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 Get it here! This started out as a joke that I tried to fob onto Fuego Fish, but because his plate was full I sat down and fleshed it out myself and one thing led to another and I ended up with babby's first PDF.  This is a high-level generator for fantastical city-states. It cranks out traits for the culture, architecture, how the city is laid out, Fantasy Weird poo poo, and if you want to make ruins, what took the city off the map and what it left behind. It's up to you to connect the dots into a coherent narrative, so it's absolutely not a GM aid for improvising on the spot, unless you're playing Microscope or something, but that also means that every city you generate is going to be your own. No two people are going to read the same set of traits identically. I wrote this with pulpy Atlantean mermaids in mind (there's a 3/8 chance that the city's technology has a crystal veneer), but the goofiness level is ultimately up to you, and I had very little trouble getting it to work with hard SF assumptions. I'm told SWN is an especially good fit, since the setting is all about there being cultures in various states of decline and renaissance. Also handy if you want a little backstory and/or theme for random dungeons. Some example cities: quote:Academy of Forbidden Knowledge hidden far out in the open ocean, to keep its secrets safe from evildoers. The campus was lost in to flooding from an endless monsoon, but not before the dean of each school agreed to a forbidden immortalization, should the world need their knowledge again. Few even know of the existence of these Secret Sages, and no one person knows how to find them. quote:Dojo City ruled by a long line of tyrants. The citizens trained in and improved various Animal Styles to win riches and glory for the Emperor in battle, but when the masters discovered the Perfected Styles, they turned to fight their true enemy: the gods who had let them suffer under the wicked Emperors. The crumbling dojos still bear murals demonstrating techniques from the Perfected Style, though no one has returned having mastered all of them. quote:Giant mechanical spider that roamed the land, visiting city after city. The people were friendly, and had no ulterior motive. They only wanted everyone to understand the value of being a good neighbor. The spider-city's travels ground to a halt when it got irrecoverably infested with gremlins who ate its gears and driveshafts. If you like this and want more, I'm working on a monster generator now, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I always love seeing what other people come up with!
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Nov 13, 2018 17:49
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I used this to make The City of Black Steel, a stone age/proto-polynesian ocean city with a unique metal its inhabitants used to infuse everything with animist spirits to provide blessings and fortune. The wealthy displayed their power by building ever more elaborate docks and fishing fleets, until they fell to sheer, obvious hubris by stripping the oceans of fish even with the spirits' bounty. Most of them fled on the fishing fleets when the city's demise became clear, but a few remained and died after leaving behind their notes. My PCs thought that was awesome and then proceeded to loot every bit of the spirit-trapping metal they could carry.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:09
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That rules, and I can't believe I forgot "irreproducible high-tech alloy" as an example of leftover mineral wealth. Did the spirits care about being abandoned for millennia, were they happy to have been left alone, or were they more impersonal sorts without feelings? Or did your players just not worry about that part?
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Nov 13, 2018 20:20
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Abyssal Squid posted:That rules, and I can't believe I forgot "irreproducible high-tech alloy" as an example of leftover mineral wealth. The spirits were loving pissed, but the players are trying to be practical good guys in SotDL, so they ended up freeing most of them to escape the desolate rock in the middle of the ocean leagues from anywhere (and came off looking like the better option for the spirits than the evil cultist archaeologists they'd defeated). I'll have it come back to haunt them if they try to use the metal. I'm definitely going to have to use this for my Godbound game whenever I get around to returning to that - it fits in nicely between Crawford's faction generators and dungeon generators, giving them cool places to live/exist.
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Nov 14, 2018 04:36
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What other city generators are out there that this can be used with? I've heard good things about Dortoka (although that seems like it's still Kickstarter only), and today I learned that Red Markets has its own city generator that covers a different aspect. My lost city generator covers big picture cultural, aesthetic, and setting stuff, while the Red Markets generator generator focuses on the nitty gritty of the economics and security of cities. Then Dorotka gets much more granular, filling in details of individual districts and offering specific plot hooks. Anything else out there along those lines? What sort of generators does Godbound have? I'm not expecting to make major changes to the Lost Cities Generator, especially while I'm still working on Infinite Monsters, so the more tools to complement LCG the more useful it can be.
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Nov 21, 2018 04:46
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