My most recent campaign is a city! My recommendations to any fellow dms building a city is to not make a bunch of specific locations-let your players fill out the map! You should focus on making factions and characters. You can never make every building that your players are going to enter, but you can put interesting characters in their way.

If there's one thing I can advise to you world builders out there: Connect your cities to the larger world! If you have something unique in your city, why is it unique to this place? How does this city get resources? How is trading going? Do they have any alliances? The best thing you can do to connect your city to the rest of the world is to have a few factions from outside the city inside it! Maybe splinters and offshoots of those places, or ambassadors or even spies... TLDR: just a few references to other places in the world just makes a city feel so much more alive and realized. It's a good way to add detail without overwhelming yourself by creating 30 new factions. So... Yeah!

The agromancer is such a dope idea hahaha. I imagine that their thralls would also make good compost. Once they've run out of steam/lost control of a zombie (idk how necromancy works in d&d) it just collapses where it was working, providing one last contribution to the farm.

Man I'm in love with your channel. I think a building better demiliches would be really awesome, right now they just feel like a watered down version of the lich but have soo much potential.

I don't know if I'm ever going to use any of these tutorials, but my god are they soothing to watch and listen to

I love the little information that is crucial for a city like where the junk goes, or where the material comes from, Also definitely going add dinning cult on my next campaign (love the idea of rich nobles having an appetite. Like a side quest in zelda botw 😅)

I’m literally building the next city my players are heading to right now and this video was perfect! Thanks for the tips!

Your interpretation of the city as an organism with its own metabolism is wonderful. I will make great use of it probably every single time i develop a permanently-inhabited location from now on.

I too am just getting to the cities of my little worldbuilding project -- your timing is wonderful, so either you're reading the SEO tea leaves perfectly or just all of us are on the same wavelength right now.

I've been stuck trying to create a fantasy metropolis for a new campaign idea I had (where the players will be the actual police solving the crimes, rather than vice versa for once!) for so long, so this is extremely well-timed!

I am literally prepping my blades inspired 5e game for this weekend, and despite the weeks of work so far, you've given me even more to think about!

Cities can get pretty intense for Worldbuilders. They're able to be their own micro-worlds themselves if they're big enough. 🙂 ~ Adam

I ADORE your resources. Thank you so much! Your experience and love for the craft really shows.

I had the same problem of my players wanting to stick to 5e instead of a Blades hack, so I feel you. I forced their hands, and after two rocky first sessions ("Please don't make me think about my character" / "Rolls aren't fun unless I'm killing shit" / "So I only get xp for acting like my character?!?") I doubled the amount of pure action and dice rolling in the third and it seems like they'll be willing to meet me halfway (as long as I don't expect much actual roleplay, lol).

Magical Industrial Revolution and Genial Jack are both incredible. Thanks for this video.

I’m conscripting a few friends of mine to help me write my book, but I’m doing it through the lense of a DND campaign to help add some randomness and break writers block. It will probably spend a hot minute in a massive city, so this video is a big help. Thanks for the informative videos!

Love this worldbuilding series. For building better monsters, I'd like to see your take on a classic monster, like a griffin or a vampire. I love what you did with dragons where you took a familiar, almost overdone monster and did something new with it

I discovered your channel recently and I wanted to say I absolutely love the content, and I really appreciate how digestible it is!

I really love your channel, and this is the first advertised product I've actually used based on a channel recommendation/ad, so I'm actually doubly grateful!

Damn, I stumbled upon this just as I am beginning to plan a city campaign inspired by blades in the dark! What a helpful coincidence

I found your channel In the middle of making my campaign and continent for the game and your vids have helped me get an idea of how it is going to work out so I wanted to say thanks

You are very well spoken and do a great job of explaining things!!! Your videos give me a lot of comfort and inspiration! Thank you!

Awesome my dude. I'm starting to really love your channel! Keep up the great content.

Always happy to see someone bringing up Blades. I'm in the process of writing for the next Blades session and I like this client/resource way of mapping factions, so I'm using that this afternoon. Cheers!

