Quick City Generation Resources

tl:dr; there is a wealth of city building resources, I describe two approaches I use to save heartache as a DM.

I find that published books tend to be somewhat 'build up from map' which I used to do myself; identify every building, roll up the inhabitants. I used to do this but found that players blew through town without interacting with a large fraction of the prepared work and as time became constrained by life, I stopped.

More recently I use thematic generators, that give me a broad sense of how the city works then I can ad-lib from there as needed.

My go-to fast town building is Stupidly Quick City-Building from r/DNDBehindTheScreen coupled with steps 3 & 4 from creating fantasy villages, towns and cities to get the layout.

For more detail I have used the truly awesome in Corpathium from Last Gasp Grimoire.

Sholtipec (2019 campaign) was created using In Corpathium to give a framework then the outcomes of the generator translated into setting appropriate issues. E.g. fungal infestations were pushed towards being encroachment of the jungle, locations were swapped around for dramatic license (move the mysterious quarter away from beside the main gate.

Sholtipec ended up having a page per district with a selection of major locations that could be located on the map as needed and a span of emergent neighbourhood behaviour that came from those tables. Medium work, very 'guided by the dice'.

Thenya (2020) was created using Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator then working up from that using suburb generators for Infinigrad, the Endless City to put some flavour descriptors on each of them. This was modified using a tweaked set of tables for inhabitants to make a menagerie world - adding d50 fantasy races from Skerples into the Infinigrad raceoid mix.

Thenya ended up having a single page with a section per neighbourhood for major descriptors and detailed handled elsewhere - events and locations were referenced in the session play sheets (e.g. a tavern name and the episode number on the city sheet). NPCs were all aggregated to a cast list with some descriptors.

I find that broad scene setting works better for me than detailed building-by-building mapping in an effort/reward sense. I can only admire Bearded Devils mapping dedication but for me, more work at the macro level (who is likely to be in a district, what is the district like) has help to create more memorable character for the city as the streets tell the story without the players needing to interact with the specific buildings and their inhabitants.