The World in a Grain of Sand - Tables, Randomizationa and Generation in a City Setting

A few years back I decided to create a setting for my home D&D campaign. I wanted to create a fantasy city, so I went out and read a ton of published fantasy cities to see how they handled this. Most of them were like the old Judges Guild products, short entries for the majority of buildings in the city, usually accompanied by brief stats for the people within, and a number of buildings that were not given any sort of stats at all. 

This was a tempting approach, but my problem was that I was planning a BIG city environment, REALLY BIG. To “stat out” something that large was not going to happen, and would make the setting too unwieldy to use. I could partially stat out the setting, but that would leave hundreds of unkeyed entries. That’s not necessarily a problem, but what happens in play at the table when you have to provide stats for the unkeyed entries on the spot. I’ve done this before, but it can be a challenge.

So I fell back on what I know: tables and bounded randomness. 

If there was one thing I learned from 1e AD&D is that curated tables can be used to create a world relatively simply. So the idea was to create tables for each ward in the city, and use these, rather than explicit descriptions, to populate things. The “insight”, such as it was, was that AS THE PLAYERS EXPLORED THE SETTING, THE LOCATIONS WOULD BE SPECIFIED.

I have come to think of this as “Schrodinger’s Setting”, e.g. everything is in flux until it is interacted with, then the waveform collapses and you get an entry. It give the players a real role in quite literally CREATING THE WORLD THEY PLAY IN, and it gave me two important gifts. First, I didn’t have to stat everything, so I could create a huge city setting that wasn’t gigantic, and two, I would have a system for providing stats for everything, rather than just leaving things blank and filling them in on the spot. 

With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to give an example of one Ward from the setting to show how it works. 

13. Clothing Ward – Crest: Yellow knife on a blue background

House Kesht - Magus Warlock Nasim Tellbinder (H)*  – MU14/Il12 – Ur Lord Omari Ekon (S)  – F12/C10

PP: 1 in 6, FC: 4 in 6

Establishments

1-2: Dyers

3-4: Bootmaker

5-6: Tavern

7-8: Private Residence

9-10: Seamstress/tailor (exotic materials)

11-12: Clothworkers/ Clothier

13-14: Cordwainers (workers in fine leather)

15-16: Jeweler

17-18: Furrier

19-20: Restaurant

21-22: Hat Maker

23-24: Plumer - a dealer in feathers

25-26: Tailor

27-28: Private residence

29-30: Dressmaker

31-32: Laundry/ Launderer

33-34: Tanner

35-36: Mask Maker

37-38: Outdoor stable

39-40: Alchemist

41-42: Inn

43-44: Jeweler

45-46: Tavern 

47-48: Seer

49-50: Cordwainer (unusual leathers)

51-52: Seamstress/tailor (non-standard humanoids)

53-54: Glover

55-56: Restaurant

57-58: Dress maker

59-60: Alchemist 

61-62: Fine Clothier (custom- small humanoid races)

63-64: Cloak and Robe Maker

65-66: Dyer

67-68: Bonesmith

69-70: Shoemaker

71-72: Tavern

73-74: Fine Clothier

75-76: Furrier

77-78: Private Residence

79-80: Seamstress/Tailor (custom small humanoids)

81-82: Inn/tavern

83-84: Bootmaker

85-86: coatmaker

87-88: Beltmaker

89-90: Backpacks, Pouches, Satchels

91-92: Tailor

93-94: Private Residence 

95-96: Restaurant 

97-98: Glover (exotic materials)

99-100: Private Residence

This is Ward 13, it is primarily filled with establishments related to the trade and creation of clothing. It is the domain of House Kesht. 

There is an establishments list. There are around 30 different establishments, some come up more than once in the list. There are 49 entries on the table, and every ward has a warlock tower, garrison and temple that are placed by the ref. As the PCs explore the ward when they ask about a particular building I roll on the list. Every list has generic listings like inns, taverns, stables, seers and alchemists, and entries keyed to the guild/trade associated with it. 

There are around 100 buildings in this ward. So let’s do a thought experiment, say the party took up residence in this ward and adventured in the campaign for a few years. They would slowly but surely encounter the buildings in the Ward and they would be specified. 

So as a thought experiment, what would the ward look like if the party went to EVERY building in the Ward? Each time you would roll for the building in question, so just for fun I went to Discord and rolled percentage dice 100 times then noted the results. 

This produced:

Private Residences - 9

Bootmakers -7

Dressmakers -7

Tanners - 6

Jewelers - 6

Clothworkers/Clothiers - 5

Tailors - 5

Taverns - 5

Dyers - 4

Inns/taverns - 4

Alchemists - 3

Bonesmiths - 3

Fine Clothiers (custom- small humanoids) - 3

Furriers - 3

Laundries/Launderers - 3

Outdoor Stables - 3

Restaurants - 3

Shoemakers - 3

Backpacks, Pouches, Satchels - 2

Cloaks and Robes - 2

Seamstresses/tailors (exotic materials) - 2

Seers - 2

Beltmakers

Coatmakers

Cordwainers (workers in fine leather)

Glovers

Glovers (exotic materials)

Hat Makers

Inns

Mask Makers

Plumers

Seamstress/tailors (non-standard humanoids)

There are 53 wards in the city, a small number of them are mostly residential, mostly parks or mostly agricultural, but the majority have mixed use buildings. This system allows me to instantly determine what any particular building is for, without having to list them out ahead of time. 

But almost as important as that, this system allows the ref to explore the city right along with the players. I don’t have all the answers when we start, I discover them as we play the game. I find that this makes the setting uniquely alive in a way that a heavily detailed, fully specified system would not.

One of the brilliant ways that 1e AD&D handled the creation of entire game world’s was exactly this, using bounded randomness and tables to generate material on the fly. What I have done here is simply an extrapolation of that on a bigger scale. Good game design scales up well.