Dungeon Bash BLOG

8-27-2005: Life in the City
The first of the two expansions for Dungeon Bash will be the city expansion. With this, you'll be able to randomly generate a city (from small town to large metropolis) which your party of adventurers can use as a base of operations. And that's not all: there'll be a bunch of new quests that take part in the city itself.
The first question you'll need to answer for yourself is whether you just want to know what kind of attractions (vendors, for instanc) the town has to offer for your party, or if you want to generate the whole city (districts, street layout and so forth).
You might think that the latter is necessary to run adventures in the city itself, but that's not true: you can generate any streets and buildings on the fly if you're so inclined. At every stage the amount of detail you want to include in a game is up to you.
Let's say you want to generate the whole city. For that you'll first generate the city's surrounding, as this'll influence the city's size one way or another. There might be a river running through the settlement, it might be a coastal city, and so on. Once that's done it's time to see how large the city is. The size gives you a number called "Size Modifier", which is used on many of the following tables.
Note that if you're also using the second expansion (once it's published, of course) you already know the surroundings and the size of the settlement, but I digress.
Then it's time to determine the city's districts. A larger city will naturally have more districts than a small one, and some districts will only show up in larger cities - no town with a population of 1,200 adults will have a thieves district, for instance.
Next you'll place any "special" (non-ordinary; most vendors would be considered ordinary, for instance) buildings, like arenas, academies and so on. These are "quest sources" (lacking a better word), and the more "special" buildings a city has, the more chances for adventures the party will find there.
All in all, the city generator is in the "alpha test" phase - meaning that it's basically me sitting at my desk generating city after city. So far it looks pretty ok, although the cities don't feel organic enough for my taste, so I still need to tweak the tables here and there before I can launch the "beta test" (asking other people to try the city generator).
I've got some exciting quests written, but not enough - many more are needed. Additionally, I've yet to figure out how exactly the quests are given, and how to incorporate the standard quests from the DB core rules. And there's another large and crucial generator yet unfinished: the building generator. And I'll still need to populate the city with vendors, guards, villains and more.
You see, there's still a ton of work to do, but this project is very cool... there has never been anything like these rules, or when was the last time you rolled up a whole fantasy city?
Ok, that's all for now. Next time I'll write about the goblinoid web-enhancement, and what flavor it'll offer (pun intended).

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