I tend to run my fantasy games with more modern cleanliness ideals. I don't really care for my characters having to dodge buckets of crap getting thrown out of upper story windows. Even my WFRP games are like this.
The only time I really deal with it being really nasty is if the players are going into a sewer or similar situation.
Dirty and gritty. I tend to think of Lankhmar or even EGG's Greyhawk as described in the first Gord book (i.e. pretty damn seedy) when I think of fantasy cities rather than Minas Tirith.
Quote from: danbuter;640685I tend to run my fantasy games with more modern cleanliness ideals. I don't really care for my characters having to dodge buckets of crap getting thrown out of upper story windows. Even my WFRP games are like this.
The only time I really deal with it being really nasty is if the players are going into a sewer or similar situation.
Depends on the city, TBH.
Some I want to have a clean, upkept, and tidy demeanor and others I want to be filthy, rundown, and seedy. It all depends on the character of the individual city and how it fits into the setting.
Dirtier than modern cities, but I'm sure much cleaner than real life medieval cities.
Lived in.
Depends on the neighbourhood. If you're right next to the meat market with livestock strolling back and forth all day and blood and entrails gushing forth out of the slaughterhouses it's completely foul. If you're on the street where the great and the good maintain their townhouses (merchant princes, nobles who maintain a home in the city to use when they have to attend courtly gatherings, that sort of thing), it's going to be kept clean and if you're making the place untidy (either by your activities or by your presence) you'll be asked to hustle along.
Depends on the city, some places are cleaner than others. In my current High Valor game they're in the city of Mohrn, attached to the keep at Thayn Mohr (the latter which the players saw collapse last session with the Dragon Gluum, escaped.) Its pretty ragged, but fairly clean for a no-paved road fishing town.
Quote from: Technomancer;640694Dirtier than modern cities, but I'm sure much cleaner than real life medieval cities.
This way.
Filthy dirty, a brothel on every streetcorner.
Oh you mean sanitary-wise? Depends.
Quote from: Black Vulmea;640695Lived in.
That's probably closer to what I'd say, rather than "clean" or "dirty". No modern assumptions or conveniences (concrete sidewalks, public restrooms,) but the better places do occasionally use a scrub brush on a long pole to give a building a quick wipe-down. The more squalid parts of town may have people tossing the contents of chamberpots out into the street, but I don't normally call for dodge rolls. You have to be cursed/already having a bad day/have low Dex, Wisdom, *and* Intelligence before I'd do that. Presumably, people in medieval environments know how to avoid routine inundations of filth.
It depends on the race.
Elven and dwarven cities are really clean. Elves because they are naturally clean, dwarves because they build high tech sewers and water distribution systems.
Humans are the stinky ones, yet if its high fantasy they may adopt some of the systems from elves and dwarves.
I totally read this thread as "Are your fantasy titties dirty or clean?"
-clash
Quote from: flyingmice;640769I totally read this thread as "Are your fantasy titties dirty or clean?"
-clash
Still a rock star at heart, eh Clash?
Most of my fantasy cities have packed earth streets, so I guess that qualifies as 'dirty'. They all handle waste in different ways, but how they do doesn't factor into play often. I describe things in the game from the character's point of view, so the filth of a city might not even make an impression on characters who are city-folk, as they will have trained themselves not to notice such things (unless they make a living from such things).
I did once run a game that featured some scenes around an open-pit garbage dump outside of city walls that had corpses mixed in with the rubbish - It was where foreigners were buried, and a lot of foreigners were dying at the time. It was inspired by something I saw in a documentary about La Paz, Bolivia.
Quote from: Thalaba;640775Still a rock star at heart, eh Clash?
Hey! What can I say? Groupies will be groupies! :D
-clash
It varies by system and setting. Using the D&D default, they're clean across the board due to the active intervention of magic-using institutions (religions, for the most part, with wiser wizards pitching in).
They are not going to be as clean as modern cities, but it depends. If I have a city modeled after Rome or Carthage, they will have things like baths, sewer systems and toilets that flush out of the city. They will still have plenty of grime and poorer sections are probably going to be dirtier than others. A setting with magic might have even more solutions to the problem.
The thing is if it just a dirty world wherever you go, that is simply part of the pcs everyday experience, so I wont mention every smelly horse or pile of sewage they encounter.
Clean. I've always thought fantasy cities would be more like Roman (or other ancient ones) than medieval.
I mean, it's not like it's a particularly new technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet
Depends.
Current game is pretty clean. city is build of stone with stone streets and a bunch of peopel paid to keep it clean.
The dirtiest was a city called Durba in a game I called Mud! because it rained constantly and the streets were earthen so if you weren't on the slippery wooden walkways you could forget running... I was going for a wild west/Kurosawa kind of a vibe
Dirty if I'm going for a Medieval to Early Industrial feel.
Ancient and modern-day stuff may be dirty or clean, depending on what I intend to do with it. The capital of a mighty empire may have stone-paved streets and acqueducts, while a decadent city-state may have pigs on the street eating sewage thrown out the windows by its denizens.
Depends on the culture, level of technology and or magical availability.
There will be dank dirty hovel of a city for the seedy adventures. Then there will be the marvels of the world, with functional plumbing, well maintained sewers (kept clean via trained Gelatinous Cubes), and dedicated magical support.
I admit I sanitize my settings to some degree.
Reason being players do not usually enjoy realistic filth.
London a few centuries ago had toilets installed in your house along the outer walls. So when you used the toilet your excrement fell out on the street. It piled up so much it was dangerous to walk over.
Then workers would shovel some of it into carts, and supposedly dump it in the river. But many would not want to walk all the way, and would dump it somewhere else in the city.
That degree of filth is kinda distracting from "My Paladin carries children from the burning building!"
So filth is there but I ease up on drawing attention to it.
They are normally dirty. What effect does this have in play? Virtually nothing. Being dirty increases the chance of picking up a disease and that's about it.
Dirty but not filthy.
My human fantasy cities are usually dirty, unless there's a good reason for them not to be.
It all comes down to emulation and what makes sense in the setting.
RPGPundit
Almost always dirty. Rural towns and such are downright filthy. More urban cities - hearts of empire and so forth - are nightmares, though. The larger the population the greater the level of filth, especially if tech levels aren't high enough to allow for things like proper sanitation systems, clean water, etc.
Think "London during the mid 1800s when monied people had to flee to the countryside every summer to escape the miasma" and you'd be pretty close.
Elven cities and towns tend to be cleaner due to a variety of reasons (most of them magical or elven-essential). Dwarven towns and cities would be dirty, but not with effluence like human cities would be. They'd be even more nightmarish for humans, though, with the byproducts of constant industry and so forth ratcheted up to even greater levels.
Orc and goblinoid towns would be the bottom of this particular totem pole.
Absolutely filthy. People have no concept of germ theory. If my players come across a city that is unusually clean they'll know there is something seriously wrong ...
'bout like this:
Quote from: thedungeondelver;642574'bout like this:
Artist?
Quote from: Black Vulmea;642728Artist?
According to the signature in the lower-left of the painting (I have a 2560x1600 image here) it's a "G. Hellqvist", and this was painted ca. 1880.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_Hellqvist
Quote from: thedungeondelver;642574'bout like this:
Yup, that's pretty good.