex of the three tower cities and the ruins and farmland are a series of water canals and locks that are still filled with brackish water and nasty creatures.
So what I don't want this project to be is just a series of random rooms to fit the encounters. I want to kind of plan a city that has an ancient feel to it, albeit fantasy in origin. I'm thinking ancient Jericho, Nippur, Nimrud, and Petra to name a few. However I'm having some initial roadblocks when it comes to designing it. what width do I make the towers? I'm thinking the entire area once had a population of around 60,000. 12,000 per tower and then 24,000 for the surrounding villages and farm land. Although everytime I sketch something it doesn't have the right feel. It seems too organised compared to what you would think of for the randomness of the ancient cities.
What mapping styles do you suggest?
I made some templates in MS Word to draw out some of the planning before attacking it in CC3+
Comments
Determine a number of districts (3, 5, 7, uneven numbers are more interesting, imho), and write them down, naming each one. Ex: residential, religious, agricultural, commercial, governmental, military, tradecraft.
Now, for each of those districts, make a list of the "rooms" or area types that one might find in that district. Some may overlap and that's okay. Then convert those lists into rollable tables, dividing up the probability as you see fit.
Might also help to think of a size range each type of room/area might take up.
Once all that overhead is done, the fun part comes! Pick a level of your tower, decide what district(s) might be on that tower, and start rolling to fill in rooms/areas.
Bonus: Don't forget privvies and fountains. These are vital to any city, and many people leave them off of maps.
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Even if this doesn't work for the idea you have in your city, I look forward to seeing where you go with this, so please share as you go? This idea is fascinating!
Although, if you want to keep it in line with your current hand drawing, perhaps this months annual, Inked Dungeons could be nice.
For the overland map I was thinking Pär Lindström's The Cartographer's Annual June ’18 City Ruins combined with Something else.
If you want to divide it up, given the square nature of images and software in general, I would probably divide it into the 4 quarters of the circle, NW, NE, SW and SE sections.
Now, this map is pretty big, and if you are going for a low-detail approach here, you may actually want to scale the fills a bit. I did tell tearalum how to do just that in the bottom 6 posts of this thread