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.