Book Description

City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities is a manual specifically designed to help guide Game Masters through the process of creating exciting and compelling urban areas and other sorts of communities and places within them for their campaigns. It is a universal resource that is not specific to any particular game system and is intended to be compatible with the needs of almost any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, fantasy, or other role-playing milieu. This comprehensive, fully-illustrated book is divided into 14 sections and includes: * An Introduction that describes the scope of the book and how to use the material it contains; * A chapter on Communities that examines the Characteristics of Communities, including thorps, hamlets, villages, towns, cities, military bases, and plantations, along with regional and racial influences on their development; Buildings; the Physical Characteristics of Cities, including fortifications, lighting, and conditions on, above, and below city streets; and Disasters. * Chapters devoted to 10 specific sorts of places, including Craftsman Places, Entertainment Places, Professional Places, Tradesman Places, Mercantile Places, Service Places, Scholarly Places, Religious Places, Governmental Places, and Underworld Places. * Descriptions of nearly 70 different sorts of places, including eight created specifically for this book that have never before appeared elsewhere. * One to four Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place. * An appendix on Guilds that discusses Guild Organization and Common Guild Regulations and includes a series of tables for Random Guild Generation. City Builder has also been written so as to be fully compatible with the various Skirmisher Publishing LLC d20 publications, including Experts v.3.5, Warriors, and Tests of Skill v.3.5. The contents of City Builder were initially released in 11 different volumes and these have been combined and expanded in this unified edition of the book. "City Builder is one of the most useful city building tools to come around in this half of the decade," DriveThruRPG staff reviewer Nathan Collins wrote of the individual volumes. "Strong writing accompanies fantasy element nicely. Whether you need to develop one isolated building the PCs are set to encounter, or a city that needs to 'pop up' quickly, there is something in this set that will greatly help you.