Loved this! This reminded me a lot of one of my fav D&D streams, Shadow of Drakkkenheim by the Dungeon Dudes

The dinner cult reminds me of the church of dragon communion from Elden Ring

Your videos have been a great inspiration so far. Today I've started making my own prompts and creating factions. It's going smoothly. Thank you.

Yo love your stuff so far. I’ve only seen two or three vids but I like the simplicity.

If you put together everything you've ever written for or drawn on this channel, and slapped it all into a book with some descriptions and examples, I would Kickstart the hell out of it. Just sayin. Loving the work and I hope you stay well.

Amazing video, thanks! The city metabolism idea is really useful.

Great introduction to organic, emergent city design. Amazing how relevant Wolman still is. It would be nice to have a follow up/debrief for this campaign and some of your others (maybe I just haven't found them) talking through the successes and lessons learned. As a fellow game designer once (once) fortunate enough to teach an intro to game design course, I know you've got the playtest debrief in your curriculum... Also, the illustrious John Harper seems quite open to interviews, and wouldn't it be a joy to interview him on city design or that moment when art splices into mechanics or pretty much anything else? It would be an amazing conversation.

MAAN your work is so inspiring! It feels like you are immune to the blank canvas syndrome!!!

Would love to see how you would do a constant/region map, a la I only have vague location ideas but nothing else

This is why I like this hobby. Making a sharing house rules

Under a minute into the video and just subscribed since I heard mention of Blades in the Dark 😀

Great minds think a like, I'm running a urban campain in the summer for a group and this will really help me plan thank you

I ran a couple of Urban/Underdark campaign centered around the PC's building a kind of company in a crime-dominated city for a few years during the pandemic (I ran online of course). That campaign is one of my favorites but I never mapped the city in a visual way 'cause I wasn't confident in my drawing skills. Blades in the Dark and Veins of the Earth mashed up very well but I used FateCore to run the game 'cause I wanted to keep the mechanics simple. That said, I came up with LOADS of NPCs, factions and stuff and I LOVe the city as it developed over the course of two campaigns in a sequence that took roughly 3-5 years of in-world time and included a major industrial shift due to the PCs essentially starting a magical-oil firm and developing a system for trading it. Gosh, I get excited just typing about that city. It can be super rewarding, so good luck!

Love these thank you

Where was this video three years ago when I was planning my campaign? Seriously, love your work and will certainly be stealing this

I'm glad you worked with World Anvil- I found them years ago and thought that was an amazing site, but i forgot the name of it. So thank you for reminding me!

World building cosmology/planes? Great vid, thanks!

Great video! It would be really nice to see you expand upon the mapping for cities.

Great idea to share about City Metabolism. Plenty to Digest about that

This is awesome. Been struggling figuring out the machinations of how a big monolithic xenophobic society can lead people outside to be on their own, etc cetera. Your video really helped with the big city problem.

I'd love to see your take on Gibbering Mouthers, or Squamous Spewers.

Hey can you do Teifling for the monster video, please? I thought of the idea that teiflings as ancestors of people who broke a deal with a demon or devil. I thought you might like that Idea.

I’m so happy you mentioned Dael and the Monarch’s Factory! I feel her work is fantastic but she doesn’t get as much call out as people like Colville. The city video is my template for city’s now

This reminds me how much I love Blades in the Dark as a setting (well, Doskvol).

Yooooo Johnathan Newell Personally my favorite city of his is still Hex, the gazetteer is gonna be insane when it comes out

Great content. For the city layout itself i copy old maps of cities. Like I'll find a map of manchester in the 1400s and copy the streets and rivers. I try to keep with the layout of churches, castles, the market street, etc. It works well.

Judge Dredd megacity, but fantasy. nice idea also i love your simplistic drawing style

Please continue with your videos 🤩

Necro-farmers? Cool! I have a similar mining guild in my setting. Necromancers are it's only living "employees". All others are zombies and skeletons working down in the mines :D

Dude, really great conversation!! Could you more deities from building patheons? I really loved the last video

Regarding your agrimancer: If one is looking for artwork, other inspiration or possible some mechanics in that line, I'd recommend looking into the Golgari guild in MTG's Ravnica setting. There's some considerable overlap and Ravnica isn't just full of fascinating factions, there's also an official 5e supplement for it

this video came at the perfect time :)

I see it, comparing a city to a living organism. In ancient Rome the sewer was called the cloaca. That is also the name given to the end of the digestive system of a frog in my biology textbook.

