Do you have any tips for city building? Or maybe any good RPG books for city building?

And I don't mean world building, I mean modern day city building. A city with districts (downtown, harbor, nightlife, slums etc.) and buildings in those districts.

I want to use it for my next WoD game, but I can't stand those city books they make. They have usually a very bad layout. You can never guess what you are gonna read based on the chapter titles or the section titles. On top of that they need about 100 words where other games only need 20 words.

Have you checked out Damnation City for Vampire: the Requiem?

Well ... if you want to build contemporary cities, why go to all that work when you can simply steal?  Find a city with which none of your players are familiar, and file off the serial numbers.  Get a guidebook, copy the Wikipedia article, pull up the yelp.com reviews for its businesses, and there you go.

Like a Vornheim except with modern day elements?

Sometimes you can grab some nice images off of google maps, you can do a print and lay a grid over it.

Well, it certainly wasn't written with any sort of RPG-related use in mind, and it won't give you ready-made answers, but Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language is a book on real-life city design and architecture.

Chaosium had a RQ Cities supplement which did this for fantasy cities.

For modern cities, have you tried Sim City?

Quote from: The Butcher;731454Have you checked out Damnation City for Vampire: the Requiem?

Yep, but I like Block by Bloody block better. Damnation city suffers from the typical WW problems. Too many words, pretention and I don't need half of the book, because it gives me additional rules. YMMV, but I only like the example Princes in chapter one and the city of million in chapter two. The rest is just blatter to me. Chapter three and four are extra rules, so skip.

Chapter five is actually what I need. But again extra rules on districts and sites, so I skip those too. Redundant districts (slums 1,2,3 and 4) and one building districts (Cathedral, City Hall, City Court) are also getting a skip. So all in all is about 10-20% of the book useful to me.

Just checking if there is something else that is a little bit less wordy and more practical. I figured I only need six districts. Three residential (poor, suburbs, rich) and three commercial (industrial, nightlife, downtown). I could do without the entire first part in Damnation City about the Neo-Feudal society. It's a lot of words about several different subjects. I get lost in it, it gets me in the wrong headspace.

Use Google to search for images of older cities, especially ones like Bologna where the medieval part of town is still standing:



Or you can just pick one that looks cool.

You can use some of these as-is, or use them as an outline to draw your own. I've found that it's usually much easier to draw the rivers, streets, hills, etc, then place the buildings.

Another thing to keep in mind is that unless you have a LOT of free time, there's really no need to do a detailed map of an entire town, or to worry about getting the scale 100% right. Just a general layout and a scenic pic is all you need.

I found a cool city build guide in The Dresden files RPG. It is more practical, because it works with themes (wod too) and threats (wod uses mood instead). Of course the threat is always related to the theme (and the mood). A threat can be a physical threat (orcs wanna kill you) or a mental threat (find the serial killer) or a social one (the elder is denying you to feed on the best feeding grounds).

I think this is something that is usually absent in the wod. It doesn't have a lot of external conflicts. Therefor it lacks focus sometimes. It isn't always clear what to do with it. Not like D&D or even Cthulhu. Of course the social threat is the most common in most wod games (vampire, mage, changeling), because it's a game of political intrigue. But they never present it in a way that has focus.

They hardly ever write something like: "The Mekhet Primogen has killed another vampire and wants to frame you for it.". Then you immediately have a plot and a theme (No one can be trusted.) and a mood (Dark conspiracy maybe?). It isn't that black and white.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;731611Yep, but I like Block by Bloody block better. Damnation city suffers from the typical WW problems. Too many words, pretention and I don't need half of the book, because it gives me additional rules.

No, that's actually a good rundown. If a tad more negative than my own take on it. I liked the new rules and the city-building guidelines, though. The writing, well, you don't read and play WW for 20 years without developing some serious anti-pretension antibodies.

I agree that the one-building distrcits are dumb, but there's no reason you can't combine features from several in a single district.

And yeah, the Princes are awesome.

Quote from: The Butcher;731749No, that's actually a good rundown. If a tad more negative than my own take on it. I liked the new rules and the city-building guidelines, though. The writing, well, you don't read and play WW for 20 years without developing some serious anti-pretension antibodies.

I agree that the one-building distrcits are dumb, but there's no reason you can't combine features from several in a single district.

And yeah, the Princes are awesome.

Well, I am mostly glad I can actually say this without igniting a flame war. I have to admit that it is a lot better now the WW forum is axed and the Onyx Path forum replaced it. Same people, different attitude somehow.

Anyway, Damnation City is unique, but a mixed bag for me. So is Danse Macabre. The nwod books that I really like are Requiem for Rome/Fall of the Camarilla, Blood & Smoke and the Clanbooks. Outside of vampire I like the cores of Changeling and Hunter, Slasher and the Night Horrors series in general. I didn't like the first editions of vampire and mage at all. Really bland. I also like the God Machine Chronicle, but I find it a shame I still don't what it is exactly.

Travel guides?

Quote from: RPGPundit;732093Travel guides?

Wikitravel is really good. Better than wikipedia for city building in RPG's. Is am now using it for building a Chicago setting. It is nicely set up in districts and it doesn't give too much info on uninteresting residential districts.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;732189Wikitravel is really good. Better than wikipedia for city building in RPG's. Is am now using it for building a Chicago setting. It is nicely set up in districts and it doesn't give too much info on uninteresting residential districts.

Mm, I would have considered travel guides, but yeah, Wikitravel has a significant advantage: you can pull up a particular article, cut and paste it into your own word processor, and change things around more easily to fit in a city printout.