Waterdeep Dragon Heist is just “the caper for the sack of gold” but in italics

Love the channel! This is a selfish request but I love mountains and mountainous regions and I’d love to hear your take on them! Particularly recently I’m having trouble figuring out how to map a regional area with a lot of emphasis on the vertical (think cities carved into cliffs, that sort of thing).

Great video. I really like your world building series. You said that you would start Building Better Monsters, up again. I would really like it if you built better Flumphs or Liches. Very excited for what is coming up next.

Love this idea, a campaign in one setting. I wonder how it could be modified to be like a private school setting to go even smaller and change things from just stealing valuables.

Great video as usual! i'd love to see a better sphinxes video

This is timely

I mean a "boring" thing 5e offers for the question on how to feed a city in a self-sustainable way is the Plant Growth spell. All you need are enough spellcasters capable of casting this 3rd-level spell to cover the entirety of the farmlands within the outer walls in a reasonable time and presto, the agricultural yield of the farms has been doubled. The area covered by that spell is a circle with a radius of 1/2 mile, so with an area of roughly 0,78 sq miles or 2 km², which is around 202 hectares or 499 acres... I checked some sources on how much space a person needs to be fed for a year with a non-vegetarian diet of MODERN STANDARDS is slightly less than an acre (which includes storage space, pathways, etc). To achieve genuine food security, let's double that amount and say that it takes two acres instead. A single farmer can easily take care of four acres of land without help. Now Plant Growth would double the yield, of course, so one acre would then actually suffice (and for simplicity's sake the fact that the area needed was originally just under an acre, we now round up to accomodate that extra yield and the storage necessary). In 1328 Paris had a population of ~200k inhabitants and its city wall covered an area of 439 hectares/1085 acres/4.39 km²/1.695 sq miles. Paris was incredibly dense in terms of its population, with multi-story buildings being common around the time. So let's presume half the population, which is about the population of Waterdeep proper. To safely feed 100k people, you need 100000 acres of land, or 405 km²/156 sq miles. That is about a quarter of the area of Greater London and it will take a single Lvl 5 druid using two castings of Plant Growth per day 200 days to cover that area to produce these yields. Now presuming a predominantly potato-based diet, like how 1840s Irish farmers had to deal with, where they ate around 14 pounds of potatoes per day... That means roughly 2.5 short tons of potatoes per year, and an acre of potatoes can easily produce 25 tons with modern methods, so an acre is enough to feed 10 people using this method. So assuming a high yield, nutrition-rich base crop like the potato serving as the foundation of the city's diet, then the area can be reduced noticably, maybe even to half that area. That way even feeding Paris with its actual 1328 population would only require not THAT much extra land. Please note that I did some BAD math in an earlier version of this comment, sorry about that!

That typo on the card is real awkward :P

They could also send hunting parties outside of the city walls to "harvest" the edible monsters.

The dinner cult could have the motto 'Miror quid ad prandium'.

this is an old video so i severely doubt anyone will see this, but i’m currently building a campaign that takes place within a prison city where the king ships all the undesirable people and basically forces them into labor, does anyone have any tips?

I was going to ask why people aren't eating monster meat if there are so many of them outside the walls. Maybe beast meat is for the rich and monster meat is all the poor could afford. Or maybe they don't know it's monster meat and it keeps causing salt-in-wounds still mutations.

I think a building better fiends/celestials could be cool, I just feel like the possibilities to make such interesting characters, whether they’re friends or foes, is just endless

This is amazing! Very helpfull indeed and I will put this into practice, but... With what video of yours should I start? There are many! And I'm kinda new here and I feel a bit lost

I personally would love to see some more unique giants, something detached from the heavenly forces they represent. My idea would be to base it off the 7 deadly sins as I feel it adds a bit of a folklore feel to them, but interested in seeing what your take would be on these big sacks of hit points.

At the very beginning g of the video I’m just thinking ok Paris nice

Better monsters idea: better grim reapers

I've been running a game in a city for going on three years. I feel like playing on social dynamics and status has been quite fun, but not a game for people that want combat every few sessions. It's that odd feeling of only now feeling prepared once it's all almost done.

Building better beholders could be fun! I love them but they always just seem so cartoonish to use, would love something experimenting with their more alien nature. Also: kobolds!

How come your pencil is always so stubby? I tend to sharpen my pencil into a deadly point. I like to play around and draw, but my line work really sucks. I'm just curious if there is a logic behind it.

Bodies going into tombs is a waste of a resource for a magical city under siege. Build a Necromancer Officer Corps that takes the dead and leads them against the monsters outside as soldiers that don't fear death and aren't missed when they are slain as they are already dead.

I recommend becoming a writer since you can do perfect fantasy. (I'd definitely read it if you did). 😁

@Map Crow can you do Soemthing cool for a city in the sky? Like lore wise and maybe even a dungeon/adventure to go with it?

I believe this is the first time when the vlogger honestly describes the reasons for the integration.

Hey Kyle, what are your opinions on soft worldbuilding in RPGs? How might you let go of historical, political and cultural detail in your game to instead create an experience that explores emotion more than immersion- without it feeling ill-thought out? Think Ghibli, as opposed to Tolkein.

Am I missing Dael's video? I don't see it here, not a problem the search bar works, I'm just curious

I have a whole class based around eating monsters to get their traits lol

Been working an a new fantasy Blades hack of you're interested ;)

9:40 You should read Dungeon Meshi.

A couple things you missed that I think can be really interesting: 1-Think in Boroughs!!! Boroughs are VITAL for medieval cities, even for relatively small tows! Come to the Pueblos Blancos here in the mountainrange of Cadiz Province and you'll see most were cut in half by 2 distinct boroughs even back during the middle ages. Why is this so vital? well, you see, medieval cities aren't cities like modern people understand them, they're more like a federated collection of boroughs, each of which is kind of its own separate city which all just so happened to get mushed together by virtue of being on the same place. Kind of like a colonial organism. So how do boroughs work? It's simple really! Boroughs are like eukariotic cells. And cells primarily have 2 things, a NUCLEUS and a MITOCHONDRIA. That is, something that TAKES DECISSIONS (a BRAIN of sorts) and something that TURNS NUTRIENTS INTO FOOD (a STOMACH so to speak), in the middle ages the BRAIN was a PARISH, and the STOMACH was the PLAZA. (Using all caps for key words to keep track.) It's simple really! Every borough had 1 PLAZA where you could find a market, or inn, or food shop (it depends on how much food was imported and producef, how much people lived there, and how close they were to a borough with a bigger market. For example: Small 1 borough villages typically produced their owm food, so they only had an inn for travelers and people who didn't cook, a highly populous borough typically had a commercial main streat or proper market, while a highly industrial one usually only had taverns for the workers while depending on neighboring borough's markets for proper food intake), and 1 PARISH (which not only served a religious function, but also served as the place where Assemblys were called, the stairs where rulers' messangers came to scream the changes in legislation or new orders, etc. Again depending on borough you could get something as impressive as a cathedral or monastery, or something as small as a local altar. Also to note, non-religious equivalents are pretty much nonexistent (people claim Greek Agoras would fit, but they usually had altars in them, so they,re still religious) but for fantasy you could make one, like using a town hall or hero's statue if the town is atheistic, it's weird as hell but yknow, not any weirder than firebreathing wheel shaped bone golems with wheel tentacles, and I for one won't let "it's weird" from stopping me. Now this composition may look needless. But when dealing with local factions it can be vital. Not only do Boroughs let you divide the regions, but they let you start mapping how factions interact with the town. For example, lets say you have a town like my hometown, Cadiz Capital, which has one "sea gate" (docks) divided amongst "El Muelle" (commerical docks) and "Astilleros" (industrial docks), a "land gate" (the literal land bridge connecting it to the rest of Cadiz Province) which back in the middle ages sported massive Glacis (defensive structures) the "extramuros" area where people who live outside the walls reside, "la viña" (a literal vineyard, well now it's been urbanized but back then it was a vineyard), "el populo" (the place where the lower classes that worked on other boroughs reside), and "Santa Maria", which lets say is the central borough because that's where the Cathedrals are (yes, plural, Cadiz has 2, tho the Old Cathedral is technically a parish now... that's a long story), also note if this looks long... Cadiz actually has 31 Boroughs in total. I'm ABRIDGING THE HELL OUT OF THIS. Well... If we got this few selection of boroughs to form a fantast city on their own. How would it work? -El Muelle would DECIDEDLY be the rich area. It has not only the commercial docks but also the warehouses and markets where trade is decided. It is full of houses which have towers for burgers to find incoming vessels and brimming with life at almost all times of the day. It's unlikely a single faction has managed to get a hold here, instead being more of a battleground, the Burger's private thugs would beat the shit out of anyone who gets in their way, so unless they have unified under a single banner, this is where other factions send you to raid, and any job you get from here comes from the burgers or port authority. -Astilleros on the othet hand is a lot more industrial, Burgers care about their boats, of course, and so does the navy, but aside from that workers are kind of on their own, and not exactly happy about it. This IS one where the ruling faction is easier to spot. You either have Criminals, or Collectives, so let's focuse on the second: Irl it was the Cofradias (basically the medieval spanish equivalent to labor unions), but you can change it for any equivalent. Either way, whatever faction rules here does so by feeding off the workers' need for collective bargain, and as such unlikely to be liked by literally anyone, even criminals, they're a wart on EVERYONE's ass, smugglers can't threaten workers if they're there, burgers can't press gang if they risk having their ships sabotaged by the union, the army can't push them too hard without fear of them retaliating with a very poorly timed strike in the middle of a war, etc. But if they exist it's probably because they learned to adapt. In the case of the Spanish Cofradias, they used certain laws regarding religious practices to meet legally and allied with the Santas Hermandades (peasant's militias which also used religious law to legitimate their existance and later would become Spain's police force... And indeed the first state police force in European History) for protection. -Puerta Tierra: The Glacis themselves are of course highly militarized, so just treat them as a massive castle, while the rest is more interesting. It is a commercial area much like El Muelle as land trade comes through here, but far less important as the business area is El Muelle, so criminality is also considerably higher (in our case the Cuevas de Maria Moco were a warring zone between multiple Gypsy clans vying for control of the area, tho none managed to succeed), and some industrial expansion is done towards this area, namely the kind of industry people DON'T want near, which just exhacerbates the poverty. This area really only has 2 possible factions controling it. Either a police force cracked down on it, or the thieve's/smuggler's guild took over. -Santa Maria (the central borough), this is where you find the nominal powers, be it old nobiliary houses or religious entities, usually both. In Cadiz's case, the religious had more influence than the nobles due to (will continue later gtg)

Hey I wanna do more a modern city any ideas.

I really enjoy the city-building game Ex Novo by Martin Nerukar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos. It's particularly good for generating histories and timelines. When you talked about your city not getting much meat, my first thought was insect-farming. Urban factory-farming of crickets and grasshoppers is something people have tried in the real world, and it would be another way of dealing with waste, beyond throwing stuff in the river.

Druid

Casually drew the "Attack on Titan" world as a City..

I'd love to see your take on my traditional animals as enemies. I am running my first campaign in a swamp and I am trying to think of ways to make crocodiles or other beginner friendly enemies more interesting.

Five years is not very long.

Building a better Dwarf; Building a better Bugbear.

Little bit of a nitpick at 5:25. Pig meat wouldn't be rare at all in the city. In the medieval period, there were more pigs in the cities than in the countryside. The pigs ate the trash humans didn't want to eat, and essentially turned into meat.

"sorry for the long runtime." No, make your videos longer